Читать книгу Putin’s People - Catherine Belton - Страница 22

Yevgeny Primakov had always been a man of consensus, a consummate diplomat who did not like to rock the boat. Already in his seventieth year, he stepped for a while into the shadows, appearing to concede a temporary defeat. Yeltsin’s Kremlin, it seemed, had won breathing space.

But if Primakov had been the KGB’s Plan A to take back power, another opportunity was lying in wait. Whether by coincidence or by design, a combination of legal threats, fears, rivalries and pure political calculation came together, and led to the takeover of Russia by a far more ruthless generation of KGB men. The Family had been stuck in the mindset that Primakov could only be replaced by someone from the security services. ‘After Primakov, it was not possible to appoint a liberal,’ said Yumashev. ‘It had to be someone that the Duma – and society – would see as a strong figure, like Stepashin, who was a general.’

But Sergei Stepashin was probably the most liberal of all the leaders of the Russian security services – he’d even joined the progressive Yabloko Duma political party. Despite a background serving in the interior ministry in Soviet times, he was a historian by training, and had long been close to Yeltsin. They’d been working together ever since Yeltsin entrusted him to lead a federal investigation into the KGB’s role in the failed August coup. Yet for Yumashev and Pugachev, Stepashin had never been more than an interim candidate. Stepashin, Pugachev said, was vyaly – the Russian word for weak. He did not believe Stepashin was decisive enough to take the actions necessary to protect them: ‘It seemed to me he was someone who would make compromises with the Communists.’[86] Yumashev said that he too began to entertain doubts about Stepashin. They were jealous of Stepashin’s close relationship with Anatoly Chubais, the former Kremlin chief of staff and privatisation tsar who’d long been their rival for Yeltsin’s affections. Until late June, part of the Yeltsin Family had been toying with the idea of another candidate, Nikolai Aksyonenko, the railways minister, who they believed would more strongly defend their interests. But Yeltsin soon took a strong dislike to him.[87]

In the background, said Pugachev, he’d long been advancing his own candidate, the man he believed to be the safest, most loyal pair of hands. He was backing Vladimir Putin, who he’d first seen as a potential successor when he handled the tape of Skuratov with the prostitutes so coolly. They’d first met briefly in St Petersburg in the early nineties, and had got to know each other better when Putin was appointed as Borodin’s deputy in the Kremlin property department. There, they’d worked together every day, said Pugachev. Pugachev’s Mezhprombank was involved in raising funds for the foreign property department Putin headed (though Pugachev declined to specify exactly what the bank did).[88] From his office in a small room of the former Central Committee’s headquarters on Old Square, Putin was tasked with rooting through the vast foreign holdings Russia had inherited on the Soviet Union’s collapse. There were the palatial buildings of the special trade representative offices through which the lifeblood of the USSR’s export-based economy had run. There were the embassies and the strategic military bases, the arms depots and the secret safe houses of the KGB. Many of these holdings had been looted in the chaos of the collapse by the KGB and organised crime. They were meant to be on the balance sheet of the ministry of foreign affairs, but no accounting had ever been done. Putin’s job was to bring these properties back onto the books, but it’s not clear if he ever succeeded in doing so. The foreign property department was at the heart of the strategic interests of the KGB, and while Pugachev claimed that Putin had no inkling of the slush-fund machinations through Mabetex, or MES, the oil trader granted billions of dollars in export deals, it’s far from clear whether that could have been the case.

They’d stayed close as Putin continued his dizzying rise through the Kremlin, first as head of the Control Department, and then when he was anointed head of the FSB in July 1998. All the while, said Pugachev, Putin had been his protégé. His charm lay in the fact that he knew him as someone he could give orders to: ‘He was as obedient as a dog.’[89]

Initially, Yumashev claimed, he’d ‘had no idea about Putin’ as a candidate, and had pushed Aksyonenko instead.[90] But he had always been aware of Putin’s abilities. As Kremlin chief of staff, he’d overseen and approved each of the key moments of Putin’s rise, and they’d forged a close relationship. By March 1997 Putin was a deputy head of the Kremlin administration. Yet he’d always appeared modest, said Yumashev, and, unlike most other officials, uninterested in furthering his career: ‘Among my deputies, he was one of the strongest. He always worked brilliantly. But at one point he came to me and said he wanted to step down. I asked him not to go. He told me, “I have sorted out this work. I would like to find something new.”’[91] Soon after, in May 1998, Yumashev promoted Putin to the third most powerful post in the Kremlin: first deputy chief of staff in charge of the regions, a role that brought him into more frequent contact with Yeltsin. And then, just two months later, Yumashev moved Putin sideways to head the FSB.

