Dead Souls: From Stalin to Putin

Seated in seiza he repeated each line as it was spoken by a senior member of the dojo: ‘Hitotsu-Warewarewa, We will observe the rules of courtesy, respect our superiors, and refrain from violence.’ After the exercise Victor Zolotov, the personal bodyguard of Putin, went to his Kremlin office adjacent to that of the president himself to contemplate the operation that would take place in London on 1 November. His duty was to protect his boss. And to hell with courtesy.

Today is 3 February 2006. I am in Rome. My name is Alexander Walterovich Litvinenko. I am a former officer of the KGB and FSB. I occupied the position of a department chief in its most secret department that was involved in political assassinations of undesired persons …¹

My name is Pavel Anatolyevich Sudoplatov, but I do not expect you to recognize it because for fifty-eight years it was one of the best-kept secrets in the Soviet Union. My Administration for Special Tasks was responsible for sabotage, kidnapping, and assassination of our enemies beyond the country’s borders. It was a special department working in the Soviet security service. I was responsible for Trotsky’s assassination …²

The old man spoke straight into the camera. ‘It is strange to look back fifty years,’ he said, ‘and re-create the mentality that led us to take vengeance on our enemies with cold self-assurance. We did not believe there was any moral question involved in killing Trotsky or any other of our former comrades who had turned against us. We believed we were in a life-and-death struggle for the salvation of our grand experiment, the creation of a new social system that would protect and provide dignity for all workers and eliminate the greed and oppression of capitalist profit.’³

Three years after the death of Lenin, opposition to Stalin was still thinkable. Significant resistance to his growing personal power came from within the Bolshevik party in the form of the ‘Left Opposition’ led by Trotsky and Zinoviev. During 1927, the OGPU – later to be called KGB – was busy following the ‘power game’ at the top of the Bolshevik leadership. By autumn, it was over. In November, Trotsky, Zinoviev and almost a hundred of their followers were expelled from the Party. Zinoviev agreed to recant, denounced ‘Trotskyism’, and was readmitted to the Party. Trotsky refused and in January 1928 was sentenced by the OGPU to internal exile in a remote corner of Kazakhstan on the Chinese border.⁴

From February 1929 onwards Stalin became increasingly preoccupied with the opposition to him within the Communist Party. After Trotsky was removed from the Soviet Union and deported to Turkey, Yakov Blyumkin, Trotsky’s former bodyguard, sympathiser, and now a famous Chekist and chief illegal rezident in the Middle East, not only visited the former leader of the Bolshevik revolution in his exile but also helped the Trotskyist movement financially. Esther Rosenzweig, better known as Liza Gorskaya (aka Elsa Hutschneker, aka Elisabeth Zarubina aka Zubilina), Blyumkin’s mistress and a Soviet illegal, betrayed him to the OGPU. Blyumkin was recalled to Moscow, arrested and shot. After that episode, Stalin began to fear that there were other, undiscovered Blyumkins within the Cheka foreign department. Soon the mass purges within the Soviet intelligence services began that continued on and off until Stalin’s death in 1953.

Blyumkin was certainly not the first and far from the last victim of Stalin’s hatred for his Enemy No. 1. Trotsky’s assistants were brutally dealt with: S. Sermuks and I. Poznansky perished in the Gulag; M. Glazman, driven to despair, committed suicide; G. Butov died in prison in 1928. The last victim, albeit coincidental, was Jean van Heijenoort, Trotsky’s secretary from 1932 to 1939, who was murdered in Mexico City in 1986 aged 73.

Among other tasks assigned to the Soviet advisers during the Spanish Civil War was annihilation of the Trotskyites in the Republican camp. What should be termed the secret war within the civil war began in the spring of 1937. It mirrored the events in Russia.

Like many similar enterprises of the NKVD, activities in Spain were divided into several parts. First, the POUM – the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, the fusion of the Trotskyite Communist Left of Spain and the Workers and Peasants’ Bloc – had to be rendered harmless together with its leaders – Andrés Nin, Julian Gorkin, Juan Andrade, Pedro Bonet, Gironella (Enrique Adroher), Jordi Arquer. It is now known that among this group Nin was on the Kremlin’s hit list not only as Trotsky’s former secretary but also as the one who offered to accept Trotsky in Catalonia as a political refugee, an intolerable provocation in Moscow’s view. In addition to Nin, the hit list contained other literniks, the euphemism used by the Centre to mark those whom Stalin doomed to die. The names sent from Moscow included Marc Rein, Alfredo Martínez, Hans Freund (Moulin), Erwin Wolf, Kurt Landau, Rudolf Klement, and others less well known, who at one moment worked for or with Trotsky. They had all fallen victims of Stalin’s sinister mind.⁵

Lev Nikolsky alias ‘Alexander Orlov’, Stalin’s loyal henchman and the chief of the NKVD stations in Madrid and Valencia, was fully employed in eliminating the ‘Trotskyite-Fascist element’ from Spanish territory.

Stalin first assigned the murder of his archenemy to Nikolsky’s boss, Sergey Spiegelglass, codenamed DUCE, in 1937. But as the Kremlin leader later told Sudoplatov, Spiegelglass ‘had failed to fulfil this important government mission’. So he was shot.

As usual in any successful assassination operation the victim’s entourage had to be infiltrated with Moscow’s agents. Apart from Mark Zborowski (codenamed TYULPAN) in Paris, Maria de Hernández d’Harbat de las Heras (aliases Maria Luisa de Marchette, Maria de la Sierra, África de las Heras, codenamed PATRIA), recruited by Naum Eitingon (‘Colonel Kotov’), Orlov’s deputy in Spain, operated in Trotsky’s secretariat from 1937 until 1939. In April 1940 a young American agent, Robert Sheldon Harte (codenamed AMUR), posing as a New York Trotskyite, was placed as a volunteer guard in Trotsky’s villa in Cocayan.

In March 1939, Stalin summoned Sudoplatov to the Kremlin and verbally instructed him to assassinate Trotsky, simultaneously appointing him deputy head of foreign intelligence. The old spymaster later recalled that the Soviet leader preferred indirect words like ‘action’ to describe the murder, noting that if the operation were successful the party would forever remember those who were involved and would look after not only them, but every member of their family.⁶ Sudoplatov moved to office no. 735 on the seventh floor of the Lubyanka building where the experienced illegal Eitingon, who just returned from Spain via France, joined him in supervising the plan to kill Trotsky. Eitingon suggested that it should be codenamed Operation UTKA (‘Duck’). In Russian utka has the same meaning as ‘canard’ in English – ‘to start a canard’ is to disseminate disinformation, ‘duck shooting’ also universally means a good hunt full of fun. For them, enemies of the state were personal enemies and they enjoyed their work.

At least in one way the Trotsky operation was unusual: the cover-up preceded the hit. Starting from the late 1920s the Kremlin, actively using agents of influence recruited by its secret political police all over the world, started a fierce smear campaign against the Great Heretic who was painted as an enemy doing his best to discredit the Soviet state and its leadership. It was said that Trotsky aimed to blacken Russian achievements and opposed Stalin’s aspirations to make the country a superpower. All Soviet newspapers were duly publishing materials supplied by the secret police and its collaborators. A special task force was established within the secret police to monitor all Trotsky’s calls, visitors and correspondence, making monthly reports to the Big Boss. As Trotsky himself had announced his struggle against the ‘Kremlin winner’ and the need to use force, the Soviet propaganda accused the exile of plotting the violent overthrow of Soviet power.

In Stalin’s logic, Trotsky was planning to accomplish his plans by bringing powerful politicians including some Politburo members to his side so that those secret followers would one day mount a palace coup. As Trotsky had enjoyed enormous political influence in Russia before being forced to exile, Stalin believed that Trotskyite opposition in the country was able to overthrow the regime. This led to infamous Moscow trials of 1936–8, the execution of most of the defendants, and the Great Purge better known as the Great Terror.

In his persecution of any form of dissidence, the Soviet leader presented his exiled opponent as a bloody terrorist, imperialist spy, ruthless killer and scum of international proportions, expecting that one day there would be no country willing to accept him.

In reality, Stalin cunningly used the name of Trotsky over a period of about ten years to accumulate absolute personal power in his hands. By 1938 the time had come to get rid of the nuisance.

The assassination plan as usual consisted of two parts and accordingly two groups were dispatched to carry out the operation.

The first was headed by a Spanish Communist Eustacia Maria Caridad del Rio Hernández, whom Eitingon had recruited in Barcelona and who was given a simple codename MOTHER, and her son Ramón Mercader, recruited by Nikolsky-Orlov, with an equally uncomplicated codename RAYMOND. Caridad came from a wealthy family, among her ancestors were governors of Cuba and her grandfather had been a Spanish ambassador to the Tsar. She had deserted her husband, a Spanish railroad magnate, and fled to Paris with their four children in the 1930s. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, she returned to Catalonia, joined the anarchists, and was wounded in an air raid. Her eldest son was killed in action. Her middle son Ramon served in a guerrilla detachment. The youngest son, Luis, and her daughter came to Moscow in 1939 with other children of Spanish Republicans who fled from Franco.⁷

Kyrill Khenkin, who served with him in Spain, recalled that Ramón Mercader was sent to Moscow in the summer of 1937 for formal recruitment and training.⁸ Afterwards he arrived in Paris on a doctored Canadian passport in the name of Frank Jacson (with a mistake in the family name spelling, typical of the NKVD forgers). With the help of another NKVD agent, Mercader got acquainted with Sylvia Angeloff, an American Trotskyite, who played a key role in introducing him to the Trotsky’s inner circle. They both attended the founding conference of the Fourth International in September 1938.

