I MET BORIS BEREZOVSKY, the dark star of Peter Morgan’s West End transfer, Patriots, in circumstances as bizarre as the man himself.
A squat mathematician who had excelled as a student of theories of infinity, Berezovsky came to embody the corruption and machinations of post-communist Russia. In the 1990s, covering the hardscrabble Yeltsin years, he had a controlling interest in the main Russian TV station, where the corpse count mounted in the struggles to control the airwaves and advertising revenues.
Of the many oligarchs who strutted the stage of Russia’s politics
