The Russia Conundrum

How did Russia come to this? As we know, Putin and almost his entire inner circle are former KGB/FSB men, a secretive, closed caste, a tightknit clan that ‘protects its own’ and resolves disputes ‘in house’. The template was already there; but back in Soviet times the KGB was reined in by its subservience to Party control and the demands of communist ideology. In some areas, the KGB was pretty effective, such as its work in intelligence and counterintelligence conducted by ideologically committed people. In other areas, such as the bureau’s regional networks, things weren’t quite so rosy, but in general the system worked. With the difficult perestroika years of the late 1980s, though, the KGB consolidated its links to organised crime. They moved into racketeering and drugs, smuggling illegal goods, seizing people’s property, but they had to be quite careful because the state apparatus was still functioning: the security forces didn’t yet control the institutions of civil society, the courts and the Prosecutor’s Office, so they could still be called to account with serious consequences. But once Putin came to power, they were in clover.

Putin himself never got very far in his KGB career. He spent his time in middle-ranking posts and even his top job, as director of the Soviet cultural mission in Dresden, was a disappointment. The real shift in his fortunes happened once he had endeared himself to the pro- perestroika mayor of St Petersburg, and under his guidance the city was turned into a stronghold for organised crime, with its historic port acting as the principal gateway for huge volumes of drug-trafficking.

In 1992, Putin was in charge of a deal to trade raw materials for supplies of food that were urgently needed by the hard-pressed St Petersburg population. An official commission of inquiry, led by the St Petersburg deputy Marina Salye, would later discover that the raw materials were duly handed over, with documents bearing Putin’s signature, but that the food did not arrive. The money paid for the raw materials, reportedly $100 million, was never found. The deputies demanded Putin’s resignation and called for him to be brought to justice, but the findings of the investigation were ignored. In 2001, after Putin had become president, Marina Salye fled from St Petersburg to a village 400 kilometres away, explaining that she was leaving because she was ‘in fear for her life’.

Another investigation, closed ‘for lack of evidence’ during Putin’s time as prime minister, involved the activities of a St Petersburg construction company called Twentieth Trust, which appeared to investigators to have been the beneficiary of substantial funds from the city budget, despite being in debt and close to bankruptcy. No explanation was given for why the company received such favourable treatment, but the former Investigator for Serious Crimes in the Fight against Corruption, Lieutenant Colonel Andrei Zykov, later alleged after he had been removed from office that Twentieth Trust had built a dacha for Putin on the outskirts of the city and a villa in Spain. Twentieth Trust is today under different ownership and management.

Many of those involved in the corrupt world of St Petersburg in the 1990s would later rise to prominence in Putin’s Kremlin, following the mafia principle that the family looks after its own. Politicians who were foolish enough to attempt to expose the corruption found themselves threatened.

As president, Putin has not only continued to rely on this model of governance, he has taken it to new levels. He rules through patronage, personal connections, corruption and the brazen manipulation of the state apparatus. So, if you want to get an important post, you have to be anointed into the mafia clan – you have to show that you know how to elicit bribes, how to steal and pass on the cut to the bosses upstairs. And even then, you’re not safe. As soon as they have got what they wanted from you – or if you fail to carry out their orders – you may find yourself arrested on trumped up charges and facing jail.

Of course, Putin’s system of rule through cronyism and personal patronage isn’t new. Tsars as far back as Ivan the Terrible ran Russia as a capricious autocracy, with the tsar at the top, the people at the bottom, and no effective civic institutions to mediate power and justice between them. The tsar simply appointed his favourites – corrupt, often uneducated men, who gained advancement through connections and grift – to positions where they wielded unchecked authority over justice, taxes and daily life. The system was known as kormlenie – literally ‘feeding’ – because the appointee would receive no salary, but he would have the right to enrich himself from the cashflow his position generated, taking his cut from the money raised from the people. It was an unfettered licence to steal from the country and its people, and it fostered resentment and unrest.