Putin’s People. Catherine Belton

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.’

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