Putin’s People. Catherine Belton

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      Veselovsky, a specialist in international economics, had been transferred from his post in Portugal in November 1990 to work on the plan to create an ‘invisible economy’ for the Party’s wealth. It was he who proposed the system of ‘trusted custodians’, or doverenniye litsa, who would hold and manage funds on the Party’s behalf. He’d prepared a series of notes for Kruchina with proposals for disguising the Party funds to protect them from confiscation. These included investing them in charitable or social funds, or anonymously in stocks and shares. The process was to be led by the KGB.

      ‘On the one hand this will ensure a stable income independent of the future position of the Party. And on the other, these shares can be sold at any moment through stock exchanges and then transferred to other spheres to disguise the Party’s participation while retaining control,’ he wrote. ‘In order to conduct such measures there needs to be an urgent selection of trusted custodians who can carry out separate points of the programme. It could be possible to create a system of secret Party members who will ensure the Party’s existence under any conditions of these extreme times.’[30]

      In another note, he suggested the creation of a network of companies and joint ventures, including brokerages and trading firms, in tax havens such as Switzerland, where the shareholders would be the ‘trusted custodians’.[31]

      Just as the Stasi had begun preparing, transferring funds into a network of front companies before the fall, the KGB was readying the Party for regime change, fully aware that its monopoly on power was becoming ever more precarious. To some operatives of the foreign-intelligence network drafted in to work on the scheme, when they received the orders from Kryuchkov to start creating private companies it was a clear signal that the game was up for the Communist regime. ‘As soon as this happened, I understood it was the end,’ said Yury Shvets, a senior officer in the KGB’s Washington station until 1987.[32]

      But when, after the botched coup attempt of August 1991, the Soviet Communist Party was suddenly no more, it was not at all clear what had happened to the structures created to preserve its wealth, or who was in charge of them. For the Russian prosecutors investigating, the documents left behind in the archives and in Kruchina’s flat provided only the faint outlines of the network. The figures and cogs in the schemes, the trusted proxies, the doverenniye litsa managing the funds, the network of companies, joint ventures and brokerages were hidden.[33] When later questioned about the documents, former members of the Politburo insisted that the collapse had come so swiftly and unexpectedly that no one had had time to implement Ivashko’s plans for the ‘invisible economy’.[34] But the prosecutors found plenty of signs that the project had been at least partially activated, and was long under way – and that it appeared to be led by the foreign-intelligence arm of the KGB.

      Veselovsky’s career was just one indication. Two weeks before the August coup attempt he had resigned his position and headed for Switzerland, where he took up a post at a trading firm named Seabeco that was the epitome of a KGB-backed ‘friendly firm’,[35] and that had sold vast amounts of raw materials from the Soviet Union. It was headed by a Soviet émigré named Boris Birshtein, who in the seventies had gone first to Israel and then to Canada, where he set up a string of joint ventures, including one with a leading light of Soviet foreign intelligence.[36] The KGB appeared to have its fingerprints all over Seabeco’s rise. ‘None of this could have happened without the patronage of the KGB,’ said Shvets.

      When questioned, former KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov admitted that the trading firm had been created as a channel for the Communist Party’s funds. But he insisted again that the plans had never been implemented – there’d been no time before the collapse of the regime.[37] But telltale signs emerged of Seabeco’s continued association with the KGB. A taped telephone conversation between a Seabeco associate and a Russian foreign-intelligence chief was leaked, in which the two men openly discussed the trading network they’d set up.[38] This Seabeco associate, Dmitry Yakubovsky, went public with claims that Seabeco had received tens of millions of dollars to finance KGB operations in Europe.[39]

      Any remaining chance the prosecutors might have of following the money trail, however, seemed to evaporate completely when Veselovsky disappeared from his post in Switzerland without a trace. Without adequate funding and only a scanty paper trail, the prosecutors soon ran into a brick wall. Inside Russia, they’d been able to trace the transfer of billions of roubles from Kruchina’s property department to more than a hundred Party firms and commercial banks.[40] But their attempts to recover any of it were simply stonewalled.[41]

      The new Yeltsin government seemed to have little interest in finding any of the funds amid the chaos of the Soviet collapse. For one brief moment that seemed to change, when Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s round-faced new reformist prime minister, announced with great fanfare that the government had hired Kroll, a top international investigations firm, to hunt down the Party cash. But, a $1.5 million contract and a year scouring the globe for the missing Party funds later, Kroll appeared to have made even less progress than the prosecutors had. Apparently, there was nothing to report. ‘They didn’t find anything,’ said Pyotr Aven, the government minister whose initiative it was to bring in Kroll in the first place. ‘They found nothing more than the accounts of a handful of top-level bureaucrats. They had no more than half a million dollars on the accounts.’[42]

      The problem was, it seemed, that the government did not want the funds to be found. The reason Kroll came back largely empty-handed was that it received no assistance from the Russian government at all. The firm had been blocked from working with the Russian prosecutors. ‘The Russian government was not interested in us finding anything, so we did not,’ said Tommy Helsby, a former Kroll chairman who worked on the probe.[43] ‘All the government wanted to do was use our name in a press conference.’ It only wanted to give the impression that a real search was under way.

      The task was made more difficult by the fact that, rather than through straightforward bank transfers, much of the wealth of the Soviet Union appeared to have been transferred, via friendly firms like Seabeco through the raw materials trade. Another big operator in these trades, said Helsby, was the controversial Geneva-based Glencore founder, commodities trader Marc Rich.[44]

      The KGB foreign-intelligence operatives who had been behind the creation of the scheme now held the keys to the hidden wealth. ‘At the end, when the Soviet Union collapsed, when the music stopped, these KGB men were the men who knew where the money was,’ said Helsby. ‘But by then they were the employees of a non-existent Soviet state.’

      Some of them, however, stayed on; fragments of the KGB’s foreign-intelligence networks were being preserved. Behind the scenes, amid the chaos, ‘some of them continued to manage money for the KGB’, Helsby said.

      The night Nikolai Kruchina plunged to his death was the night the Communist Party’s wealth was transferred to a new elite – and part of it had gone to the foreign-intelligence operatives of the KGB. Some of the cash had already undoubtedly been stolen, squirrelled away by top Party bosses and organised crime. But the foreign-intelligence operatives were the men who controlled the accounts when Yeltsin signed the Soviet Communist Party into history. Kruchina may have been grappling with the despairing realisation that the men who handled the funds were no longer under his control. Equally, he may have been sent to his death by those same men, to make sure he could never tell.

      ‘Kruchina was most probably frightened that he could be asked where all the property had gone,’ said Pavel Voshchanov, a former spokesperson for Yeltsin and a journalist who spent many years investigating the Party’s stolen wealth. ‘Kruchina gave the orders, but now he didn’t know where it all was. The state was being destroyed. The KGB was being destroyed. And already no one knew where these KGB guys were – and who they were.’[45]

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      The story of the prosecutors’ search for the СКАЧАТЬ