Gleb Pavlovsky was seen as a PR guru with liberal leanings when he helped bring President Vladimir Putin to power four years ago. Today he is facing bankruptcy in a sign of how the political winds are shifting in the Kremlin.
Pavlovsky was put in charge of Putin's election campaign when the low-profile former KGB officer soared through government ranks and eventually became acting president when his ailing mentor and predecessor Boris Yeltsin retired on New Year's eve 1999.
The campaign Pavlovsky organized was nasty but effective -- state-run television was overflowing with sometimes unsubstantiated attacks on Kremlin opponents -- and landed Putin with an overwhelming first-round election win in March 2000.
Pavlovsky then turned into something of a household name, a soft-spoken political star who dressed in casual turtlenecks and regularly drew crowds of journalists to hear him preach insights about the Kremlin's secretive inner workings. But those insights landed him in hot water in November when he published a study suggesting that a group of shadowy bankers and former KGB officers were taking control of the Kremlin and Putin's political agenda in order to eventually win hold of Russia's top businesses.
Pavlovsky's report claimed that this clan "has turned into one of the top players in Russian politics which is aggressively attacking businesses and politics -- including proposing changes to the constitution and the president's political course."
That report came weeks after the arrest of now-retired Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky -- Russia's richest man, who tried to organize political opposition to pro-Kremlin forces in December's parliamentary elections in which liberal parties eventually lost almost all of their seats.
Pavlovsky said the hawkish insider group orchestrating an attack on big business included Sergei Pugachyov -- former head of the Mezhprombank and current member of the Federation Council upper house of parliament.
Pugachyov has been identified as "Putin's banker" by several newspapers who studied his links to the Russian president in both men's native city of Saint Petersburg.
The secretive businessman has filed and won libel lawsuits against at least three major newspapers and a popular radio station who reported the charges.
Now Pugachyov has won a 30 million ruble (about US$1 million dollar) lawsuit against Pavlovsky for again suggesting that he was a leading member of a hawkish clan inside the Kremlin administration -- one that may be running away from Putin's control. Some media have suggested that Pavlovsky's loss of his court case has underscored that the Kremlin hawks were now running the show.
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