Prologue
1. The valuations for the assets listed are based on documents seen by the author filed as part of a $12 billion Bilateral Investment Treaty Claim by Pugachev over the alleged expropriation of his assets. They show that Western accounting firm BDO had valued the shipyards at $3.5 billion, while Nomura had estimated them at between $2.2 billion and $4.2 billion. Ernst & Young had valued the coking-coal company EPK at $4 billion. Indeed, the buyers of EPK, Ruslan Baisarov and Igor Altushkin, had initially announced to the Russian press that they bought it for $4 billion.
2. Copies of correspondence between creditors represented by Nomura investment bank and the Russian central bank show that the stakes in the shipyards had been held as collateral for a central bank bailout loan. A sale at a market price would have guaranteed that all creditors’ demands could be met, the correspondence says.
3. Author interview with Richard Hainsworth, June 2014
4. A tape of this conversation has been filed with the French interior ministry as part of a criminal investigation into the threats. The author has reviewed the evidence.
5. Jane Croft and Neil Buckley, ‘Kremlin Critic Loses $6.5 Billion Lawsuit Against Fellow Oligarch’, Financial Times, September 1 2012; Konstantin Kagalovsky, the former representative of the Russian government to international financial institutions and an architect of the loans-for-shares privatisation schemes, later told me that ‘many in Russia knew that [Abramovich and Berezovsky] were 50:50 partners’. He said that he himself had found documents testifying to that, but had since destroyed them. (Kagalovsky also served as first deputy head of Khodorkovsky’s Menatep bank, and was working on merger plans between Khodorkovsky’s Yukos and Sibneft.) ‘During [Berezovsky’s] court case no one from Russia came to testify about Berezovsky’s ownership because they did not want to damage their relationship with the Russian authorities and with Roma [Abramovich],’ he said.
6. Berezovsky had condemned the ruling at the time. ‘Sometimes I have the impression that Putin himself wrote this judgment,’ he said. ‘Roman Abramovich wins Court Battle against Berezovsky’, BBC News, August 31 2012. Later, it turned out that Mrs Justice Gloster’s stepson had been paid nearly £500,000 to represent Abramovich in the early stages of the case. David Leppard, ‘Berezovsky Cries Foul Over £3.5bn Abramovich Trial Judge’, Sunday Times, September 22 2012. Mrs Justice Gloster declined to comment, while the Judicial Office, which represents judges, said she had declared the matter and that Berezovsky had raised no objection at the time.
7. Ablyazov claimed he was the victim of a political witch-hunt. He was Nazarbayev’s only real political foe. The bank’s collapse, he claimed, was caused by the fact that Nazarbayev had seized it from him.
8. Author interview with Pugachev, May 2014
9. The coroner recorded an open verdict in the inquest into Berezovsky’s death, despite the protestations of the Thames Valley Police. A forensic expert acting on behalf of Berezovsky’s family testified that examination of the post-mortem photographs led him to believe Berezovsky did not kill himself. There was no v-shaped mark round his neck, which there should have been if he’d hanged himself. Police had been unable to find a match in FBI and Interpol databases for the fingerprint found on the shower-rail. (Jane Croft, ‘Open Verdict Fails to Dispel Mystery Over Death of Kremlin Critic Berezovsky’, Financial Times, March 28 2014)
10. In March 2018, then home secretary Amber Rudd said the UK police and MI5 would reopen investigations into a string of Russian deaths on British soil, apparently including that of Berezovsky. (‘Russia Spy Poisoning: Rudd Says Inquiry Widened to Other Deaths’, BBC News, March 13 2018)
11. Documents from Swiss Prosecutors’ office obtained by author. Russia’s Investigative Committee, however, claims the funds transferred were not from Pugachev’s company OPK Development, but from the central bank bailout loan. The Russian prosecutors claim that OPK deposits in Mezhprombank, holding funds from a commercial loan from Russian state bank, VTB, since June 19 2008, long before the central bank bailout loan, had been falsified and backdated. However, their evidence relied on testimony from two senior Mezhprombank executives who agreed deals with the prosecutors under duress. One of the executives, Dmitry Amunts, agreed to say the deposits were falsified after prosecutors promised him he would be freed from detention, according to transcripts of taped conversations between Amunts’s wife and a lawyer, Marina Yarosh, citing senior officials from the FSB. (He gave the testimony, but was not freed.) The other executive, Alexander Didenko, also agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, and was freed early. He currently holds a senior position at a bank under the management of the state deposit insurance agency, i.e. the government body that is spearheading the case against Pugachev. For more on all this, see Ilya Rozhdestvennsky, ‘Sbezhavshie Milliardy: kak Bankir Pugachev Vyvodil Dengi iz Rossii’, RBK, November 14 2016
12. Author interview with person close to the Russian state legal team, February 2018. The bankruptcy case against Pugachev was also based on claims that he ordered another senior bank executive to lift pledges holding shares in his coking-coal company EPK in preparation for its sale, which also allegedly worsened the bank’s financial position.
13. Author interview with person close to the Russian state legal team, February 2018
14. Author interview with senior Russian banker, March 2018
Chapter 1: ‘Operation Luch’
1. Igor Shadkhan, Vlast, 1992
2. Author interview, Igor Shadkhan, June 2013
3. Vladimir Usoltsev, Sosluzhivets, p.239
4. Author interview with Lieutenant Colonel Horst Jehmlich, special assistant to Dresden Stasi chief, Horst Böhm, March 2018; Mark Franchetti, ‘Germans Flush Out Putin’s Spies’, Sunday Times, January 16 2000
5. Andreas Forster, Auf der Spur der Stasi Millionen: Die Wien-Connection, pp.20–2
6. John O. Koehler, Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police, p.75
7. Author interview with Jehmlich, March 2018
8. Kristie Mackrakis, Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World, p.116
9. Author interview with Franz Sedelmayer, April 2018
10. Author interview with Jehmlich, March 2018
11. Forster, Auf der Spur, p.111
12. Forster, Auf der Spur, pp.50, 51, 68–71
13. Ibid., pp.23–5
14. Deutscher Bundestag, Beschlussempfehlung und Bericht, May 27 1994, pp.97–102, 117–28, 137–41, 176–211
15. Koehler, Stasi, pp.74, 76, 79–80
16. Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, pp.598, 285 (The authors also state the HVA was a chief source of intelligence on Western technology.)
17. Author interview with Jehmlich, March 2018
18. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PAQ_Y5ins8, 21/7/2017, Putin answering students’ questions at the Sirius education centre for gifted children in Sochi
19. Author interview with former member of Red Army Faction, March 2018
20. Michael Wines, ‘Putin Was Once Decorated as a Spy. Few Agree on his Deeds’, New York Times, January 10 2000. See also author interview with Franz Sedelmayer, April 2018
21. Guy Chazan and David Crawford, ‘In From the Cold: A Friendship Forged in Spying Pays Dividends in Russia Today’, Wall Street Journal, February 23 2005
22. Ibid.
23. Warnig was recruited by the Department of Rocket Science and Technology. By 1989, Warnig had become deputy head of the Stasi’s information and technology unit. See Mackrakis, Seduced by Secrets, p.50; Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia, pp.51-2
24. Author interview with former member of Red Army Faction, March 2018
25. Mark Franchetti, ‘Germans Flush Out Putin’s Spies’, Sunday Times, 16 January 2000; Geoffrey York, ‘Putin Brings Spies in From the Cold’, Globe and Mail, 8 May 2000
26. Author interview with Jehmlich, March 2018
27. Natalia Gevorkyan, Natalia Timakova, Andrei Kolesnikov, In the First Person: Conversations with Vladimir Putin, p.69
28. Forster, Auf der Spur, p.111
29. Author interview with Western banker, February 2018; the princess later appeared in St Petersburg, her home town, when Putin was its deputy mayor. She’d led the Order of St Lazarus, a charitable order that sent humanitarian assistance and food to St Petersburg in the months following the Soviet collapse. Putin was later said to hold her in ‘high esteem’. (This taken from Tatiana von Metternich’s obituary, Daily Telegraph, August 19 2006. Also, Putin signed a letter of thanks to von Metternich as head of the Charitable Order of St Lazarus of Jerusalem: ‘Putin Tenders Thanks to Leader of German Charitable Order’, ITAR-TASS, February 25 2003)
30. Forster, Auf der Spur, p.31
31. Koehler, Stasi, p.411
32. Forster, Auf der Spur, p.29
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., p.31
35. Ibid., pp.29–31
36. Stasi archives Dresden, BSTU number 10448. The document dated December 22 1988 lists the birthdays of the Soviet comrades in Dresden. Putin is listed as a Liaison Officer and as the Party Secretary. Putin himself in In the First Person: Conversations with Vladimir Putin, p.73, claims he did not interact with Modrow apart from a few times at official receptions. ‘In general, we didn’t work with party functionaries, including our own by the way. It was prohibited.’ – a claim that is belied by his official role as party secretary.
37. Forster, Auf der Spur, p.33
38. Leonid Nikitinsky and Yuriy Shpakov, ‘Putin v razvedke’, interviews with Vladimir Kryuchkov and Markus Wolf, Moskovskie Novosti, January 20 2000, http://flb.ru/info/3508.html
39. Ibid.
40. Author interview with Jehmlich, March 2018. Again in In the First Person: Conversations with Vladimir Putin, pp.72–4, Putin claims he wasn’t involved in Operation Luch. ‘I’m baffled to read that western countries are looking for agents I recruited. It’s all baloney. Our friends as we called the GDR security agents have copies of everything we produced. It is all preserved in their archives … Everything is transparent and understandable.’ Putin himself and his own colleagues however have described how they destroyed all their files, including the ones kept by the Stasi, while officials at the Dresden Stasi archive and Jehmlich confirm the Russians managed to destroy almost everything.
41. Forster, Auf der Spur, p.26
42. Ibid., pp.9–10 (The senior German official was Dr Klaus-Peter Wild, then in charge of ‘special assets’ in a state agency set up to reprivatise East German assets.)
43. Ibid., p.36; see also Deutscher Bundestag, 2 Untersuchungsausschuss ‘DDR Vermogen’, Protocol of witness statement of Herbert Kohler, Bonn, 27/2/1997
44. Report of Schalck commission, Beschlussempfehlung and Bericht des 2. Untersuchungsausschusses nach Artikel 44 des Grundgesetzes. Drucksache 13/10900, 1998, pp.221–3. Also Andreas Forster, Auf der Spur, pp.98–107; see also Kristie Mackrakis, Seduced by Secrets, pp.130–2
45. Forster, Auf der Spur, p.131. When questioned by the federal authorities of the reunified Germany in 1997, Kohler claimed that the plans to create a network of operative firms in case of collapse had never been put in motion, as the speed of the GDR’s fall had taken everyone by surprise and rendered them obsolete. But documents from the Stasi archive appear to show that the Dresden Stasi, under Kohler’s watch, signed off on a string of deals for the import of components for the hard-disc plant following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, while the components seem never to have shown up. Hundreds more millions of marks disappeared into Schlaff front companies in Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Singapore in a series of deals. Schlaff’s companies in turn made a series of unsecured loans to companies staffed by former Stasi members, including to a chain of travel agencies and to a Stasi collaborator who bought an elite guesthouse overlooking the Elbe, which was often visited by Markus Wolf. Kohler, meanwhile, went to work as an adviser to Schlaff. Precisely what happened to the hard-disc plant remains a secret. The German government filed suit against Schlaff in Switzerland in the late nineties for the siphoning of tens of millions of marks intended for the hard-disc plant. In 2002, a Swiss court rejected the claim. Schlaff has denied ever working for the Stasi. He didn’t respond to an interview request for this book.
