The Russia Conundrum

Patrushev is now approaching 50 years in the security services, having begun his KGB career in the 1970s. After succeeding Putin as director of the FSB in 1999, he held the post until 2008, when he was appointed secretary of the Security Council of Russia and makes no secret of his admiration for Putin, whom he described as ‘a true statesman and a representative of the country’s strategic elite, who put national interests above all else.’ Under Patrushev’s watch, the FSB achieved Andropov’s dream of placing its people across all sectors of government and business, with the result that the bureau has been able to play a decisive role in removing politicians who pose a threat to the leadership, strangling the media and neutralising those who push for transparency in public life. Even Patriarch Kirill, the servile head of the Russian Orthodox Church who relentlessly instructs the faithful to support Putin, is rumoured to be a former KGB agent. In return for his unwavering loyalty, Kirill is invited on skiing holidays with the president and has appeared in public wearing bejewelled watches worth tens of thousands of dollars.

Because Putin’s Kremlin today is so stuffed with hardline anti- liberals, it can be tempting to assume it has always been so. But as noted above, when Putin came to power, he inherited Boris Yeltsin’s team of ministers and officials, who were overwhelmingly reformers. Putin’s first government was led by the pro-Western Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and most of its members shared his political views. But the team Putin brought with him from St Petersburg were preponderantly KGB men who coalesced into the Siloviki clique and very soon came into conflict with the Kremlin liberals. The battleground on which they clashed was the economy, specifically the results of Yeltsin’s privatisation programme of the 1990s. Igor Sechin and the other Siloviki argued that the privatised industries should be renationalised as a signal that the era of liberal free enterprise was over and that the state would henceforth call the shots. The liberals, led by Kasyanov, continued to fight for a free market and economic integration with the West; they argued that wealthy businessmen were a natural part of a properly functioning economy. But by 2003, their opponents were gaining the upper hand.

As I would soon find out.

CHAPTER 9

PUTIN UNBOUND

The arrest of Yukos’s head of security, Alexei Pichugin, in June 2003 and then our chief executive, Platon Lebedev, in July was a declaration of intent. Putin had taken offence at my denunciation of official corruption at our February meeting in the Kremlin; he disapproved of our plans to take Yukos on to the world stage in partnership with the Americans and he was alarmed by reports – not all of them accurate – that I was planning to go into politics to champion a pro-Western, liberal democracy. The fact that Putin opted to arrest my colleagues rather than come directly for me indicated that there were still some restraining influences in the Kremlin, that the old-guard liberals who shared my commitment to free-market democracy were still striving to mitigate the predations of the Siloviki.

It has been suggested that Putin was giving me a warning, hoping to persuade me to back down over Yukos’s collaboration with the Americans and eat a good helping of humble pie. This was something I was not prepared to do. It would have meant renouncing everything I stood for – the freedom to conduct business, to express independent views, to stand against the restrictive, stultifying model of xenophobic autocracy that Russia was being drawn into; and it would have meant abandoning my comrades who were now bearing the brunt of Putin’s anger. Pichugin and Lebedev were in jail, later to be joined there by another eight Yukos employees, and our lawyers were being physically threatened by the FSB. The pressure was being ratcheted up and there was much anxiety among Yukos employees and their families.

Meanwhile, Pichugin had been transferred to the infamous Lefortovo interrogation centre, where he was pressured to give false testimony implicating the Yukos management in plots to intimidate business rivals. Pichugin refused to perjure himself, so the interrogators injected him with a psychotropic drug that left him disoriented and confused. Despite all the intimidation, the Kremlin was unable to substantiate any of its allegations. When the Moscow Basmanny Court announced that proceedings in the Pichugin case would be held behind closed doors and that defence lawyers would be barred from revealing the contents of the hearings, over a hundred members of the Russian parliament signed a petition of protest, something that would be hard to imagine today. It was becoming a very public dispute with battle lines drawn on both sides.