The hacking of the 2016 US elections. The sponsorship of extremist politics in Europe. War in Ukraine. In recent years, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has waged a concerted campaign to expand its influence and undermine Western institutions. But how and why did all this come about and who has orchestrated it?This rigorous and revelatory book explains how this happened, Putin’s rise to power, and how Russian black cash is subverting the world. In Putin’s People, former Moscow correspondent and investigative journalist Catherine Belton tells the untold story of the rise of Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him. Delving deep into the workings of Putin’s Kremlin, Belton accesses key inside players to reveal how Putin replaced the free-wheeling tycoons of the Yeltsin era with a new generation of loyal oligarchs, who in turn subverted their country’s economy and legal system and expanded its influence in the West.The result is a chilling and revelatory expose of the KGB’s renaissance – a story that began long ago in the murk of the Soviet collapse when networks of operatives were able to siphon billions of dollars out of Russia and into the West. After Putin’s takeover of the economy, some of these networks acquired new flows of cash to realise their goals. Based on many years of research, Belton charts the relentless seizure of private companies and the installation of those closest to Putin into the richest, highest seats of power.Ranging from Moscow to London, Switzerland and Trump’s America, and introducing a colourful cast of characters, Putin’s People is a gripping and terrifying account of how hopes for the new Russia went astray, with stark consequences for its inhabitants and, increasingly, the world.
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Catherine Belton. Putin’s People
PUTIN’S PEOPLE. How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West. Catherine Belton
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Illustrations
Dramatis Personae
Prologue. Moscow Rules
1 ‘Operation Luch’
2. Inside Job
New Day
3 ‘The Tip of an Iceberg’
Submariner, Soldier, Trader, Spy
Submariner
Soldier
Trader
Spy
4. Operation Successor:‘It Was Already After Midnight’
Plan A
Plan B
5 ‘Children’s Toys in Pools of Mud’
6 ‘The Inner Circle Made Him’
7 ‘Operation Energy’
8. Out of Terror, an Imperial Awakening ‘It’s like a knot with three elements’
9 ‘Appetite Comes During Eating’
10. Obschak
11. Londongrad
12. The Battle Begins
13. Black Cash
The Moldovan Laundromat
The Mirror Trades
Diskont Bank
The Bank of New York
14. Soft Power in an Iron Fist –‘I Call Them the Orthodox Taliban’
15. The Network and Donald Trump
Agalarov
Sater
The Dangle
Revenge of the KGB
Epilogue. Sistema
Reckoning
Picture Section
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
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To my parents, Marjorie and Derek,
as well as to Richard and to Catherine Birkett.
.....
The recording offers a unique window into the unguarded views of two men who had brought Putin to power, and their horror at the system they’d help create. This book is the story of that system – the rise to power of Putin’s KGB cohort, and how they mutated to enrich themselves in the new capitalism. It is the story of the hurried handover of power between Yeltsin and Putin, and of how it enabled the rise of a ‘deep state’ of KGB security men that had always lurked in the background during the Yeltsin years, but now emerged to monopolise power for at least twenty years – and eventually to endanger the West.
This book began as an effort to trace the takeover of the Russian economy by Putin’s former KGB associates. But it became an investigation into something more pernicious than that. First research – and then events – showed that the kleptocracy of the Putin era was aimed at something more than just filling the pockets of the president’s friends. What emerged as a result of the KGB takeover of the economy – and the country’s political and legal system – was a regime in which the billions of dollars at Putin’s cronies’ disposal were to be actively used to undermine and corrupt the institutions and democracies of the West. The KGB playbook of the Cold War era, when the Soviet Union deployed ‘active measures’ to sow division and discord in the West, to fund allied political parties and undermine its ‘imperial’ foe, has now been fully reactivated. What’s different now is that these tactics are funded by a much deeper well of cash, by a Kremlin that has become adept in the ways of the markets and has sunk its tentacles deep into the institutions of the West. Parts of the KGB, Putin among them, have embraced capitalism as a tool for getting even with the West. It was a process that began long before, in the years before the Soviet collapse.