46. Author interview with Jehmlich, March 2018
47. See Chapter 11
48. Forster, Auf der Spur, p.91
49. Author interview with Sven Scharl, Stasi Archive Dresden, March 2018
50. Putin’s Stasi file, Dresden, BSTU MfS BV Dresden 1.Stellvertr. d. LTR. 3, BSTU 000004, September 7 1989
51. Christoph Seils, ‘Was tat Putin in Dresden?’, Cicero Magazin, November 2004; see also Leonid Nikitinsky and Yuriy Shpakov, ‘Putin v razvedke’
52. Vladimir Usoltsev, Sosluzhivets, pp.61–2; Putin first admitted his work with the illegal sleeper-agent division in an interview with Russian state television channel Rossiya on the ninety-fifth anniversary of the infamous Upravleniye S, June 24 2017, https://ria.ru/politics/20170624/1497226538.html
53. Vladimir Usoltsev, Sosluzhivets, pp.69–70, 109–10. The book mainly describes the everyday lives of the KGB officers serving in Dresden and their families, including the tourist trips they took, the Christmas fairs and other attractions of Dresden, the beer they drank and the many formal celebratory events they had to attend for ‘protocol’ with their Stasi ‘friends’. It takes care to go into almost no detail on their operative work, stressing only its mundanity. See also ‘Intervyu s byvshim sosluzhivtsom Vladimira Putina’, Radio Svoboda, November 11 2003
54. Putin, First Person, p.70
55. Author interview with former RAF member, March 2018
56. From Politburo archives retrieved by Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. www.bukovsky-archives.net, document numbers 0903, 0911, 0912
57. Koehler, Stasi, p.359
58. Dr Marian K. Leighton, ‘Strange Bedfellows: The Stasi and the Terrorists’, International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, Volume 27, 2014 (According to this paper, Leighton worked in the US intelligence community from 1980, first as a Soviet analyst at the CIA, then as a counter-terrorism specialist with the Defence Intelligence Agency, and then again with the CIA as an independent contractor.)
59. Koehler, Stasi, p.360
60. Ibid., pp.361–2, 368–71; see also Leighton, ‘Strange Bedfellows’
61. Leighton, ‘Strange Bedfellows’
62. Koehler, Stasi, p.333
63. Ibid., p.344
64. Oleg Kalugin, CNN interview, February 6 2007
65. Ion Mihai Pacepa, ‘Russian Footprints: What does Moscow have to do with the recent war in Lebanon?’, National Review Online, August 24 2006
66. Ibid.
67. Koehler, Stasi, p.389
68. Author interview, April 2018
69. Koehler, Stasi, p.392
70. Butz Peters, ‘Dresden Vergessen’, Sächsische Zeitung, August 1 2017, https://web.archive.org/web/20170802045025/http:/www.sz-online.de/sachsen/dresden-vergessen-3739077.html; see also Leighton, ‘Strange Bedfellows’
71. Koehler, Stasi, p.392; see also Steven Kinzer, ‘Spy Charges Widen in Germany’s East’, New York Times, March 28 1991
72. Jeffrey Steinberg, ‘Arrests Prove Stasi-KGB Control of Baader-Meinhof Terrorists’, EIR, Volume 17, Number 27, June 29 1990
73. Author interview with former RAF member, March 2018
74. Koehler, Stasi, p.370
75. Leighton, ‘Strange Bedfellows’
76. Koehler, Stasi, p.392
77. Author interview, March 2018
78. Lally Weymouth, ‘East Germany’s Dirty Secret’, Washington Post, October 14 1990. The defector interviewed for this article is described by West German officials as ‘one of the most important eastern bloc intelligence agents to have emigrated’.
79. Author interview with former Red Army Faction member, March 2018
80. Koehler, Stasi, p.392; see also David Crawford, ‘The Murder of a CEO’, Wall Street Journal, September 15 2007
81. Author interview with Western intelligence expert, March 2018
82. Koehler, Stasi, p.392
83. Author interview, March 2018; other attacks the Red Army Faction was implicated in while Putin was in Dresden include bombings at the USAF Rhein-Main air base and the assassination of the chief technology officer at Siemens.
84. Author interview with Horst Jehmlich, March 2018
85. Author interview with Putin ally, October 2018
86. David Crawford and Marcus Bensmann, ‘Putin’s Early Years’, Correctiv, July 30 2015
87. Ibid.
88. Putin, First Person, p.76
89. Ibid., p.79
90. Ibid.
91. Ibid., p.80
92. Vladimir Usoltsev, Sosluzhivets, p.253. ‘All the documents that had anything to do with us were collected by Thomas Muller, and he handed them over in their entirety to Volodya Putin, carrying out the orders of Böhm. Within a few hours nothing was left of them apart from a pile of ash.’
93. Vladislav Kramar, ‘Gruppa v Dresdene byla nebolshaya, no moshchnaya’, Voenny-Promyshlenny Kurier, December 14 2005
94. Ibid.
95. Masha Gessen, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, p.97
96. Author interview with Jehmlich
97. Zuchold, however, had defected to the West almost immediately, and according to Thomas Schade, ‘Verbrannte Vogel’, Sächsische Zeitung, October 15 2015, he had allegedly exposed fifteen agents in Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden and Erfurt.
98. ‘Putin Rasskazal o nelegalnoi razvedke i svoei rabote v KGB’, RIA Novosti, June 24 2017
99. Weymouth, ‘East Germany’s Dirty Secret’. The defector is cited as saying that Modrow was designated as successor to Egon Krenz, then leader of the SED, at a secret conference at the Soviet embassy in East Berlin on November 12 1989, attended by Valentin Falin, the head of the Soviet Communist Party’s International Department, Markus Wolf, Krenz and Modrow
100. Forster, Auf der Spur, p.122
101. Weymouth, ‘East Germany’s Dirty Secret’
102. Oleg Blotsky, Vladimir Putin: Doroga k Vlasti, pp.281–86
103. Author interview with Andrei Illarionov, former presidential economic aide to Putin and a friend of Starovoitova from Leningrad, September 2014
104. Author interview with Franz Sedelmayer, April 2018
105. Archive footage in Delo Sobchaka, film by Ksenia Sobchak and Vera Krichevskaya, 2018, shows Putin entering the TV tower with Sobchak ahead of the speech
106. Author interview with Alexander Belyayev, then deputy head of St Petersburg’s city council, and eyewitness to these events, June 2013
107. Ibid.
108. Author interview with Sedelmayer, April 2018
Chapter 2: Inside Job
1. Sovershenno Sekretno, Taina Zolota Partii, 2007. Interview with Valentin Falin.
2. Valentin Stepankov, Kremlyevsky Zagovor: Versiya Sledstviya, pp.238–9. This account by the Russian prosecutor general in charge of investigating the missing Party funds is based on testimony by Kruchina’s wife and the KGB watchman who found his body. See also Sovershenno Sekretno, Taina Zolota Partii
3. Ibid., pp.235–6
4. Ibid., p.236
5. Author interview with Gerashchenko, September 2013
6. Author interview with Leonov, September 2013
7. ‘Soviet Turmoil; New Suicide: Budget Director’, New York Times, August 27 1991
8. Sergei Pluzhnikov and Sergei Sokolov, ‘Kak KGB Svodil Schety c KPSS’, Komsomolskaya Pravda, January 1 1992
9. Peter Torday and Tony Barber, ‘Communists Pillaged Party Gold – Officials Investigate Flight of Soviet Billions’, Independent, March 27 1992; John Rettle, ‘Russian government Launches Investigation into Missing Communist Party Billions’, Guardian, September 10 1991. Nikolai Ryzhkov later told a parliamentary hearing that when Gorbachev came to power the Soviet Union’s gold reserves had stood at 1,200 tonnes, but by the time he stepped down they were close to zero. One Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda cited documents apparently showing the Party had transferred 280 billion roubles ($12bn) into hard-currency accounts in foreign banks. The original article has since disappeared from the internet. Sovershenno Sekretno, Taina Zolota Partii
10. Stephen Handelman, ‘How Man’s Conscience Overcame His Fear’, Toronto Star, February 14 1992
11. Stepankov, Kremlevsky Zagovor, pp.313–14
12. Ibid., p.284; Handelman, Toronto Star, February 14 1992
13. Stepankov, pp.286–7
14. Ibid., p.290
15. Handelman, Toronto Star, February 14 1992
16. When later questioned, many of the Party’s top operatives believed they were in the right, and that the Party’s interests were synonymous with those of the state. In fact, the Party was the state, and had been since the Bolshevik Revolution. ‘There is nothing unusual about this practice,’ the Party’s former deputy secretary general, Vladimir Ivashko, later told prosecutors. ‘The support of social forces … to influence public opinion has always been one of the most important functions of the state.’ Testimony from Ivashko, Kremlevsky Zagovor, pp.295–6
17. Stepankov, p.285; Smirnov however also said at least $200m per year had been transferred out of the Soviet Union to fund Communist-linked parties between 1977 and 1989: Handelman, Toronto Star, February 14 1992
18. Stepankov, p.301; Vadim Belykh and Valery Rudnev, ‘Dengi Partii: Milliardy Obnaruzheny, no sledstvie, pokhozhe, v tupike’, Izvestia, 10/02/92, https://old.flb.ru/info/4896.html
19. Author interview with Antonio Fallico, June 2013. Fallico named three friendly firms that Italian business had to work through in order to do business deals in the Soviet Union. One was named Restital, and even if it did not participate directly in a deal, he said, Italian firms would have to pay a percentage to it. The two others were Italimpec and Esteuropa, while any tourists seeking to go to the Soviet Union would have to go through a Communist Party-owned firm, Italtourism.
20. Mary Dejevsky, ‘Maxwell’s former firm on List of Soviet Favourites’, Independent, November 9 1991; Peter Pringle, ‘Soviets to Conduct Inquiry Over Friendly Firms’, Independent, November 11 1991
21. Author interviews with former senior KGB operative, May 2013, and with an intermediary who ran one of the friendly firms supplying dual-use medical/military equipment, March 2013. Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, pp.597–8, however, describes a more realistic explanation: that Thyssen, Siemens and others were infiltrated by Soviet agents stealing Western technology.
22. Author interview with former Gorbachev aide, June 2014
23. Vadim Belykh and Valery Rudnev, Izvestiya, ‘Dengi Partii: Milliardy Obnaruzheny, no sledstvie, pokhozhe, v tupike’, February 10 1992, https://old.flb.ru/info/4896.html; author interview with Tommy Helsby, a former Kroll chairman, March 2013. For more information on the work of the friendly firms and the looting of the Party funds by the KGB operatives see also the excellent testimony of Richard Palmer, former CIA station chief in the Former Soviet Union, on the Infiltration of the Western financial system by elements of Russian Organised Crime, before the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services, September 21 1999
24. Stepankov, p.301
25. Author interview with Vitaly Shlykov, September 2006
26. Stepankov, pp.301–3
27. Stepankov, p.236; Belykh and Rudnev, ‘Dengi Partii: Milliardy Obnaruzheny, no sledstvie, pokhozhe, v tupike’, Izvestiya, February 10 1992; Sokolov and Pluzhnikov, ‘Zoloto KPSS: Desyat Lyet Spustya’, Moskovskie Novosti, September 18 2001, http://kompromat.flb.ru/material1.phtml?id=566
28. Sokolov and Pluzhnikov, ‘Zoloto KPSS: Desyat Lyet Spustya’, Moskovskie Novosti, September 18 2001
29. Stepankov, p.296; Sokolov and Pluzhnikov, ‘Zoloto KPSS: Desyat Lyet Spustya’, Moskovskie Novosti, September 18 2001; Richard Palmer, House Banking Committee Testimony, September 21 1999; author interview with Yury Shvets, May 2018
30. Sokolov and Pluzhnikov, Moskovskie Novosti, September 18 2001
31. Ibid.
32. Author interview with Shvets, May 2018
33. Sokolov and Pluzhnikov, Moskovskie Novosti, September 18 2001. The criminal investigation by the Russian prosecutors into the missing Party wealth was later classified – all two hundred tomes of it. Only fragments of information have been released.
34. Sovershenno Sekretno, Taina Zolota Partii, interview with Oleg Sheinin, former Politburo member, who says Gorbachev ignored the Ivashko memo and nothing was done
35. Stepankov, p.303
36. One of the joint ventures Seabeco set up in Toronto was the Soviet Central Council of Trade Unions, to ‘build resorts, a department store and even a car rental agency’ (‘Soviet Organisation, Toronto Group of Firms Join Forces in Projects’, Globe and Mail, October 12 1988); another was between Seabeco and Georgy Arbatov, director of the Institute of Canadian and American Studies in Moscow, believed to be a front for Russian intelligence (Canada Newswire, November 15 1988).
37. Sovershenno Sekretno, Taina Zolota Partii. Interview with Kryuchkov
38. Sovershenno Sekretno, Taina Zolota Partii. The taped conversation is apparently between Dmitry Yakubovsky who worked for Seabeco in the early nineties, and Yury Kotov, a former colonel in the SVR, the foreign-intelligence service, who worked closely with Primakov in the seventies.
39. ‘Ex-Aide to Gaidar Targets Rutskoi in business scandal’, Agence France-Presse, August 12 1993. The Swiss intelligence service later named Seabeco as being one of the firms believed to be at the centre of transfers of Soviet state and Party wealth by the KGB, while it claimed Birshtein was a former KGB officer.
40. Sokolov and Pluzhnikov, ‘Zoloto KPSS: Desyat Lyet Spustya’, Moskovskie Novosti, September 18 2001. Sovershenno Sekretno, Taina Zolota Partii, reports that the prosecutors were able to find six hundred banks and firms inside the Soviet Union, as well as a further five hundred abroad, including dozens of German, Swiss and offshore firms.
