Putin’s People. Catherine Belton
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Название: Putin’s People

Автор: Catherine Belton

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

Серия:

isbn: 9780007578801

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СКАЧАТЬ testimony.[42] Only Skuratov’s closest deputy was in the know.[43] He’d also consulted, on the quiet, with the old-guard KGB prime minister Yevgeny Primakov.[44] But once Skuratov sent the order for the raid in Lugano in January, the secret was out. ‘All our efforts to ensure the confidentiality of the case collapsed,’ he said. ‘Under Swiss law, del Ponte had to show Pacolli the international order that was the basis for the raid. Of course he contacted Borodin immediately.’[45] Turover too was upset by the sudden end to the secrecy: ‘She [del Ponte] didn’t need to make so much noise. She didn’t need to send all those helicopters. It was a signal to Moscow they had taken the books.’[46]

      The raid marked the moment when Pugachev began a tense game of cat and mouse to bring about the removal of Yury Skuratov as prosecutor and end the case. It was then too that Pugachev – and the Yeltsin Family – began the chess game for their own survival that helped propel Vladimir Putin to power. It was the tipping point when they realised they were totally under siege.

      ‘It took them just four days to get organised,’ said Skuratov.[47]

      *

      When Pugachev looks back now and remembers it all, he says, parts of it seem like a blur: the constant telephone calls, the meetings stretching far into the night. Some of the dates are mixed up, remembered only by the time of year, how the weather was outside the window. But the meetings themselves, the important ones, are remembered distinctly, inscribed forever into his brain. Others are recorded in diary entries from those times.[48] Those were the days when Russia’s future was decided, when Pugachev was trying to act so fast, in the belief that he was countering the threat of takeover by Primakov’s alliance with the Communists – as well as saving his own and the Yeltsin Family’s skin – that he didn’t notice he was ultimately helping to usher in the KGB’s return. Pugachev’s story was the untold, inside account of how Putin came to power. It was the one the Yeltsin Family never wanted aired. At the time of the raid on Mabetex, Primakov’s political star was rising, and an alliance he’d forged with the powerful Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov and other regional governors was already threatening to bring down the curtain on the Yeltsin regime. Skuratov’s criminal case could bring them a still more powerful weapon.

      For years, Pugachev had developed his own network within the Russian prosecutor’s office. Like any powerful Russian institution, it was a den of vipers, where deputies jostled for position and collected kompromat on each other. Pugachev’s particular ally was Nazir Khapsirokov, the wily head of the prosecutor’s own property department, a sort of miniature version of the Kremlin department overseen by Borodin. With the power to issue apartments and other benefits to prosecutors, Khapsirokov, who was a master of intrigue, wielded the same ability to help make or break careers within the prosecutor’s office as Borodin and Pugachev did in the Kremlin. ‘In essence he was my guy in the prosecutor’s office,’ said Pugachev. ‘He brought me all the information. He told me an uprising was being organised against Yeltsin. Then he brought me a tape. He told me, “Skuratov is on it with girls.”’[49] Pugachev said that at first he didn’t believe Khapsirokov: such a tape would be the ultimate kompromat, powerful enough to cost Skuratov his job and close down the Mabetex case.

      Pugachev took the tape back to his office, but, unused to handling technology himself, he was unable to get it to play on his video recorder – he fumbled and fumbled with the settings, trying to find the right channel. Eventually he had to enlist his secretaries’ help. As soon as they managed to switch it on, he regretted that they’d become involved. The grainy footage of the rotund prosecutor general cavorting naked on a bed with what appeared to be two prostitutes made for grim viewing. Pugachev cleared his throat, red-faced. But his secretaries made a copy of the tape nevertheless. Pugachev believes it was a decisive moment. ‘If we hadn’t made a copy, then none of this would have happened,’ he said. ‘History would have been different. Putin would not have been in power.’

