Killer in the Kremlin, page 4
I moaned that, as a storyteller, I love the story of Vova Putin the bastard so much I want it to be true.
Rayfield: ‘I’m sorry to spoil the story. There’s sufficient proof that he was born in wedlock. The third son, but the only one who survived. There’s enough evidence of his youth from the old men who grew up with him as boys in the yard where he played.’
The non-bastard version continues that Vera’s real son, Vladimir Platonovich Putin, became an oil worker in Siberia and is thought to have died some years ago.
Rayfield knows his Russia. And in my forty years as a reporter, more, the perfect story never quite rings true. That said, there is something unexplained about Putin’s origins before he was five years old. The truth remains murky and that comes as standard throughout the whole story, because he is a man who starts in the shadows as an infant and he never leaves them.
Vova the boy is nasty, brutish and short. His mother is traumatized by the loss of her first two sons; his father by his war wounds and the state’s failure to properly look after him or his family. Putin ‘was born into this atmosphere of hunger, disability and profound grief’ is how psychotherapist Joseph Burgo put it in The Atlantic.
He grows up in Soviet Leningrad in the 1960s; few streets, in those bleak days, meaner in the whole world. They lived in a fifth-floor apartment with two other families in grim conditions. Vera Dmitrievna Gurevich was Putin’s schoolteacher: ‘They had a horrid apartment. It was communal, without any conveniences. And it was so cold, just awful, and the stairway had a freezing metal handrail. The stairs weren’t safe either, there were gaps everywhere.’ And the facilities? ‘There was no hot water, no bathtub. The toilet was horrendous.’
Decades on, the democracy activist Alexei Navalny releases an extraordinary video, Putin’s Palace, which has had 123 million views on YouTube and counting. The film is about a billion-dollar palace that Putin’s cronies built for him on the shores of the Black Sea. One of the most extraordinary revelations by Team Navalny is that the palace has gold toilet brushes each worth €780. Any normal human being would be revolted by such pitiful extravagance, but not perhaps if you were brought up using a toilet that gave your schoolteacher the shivers.
Putin tells a story about rat-hunting in First Person, his ghosted autobiography released in 2000 to give some flesh to the grey character who had suddenly emerged from the gloom of the secret state. All ghosted autobiographies are unsatisfactory, but they often disclose more about the subject than they might realize. His block of flats was infested with rats, some of which even turned on their tormentors. Putin’s ghost writes: ‘There, on that stair landing, I got a quick and lasting lesson in the meaning of the word “cornered”. There were hordes of rats in the front entryway. My friends and I used to chase them around with sticks. Once I spotted a huge rat and pursued it down the hall until I drove it into a corner. It had nowhere to run. Suddenly it lashed around and threw itself at me. I was surprised and frightened. Now the rat was chasing me. It jumped across the landing and down the stairs. Luckily, I was a little faster and I managed to slam the door on its nose.’
Killing rats with a stick is inefficient. The best way of killing them is to use rat poison. Perhaps this is the moment when Putin became seduced by the power of venom. Leastways, it is striking that so many of his enemies end up being poisoned and as his grip on power becomes stronger, the rat poison becomes more and more expensive, the chemistry more fiendishly complicated. But the method remains the same.
His mother did various poorly paid jobs: caretaking, delivering bread at night, washing laboratory test tubes by hand; his dad made train carriages in a factory, his earning capacity limited by his disability. Putin the boy was small, even for those ill-nourished days, slight, and left to fend for himself for much of the time. But pretty soon he earned a reputation for punching – or kicking or biting – above his weight. In 2015 he gave an interview in which he said: ‘If a fight is inevitable you have to throw the first punch.’
Did Young Vova get mixed up with gangsters by any chance?
Zarina Zabrisky is a Russian novelist, now living in exile in the United States after the Russian authorities deemed her a terrorist. Her hobby is researching Vladimir Putin’s gangster past. ‘Around the age of twelve or thirteen, he gets deeply into martial arts in Leningrad (St Petersburg). He learns judo and sambo.’
Sambo is a Russian combination word meaning ‘self-defence without weapons’, originally developed by the Soviet secret police and the Red Army in the 1930s. One of its founders spent years in Japan but died in the Gulag during Stalin’s Great Terror, suspected, falsely, of being a Japanese spy. Putin’s coach at the Leningrad martial arts club was a gangster, says Zabrisky: ‘he trained under Leonid “The Sportsman” Usvyatsov, who was a professional wrestler, a stuntman and an organized crime group boss. He had two convictions for currency fraud and group rape and spent almost twenty years in prison.’ On his gravestone, his epitaph reads: ‘I’m dead but the mafiya is immortal.’
Many of the friends Putin made in the martial arts club are still part of his gang now and, guess what, some of them are billionaires. There is one more aspect to young Putin which requires some study, his sexuality, but we shall look at that down the track.
So many of Putin’s preoccupations as master of the Kremlin are, or appear to have been, stamped by his childhood: the old gangster as role model; the habit of staying in the shadows; and a passion for killing things.
This, then, is the childhood story of the man who would become the tsar of all the rats.