41. Andrei Illesh and Valery Rudnev, ‘Poisk deneg KPSS: Pessimistichesky Konyets’, Izvestiya, April 1 1993, https://old.flb.ru/info/4910.html
42. Author interview with Pyotr Aven, May 2015
43. Author interview with Helsby, March 2013
44. Ibid. Rich was indicted for fraud and racketeering, and later controversially pardoned by US President Bill Clinton. A chief investigating magistrate in Bologna Italy, Paolo Giovagnoli, has said Marc Rich worked closely with a Vienna-based trading firm owned by Grigory Loutchansky, an alleged Russian mobster. Giovagnoli said Nordex was another outfit set up to funnel out Communist Party funds before the Soviet collapse. (P.K. Semier, ‘US Fugitive Rich Linked to Money Laundering; Russian-Mafia Prosecutors May Subpoena Him’, Washington Times, June 21 2002)
45. Author interview with Pavel Voshchanov, March 2013
46. Author interview with senior Russian businessman, May 2018
47. David Remnick, ‘Soviet Union’s Shadow Economy – Bribery, Barter, Black Market deals are the Facts of Life’, Washington Post, September 22 1990; for further reading on the shortages of the skewed Soviet economy see David Hoffman’s excellent The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia, pp.11–20
48. Author interview with former black-market currency trader
49. Author interview with Shvets, May 2018
50. Author interview with Milshtein associate, May 2018; Vesti, Programma 60 Minut: ‘Mikhail Milshtein: Genialny Razvedchik I Borets s Kholodnoi Voinoi’, September 15 2010, http://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=392836
51. Author interview with Rair Simonyan, November 2013
52. Author interview with Vladimir Yakunin, August 2018; see also Vladimir Yakunin, The Treacherous Path, p.21
53. Author interview with Christian Michel, June 2004
54. Author interview with Anton Surikov, February 2005
55. A report by the Swiss intelligence service, obtained by the author and written in June 2007, stated Luchansky and Birshtein had been recruited by the KGB to transfer the state and Party wealth into private hands on the eve of the Soviet collapse: ‘The money should have partly been used for financing political operations, but partly the cash was stolen to finance private economic activity.’
56. Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Natalya Gevorkyan, Tyurma I Volya, pp.91–2
57. Author interview with former Khodorkovsky partner
58. Khodorkovsky and Gevorkyan, p.94
59. Author interview with Khodorkovsky, May 2014
60. Hoffman, The Oligarchs, pp.107–10; author interview with Khodorkovsky, May 2014; Khodorkovsky and Gevorkyan, pp.75–82
61. Hoffman, The Oligarchs, pp.107–8; author interview with Khodorkovsky, May 2014
62. Author interview with Christian Michel, January 2014
63. Author interview with Thomas Graham, June 2014
64. Author interview with Michel, September 2013
65. Author interview with Khodorkovsky, May 2014
66. According to the former head of the State Duma’s security committee, Viktor Ilyukhin, who wrote in a letter to Russia’s interior minister that Fridman had cooperated with the KGB since his student days.
67. Author interview with former government official, June 2014
68. Author interview with Khodorkovsky, May 2014; Khodorkovsky and Gevorkyan, pp.82–6
69. Author interview with Artyom Tarasov, November 2013; see also the autobiography by Artyom Tarasov, Millionaire: The Sermon of the New Russia’s First Capitalist, Chapter 5
70. Author interview with Michel, January 2014
71. A key intermediary in talks with the KGB on holding off any storm was Arkady Volsky, a former economic adviser to KGB chief Yury Andropov who’d built close ties with the KGB and later was seen as the grandfather to Russia’s new class of tycoons as head of the powerful Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. Volsky had also participated in the gold rush: his Simako company had been permitted to convert roubles into dollars at a special Party rate of 1.8 roubles to the dollar, as well as export large quantities of arms.
72. Author interview with Andrei Illarionov, September 2015
73. Author interview with Simonyan, November 2013
74. Author interview with Graham, June 2014
75. Author interview with former senior KGB operative, May 2013
76. Richard Palmer, testimony before the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services, September 21, 1999; see his testimony too for a clear-eyed account of the various stages in the KGB plans to transfer the Party wealth out of the country into the West.
77. Ibid.
78. See Chapter 15; Author interview with Yury Shvets, May 2018
79. Pete Earley, Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War, pp.285–8
80. One of the biggest conduits, a company named Fimaco, had been quietly set up on Jersey by senior Soviet banking officials just months after Ivashko’s decree on the creation of the ‘invisible economy’. A Russian prosecutor later claimed it had been used to funnel up to $50 billion in central bank reserves in the nineties, including billions of dollars in loans from the International Monetary Fund. (‘Eight metric tons of platinum, 60 metric tons of gold, hoards of diamonds and an estimated $15 billion to $50 billion in cash were … transferred to unknown hands by the KGB’s espionage branch between 1989 and 1991,’ Palmer later testified to US Congress.)
81. Yevgenia Albats, KGB: State Within a State, p.303
82. Author interview with KGB intermediary, March 2013
83. Author interview with Andrei Illarionov, September 2015. The $200 million payment came out of the difference in price between the oil products supplied and the sugar imports received. For a full description of this scheme see Illarionov, ‘Trudny Put k Svobode’ Part II, Zhurnal Kontinent, No 146, May 4 2011, pp.13–17
84. Author interview with Illarionov, September 2015. The missing $1 billion IMF loan had troubled Illarionov’s associate Boris Fyodorov, then finance minister, since 1992. Illarionov had only been able to find out what happened to it after he was appointed Kremlin economic adviser in 2000. Then, as a member of the central bank’s supervisory council, he was able to access the accounts of the Russian foreign state banks, including Eurobank: ‘We were studying the accounts after the Eurobank network had been sold on, and I said, “Where does this $1 billion come from? We need to pay attention to this sum it received at the end of 1992.” It turned out the IMF loan had been transferred to save Eurobank. It was the KGB bank, and Gaidar had been able to save it all.’ The government had first transferred the loan from the central bank to the state bank for foreign economic operations, Vneshekonombank, from there to Eurobank, and then to Fimaco on the offshore haven of Jersey, which used the funds to buy up Eurobank’s bad debts. For more detail on this see Illarionov, ‘Trudny Put k Svobode’ Part II, Zhurnal Kontinent, No 146, pp.150–6
85. Author interview with Michel, January 2014
86. Filip Bobkov, the former head of the KGB’s fifth directorate for minorities, went to work with his close protégé Vladimir Gusinsky at Most Bank, as head of its analytical department. Leonid Shebarshin, the head of the KGB’s foreign-intelligence directorate in the final years of the regime, served as head of security for the first bank to be given a hard-currency licence, the All Russian Exchange Bank. Nikolai Leonov, the powerful head of the foreign-intelligence service’s analytical department, took a post as its vice president. On paper, the bank was headed by a twenty-three-year-old finance whizz, Alexander Konanykhin. But in reality it was a front for the KGB. Leonov had worked closely too with a man who was then one of the country’s most under-the-radar bankers, Sergei Pugachev, whose Mezhprombank had also been one of the first to receive a hard-currency licence.
87. Author interview with Shvets, May 2018
88. Hoffman, The Oligarchs, pp.120–1
89. Jeffrey D. Sachs, ‘Russia’s Failure to Reform’, Project Syndicate, August 30 1999
90. Janine R. Wedel, ‘The Harvard Boys do Russia’, The Nation, May 14 1998 (Wedel refers to one of these Harvard economists, Andrei Shleifer, noting in his book Privatising Russia that ‘Aid can change the political equilibrium by explicitly helping free-market reformers to defeat their political opponents’.)
91. Author interview with Yavlinsky, February 2014
92. Author interview with Pavlovsky, May 2014
93. Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century, p.169
94. Ibid., pp.173–4
95. Chrystia Freeland, John Thornhill and Andrew Gowers, ‘Moscow’s Group of Seven’, Financial Times, November 1 1996. Tellingly, Khodorkovsky, for instance, had first secured a pact with the management of Yukos, including two former senior KGB operatives, agreeing to later pay them 30 per cent of the company’s worth. One of the privatisation officials in charge of the Yukos auction later admitted that Khodorkovsky had used his connections there to pledge future oil sales from Yukos to raise the cash for the auction.
96. Author interview with Michel, December 2012
97. Author interview with Simonyan, November 2013
98. Author interview with Shvets, May 2018
Chapter 3: ‘The Tip of an Iceberg’
1. Author interview, February 2014
2. Author interview, June 2014
3. Author interview with former senior KGB officer, May 2013
4. Author interview with former local FSB officer, June 2014
5. Marina Salye, ‘V. Putin – “President” Korrumpirovannoi Oligarkhii!’, The Glasnost Foundation, March 18 2000
6. Anastasia Kirilenko, ‘Pochemu Marina Salye Molchala o Putine 10 Lyet?’, interview with Marina Salye, Radio Svoboda, March 2-4 2010; for more information see also the excellent article by Vladimir Ivanidze, ‘Spasaya Polkovnika Putina: Vtoraya Popytka’, Radio Svoboda, March 16 2010
7. Vladimir Ivanidze, ‘Spasaya Polkovnika Putina: Vtoraya Popytka’, Radio Svoboda, March 16 2010. According to documents on the deals collected by the Salye foundation and seen by the author, Putin sends a letter to Aven on December 4 1991 asking for the city to be granted quotas for the export of $124m worth of raw materials in exchange for imports of food, as the only way to ensure food supplies to the city in the first two months of 1992. In the letter, Putin asks for his Committee for Foreign Relations to be granted the right to issue export licences to firms working on the deals. The signature of Yegor Gaidar, the Russian prime minister, saying he agrees, is apparently dated December 5 1991 (some commentators have cast doubt on the signature, saying they believe it is a forgery). But the government order agreeing the scheme is issued only January 9 1992. However, a February 3 1992 letter from the head of St Petersburg’s representative for the ministry of foreign economic relations A. Pakhomov to Aven indicates another barter scheme had been approved for St Petersburg earlier in November, but had also failed. This letter says the first quota for the sale of 100,000 tonnes of diesel fuel was issued by Gaidar on November 21 1991 and granted to Kirishinefteorgsintez, which it said sold the diesel fuel but had not given any of the revenues to the city for the purchase of food. Pakhomov’s letter says a new set of quotas were then issued by the Gaidar government.
8. Author interview with Alexander Belyayev, former chairman of St Petersburg City Council, June 2013
9. Marina Salye, ‘Nastal Chered Putina – ‘Presidenta’ Korrumpirovannovo Klana’, February 29 2012; Ivanidze, ‘Spasaya Polkovnika Putina: Vtoraya Popytka’; Letter from Belyayev to V Putin calling on him to address the city council on January 14 1992 and produce all documentation on the deals.
10. Ivanidze, ‘Spasaya Polkovnika Putina’; Marina Salye, ‘Nastal Chered Putina – ‘Presidenta’ Korrumpirovannovo Klana’; the two pages of notes Putin handed over can also be found in the documents of the Salye Commission: Prilozhenie 16 ‘O sostoyanii del po Vydache Litsenzii pod obespechenie goroda prodovolstviem’, V. Putin; Tablitsa No 1 ‘Prodovolstvie, poluchaemoe v schet Vydannoi Litsenzii’
11. Ivanidze, ‘Spasaya Polkovnika Putina’
12. Salye, ‘V. Putin – “President” Korrumpirovannoi Oligarkhii!’
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.; Salye, ‘Nastal Chered Putina – “Presidenta” Korrumpirovannovo Klana’
15. Documents from Salye Commission: January 27 1992 letter from the head of St Petersburg’s Customs, V.T. Stepanov, to Putin, saying cargo of timber cannot be passed because the export licence is not in line with the laws governing such barter schemes: only 50 per cent of the revenue from the sale is to be used to purchase food, licence has not been signed by the correct person, the value of the goods is artificially low; February 12 1992 letter from Fyodor Shkrudnev, deputy representative of the president in the St Petersburg region, to Putin saying licences contain serious miscalculations on the value of exported goods and on the sanctions to be levied if the intermediary fails to meet the terms; February 3 1992 letter from Alexander Pakhomov, the St Petersburg representative for the foreign trade ministry, to Aven pointing out that the quotas issued to Putin have not been confirmed by the ministry of economy and finance, the licences have been handed out to obscure firms not specialists in foreign trade operations, the 50:50 split in the revenues with half going to the city for food imports and the rest going to the intermediaries is not in line with laws governing barter schemes.
