Читать книгу Putin’s People - Catherine Belton - Страница 13

When Boris Yeltsin, blinking in the sunlight, strode out of the Russian White House in the middle of the hard-line coup on the afternoon of August 19 1991, the world believed it had gained an icon for a new age. Defying the military hardware surrounding the White House, Yeltsin clambered stiffly on top of one of the tanks, shaking the hands of the soldiers manning its guns as he went.

In the euphoric days that followed, the symbol of the KGB’s overpowering might, a statue of the founding father of the Soviet secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, was winched away from its plinth in front of the KGB headquarters on Moscow’s Lubyanka Square. Western bankers and government officials were soon hurrying to Russia to advise Yeltsin’s new government on the creation of a market economy. The new cabinet was partly staffed with bright young economists, including Yegor Gaidar and Pyotr Aven. Russia was to integrate into Western markets, and a new era of cooperation was hailed.

Although in October 1991 Yeltsin signed an order abolishing the KGB and breaking it up into four different domestic services, his appointment of Vadim Bakatin to head the organisation in the final months before its break-up was an early sign that change was going to be cosmetic. Bakatin was an inexperienced outsider who’d served briefly as interior minister in the final years of the Soviet regime, and his new KGB comrades ran rings around him. He himself admitted to the Moscow journalist Yevgenia Albats that he had little control over his employees, and that he knew they were manipulating him and withholding information from him: ‘I am absolutely convinced that whatever the komitetchiki don’t want me to know, I won’t know,’ he told her.[81] And once the KGB had officially been broken up, under Primakov’s stewardship the powerful foreign-intelligence service, now renamed as the SVR, remained intact. Even though tens of thousands of apparently demoralised officers resigned from the service to join the rush into business, part of the system merely went underground. Like Putin with Sobchak, ‘they stayed in the shadows’, said one former intermediary for the KGB, speaking on condition of anonymity.[82] ‘They didn’t really get rid of anything. They changed the façade and they changed the name. But nothing else really changed.’ While officially the SVR’s budget was shredded, unofficial sources of funding were soon found.

Even though the Russian government was struggling in the chaos of the Soviet collapse to pay pensions and the wages of teachers, doctors and other state workers, the new prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, made sure to find funds to maintain strategic outposts for foreign intelligence. One such payment was $200 million in 1992 to Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba for Russia’s foreign-intelligence service to continue to use its Lourdes listening station for eavesdropping on the US. The payment was made through a convoluted barter scheme, swapping oil products for sugar imports – exactly like the smuggling schemes deployed by the KGB through friendly firms.[83] The $200 million transfer was made at the same time as Russia’s official state budget for 1992 was $148 million. Later that year, Gaidar diverted an entire $1 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, aimed at stabilising the Russian economy, to bail out one of the most important financial outposts of Russia’s foreign-intelligence network, Eurobank, the Soviet state bank in Paris.[84]

For the first half of the nineties, the KGB remained a potent force behind the scenes. Its operatives were still everywhere, employed as advisers for trade or government relations or as security chiefs. Until 1995, most of the oil sector remained in state hands, its exports watched over by the foreign operatives of the KGB. ‘You found this virtually everywhere, in all the companies, in all the government agencies,’ said Christian Michel. ‘Through their networks, they were a lot more than individuals. These men from the KGB controlled networks, and without them nothing would move.’[85]

At first, many of the senior KGB operatives involved in forging Russia’s market transition went to work for the young tycoons they’d helped create through Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms.[86] They were mostly there simply to take their cut, but in some cases they had control. ‘They said, “You’ll make money and kick it back to us,”’ said Yury Shvets, the former foreign-intelligence operative.[87]

But as the young tycoons gained wealth and power under the market reforms launched by Yeltsin’s government, gradually they began to eclipse their former sponsors in the KGB. A new Russia seemed to be emerging, in which the former Komsomol members became brash symbols of the new capitalist age. Khodorkovsky and his team from Menatep even issued a manifesto, issuing 50,000 copies of a screed handed out on the streets that proclaimed the virtues of getting rich: ‘Our compass is profit. Our idol is his financial majesty capital.’[88] Their goal was ‘to become billionaires’, and they wanted to demonstrate that there was nothing wrong with getting wealthy after decades in which making a profit was considered a crime. But they benefited from an inside track to riches from the start.

