Читать книгу Putin’s People - Catherine Belton - Страница 19

When the senior KGB officer Vladimir Yakunin returned to Leningrad in February 1991, a year after Putin, from a posting undercover at the United Nations in New York, he was shocked by the conditions that greeted him. He had come from a comfortable residence in New York to the grime of a working-class area of Leningrad, where the street lamps rarely shone and his wife would return home from the shops in tears because the only thing on the shelves was pickled cucumbers. ‘In essence, the country that had sent me to work abroad, and in which I grew up and where my children were born, had ceased to exist,’ he said. ‘So too had the values – the social and moral values – which were the fundamental basis for any society. The entire country had descended into a certain darkness.’

It seemed to him that everything he’d once believed in had collapsed: ‘We were brought up in the spirit of loyalty to the Party and to the people. We really did believe we were doing something useful for our country and for our people.’ But like many in the foreign-intelligence services, he’d long been able to see that the Party leadership was failing: ‘There was no one who knew how to deal with the growing problems … The gap between reality and ideological dogma led to deep distrust in the country’s leaders.’[100]

Although the loss of empire and the loss of the decades-long Cold War hit men like Yakunin hard, he was among those who moved fast to embrace Russia’s new capitalism. And while he said he hankered for the days of certainty, for the morality and values that he believed lay at the foundation of Communism, that did not stop him from leaping into business before the Soviet Union had even collapsed, to pocket vast amounts of cash both for himself and, more importantly, to help preserve the networks of the KGB.

For four years after the Soviet collapse, Yakunin remained an officer in the security services, never resigning his post. Although he insisted that he hadn’t been taking orders, he admitted that the aim of his and his partners’ business activities was partly to preserve what they could: ‘We needed to redirect ourselves. We needed to create commercial enterprises that would earn money … We were all part of this process. The traditions of communication and cooperation remained.’

Yakunin joined forces with associates from St Petersburg’s prestigious Ioffe Institute for Technology and Physics, where he’d worked overseeing the institute’s international connections before being sent to New York. Among them was Yury Kovalchuk, then thirty-nine and a leading physicist of his day. Kovalchuk had a high forehead and a hawk-like gaze, and he worked closely with Andrei Fursenko; both of them were deputies in the Ioffe Institute’s work on sensitive semiconductor technologies deployed in laser and satellite systems. This was an area at the heart of the KGB’s special interest, in which all manner of smuggling schemes had been deployed to bypass embargoes and steal technology from the West (Yakunin was believed to have worked on technology smuggling when he served undercover in New York). Their expertise landed Yakunin, Kovalchuk and Fursenko a lucrative assignment: a deal to sell a batch of rare-earth metals, including rare and strategic isotopes used in the aerospace and military industries, and in semiconductor technology.[101] They were given the deal by a senior general in the KGB, said Yakunin. Once they’d pulled it off, one of the joint ventures they’d created, Temp, landed 24 million roubles in profits.[102] It was a huge sum in those days, and it helped them take over Bank Rossiya.

The three men had set up a string of such joint ventures in the final months before the Soviet collapse, as the KGB stepped up preparations for the transition to a market economy, and they’d already been working closely with Bank Rossiya. In the aftermath of the failed August coup, said Yakunin, they had briefly feared that they might go out of business when their accounts in Bank Rossiya were frozen, along with the rest of the property of the Communist Party. But their connections, and the cash they made in the rare-earth metals deal, saved them. High-ups in the local Party and the KGB gave them the nod to take over Bank Rossiya and bring it back to life. ‘We were people who were well-known in the party structures of the city of Leningrad,’ said Yakunin. ‘We had many contacts, and people trusted us. We were allowed to take a controlling stake in Bank Rossiya precisely because these people trusted and respected us.’[103]

From the beginning, Bank Rossiya had been strategically connected to the foreign-relations committee run by Putin. Its offices were in the Smolny Institute, which had become the city’s mayor’s headquarters, and it began to play a key role in the creation of the obschak, the common cash pot for Putin’s men. The city’s KGB-connected businessmen, including Yakunin, Kovalchuk and Fursenko, almost religiously continued to follow the prescriptions of the KGB laid out in the twilight years of the Communist regime, when trade was to be ordered through joint ventures with foreign entities. All joint ventures were set up on the approval of Putin’s committee, and most were directed to open accounts with Bank Rossiya. In one instance, millions of dollars were siphoned from the city budget through Bank Rossiya’s accounts into a network of such companies linked to Putin’s men. The cash had been funnelled through a fund known as Twentieth Trust. At one point the scheme had threatened to embroil Putin in a criminal case. Like many of the slush funds created by Putin’s men, the money had gone towards strategic needs such as funding election campaigns, and also for personal acquisitions such as luxury properties in Finland and Spain for city officials.[104]

