Putin's People

How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West

Catherine Belton

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780007578801
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Inteligencia y espionaje

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

‘The Putin book that we’ve been waiting for’ Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland

‘Books about modern Russia abound … Belton has surpassed them all. Her much-awaited book is the best and most important on modern Russia’ The Times

PART ONE

1

‘Operation Luch’

ST PETERSBURG – It’s early February 1992, and an official car from the city administration is slowly driving down the main street of the city. A grey slush has been partially swept from the pavements, and people are trudging through the cold in thick anonymous coats, laden with bags and hunched against the wind. Behind the fading façades of the once grand houses on Nevsky Prospekt, shops stand almost empty, their shelves practically bare in the aftershocks of the Soviet Union’s sudden implosion. It’s barely six weeks since the Soviet Union ceased to exist, since the fateful day when Russia’s president Boris Yeltsin and the leaders of the other Soviet republics signed their union out of existence with the stroke of a pen. The city’s food distributors are struggling to react to rapid change as the strict Soviet regulations that for decades controlled supply chains and fixed prices had suddenly ceased to exist.

In the bus queues and at the impromptu markets that have sprung up across the city as inhabitants seek to earn cash selling shoes and other items from their homes, the talk all winter has been of food shortages, ration cards and gloom. Making matters worse, hyperinflation is ravaging savings. Some have even warned of famine, sounding alarm bells across a city still gripped by memories of the Second World War blockade, when up to a thousand people starved to death every day.

But the city official behind the wheel of the black Volga sedan looks calm. The slight, resolute figure gazing intently ahead is Vladimir Putin. He is thirty-nine, deputy mayor of St Petersburg and the recently appointed head of the city’s foreign relations committee. The scene is being filmed for a series of documentaries on the city’s new administration, and this one centres on the youthful-looking deputy mayor whose responsibilities include ensuring adequate imports of food.[1] As the footage flickers back to his office in City Hall at Smolny, Putin reels off a string of figures on the tonnes of grain in humanitarian aid being shipped in from Germany, England and France. There is no need for worry, he says. Nearly ten minutes is spent on careful explanations of the measures his committee has taken to secure emergency supplies of food, including a groundbreaking deal for £20 million-worth of livestock grain secured during a meeting between the city’s mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, and British prime minister John Major. Without this act of generosity from the UK, the region’s young livestock would not have survived, he says.

His command of detail is impressive. So too is his grasp of the vast problems facing the city’s economy. He speaks with fluency of the need to develop a class of small and medium business owners as the backbone of the new market economy. Indeed, he says, ‘The entrepreneurial class should become the basis for the flourishing of our society as a whole.’

He speaks with precision on the problems of converting the region’s vast Soviet-era defence enterprises to civilian production in order to keep them alive. Sprawling plants like the Kirovsky Zavod, a vast artillery and tank producer in the south of the city, had been the region’s main employer since tsarist times. Now they were at a standstill, as the endless orders for military hardware that fuelled and eventually bankrupted the Soviet economy had suddenly dried up. We have to bring in Western partners and integrate the plants into the global economy, says the young city official.

With sudden intensity, he speaks of the harm Communism wrought in artificially cutting off the Soviet Union from the free-market relations linking the rest of the developed world. The credos of Marx and Lenin ‘brought colossal losses to our country’, he says. ‘There was a period of my life when I studied the theories of Marxism and Leninism, and I found them interesting and, like many of us, logical. But as I grew up the truth became ever more clear to me – these theories are no more than harmful fairy tales.’ Indeed, the Bolshevik revolutionaries of 1917 were responsible for the ‘tragedy we are experiencing today – the tragedy of the collapse of our state’, he boldly tells the interviewer. ‘They cut the country up into republics that did not exist before, and then destroyed what unites the people of civilised countries: they destroyed market relations.’