16. Salye Commission; Expert Opinion, Prilozhenie 12
17. Salye Commission: Copies of contracts and licences; Salye, ‘V. Putin – “President” Korrumpirovannoi Oligarkhii!’
18. Salye, ‘V. Putin – “President” Korrumpirovannoi Oligarkhii!’
19. Ibid.; Salye Commission documents: December 4 1991 letter from Putin to Aven asking for his Committee for Foreign Relations to be granted the right to issue export licences to firms working on the barter deals. The signature of Yegor Gaidar, the Russian prime minister, saying he agrees, is apparently dated December 5 1991 (some commentators have cast doubt on the signature, saying they believe it is a forgery). But the government order agreeing the scheme was issued only on January 9 1992. Gaidar later apparently overrules Putin’s authority to issue such licences, writing to the head of the Customs Committee that according to a government decree of December 31 1991 only the ministry for foreign economic trade and its regional representatives have the right to do so. But Aven, again covering Putin, writes an order dated March 25 1992 instructing A. Pakhomov, the St Petersburg representative for the foreign trade ministry, to hand over authority for foreign economic activity to Putin’s Foreign Relations Committee – i.e. Putin’s committee is to keep its sphere of authority over licences.
20. Salye Commission documents: Prilozhenie 3, date 20/12/91
21. Salye Commission documents: Prilozhenie 30, 59, date 14/1/92
22. Salye, ‘V. Putin – “President” Korrumpirovannoi Oligarkhii!’
23. This was an Azeri named Dzhandir Ragimov. ‘He was very close with Putin,’ one former employee of the firm said, author interview with former employee of Dzhikop, March 2014. On paper the firm was owned by a German named Peter Bachmann who has never been heard of since – Ivanidze, ‘Spasaya Polkovnika Putina’
24. Salye, ‘V. Putin – “President” Korrumpirovannoi Oligarkhii!’; Ivanidze, ‘Spasaya Polkovnika Putina’
25. Irena Pietsch, Pikantnaya Druzhba, p.171
26. Author interview with Belyayev, June 2013
27. According to documents obtained by the author from the Salye Commission [Prilozhenie 44, date 31/3/1992], quotas for the export of 150,000 tonnes in diesel and fuel oil were granted under the oil-for-food scheme to Kirishineftorgsintez, the Kirishi refinery which at the time owned Kirishineftekhimexport where Timchenko worked as a senior manager. (Andrei Korchagin, a former official in the St Petersburg city government, told me Timchenko also worked as Kirishineftorgsintez’s finance director in 1991–92.) According to these documents, however, unusually the licence to sell these exports was given to an outfit named Nevsky Dom, not to Timchenko’s Kirishineftekhimexport, which normally handled all exports for the Kirishi refinery. However, one of Timchenko’s former partners in Kirishineftekhimexport told me the company participated in the oil-for-food scheme, and met its obligations in full (see note 34), while Belyayev is a senior official who had broader oversight of the scheme than Salye (Salye’s commission did not have access to all the documents in the scheme) and his claims that Timchenko and co also took part in the scheme are credible.
28. Author interview with former Timchenko partner in Kirishineftekhimexport, June 2013. ‘We decided to create an external trade firm for the refinery,’ the former Timchenko partner said. ‘This is how we began … We went [to the heads of the refinery] and got to know them. It was our initiative.’
29. Author interview with former Western intelligence source, July 2013
30. Author interview with former senior KGB, officer, March 2014; Author interview with another former senior KGB officer and former Timchenko partner, September 2013
31. Irina Mokrousova and Irina Reznik, ‘Chelovek s Resursom’, Vedomosti, January 21 2013
32. Author interview with senior KGB officer, March 2014
33. Author interview with senior Russian banker with ties to the security services, September 2017; see also Alexander Levinsky, Irina Malkova and Valery Igumenov, ‘Kak Matthias Warnig stal samim nadezhnym “ekonomistom” Putina’, Forbes, August 28 2012
34. Author interview with former Timchenko partner, June 2013. In the interview, the former Timchenko partner said the following about their firm’s participation in the oil-for-food deals: ‘We sold oil products – diesel and fuel oil – in return for food. They were barter deals under a special decree of the Gaidar government … Of course we did not choose ourselves. We came to the city and said what do you need – we will sell for you – and what to buy for the city we didn’t know. For this, of course, we were given orders from the city administration … 100 per cent of the earnings went to buy food. We were asking what was necessary. I don’t remember now what we bought. I think we bought children’s food for example.’ The former Timchenko partner also said the firm’s founders met with Putin then. ‘Part of his authority was external economic trade. Of course we came across him.’ In an earlier interview with Russian Forbes (Irina Malkova and Igor Terentyev, ‘U menya vezde yest optsiony’, November 2012), Timchenko had denied Kirishineftekhimexport, otherwise known as Kinex, took part in the oil-for-food deals. ‘Kinex never had any relation to this story. For a long time I didn’t understand where all this came from. We were checked all the time. And recently I finally got documents which showed that Kinex had no relation to the story with this diesel. There was just a company with a similar name.’ In addition, lawyers for Timchenko said in a comment for this book that any allegation Kinex was involved in any form of illegal or otherwise improper or unethical conduct in that regard – and that Mr Timchenko was thereby also complicit in any such misconduct – would be ‘entirely untrue. All of Kinex’s activities were fully transparent and legitimate.’
35. Author interview with Salye associate, March 2014
36. Author interview with Felipe Turover, over three days, May 2013
37. Ibid.
38. Second author interview with Felipe Turover, March 2014
39. Ibid.
40. Author interview with Viktor Gerashchenko, September 2013
41. Author interview with Turover, March 2014
42. Others who delved into these deals had been frightened, or worse. Yury Gladkov, a St Petersburg deputy who’d worked closely with Salye on the parliamentary investigation, refused for years to give any interviews on the subject. When he died in 2007 after a long illness, one associate said he believed he’d been poisoned: ‘When I saw him a year before his death, he was shaking. It was as if he’d been pumped with something.’ Another former Sobchak aide, Yury Shutov, who’d been Putin’s sworn enemy, died in one of Russia’s harshest and most remote penal colonies, having been arrested in 1998 as Putin moved up the Kremlin ladder. The many secrets he’d dug up on Putin’s time as deputy mayor disappeared with him forever.
43. Author interview with Illarionov, September 2015
44. Author interview with Kharchenko associate, November 2013
45. S. Ochinsky, ‘Vozrozhdenie Flota – Zalog Stabilnosti Razvitiya Rossii. Konkurentskiya I Rynok’, 2013, No. 4 (60). In 1991 the Baltic Sea Fleet’s net profits reached $571m from transport services alone.
46. Ibid.
47. Author interview with Kharchenko associate, November 2013
48. Author interview with two associates of Kharchenko, November 2013 and March 2014; ‘Vmeste rabotali, vmeste I syadem’, Kommersant, October 24 1996
49. ‘Ubistvo Gendirektora Parokhodstva’, Kommersant, October 4 1995
50. Author interview with Kharchenko associate, March 2014
51. Ibid.
52. Author interview with Kharchenko associate, November 2013
53. Documents from the Spanish court: Protocols from Initial Investigation no 321/06, Central Court of First Division No. 5, Fiscalia Especial Contra la Corrupcion y la Criminalidad Organizada; also a note from Interpol Monaco, dated July 3 2006, obtained by the author, which says that Traber was barred from the territory of Monaco from April 2000 due to his ‘activities connected with Russian organised crime’; and in a note to Prince Albert’s chief of staff, Jean-Luc Allavena, dated 10/04/2006, of which the author also has a copy, Robert Eringer, then head of the Monaco intelligence service, writes that Traber has ‘ties to the Tambov Russian organised crime group’ and has been ‘active in trading drugs, oils and metals on their behalf’.
54. Author interview with former Traber associate, November 2015
55. Author interview with former Traber partner, November 2015; DozhdTV, ‘Minstr Porta: Kak Peterburgsky Avtoritet Ilya Traber Svyazan s Vladimirom Putinym I yevo okruzheniem’, August 25 2017
56. Author interview with former St Petersburg FSB officer, June 2014
57. Author interviews with two former Traber associates, September 2015, and March 2013 and November 2015; and with former St Petersburg city official, March 2014. Documents obtained by the author show that in May 2001 Traber held a 52.5 per cent stake in the St Petersburg oil terminal via three Cyprus companies: Hellman Holdings Ltd, Myra Holdings Ltd and Almont Holdings Ltd.
58. Author interviews with two former Traber associates, September 2015 and March 2013 and November 2015
59. Interview with Lyudmilla Narusova, June 2014, in which she confirmed that her husband had stayed in close touch with Traber after he fled Russia for Paris in 1996, and that they were neighbours there
60. Author interview with former St Petersburg city official, March 2014
61. Author interview with former St Petersburg officer from FSB contraband division, June 2014
62. Kumarin became vice president of PTK in 1996, while his close partner Vladimir Smirnov became chairman of the board, as Kumarin’s control over PTK came out into the open. Among the co-founders of PTK in 1994 was Bank Rossiya.
63. Documents from the Spanish court: Protocols from Initial Investigation no 321/06, Central Court of First Division No. 5, Fiscalia Especial Contra la Corrupcion y la Criminalidad Organizada
64. Roman Anin, ‘Druzya – Ne Razlei Neft’, Novaya Gazeta, April 15 2011; author interview with Maxim Freidzon, former owner of the Sovex oil trader, September 2015; ‘It was all one structure and at the top there was Putin. It would not have been possible to create PTK without him, while [Viktor] Cherkesov provided cover as head of the FSB,’ said Andrei Korchagin, a former official in the St Petersburg city government.
65. German prosecutors opened a criminal probe into money laundering for the Tambov group by SPAG in 2003. At the time they were very specific about its suspected links: ‘SPAG is Kumarin. All orders come from Kumarin,’ said one of the prosecutors then. A founding shareholder of SPAG was a Liechtenstein financier named Rudolf Ritter, who in 2003 was arrested and charged with fraud and laundering millions of dollars in drug-trafficking funds for the Colombian Cali cartel, and transferring funds through SPAG for Russian organised crime. A Liechtenstein court found Ritter guilty of fraud in October 2003. The overarching investigation into SPAG ended in 2009 when the statute of limitation expired following resistance to the probe from Russian counterparts. The Kremlin has dismissed Putin’s role on SPAG’s supervisory board as no more than one of many such ‘honorary’ positions on companies’ supervisory boards in his capacity as St Petersburg deputy mayor in charge of foreign economic affairs. One document seen by the author, however, appears to indicate a more active role: a December 1994 affidavit signed by Putin gives Vladimir Smirnov, Kumarin’s business partner in PTK, or the St Petersburg Fuel Company, and a close Putin associate, ‘voting rights in our absence’ to 200 SPAG shares, then worth about 20 per cent of the company. In addition, another SPAG co-founder, Klaus-Peter Sauer, told me in 2003 he met with Putin five or six times in Frankfurt and St Petersburg to discuss SPAG’s subsidiaries in St Petersburg.
66. See for instance Irina Malkova and Igor Terentyev, ‘Tot samy Timchenko: Pervy Interview Bogateishevo iz Druzei Putina’, Russian Forbes, October 26 2012
67. Irina Mokorusova and Irina Reznik, ‘Chelovek s Resursom’, January 21 2013
68. This French intelligence report, of which the author has a copy, was cited by Robert Eringer, then head of the Monaco intelligence service, in a note to Prince Albert’s chief of staff, Jean-Luc Allavena, dated 10/04/2006, which the author also has a copy of.
69. Author interview with former Timchenko partner, August 2019
70. Ibid.
71. St Petersburg registration documents provided by Vladimir Pribylovsky
72. Author interviews with senior Western banker involved in the process, May 2014, and with former Timchenko partner involved in the process, May 2014 and August 2019
73. Ibid.
74. Author interview with former Timchenko partner, May 2014 (the senior Western banker said the talks foundered because the project was under attack from organised crime)
75. Ibid.
76. Author interview with two senior Western bankers, May 2014 and June 2013. According to them, the man who’d guaranteed Putin’s daughter’s safety in Germany was the German banker Matthias Warnig – the former Stasi officer who had worked with Putin in Dresden as part of a KGB cell. Warnig took over legal guardianship of Putin’s daughters, one of them said. ‘Putin was afraid.’ Warnig had arrived in St Petersburg soon after Putin’s appointment as deputy mayor, as head of the new St Petersburg office of Dresdner Bank, which opened in December 1991.
