Putin’s People. Catherine Belton

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СКАЧАТЬ training, Putin had reflected everyone’s views back to them like a mirror: first those of his new so-called democratic master, and then those of the old-guard establishment he worked with too. ‘He would change his colours so fast you could never tell who he really was,’ said Sedelmayer.[108]

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       Inside Job

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      ‘What we’ve discussed is how the darkest forces never give up. The French Revolution, the Soviet one, all the others, appear first as a liberating struggle. But they soon morph into military dictatorship. The early heroes look like idiots, the thugs show their true faces, and the cycle (which isn’t what revolution means) is complete.’

      Christian Michel

      *

      MOSCOW, August 25 1991 – It was late in the evening when Nikolai Kruchina trudged wearily through the door to his flat in the closely-guarded compound for the Party elite. Just four days before, on August 21, the attempted coup by Communist hard-liners seeking to preserve Soviet power had collapsed in failure. And now, the institutions Kruchina had served for most of his life were being dismantled in front of his eyes. The evening before, he’d held a series of high-level meetings with the powerful boss of the Central Committee’s International Department, Valentin Falin, and he seemed exhausted.[1] The KGB watchman outside his home noticed his downcast gaze, his clear reluctance to talk.[2]

      The changes in those four short days had come thick and fast. First, the pro-democratic Russian leader Boris Yeltsin had signed a decree, broadcast live, suspending the Soviet Communist Party and ending its decades of rule. Yeltsin’s defiant stance against the hard-line leaders of the attempted coup had put him firmly in the ascendant. He now by far eclipsed Gorbachev, who stood timidly to the side of the podium as Yeltsin addressed the Russian parliament. Arguing that the Communist Party was to blame for the illegal coup, Yeltsin ordered that the sprawling, warren-like headquarters of the Party’s Central Committee on Moscow’s Old Square be immediately sealed. Filed in hundreds of its rooms were the secrets of the Soviet Union’s vast financial empire, a network that spanned thousands of administrative buildings, hotels, dachas and sanatoriums, as well as the Party’s hard-currency bank accounts and untold hundreds, perhaps thousands, of foreign firms set up as joint ventures in the dying days of the regime. Through these bank accounts and other connected firms, the strategic operations of the Communist Party abroad – and those of allied political parties – had been funded. It was the engine room of the Soviet struggle for supremacy against the West. This was the empire Kruchina had administered as the chief of the Communist Party’s property department since 1983. Its sudden sealing felt like a symbol of all that was lost.

      Kruchina’s wife turned in early that night, leaving her husband alone, she believed, to spend the night sleeping on the couch. But early the next morning she was awoken by a knock on her door. It was the KGB watchman. Her husband, she was told, had fallen to his death from the window of their seventh-floor flat.[3]

      There were no apparent signs of disturbance, and the watchman said he’d discovered a crumpled note lying on the pavement next to Kruchina’s body. ‘I’m not a conspirator,’ it said. ‘But I’m a coward. Please tell the Soviet people this.’[4] The KGB immediately declared his death a suicide. But to this day, no one knows what exactly happened – or if they do, they are not willing to tell. Those who were at the centre of events in those days, like Viktor Gerashchenko, then the head of the Soviet state bank, prefer to limit their explanations to a Delphic ‘He fell.’[5] Others like Nikolai Leonov, then the powerful head of the KGB’s analytical department, insist that Kruchina was a victim of a ‘deep depression’ that set in at the empire’s collapse.[6]

      A little over a month later, the same thing happened to Kruchina’s predecessor as property department chief. On the evening of October 6, Georgy Pavlov fell to his death from the window of his flat. His death, at the age of eighty-one, was also recorded as a suicide. Eleven days after Pavlov’s death, another high-ranking member of the Party’s financial machine fell to his death from his balcony. This time it was the American Section chief of the Communist Party’s international department, Dmitry Lissovolik. Again, it was recorded as a suicide.

      What linked the three men was an intimate knowledge of the secret financing systems of the Communist Party at the time the KGB was preparing for the transition to a market economy under Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms. The property department Kruchina and Pavlov oversaw had been understood to have a value of $9 billion.[7] Western experts estimated its foreign holdings at many times more.[8] But in the first few days after the Communist Party’s collapse, Russia’s new rulers were bewildered to discover that the Party’s coffers were nearly empty. Rumours abounded that officials, overseen by Kruchina, had siphoned billions of roubles and other currencies through foreign joint ventures hastily set up in the final years of the regime.[9] Russian prosecutors, originally ordered by Yeltsin to investigate the Communist Party for its role in the August coup attempt, were soon redirected to investigate what had happened to the Party funds.

      Although Yeltsin ordered the offices of the Central Committee on Old Square to be sealed, Valentin Falin, the head of the committee’s International Department, which oversaw the funding of foreign operations, immediately ordered his subordinates to start destroying documents.[10] What lay in the archives could provide a roadmap to the crimes of the Communist regime and, most importantly of all, to the cash that had been stashed away.

      The most top-secret operations had been run out of Room 516, which had housed the International Department’s special section for ‘Party technology’. It was headed by Vladimir Osintsev, a specialist in black operations, who ran Communist Party influence campaigns to sow discord in countries where the existence of the Party was illegal, such as El Salvador, Turkey, South Africa and Chile. When the Russian prosecutors finally entered this room months later, in October 1991, reams of shredded files were found in ribbons across the floor. But signs of the lengths Party operatives had gone to run sleeper agents under deep cover remained. The prosecutors found piles of foreign passports and stamps from many different countries, heaps of other blank travel documents, and official stamps and visas waiting to be forged. There was a huge photo album filled with pictures of people of all types and races, a selection of wigs and beards, and even rubber moulds for faking fingerprints.[11]

      One of the International Department’s employees, Anatoly Smirnov, had rebelled, and smuggled out what he could.[12] The top-secret documents he managed to extract included details of hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to Communist-linked parties abroad. One such document, dated December 5 1989, showed an order for the Soviet state bank to transfer $22 million directly to Falin for the Party’s International Fund for left-wing organisations.[13] Another, dated June 20 1987, ordered Gosbank, the central bank of the USSR, to transfer $1 million to the Party’s curator for international affairs to provide the French Communist Party with additional funds.[14] The physical transfer of the money to France was to be organised by the KGB.

      To Smirnov, the fact that the Party was regularly dipping into state coffers to fund its political and influence operations abroad meant that ‘a crime was being committed against our people’.[15] For him, this was a red line. It was against Soviet law. The Party’s operations should have been funded from the donations it collected from members, not from state coffers.[16]

      The Russian prosecutors calculated that more than $200 million had been transferred out of the Soviet Union to fund Communist-linked parties in the USSR’s final decade of existence; Smirnov put the total at many times more.[17] The sums transferred by more surreptitious means, for more clandestine СКАЧАТЬ