The Creator of The Crown Has Turned Putin’s Rise Into a Timely Shakespearean Drama (2024)

Vladimir Putin’s rise to power is the stuff of Shakespearean drama, so it’s no surprise that the tale is now the subject of a play, which ran on London’s West End last summer and opened on Broadway this week. It doesn’t necessarily follow that such a play would be a commercial success, but it was a hit in England, and it’s a hot ticket in New York, though for reasons quite apart from mass interest in the subject matter.

The play, called Patriots, was written by Peter Morgan, the creator of the hugely popular Netflix series The Crown, about Britain’s royal family. Netflix is also producing the Broadway version of Patriots as part of the network’s creative deal with Morgan, meaning there will likely be a screen adaptation streaming sometime soon.

Of course, Putin on his own is a figure of great public interest, especially since his invasion of Ukraine, which transformed global politics and heightened fears of a wider war. But Patriots was written before the invasion. It focuses on the struggle between Putin and Boris Berezovsky, the most flamboyant of a group of Moscow billionaires known as “the oligarchs.” Berezovsky was the most powerful private Russian citizen at the time, and his struggle with Putin was truly titanic.

But these events took place 30 years ago. Few in the West remember Berezovsky or the other oligarchs, much less their clash with the man who still occupies the Kremlin. Still, this is a story worth recalling: It sheds light not only on Russia’s recent past but its possible future—and thus the lives and fortunes of us all.

The oligarchs were a small group of smart outsiders who figured out various ways to reap tremendous wealth from the chaos of the cowboy capitalism of early post-Soviet Russia, and who tried using this wealth to alter the course of their country, transforming it into a Western-style bastion of freedom and free enterprise.

The premise of Patriots is that Berezovsky “created” Putin, insinuating this low-level former KGB spy and deputy mayor into President Boris Yeltsin’s inner circle. Then, once he climbed the rungs of power, finally succeeding Yeltsin as the Kremlin’s top man, Putin turned on his maker, confiscated the oligarchs’ assets on behalf of the Russian state, where he thought they belonged, and punished those who resisted.

The themes are clear (if sometimes didactically expressed in the script): the allure but also dangers of power, the revolving stakes of loyalty and betrayal, and, in late-20^th-century Russia, the competing definitions of patriotism (hence the play’s title): the advancement of individual liberty vs. the consolidation of state control, with Berezovsky portrayed as the former’s unbridled incarnation, and Putin seen in the transition stage of the dictator he would soon become.

In a climactic scene (which probably didn’t take place in real life but certainly reflects the real conflict’s drama), Putin, the new president, calmly tells Berezovsky that the state must take back its vital assets, which the tycoon and his friends have been exploiting for their own wealth. Berezovsky screams that Russia needs the oligarchs; that they had turned the assets, which had been lying fallow under Soviet rule, into profitable enterprises; that their ventures were essential if Russia were to become a rich and powerful country.

As is usually the case in dramatic dialogues like this, both sides have their points. Berezovsky and the others were familiar with the history of America’s robber barons, whose industrial-age monopolies made them fantastically rich, but who then used their wealth to transform the nation: building railroads, but also endowing universities, libraries, and charities, vastly widening inequalities of wealth, but at the same time spreading wealth across the nation. The Russian oligarchs—Berezovsky more than most—had that same ambition for themselves and the masses. Berezovsky was at once cynical, pragmatically self-interested, and poignantly idealistic.

He made his initial fortune buying and selling fleets of cars, including foreign cars (an unknown commodity in Russia till then), signing contracts but then waiting to pay the invoices until hyperinflation shrunk the bill’s value by orders of magnitude. He then invested his profits in what became one of Russia’s largest oil and gas companies. He helped convert Aeroflot from a butt of jokes to a top-flight international airline. And he purchased Russia’s main television station, turning it into a beacon of honest journalism.

I was the Boston Globe’s Moscow bureau chief from 1992–95, the peak of Berezovsky’s rise. I never met him, but I did get to know one of the other oligarchs, Vladimir Gusinsky, a former provincial theater director who created a very successful bank. Gusinsky was longtime good friends with Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, and Luzhkov deposited all of the city’s funds into Gusinsky’s bank. Gusinsky then used his profits to create the first independent TV station and the first independent newspaper, which were even more enterprising and critical than Berezovsky’s.