77. Author interviews with two former Timchenko partners, June 2013, March 2014 and May 2014, August 2019
78. Author interview with former Traber associate, November 2015
79. Author interview with former KGB officer who worked in St Petersburg with Putin, May 2013
80. Roman Anin, ‘Druzya – Ne Razlei Neft’, Novaya Gazeta, April 15 2011
81. Alexander Levinsky, Irina Malkova, and Valery Igumenov, ‘Kak Matthias Warnig stal samym nadezhnym “ekonomistom” Putina’, Russian Forbes, August 28 2012
82. According to former Timchenko partner interviewed by the author in June 2013 and March 2014
83. According to Maxim Freidzon, the former Skigin partner in Sovex who the author interviewed September 2015
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid.
86. Anastasia Kirilenko, ‘On Prosto Pisal Summu vo vremya besedy’, interview with Freidzon, Radio Svoboda, May 24 2015
87. Author interview with former Traber associate, March 2013
88. Robert Eringer, then head of the Monaco intelligence service, note to Prince Albert’s chief of staff, Jean-Luc Allavena, dated 10/04/2006
89. Author interview with two former Traber associates. According to Freidzon, Putin’s interest in the oil trading business extended to payment for his logistical support. At least, that’s what he said had happened with the much smaller oil trader, Sovex, he co-owned with Skigin. Sovex bought fuel from Timchenko and sold it to the city’s Pulkovo airport. Putin had granted Sovex everything it needed to operate: a licence to trade fuel, the right to use storage facilities at the airport, as well as the right to use its pipeline terminal. Freidzon claimed Putin had been granted a 4 per cent stake in the venture in return for his efforts. He said the stake was held via two of Traber’s closest business partners, Alexander Ulanov and Viktor Korytov, a former KGB officer who’d worked closely with Putin in the Leningrad KGB. He was convinced the same arrangement must extend to other business such as the port and the oil terminal, but he never had any proof. The money Sovex made was funnelled through Liechtenstein where Skigin had registered the outfit. (Documents show that Nasdor Incorporated, the vehicle through which Traber and Skigin controlled the sea port, was registered there, while Hassler represented Skigin’s interests in the oil terminal and the port into 2000 and beyond.) The same went for Skigin and Traber’s stakes in the sea port and the oil terminal. The controlling stakes were held and managed by an outfit called Fibeko Treuhandstalt, where two financial managers who’d distributed Communist propaganda in Western Europe during Soviet times ran an antique bookstore as a front. Some of the financial intermediaries deployed in Soviet times had remained in place. ‘These networks didn’t go anywhere,’ said one former intermediary for the KGB who’d worked with the Liechtenstein money men. (Author interview with former KGB intermediary, November 2015) ‘The connections remained. When people have established trusted contacts, they don’t like to experiment with new ones.’
90. The report cited by Yury Shvets said that Viktor Ivanov, a close associate of Cherkesov and Putin, who’d served as head of the FSB’s contraband division in those years, had developed close links with the head of the Tambov organised-crime group, Vladimir Kumarin, and through him acquired an interest in the port. It also asserted that Putin was complicit in these dealings. Litvinenko Inquiry, Report into the Death of Alexander Litvinenko, Chairman: Sir Robert Owen, Jan 2016, pp.100–1, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/493860/The-Litvinenko-Inquiry-H-C-695-web.pdf; https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/2015/03/INQ006481.pdf
91. Olbi-Dzhaz, a company co-owned by a Russian businessman once under investigation by the FBI for importing cocaine into St Petersburg in the early nineties, ostensibly imported bananas. According to Vedomosti, the company had links with Shabtai Kalmanovich, the Russian mobster who according to the FBI worked closely with the KGB and the Solntsevskaya.
92. Author interview with former Traber associate, November 2015; DozhdTV, ‘Minstr Porta: Kak Peterburgsky Avtoritet Ilya Traber Svyazan s Vladimirom Putinym I yevo okruzheniem’, August 25 2017
93. Author interview with former Traber associate, November 2015
94. Konstantin Alexeev, ‘Zavety Ilyicha, Versiya v Pitere’, September 28 2009, quoting newspaper article from Sovershenno Sekretno-Versiya, October 9 2001, which cites Shevchenko’s testimony in full. As well as Nadezhda Ivanitskaya, ‘Namyvnoe delo’, Russian Forbes, November 2 2012; Dmitry Matveyev, ‘Tsapki Ministra Levitina’, Versiya v Pitere, December 20 2010; Arkady Butlitsky, ‘Rokovaya Druzhba’, Moskovskaya Pravda, August 16 2003; Anton Grishin, ‘Vorotily “Zolotykh Vorot’’’, Versiya, October 9 2001. This article cites this testimony as being given by Shevchenko February 19 1999 to the deputy head of investigations of the St Petersburg prosecutors office, N. A. Litvinova.
95. In an email sent by his Moscow lawyer, Traber refused to answer a series of questions connected with the findings of this chapter, saying only ‘It is not possible to comment on fantasy, slander, invention and stupidity.’
96. According to sea port documents obtained by author, which also show that 50 per cent of OBIP was owned by Nasdor. Author interview with former Traber partner, November 2015. See also: Anastasia Kirilenko, ‘4% Putina. Kak blizkie k Kremlyu kriminalniye avtoritety otmyvayut neftyaniye dengi v Monako’, The Insider, December 19 2017; and Roman Anin, ‘Zavody, Tsisterny, Offshory, Sosedy’, Novaya Gazeta, April 20 2011. The new St Petersburg property chief who replaced Manevich and signed off on the deal was German Gref, a close Putin ally who became a senior state official under Putin and was apparently to keep close ties with Traber.
97. Anatoly Sobchak, ‘Kak Rossiya Poteryala Flot na Baltike I Kto v Etom Vinovat?’, Moskovskie Novosti, October 6 1998, retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20131029211741/http://datarhiv.ru/51/85
98. Interview with former Kharchenko associate, March 2014. For Sobchak’s death, see Chapter 5
99. Author interview with former KGB officer, May 2013
100. Author interview with Yakunin, June 2013
101. Author interview with Yakunin, June 2013. ‘Everything connected to rare earth metals was connected to the Ioffe Institute,’ said Alexander Belyayev, the former head of the St Petersburg City Council. ‘They were specialists,’ he said.
102. Author interview with Yakunin, June 2013
103. Ibid.
104. According to copy of finance ministry audit of Twentieth Trust for the years 1993-1996, conducted December 12–April 7 1997, and obtained by author. For more information, see Roman Shleynov, ‘Ugolovniye Dela, v kotorykh upominalsya Vladimir Putin, obyasnyayut kadrovuyu politiku prezidenta’, Novaya Gazeta, October 3 2005; Ilya Barabanov, ‘Ptentsy gnezda Petrova. Delo XX Tresta’, The New Times, March 23 2009
105. Information provided by Lt Col Andrei Zykov, a former senior investigator in the interior ministry leading the criminal investigations into Putin and the funnelling of St Petersburg budget funds through Twentieth Trust. Author interview, March 2014
106. Author interview with former Putin associate, January 2013
107. Author interview with Ozero dacha cooperative neighbour, June 2014
108. Author interview with former Putin associate, January 2013
109. Author interview with Ozero dacha cooperative neighbour, June 2014
110. Alexander Bondarenko, ‘Ob etom, mozhet byts, kogda-nibud rasskazhut’, Krasnaya Zvezda, January 10 2002, interview with Gennady Belik
111. Author interview with Putin ally, August 2018
112. Author interview with Yakunin, June 2013
113. Author interview with former KGB officer, May 2013
114. Author interview with Sobchak’s widow, Lyudmilla Narusova, June 2014
115. Author interview with Narusova, June 2014; Delo Sobchaka, film by Ksenia Sobchak and Vera Krichevskaya, Moscow, 2018
116. Author interview with Putin ally, August 2018
117. Ibid.
118. Author interview with Yumashev, October 2017
119. Author interview with former Putin associate, January 2013
120. Author interview with Andrei Korchagin, former St Petersburg official, January 2015
121. Author interview with Linkov, November 2013
122. Mariya Kaluzhskaya, Desyat Lyet bez Starovoitovy, Valeria Novodvorskaya on Starovoitova, grani.ru, November 20 2008, https://graniru.org/Politics/Russia/m.144242.html.
123. Author interview with former Traber associate, November 2015
124. Author interview with former FSB officer, June 2014; St Petersburg prosecutors finally charged the former leader of the Tambov group, Vladimir Kumarin, with organising Starovoitova’s murder in April 2019. By that time, Kumarin was already serving the twelfth year of a 24-year prison sentence for charges including running an organised-crime group, after having fallen out with the Kremlin authorities, his position as leader of the Tambov group long taken over by Gennady Petrov.
125. Author interview with Eringer, June 2016; Eringer has published a photo of this meeting; in an open letter to Putin, Prelin wrote of how at a press conference in spring 1999 he’d forecast that Russia’s next president would be someone little known who was not part of the current political elite. Prelin wrote that after his prediction came true, the foreign press claimed that he knew ahead of time who would be president and he’d even taken part in a special operation of the secret services to bring ‘their person’ to power. Prelin writes: ‘However strange it might seem, after these silly publications, I felt a certain personal responsibility for your actions as president of Russia, as if in fact I did have a direct role in your election to this high post.’ Prelin said he hoped he’d been an inspiration to Putin and suggested the fact that Putin wore his watch on his right wrist even though he was right-handed could be a sign of that. ‘I have some hope of that because as far as I know after you met me you began wearing your watch on your right wrist as I have done for my whole life,’ he wrote. (Prelin wore his watch on his right wrist because he was left-handed.) A copy of the letter can be found at krasvremya.ru/veteran-vnesnej-razvedki-igor-prelin-otkrytoe-pismo-vladimiru-putinu/. At the time of writing, I still had not located Prelin himself.
Chapter 4: Operation Successor: ‘It Was Already After Midnight’
1. Author interview with Vavilov, January 2013
2. Author interview with Pugachev, February 2016
3. Arkady Ostrovsky, ‘Ailing Yeltsin will not Stand Down’, Financial Times, October 30 1998. The Kremlin aide is deputy chief of staff, Oleg Sysuyev, who turned out to be a close Primakov ally. He told the newspaper Yeltsin was about to outline a new reduced role in a speech to parliament in the New Year and would hand over day-to-day running of the economy to Primakov.
4. Author has copy of this six-page letter to the chairman of the State Duma, Gennady Seleznyov, dated February 1 1999
5. Author interview with Pugachev, February 2016
6. Author interview with Turover, May 2013
7. Turover provided to author a series of documents which show Banco del Gottardo acting as an intermediary in the payment of Soviet-era foreign debts, mostly owed for supplies of strategic equipment, through various barter schemes. One document, signed March 9 1994 by Russia’s first deputy finance minister Andrei Vavilov and foreign economic trade minister Oleg Davydov, announces the creation of the ‘Joint Russian-Swiss Banking Club Gottardo’. When asked about this by the author, Vavilov said the plans for Banco del Gottardo to act as an intermediary in paying down the Soviet-era debt had never gotten off the ground. But numerous documents provided by Turover show that Banco del Gottardo continued to act in this role for at least three years. Banco del Gottardo’s role in making these payments has never been disclosed by the Russian government. Indeed, at the time, officially there was an international moratorium on any payments of foreign debt by the Russian Federation. Other foreign creditors were not paid. Another document dated March 4 1994 appoints Turover as Banco del Gottardo’s adviser for ‘all matters pertaining to our relationship with the government authorities and agencies of the Russian Federation and of our dealings with financial, commercial and economic entities, companies and corporations of the Russian Federation’. Another protocol dated June 2 1997 proposes that the Russian government will pay outstanding debts owed to Swiss trading firm NOGA through the sale of Russian air defence systems built by the Mari-El Engineering Works [the maker of Russia’s highly strategic S-300 air defence system] through NOGA. This was another deal that has never been disclosed by the Russian government.
8. Author interview with Turover, May 2013
9. Ibid.
10. Yury Skuratov, Kremlyevskie Podryady Mabeteksa, pp.63–4
11. Author interview with Turover, May 2013
12. Author interview with Skuratov, October 2013; the sums Skuratov names Tatyana Dyachenko as spending in his book Kremlyevskie Podryady, pp.185–6, however, sound much less. He cites credit card documents sent by the Swiss prosecutors as showing Tatyana and her sister Elena spent in total ‘many tens of thousands of dollars’. Tatyana, he said, on one occasion spent $13,000 in one day. He also adds he has copies of Tatyana Dyachenko’s bank accounts which show she spent more than $100,000 in three years.
13. Author interview with Skuratov, October 2013; again, Skuratov’s Kremlyevskie Podryady, p.185, makes the sum spent by Yeltsin sound far less. He cites Turover as telling the New York Times that the amount spent by Yeltsin himself was ‘purely symbolic’.