According to Sudoplatov, there was still another important agent in Paris, an Englishman named Morrison and codenamed HARRY, who was instrumental in stealing the operational records of the Trotsky organisation in Europe in December 1939. Allegedly the agent had good connections in the Directorate-General of the National Gendarmerie and was able to provide his Soviet handlers with real French police stamps for forged passports and permissions for agents to remain in France.

In August 1939 Caridad and Ramón sailed from Le Havre to New York. Eitington was supposed to follow them soon after but was detained by some problems with his forged documents. The head of station in Paris, Lev Vasilevsky, who served as Consul General under the alias ‘Tarasov’, was supporting the operation and was instructed to secure valid papers for the agents’ overseas travel. The only problem was an American visa.⁹

The NKVD connection with the American consulate was through a respectable businessman from Switzerland, who was in fact another Soviet illegal named Maxim Steinberg.¹⁰ Within a week Steinberg obtained the visa in Bern and a courier returned with it to Paris where Eitingon was waiting in hiding.

Eitingon arrived in New York in October 1939 and quickly registered an import-export company as a front for the operation. Mercader later travelled to New York to get instructions and money from his handler. Moscow also used it to communicate with their man. Due to the secrecy of the whole operation they had to dispatch a case officer from the headquarters whenever they needed to convey a message. Fortunately for them, there was no counter-intelligence in America at the time.

On 1 January 1940 Stalin – the instigator of this murder operation – was named Man of the Year by Time magazine.

According to the initial plan, the attack on Trotsky’s family (to include him, his wife and a small grandchild) was to be led by a second group of agents drawn from veterans of the Spanish Civil War, headed by the celebrated Mexican painter and Stalinist David Alfaro Siqueiros. But before they were put into action, Beria decided to strengthen the force and assigned the young illegal named Iosif Grigulevich to the Sudoplatov group. Grigulevich, known as Grig among friends, was an assassin who spoke impeccable Spanish with Latin American accent and who operated in Spain documented as ‘José Ocampo’. Grig arrived in Mexico in January 1940 and under Eitingon’s instructions established a reserve illegal network in Mexico and California. He also cooperated with the Siqueiros group.¹¹

In Mexico Grigulevich managed to recruit Antonio Pujol (codenamed JOSE), a former pupil of Siqueiros, whom he later described as ‘Very loyal, exceptionally reliable and quite bold’. Among his other recruits was his future wife and assistant, the Mexican Communist Laura Araujo Aguilar (codenamed LUISA). Though this group of former International Brigades fighters was formally headed by Siqueiros with Pujol acting as his second-in-command, KGB records seen and copied by Vasili Mitrokhin identify Grigulevich as the real leader of the assault.¹²

The attackers had in their disposal a floor plan of Trotsky’s villa that had been drawn by agent PATRIA before she was recalled to Moscow. She also made an assessment of the bodyguards and gave the Moscow planners detailed character analyses of Trotsky’s secretariat. This piece of intelligence was to be very useful at the final stage of the operation.

The first attack on the Trotsky’s villa, in the small hours of 23 May 1940, failed. Their gunfire missed the targets. Siqueiros’s gunmen dispersed and the alternative plan came into effect: Mercader was promoted from penetration agent to assassin. In the meantime, Moscow was actively spreading the story that Trotsky himself had organised the assault on his house to attract attention to his person.

Recalling the details, Sudoplatov said that ‘it was important to suggest a motive for the act that would undermine Trotsky’s image and discredit his movement.’ If caught, as was likely, Mercader would explain his act as personal revenge for Trotsky allegedly having discouraged Sylvia Angeloff from marrying him. He was also to claim that the Trotskyites wanted to use his financial contribution for personal gain instead of political activities and that Trotsky had tried to convince him to join an international terrorist group planning to assassinate Stalin and other Soviet leaders.¹³ If all this had not been written by the chief of the Soviet ‘special tasks’ years before the Litvinenko operation – for which it looks like a blueprint – I would think it had been invented. It is more likely that Moscow’s assassins were using Sudoplatov’s book as an instruction manual.

Mercader fulfilled Stalin’s orders on 20 August 1940 using an ice-pick as the murder weapon. After his release from prison twenty years later, he was given the medal of the Hero of the Soviet Union in addition to the Order of Lenin. In 1966 Siqueiros was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize.

***

On the second floor of the Kremlin, down the long, wide, carpeted and empty corridor, one of the high doors opened to let visitors to the huge reception room with three writing tables. Behind them there were two people in tunics the same style as Stalin’s and one in military uniform. It was Stalin’s personal bodyguard, General Nikolai Vlasik.

Vlasik was born in a small and poor village in Western Byelorussia in 1896. His father was a peasant and the family could not afford more than three years in a local parish school that although retained its church connection essentially provided secular education in accordance with standards set by the government. At the age of 17, Vlasik was a menial labourer and navvy before he was drafted to the Tsarist army. When the Bolshevik revolt broke out in Petrograd, he was a militiaman in Moscow and soon joined the party of workers and peasants. In 1919 Vlasik was transferred to the Cheka.

Some of his biographers claim that he was together with Stalin from those early days as a young guard. According to the documents, Vlasik was promoted to a senior position in the Operational Department, responsible for the protection of the heads of the party and government, in November 1926. Five years later, in early 1931, he became chief of Stalin’s personal protection service in the Kremlin.

Lana Peters, Stalin’s daughter and an American citizen, remembered Vlasik as an ‘illiterate, silly, rough and extremely impudent despot’. (In an almost impossible turn of fate, Lana, born Svetlana Alliluyeva, emigrated to the United States in 1967 and fifteen years later settled in Cambridge, England, becoming a neighbour of the famous Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky.)

Vlasik was completely devoted to Stalin and served him well, taking care of his children and running all the necessary errands for the household apart from the bodyguard job – also acting as Stalin’s barber and personal photographer. But one thing made him quite outstanding – he became so corrupted with authority that from the man behind Stalin’s back he positioned himself as someone second only to the leader, accumulating an unlimited power.

There was a certain reason for that. Being as suspicious about his own secret police under Beria as about the army marshals, Stalin established a top secret ‘inner cabinet’ that included his personal secretary Alexander Poskrebyshev, whose wife, a very distant relative of Trotsky, was eventually arrested, charged with espionage and shot; Georgy Malenkov, described by one Western diplomat as ‘the most sinister thing in the Soviet Union’; and Vlasik. It was a kind of private think-tank and Stalin’s own intelligence service in one. As Vlasik was subordinate only to the Big Boss, he, with Poskrebyshev, was watching the secret police, the army and the Politburo for his master.

The system operated quite independently of the MGB and was completely under Stalin’s personal control. According to Peter Deriabin, who was a member of the Kremlin guards, as they used to be known, the key elements of the dictator’s personal protection force consisted of a vast and overlapping bodyguard system, numbering some 50,000 at the time when Deriabin was there, with independent capabilities for shadowing, spying, liaising with other agencies, and eliminating people. It also included the directorate’s own investigative unit known as operod – the operational department. Besides, a special section within the MGB’s Technical Operations Department was subordinated to the Vlasik’s directorate. Finally, the Praetorian Guard, military units under the commandant of the Kremlin, though largely ceremonial, counted some 3,000 elite troops with powerful weapons, high discipline, and loyalty to Stalin.¹⁴

But even with the gift of the rank of lieutenant general and an impressive military force under his command, this poorly educated lout was ill fitted for his role. Vlasik had many mistresses (often seducing his friends’ wives) and engaged in drinking bouts and orgies in government dachas. Moreover, he allowed his lovers and friends to attend official ceremonies in the Kremlin and Red Square, booked government theatre boxes for them and overlooked some serious embezzlement of funds from his department. Sudoplatov claimed that it took torture and beatings to make Vlasik confess all those crimes, but during the court hearing on 17 January 1955, two years after Stalin’s death, the former bodyguard quite freely admitted his negligence of duty.¹⁵

As the head of the Chief Directorate of Protection of the Ministry for State Security from 1947 to 1952, he said, he indeed kept secret documents at home, appropriated valuables captured during the war – after his arrest virtually tons of hand-blown lead crystal and cut-glass accessories, tableware, vases and glasses, in addition to fine china and fourteen cameras with various lenses, were confiscated from his state apartment and dacha. Certainly a sex champion, Vlasik cohabitated with more than fifteen women during a short period of time and, as he himself admitted, was on the lowest level of moral degradation. But he never was asked and never mentioned his role as a backstage mover in the Kremlin.

The ‘inner cabinet’ was a sophisticated setup. While Malenkov managed Stalin’s personal secretariat, Poskrebyshev was in charge of the Special Sector of the Central Committee that was later transformed into a secret sub-department, the tyrant’s political police inside the party that reported only to him. Parallel to that, Stalin’s personal protection service under Vlasik watched everybody, including the chief of the MGB, in terms of their loyalty to the leader. Thus, Stalin was not only under a triple guard, but had all power structures of the state under his complete and complex control.