The market reforms of Gaidar’s new government aimed to bring the market to Russia as fast as possible – regardless of the consequences. They were encouraged by a team of American economists from Harvard led by Jeffrey Sachs, who hoped to emulate the success of so-called ‘shock therapy’ reforms in Poland, where two years before a rapid transition to the market seemed to have been successfully launched.[89] But in Russia, the legacy of the Soviet state weighed far more heavily. Gaidar’s market reformers were in a minority, and the corrupted system in which they launched the reforms only further warped the economy. Only those, like Khodorkovsky, who’d set up banks in the final years of the Soviet Union were in a position to benefit. For a while, however, the American economists seemed to go along with that. They believed they were helping create a new class of entrepreneurs, and seemed ready to do anything that would help break the hold of the Soviet old guard.[90]

When the Yeltsin government freed prices overnight on January 1 1992, lifting decades of Soviet controls, the young tycoons made money, while the population and the government struggled to survive. The price-freeing unleashed a devastating bout of hyperinflation, as suppliers and producers struggled to overcome the shortages long built into the Soviet economy. Unlike in Poland, where inflation had soon settled after an initial surge, Gaidar was contending with a wily old-guard central bank chief, Viktor Gerashchenko, who’d once worked at the pinnacle of the Soviet foreign-bank network funding the operations of the KGB, and who now continued to print money no matter what. Prices of consumer goods soared by 400 per cent, sometimes many times more. While the hyperinflation ravaged the government’s spending power, and wiped out what little savings the population had, Khodorkovsky and other young tycoons were able to hedge against devaluation. They could access hard currency through their banks, and were able to swiftly transfer any rouble income into dollars.

The tycoons also benefited from the next planned market reform of the Gaidar government, the privatisation of state enterprises. The only people with funds to participate in the so-called mass privatisations were the narrow elite who had already taken over much of the enterprises’ cash flows under Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms: the young businessmen from the Komsomol, the black marketeers, the organised-crime groups, the KGB and the state directors.

Privatisation at a time of hyperinflation could only further concentrate the country’s wealth in the hands of this small group, said Grigory Yavlinsky, one of Russia’s most principled economists, who’d argued strongly for more gradual reforms. ‘How is it possible to have privatisation when money has been wiped out as an institution? There can only be a criminal privatisation. The next step was criminal privatisation.’[91]

‘When Gaidar tried to conduct the first privatisations, everything had already been seized,’ said Gleb Pavlovsky, a former Kremlin adviser.[92] ‘Gaidar’s biggest mistake was that when he began his reforms he considered that what was before him was still the Soviet economy of 1987. But already the Soviet economy did not exist.’ The Gaidar government had sought to keep the privatisation process open to all, by giving plant workers vouchers to take part in the sell-offs. But the workers were often forced to exchange their vouchers for cash, or even for bread, just to survive the hyperinflation.

The new tycoons from the Komsomol benefited most of all when the Yeltsin government granted them access to deep stores of cash, without their having to lift a finger. Instead of having its own treasury, the government authorised the tycoons’ banks, including Khodorkovsky’s Menatep and Fridman’s Alfa, to hold strategic funds from the Russian budget on deposit. It was a get-rich-quick scheme for the chosen favourites of the Yeltsin regime. They could direct hundreds of millions of dollars in government funds into high-yielding investments, sometimes even into the privatisation auctions, while the government was left waiting for the disbursal of its funds. Vital programmes such as defence spending or aid for citizens half-abandoned in the crumbling industrial wastelands of Russia’s far north were delayed or simply unpaid, while the ruthless new bankers fobbed the government off with promissory notes. The government was being bled dry, while the new wolves of the Russian economy concocted elaborate schemes to avoid paying taxes or customs duties.

Faster and more adept in the ways of the market than their one-time masters in the KGB, the young tycoons from the Komsomol were becoming a sort of Frankenstein’s monster, fast outrunning the men who had made them. The real turning point, when control of the economy appeared to transfer irrevocably into the hands of the new tycoons, came towards the middle of 1995. Russia was entering the final year before the first post-Soviet presidential elections, and the government’s coffers were empty. Wages and pensions were months in arrears, and Yeltsin’s approval ratings were terrifyingly low, at 6 per cent. The tycoons feared a return to Communism, that would strip them of their fortunes and could even land them in jail. Even more importantly, they’d long been eyeing the crown jewels of Soviet industry, the state’s biggest industrial giants. What they’d acquired so far was small-scale compared to the vast resources still under the control of the state.

Vladimir Potanin, the smooth-talking son of a senior Soviet diplomat, who’d become one of the country’s major new bankers, concocted what seemed an ingenious scheme. He proposed that the young bankers offer to help out the cash-strapped Yeltsin government with a series of loans. As collateral, the tycoons would take stakes in a select handful of the nation’s biggest enterprises. The tycoons would manage the enterprises, and could sell off their stakes if the government was unable to pay the loans back. When the idea was first floated, outside observers scoffed that it would never gain any traction. The potential for corruption, they said, was too great.[93] It would be too easy for the bankers simply to sell the stakes to themselves.

