In the years it took journalist Catherine Belton to research and write “Putin’s People,” her bulky but elegant account of money and power in the Kremlin, several of her interviewees tried various tactics to undermine her work. One of them, “a close ally of Putin” apparently alarmed by his questions about the activities of Russian President Vladimir Putin as a KGB agent in Dresden in the 1980s, emphatically insisted that no rumored link had ever been demonstrated between the KGB and terrorist organizations: “And you shouldn’t try to do it! He warned.
Another source, defending Putin’s mandate as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, took a fresher approach. When asked about a local politician named Marina Salye who found evidence of corruption in the so-called oil-for-food scheme that Putin oversaw in the early 1990s, he did not bother to deny his findings; he simply rejected the idea that his findings mattered. “All this happened,” he acknowledged smugly. “But these are absolutely normal business operations. How can you explain this to a menopausal woman like that?
Belton suggests that this is the kind of double strategy the Kremlin has used to pursue its interests at home and abroad: implement threats, disinformation, and violence to prevent harmful secrets from coming out, or resort to a chilling cynicism that says everything it makes sense as nonsense. anyway.
The intrepid Belton, currently an investigative reporter for Reuters who previously served as the Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, did not allow either approach to deter her, speaking to figures with disparate interests everywhere, tracking documents, following the money . The result is a meticulously assembled portrait of Putin’s circle and the emergence of what she calls “KGB capitalism”, a form of ruthless wealth accumulation designed to serve the interests of a Russian state that she calls “ruthless in its scope. “
As important as Putin is to the narrative, he mostly appears as a shadowy figure, not particularly creative or charismatic, but capable, as the KGB agent he once was, of reflecting people’s expectations. The people who facilitated Putin’s rise did not do so for particularly idealistic reasons. A sick Boris Yeltsin and the oligarchs who thrived in chaos after the collapse of the Soviet Union were looking for someone to preserve their wealth and protect them from corruption charges. Putin introduced himself as someone who would honor the deal, but then replaced any Yeltsin-era player who dared to challenge his grip on power with loyalists he could call his own.
“Putin’s People” tells the story of a number of figures who ultimately came into conflict with the President’s regime. Media tycoons like Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky were stripped of their empires and fled the country. Belton says the real turning point was the 2004 trial that sent Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man, with a controlling stake in oil producer Yukos, to a Siberian prison camp for 10 years. . Putin has since presided over the country and its resources as a tsar, Belton writes, backed by a cadre of friendly oligarchs and secret service agents. Russia’s legal system became a weapon and a fig leaf.
Putin allowed and even encouraged the oligarchs to accumulate large personal fortunes, but they were also expected to divert some money from their businesses in the obschak, a collective kitten whose bribery funds, Belton says, have been helpful in projecting the image of a powerful Russia on the world stage. The Kremlin’s permanent definition of power was narrow and zero-sum; the resources went to undercut other countries at relatively low prices, by financing trolley farms, electoral meddling and extremist movements.
It was an old KGB model adapted for the new era, with Putin pursuing a nationalist agenda that spanned the country’s pre-revolutionary imperial past. Putin’s people had even figured out a way to turn the London Supreme Court into a tool for their own interests, freezing the assets of rival oligarchs while British lawyers charged huge fees from both sides.
As much as the West has been a target for the Kremlin’s “active measures”, Belton argues that the West has also been accommodating and even complicit. Complacency has taken the form of a joyous belief in the power of globalization and liberal democracy, a persistent faith that once Russia opened up to capital and international ideas, it would never look back.
But more mercenary motives were also at stake. Western business interests recognized the amount of profits that could be made from Russian oil giants and the giant sums of money that are spilled. (Unsurprisingly, Deutsche Bank, an institution at the center of many scandals, has occupied a crucial paper.) Even when Putin was the beneficiary of such arrangements, he despised them; his ability to use Western companies for the benefit of Russia only confirmed his long-standing opinion “that anyone in the West could be bought.”
“Putin’s People” ends with a chapter on Donald Trump, and what Belton calls the “network of Russian intelligence operatives, tycoons and organized crime associates” that has surrounded him since the early 1990s. The fact that Trump was often overwhelmed by debt and provided an opportunity for those with the cash he desperately needed. Belton documents how the network used high-end real estate businesses to launder money and evade stricter banking regulations after September 11. She is agnostic about whether Trump was a resourceful accomplice who knew how they were using him. As a former Trump organization executive put it, “Donald is not doing due diligence.”
But Belton does. And while the president may not read much, neglecting even those intelligence reports about Russian bounty payments to Taliban militants, presumably there are any number of people in the White House and his party who do.
Still, reading this book is wondering if cynicism has embedded itself so deeply in Anglo-American political classes that even the incriminating information it documents will not make a actionable difference. A person familiar with Russian billionaires told Belton that once the corrosion begins, it’s devilishly difficult to reverse: “They always have three or four different stories, and then it all gets lost in the noise.”