This was the first sign of Yumashev’s – and the Family’s – absolute trust in Putin. In those days, just a month before the August 1998 financial crisis, clouds were already fast gathering over the Yeltsin administration. The country was besieged by a series of miners’ strikes over unpaid wages, which were beginning to spread into the nuclear sector too. The miners were blockading the Trans-Siberian Railway, a vital artery of the Russian economy. Putin’s predecessor as FSB chief had been seen as close to the Communists, and that summer, as the strikes began to spread and the threat of economic crisis loomed, while parliament was already beginning to speak of impeachment, it was of paramount importance for Yeltsin’s Kremlin to have its own man in charge of the security services.[92] The fact that Putin was only a lieutenant colonel rather than a general was whitewashed, and he was dubbed the first civilian head of the FSB instead. In that summer of crisis and murk, they got away with it.

Yumashev insisted that he’d always been convinced of Putin’s democratic credentials. What struck him most, he said, was his dogged loyalty to his former mentor and boss, Anatoly Sobchak, the former St Petersburg mayor. One incident in November 1997 stood out for him above all others: ‘The reason why I so strongly recommended him [as head of the FSB] was because there was an episode when he worked as head of the Control Department and he came and said, “Sobchak is going to be arrested, and I have to save him.” He said, “I have to take him out of the country because the siloviki – the prosecutors, the interior ministry and the FSB – should arrest him in the next two or three days.” It was absolutely clear to him and to me that there was a 50:50 chance he would be caught. I told him Vladimir Vladimirovich, “You understand that if you are caught you will lose your position, and it’s possible you will never find work again. You are going against the law.”’[93]

Putin, however, held his ground. He insisted the case against Sobchak was fabricated, just part of the smear campaign launched by the old-guard security men in 1996 ahead of Sobchak’s bid for re-election in St Petersburg because they hated him ideologically. Then Sobchak had been targeted by a criminal investigation over bribery allegations.[94] But what neither Putin – nor Yumashev when he recounted the tale – spoke of was the risk that the arrest of Sobchak could lead to Putin himself. There was no telling where it might lead if a rival faction had it in for him.[95]

Putin had arranged for Sobchak to be spirited away out of hospital on a national holiday, when no one was watching. He’d whisked him off on a private jet, which one insider said belonged to his close ally Gennady Timchenko, the alleged former KGB operative who’d won a monopoly on exports through the St Petersburg oil terminal. When Putin arrived back in the Kremlin after a brief absence, Yumashev was deeply relieved: ‘For two or three days I was between worry and horror, because it would have been such a grandiose scandal if the FSB or the MVD [the interior ministry] had caught Putin and Sobchak when they were crossing the [Russian] border. For me it was important that a person was ready to sacrifice his career for justice, and when he returned I told Boris Nikolaevich [Yeltsin] of this.’[96]

Yumashev claimed that another event had also imprinted itself on his perception of Putin. In late 1998, during Primakov’s tenure as prime minister, Putin had called Yumashev from his car and told him he’d just been with Primakov, and wanted to meet urgently. ‘When he arrived, he told me, “There is a very strange situation.” He said, “Primakov called me and asked me as head of the FSB to begin wiretapping Yavlinsky.”’ Grigory Yavlinsky was a leader of the liberal opposition in the Duma who had spoken out about corruption in Primakov’s cabinet. Primakov had apparently told Putin he needed him to bug him because, he claimed, Yavlinsky was an American spy. ‘Putin told me that he’d refused him, because this is absolutely unacceptable. He’d said that if we return the FSB to Soviet times when it went after dissidents in politics, then we will destroy the security services. He said that if Yeltsin shared Primakov’s position, he was ready to resign over it.’[97]