As Putin and his KGB men became more secure in their control of the city’s economy, they began to dream their own bourgeois dreams. One transfer in particular paid for a five-star hotel trip for Putin and the head of Twentieth Trust to Finland, where they met an architect from the St Petersburg government and most likely discussed plans for the building of a group of dachas, according to a senior police officer who investigated the case.[105] ‘Soviet people always have a dream to have a dacha,’ said a Putin associate from then.[106] ‘The understanding was that it was not just important to have a good piece of land, but also to have the right neighbours.’

The patch Putin chose to while away his weekends in peace and tranquillity was far down a highway snaking north from St Petersburg through the forests and lakes of Karelia. Near the border with Finland, an unsignposted road led to a snug group of wooden houses on the shores of the Komsomolskoye lake, renowned for its excellent fishing. Before Putin moved in, the road had been no more than a dirt track. But soon after the new inhabitants arrived it was asphalted over, and lights were installed.

The villagers who’d lived peacefully for generations on the coveted stretch of land on the lakeshore saw new, more powerful electrical lines installed, though none of the power reached their homes. Instead they were asked, one by one, to move away, and were either given money to leave or provided with new ready-built houses further inland. Their powerful new neighbours built imposing Finnish-style chalets on vast tracts of land. They formed a group that became known as the Ozero dacha cooperative, and took over the lakeshore, from which their former neighbours were cut off by a high new fence. When the newcomers had parties, the old inhabitants could only watch the festivities and fireworks from afar. They knew not to object. ‘My mother told me a simple thing: don’t fight the strong and don’t sue the rich,’ said one of them.[107] The only inhabitant who tried to fight lost every stage of her trial.

The men who moved to Lake Komsomolskoye with Putin were the blue blood of his KGB acquaintances. Mostly shareholders of Bank Rossiya, they included Yakunin, Fursenko and Kovalchuk. All of them had been connected to Putin since even before the St Petersburg days. ‘These were people who were close to Putin from before,’ said one former Putin associate.[108] ‘They hadn’t got there because of their work or their knowledge – but just because they were old friends.’

This was a principle that was later expanded across the entire country. After Putin became president, he and his allies from the Ozero dacha group began to capture strategic sectors of the economy, creating a tight-knit network of loyal lieutenants – trusted custodians – who took control of the country’s biggest cash flows and excluded everyone else. Bank Rossiya was to form the core of the financial empire behind this group, and it was to spread its tentacles throughout Russia, and deep into the West too.

Those who’d worked with Putin at the sea port and the oil terminal also followed him when he vaulted to power. Timchenko was prime among them, first in the shadows working, according to two former associates, as an unofficial adviser, and then becoming the nation’s biggest oil trader. The men who ran the St Petersburg sea port under Traber’s watch were to take the first senior positions in Gazprom, the state gas giant, as Putin began to take over the country’s biggest and most strategic assets. Then, when Putin made his first moves to take back the nation’s oil industry from Western-leaning oligarchs like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Timchenko and Akimov were part of the core group who benefited.

But in those days in the nineties, when they were just starting out, it was difficult to imagine that they would ever make it so far. The members of the Ozero dacha cooperative kept themselves to themselves, rarely speaking to the former neighbours who they’d moved away from the shores of the lake. But after Putin moved to Moscow, the weekend visits became rare. The houses they’d built were left empty, like ghosts on the edge of the lake. ‘It became too small for them here. They had absolutely different opportunities in Moscow,’ said one of the neighbours.[109]

*

When Putin was suddenly appointed to a senior position in the Kremlin in Moscow in the summer of 1996, one of the senior KGB generals who’d watched closely over his St Petersburg career pronounced himself satisfied with him. ‘He began his career as an official from zero,’ the general, Gennady Belik, later told a reporter. ‘Of course he made mistakes. The issues for him were absolutely new … The only people who don’t make mistakes are the ones that don’t do anything. But by the end of his activities in St Petersburg, Vladimir Vladimirovich had grown a great deal.’[110]

