Berezovsky said ‘his life no longer made sense’: report

Exiled Russian tycoon and Kremlin critic Boris Berezovsky, who died Saturday, said the day before his death that “his life no longer made sense,” according to interview published on Forbes’ Russian language website.

“My life no longer makes sense,” he told journalist Ilya Zhegulev. “I have no desire to take part in politics.

“I don’t know what I should do. I am 67 years old and I don’t know what I should do from now on,” said Berezovsky in the interview, published on the Forbes.ru website.

Zhegulev said it had been an informal interview on Friday evening, which he had not recorded. He had promised Berezovsky not to publish it.

But he decided to make it public after the oligarch was found dead in his home outside London in what police called unexplained circumstances.

“There is nothing that I wish more today than to return to Russia,” he quoted Berezovsky as saying.

“I had underestimated how dear Russia is to me and how little I can stand being a emigre.” Berezovsky has lived in exile in Britain for 13 years.

“I have changed my opinion on a lot of subjects. I had a very idealistic idea on how to build a democratic Russia. And I had an idealistic idea of what democracy is in the centre of Europe.

“I underestimated the inertia of Russia and greatly overestimated the West,” Berezovsky said, according to Zhegulev’s report.

While Berezovsky’s lawyer, Alexander Dobrovinsky, told Russian television that his client had committed suicide after suffering from weeks of depression over his huge debts, a friend of the tycoon has strongly denied this.