It is just a few months since his appointment as deputy mayor of St Petersburg, but already it is a powerful, carefully crafted performance. He sits casually straddling a chair backwards, but everything else points to precision and preparation. The fifty-minute film shows him on the judo mat flipping opponents over his shoulder, speaking fluent German with a visiting businessman, and taking calls from Sobchak about the latest foreign aid deals. His meticulous preparation extends to the man he specifically requested to conduct the interview and direct the film: a documentary film-maker known and loved across the Soviet Union for a series he made intimately charting the lives of a group of children, a Soviet version of the popular UK television series Seven Up. Igor Shadkhan is a Jew, who recently returned to St Petersburg from making a series of films on the horrors of the Soviet Gulag in the far north; a man who still flinches at the memory of anti-Semitic slurs from Soviet times, and who, by his own admittance, still ducks his head in fear whenever he passes the former headquarters of the KGB on the city’s Liteyny Prospekt.

Yet this is the man Putin chose to help him with a very special revelation, the man who will convey to the world the fact that Putin had served as an officer in the feared and hated KGB. It is still the first wave of the democracy movement, a time when admitting this could compromise his boss, Sobchak, a rousing orator who rose to mayor on a tide of condemnation of the secrets of the old regime, of the abuses perpetrated by the KGB. To this day, Shadkhan still questions whether Putin’s choice was part of a careful rehabilitation plan. ‘I always ask why he chose me. He understood that I was needed, and he was ready to tell me he was from the KGB. He wanted to show that people of the KGB were also progressive.’ Putin chose well. ‘A critic once told me that I always humanised my subject matter, no matter who they were,’ Shadkhan recalls. ‘I humanised him. I wanted to know who he was and what did he see. I was a person who had always criticised the Soviet authorities. I endured a lot from them. But I was sympathetic to him. We became friends. He seemed to me one who would drive the country forward, who would really do something. He really recruited me.’[2]

Throughout the film, Putin artfully takes opportunities to stress the good qualities of the KGB. Where he served, he insists in response to a delicate question on whether he abused his position to take bribes, such actions were considered ‘a betrayal of the motherland’, and would be punished with the full force of the law. As for being an ‘official’, a chinovnik, the word need not have any negative connotation, he claims. He’d served his country as a military chinovnik; now he was a civilian official, serving – as he had before – his country ‘outside the realm of political competition’.

By the end of the documentary, Shadkhan appears to have fully bought in. The film concludes with a nod and a wink to a glorified KGB past: Putin is shown surveying the icy river Neva, wrapped against the cold in a fur hat, a man of the people behind the wheel of a white Zhiguli, the boxy car ubiquitous in those days. As he watches over the city with a steely and protective gaze, the film closes to the strains of the theme tune from a popular Soviet TV series – 17 Moments of Spring – that made a hero out of an undercover KGB spy who had infiltrated deep into Nazi Germany’s ruling regime. It was Shadkhan’s choice. ‘He was a person exactly of his profession. I wanted to show how it turned out that he was still in the same profession.’

Putin, however, had taken care in the interview to give the impression that he’d resigned from the KGB as soon as he’d returned to Leningrad, as St Petersburg was then called, in February 1990. He told Shadkhan that he’d left for ‘all kinds of reasons’, not for political ones, indicating that he’d done so before he started working in May of that year with Sobchak, then a law professor at Leningrad’s State University and the fast-rising star of the city’s new democratic movement. Putin had returned to the tsarist-era capital from five years of service in Dresden in East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR), where he’d served as liaison officer between the KGB and the Stasi, the East German secret police. Later legend had it that he’d confided to a colleague that he feared he might have no better future than working as a taxi driver on his return.[3] Apparently he was keen to create the impression that he’d cut all ties to his old masters, that Russia’s rapidly changing order had cast him adrift.

What Putin told Shadkhan was just the start of a string of falsehoods and obfuscation surrounding his KGB career. In the imploding empire that he had returned to from Dresden, nothing was quite as it seemed. From the KGB villa perched high on the banks of the river Elbe overlooking Dresden’s still elegant sprawl, Putin had already witnessed at first hand the end of the Soviet empire’s control of the GDR, the collapse of the so-called socialist dream. The Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact power bloc had shattered around him as its citizens rebelled against the Communist leadership. He’d watched, first from afar, as the aftershocks began to reverberate across the Soviet Union and, inspired by the Berlin Wall’s collapse, nationalist movements spread ever more rapidly across the country, forcing the Communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev into ever more compromise with a new generation of democratic leaders. By the time of Putin’s interview with Shadkhan, one of those leaders, Boris Yeltsin, had emerged victorious from an attempted hard-line coup in August 1991. The abortive putsch had sought to turn the clock back on political and economic freedoms, but ended in resounding failure. Yeltsin banned the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The old regime, suddenly, seemed to have been swept away.