None of these sentiments fitted in any way with Putin’s activities as deputy mayor in St Petersburg, when a ruthless alliance of the KGB and organised crime ruled the roost. Nor did they fit with Putin’s activities in Dresden, running illegals against the West. But still Yumashev claimed to have taken him seriously. Even now, after everything that has followed in Putin’s twenty-year rule, Yumashev said he has stuck to this view: ‘I am 100 per cent sure he was not playing me. In this case Putin really would have resigned, because he was absolutely aggressively against this. But of course Boris Nikolaevich would never have given the go-ahead.’[98]

Yumashev believed there was no way that during Putin’s time as deputy mayor of St Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak’s ardent proclamations for democracy could have failed to rub off on him. But he appeared not to know, or not to want to know, the details of how St Petersburg had been actually run.

Putin was a past master at recruiting. In the KGB it had been his speciality, according to one former close associate.[99] ‘In KGB school, they teach you how to make a pleasant impression on the people you are speaking with. Putin learned this art to perfection,’ said a senior Russian foreign-intelligence operative. ‘In a small circle of people he could be extremely charming. He could charm anyone. And as a deputy, he was extremely effective. He carried out any tasks quickly and creatively, without worrying much about the methods.’[100]

If Yumashev was naïve, then in that year of intense pressure and attack on the Yeltsin Family from Primakov, so too perhaps was Boris Berezovsky, the wily, fast-talking oligarch who’d become the epitome of the insider dealing of the Yeltsin years, when a small coterie of businessmen bargained behind the scenes for prime assets and government posts. The former mathematician had earned his fortune running trading schemes for AvtoVAZ, the producer of the boxy Zhiguli car that symbolised the Soviet era, at a time when the car industry was steeped in organised crime. He’d survived an assassination attempt that decapitated his driver. Yet somehow he’d still found his way into the Kremlin. He’d hung out drinking tea in the office of Yeltsin’s chief bodyguard, Alexander Korzhakov, and then found his way into the graces of the president himself and his Family. All the while he cultivated ties among the leaders of Chechen separatists. Berezovsky’s LogoVAZ club, in a restored mansion in downtown Moscow, became an informal centre for government decision-making. At the height of his powers in 1996, the Yeltsin government’s ‘young reformers’ and oligarchs would gather there through the night to plot counter-coups against the hard-liners.

By 1999, however, Berezovsky was politically toxic. His relations with members of the Yeltsin Family had come under target. Not only had the raid on his Sibneft oil major threatened to expose dealings with the oil-trading company of Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana’s then husband, Leonid Dyachenko, there was also a criminal investigation into his business operations through Aeroflot, the state’s national airline, in which he held a significant stake, and where the husband of Yeltsin’s second daughter, Elena, was president. The Family were seeking to jettison their relations with him. Rumours surfaced that his security company had been bugging the Family’s offices, and he’d been ousted in April from his Kremlin post as executive secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States, as the loose alliance of former Soviet republics was then known. Yumashev, for one, had tired of dealing with him. ‘There was only so many times he could hear Berezovsky telling him he didn’t understand,’ said one close Berezovsky associate.[101] ‘He began to get on his nerves.’ Berezovsky seemed to have been abandoned by all. And so when Vladimir Putin turned up at the birthday party of his wife Lena early in 1999, he was deeply touched by the show of solidarity when everyone else had their knives out for him.

Putin’s gesture helped Berezovsky set aside qualms about his KGB past.[102] Initially, he’d chiefly supported Aksyonenko, the railways minister, as Yeltsin’s successor – his relations with Putin had chilled distinctly that year after Putin, as FSB chief, ordered the arrest and March 1999 jailing of the FSB officer closest to him, Alexander Litvinenko. But, faced with the constant threat of arrest, Berezovsky eventually fell in line behind Putin’s candidacy. Later, always a mythmaker about the extent of his influence in Yeltsin’s Kremlin, Berezovsky liked to claim that it was he who had helped bring Putin to power, by proposing him to Yumashev as FSB chief in the summer of 1998. He said he’d then held secret meetings with Putin in the lift of the FSB’s imposing Lubyanka headquarters, where they’d discussed Putin possibly running for the presidency.[103] The two men had met only fleetingly prior to that, when Berezovsky visited St Petersburg in the early nineties and Putin assisted him in opening his LogoVAZ car dealership there. That was a business riven with the mafia, and Berezovsky must have known about Putin’s links with organised crime there, said one Berezovsky associate: ‘Putin helped him in all questions connected to the sale of LogoVAZ cars in St Petersburg. This business was a mafia business, a bandit business, and in Moscow Berezovsky organised this with the help of Chechens and the corrupt bureaucracy. In St Petersburg he organised this with Putin’s help. Therefore he understood everything about his connections and his situation. He wasn’t a child.’[104]