14. Author interview with Turover, May 2013
15. Skuratov, Kremlyevskie Podryady, p.76
16. Thane Gustafson, Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia, p.90, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2012
17. Author interview with Skuratov, May 2014
18. Skuratov, Kremlyevskie Podryady, pp.78–9
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., p.80
21. Ibid., p.78; Skuratov cites Swiss prosecutor Daniel Devaud as saying MES may have earned as much as $1.5 billion through the oil sales, while only $200m of this amount went towards funding the Kremlin reconstruction
22. Author interview with Pugachev; Skuratov in Kremlyevskie Podryady, p.95, describes the close relationship between Borodin’s Kremlin Property Department and Pugachev’s Mezhprombank. It says Mezhprombank was the main creditor of the Kremlin’s Property Department and also says Mezhprombank serviced foreign loans under finance ministry guarantees, including for the Kremlin reconstruction.
23. Borodin had even estimated its holdings as being worth $600 billion in a press conference he gave in January 1999. This figure is almost certainly overblown, but Borodin had claimed it was based on an evaluation given to him by US experts.
24. Author interview with Pugachev, May 2014 (Yumashev said Borodin bought apartments for ‘everyone’ – author interview October 2017)
25. Author interview with Pugachev, June 2018
26. Author interview with Pugachev, February 2016; see also Skuratov in Kremlyevskie Podryady, p.95
27. One document provided by Pugachev to the author is a letter from the Patriarch Alexei II to Yeltsin dated March 21 1996. In it, Alexei II calls on Yeltsin to appoint Pugachev as his representative to the Russian president. ‘During one of our most recent meetings (February 1), I raised the question of the expediency of having a person who could act as an intermediary between you and I to decide more operatively questions between the Church and the president, taking into account the complicated internal situation in the country and the fateful times in which we live. In my view, Sergei Viktorovich Pugachev, the chairman of Mezhprombank, could be such a person as I mentioned to you. I know S.V. Pugachev well as a good Christian who has done a lot to help the Church in its restoration.’
28. Mezhprombank’s financial arm in San Francisco was called International Industrial Bank Corp.
29. Documents seen by author include one note of thanks from Tatyana Dyachenko to Pugachev thanking him for his help with the 1996 election campaign, as well as correspondence between Pugachev and Fred Lowell, a San Francisco lawyer with close ties to California’s Republican Party. Lowell brought in George Gorton, a former aide to Pete Wilson, the Californian Governor, who worked on the campaign as a consultant together with Joseph Shumate and Richard Dresner. Officially they were hired by Oleg Soskovets, deputy prime minister in Yeltsin’s government. But Felix Braynin, one of Pugachev’s employees at International Industrial Bank Corp in San Francisco, was the first and most direct connection with them. The story of the US consultants is told in this article by Michael Kramer, ‘Rescuing Boris’, Time magazine, June 24 2001. The role of the US consultants in the re-election campaign later drew controversy because of Tatyana Dyachenko’s claim they had overstated their importance. However, it may well also be the case she wanted to minimise their impact because it was not good politically for it to be known US consultants had assisted Yeltsin. Their role in the campaign had been kept a secret until the 2001 Time Magazine article.
30. Skuratov, Kremlyevskie Podryady, pp.60–1
31. Ibid.
32. Author interview with Pugachev, February 2016
33. Skuratov, Kremlyevskie Podryady, p.62
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., p.81; author interview with Pugachev, February 2016, during which he said he’d leaned on Vavilov to provide the finance ministry guarantees for the bonds
36. Author interview with Pugachev, February 2016
37. Paul Beckett and David S. Cloud, ‘Banking Probe Reaches Yeltsin Family – Cayman Accounts Now Draw US Scrutiny’, Wall Street Journal, September 22 1999. The WSJ reported the money was paid into the accounts by Belka Energy, Mr Dyachenko’s oil trading company, which it said, in turn, had dealings with Runicom, Abramovich’s Swiss-based oil trader. A lawyer for Belka told the Washington Post (Robert O’Harrow Jr ‘Bank Subpoenas Trading Firm’, Washington Post, October 1 1999) that the funds had been paid for Dyachenko’s work for the company and that there was no connection to any criminal activity.
38. ‘Podrobnosti Dela Mabeteksa’, Vremya MN, January 28 1999; author interview with Turover, May 2013; author interview with Skuratov, October 2013
39. Author interview with Pugachev, February 2016
40. Author interview with Skuratov, October 2013
41. Skuratov, Kremlyevskie Podryady, p.25
42. Ibid., pp.34–44
43. Ibid., p.29
44. Ibid., pp.54–5
45. Author interview with Skuratov, October 2013
46. Author interview with Turover, May 2013
47. Author interview with Skuratov, October 2013
48. Diary entries of this period seen by author include three days of meetings with ‘Tanya’ and ‘Valya’, as Yumashev and Dyachenko were affectionately known, from January 27 1999, in the immediate aftermath of the raid on Mabetex; as well as numerous other meetings with Valya, Tanya, Bereza (as Berezovsky was known), Putin and Voloshin throughout the year.
49. Author interview with Pugachev, February 2016
50. In an October 2017 interview, Yumashev conceded that it may have been Pugachev who procured the tape, but would not elaborate further: ‘I don’t know who found the tape. Probably it was Pugachev, because he had good relations with Khapsirokov. And Khapsirokov was head of the property department of the prosecutor’s office.’ Yumashev said it was ‘totally possible’ that it was important for Pugachev because he was involved somehow in the Mabetex affair through his work with Borodin. But he insisted the case did not influence the Kremlin’s decision to oust Skuratov: ‘I repeat for Yeltsin – and in our conversations with business, with Chubais, with Gaidar – what was important was that the prosecutor general had been turned into an instrument for business instead of dealing with real criminal cases. Skuratov, because of human weaknesses connected to the fact he thought he could do business with people who gave him bribes and prostitutes, he lost his independence. The position of the Kremlin was that a prosecutor general who could be manipulated did not have the right to occupy such a position.’ In 2000 Khapsirokov went to work for Pugachev at Mezhprombank, and in 2001 he was appointed as an aide to Voloshin, who was then Kremlin chief of staff.
51. David McHugh, ‘Primakov Plan Sees Sidelined President’, Moscow Times, January 27 1999
52. Author interview with Yumashev, October 2017
53. Simon Saradzhyan, ‘Primakov to Clear Jails for Corrupt’, Moscow Times, February 2 1999
54. Author interview with Yumashev, October 2017
55. Simon Saradzhyan, ‘Prosecutor Resigns as Sibneft Oil Raided’, February 3 1999
56. Michael Wines, ‘Yeltsin Son-in-law at Center of Rich Network of Influence’, New York Times, October 7 1999
57. Author interview with Berezovsky associate, June 2018
58. Yumashev made way for Nikolai Bordyuzha, also a representative of the security services, who enjoyed much closer relations with Primakov.
59. Author interview with Yumashev, October 2017
60. Author interview with Pugachev, January 2015
61. Sarah Karush, ‘Kremlin Rulers Set Up at Elite Hospital’, Moscow Times, March 17 1999
62. Natalya Shulyakovskaya, ‘Prosecutor Skuratov Slips Back to Work’, Moscow Times, March 10 1999
63. The Swiss prosecutor Carla del Ponte had telephoned Skuratov with the news that the raids on Mabetex had, as they’d hoped, unearthed copies of the Yeltsin Family credit cards paid down and guaranteed by Pacolli. Though the direct evidence linking the probe with the Family was not made public then, the pieces were in place for a revolt.
64. David McHugh, ‘Upper House Reinstates Prosecutor’, Moscow Times, March 18 1999
65. Author interview with Pugachev, February 2016
66. Ibid.
67. Author interview with Pugachev, June 2018
68. Sarah Karush, ‘Prosecutor Steps Up Pressure on Yeltsin’, Moscow Times, March 24 1999
69. ‘Ilyukhin Nashel Scheta Yeltsina’, Kommersant, March 24 1999
70. Author interview with Pugachev, February 2016
71. Author interview with Yumashev, October 2017
72. Author interview with Pugachev, January 2015
73. Author interview with Russian tycoon close to Luzhkov, April 2018
74. Author interview with Pugachev, January 2015
75. Later it turned out that Borodin was among them.
76. Author interview with Pugachev, February 2016
77. Ibid.
78. In Kremlyevskie Podryady, pp.354–6, Skuratov gives a slightly different version of events that night. He says he later found out (through a deputy who spoke to Rosinsky) that Rosinsky had indeed been brought into the Kremlin by the FSB at 2 a.m., but that he’d been taken in to see Voloshin, who showed him the tape and then a pre-prepared criminal case. Voloshin told him to go to Tatyana Dyachenko’s unoccupied office to work on it, and said that if he had any difficulty there were two deputy prosecutor generals on hand. According to this account, Putin and Stepashin had been in the office with Voloshin, while Chaika and Demin’s cars were seen parked at the Kremlin that night. No mention of Pugachev is made. However, it is possible that Rosinsky may not have mentioned Pugachev if he was the one who was organising the reward for him. (Skuratov also says he thinks the reason this happened is because the next day the prosecutors’ office was planning to arrest Berezovsky.)
79. Valeria Korchagina, ‘Yeltsin Loses Vote to Oust Skuratov’, Moscow Times, April 22 1999
80. Author interview with Pugachev, February 2015
81. Ibid.
82. Author interview with Yumashev, October 2017
83. Yeltsin had wanted to fire Primakov months before, in the winter. But his aides, Yumashev said, held him back: ‘We understood that in winter powerful forces were still behind Primakov, and the Kremlin was still weak. In winter the consequences of the default still had not passed. But by spring it was clear we were coming out of the crisis and it was possible to take tough political moves.’
84. Author interview with Turover, May 2013
85. Author interview with Skuratov, June 2014
86. Author interview with Pugachev, February 2016. There were also worries about how Stepashin had continued to maintain relations with Primakov, with whom he’d been close since the days when he headed the FSB.
87. Stepashin later claimed it had been made clear to him from the start that he could be replaced by Aksyonenko. Stepashin interview with Nezavisimaya Gazeta, January 14 2000; Pugachev however claims that Aksyonenko was only ever a marginal candidate, and that Yeltsin had taken a dislike to his aggressive behaviour, which was similar to that of a Soviet factory boss.
88. Ibid.; Skuratov’s Kremlyevskie Podryady also states Pugachev’s bank was the biggest creditor to the Property Department.
89. Author interview with Pugachev, September 2014
90. Author interview with Yumashev, October 2017. Yumashev was referring then to December 1998–March 1999 just after he stepped down as chief of staff to make way for Bordyuzha and then Voloshin: ‘The main task at this time was to find someone who would be president … and Putin at this moment – I had no idea about Putin. I had several thoughts along the way about who could be president. For example, I had the idea that it could be [Sergei] Yastrzhembsky. If there hadn’t been this crisis [over Yastrzhembsky’s backing for Luzhkov] then one of the strongest candidates could have been Yastrzhembsky. He spoke brilliantly. He was handsome and interesting. He was an absolute liberal … And honestly I looked at who was in government and in government there were candidates who could have been president. For example there was Aksyonenko [the railways minister] who was an absolute workaholic. The only sector that continued to function well despite the terrible crisis was the railways which was thanks to the organisational talents of Aksyonenko … In his understanding of what we needed to do with the market and ideologically, he was suitable.’ In addition, Yumashev said, by the time Yeltsin appointed Stepashin prime minister that May Putin ‘was a candidate. But he was not the main candidate … Stepashin came up at this moment because Yeltsin considered that he had political experience and Chubais was very active in support of him. The opinion of Chubais was very important for Boris Nikolaevich. Putin continued to work as secretary of the Security Council and of course did not dream of becoming president.’
91. Ibid.
92. Even darker forces led by a rogue general, Lev Rokhlin, disaffected by the futile losses and bloodshed of the war in Chechnya, had been suspected of plotting a coup against Yeltsin earlier that year – until Rokhlin was stopped in his tracks by his mysterious and brutal murder just weeks before Putin’s appointment as FSB chief. In the circumstances, ‘the Yeltsin Family really did need their own person in charge of the FSB’, said Leonid Nevzlin, another Yeltsin-era oligarch from Khodorkovsky’s Menatep.