CHAPTER THREE
Once and Future Spy
Leo ‘The Sportsman’ Usvyatsov used his connections to get Putin, a student from a poor family, into university on an athletics scholarship. Putin mastered German and some English, studying law at Leningrad State University, graduating in 1975. There, one of his professors was Anatoly Sobchak, who would re-emerge in 1991 as the mayor of St Petersburg and Putin’s democratic mentor. His thesis at university was on ‘The Most Favoured Nation Trading Principle in International Law’, ditchwater-dull stuff but noteworthy because of the subject.
In 1975 Putin joined the KGB, training at the 401st KGB school in Okhta, Leningrad. For many young Russians, getting into ‘The Organs’, the heart of the Soviet secret state, was a ticket out of poverty. The KGB training programme was as brutal as it was intense, a mixture of brainwashing and tuition in the dark arts of killing and psychological manipulation. Chris Donnelly, the senior adviser on Russia to four Secretaries General of NATO, now retired, told me a grim story he believes is true. It’s hard to verify but it goes like this: ‘KGB trainees were given an Alsatian puppy at the start of their training. At the end, to graduate, the trainees were required to strangle their own dogs with their bare hands.’
Top-flight graduates got postings in New York, Paris or Rome. Putin was clearly not rated very highly by the bosses because his first proper job was monitoring foreigners and consular officials in Leningrad. That is, the man who wanted to spy on the world was posted to his home town.
He wasn’t very good. The psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman explained that he has a woman friend whom Putin tried to recruit as a KGB informer back in the day when he was a runt working in Leningrad. His approach was dogged, unsubtle and maladroit, so much so that the woman ended up despising him, not just because he was KGB, but so clumsily KGB. The officers Semyon tangled with during his time in the Gulag were of higher grade.
The feeling you get from his later chit-chat was that he was too boring, too small-minded to become a top-flight spook. Putin once said he could not read a book by a Soviet defector because ‘I don’t read books by people who have betrayed the Motherland.’
That would rule out, say, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of the definitive books about the Gulag, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago. The author was a brave artillery officer in the Soviet Army fighting in East Prussia in 1945 when he wrote a private letter to a friend criticizing Stalin. The letter got intercepted by the secret police. From his cell in the Lubyanka, Solzhenitsyn recalled Victory Day in 1945: ‘Above the muzzle of our window, and from all the other cells of the Lubyanka, and from all the windows of the Moscow prisons, we too, former prisoners of war and former front-line soldiers, watched the Moscow heavens, patterned with fireworks and criss-crossed with beams of searchlights. There was no rejoicing in our cells and no hugs and no kisses for us. That victory was not ours.’ He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and lived in exile in Vermont in the United States.
More than any other pieces of writing, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago nail the inhumanity of the Soviet project. To take pride in rejecting great works of literature and documentary history because of their lack of political loyalty to the state shows that, however street-wise and gangster-savvy Putin may be, he has a small mind and that a great intelligence officer does not make.
Nothing about this stage of Putin’s life suggests that he was ever cut out for the Kremlin, not even the woman who became his first wife. Putin’s ghosted book, First Person, records the story of his first date with Lyudmila, an Aeroflot hostess. It’s not exactly love at first sight. In her words, ‘Volodya was standing on the steps of the ticket office. He was very … poorly dressed. He looked very unprepossessing. I wouldn’t have paid any attention to him on the street.’
They were married in 1983, a good career move for him. The KGB liked its officers to marry early. It meant that they had another set of eyes on the officer and some kind of leverage, through family, if he was ever tempted to defect.
A slow developer, Putin learnt to hide his frustration at his early lack of success skilfully. His first posting outside of Russia was a second disappointment. He was sent to Dresden in Communist East Germany, working from a grey villa on Angelikastrasse, in a fancy part of town overlooking the River Elbe, directly opposite the local HQ of the Stasi, the East German secret police. The film The Lives of Others is the best single take on the Stasi, how it graded and degraded the human soul. In Dresden, its files on the local population would, if laid end to end, have stretched seven miles.
In their coruscating 2012 biography of Putin, Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen wrote: ‘Putin and his colleagues were reduced mainly to collecting press clippings, thus contributing to the mountains of useless information produced by the KGB.’
Catherine Belton is a brilliant British journalist, originally from Rainhill, Liverpool. She and her publisher HarperCollins were variously sued by Roman Abramovich, other Russian oligarchs and the energy company Rosneft for her 2020 book, Putin’s People. After expensive battles in and out of the London law courts for her and her publisher, Belton corrected some piffling errors whereupon Abramovich and the other litigants ran away, very much like the knights run away in the last scene of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Belton sets out the evidence that the press-clipping story was a cunning cover to mask Putin’s serious job of funding terrorism against West Germany by supporting the Red Army Faction, a far-left group responsible for multiple murders, kidnappings and bomb outrages. The RAF, also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, was a death cult in love with a gibberish unreality, that West Germany was Nazi, while neo-Stalinist East Germany was a place of virtue. Belton’s evidence for her story that Putin helped run the RAF is based on subtle deduction and testimony from anonymous sources. They say that the Baader-Meinhof people presented Putin with a shopping list of weapons which were then delivered to them in West Germany, that Putin tried to recruit an author of a study on poisons, that he ran a neo-Nazi agent. None of this is 100 per cent proven fact, but Belton is a journalistic rock star and her work is darkly fascinating.