But although Berezovsky was undoubtedly to play an enormous role in helping secure the defeat of Primakov later that year, he had never known or worked as closely with Putin as Pugachev had. And according to one of his closest associates, Alex Goldfarb, he never claimed to have been the one to introduce Putin to Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana, or to suggest him as a replacement for Stepashin, or as Yeltsin’s successor.[105]

*

The moment everything changed came in the middle of July, in the dog days of the Moscow summer, when the Kremlin was emptying and many, including Yeltsin, were away on vacation. It was then that the Swiss prosecutors presented the Yeltsin Family with another shock. They’d thought the Mabetex case had been dealt with – Skuratov had been suspended from his position for several months by then, as a result of the criminal case Pugachev had helped open. But the Swiss were still active – and so were Skuratov’s deputies. On July 14, the Swiss prosecutors announced that they’d opened a criminal case into money laundering through Swiss bank accounts by twenty-four Russians, including Pavel Borodin and other senior Kremlin officials, and alleged that the funds may have been obtained through ‘corruption or abuse of power’. When asked whether the list included Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana, one of the Swiss investigating magistrates answered, ‘Not yet.’[106] It was clear that they were circling, and according to Pugachev, a fresh sense of panic set in.

The Geneva prosecutors said their Russian partners were still conducting a parallel inquiry. It was then, Pugachev said, that he decided to act: ‘We needed someone who would be able to deal with it all. Stepashin wasn’t going to do it. But there was Putin with the FSB, the Security Council, Patrushev. There was an entire team.’[107] Pugachev remembered Putin’s coolness when he handled the Skuratov tape, and said he decided to introduce him to Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana, who in those days was still the main channel to the president. As if on cue, a day later Putin’s FSB had taken action, opening a criminal investigation into the construction business owned by the wife of the Yeltsins’ political opponent, the Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov.[108] Pugachev had first sought to undermine Tatyana’s view of Stepashin, demonstrating to her how, unlike Putin, he had failed to vigorously defend the tape of Skuratov and the prostitutes after it had been aired on TV. ‘I told her, “Tanya, look. You need a person who will save you. Stepashin will make compromises with the Communists. He will compromise us in front of our eyes. Look at how he is now.”’[109] Then he said he’d taken Putin from his office in the Kremlin’s Security Council to her. ‘I told her Putin was a much clearer person. He is young and listens attentively. Stepashin doesn’t listen any more.’ Pugachev claimed that Yumashev later persuaded her to go to her father and convince him to make the switch.

Yumashev insisted, however, that Pugachev played no role in Putin’s rise, while the criminal case in Switzerland and the investigation in the US had never posed a threat at all: ‘Of course, it was total rubbish that this was dangerous,’ Yumashev said. ‘The only thought I had – and Voloshin shared this view, and Yeltsin too – was that power was being given to a person who mentally, ideologically and politically was exactly the same as us. We’d worked together in the Kremlin as one team. There was an absolutely common understanding with Putin on how the world should work and how Russia should work.’[110]

But these were the days when everything was decided. Stepashin’s world – and the chances for a more liberal administration – were to be swept away. There was no pressing reason to risk replacing Stepashin with Putin, a relatively unknown official, unless the Yeltsin Family needed someone they considered more loyal – and more ruthless – because of the risk presented by the escalating Mabetex probe. Yumashev tried to explain the switch with lame-sounding reasons, for instance that Stepashin was under the thumb of his wife. He liked to tell long, contorted tales of the many arguments he’d made in those days for why they had to act quickly, before it was too late to replace Stepashin, who just was not the right fit. But no explanation other than the rising panic over the Swiss probe made any sense. This was the motive the Yeltsin Family never wanted told, for it revealed how the Family’s rush to save itself was the inadvertent cause of Putin’s rise and its world’s demise. They needed a tough guy to protect their interests, and got more than they bargained for. In his authorised narrative, Yumashev didn’t want to give credence to any of this. Pugachev was the narrator who strayed from the Kremlin’s official version, and appears to have told the truth.[111]

