Putin

On April 5, 2016, Russian president Vladimir Putin did a most extraordinary thing—with the stroke of a pen he created his own personal army, 400,000 strong. To be known as the National Guard (and also as Rosguard), it will be staffed largely by troops from the Interior Ministry, including the fearsome OMON a mix of SWAT and riot police. Possessing nine battle tanks, thirty-five artillery pieces, twenty-nine airplanes, and seventy helicopters, the National Guard will be about half the size of Russia’s regular army and among the world’s ten largest. The guard was created by presidential decree without a scintilla of public discussion or debate, but, as one Russian commentator waggishly put it: “As is often the case in Russia, the creation of the National Guard was long anticipated, and therefore, caught everyone by surprise.”

Unlike any other part of the Russian administration from agriculture to space, the National Guard will not report to a minister but directly to Putin himself and so has already been dubbed Putin’s Praetorian Guard. Putin, of course, remains commander in chief of Russia’s armed forces, but as such he has to contend with an array of strong-minded generals and admirals, not to mention the highly popular minister of defense.

The National Guard is unique in reporting directly to Putin, and the man who will lead the National Guard and do that reporting, Viktor Zolotov, is considered unique in his loyalty to Putin. Whether based on demonstrated trust or complicity in crime or the acquisition of wealth, loyalty has always been of the essence for Putin. In a Darwinian society only loyalty stands as a bulwark against greed and violent ambition.

“When it comes to President Vladimir Putin’s personal trust, Viktor Zolotov has no peers,” wrote Mikhail Fishman in a Moscow Times article, “A Bigger Bludgeon.” Zolotov has all the basic characteristics to pass Stage One of Putin’s Loyalty Test. They are both from the same city, Leningrad, and from the working class, and they are of the same generation, less than two years apart in age. They even look somewhat alike, with very Russian blue-gray eyes that stare intently and allow no entry. Most important, they are both former KGB, and as Putin is wont to remark, there is no such thing as that.

Stage Two of Putin’s Loyalty Test is prolonged, close contact, especially in sharp and sudden situations when there is no time to dissemble and true colors come out. His relationship with Zolotov goes back to the early 1990s, when Zolotov was assigned to head up the bodyguard for the mayor of St. Petersburg and his deputy, Vladimir Putin, recently returned from five years of KGB service abroad in Dresden. Zolotov became Putin’s sparring partner in boxing and judo, attempting to punch or flip him when he was not ensuring his safety.

Between 2000 and 2013 Zolotov was chief of security for the president and the prime minister of Russia, both of which offices Putin would occupy in that time. Little is known about Zolotov, as befits a secret service chief, yet there are fascinating and ominous glimpses of him in Comrade J, the memoirs of Colonel Sergei Tretyakov, who ran foreign intelligence for Russia in the United States after the end of the Cold War.

Newly elected president Vladimir Putin was scheduled to attend the UN Millennium Summit in New York in the first week of September 2000. The deputy head of Putin’s advance team Aleksandr Lunkin was an old friend of Colonel Tretyakov’s, and pumped Tretyakov for information about Zolotov. Lunkin recounted a conversation between Zolotov and an associate trying to decide which of Putin’s rivals and enemies should be assassinated to better secure the new president’s hold on power. Methods were discussed—how to make the killings look like a Mafia hit or the work of a Chechen terrorist. But one killing would necessitate another, the targets ranging from political figures to members of the press corps who might investigate the crimes. After much serious consideration, Zolotov concluded: “There are too many. It’s too many to kill—even for us.”

When, Zolotov himself, accompanied by a general, arrived in New York for a final security review, Colonel Tretyakov took the three of them to the popular Tatiana Café in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. There Zolotov bragged about the superiority of the Russian secret service—its use of multiple armored limousines in a motorcade so an assassin wouldn’t know which one bore the president, the quality of the weapons used by his “Men in Black,” so called because of their black suits and black sunglasses. Those weapons included Gyurza pistols whose magazines contained eighteen bullets that could penetrate bulletproof vests from more than fifty yards away and also portable “Wasp” rocket launchers. Each man in the presidential guard was also an expert in martial arts, added Zolotov, and could kill with a single blow.