Once Putin rose to power, he ran Berezovsky, Gusinsky, and several of the others out of Russia. Berezovsky was granted asylum in England, where he lost some lawsuits, wallowed in debt, and was found hung to death, either by suicide or by murder (the evidence is ambiguous). Gusinsky is still alive; reports have him living in Connecticut, Spain, Israel, or perhaps all three. (Many of the oligarchs were Jewish, a badge of Russian outcasts—in Soviet times, their passports marked their “nationality” as “Jewish,” not “Russian,” indicating second-class citizenship—that also made them easy martyrs and victims.)

In the play, Berezovsky and Putin meet when the latter was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg and the former was keen to set up a car dealership on Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main street. Not long after, when the mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, loses an election, Putin is thrown out along with him and comes begging Berezovsky for a job. The tycoon uses his connections with Yeltsin’s daughter to install Putin in the Kremlin, then engineers his every advance up the pole of power, figuring that once he was at the top, he would do the oligarchs’ bidding, as Yeltsin had done. (In return, they donated millions to Yeltsin’s reelection campaign and touted his glories in their media.) But Putin had his own vision of patriotism and cast his erstwhile patrons into oblivion.

The beginning of this narrative is true—Berezovsky persuaded Putin to give him prime real estate for a car dealership—but the rest of the storyline, though broadly accurate, is a bit off in the details, and at times stretched to fit the Shakespearean themes. (Shakespeare did this as well. Whether it should be tagged as “poetic license” or sheer distortion is up to you.)

First, Putin wasn’t quite a nobody when he met his patron. Berezovsky refers to him in the play as a “provincial deputy mayor,” but St. Petersburg was, and still is, Russia’s second-largest city. Mayor Sobchak was a leading figure in Russia’s reform movement, and Putin was seen as a like-minded aide and thus a natural recruit for Yeltsin’s apparatus. In the play, Putin becomes a cab driver after Sobchak loses the election; Berezovsky lifts him out of dire poverty and aimlessness to place him in the Kremlin. In fact, though Putin says he drove a taxi for extra income in the early 1990s, he moved to Moscow and into an administrative job in the Kremlin right after the mayor’s 1996 electoral defeat. He didn’t need Berezovsky’s help for that.

Second, Berezovsky did help maneuver Putin into higher positions, but Putin had his own bureaucratic skills. At one crucial point, Yeltsin was debating whether to choose Putin or Boris Nemtsov, the reformist mayor of Nizhny Novgorod, to be his prime minister—and, by implication, his successor. Had he chosen Nemtsov, Russia’s next several years might have looked very different. It was on Berezovsky’s strong recommendation that Yeltsin picked Putin—though it’s worth noting that Putin was seen as a fellow reformer at the time. But there was another angle that the play omits: Putin promised not to letYeltsin—and perhaps his family members—be prosecuted for financial crimes. It was one of the rare promises that Putin kept. It is unlikely that Nemtsov, a more ethical man, would have accepted the bargain. (Several years later, Nemtsov, a prominent critic of Putin, was murdered while crossing a bridge near the Kremlin—one of the first of several opposition figures who were assassinated.)

Finally, the real Putin isn’t as pure a counterpart to Berezovsky’s “greed is good” capitalism as the play makes out. It may be true that as deputy mayor, he turned down the tycoon’s offer of a free Mercedes in exchange for a Nevsky Prospekt dealership, saying he didn’t take bribes. But as president of the Russian Federation, Putin’s greed and corruption have dwarfed that of the oligarchs. He has formed his own entourage—many of them old friends from the spook world, to whom he’s given control of large companies in exchange for sharing the profits. Intelligence sources estimate his personal wealth at $200 billion. (The great opposition figure Alexei Navalny was thrown in prison, and subsequently killed, for documenting Putin’s corruption.)

Otherwise, Patriots is a fairly accurate tale about Russia at a crucial pivot point, when it could have gone in one of two very different directions, which the play’s protagonists genuinely embodied. Michael Stuhlbarg captures Berezovsky’s high-pitched energy (the opening scene has him at his desk, simultaneously talking on two phones, taking notes, and screaming at an assistant about an appointment) and steely charisma. Will Keen eerily looks like Putin and conveys his transition from passive supplicant to self-possessed ruler with a familiar icy chill. It’s a sudden change of character that the play, as a text, doesn’t make quite convincing, but Keen makes it very much so, with the subtlest shifts in expression and gait.

Those who know little of the history may find Patriots confusing or muddled. The main characters are less than fully drawn, the actors’ heroic efforts notwithstanding. Important sidemen (and they are almost all men) seem sketchier still. Some key events are passed over too quickly to be absorbed. If Netflix does turn this into a movie, I hope Morgan and its producers expand it into a four- or six-hour miniseries. It’s a big story. It needs a bigger canvas.