At first Yeltsin had hesitated. But in the last week of July, Chechen rebels began to mount armed attacks on the border with Dagestan, the mountainous region neighbouring the breakaway Chechen republic, and, Yumashev claimed, Stepashin appeared to struggle to deal with it.[112] Before he made his first trip as prime minister to Washington, DC, on July 27, he’d publicly vowed that there would be no new war against Chechnya. But almost every day in the week that followed his return, clashes on the border broke out. At the weekend, on August 8, there was a massive escalation in fighting as two to three hundred armed Chechen insurgents seized control of two villages in Dagestan. Yeltsin’s efforts to retain him as prime minister were running out. Even then, at the last minute Anatoly Chubais, who worked closely with Stepashin, had nearly derailed Pugachev and the Yeltsin Family’s plans when he’d got wind that a replacement was being lined up. Chubais tried to reach Yeltsin at his dacha the weekend before the announcement was to be made, and to talk him out of it. But he only reached the security guard, who promptly relayed his request to Pugachev.

Furious at this attempt to undermine his plans, Pugachev said he made sure the security guard never told Yeltsin about Chubais’ call: ‘I’d worked constantly for the last eight months to get Putin into power. I turned Putin from being a total nobody who’d been head of the FSB into this, a real pretender for power. I’d monitored and checked ceaselessly. And where was Chubais when we had to deal with the Mabetex scandal?’ he raged. ‘Where was he? What did he do? He’d completely disappeared.’[113]

Even then, when they all met in Yeltsin’s office early that Monday, August 9, Yeltsin had still hesitated, said Pugachev. Stepashin refused to step down without a vote by parliament, and Yeltsin had left his office to think again. ‘I remember the whole story,’ said Pugachev. ‘Stepashin told Yeltsin Putin was no one, that he would not stand for it. But everything had already been decided. It was a rare case when Yeltsin decided nothing himself. It was a matter of life and death.’[114]

When Yeltsin finally made the announcement later that day, the nation was stunned by the identity of their new prime minister. Putin was a little-known bureaucrat, a grey figure who rarely appeared on the news. The country’s news outlets scrambled to put together biographies of him. What shocked the nation most of all was that Yeltsin openly named him as the man he hoped would succeed him as president, announcing in a televised address: ‘I decided to name the person who in my opinion will be able to consolidate society based on the broadest political forces, to ensure the continuation of reforms in Russia. He will be able to unite those around him who, in the twenty-first century, have the task of renewing Russia as a great nation. This person is the secretary of the Security Council, the director of the Federal Security Service, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.’[115]

Putin had accomplished the most vertiginous leap of his dizzying career. The Russian parliament was in shock, although most believed he was a nobody who later could easily be defeated, and this helped squeeze his appointment as prime minister through a confirmation vote.[116] By that time, Primakov had re-emerged from the political sidelines to form a bold new alliance with Yury Luzhkov, the powerful Moscow mayor, for the upcoming parliamentary elections. By comparison, said Yumashev, ‘Putin looked like a child.’[117] But many in the Kremlin still worried that Yeltsin had gone too far in naming him as his preferred successor. ‘Many of our colleagues considered that Yeltsin categorically should not do this – because Putin was an unknown entity and Yeltsin only had 5 per cent political support. They thought that after such an announcement Putin would never win,’ Yumashev said.

To the outside world, it seemed the Yeltsin Family were taking an enormous risk. But other plans were afoot. An escalation of a Russian military offensive against Chechnya had already been under discussion, Stepashin said later.[118] Most important for the bureaucrats and spin doctors inside the Kremlin was to transform the awkward-seeming candidate they’d been presented with into a force to be reckoned with. At first glance, the material didn’t seem very promising. People still talked over Putin in meetings. The plan was to cast him in the image of one of the most popular fictional TV heroes from Soviet times. He was to be a modern-day Max Otto von Shtirlitz, an undercover spy who’d gone deep behind enemy lines to infiltrate the command networks of Nazi Germany. Putin would be the kandidat rezident, the spy candidate, a patriot who would restore the Russian state.[119] Their main task was to distinguish him from the Yeltsin Family – so that the public would see him as independent. His youth, cast against the ageing and ailing Yeltsin, was meant to give him an immediate advantage, while Kremlin-linked TV channels sought to portray him acting decisively against the separatist incursion into Dagestan. In the background, Berezovsky was perfectly capable of trying to organise a small victorious war to help spur Putin’s vault to power, two of his close associates said.[120]