But the young tycoons had powerful friends in the Yeltsin government. Prime among them was Anatoly Chubais, the red-haired deputy prime minister and close Gaidar ally who’d been the architect of the privatisation programme so far. With strong support from the team of US economists, Chubais had been intent on breaking the hold of the state over the economy at any cost. Too much of industry was still in the hands of the state, of ‘red’ Soviet-era directors and the KGB, while the threat of a return to Communism seemed all too real. If the government signed off on the bankers’ proposal, it would create a major new class of property owners overnight, as well as filling empty government coffers with a proposed $1.8 billion in loans. The tycoons would then back Yeltsin to the hilt against the Communists to preserve their new wealth. Chubais believed it would signal a final victory for liberal reformers over the forces of the old guard.

But the scheme would become one of the original sins of Russia’s market transition. It tainted everything, and opened the way for constant threats over the legality of the property the young tycoons acquired at that time. It became known as the loans-for-shares privatisations, an insider deal that transferred the nation’s resource wealth into the young bankers’ hands at a knockdown price. Far more financially nimble, and able to access much bigger pools of ready cash through the rapid growth of their banks and the government deposits they held, the young tycoons outmanoeuvred their former KGB masters. The combined forces of the KGB and the former Soviet directors managed to win only two of the auctions for stakes in oil companies: 5 per cent of an oil firm named Lukoil, and 40 per cent of Surgutneftegaz, whose managers went to great lengths to keep the young bankers away. The nearest airport to the Siberian oil town of Surgut, where the sale was being held, was shut down, and armed guards manned roadblocks across the main routes in.[94]

Most of the rest of Soviet industry passed into the hands of the young bankers, in auctions that were widely seen as rigged. Potanin won the prize he’d long coveted – a controlling stake in the world’s biggest producer of nickel and platinum, Norilsk Nickel, a sprawling plant high above the Arctic Circle whose profits in 1995 stood at $1.2 billion. He’d done so by extending a loan of just $170 million to the government – and when, as expected, the still cash-strapped government defaulted on the loan after Yeltsin secured his election victory, the way was clear for Potanin to win the stake in an auction for little more than the loan price. Khodorkovsky had long been targeting Yukos, an oil producer in west Siberia which controlled some of Russia’s largest reserves. He took control of it after lending the government $159 million for a 45 per cent stake, and then paying a further $150 million in investment for an additional 33 per cent. Another oil giant, Sibneft, was won for $100 million by Boris Berezovsky, who already controlled sales at Russia’s biggest carmaker and chaired a bank of his own. Most of these bankers were still barely in their thirties, but with the help of sympathetic government officials running the auction process, they were able to secure the foundations of fortunes that within a few years would be worth billions, and then tens of billions, of dollars. Berezovsky was soon crowing that a group of seven bankers controlled 50 per cent of the nation’s economy.[95]

The loans-for-shares auctions marked a huge shift in the control of the economy. It was the moment the tycoons were transformed from mere bankers to owners of the biggest assets in the country, with access to some of the most lucrative cash flows. ‘This is when they started to reinvent themselves,’ said Christian Michel. ‘They acquired real assets. They became much more than banks.’[96]

By the end of the nineties, the young tycoons were starting to turn around the Soviet legacy of falling production, deep debts and neglect. But for the members of the security services that had helped create these new billionaires, the loans-for-shares auctions was a moment they would never forgive or forget, and would be the kernel for the KGB’s later revanche. Before then, in the shadows, the KGB men had still been able to control much of the cash flow from the nation’s oil wealth. But now they’d been outwitted and outpaced, and the financial reins had largely been taken out of their hands. ‘This was the turning point when [the young tycoons] took control,’ said Rair Simonyan, the ally of Yevgeny Primakov who’d worked on the early perestroika reforms. ‘It changed the entire paradigm.’[97]

But in those days, the tycoons of Russia’s new order were giddy at their new wealth. They were fast becoming oligarchs who held considerable sway over the weakened Yeltsin government. The remaining members of the old-guard security services who had served in government had been ousted amid scandal in the run-up to the presidential elections, and Western-leaning reformers like Chubais had been left to take the lead. Fresh from his successful engineering of the loans-for-shares sell-offs, Potanin took a post as Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister, while Berezovsky was appointed secretary of the Security Council. Chubais became Yeltsin’s chief of staff. It was the apotheosis of their era. The country, it seemed, was theirs. The forces of the KGB appeared to be receding into the background.

But, said the former senior foreign-intelligence operative Yury Shvets, the oligarchs ‘all forgot to whom they owed a debt’.[98] In the rush to shore up their positions, in the battle to accumulate more wealth, Khodorkovsky and the others didn’t notice that nearby, in St Petersburg, there was a chill in the air. Things were being run differently there. Isolated from the goldrush of Moscow’s economic boom, the forces of the KGB were exerting far greater control, in a city where the economy was tougher and darker, in the violent scrabble for cash.