The plot sounds like a geopolitical thriller. Amid an empire’s collapse, the secret police funnel money out of the country, creating a slush fund to rebuild their old networks. They regain power, become spectacularly rich and turn on their enemies, first at home — and then abroad.
That is fact, not fiction. Catherine Belton, for years a Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, relates it with clarity, detail, insight and bravery. Books about modern Russia abound, delving into aspects such as corruption, spookdom, geopolitics, propaganda or the personalities who bestride the Kremlin’s corridors, notably Vladimir Putin. In 2014 the late Karen Dawisha, an American academic, overcame her publishers’ shameful cowardice to produce Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?, a formidably researched book on theregime’s gangster roots and epic money laundering.
Belton has surpassed them all. Her much-awaited book is the best and most important on modern Russia. It benefits from a meticulous compilation of open sources, but also from the accounts of disillusioned Kremlin insiders, former business cronies and some remarkably candid people still high up in the system. The result is hair-raising.
Here is Belton relating an account of Putin’s close ties to an alleged St Petersburg mafia boss, Ilya Traber, in the early 1990s. A foreign businessman, arriving to discuss a municipal port project, gained a heart-stopping introduction to local business mores.
“He was whisked from the city’s Pulkovo airport straight to Traber’s lair, in an armoured car accompanied by police and Traber’s guards. On arrival at the high-gated compound in a back street, he was escorted past armed guards and snarling German shepherds. After passing through several rooms adorned with icons, he arrived at an inner chamber where Traber was waiting, wearing a tracksuit bottom and slippers, a thick chain with a huge gold cross around his neck — the uniform of the city’s bandits.”
After gaining a terse nod of approval for the project from Traber, the visiting westerner (who wisely goes unnamed in Belton’s account) was reportedly brought to a more conventional-seeming meeting at the offices of Traber’s lawyer. In truth, this seems even more alarming. Those apparently present included the official responsible for municipal property; the young Putin, at the time in charge of the city’s “foreign economic relations”; and Traber’s business partner, a respectable-looking young man — whose father just happened to be a KGB colleague of Putin’s.
The vignette — one of dozens in the book — exemplifies the hybrid that took shape in St Petersburg, mutated, and eventually took over Russia. It is a combination of the savviest elements of the old KGB and its cosmetically rebranded successor (the FSB), Russian officialdom, big business and gangsters.
The cast list is as extensive as it is lively. Anyone trying to tell this story in fiction would meet immediate demands to prune it. Belton, dealing with real life, has to stick to the facts. As with a Russian novel, readers will need to concentrate to remember who is who. A dramatis personae at the book’s start gives a flavour of what lies ahead. The first category she lists is Putin’s inner circle, the siloviki, or “men of power”.
Next come the “custodians”, KGB veterans with business empires. Many hold their wealth, she explains, not as owners, but trustees of the obschak, gangster slang for a kitty. The “family” are the Boris Yeltsin court, both relatives and hangers-on. In a last desperate throw of the dice after the Russian economy imploded in 1998 they turned to the former KGB in the hope of fending off a populist revolt. Unbeknown to them, Belton argues, they succumbed to a coup.
The final category is “mobsters”, whom she characterises as foot soldiers for the security services. Ties between the two camps were forged in the late Soviet era, when the secret police worked closely alongside black marketeers, partly to entrap foreigners, but also for mutually beneficial business deals.
For the story she tells is only partly about the former KGB’s seizure of power in Russia. It is also about its western accomplices and victims. She lays bare how western moneymen have been the enablers for the former Soviet Union’s gangsters, kleptocrats and spooks. This started in the declining years of the Soviet empire, when regime insiders, chiefly elements of the KGB, realised that the communist model of a planned economy and one-party state was doomed. They began to use their foreign connections, originally developed for espionage, technology theft and influence-peddling, for a new purpose: to build a lifeboat. The regime might go down, but they would survive.
