The combination of Vladimir Putin as president and Nikolai Patrushev as FSB director created an echo chamber of self-amplifying paranoia, with each of them reinforcing the fears and prejudices of the other. In his years at the head of the FSB and then as secretary of the State Security Council, Patrushev has displayed a longstanding distrust of the West, opposing integration and cooperation, encouraging Putin to rely on the security services by feeding him lurid ‘intelligence’ of alleged American hostility. In 2014, Patrushev declared that it was ‘the Americans who brought down the Soviet Union’ and that the same CIA operation was still being actively pursued, with the goal now of dismembering Russia. The West had deliberately provoked the war in Chechnya, he reported, with ‘extremists and their adherents being supported by US and British intelligence services, as well as by their allies in Europe’. Meanwhile, in his view, Washington had spent the quarter-century since the collapse of the USSR laying the groundwork for the crisis in Ukraine. ‘A whole generation of Ukrainians,’ Patrushev claimed, ‘has been poisoned by the West with hatred for Russia and with the mythology of so-called “European” values … the calamity in Ukraine is another means for them [the West] to intensify their policy of “containing” our country. They have continued unfailingly to follow this course, with only the forms and tactics of its execution changing.’ Other claims by the FSB chairman included the assertion that ISIS had been created by the policies of the United States, that the governments of the Baltic countries were supporting neo-Nazis and that Madeleine Albright believed that Siberia should not belong to Russia. When evidence was sought for this surprising assertion, FSB General Boris Ratnikov revealed that it was based on the work of his mind-reading agent who had ‘intercepted Albright’s thoughts’ and discovered that she had a ‘pathological hatred of Slavs’.
Joe Biden’s assertion in 2021 that Putin is a ‘killer’ was grist to Patrushev’s anti-Westernism. It was, he said, the signal for another Cold War, just as Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech had signalled the start of the first one. ‘Even Truman and Reagan, the most fanatical opponents of our country, accepted that there were limits on what should be declared in public … no matter how extreme their Russophobia behind closed doors.’
In Soviet times, the KGB would regularly stoke confrontation with the West, but its aggression would be softened by the Foreign Ministry, whose diplomats had direct contact with colleagues in Europe and North America. The unprecedented dominance of today’s FSB, with its exclusive access to the ear of the president, means that the old mediating forces no longer exist. Wild theories of encirclement, danger and Western aggression, propounded by Patrushev and his associates, have become increasingly dominant and influential in the president’s circle. The February 2022 invasion of Ukraine was at least in part the result of the Kremlin’s distorted view of reality, stoked by this echo chamber of self-reinforcing paranoia.
As for the promises of continuing liberty and democracy made by Putin in his New Year address of 1999, few if any have been kept. The political freedoms of the 1990s have disappeared, and have been replaced by the autocratic control of a small group of crony gangsters clustered around the president and the similarly bandit-like Siloviki, supported by the loyal apparatus of the FSB. Alternative centres of power, including opposition parties, prominent individuals who challenged Putin’s divine right to rule, environmental organisations, human rights groups, foreigners, critics and the media have been repressed. The ‘group of FSB men despatched to work undercover in the national government’ in December 1999 has achieved its goal. Few of us back then foresaw the toxic consequences that would unfold as a result.
PART TWO
ENTER THE STRONGMAN
CHAPTER 6
ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN
When Boris Yeltsin stepped down and Vladimir Putin came to power on the eve of the millennium, everything changed in Russia. In the runup to Yeltsin’s resignation, I heard whispers that Putin would be shooed in as president, but I didn’t say anything. I neither supported him nor spoke out against him. I just accepted that Putin had been chosen by Yeltsin, and that Yeltsin must have known what he was doing; that he knew better than I did what sort of person Putin was.
For a while, at first, I thought that maybe Putin was a good choice. I had been involved in Kremlin politics on and off for a decade and I was conscious that we were living through one of those great turning points in history when Russia’s future is up for grabs: when the nation can go in radically differing directions and that the slightest nudge of events can send her hurtling along the right or wrong path. At all her moments of destiny – the Mongol invasion in 1237, the reigns of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, the liberation of the serfs in 1861, the revolutions of 1917, the death of Stalin in 1953 and the attempted coup of 1991 – Russia has found herself at a crossroads between the path of democracy and the continued domination of autocracy. When such moments occur, the individual characters of our leaders have had a disproportionate influence on their outcome. So, I held my breath and hoped Vladimir Putin would make the right choices.
The first time I met him, I had the impression I was dealing with a fairly sensible guy, someone who shared the liberal views of Yeltsin and the rest of us. After that first meeting, he used to call on me at times when he needed advice or information about the economy or Yukos and the company’s activities. We usually met in his offices, but one particular meeting stands out, because on this occasion he invited me and my colleagues to an outdoor barbecue. It was in May 2000, when he was already president, and Putin used the occasion to suggest a deal, a sort of nonaggression pact: the state, he said, would promise not to interfere in our business affairs if we, the so-called oligarchs, would agree not to use the power of our businesses to put pressure on the authorities. He wasn’t demanding an end to commercial lobbying, of course – that would have been naive – but, rather, an agreement not to use the powerful resources of our companies to cause trouble for the government by inciting protests against the authorities or sabotaging deliveries, for instance, and it seemed to me at the time that this was a fair request. Because of the circumstances of the encounter, it became known as ‘the barbecue meeting’ and people started talking about the ‘barbecue agreement’ between the two sides. There were plenty of more formal meetings between us, always in the Kremlin, sometimes sitting at the large round negotiating table in St Catherine Hall, often with other members of the Bureau of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs.
Putin, without a doubt, has a convincing manner. It’s a skill that I think he acquired in the KGB and then developed when he was deputy mayor of St Petersburg, when Mayor Anatoly Sobchak had used him as a go-between in the three-way conspiracy of officials, security forces and criminals that ruled the city, divvying up the loot between them. He acquired a talent for taking people in, and he used it in the first period of his time in power: if Putin needed your help, he would do everything possible to convince you that you shared the same aims and opinions. One conversation I had with him in those early days was in a basement restaurant next to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, a few hundred metres from the Kremlin. Putin started by saying ‘This is what the state needs…’ but immediately corrected himself. ‘No, it’s not the state,’ he said. ‘It’s the country! The country is much more than the state; it’s the country that’s the important thing!’ And, of course, I immediately thought that he was a right-thinking and well-meaning man. It seemed that he knew the needs of Russian citizens are more important than the interests of a powerful state – he must be one of us. Even Yeltsin didn’t really understand that politicians must work for individual rights rather than for ‘the state’.