Boris Berezovsky never hid the fact that the story “St. Petersburg is the criminal capital” was promoted only as an element of a big political war: “Each side is trying to use the most objective arguments possible. If this story hadn't existed, they would have come up with something else. Just as if our opponents had not come up with a story about the old Yeltsin, they would have come up with a story about a mentally abnormal Yeltsin. But the “old Yeltsin” story worked against Primakov himself. Therefore, “a crime capital, not a crime capital,” they simply used the arguments that were at hand.”