Berezovsky, Boris Abramovich (1958- )

Russian entrepreneur and associate of Boris Yeltsin, deputy secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States from 1998.

In the latter stages of Boris Yeltsin's presidency, the government came to be seen as dominated by ‘oligarchs’ - financier industrialists who had rapidly amassed large fortunes since the collapse of the USSR. First among these was Boris Berezovsky, who, in the late 1980s, saw the wealth that could be made by selling cars to a market in constant and chronic deficit - making deals with factory managers and cutting them into the huge premium charged. On the fortune built up by his company Logovaz he extended his empire into media, airlines, oil, and banking. His closeness to Yeltsin through his powerful daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, was such that most believed him, in the mid-1990s, to be more powerful than any minister or adviser. He survived an assassination attempt in 1994 and was persistently rumoured to be connected with the murder of Vladimir Listiev, head of the state TV service ORT; but his power remained such that Yeltsin appointed him deputy head of the National Security Council and then, in 1998, deputy secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a role that allowed him to deepen his links with the leaders of the post-Soviet republics and to further his business interests.

Chief among those who pumped some $150 million into Yeltsin's re-election campaign in 1996, he then swung away from the ailing president to back the governor of Krasnoyarsk, Alexander Lebed.