The West largely missed this, focusing instead on the seeming triumph of democracy and capitalism. A second huge mistake was to misread Putin’s accession to power as a modernising moment, replacing the bumbling chaos and corruption of Yeltsin’s Kremlin with the cool efficiency of a well-run intelligence service.
Putin did bring order to Russia, of a kind. Belton vividly describes how the Kremlin tamed the “oligarchs”, the politically connected tycoons who in the 1990s had seemed more powerful than the state. But far from bringing plutocrats to heel, the Kremlin and its cronies simply looted their business empires and turned their media holdings into propaganda outlets for the regime. Again, the West greedily went along with these farcical auctions, nationalisations and tax raids.
Theft was accompanied by murder, inside Russia and abroad. Worse than the assassinations of leading critics were the bloody stunts pulled by the regime to manipulate public opinion. Belton provides damning evidence of what seemed like terrorist outrages that were staged or orchestrated by the authorities. Those who investigated were repressed inside Russia or dismissed as conspiracy theorists abroad.
One reason was greed. Another was that for 20 years after the Soviet collapse hawkish Russia experts in western government ministries and agencies were regarded as irrelevant at best, paranoid at worse. We are still repairing the damage caused by complacency.
Having consolidated economic and political power in Russia, the regime then began to rebuild its empire. This only sometimes involves brute force; far more effective is building networks of influence. Belton’s passages about Donald Trump’s business ties with Russia during the 1990s are particularly thought-provoking. It is tempting to speculate how much more she could have said about some other prominent people were it not for the constraints of English libel laws. But what she does describe is convincing, particular because of the careful sourcing from numerous witnesses and insiders.
In her epilogue Belton sharply changes tack. Just as Putin’s Russia is posing an increasing threat to the West, she argues, it is in trouble at home. “KGB capitalism” appears to be “calcifying and perhaps becoming unsustainable”, with Putin’s rule “in danger of becoming more brittle by the day”. She concludes that the former KGB men have merely repeated the mistakes of the past. Political and economic failure brought down the Soviet Union. It will do the same for Russia.
This judgment sits a little oddly with the rest of the book. The Russian regime has guns and money. No credible opposition is in sight. It can survive an oil price crash and an epidemic. Meanwhile, its great enemy, the western liberal order, is self-destructing before our eyes.
