Putin’s People. Catherine Belton

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