Stalin’s daughter recalled in her memoirs that Vlasik ‘began to dictate to art workers and arts tastes of comrade Stalin’, and ‘… figures listened and followed his councils’. No important function at the Bolshoi Theatre or the Kremlin ornate white-marbled St George’s Hall took place without his sanction. She added that Vlasik also damaged the lives and careers of many people.

Wittingly or unwittingly, but certainly because of the personality of the Soviet leader at the time, Vlasik established a new precedent when he moved up from private bodyguard to hidden Kremlin puppeteer. The Kremlin leader himself had elevated his position to that of a counsellor. Would he kill for Stalin? Only in one case – when there would be a direct attack or a threat. For the wet jobs’ at large Stalin had Sudoplatov’s service.

In May 1952, Beria managed to undo Vlasik’s power and transfer him to Asbest, in Sverdlovsk region, 900 miles east of Moscow, as nothing more than deputy commandant of a correctional labour camp.¹⁶ In November Beria succeeded in removing Poskrebyshev from the Kremlin and a few weeks later the arrest of Vlasik followed. Two Russian authors who recently published a book about Stalin uncovered an eyewitness account of Vlasik’s saying: ‘If I am arrested, Stalin doesn’t have much time left.’ Indeed, Stalin was gone in three months allegedly with a cerebral haemorrhage.

Thirty years later, Deriabin, a former subordinate of General Vlasik, wrote:

The story of Stalin’s downfall, as I know it, has an ironic twist. It required the dismantling of a protective system unequalled in history – and this before the eyes of a man who knew better than anyone alive how to defend himself against plotters. Stalin had built around himself a mysterious apparatus whose capabilities were not fully known to any but the top bodyguards themselves and to a few of Stalin’s closest associates. It protected him not only against the people but also against his own courtiers – spying on other leaders, blackmailing them and striking from the dark to murder or discredit any who, to Stalin’s increasingly suspicious eye, might oppose him.¹⁷

In 2003, a joint group of Russian and American historians announced their view that the Soviet leader had ingested warfarin, a powerful rat poison that inhibits coagulation of the blood and thus may lead to haemorrhagic stroke. As there was no forensic examination and Stalin was embalmed four days after his death, this could only be accepted as a theory. Vlasik and a few others accused Beria of being Stalin’s poisoner.

***

Besides complete devotion and readiness to risk his life, a bodyguard of a Russian leader must have some other qualities making him appealing to his master. Lenin’s bodyguard Peter Pakal whom Stalin subjected to repression in the 1930s, was a simple man who came from a worker-and-peasant family. Mikhail Soldatov, the bodyguard of Khrushchev, sang Ukrainian songs with the bold leader to help him to calm down and change his mood. Vladimir Medvedev, who served for fourteen years as the bodyguard of Brezhnev and then another six as the personal bodyguard of Gorbachev, was an intelligent and pleasant man, never engaged in palace intrigues.

However, on 19 August 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev and his family were in the Crimean Black Sea resort of Foros accompanied, as usual, by their personal bodyguard, Yuri Plekhanov, head of the 9th Directorate of the KGB, summoned Mevdedev and ordered him to leave Foros at once. At that moment, the KGB chairman Kryuchkov with a couple of accomplices was attempting a coup d’état in Moscow. Without too much thought, General Medvedev obeyed the order. The Gorbachevs never forgave him.

While the General Secretary was frustrated and locked at his Foros dacha with all communications cut off and nobody to rely on, Boris Yeltsin, the President of Russia, arrived at Moscow’s White House at nine o’clock in the morning and climbed the tank with Alexander Korzhakov, the man who would shortly after become the third most influential politician in the country. Thanks to CNN, the whole world saw Yeltsin’s 42-year-old bodyguard, with the paunch acquired during two years out of service, wearing a grey baggy suit and a blue tie as he covered his boss while the President of the Russian Federation addressed the nation.

The August Putsch was over in a record time. Kryuchkov was arrested together with others and hours later, on the night of 23–24 August, the monument to Felix Dzierzyński, the founder of the Cheka, in front of the KGB Lubyanka building, was dismantled.

In those August days of 1991 very few people were actually aware of the person standing together with Yeltsin on the tank. In five years every Russian household would know his name.

Alexander Korzhakov was born in January 1950 to a factory workers’ family in Moscow. After finishing school he laboured as a metal worker at the Moscow Electro Mechanical Plant. In the army Korzhakov was recruited to the KGB and in 1970 joined the government bodyguards.

At that time Sergei Antonov, an old KGB hand, was in charge of the 9th Directorate. When General Antonov learned that Kalugin just arrived from Washington to work at headquarters, he gave his old friend a call suggesting him to join the directorate as a section chief. The section had more than 1,500 officers whose job was to make sure no harm could be done to the Kremlin leaders. Besides, they were permanently recruiting the service staff – drivers, cooks, housekeepers, and other employees – as secret informers. ‘You would have great power,’ Antonov said, ‘and great perks. You don’t even have a decent place to live. With us you’ll get everything – an apartment in the best building in Moscow, a car by your door every morning, and first-class food.’¹⁸ Kalugin thought it over and refused.

For many years Korzhakov had served under Lieutenant General Yuri Storozhev and in 1983 was assigned to the bodyguard detail of Andropov, the Chief. In 1985 Korzhakov became one of three bodyguards of Yeltsin, then a candidate to the Politburo.

After Yeltsin was sacked from his high-ranking party positions in October 1987, Korzhakov did not last long and was retired from the service in 1989. In the same year he joined the secretariat of Yeltsin who had been moved to an obscure position as the chairman of the parliamentary committee supervising construction and architecture.

On 12 June 1991 Yeltsin won 57 per cent of the popular vote in the elections for the Russian presidency. In less than half a year the Russian Federation took the Soviet Union’s seat in the United Nations. The next day, President Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet Union ceased to exist. In his fifth year in office, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe’ of the twentieth century.

After the August events Korzhakov was with Yeltsin all the time and in December 1991 became the chief of the newly established Presidential Protection Service and deputy head of Main Protection Directorate, formerly the 9th Directorate, known to its officers as ‘the Ninth’. He was now a general commanding a considerable force that, apart from its numerous staff and support, included the Centre for Special Operations.

Yuri Felshtinsky, whose book, The Age of Assassins: The Rise and Rise of Vladimir Putin (2007), deals in great detail with the situation, notes that ‘after successfully implementing the idea of creating an independent presidential security service and filling all key positions in other newly formed [power] agencies with people personally loyal to himself, Korzhakov effectively became – without this being noticed by anyone, least of all by his boss, Yeltsin – the second man in Russia.’¹⁹

‘Yeltsin’s main dilemma throughout his entire administration,’ writes Alex Goldfarb, another well-informed insider, ‘was just how far he was willing to violate democracy in order to save it. In fall 1993, the Supreme Soviet – the parliament, which was still full of ex-Soviet apparatchiks – had blocked his reforms and called on federal regions to rebel. Yeltsin disbanded the legislature and sent tanks to smoke out the deputies who barricaded themselves inside; 140 died in the melee. It was a tough choice, but the alternative had seemed worse: total economic collapse and political implosion.’²⁰

It was clear that the battle for voters and subsequently for the course the country would take lay in the control of the media, and first of all, television. Ostankino TV was effectively influencing the opinions of some 200 million people who inhabited the territory of the now defunct Soviet Union. To bring them to the side of the president was the matter of primary importance.

Two people understood that better than anyone else. One was Boris Berezovsky, who had recently gained access to Yeltsin with the help of Valentin Yumashev, and Vladimir Gusinsky, nicknamed Goose, a former show-master and the owner of NTV – at that time, the only private television network in the country – and of Most-Bank, which served the Moscow’s mayor’s office. Yumashev was a successful journalist with the country’s perestroika-era most popular magazine Ogonyok when I got to know him in 1987. Valentin, usually called by friends and colleagues by his diminutive, Valik or Valya, was then in charge of the readers’ letters department. He later rose to become deputy editor and then editor-in-chief of the magazine and was chosen to ghostwrite the president’s memoirs. There he met Yeltsin’s good-looking daughter, Tatiana Dyachenko, who was married, in her second marriage, to a businessman, and would soon give birth to her second son. Valik and Tatiana got along well and arranged that Berezovsky be introduced to two important people of the Yeltsin’s inner circle: Victor Ilyushin, the former chief of his secretariat at the Supreme Soviet, and in the Kremlin at the time first assistant to the President; and Alexander Korzhakov, Yeltsin’s most powerful bodyguard.

Berezovsky’s concern was Channel One, broadcasting news and programmes across ten time zones, because that would be instrumental in Yeltsin’s presidential campaign of 1996. Boris suggested privatising it with 51 per cent belonging to the state and the rest to private investors and convinced Yeltsin’s closest assistants that ‘he was the man who could control the airwaves for the benefit of the reforms and the president’. Soon the ORT was born that stood for Russian Public Television, a.k.a. Berezovsky’s channel, as Goldfarb put it.

In this attempt to control the airwaves, Gusinsky with his NTV turned to be Boris’s natural rival.

On that memorable day in December 1994, Goose’s motorcade left his country’s dacha as usual. In the lead was a fast car with watchers scanning both sides of the road. Then came Goose’s armoured Mercedes, followed by an SUV swaying from side to side to make sure that no one attempted to pass, and finally a windowless van carrying a team of former paratroopers led by a fierce, egg-headed gorilla nicknamed Cyclops.