93. Author interview with Yumashev, October 2017
94. Author interview with Sobchak’s widow, Lyudmilla Narusova, June 2014; Delo Sobchaka, film by Ksenia Sobchak and Vera Krichevskaya, Moscow, 2018
95. Yumashev also said that he thought Putin confided in him about helping Sobchak escape because ‘We had fairly open relations. And in my view, he considered that if he didn’t tell me he would undermine me. When a deputy takes such a suicidal act – and I’d recommended him to Yeltsin and he worked in my team – he thought he did not have the right to take such action without warning me.’ Author interview with Yumashev, October 2017
96. Ibid.
97. Ibid.
98. Ibid.
99. Author interview with former close Putin associate
100. Author interview with senior Russian banker/foreign-intelligence operative, December 2018
101. Author interview with close Berezovsky associate, October 2019
102. Berezovsky had also initially supported Aksyonenko to take over as PM.
103. Masha Gessen, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, pp.18–19. Author interview with Leonid Nevzlin, July 2018, in which Nevzlin also said he believed Berezovsky could well have played a role in helping propel Putin to the post of FSB chief. Berezovsky knew Putin’s predecessor as FSB chief, Nikolai Kovalyov, hated him. ‘Kovalyov was not a bad guy,’ Nevzlin said. ‘But he very much hated Berezovsky. This is why they replaced him … He hated him so much you can’t imagine. Berezovsky met a few times with Kovalyov and he always saw him as an enemy.’
104. Author interview with Berezovsky associate, July 2018
105. Author interview with Alex Goldfarb, July 2015. Berezovsky did however claim in his interviews with Gessen, The Man Without a Face, that in mid-July 1999 he’d gone to Putin and suggested he become president. However, he never went into any detail and Yumashev and Dyachenko however have said that at that point the decision had already been made.
106. Melissa Akin and Natalya Shulyakovskaya, ‘Swiss Tie Kremlin to Money-Laundering’, Moscow Times, July 15 1999; Andrew Higgins, ‘Yeltsin Aide is Focus of Corruption Probe – Swiss Investigators Allege Money-Laundering’, Wall Street Journal, July 16 1999
107. Author interview with Pugachev, August 2019
108. ‘Luzhkov Schitayet “Politicheskoi Provokatsii” Vozbuzhdeniye FSB Ugolovnovo Dela, v Kotorom Figuriruet Firma Evo Zheny’, Interfax, July 17 1999
109. Author interview with Pugachev, February 2016
110. Author interview with Yumashev, October 2017. Yumashev denied that Pugachev could have played any role in Putin’s rise to power. He insisted Pugachev was exaggerating it all. ‘In fact he played a most minimal role in all the political stories of the time,’ he said. ‘We spoke with him, yes. But I also spoke with dozens of other businessmen as chief of staff – with Potanin, with Khodorkovsky and Alekperov … It was important for us that they were our allies.’ He did concede that Pugachev had known well Khapsirokov, the official from the prosecutor general’s office who’d supplied the Skuratov tape and that it may well have been Pugachev who procured the tape. He also conceded that Pugachev had worked closely with Borodin including on the Mabetex contracts. But Yumashev claimed that the idea to forward Putin as Stepashin’s replacement came initially from Voloshin, who then served as Kremlin chief of staff. ‘The main initiator was Voloshin. He considered that because the situation in the Caucasus was escalating – there was a constant threat of terrorism – to go in when there was less than a year before presidential elections with a PM who was under the heel of his wife … and who it was dangerous to give the country to … it was clear that it was not possible to remove the PM three months before elections. The person who would do this would lose the election. The new PM should have at least a year for the country to get to know him. It was clear we needed to do it fairly fast and not delay till autumn. Therefore we of course took part in these discussions. It was me, Tatyana, Voloshin and Chubais. We had fairly rowdy discussions. Chubais considered it a mistake … He believed that to remove Stepashin now when he had worked only three months would be to demonstrate the Kremlin’s total inadequacy. He believed the Duma would not approve Putin because it didn’t know him.’
111. Other businesspeople had not served as adviser to a succession of Kremlin chiefs of staff, as Pugachev did (documents seen by the author show). They’d also not had the same cosy chats with Yumashev, like the one in the recording about how they’d rushed to bring Putin to power. Diary entries show Pugachev’s frequent meetings at that time with Yumashev and with Dyachenko. A log of telephone calls from Pugachev’s downtown Moscow office shows that he and Yumashev spoke at least eighty-eight times in 1999 on Pugachev’s office line alone, not including calls from mobile phones or from Pugachev’s office in the Kremlin. The log also indicates the depth of Pugachev’s other connections in the Kremlin: there are calls between him and Putin, and with Tatyana Dyachenko; there are meetings with Voloshin, calls with prosecutor general Vladimir Ustinov, and messages that ‘Derevo’ – a nickname for Berezovsky – had rung.
112. Author interview with Yumashev, October 2017
113. Author interview with Pugachev, March 2015. Chubais did admit he’d done everything he could to stop Putin’s appointment, telling Lyudmilla Telen, Pokolenie Putina, p. 53 that: ‘I considered that Stepashin the candidate had greater chances of being elected than did Putin the candidate. I fought for my point of view right to the end. Right up till that moment [on August 9] when Yeltsin informed Stepashin of his removal.’ Yeltsin, also, in Midnight Diaries p.332, writes that Chubais made a last-ditch bid to stop the appointment over the weekend, but he only found out about it much later. ‘Chubais could have changed everything,’ Pugachev admitted. ‘For Yeltsin, Yumashev was family. But he respected Chubais as a great professional. If he’d managed to tell him don’t touch Stepashin, then probably [Putin’s appointment] wouldn’t have happened.’ (Also in Midnight Diaries, p.329, Yeltsin writes that he first calls Stepashin and Putin (separately) to his office to inform them of his decision on August 5. But then takes the weekend to think further about it.) In his book Vremya Berezovskovo, Pyotr Aven, the Russian oligarch and Alfa Bank president, has also spoken of Chubais’s last-ditch efforts that Sunday to call a ‘meeting of the oligarchs’ to form a consolidated position of big business. ‘It was clear that Stepashin would most probably be ousted on Monday morning, but it was possible to try and do something over the weekend,’ said Aven. ‘At this meeting Chubais spoke very clearly against Putin’s candidacy.’ Aven also tells of how Chubais asked him to meet with Putin and persuade him to decline the appointment. Aven says he went to Putin’s dacha that Sunday evening but when they met, Putin told him he’d already agreed.
114. Author interview with Pugachev, August 2019. ‘In this case, he was not acting as the president or the tsar. He was acting as a grandfather who feared for Tanya most of all, and for his grandchildren,’ Pugachev said.
115. Brian Whitmore, ‘Yeltsin Sacks Stepashin, Anoints Putin’, Moscow Times, August 10 1999
116. Putin’s candidacy barely got the majority needed, by only six votes.
117. Author interview with Yumashev, October 2017
118. Reports suggest that the Family had indeed been planning for a second Chechen war: Voloshin, the Kremlin chief of staff, had allegedly been detected by French intelligence meeting a Chechen rebel leader, Shamil Basayev, at a villa on July 4 on the outskirts of Nice a month before the Chechens began their armed incursion into Dagestan – John Dunlop, The Moscow Bombings of September 1999, pp.66–8. Later, Stepashin gave a series of interviews in which he admitted that a plan to launch a fresh military action against Chechnya – to even seize Chechen territory – had been under discussion in the Kremlin months before, when he was still prime minister, and even suggested that the plans had been part of discussions to destabilise the situation and impose emergency rule: Dunlop cites three interviews Stepashin gave: one to Frankfurter Rundschau in February 2000, in which he said plans had been under way since March to close the Chechen border and create ‘a sanitary cordon’ around Chechnya ‘like the Berlin Wall’. ‘In July, we decided to seize territory [in Chechnya] north of the Terek’. He was admitting plans to invade Chechnya were authorised before the Chechens began the armed incursions into Dagestan in August. Another to Michael Gordon, ‘A Look at How the Kremlin Slid into the Chechen War’, New York Times, February 1 2000, in which Stepashin said that in March the plan had been only to secure Chechnya’s borders, but by July it had expanded to seizing the top third of Chechnya, with special forces going after rebels. The third, with Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets in September 1999, cited him as indicating that Berezovsky had been seeking to provoke a limited conflict that would enable Yeltsin to impose emergency rule. ‘As for the version of a conspiracy, [one needs to realise that] having provoked a war, it is difficult in that region to quickly gain a victory.. It is another matter [altogether] that certain agreements were possible, in order to destabilise the situation and to bring it under Emergency Rule. Now that is a version.’
119. Gleb Pavlovsky, ‘Eksperimentalnaya Rodina’, Moscow, July 2018
120. Author interview with two close Berezovsky associates, October 2019. Both confirmed Berezovsky knew the Chechen leader Shamil Basayev.
121. Author interview with Pugachev, February 2016
122. Carlo Bonini and Giuseppe D’Avantso, ‘Svizerra, carte di credito accusano Eltsin’, Corriere della Sera, August 25 1999
123. Author interview with Yumashev, October 2017
124. Author interview with Pugachev, February 2016
125. Andrew Higgins, ‘Former Legislator Clears Yeltsin Family’, Wall Street Journal, September 28 1999
126. Author interview with Pugachev, February 2016
127. Author interview with Yumashev, October 2017
128. Raymond Bonner and Timothy L. O’Brien, ‘Activity at Bank Raises Suspicion of Russian Mob Tie’, New York Times, August 19 1999
129. Paul Beckett and David S. Cloud, ‘Banking Probe Reaches Yeltsin Family – Cayman Accounts Now Draw US Scrutiny’, Wall Street Journal, September 22 1999. A lawyer for Mr Dyachenko has said the funds were payment for work for the oil trading firm, Belka Trading, and were not connected to any illicit activity.
130. The document from the Swiss prosecutors’ office, dated July 28 2000, showed prosecutors were investigating a $235m transfer through Banco del Gottardo to an account held in East-West United Bank in Luxembourg by a company called Questor Corporation Ltd, which the prosecutors said Dyachenko was the beneficiary of. In response to written questions, Yumashev said any suggestion that Tatyana had ever received such funds was ‘absolute lies. Tatyana never had any offshore companies – any companies abroad or in Russia. And if this transfer took place, then Tatyana never had any relation to this company.’
131. Author interview with Pugachev, May 2014
132. Author interview with Pugachev, September 2014
133. Primakov, ‘Vosem mesiatsev plus’, pp.222–3: Primakov writes that after he was fired from his post as prime minister, Putin rang him and proposed he meet with the FSB leadership. Putin brought the entire top ranks of the FSB to Primakov’s dacha, where they toasted him. ‘This was a serious gesture, and I don’t think Putin agreed the details with anyone,’ Primakov wrote. Then, when Putin in turn had been appointed PM, he accepted an invitation to attend Primakov’s seventieth birthday celebrations, and again gave a speech. ‘I of course had not invited one person from Yeltsin’s inner circle,’ Primakov wrote. Primakov says they stayed in close contact after Putin’s election as president.
134. Valentin Yumashev, ‘My glotnuli svobody I otravilis yeyu’, interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets, January 31 2011
135. Gleb Pavlovsky, ‘Eksperimentalnaya Rodina’, Moscow, July 2018
136. Author interview with Turover, May 2013
Chapter 5: ‘Children’s Toys in Pools of Mud’
1. Author interview with former senior KGB officer close to Putin, August 2018
2. Ibid.
3. Author interview with Graham, June 2014
4. Pavlovsky, ‘Eksperimentalnaya Rodina’, July 2018. ‘From 1996 to the end of Yeltsin’s presidency, we spoke in the Kremlin not about a “successor” but of strengthening power,’ Pavlovsky said.
5. Author interview with Illarionov, September 2015
6. Ibid.
7. Author interviews with Pugachev, September 2014, August 2018
8. Pugachev’s claim that the decision had been taken earlier, almost as soon as Putin was appointed as prime minister and announced as Yeltsin’s successor, fitted much better with what actually happened then. Two other Kremlin officials also indicated that the decision had been taken long before. In one interview with Newsweek International (January 10 2000), Anatoly Chubais, the former Kremlin chief of staff and privatisation tsar, said the idea had long been known and discussed, while Gleb Pavlovsky, the Kremlin spin doctor, said the decision had been made earlier in the year. (‘Eksperimentalnaya Rodina’, July 2018)
9. Author interview with close Putin ally, August 2018
10. Oksana Yablokova, Simon Saradzhyan and Valeria Korchagina, ‘Apartment Block Explodes, Dozens Dead’, Moscow Times, September 10 1999
11. Valeria Korchagina, Simon Saradzhyan, ‘Tensions Grow as Toll Rises to 118’, Moscow Times, September 15 1999
12. Sergei Yushenkov, a leading liberal MP, was shot dead outside his house in April 2003, a year after he became part of an independent public commission set up to investigate the apartment bombings. Yury Schekochikin, a well-known investigative journalist who’d also joined the commission, died three months later from a mysterious illness that bore the hallmarks of poisoning by radioactive materials. A former FSB colonel Mikhail Trepashkin who’d also joined the commission was arrested in October 2003 and jailed for four years in a military prison for alleged improper handling of classified materials shortly after he shared information with a journalist indicating an FSB agent may have been involved in the bombing of 19 Guryanova Street.
