The news from prison was that Lebedev was refusing to cooperate with the investigators and had been involved in an angry confrontation, accusing them of violating his civil rights and using false pretences to keep him in custody. As the stand-off escalated, Lebedev was moved to Moscow’s high-security Matrosskaya Tishina Prison, where he was held in harsh conditions. I was next on the list.
CHAPTER 8
AN ANATOMY OF CORRUPTION
The actions of Putin and his cronies against Yukos were an indication of the criminal nature of the regime he leads, a criminality that has become ever more flagrant in the two decades since. I have no hesitation in saying that Russia today is a mafia state. But I do not want an English-speaking reader to misunderstand what I mean by that. It is a subtle linguistic point, but when a Western person says ‘state’, he or she means all the institutions and state bodies that govern the running of her country. For a Russian speaker, the word ‘state’ means something different. The Russian term for the Western concept of the state would be the judgementally neutral ‘state apparatus’ or the more negatively coloured ‘bureaucracy’. So, when we talk about a mafia state, there is room for misunderstanding between us.
Ordinary Russians, when they are on the receiving end of ill- treatment from dishonest or incompetent local officials, or think of the lack of respect they receive from the healthcare or education systems, may well grumble that ‘the whole state’ is corrupt. But that would be to overstate the case. No one, least of all me, would argue that the whole Russian ‘state apparatus’ – which is manned by something like one or two million people – is a gigantic mafia operation, a sort of Corleone clan expanded to the millionth degree. There is undoubtedly poor governance, corruption and other bad things going on throughout the country. In some places, such as Chechnya or Ulyanovsk, it is quite bad, while in, say, Moscow or Novosibirsk it is less so (I know that might sound surprising, but the Moscow authorities do quite a lot for the people of the city, even if they look after their own interests at the same time). If we talk about the state apparatus as a whole, then I would say it is getting on with things to the best of its ability. Allowing for the shortcomings and inefficiencies endemic in the overall system, it seems to be performing the sort of tasks that are the responsibility of any state apparatus.
It is a very different matter when we come to the top of the state pyramid: to the relatively high ranks of the FSB and the presidential administration, and in particular to Putin’s inner circle. These people rule by whim and coercion. If they take a dislike to someone, if someone won’t knuckle under and do their bidding or, even worse, tries to expose their misdeeds, they get fired, or beaten up, or thrown in jail, or simply eliminated. You don’t even need to fall out with them to be targeted: they can simply take a fancy to your business or your property, or they can destroy you for show, just to demonstrate what they are capable of. And once they have you in their sights, there is no way out. You have no one to turn to, no one to help you – not the law, not the courts, not the media, not your bosses or your neighbours. Your only choice is to give them what they want or the consequences will be dire for you; and not just you – nowadays your family may be victimised, too.
You may ask what interests these Kremlin mafiosi. It’s the same as the regular mafia – they are after your property or your business, as in the case of Bill Browder, the British-American businessman whose Russian company was stolen from him by crooked officials. They will want you to hand over a significant share of your earnings. They will be embroiled in a power conflict with other members of the mafia or their family. They’ll try to force you to collaborate on their projects, such as – crucially – the falsification of election results. Or they will prevent you from using your public position to blow the whistle on their activities, as happened to me, and to the former liberal politician Boris Nemtsov and journalist Anna Politkovskaya, both of whom were eventually assassinated.
How did Russia come to this? As we know, Putin and almost his entire inner circle are former KGB/FSB men, a secretive, closed caste, a tightknit clan that ‘protects its own’ and resolves disputes ‘in house’. The template was already there; but back in Soviet times the KGB was reined in by its subservience to Party control and the demands of communist ideology. In some areas, the KGB was pretty effective, such as its work in intelligence and counterintelligence conducted by ideologically committed people. In other areas, such as the bureau’s regional networks, things weren’t quite so rosy, but in general the system worked. With the difficult perestroika years of the late 1980s, though, the KGB consolidated its links to organised crime. They moved into racketeering and drugs, smuggling illegal goods, seizing people’s property, but they had to be quite careful because the state apparatus was still functioning: the security forces didn’t yet control the institutions of civil society, the courts and the Prosecutor’s Office, so they could still be called to account with serious consequences. But once Putin came to power, they were in clover.
Putin himself never got very far in his KGB career. He spent his time in middle-ranking posts and even his top job, as director of the Soviet cultural mission in Dresden, was a disappointment. The real shift in his fortunes happened once he had endeared himself to the pro- perestroika mayor of St Petersburg, and under his guidance the city was turned into a stronghold for organised crime, with its historic port acting as the principal gateway for huge volumes of drug-trafficking.
In 1992, Putin was in charge of a deal to trade raw materials for supplies of food that were urgently needed by the hard-pressed St Petersburg population. An official commission of inquiry, led by the St Petersburg deputy Marina Salye, would later discover that the raw materials were duly handed over, with documents bearing Putin’s signature, but that the food did not arrive. The money paid for the raw materials, reportedly $100 million, was never found. The deputies demanded Putin’s resignation and called for him to be brought to justice, but the findings of the investigation were ignored. In 2001, after Putin had become president, Marina Salye fled from St Petersburg to a village 400 kilometres away, explaining that she was leaving because she was ‘in fear for her life’.
Another investigation, closed ‘for lack of evidence’ during Putin’s time as prime minister, involved the activities of a St Petersburg construction company called Twentieth Trust, which appeared to investigators to have been the beneficiary of substantial funds from the city budget, despite being in debt and close to bankruptcy. No explanation was given for why the company received such favourable treatment, but the former Investigator for Serious Crimes in the Fight against Corruption, Lieutenant Colonel Andrei Zykov, later alleged after he had been removed from office that Twentieth Trust had built a dacha for Putin on the outskirts of the city and a villa in Spain. Twentieth Trust is today under different ownership and management.