Suddenly word came through the guards’ earphones: ‘We have company.’ Someone was tailing the convoy. Gusinsky’s driver floored the gas pedal and they screeched up to the Most-Bank headquarters, located in one of the city’s tallest buildings, which also housed City Hall. It was formerly the headquarters of Comecon, the economic command centre of the Soviet bloc. Shielded by bodyguards, Goose disappeared inside and rushed straight into the safety of the mayor’s office.

Moments later his pursuers arrived, about thirty strong, in flak jackets and balaclavas, armed with automatic weapons and grenade launchers. For the next two hours, in horrified disbelief, Goose watched from the mayor’s window. The attackers, who evidently belonged to a branch of the secret service, disarmed his men and put them facedown in the snow, where they remained for nearly two hours, in full view of a crowd of spectators and TV cameras. The city police, called to the scene, exchanged a few words with the attackers and then quietly drove away. So did an FSB squad, alerted by Most-Bank staff, who thought a robbery was in progress.

Eventually the assailants left, as mysteriously as they appeared, without identifying themselves or explaining the reasons for the raid. The next morning Goose took his family to London and the safety of the Park Lane Hotel, where he remained for several months. The managers of his vast business empire shuttled back and forth from Moscow to London.’²¹

‘Hunting geese is among my favourite hobbies,’ Korzhakov told a Russian weekly on 18 January 1995. Indeed, duck-hunting and goose-shooting have always been the Kremlin hard men’s most favourite pastime. For Yeltsin’s bodyguard it was revenge for humiliation. But demonstrating power was not Korzhakov’s only aim. As one of the officers of his Special Operations Centre later recalled, ‘Our task was to provoke Gusinsky into action and to find out whose support he had secured in the government.’

They quickly found out that Gusinsky had called Eugeny Savostyanov, the chief of the FSK (the successor of the KGB, later to be renamed the FSB) Directorate for Moscow and Moscow region. On the same day as his men raided the tycoon’s domain, Korzhakov insisted that General Savostyanov should be replaced. Anatoly Trofimov, an experienced investigator close to Korzhakov, was installed instead.

On 30 August 1995 Yeltsin’s second grandson, Gleb Dyachenko, was born and in March 1996 Tatiana joined her father’s presidential election committee as its leading member. By that time many changes had taken place in Moscow.

Better than anyone else, Korzhakov was aware of his boss’s ailing health. Shortly before the elections, Yeltsin was recuperating from a series of heart attacks. Puffing and bloated with medication, he was watching his popularity closing to zero. Domestic and international observers also noted his occasionally erratic behaviour. Under the circumstances, Korzhakov wanted to surround himself with people who would secure his prominent behind-the-scenes role in the Russian state affairs. But being a simple and dull-witted person, he based his choice on primitive considerations. He chose Mikhail Barsukov, the newly appointed FSB director who had previously been the head of the Main Protection Directorate, Korzhakovs own service, and First Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Soskovets, whom he hoped one day to install in the president’s office and who was under an ongoing investigation in Kazakhstan for financial abuses and corruption (he was never prosecuted). As an extra advantage, neither of the two could boast an intellectual superiority to Korzhakov. So he concentrated on removing Anatoly Chubais, First Deputy Chairman of the Russian government now in charge of economy and finance, as his main adversary.

Chubais, a young ‘dissident economist’ from Leningrad, worked as deputy to the law professor named Anatoly Sobchak, a prominent democrat elected the Chairman of the Leningrad Council in 1990. He became Sobchak’s economic adviser when the university professor was elected mayor. In May 1990, Sobchak appointed Vladimir Putin as his adviser on international affairs. Korzhakov sent one of his officers, Victor Zolotov, as an official government bodyguard to the Leningrad mayor during whose time in the office the city restored its original name, St Petersburg. Having settled in the northern capital, Zolotov established a private security firm named Baltic Escort, one of the first in the city, and installed Roman Tsepov, a former captain of the internal militia troops, as its head. Tsepov’s people started to protect Putin and his family and soon Baltic Escort became the biggest and the most important security company of St Petersburg. Tsepov was not only in charge of the security matters, but showed himself as a talented organiser and an indispensable liaison with the criminal underworld of the most corrupt city of Russia.

In November 1991 Chubais became a minister in the Yeltsin’s Cabinet in charge of the State Property Committee. He would soon be scornfully called ‘the Privatiser’ for his role in Russian privatisation.

The programme was launched by the decree signed by President Yeltsin on 19 August 1991. As deputy chairman of the government, Chubais organised the ‘loans-for-shares’ privatisations that quickly made two dozen Kremlin-connected businessmen, who became known as ‘oligarchs’, enormously wealthy. Initially, the Privatiser wanted to sell state companies to highest bidders. But the Russian parliament approved a voucher privatisation scheme similar to the one adopted in the Czech Republic where each citizen was given a voucher allowing him or her to acquire a share of state property at auction. The scheme had led to a fiasco in the Czech Republic and in 1997–99 was sharply echoed in Azerbaijan. Amazingly, in both Prague and Baku, one and the same international fraudster, named Viktor Kozeny, was the main perpetrator of the elaborated financial fraud that rid the investors of hundreds of millions of dollars. In Moscow, a handful of men and a woman managed to make a fortune. Chubais headed the State Property Committee until November 1994.

His apparent favour with the West, ‘from the Clinton administration, to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to the flock of Harvard University advisers who were helping him build such capitalist institutions as a stock market and a tax service,’²² certainly made Chubais a liability in the Korzhakov’s mind.

In January 1995 Korzhakov managed to install Nikolai Yegorov, a hard-liner, as Yeltsin’s chief of staff. As in June Barsukov was elevated to become the director of the security service and Yuri Krapivin was appointed head of the Main Protection Directorate, Korzhakov arranged that it was placed under the command of the Presidential protection service (SBP), that is, himself. A year later, in early January 1996, the pro-Western Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev was replaced by an arch-hawk, Evgeny Primakov, the former chief of the Russian foreign intelligence. Without doubt acting on the tip of his personal bodyguard, Yeltsin opened his presidential election year by sacking Chubais from the government and appointing Soskovets to chair his re-election staff assisted by two generals: the FSO’s Korzhakov and the FSB’s Barsukov, at one fell swoop.

While all those battles were fought in Moscow, Frederick Forsyth was working on his novel, which would soon come out as Icon, in the comfort of his English countryside. The writer predicted a neo-fascist coup with the Russian democracy only saved at the last moment by a small group of Western intelligence wizards. In reality, it was saved, albeit not for long, by Boris Berezovsky and a few people whom he could persuade that his course was just. Not that they had much doubt that if Yeltsin lost, the Communists would hang them from the lamp-posts.

It was a difficult victory, but they had won. In June Korzhakov, who by that time had become First Assistant to the President in addition to his post of the chief of SBP, was dismissed. Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatiana, became her father’s loyal and capable assistant. In July Anatoly Chubais was appointed Yeltsin’s chief of staff to be succeeded eight months later by Valentin Yumashev. Together with Korzhakov, the president in a nationally televised address also fired two of his buddies, Barsukov and Soskovets.

Next morning, when Litvinenko arrived at the Lubyanka headquarters, a Barsukov assistant summoned him to his office. ‘Tell Boris that if Korzhakov or Barsukov are arrested, he is dead,’ the man said. Sasha dutifully delivered the message.²³

They were never arrested. In the run-off on 3 July Yeltsin won 53.8 per cent of the vote in a decisive victory against the Communists. After one year of virtual unemployment in the active reserve, Barsukov was appointed to oversee the presidential dachas and later downgraded to chair the commission in charge of subterranean facilities. Korzhakov attempted to sue the president but the court rejected the suit. In February 1997 he was elected member of parliament and soon joined the Defence Committee. Korzhakov’s revenge was an anti-Yeltsin book From Dawn to Dusk that he published in Moscow in the same year.

Contrary to some expectations, Yumashev married not Tatiana Dyachenko but the sister of Oleg Deripaska, who ten years later would become the richest man of Russia. Yumashev’s daughter, Polina Deripaska, was born in London.

On Christmas Eve, Time magazine announced their Person of the Year 2007: Vladimir Putin. The article that followed the picture of the man with cool eyes devoid of any emotion was entitled ‘A Tsar is Born’.

It is a peculiar quality of Russian politics that the principal of the Kremlin, be it a tsar, a general secretary or a president, is endowed with a mystical quality of vlast, or ‘right of power,’ which instils in the populace a measure of instinctive humility and respect. This regal ingredient of supreme authority links all historical rulers in Russia into a single virtual dynasty from the House of Romanovs through Lenin and Stalin down to Gorbachev and Yeltsin.²⁴

Eight months before the election, Boris Berezovsky met Putin in the old KGB building.

‘Volodya, what about you?’ he asked.

‘What about me?’ Putin did not understand.

‘Could you be president?’

‘Me? No, I am not the type. This is not what I want in life.’

‘Well, then, what? Do you want to stay here forever?’

‘I want…’, he hesitated. ‘I want to be Berezovsky.’

‘No, you don’t really,’ Boris laughed.²⁵

I dare say that Time was wrong, as it was twice wrong with Stalin. After his two terms in office a tsar was not born in Putin. But he almost managed to become Boris Berezovsky. Now he needed to eliminate the prototype.