13. Said Islamyev, ‘Thousands Flee Grozny as Bombs Fall’, Moscow Times, September 25 1999
14. Brian Whitmore, ‘Real Target of Airstrikes May Be PR’, Moscow Times, September 28 1999
15. Putin in helicopter and tent – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Xn7pJQmATI; www.ntv/ru/video/1749560
16. Brian Whitmore, ‘Prime Minister’s Popularity Rating Skyrockets’, Moscow Times, November 30 1999
17. Brian Whitmore and Simon Saradzhyan, ‘Moscow Awash in Explosion Theories’, Moscow Times, September 14 1999
18. ‘Gennadiya Seleznyova Predupredili o vzryve v Volgodonske za tri dnya do terakta’, Newsru.com, March 21 2002
19. John Dunlop, The Moscow Bombings of September 1999: Examination of Russian Terrorist Attacks at the Onset of Vladimir Putin’s Rule, pp.170–1; ‘Taimer Ostanovili za Sem Chasov do Vzryva: Terakt Predotvratil Voditel Avtobusa’, Kommersant, September 24 1999; ‘Nezavisimoye Rassledovanie: Ryazansky Sakhar’, NTV, March 24 2000: before Putin’s clampdown on the media NTV ran a nearly hour-long discussion programme on the events in Ryazan, where residents, including the one who reported it all, Alexei Kartofelnikov, spoke of their disbelief it had been an exercise and demanded answers from the FSB.
20. Ibid., pp.170–1; see also Pavel Voloshin, ‘Chto bylo v Ryazani: sakhar ili geksogen?’, Novaya Gazeta, February 14 2000; and ‘Taimer Ostanovili za Sem Chasov do Vzryva: Terakt Predotvratil Voditel Avtobusa’, Kommersant, September 24 1999
21. Dunlop, The Moscow Bombings of September 1999, pp.172–7; Simon Saradzhyan, ‘Police Find Dummy Bomb in Ryazan’, Moscow Times, September 24 1999; ‘Taimer Ostanovili za Sem Chasov do Vzryva: Terakt Predotvratil Voditel Avtobusa’, Kommersant, September 24 1999
22. ‘Nezavisimoye Rassledovanie: Ryazansky Sakhar’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-lEi_Uyb_U
23. Ibid.: the programme shows footage of Rushailo addressing law enforcers at the interior ministry headquarters September 24 and telling them an explosion in Ryazan has been prevented. It also includes footage of Patrushev emerging to tell a TV reporter thirty minutes later that it was no more than an exercise; there was only sugar in the sacks.
24. Patrushev had started out in Leningrad KGB counter-intelligence with Putin, and then moved to head the city’s contraband division. By 1994 he’d moved to Moscow, where he served as head of the FSB’s all-important internal security division.
25. Alexander Litvinenko and Yury Felshtinsky, ‘FSB Vzryvayet Rossiyu’. The authors cite a statement, apparently issued by the Ryazan FSB soon after Patrushev claimed the incident was no more than an exercise, as saying: ‘As it became known, the device discovered 22.09.99 that was an imitation of an explosive device was part of an inter-regional exercise. The news of this was unexpected for us and came after the moment when the FSB had uncovered the place of residency in Ryazan of those who’d placed the explosive device and when it was preparing to detain them.’ It also quotes the head of the investigative division of the Ryazan FSB, Yury Maksimov, as saying on March 21 2000: ‘We took the events that night very seriously, as if it was a military situation. The news that this was an FSB exercise was totally unexpected for us, and came at the time when we had uncovered the places of residency of the individuals who’d placed the imitation (as it later turned out) device and were preparing to detain them.’ Anatoly Medetsky, ‘Sacks in the Basement Still Trouble Ryazan’, Moscow Times, September 24 2004
26. ‘Nezavisimoye Rassledovanie: Ryazansky Sakhar’; Medetsky, ‘Sacks in the Basement Still Trouble Ryazan’
27. ‘Nezavisimoye Rassledovanie: Ryazansky Sakhar’
28. Alexander Litvinenko and Yury Felshtinsky, ‘FSB Vzryvayet Rossiyu’; Blowing up Russia, documentary film, producers Jean Charles Deniau and Charles Gazelle, 2002
29. Medetsky, ‘Sacks in the Basement Still Trouble Ryazan’
30. ‘Nezavisimoye Rassledovanie: Ryazansky Sakhar’
31. Igor Korolkov, ‘Fotorobot ne pervoi svezhosti’, Moskovskie Novosti, November 11 2003; M.I. Trepashkin, ‘Na pervom fotorobote byl agent FSB’, chechenpress.com, September 18 2003; see also Scott Anderson, ‘None dare call it conspiracy’, GQ, September 2009
32. Ibid.
33. Author interview with former Kremlin official, December 2014. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the claims made by the former Kremlin official were ‘total rubbish’. ‘Don’t pay any attention to this insider. He doesn’t know anything,’ Peskov said.
34. Ibid.
35. Author interview with Yumashev, October 2017
36. Brian Whitmore, ‘Real Target of Airstrikes May be PR’, Moscow Times, September 28 1999; Vremya MN article, September 27 1999, in which Putin states: ‘This time we will not put our boys under fire … We will use all modern forces and means to destroy the terrorists. We will destroy their infrastructure. We will use special forces only to clean up territory. We will protect our people. Of course, this demands time and patience.’
37. Pavlovsky, ‘Eksperimentalnaya Rodina’, July 2018
38. Author interview with person close to Yeltsin Family, July 2018. One theory could be that the Family had worked with Putin and the FSB to instigate the Chechen incursion into Dagestan, as a way of provoking a second Chechen war that would propel Putin to power, while the apartment bombings in September had been the FSB – namely Patrushev – taking matters into their own hands and going far beyond anything originally planned to propel Putin to power. One close Berezovsky associate (author interview October 2019) however also suggested the bombings could have been carried out by Chechens taking revenge for not being paid for the earlier armed incursions into Dagestan – if indeed those incursions had been planned as a way to help spur Putin’s vault to power.
39. See Chapter 1
40. Author interview with former member of Red Army Faction, March 2018
41. Author interview with Russian oligarch, July 2018
42. Author interview with senior Russian banker with links to foreign intelligence, January 2019
43. Pavlovsky, ‘Eksperimentalnaya Rodina’
44. Patrick E. Tyler, ‘Russian Says Kremlin Faked “Terror Attacks”’, New York Times, February 1 2002
45. Alexander Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko, Death of a Dissident, pp.180-2. The book cites Berezovsky as describing his qualms when at the end of August 1999, after Putin became prime minister, he visited him in his new office and saw a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, on his desk. He’d worried that Putin was still attached to the KGB, and wondered if it was not too late to find another successor. It was not until he sent Abramovich to Putin’s birthday party on October 7, and Abramovich reported back that there was no sign of other spies at the party, that he took the decision to back Putin.
46. Author interview with Berezovsky associate, June 2018
47. Brian Whitmore, ‘Agendas Clash on Sunday TV News’, Moscow Times, October 12 1999
48. Andrei Zolotov Jr, ‘Media Wars Turn to Blood and Guts’, Moscow Times, October 26 1999
49. Author interview with Berezovsky associate, June 2018
50. One person close to Berezovsky said Berezovsky had earlier intercepted correspondence between Primakov and Skuratov that showed he was number one on an arrest list (author interview July 2018)
51. Michael McFaul, ‘Russia’s 1999 Parliamentary Elections: Party Consolidation and Fragmentation’, demokratizatsiya.pub/archives/08-1_McFaul.PDF: The polling data cited by McFaul shows Fatherland-Russia’s rating had dropped from 28 per cent in July.
52. Andrei Zolotov Jr, ‘Shoigu’s Unity Rides on Putin’s Coattails’, Moscow Times, December 4 1999
53. ‘Putin Soars High on War’s Wings’, Moscow Times, December 1 1999
54. Sarah Karush, ‘Pro-Kremlin Parties Sweep into Duma’, Moscow Times, December 21 1999
55. Author interview with Yumashev, October 2017
56. Boris Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, p.6
57. Putin FSB meeting Dec 1999: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xkLdzrniyo
58. Vladimir Putin, ‘Rossiya na Rubezhe Tysyacheletii’, December 27 1999. The article is no longer available on the government portal it was published on www.government.gov.ru. But can be read here: myruwin.ru/Vladimir-putin-rossija-na-rubezhe-tysjacheletij
59. Putin, ‘Rossiya na Rubezhe Tysyacheletii’
60. ‘Vladimir Putin Obnarodoval Svoyu Programmu’, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, December 30 1999
61. Yeltsin, New Year’s Eve speech, YouTube citation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0Zb8QqXo0A
62. Author interview with former senior government official close to the security services, January 2014
63. Author interview with former senior Kremlin official, November 2017, in which he said that under a Luzhkov/Primakov leadership, ‘What took Vladimir Vladimirovich seventeen years would have happened in four years. All this has been dragged out.’ Also author interview with former presidential economic adviser Andrei Illarionov, September 2015, in which he said: ‘If it had been Primakov there would not have been an initial period of economic reform as there was under Putin. But Primakov would also not have been as tough in liquidating the opposition. It would have been easier to overturn his regime in two or three or four years. There would have been a union of democrats and oligarchs against the KGB, and there would have been a chance to overturn the KGB regime. Primakov would not have been in a condition to bring in the younger generation of KGB, and he would not have been able to maintain the stability of the regime.’
64. Catherine Belton, ‘Putin Campaign Cranks Through Regions’, Moscow Times, March 22 2000
65. Putin election night, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhQynqCXWAkn
66. Catherine Belton, ‘Putin Walks his Way into Women’s Hearts’, Moscow Times, March 9 2000
67. Catherine Belton, ‘Luzhkov Shows Putin About Town’, Moscow Times, March 24 2000
68. Author interview with Pugachev, September 2014
69. Anatoly Sobchak, ‘Kak Rossiya Poteryala Flot na Baltike I Kto v Etom Vinovat?’, Moskovskie Novosti, October 6 1998, retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20131029211741/http://datarhiv.ru/51/85
70. Elena Masyuk, ‘Volodya Tolko ne Bronzovei’, Novaya Gazeta, November 9 2012, interview with Lyudmilla Narusova
71. FBI report on the empire and associates of Semyon Mogilevich, 1995, obtained by author.
72. Author interview with Narusova, June 2014
73. ‘Sobchak Ostavil Dver Otkrytoi’, Kommersant, February 22 2000
74. Ibid.; ‘Kommersant Speculates about Sobchak’s Death’, Moscow Times, February 23 2000
75. Masyuk, ‘Volodya Tolko ne Bronzovei’
76. Author interview with former Traber associate, November 2015
77. Catherine Belton, ‘Thousands Say Farewell to Sobchak’, Moscow Times, February 25 2000
78. Masyuk, ‘Volodya Tolko ne Bronzovei’
79. When the author interviewed Narusova in June 2014, she declined to answer questions about her previous comments to Novaya Gazeta
80. Author interview with Pugachev, August 2016
81. Author interview with Pugachev, May 2015
82. Catherine Belton, ‘Putin Wins, Promises no Miracles’, Moscow Times, March 28 2000
83. Vitaly Mansky, ‘Svidetely Putina’, 2018
84. Author interview with Putin ally, March 2015; author interview with former senior government official, January 2013
85. Catherine Belton, ‘Aluminum Sale Gets Stamp of Approval’, Moscow Times, March 10 2000
86. Author interview with Putin ally, March 2015. He later clarified: ‘One condition was clear for me, and that was for four years he wasn’t to interfere in the running of the economy. That was very clear, but I can only presume.’
87. Author interview with Yumashev, October 2017
88. It seems clear that Putin and the Yeltsin Family were grafted together. One symbol of the merging of the houses of Putin’s men and the Yeltsin Family appeared soon after he came to power. Just months after the election, a little-noticed oil trader was born. It was named Urals Energy and it was owned by two business partners of Gennady Timchenko and by Leonid Dyachenko. (‘Sky’s the Limit for reborn Urals Energy’, Platts Energy in East Europe, March 31 2006)
89. Author interview with Pugachev, July 2015
90. Author interview with Nevzlin, July 2018