In the rush to help engineer his ascent, Pugachev had paid little attention to warning signs of Putin’s duplicity. That July, when Pugachev had attempted to deal with the fallout of the Swiss prosecutors’ case, holding talks in the Kremlin late into the night with Putin, Patrushev and Voloshin to try to persuade the acting prosecutor general, Yury Chaika, to step down in favour of an even more loyal ally, Putin had apparently played a double game. Chaika initially resisted, only to agree a few days later after separate talks with Pugachev, during which he warned him that Putin’s allegiance to the Kremlin might not be clear-cut: ‘With Putin you need to be careful,’ he said. ‘When you all met with me in the Kremlin and tried to persuade me for six hours to step down, Putin accompanied me out of the Kremlin after it was all finished. He told me I was right not to agree. He told me if I did it would be a crime.’[121]

But Pugachev promptly forgot Chaika’s warning. The scandal over Mabetex was still refusing to die down despite all the manoeuvrings, and at the end of August calamity hit, when details of how the probe was linked to the Yeltsin Family finally broke into the open. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera published an article that disclosed how Mabetex’s owner Behdjet Pacolli had issued the credit cards to the Yeltsin Family and covered the payments for them.[122] The paper said the Swiss prosecutors suspected the payments were bribes in return for the Kremlin renovation contract. It named Felipe Turover as the central witness for these claims.

The news hit Yeltsin’s Kremlin hard.[123] Till then, only they – and the prosecutor – had known how far the probe might go. Pugachev once again scurried to assist. ‘Tanya was totally flabbergasted when the press reports appeared,’ he said. ‘But I promised her I would make it go away.’[124] He invited the Yeltsin Family to open accounts at his own Mezhprombank, and then told the media that the credit cards in question had first been issued years ago, through his bank. The move was designed to confuse the press and remove questions over whether Yeltsin had broken the law by holding a foreign bank account.[125]

In Pugachev’s eyes, the whole case was unfair. Yeltsin, he said, had never even understood what money was. On one occasion, drunk, he’d asked his chief bodyguard, Alexander Korzhakov, to buy him vodka, and had pulled a wad of notes out of a safe in his room. This, said Pugachev, was where he’d kept the royalties for the books he’d written with Yumashev. Yeltsin had pulled out $100. ‘He asked Korzhakov if this was enough. He had no idea what money was, or how much things were worth. He never handled this himself.’ Almost no money had ever been spent on the credit card issued in Yeltsin’s name – only some for an official visit to Budapest. His daughters, however, had spent considerably more. ‘Tanya could spend $100,000 a month on furs,’ said Pugachev. But none of them understood what a credit card was, or how it worked or what it signified: ‘They would just go out with this piece of plastic and use it to buy things. They didn’t understand that someone had to pay for it.’[126]

Yumashev said they’d been convinced that the cards were financed by Yeltsin’s royalties from his memoirs. Borodin, the Kremlin Property Department chief, had told them so, he said: ‘They absolutely sincerely spent this money believing it was from the royalties of the books. But I don’t doubt that this stupidity of Borodin could be used by all kinds of forces against us, including Primakov and Skuratov.’[127]

Clouds were looming ever larger on the horizon, and the money trail had the potential to go further still. On the first anniversary of the August 1998 financial crisis, the New York Times broke the news of yet another Russian financial scandal.[128] US law-enforcement agencies were investigating billions of dollars in suspected money-laundering transactions through the Bank of New York by Russian organised crime. A month later, reports of a link to the Yeltsin Family emerged. Investigators had traced the $2.7 million transfer to two accounts held with the Bank of New York in the Cayman Islands, held in the name of Tatyana’s then husband, Leonid Dyachenko.[129] Later, documents from the Swiss prosecutors’ office showed that they were also investigating a much bigger transfer through Banco del Gottardo to an account beneficially owned by Tatyana.[130] No charges were ever pressed and Yumashev said any suggestion that Tatyana had ever received such funds was ‘absolute lies’.