Belik was a veteran of the KGB’s foreign-intelligence service, and in St Petersburg he’d overseen a network of firms trading in rare-earth metals. He’d been a mentor of sorts to Putin as he managed the city’s economy, while according to one close ally Putin also stayed in touch with former KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov.[111] But although Putin’s men had dominated much of the city’s economy, the amounts of cash they were dealing with in St Petersburg were minuscule compared to what the young Western-leaning tycoons like Khodorkovsky were taking over in Moscow. They were far away from the action as the new oligarchs of the Yeltsin era began to carve up the country’s industrial wealth. For many of the St Petersburg KGB men, what was going on in Moscow represented the collapse of the Russian state. Vladimir Yakunin, for one, saw the country as being seized by a cabal of corrupt members of the Party elite and by men like Khodorkovsky who he called ‘criminals’.[112] The KGB men saw Yeltsin as a drunken buffoon, a mid-ranking Communist Party official who danced to the tune of the West and who was now handing over the country’s strategic enterprises for a song to a corrupt gang of rapacious businessmen. ‘People had given their lives. They’d served honestly and put their lives at risk. But all they got was a finger up their ass from a drunk bastard who by the way was no better than a local Communist Party leader,’ said a former KGB officer who worked with Putin in St Petersburg.[113]

Though it seemed far from likely then, Putin’s move to Moscow was the first step towards changing that equation. His promotion had happened at a moment when he should in fact have been down and out. In the summer of 1996, Anatoly Sobchak had just lost his campaign for re-election as St Petersburg’s mayor. Putin, as his campaign manager, had been partly responsible. Sobchak lost by a whisker: by 1.2 per cent – the equivalent, his widow Lyudmilla Narusova later said, of the occupants of one large apartment building. Whispers circulated that Sobchak’s defeat had been organised by Yeltsin, who wanted him out, as the flamboyant and charismatic Sobchak could have posed a challenge to Yeltsin’s own battle for re-election as president a few months later. Narusova was convinced of that: ‘He’d become too independent. Yeltsin saw him as his competitor, and therefore the order was given that the elections were to be a farce.’[114] Before the campaign had even begun, Sobchak was targeted by a criminal investigation over bribery allegations. Many believed it was part of a dirty tricks campaign by the old-guard security men surrounding Yeltsin.[115]

The allegations undoubtedly impacted the outcome of the election, and Putin resigned from the St Petersburg administration immediately after the loss. Kremlin spin doctors telling the official story of Putin’s career have always stressed his loyalty to Sobchak in stepping down, and the risk he took in facing unemployment because of his principles. But in fact he was out of work for less than a month before he was invited to Moscow, initially to take up a prestigious position as a deputy head of the Kremlin administration. He had been helped along the way by Alexei Bolshakov, a dinosaur from the Leningrad defence establishment and most likely from the KGB, who’d somehow become Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister.

Although Putin’s appointment was unexpectedly blocked by Anatoly Chubais, the Western-leaning privatisation tsar who’d become Yeltsin’s new chief of staff, he was not abandoned. Instead, he was asked to head the Kremlin’s fabled foreign property department, which had inherited all the Soviet Union’s vast overseas holdings after the collapse – the stately trade and diplomatic missions, the network of arms bases and other military installations, clandestine or otherwise. Though it was an empire in which much had already gone unaccounted for, it represented a strategic core of the nation’s imperial wealth, and for Putin this was a prestigious promotion indeed.

It was the beginning of a dizzying rise. Within seven months of his move to Moscow, Putin was promoted further still. First, he was made head of the Control Department, a core institute of Kremlin power, where he was charged with making sure the president’s orders were carried out across the nation’s unruly regions. ‘They didn’t just take Putin from the street,’ said one close ally. ‘He was known in Moscow as an adviser to Sobchak, as an influential person in St Petersburg … I think this transfer was planned.’[116] Then, a year later, he was promoted to become the Kremlin’s first deputy chief of staff in charge of the regions, the third most powerful role in the Kremlin after the president. After just three months in that role he was appointed to head the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, for the whole of Russia. He was only a lieutenant colonel at the time, and it was unheard of for anyone other than a general to head the FSB. The FSB generals were said to be aghast, but Putin’s allies insisted that his status as first deputy chief of staff gave him a rank equivalent to a general. It was just that it was in civilian terms, they said.[117]