      He said he gave the original tape to Valentin Yumashev, Yeltsin’s son-in-law and former chief of staff, who essentially still occupied the same position behind the scenes.[50] Yumashev was to take it to Nikolai Bordyuzha, a former general from the Russian border guards who’d recently been appointed official Kremlin chief of staff in Yumashev’s place. Bordyuzha was then to call in Skuratov and tell him about the tape, and that his behaviour did not befit the office of prosecutor general.

      Always prone to overstating his role, Pugachev said that no one else knew how to act: ‘They were all still shaking.’ Bordyuzha awkwardly held the meeting with Skuratov, who agreed on the spot to resign. Bordyuzha then handed the tape to him, as if to indicate that it should all be forgotten among friends.

      Instead of securing Skuratov’s removal, that Kremlin meeting on the evening of February 1 led to an endless standoff. The position of prosecutor general had been protected under special laws seeking to enshrine its independence. For Skuratov’s resignation to come into force, it had to be accepted by the Federation Council, the upper chamber of parliament. But many of the senators in the Council at that time were already aligning themselves with Primakov and Moscow’s mayor Yury Luzhkov against the Kremlin. They were intent on protecting Skuratov. While he disappeared from sight for weeks, apparently to receive treatment at the Central Clinical Hospital, the Council stalled on putting his resignation up for a vote.

      By that time the Yeltsin Family was dealing with the beginnings of a potential coup. Just a few days after the January raid on Mabetex, Primakov had laid down the gauntlet with a public challenge to Yeltsin’s hold on power. With the backing of parliament he announced a political non-aggression pact, ostensibly to end the mounting tension between the Communist-led Russian Duma and the Kremlin.[51] The Duma was to agree to drop its impeachment hearings and set aside its constitutional right to topple the government with a no-confidence vote, at least until the parliamentary elections at the end of the year. In return, Yeltsin would give up his right to dismiss both the Duma and the Primakov government. Yeltsin was scandalised by the proposal, which had been agreed and announced without his being informed at all. ‘Because this all happened behind his back he was absolutely flabbergasted,’ said Yumashev, who was still Yeltsin’s most trusted envoy in those days.[52] ‘The main thing was that Primakov was already not hiding from the people who worked with Yeltsin that he intended to be the next president.’ Making matters worse, Primakov had also proposed that Yeltsin should be granted immunity from future prosecution for any illegal deeds he might have committed during his eight-year rule. It was as if he believed Yeltsin had already agreed to step down.

      The friction between Primakov and the Yeltsin Family was immediate. Primakov had sent shivers down their spines when, hours before Skuratov was summoned to the Kremlin and told to consider resigning over the kompromat tape, Primakov had called for space to be freed in Russia’s prisons for businessmen and corrupt officials.[53] ‘We understood that if he really did come to power that he had in his head a totally different construct for the country,’ said Yumashev.[54] And when the next day, in a final show of defiance just hours before his resignation was announced, Skuratov had sent prosecutors to raid the oil major Sibneft, it was a move clearly directed at them.[55] Suspicions had long circulated that relations between Sibneft and the Yeltsin Family were too close, that the company had been the basis for its owner, Boris Berezovsky, to become the consummate insider oligarch. Sibneft had sold oil through two trading companies: one of them, Runicom, was owned by Berezovsky’s business partner Roman Abramovich; the other, a more obscure outfit known as Belka Trading, was owned and run by Tatyana’s then husband, Leonid Dyachenko.[56] ‘The raid on Sibneft was deadly dangerous for the Yeltsin Family,’ said one close Berezovsky associate.[57] Clearly trying to contain the damage, they began trying to distance themselves from Berezovsky, who had become politically toxic for them.

      Yumashev had already stepped down from his post as chief of staff in December.[58] He said he’d done so when he first realised that Primakov was aiming for the presidency, which went far beyond the bounds of their agreement when Yeltsin first forwarded him as prime minister. They’d intended for Primakov to be a caretaker СКАЧАТЬ