Sitting in the Barrymore Theatre watching Peter Morgan’s play Patriots, about the tortuous relations between Vladimir Putin, the dictator, and Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch, who claimed to have raised Putin from obscurity to power, I had the slightly self-satisfied sense that I was probably the only person there that night who had broken bread with both men.
On Putin’s first trip to the U.S., in 2000, Tom Brokaw hosted a journalists’ dinner at the ‘21’ Club, and I was invited. Berezovsky was still making the New York scene, and I had lunch with him in real-estate tycoon Mort Zuckerman’s dining room on Park Avenue about the same time.