In the autumn of 2008 I had been tempted for quite some time to call Masha Gessen in Paris warning her that her life was in danger. Finally, I decided not to frighten the brave lady who probably fully realised it herself, as she was the author of a brilliant article about Putin published in the October issue of Vanity Fair, a very popular magazine. The banner read:

Few saw what he really was, or the way he brutally erased his footprints on the climb to power. Fewer still survived to decode him. As Russian forces bend Georgia to their will, Masha Gessen tells how one small, faceless man backed by the vast secret-police machine that formed him – took control of the world’s largest country.

Masha almost managed to decode the man. Her story is very compelling, but not complete.

After returning from his tour of duty in East Germany, where his spy work neither brought any results nor gave any push to his KGB career, Putin joined the mayor’s staff that Sobchak hurriedly formed from those he knew at the university, and in June 1991 was promoted to head the Committee for External Relations. At that time he never planned to make a prominent career not to mention a top post in Moscow so he did what all bureaucrats do best of all: took bribes. But being a cautious former intelligence officer, Putin knew the basic laws of tradecraft. One of them dictates that someone else must always do the dirty work, and another that the situation when one could be caught must by all means be avoided. There’s still the third rule that says there must be no witnesses. And, of course, yet another important principle is to deny any involvement. Putin played by the rules.

Obviously an observant journalist, Masha has noticed a thread that runs all through the Putin story: everyone who knows anything about him is leaving in exile or dead or working in the Russian government very close to the man himself.

One of those exiles, she reports, Marina Salye, now lives in a village in Russia more than ioo miles from St Petersburg. Throughout the 1990s, Salye was a leading liberal politician in St Petersburg, deputy of the legislative assembly of the city, one of only two women prominent on the national liberal political scene since perestroika. (The other, Galina Starovoitova, was shot dead in her apartment building in St Petersburg in 1998.) In 1992 Salye headed a committee of the city council formed to investigate the activity of the deputy mayor, Vladimir Putin. After she and another deputy, Yuri Gladkov, presented the results of the investigation, the city council passed a resolution calling for the mayor to fire Putin and to have the prosecutor’s office investigate apparent corruption and misappropriation of funds. The mayor ignored the recommendation. In early 2000, in the run-up to the presidential elections, Salye campaigned against Putin, attempting to draw attention to the conclusions of the committee’s investigation.²⁶

Then, abruptly, she left St Petersburg and disappeared. Masha learned why. Around New Year’s Day 2001, her sources told her, Salye received a holiday telegram from President Putin. ‘Here is wishing you good health,’ the telegram said, ‘and the opportunity to use it.’ The next day, she packed up and moved to the most obscure place she could find. Salye today won’t speak publicly about this or anything else. The fact that this account of her disappearance is believed by many Russians active in liberal politics, including some who know Putin, speaks volumes about the way the former (and, quite possibly, the future) president is perceived not only as small-minded and vengeful but also as vulgar and unsubtle.²⁷

And what happened to Yuri Gladkov? The deputy chairman of the Legislative Assembly of St Petersburg died on 6 October 2007 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Experts know that ALS can be simulated by mercury intoxication or exposure to other heavy metals. And the date, as in the case of Anna Politkovskaya, is remarkable – Putin’s birthday. (Had Gladkov survived just a couple of hours longer, he would still have been well in time; certainly no autopsy had ever been performed.)

Putin’s Committee for External Relations was also used to register business ventures in the city. With the help of Tsepov, Putin was attempting to gain control over the emerging gambling industry of St Petersburg. In the end, he succeeded in securing for the city 51 percent share of all casinos – but this, he later claimed, did nothing for the city’s coffers, because casino managers ran with the cash. Something similar, Putin explained, also happened with federal credits the city was supposed to use to stimulate food imports: he claimed that the private companies contracted by the city vanished with the money. The 1992 investigation by Salye and Gladkov drew a different conclusion: partnerships with private companies were structured in such a way as to siphon money with impunity. This was not the only allegation of misconduct levelled against Putin: in 1999 the St Petersburg prosecutor’s office launched an investigation into the alleged misappropriation of some $4.5 million earmarked for reconstruction projects; the investigation was closed in August 2000, after Putin became president. One of the investigators on the case has since joined a monastery while the other has retired. Everyone named by the investigation now has a top government position – including Russia’s president at the time of writing, Dmitry Medvedev, who, if the prosecutors are to be believed, was the man who actually engineered the transfers of earmarked funds.²⁸ The investigation commission also concluded that Putin understated prices and issued licenses permitting the export of non-ferrous metals valued at a total of $93 million in exchange for food supplies from abroad that never came to the city, wrote the St Petersburg Times when Putin entered his second term as president.

In 1992 while the commission was investigating, Putin travelled to Frankfurt am Main in Germany as part of the city delegation to attract investments. Vladimir Smirnov, a budding St Petersburg businessman, was another member of the delegation. Smirnov explained to those who were eager to listen that the best return on their capital would be by investing money in real estate of their choice in the second most important city of the country whose economy would soon be booming. As it was fashionable at the time, he suggested setting up a Russo-German property-development joint-venture company. The St Petersburg city government was giving its wholehearted support to the project, he said. Soon Putin’s Committee for External Relations duly registered the St Petersburg Real Estate Holding Company (known by its German acronym, SPAG) with Smirnov managing its Russian operations. As usual, staying in the shadow (another professional trait), Putin was among the officials registered as ‘advisory board’ separate from the board of directors.

The company operated in obscurity until Putin became the prime minister of Russia, when SPAG caught the eye of US and European intelligence agencies. Its name turned up in a probe by Germany’s BND of alleged money laundering that was operated through Liechtenstein, a notorious tax haven. The BND accused the company’s cofounder, Rudolf Ritter, who contributed much of SPAG’s seed capital, of laundering funds for both Russian organised crime and Colombian drug traffickers. A German intelligence report also suggested that Russian criminals were using SPAG to buy property inside Russia.²⁹

In 2000 Putin’s newly appointed spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, denied the president had ever ‘worked for it as an adviser’. Ritter was later investigated on money-laundering charges and this was widely reported by the world’s media.

The Newsweek investigation, however, revealed that Putin was at least in regular, and sometimes close, contact with some of the company’s key Russian and foreign directors over a period of years, and even signed important St Petersburg city documents for the company’s benefit. Klaus-Peter Sauer, a German accountant who helped found SPAG and at the time of investigation was still a company director, said he met Putin about six times both in Russia and Frankfurt. Sauer said SPAG founder Ritter travelled to St Petersburg and met Putin at least once.³⁰

He remained on the advisory board of SPAG from the day of its inception in 1992 until March 2002. The SPAG records obtained by Newsweek from a German commercial registry showed that in December 1994, Putin signed an affidavit on St Petersburg’s behalf giving Smirnov voting power over the city government’s 200 shares in the company.

In 1994, as deputy mayor, Putin granted the Petersburg Fuel Company (PTK) a virtual monopoly over petrol sales in the city and all municipal buses, taxis, ambulances and police vehicles were obliged to fill up their cars at the PTK petrol stations. The president of the PTK was Vladimir Smirnov and the vice-president Vladimir Kumarin, the leader of the powerful Tambov gang in St Petersburg. Kumarin was also listed as a director of one of SPAG’s most important subsidiaries.

But Putin’s contact to Kumarin was not so much through Smirnov as via Tsepov, who was his liaison with the city’s underground. It is documented that Alexander Tkachenko, nicknamed Tkach, the leader of the Perm organised crime group, was a one time employee of Baltic Escort; Ruslan Koryak, another criminal authority, worked in one of the companies controlled by Tsepov; Alexander Malyshev, organiser of the Malyshev gang (at the time of writing under arrest in Spain), was Tsepov’s ‘business associate’; and there were other criminals, most of them later murdered, engaged in racket, extortion, corruption including bribes to local government, and violent clashes with each other.

Two years after the PTK deal, Putin together with Smirnov co-founded the Ozero (‘Lake’) cooperative, an exclusive country cottage settlement on the Komsomol Lake near St Petersburg. By that time Smirnov had already been placed in charge of investments and the real estate belonging to the city as the general manager of the public joint stock company especially established for this matter.

According to Masha Gessen, it was as deputy mayor that Putin finally got to play the roles he had yearned for as a child: he was both a shadow ruler and a thug. But if some or even all the claims of wrongdoing are true, she notes, by the standards of 1990s Russia, Putin was no more than small-time crook in a large city. He just happened to be the only small-time crook to become the president of Russia.

In 1996 Putin was in charge of his former teacher’s re-election and Sobchak lost. Almost immediately, the city prosecutor’s office, fortified by forty investigators from Moscow, launched a probe into corruption. A year later, the former mayor and an acknowledged democrat fled to France with Putin’s help while at least one member of his administration was arrested and another killed, shot to death in broad daylight in the centre of St Petersburg. But, as the Vanity Fair reporter observed, Putin made an uneventful transition to Moscow, as though airlifted by an invisible KGB hand.³¹

In reality, all was much simpler. The former deputy mayor called his friend Chubais, who was heading the ‘analytical group’ created by Berezovsky to get Yeltsin re-elected, and begged his former colleague to take him to Moscow. Chubais saw no objections. Perhaps he exchanged words with Boris who recalled how Putin had helped him to set up shop in the city when Berezovsky owned a car dealership and that the deputy mayor neither demanded nor accepted a bribe. In June 1996 Putin was appointed Deputy Chief of the Presidential Property Management Department.