But what replaced it was only a partial changing of the guard, and what happened to the KGB was a case in point. Yeltsin had decapitated the top echelon of the KGB, and then signed a decree breaking it up into four different domestic services. But what emerged in its place was a hydra-headed monster in which many officers, like Putin, retreated to the shadows and continued to serve underground, while the powerful foreign-intelligence service remained intact. It was a system where the rules of normal life seemed to have long been suspended. It was a shadowland of half-truths and appearances, while underneath it all factions of the old elite continued to cling to what remained of the reins.

Putin was to give several different versions of the timing and circumstances of his resignation from the KGB. But according to one former senior KGB officer close to him, none of them are true. He would tell interviewers writing his official biography that he resigned a few months after he began working for Sobchak at the university, but his resignation letter had somehow got lost in the post. Instead, he claimed, Sobchak had personally telephoned Vladimir Kryuchkov, the then KGB chief, to ensure his resignation at the height of the hard-line August 1991 coup. This was the story that became the official version. But it sounds like fiction. The chances of Sobchak reaching Kryuchkov in the middle of a coup in order to secure the resignation of one employee seem slim at best. Instead, according to the close Putin ally, Putin continued receiving his paycheque from the security services for at least a year after the August coup attempt. By the time he resigned, his position at the top of Russia’s second city’s new leadership was secure. He’d penetrated deep into the country’s new democratic leadership, and was the point man for the administration’s ties with law enforcement, including the KGB’s successor agency, the Federal Security Service, or FSB. His performance as deputy mayor, as clearly presented in the Shadkhan interview, was already slick and self-assured.

The story of how and when Putin actually resigned, and how he came to work for Sobchak, is the story of how a KGB cadre began to morph in the country’s democratic transformation and attach themselves to the new leadership. It’s the story of how a faction of the KGB, in particular part of its foreign-intelligence arm, had long been secretly preparing for change in the tumult of the Soviet Union’s perestroika reforms. Putin appears to have been part of this process while he was in Dresden. Later, after Germany reunified, the country’s security services suspected he was part of a group working on a special operation, ‘Operation Luch’, or Sunbeam, that had been preparing since at least 1988 in case the East German regime collapsed.[4] This operation was to recruit a network of agents that could continue to operate for the Russians long after the fall.

*

DRESDEN – When Putin arrived in Dresden in 1985, East Germany was already living on borrowed time. On the verge of bankruptcy, the country was surviving with the help of a billion-DM loan from West Germany,[5] while voices of dissent were on the rise. Putin arrived there at the age of thirty-two, apparently fresh from a stint training at the KGB’s elite Red Banner academy for foreign-intelligence officers, and began work in an elegant art deco villa with a sweeping staircase and a balcony that overlooked a quiet, brightly-painted neighbourhood street. The villa, surrounded by leafy trees and rows of neat family homes for the Stasi elite, was just around the corner from the grey sprawl of the Stasi headquarters, where dozens of political prisoners were held in tiny windowless cells. Hans Modrow, the local leader of the ruling Communist Party, the SED, was known as a reformer. But he was also heavy-handed in his efforts to clamp down on dissent. All around the eastern bloc, the mood of protest was increasing amidst the misery and shortages of the planned economy and the brutality of state law-enforcement agencies. Sensing an opportunity, US intelligence agencies, with the help of the Vatican, had quietly started operations to funnel printing and communications equipment and cash to the Solidarność protest movement in Poland, where dissent against the Soviets had always been the strongest.

*

Vladimir Putin had long dreamed of a career in foreign intelligence. During the Second World War his father had served in the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. He’d operated deep behind enemy lines trying to sabotage German positions, narrowly escaping being taken prisoner, and then suffering near fatal wounds. After his father’s heroics, Putin had been obsessed from an early age with learning German, and in his teenage years he’d been so keen to join the KGB that he c...