But amid the mounting tension and the scramble to save themselves from attack, Pugachev had brushed aside a warning from Putin’s former mentor Anatoly Sobchak, who’d told him he was making a great mistake: ‘I thought maybe he was jealous. But of course he knew it all.’[131] He’d forgotten about Berezovsky’s own qualms when he told him, ‘Sergei, this is the biggest mistake of your life. He comes from a tainted circle. A komitetchik cannot change. You don’t understand who Putin is.’[132] He’d forgotten, too, about his own deep hatred of the KGB, about how he’d run and dodged from them long ago when he was trading currency as a teenager in the tourist hotels of Leningrad. He’d forgotten Chaika’s warning, and nobody – not even Pugachev – noticed that Putin still met frequently with Primakov, who was meant to be the arch-enemy, after he’d been fired as prime minister. It turned out that Putin had taken the entire top ranks of the FSB to Primakov’s dacha, where they toasted him, and in October that year Putin attended Primakov’s seventieth birthday celebrations and gave a speech lauding him.[133]

Pugachev and the Yeltsin Family had closed their eyes to all this. They wanted above all to believe that Putin was one of them. That summer of intensifying investigations had left them desperately seeking a successor from among the security men who could protect them. Somehow they came to believe that Putin was the only candidate capable of that. Increasingly impaired by illness, Yeltsin seemed forced to go along with them. Ever since Primakov had been appointed prime minister in the wake of the August 1998 financial crisis, the Yeltsin Family had believed there was no alternative to appointing someone from outside the siloviki as a replacement. In the financial collapse, liberal ideals and the young reformers among whom Yeltsin had once been searching for his successor had become tainted. ‘We swallowed so much freedom we were poisoned by it,’ Yumashev later said wryly.[134]

Putin’s lip service to market and democratic principles had helped the Family believe he would continue their course. But paramount in their calculations had been his daredevil operation to whisk his former mentor Anatoly Sobchak out of Russia and away from the threat of arrest. ‘This show of loyalty was counted … as a weighty factor in choosing him,’ said Gleb Pavlovsky, a Kremlin adviser and spin doctor at the time.[135] The Family knew that, much more than Stepashin, Putin was ruthless enough to break the law to protect his allies if necessary.

Besides, Pugachev said, Putin seemed loyal and obedient. He still thought of him as someone who followed him like a dog, and still identified him with Sobchak’s liberal and democratic beliefs: ‘My feeling was that if he was close to Sobchak then he should be a person of liberal views. I didn’t study closely what he represented.’ What’s more, Putin had seemed reluctant to take on the post of prime minister. He had had to twist his arm, he said, and tell him it was not for long, only till the situation was stable.

What Pugachev didn’t know was that Putin had once worked closely with one of the main players in the attempt to overthrow the Yeltsin regime. He wasn’t aware that Felipe Turover, the KGB officer behind the leaks on Mabetex and the Yeltsin accounts, with connections to the top of the KGB’s legendary black-ops department, had helped Putin set up the oil-for-food barter scheme in St Petersburg.

He’d never heard the story Turover told me, about how after Yeltsin’s chief bodyguard had allegedly given the order to eliminate Turover when his name was leaked to the Italian newspaper that August, Putin had gone to see his old associate, who was then in Moscow, warned him about the order and told him he should leave the country, fast: ‘He told me to leave because he had an order from the president to finish me off. He told me I could leave under his guarantee.’

Pugachev didn’t know that all the while, Putin had played all sides. ‘He always kept his promises,’ said Turover. ‘He never worked for the Family against Primakov. And he only worked formally against Skuratov.’[136]

Pugachev also had little inkling that Putin could represent anything close to a Plan B of the KGB, after the Primakov takeover failed. He always claimed he thought of Putin as someone he could control. He didn’t realise that he might have been lying to the Family when he appeared to support them. Putin ‘deceived them’, said Turover. ‘Warfare is based on deception. This is the strategy of Sun Tzu. He wrote The Art of War 2,600 years ago,’ referring to the ancient Chinese military treatise. ‘Putin learned his judo lessons well.’