The year was the turning point for many events that were to follow. In 1996 Zolotov and Lugovoy, and then Sokolenko and Talik left the FSO, formerly the 9th Directorate of the KGB, to start their careers as officers of the active reserve elsewhere. Zolotov remained in St Petersburg in control of the growing business formally under Tsepov. Lugovoy was employed by Berezovsky as chief of the security service of his ORT. Sokolenko started a private security business and Talik went to try his luck in Ukraine, as, according to him, he couldn’t find any job in Russia. During the same year, Limarev became a ‘public adviser’ to Gennady Seleznev, the Communist speaker of the Russian parliament. In December 1999, Talik arrived in Italy where he settled illegally.

It is hard to say how Valentin Velichko, a low-profile counter-intelligence officer of the foreign intelligence directorate, who had been expelled from Holland as a spy in the late 1980s, came across Limarev’s radar. He was just one of the KGB vets chairing a veteran organisation called ‘Honour and Dignity’. A much better candidate to come into the limelight would be Valéry Velichko, likewise a KGB vet and chairman of the veterans’ club Vega, who had supported Kryuchkov’s putsch in 1991. Before retirement, this Velichko had served as the chief of staff of the 9th Directorate and was one of the co-founders of the Russian National Economic Security Service and Centre for Bodyguards and Protection Personnel Training. My guess is that owing to the too obvious ties of Valéry Velichko with the all-important players of the Litvinenko operation, he was substituted – a standard trick – by another man with a very similar name. This said, it seems quite obvious that neither Valentin nor Valéry Velichko had anything to do with the Litvinenko operation. Many journalists spent time and energy researching the substitute and his career until finally he became quite well known.

In the Kremlin Putin was moving up rapidly enough. On 11 March 1997 Yumashev succeeded Chubais as Yeltsin’s chief of staff and two weeks later named Putin his deputy. In June Putin finally defended his master’s thesis in economics at the St Petersburg Mining Institute. Corruption was at play even there. According to Clifford G. Gaddy, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank, sixteen of the twenty pages that open a key section of Putins work were copied either word for word or with minute alterations from a management study, Strategic Planning and Policy, written in 1978 by US professors William King and David Cleland. The study was translated into Russian by a KGB-related institute in the early 1990s.³²

In November 1997 Putin went to St Petersburg to organise ‘the rescue of Sobchak’. The corruption case against the mayor’s office finally reached the mayor himself and criminal proceedings were launched against him. They say he suffered a heart attack while under interrogation, on the same day as the Attorney General signed his arrest warrant. From the police cell Sobchak was taken to a hospital where Yuri Shevchenko, a military physician and Putin’s friend, diagnosed a serious heart disease. For a while, Sobchak was hospitalised in Military Hospital No. 122 and then was transferred to the Military Medical Academy headed by Shevchenko. On 7 November Putin allegedly used his contacts to smuggle his ailing teacher and former boss to Paris by a private jet.

I have some doubt about the altruism of such a move. Putin has not been noted as a kind, honest or helpful person either before or since. And the St Petersburg FSB could not fail to notice a former mayor and very famous Russian politician leaving hospital or boarding a plane to Europe. They had informers enough to be forewarned of such activities anyway: Zolotov and Tsepov were there, Evgeny Murov, future director of the FSO, was at that time deputy chief of the FSB in St Petersburg from 1992 headed by Victor Cherkesov,³³ an appointment believed to have been engineered by Putin, who was his friend. According to Masha Gessen, to this day Cherkesov’s name makes former dissidents from St Petersburg cringe, so he could hardly miss the opportunity to grab Sobchak, one of the leading liberals. For whatever reason, the security service decided to allow Sobchak to escape and Putin to help him. This certainly greatly enhanced his reputation and favourably impressed the president especially when the story of Putin’s ‘heroic behaviour’ and devotion to the mayor reached the Kremlin. In reality, it was a criminal act as he was helping someone to escape justice. But no one seemed to care at the time.

In May 1998 Putin was appointed First Deputy Chief of Staff for regions with the job of preparing agreements granting more power to the local authorities in the former autonomous republics of the Russian Federation like Chechnya, Tatarstan or Bashkortostan. Before Putin, they were allowed to bite off as much sovereignty as they could chew, but with him chairing the commission no more agreements were signed. Putin’s wish to preserve the Soviet Union as it had been under Stalin would later be reflected in his aggressive policy towards Estonia, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and Chechnya.

One summer day Yumashev, who often discussed major government appointments with Berezovsky, asked for his opinion about Putin.

‘Why?’

‘We are considering him for the FSB directorship.’

Yumashev explained that the principal quality the president was seeking in a new security chief was loyalty, but he didn’t trust any of the FSB generals. If Putin had one defining feature, he said, it was staunch loyalty.

Boris liked the idea of putting a lieutenant colonel over generals; the newcomer would not be a part of the old-boy network and would almost certainly be snubbed by the top brass, which would only strengthen his loyalty to the Kremlin.

‘I support him 100 per cent,’ Boris said.³⁴

As usual, he was wrong about people.

When the new director took office on 25 July, Boris said to Sasha Litvinenko: ‘Go see Putin. Make yourself known. See what a great guy we’ve installed, with your help.’³⁵

In fact Litvinenko had not helped at all to instal Putin at the Lubyanka; he had never heard of the man until Boris mentioned him. But Sasha was happy to comply and took time to prepare for the meeting.

They did not hit it off at once. Putin was cold and formal. He listened in silence to Sasha’s passionate depiction of corruption in the service, and refused to accept hand-drawn diagrams that Litvinenko had prepared to show relations between the FSB officers and the criminals. Putin said he would call if he needed the, hmm, lieutenant colonel further.

‘I know a man by his handshake,’ Sasha told Marina after that meeting. ‘His was cold and spongy. I could see it in his eyes that he hated me.’³⁶

Certainly, no one cared about what Sasha Litvinenko thought when in 1999 the Family, which by that time included Putin and Roman Abramovich, a future boyfriend of Daria Zhukova, decided to make the former petty spy first prime minister and then president. The image-makers presented a completely unknown 47-year-old as a loyal and honest young man who would shepherd Russia into a bright economic future and stable democracy. Folk will gulp down everything, a modern Russian proverb says. And the folk did.

For her Vanity Fair article Gessen managed to interview Marina Litvinovich who was a top manager at the think-tank that ran Putin’s campaign. ‘We said he was young, energetic and would institute much-needed reforms,’ Marina explained. ‘People were so tired of Yeltsin that this was easy to sell. Even more incredibly,’ the reporter added, ‘Western leaders and the Western media bought the story, too.’³⁷

Well, there are no fools and many Western leaders just pretended to believe in the newly projected image of Putin, each pursuing his private priorities in the first place. It may have been establishing his public image, as in the case of Tony Blair, or economic considerations, as with Silvio Berlusconi, or some long-range personal objectives, as with Gerhard Schröder. However, unlike in Russia, there are no illusions in the West about how economy and democracy work. There are rules.

People who knew Putin even before he became a president came to understand that he was mean, small-minded, and vindictive. And very ill-mannered. In 1999, having only recently been appointed prime minister, he promised: ‘We’ll follow terrorists everywhere. Should we catch them in a shithouse, we’ll waste them there.’ In September 2000, when Larry King asked Putin what had happened to the Kursk nuclear submarine, whose crew perished when Russian officials refused to allow Norwegian rescue teams near the site of the accident, Putin smiled like a mischievous schoolboy and said, ‘It drowned.’ In November 2002, during a EU-Russia summit, a French journalist asked a question about bombings affecting the civilian population of Chechnya. Putin responded by suggesting that the questioner was an ‘Islamic radical’ who would do well to come to Russia to procure a circumcision, ‘and I’d recommend that the operation be performed in such a way that nothing will grow there again’. In September 2004, after the tragedy of Beslan, Putin explained the failure of Russia’s security services with the sentence, ‘We were weak. And the weak are being beaten.’ In October 2006, during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Putin commented on the sexual harassment scandal that had brought down Israeli president Moshe Katsav. ‘Your president is a mighty man,’ he said. ‘He managed to rape 10 women! We are all envious of him.’³⁸ With Russian tanks only 40 miles from Tbilisi, Georgia, in the August of 2008, French President Nicolas Sarkozy told Putin that the world would not accept the overthrow of Georgia’s president. Putin seemed unconcerned. ‘I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls,’ he declared. A lavatorial sense of humour.

It may be a coincidence, but in 2006 Litvinovich, who had contributed remarks about Putin to the Vanity Fair article, was attacked in the centre of Moscow and beaten senseless. Masha Gessen mentioned in her article that the attackers did not take any of her possessions.

In June 1999 the prosecutors dropped their charges against Anatoly Sobchak and he was able to return to Russia. It had nothing to do with Putin as he was still a rather small Kremlin cog. Only several weeks later Yeltsin appointed him director of the FSB and in August acting prime minister. By the time of Sobchak’s return from his self-imposed exile in France, Yuri Shevchenko, a friend of the Putin’s family, had already become federal health minister.

As soon as Putin became the prime minister, he immediately recalled Zolotov from St Petersburg and put him in charge of his personal protection service thus returning him to active duty in the FSO.