Yeltsin’s son-in-law Valentin Yumashev, a good-natured former journalist who’d risen to become Yeltsin’s chief of staff, insisted that Putin’s miraculous rise was down to his outstanding qualities. ‘Among my deputies, he was one of the strongest,’ he told me. ‘He always worked brilliantly. He formulated his views exactly. He would analyse the situation exactly. I was always happy I had such a deputy.’[118] But for others who had known him in St Petersburg, Putin’s elevation was taking on a surreal quality. Some of his former associates questioned whether he was being propelled by the KGB generals who’d mentored his career from the beginning. ‘You could make the case that he’d first been given the task to infiltrate the democratic community through his work with Sobchak,’ said one. When Sobchak had become surplus to requirements, had Putin played a role in helping make sure he lost? ‘It’s totally possible that Putin was following the orders of the Kremlin, and that when he completed this task he entered the Kremlin and became so important,’ said the former associate. ‘If you suppose this was a special operation to liquidate Sobchak as a contender, then everything becomes clear.’[119] But others argued that Sobchak had become increasingly controversial in St Petersburg in any case, mainly due to what many saw as his arrogance. It hadn’t taken much to make his bid for re-election touch and go.

However he got there, once Putin assumed his role as director of the FSB, he soon began to clean up the stains from his St Petersburg past. One of his greatest enemies from those days was Yury Shutov, a former Sobchak deputy who’d clashed with Putin and had been collecting compromising material on him – on the oil-for-food deals, on the privatisations of the city’s assets and on his ties to the Tambov group. Soon after Putin’s appointment, Shutov was arrested at gunpoint. He’d long been a deeply controversial figure and rumours of his ties to the St Petersburg underworld ran deep. But once Putin became FSB chief, the suspicions turned into legal charges. He was charged with ordering four contract killings and attempting two others. Though he was briefly freed by a local court which ruled that there was no legal basis for a criminal case, Shutov was swiftly arrested again, and dispatched to Russia’s toughest penal colony, known as the Beliy Lebed, or White Swan, in Perm, in the depths of Siberia. He never emerged from it. The material he’d gathered on Putin’s ties to Tambov simply disappeared, said Andrei Korchagin, a former city official who had known Shutov well: ‘He was Russia’s first and only real political prisoner.’[120]

An even more disturbing omen came just four months after Putin’s appointment as FSB chief. Galina Starovoitova, the same stout and tweedy human rights activist with soft brown hair who Putin had approached for work after his return from Dresden to Leningrad, was shot dead at the entrance to her apartment building late one evening in November 1998. She was by then St Petersburg’s leading democrat, its most vocal crusader against corruption. The whole city was in mourning after her death, the nation in shock. Many commentators linked her killing to tension surrounding elections to the local parliament that were to be held the following month. But one of Starovoitova’s former aides, Ruslan Linkov, who was with her at the time of the shooting but somehow escaped with his life, believed she was killed because of her corruption investigations.[121] One of her closest friends, Valeria Novodvorskaya, another leading democrat, was convinced the St Petersburg security men had ordered her murder: ‘They were clearly behind the scenes. They held the hand of the killers.’[122] A former partner of Ilya Traber said the biggest threat to Starovoitova could have come from the St Petersburg siloviki who controlled the sea port, the fleet and the oil terminal: ‘She had a dossier on the group of people who controlled the oil business in St Petersburg. Traber told me about this. He said, “Why the hell did she start looking into the oil business?” This is why she was killed.’[123] Later, a former FSB officer who’d investigated her death told me he suspected it was indeed Tambov that organised it: ‘We understood that we would not be able to get anywhere with the case.’[124]

The events that accompanied Putin’s rise were ominous. But the country was hurtling towards another financial crisis, and the warning signs, it appeared, were not noticed by anyone. Yeltsin’s health was failing, and if at least one account is to be believed, the generals of the KGB were preparing to return. One evening in Moscow, soon after a financial crash that obliterated the Russian economy in August 1998, a small group of KGB officers and one American gathered for a private dinner. Among them were the former KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov; Robert Eringer, a former security chief for Monaco who’d dabbled as an informant for the FBI; and Igor Prelin, an aide to Kryuchkov and one of Putin’s senior lecturers at the Red Banner spy institute. According to Eringer, Prelin told the other guests that soon the KGB would return to power: ‘He said, “We know someone. You’ve never heard of him. We’re not going to tell you who it is, but he’s one of us, and when he’s president we’re back.”’[125]