Sobchak became an enthusiastic supporter of his former student’s quest for presidency. He probably hoped to get an important government post after Putin was elected. This might explain his exuberance when on 16 February 2000 Putin, already the acting president of Russia, asked him to fly to Kaliningrad urgently to campaign for him. As a matter of fact, no such campaigning was necessary as the media and advertising did the job smartly and Putin was the officially announced heir apparent anyway. But for whatever reason, he asked him. And he went.

Sobchak died suddenly three days later in his hotel room in the spa town of Svetlogorsk on the Baltic Sea. During the autopsy in Kaliningrad it was established that the initial diagnosis was falsified, that he never had a heart attack (Shevchenko claimed that he had three and the fourth finished him), and that the former mayor and popular politician died of acute myocardial infarction caused by a blood clot that stopped blood flow in his heart.

Sobchak’s funeral in St Petersburg turned into a big public show for Putin, who was accompanied by Berezovsky, with major newspapers and television channels concentrating not on the gone professor, but on the alleged threat to the acting president. From that moment on, Zolotov was always behind his back.

***

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was inaugurated president on 7 May 2000. But even before that, in April, Dmitry Peskov was appointed first deputy press attaché for the president. On 18 May, following the advice of his personal bodyguard, Putin appointed General Evgeny Murov chief of the Federal Protection Service (FSO). Murov, a former foreign intelligence officer, was a contact person for Zolotov in St Petersburg and last served as deputy chief of the Economic Department at the headquarters where he was guarding and multiplying the cash flow of his superiors. In May, Putin also installed Sergey Lebedev as chief of foreign intelligence, the SVR.

Thus Putin ‘inner cabinet’ was formed. It included Dmitry Medvedev, who worked with him and Sobchak in St Petersburg, following Putin to Moscow as deputy chief of presidential staff in December 1999. Subsequently, Medvedev was put in charge of Putin’s presidential election campaign. Two other of the most important and closest assistants who physically guarded the president were Murov and Zolotov. They were also in charge of ‘special tasks’ and formed both Putin’s secret police and his private intelligence service. Another very important figure was Igor Sechin, traditionally the deputy chief of Putin’s administration (all key figures of his shadow inner cabinet are characteristically given formal second roles). In the 1980s Sechin worked in Mozambique and Angola as an interpreter, which was usually a cover for intelligence or a special reserve officer but Stratfor was certainly wrong claiming that he was the KGB rezident in those countries.³⁹ Another allegation that Sechin was ‘the USSR’s point man for weapons smuggling to much of Latin America and the Middle East’ could be true – a source of mine, himself a retired dealer living in hiding in Paris, confirmed this information. Finally, Peskov became a trusted member of the Russian president’s closely knit team. With this inner group of cronies in place, Putin started to drive the country his way.

In September 2000 the world leaders planned to hold the United Nations Millennium Summit in New York and the newly elected Russian president was going to attend. In summer, Murov sent his deputy, Alexander Lunkin, to Manhattan to take care of the security arrangements for the visit. Upon arriving, Lunkin first of all called his old acquaintance whom he knew from their Komsomol years in the KGB. Sergey Tretyakov was now the deputy SVR station chief in New York based at the UN headquarters. He managed the impressive group of sixty intelligence officers working under different guises in the Big Apple and over 150 foreign sources – contacts with a different degree of trust, from recruited agents to useful informers – who provided the Russian foreign intelligence with much needed information.⁴⁰ And not only information.

One of Tretyakov’s operatives under diplomatic cover became a pivotal player in the UN humanitarian aid programme using his position to help Russia steal hundreds of millions of dollars that were supposed to be spent helping the civil population of Iraq. Another important source, a Russian immigrant living in the United States, delivered millions of dollars’ worth of stolen medical research that landed on the table of Putin’s friend, doctor Yuri Shevchenko. Still another undercover SVR officer, a permanent representative to the UN from Azerbaijan, was delivering top-grade intelligence about the Clinton administration’s plans and strategy in oil-rich Baku. This intelligence could have helped the SVR to make a valuable input into Victor Kozeny’s famous fraud scheme in the republic, his two closest assistants being an American, Thomas Farrell, and a Swiss, Hans Bodmer, who both pleaded guilty in the Baku affair, admitting wrongdoings. It is interesting that before and after the Kozeny operation in Azerbaijan that went on from 1997 to 1999, Farrell lived in St Petersburg and worked in local security firms while Tsepov, Kumarin and Zolotov were fully in control of the protection business there. At the time of writing, Farrell was still in St Petersburg, permitted to return there after he struck a deal with the American prosecutors. He now owns the famous Shamrock Irish Bar near the Opera. The Swiss lawyer, Bodmer, was also allowed to return to Zurich where he continued wheeling and dealing for his Moscow masters, most recently being a defendant in another case of massive money-laundering and fraud involving structures close to the Kremlin. The Kozeny scam stripped American investors of $200 million. Kozeny, who was indicted in October 2005 by a federal grand jury in Manhattan, escaped to the Bahamas where he now lives in Lyford Cay. After a local court ruled against his extradition to the United States, he is as free a man as Lugovoy – not being able to travel anywhere.

Sitting round a dinner table with an old chum in Tretyakov’s New York apartment, Lunkin reported news from Moscow. He said that two guards, Murov and Zolotov, were especially close to the president. But the Russian spymaster didn’t get it exactly right when four years later he told Pete Earley that Zolotov ‘had been a steelworker before he was hired as a bodyguard by the St Petersburg mayor’.

Victor Zolotov was born in January 1954 and after finishing secondary school indeed worked for a while as a steelworker at the Moscow car factory, widely known in the Soviet Union by its acronym AZLK that produced the infamous Moskvich car. After the army, where he almost certainly served with the Kremlin regiment (the young lieutenant Andrei Lugovoy would later serve there as a drill instructor), Zolotov was recruited to the 9th Directorate of the KGB where he spent almost twenty years honing his skills to become a real professional. He also acquired a taste for marshal arts becoming a master of Oyama Kyokushinkai karate-do and a follower of Mas Oyama’s teaching: ‘Keep your head low, eyes high, mouth shut; base yourself on filial piety and benefit others.’

When Korzhakov sent him to Leningrad as the personal bodyguard of the mayor, Zolotov was a hard man but felt filial piety to his masters and kept his mouth shut. Putin, who knew him well, greatly appreciated those traits and summoned Zolotov to Moscow as soon as he was able to, placing him in charge of the newly reshuffled Presidential Protection Service. In 2000 Zolotov was a colonel. By the end of Putin’s second term – colonel general.

Zolotov is known for his penchant for black sunglasses and – when not in his cornflower blue general’s uniform – black suits. His people are called ‘Men in Black’ in the FSO. They are always armed and very dangerous.

During their friendly dinner in New York in the summer of 2000, Lunkin, who evidently knew his colleagues well, told Tretyakov that Murov and Zolotov were ‘common thugs’ and warned his friend to be wary of them. The FSO man recalled how Putin felt jealous of his own chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin whom he had inherited from Yeltsin. For years since then he had been deputy to Yumashev and until he left Putin’s presidential administration at the end of October 2003, Voloshin was the grey cardinal of the Kremlin. In Lunkin’s presence Murov and Zolotov were discussing plans to get rid of Voloshin. Based on his discussions with his old mate, Tretyakov later informed the American authorities that one plan was to murder him and blame Chechen terrorists, while another was to make the Mafia shoulder the blame. Murov and Zolotov knew no one would ever investigate. Or, if they do, any investigation will soon hit a dead end as in the case of Politkovskaya.

‘So what happened?’ the SVR man asked.

Lunkin said they finally agreed that murdering Voloshin would not end Putin’s problems. According to Murov’s deputy, two officers closest to Putin also discussed a possibility of assassinating some Russian oligarchs and members of the press corps. He said they finally decided to make a hit list of people they would have to ‘liquidate’ to give their boss unchecked power. After the list was compiled, Zolotov is said to have announced, ‘There are too many. It’s too many to kill – even for us.’⁴¹ Lunkin admitted he was quite embarrassed because Murov and Zolotov commanded a formidable force of some 20,000 troops that included, apart from the leadership, the Special Communication and Information Service, the Special garage, the Kremlin Commandant service and the presidential regiment and orchestra, in addition to underground command bunkers and a wide and well-hidden network of subterranean transportation systems that connected key government facilities.

In August, Murov and Zolotov arrived in New York for a final inspection before the visit.

As Pete Earley puts it:

Sergey [Tretyakov] met frequently with both, and one afternoon they asked him to take them to Brighton Beach to eat at the Tatiana Café, which was where he had taken General Trubnikov [a former KGB chief] and other important visitors. Murov, Zolotov and Sergey were sipping beer and waiting for their meals when Sergey asked Zolotov about the specialised training that his ‘Men in Black’ received. Zolotov boasted that his bodyguards were much better trained than their US Secret Service counterparts. President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated while riding in an open car, he declared. Whenever Putin travelled, his motorcade consisted of seven specially constructed automobiles, none of which was a convertible, making it impossible for a sniper to know in which car the president was riding. Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was murdered by her own security service in 1984, Zolotov continued. This was why Putin had only his closest friends, such as the two of them, in charge of his security. Gandhi’s son was killed when a woman suicide bomber threw herself at him while setting off explosives hidden in a bouquet of flowers. Putin was always ringed by at least twelve of Zolotov’s bodyguards whenever he was in public to prevent any such attack. ‘No one can get through my men and me and attack him,’ Zolotov proudly declared.

Clearly enjoying himself, Zolotov told Sergey that Putin’s ‘personals’ [lichniki in Russian] – as his most trusted ‘Men in Black’ were called – carried 9mm Gyurza (‘Blunt-nosed viper’) pistols that held eighteen bullets and were powerful enough to penetrate bulletproof vests up to fifty-four yards away. They rode in armour-plated jeeps equipped with AK-74 assault rifles, AKS-74U machine guns, Dragunov sniper rifles, RPK machine guns, grenade cup discharges, portable Osa (‘wasp’) rocket launchers, and other powerful armaments that, Zolotov insisted, would enable them to destroy an ‘entire battalion’ if necessary. In addition to having that weaponry, each ‘personal’ was a martial arts expert, capable of killing an attacker with a single blow.

Without any warning, Zolotov suddenly swung his hand in the air and struck Sergey in his temple. The blow knocked him off his chair and unconscious on the café floor. Moments later, Sergey awoke with Murov and Zolotov standing over him. Murov was furious.

‘You could have killed him!’ he yelled.

Zolotov began apologizing as he helped Sergey into a chair.

‘Lunkin was correct,’ Sergey said later after meeting Murov and Zolotov. ‘They were dangerous.’⁴²

At the time of writing, they still are.

On 6 September 2000, Putin spoke at the opening session of the United Nations Millennium Summit of World Leaders. VOA correspondent Breck Ardery reported: ‘Mr Putin told the gathering of world leaders that the control of nuclear weapons and the elements used to make them should be a major priority for the world.’

Back in May, Vladimir Smirnov, Putin’s business partner in SPAG, Foreign Currency Stock Exchange and the Lake dacha cooperative, was summoned to Moscow and appointed general manager of the mysteriously named Enterprise for the Supply of Goods, a state company working directly with and for the presidential administration.

Two years later Smirnov became the director general of Techsnabexport, one of the four Russian companies licensed to deal in polonium-210 and the only one authorised to export it.

On 3 July 2003 Yuri Shchekochikhin, an investigative journalist, writer and liberal lawmaker who investigated the Russian secret services and the corruption scandal known as ‘Three Whales’, suddenly died in Moscow aged 53, a few days before his scheduled departure to the United States where he planned to meet FBI agents. Although the Putin government has sealed all the documents pertinent to the case, the broad understanding in Russia is that Shchekochikhin was poisoned.

On 29 June 2004 a St Petersburg journalist, Maxim Maximov, disappeared during a meeting with three police officers. He was never found and is presumed dead. The investigation was swift and led nowhere. Maxim was known to have been investigating some most serious cases implicating Zolotov and Tsepov and their contacts with the city’s underworld as well as their shadow business deals. His assassins in uniform were allegedly reporting to Andrei Novikov, a St Petersburg militia man recommended by Tsepov as First Deputy Minister of Interior in charge of criminal police and economic security. The Russian sources report that Novikov was a protégé of Zolotov and the oligarch Oleg Deripaska. In November 2006, Novikov was suddenly dismissed from his high post and placed in charge of the Anti-Terrorist Centre of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), an insignificant position.

Several months after Maximov vanished, Roman Tsepov was poisoned in St Petersburg when he was drinking tea at the local FSB directorate. It was a signature murder – he was poisoned on 9/11 by a radioactive isotope, similar to polonium-210, but not an alpha emitter (perhaps americium-241). His symptoms were very similar to those of Khokhlov and Litvinenko. Tsepov died thirteen days later.

Tsepov was such a popular and powerful figure in the northern capital that one day Deripaska flew in on his private jet just to give him a birthday present of expensive watches.

During 2004 Tsepov was actively seeking direct contacts with Putin whom he knew well personally from the time when he provided bodyguards for him and his family in St Petersburg. He even went to Sochi, Putin’s summer residence, to meet him. However, Zolotov was straightforward and told his former associate that such a contact with the president would be undesirable.

Zolotov attended Tsepov’s funeral together with Colonel General Novikov and Vladimir Kumarin, who changed his name to Barsukov. The cathedral where the service was arranged had been guarded by special forces and there were more generals than the place could accommodate. Dmitry Mikhalchenko, who was also present in the room when Tsepov was poisoned, was also there. After the funeral he quietly took over Tsepov’s businesses.

The next signature murder was on 7 October 2006 when Anna Politkovskaya was shot on Putins birthday. They certainly couldn’t afford another method – the whole effect would be lost should she die in a car accident or of a heart attack. It was all self-protection, of course, as the lady had slapped Putin in the face by publishing her book Putin’s Russia in the West.

Those who do not know Nikolai Gogol’s Greatcoat (sometimes erroneously translated as ‘Overcoat’) would not understand the title of Anna’s strongest chapter about Putin, whom she called ‘Akaky Akakievich Putin II’. Doesn’t matter. Politkovskaya, recognised as the conscience of the Russian post-Soviet journalism, wrote:

I have wondered a great deal about why I have so got it in for Putin. What is it that makes me dislike him so much as to feel moved to write a book about him? I am not one of his political opponents or rivals, just a woman living in Russia. Quite simply, I am a 45-year-old Moscovite who observed the Soviet Union at its most disgraceful in the 1970s and ’80s. I really don’t want to find myself back there again.⁴³

Three weeks after Politkovskaya’s murder Sasha Litvinenko was poisoned. He was a personal enemy of Putin and abused him publicly not only by calling the president a paedophile, but by collaborating with the Chechens, by writing books about the Lubyanka criminal gang, by standing on the side of Berezovsky, by investigating Putin’s fledglings in Spain, Austria, Italy and elsewhere, and by calling Romano Prodi ‘a man of the KGB’. Prodi might have thought of playing a role similar to that of Schröder when he got an offer, but did not dare.

After the Litvinenko crime was committed and the dust settled, Lugovoy, a nonentity, was rewarded by election to the Duma, the Russian parliament, joining his senior comrades there: spies, recruiters, gangsters, neo-fascists and other Russian politicians.

The head of foreign intelligence, the SVR, General Sergey Lebedev (who had been a senior intelligence officer in Karlshorst where Putin reported from Dresden, and had been a friend of Putin’s) was soon dismissed and sent to a minor post at the CIS headquarters. The Litvinenko poisoning had been done professionally, but the polonium trail had been overlooked.

General Nikolai Patrushev, the director of the FSB, was also dismissed and placed in command of a largely symbolic National Security Council. He was in charge of the Russian side of the Litvinenko operation. Litvinenko died, but the consequences for the president were devastating.

In August 2007, a special squad that arrived from Moscow in two SUVs arrested Vladimir Kumarin-Barsukov in St Petersburg. He was then transferred to Moscow’s Lefortovo prison where he is still being held. An official representative of the Investigative Committee of the General Prosecutor’s Office announced a continuing investigation into Kumarin’s possible involvement in a series of crimes, including forming a criminal gang, misappropriation of several enterprises, murder, and attempted execution-style contract killing.

After she was blacklisted by Putin’s press service, Masha Gessen moved to France. From time to time she meets Alex Goldfarb in Paris.

Alex tried to explain why it was not just the Kremlin but Putin himself who was behind Litvinenko’s murder. ‘To set something like this in motion, you need a top-level decision,’ he said. ‘Even back in the USSR, it was the Central Committee that approved plans to kill someone outside the country. So who can give permission at the top level? Someone who wields power over both the FSB and the nuclear agency. Bear in mind that polonium has a half-life of four months, so this thing had to be well planned and coordinated. And yet it was a crime of passion.’⁴⁴

Surely it was a crime of passion. But the only service that could overrule both the SVR and FSB and had unlimited access to the best weapons including poisons was the Presidential Protection Service. There is no doubt in my mind that Zolotov masterminded the whole operation. And Putin knew, for sure. He was covering it up himself.

Every one from the Putin’s ‘inner cabinet’ remained with him still fiercely fighting for their master when this book was being sent to presses. While others are technicians, Zolotov is his executioner and Peskov his public face and voice. When Putin speaks himself, it comes out clumsily.

***

London, November 2006. Sasha’s statement is released to reporters outside University College Hospital:

I would like to thank many people. My doctors, nurses and hospital staff for doing all they can for me. The British police who are pursuing my case with vigour and professionalism and are watching over me and my family.

I would like to thank the British government for taking me under their care. I am honoured to be a British citizen. I would like to thank the British public for their messages of support and for the interest they have shown in my plight.

I thank my wife, Marina, who has stood by me. My love for her and for our son knows no bounds.

But as I lie here, I can distinctly hear the beatings of wings of the angel of death. I may be able to give him the slip, but I have to say my legs do not run as fast as I would like.

I think, therefore, that this may be the time to say one or two things to the person responsible for my present illness.

You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed. You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilised value. You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilised men and women.

You may succeed in silencing one man. But a howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.

May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me, but to beloved Russia and its people.

***

I am Boris Borisovich Volodarsky. I promised myself to finish this book on 23 November, Litvinenko Day. Today is 23 November. Not too much sun, to which we are used in London, but an extremely quiet Sunday, a good day to remember Sasha kindly.