Putin’s collaboration with the Stasi won him a bronze medal in 1987 from the East German security service. Not silver, not gold: the next level up, said one source, from the lowest award of all.
He made some useful friends in the East German secret police, one of whom might be Matthias Warnig, a former Stasi agent who had spied on his fellow Germans, his cover names being ‘Arthur’, ‘Economist’ and ‘Hans-Detlef’. Warnig and Putin deny knowing each other at this time, but a Stasi snap shows the two men on a joint visit to the 1st Guards Tank Army in Dresden in 1989. After the fall of the Berlin Wall that November, Warnig stops being a neo-Stalinist secret policeman and becomes a banker, pops up in Russia and befriends – or renews his friendship – with Putin. Years later Warnig becomes the German front man for the Nord Stream project, gas pipelines running from Russia underneath the North Sea to Germany. It’s a pipeline and it’s a cosh, both at the same time. Nord Stream pipelines sidestep the previous supply routes which benefited the transit countries in Eastern Europe. If the Kremlin was minded, it could cut off gas to those countries until they showed their fealty to the Russian President. No wonder Putin is content with Warnig running the show. The German has pooh-poohed such talk: ‘I’m not a Kremlin mouthpiece. And I don’t report to the Kremlin, either, or have cozy chats about what goes on there.’ The former Stasi man of course denies any wrongdoing.
While Putin was in Dresden – either compiling piles of paper or running a terrorist group by proxy – the Soviet Empire was falling to pieces around his ears. Come the fall of the Berlin Wall, Putin found himself feeding file after KGB file into the boiler in the basement of his office building until it cracked, broken by too much heat.
There were three big reasons for the death of the Soviet Union. The first was the fall-out from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Soviet generals knew that war in Afghanistan would be a terrible mistake, but the defence minister dared not say so to then leader, Leonid Brezhnev. So the tanks rolled – shades, once again, of 2022. Perhaps as many as two million Afghans were killed and 15,000 Russian soldiers died, to be returned home in zinc-lined coffins, so called Zincy Boys, or, from the standard weight of an adult male corpse, 200 kg, ‘Cargo 200’.
The war drained the Soviet Union of blood, of treasure, of moral purpose – until it was a bleached-white corpse.
The second great catastrophe exploded on 26 April 1986 at Chernobyl in Soviet Ukraine. The engineers at Number 4 RBMK reactor were ordered to carry out a test-shutdown. Instead of shutting down, the reactor blew up, showering Europe with radiation. The engineers were tried for the failure. But there was something critically wrong with the reactor design, something that had been hushed up after a near-tragic accident in Russia. The engineers at the station were blamed for a fault in the entire Soviet system. Readers who want to know more should check out the brilliant HBO drama series, Chernobyl, and the beautifully written book by the Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl.
The third failure happened over decades but came to a head in the 1990s. The Communist command economy could not compete with the West’s free markets. The late American satirist, P.J. O’Rourke, put it pithily when he said: ‘Ronald Reagan may have been a bit ga-ga, but he understood that a country which bans the Xerox photocopier and the fax machine cannot win over a country that creates them.’
The Soviet Union could not afford to feed or house or care for its people, so it started to implode. Putin, the secret policeman in Dresden, never properly grasped the power of these three failures. His tragedy – our tragedy – was that he had no first-hand knowledge of the three catastrophes. He was too high up in the secret police food chain to be sent to Chernobyl; too pathetically low to be sent to the fag-end of the failing war in Afghanistan; let alone to the fleshpots of the West where he would have seen the stark evidence of how ordinary people in New Jersey or New Brighton in the Wirral lived so much better than in Moscow, let alone Omsk or Tomsk. He never saw the comparative evidence of Soviet economic failure with his own eyes or, if he did, he was too brainwashed to understand what he was looking at.
Instead, from the bowels of Stasiland, he came to internalize a dark nonsense, that his country’s collapse was due to Western trickery and domestic betrayal, rather than the simple facts that the Soviet Union had run out of cash and self-belief and purpose. It was a failed state, just like the Kaiser’s Germany became a failed state after it launched its own stupid war in 1914. Like Hitler in 1923, Putin from 1991 onwards breathed a poisonous fiction, that his country had been wronged, that it ‘had been stabbed in the back’. In truth, it fell apart because it had been wrong, it had stabbed itself in the front, three times over.
Vladimir Putin is not, I believe, mad, for the reasons my friend the psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman set out to me four days before the 2022 invasion. But Putin’s understanding of the world is maddeningly narrow, reduced to a gloomy tunnel vision, locked into a false narrative of betrayal. He once declared the fall of the Soviet Union ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’.
What?
Worse than the First and Second World Wars? Worse than the Holocaust? The Soviet Union was, in reality, a dark totalitarian dictatorship under Stalin that slowly morphed into a gloomy senility.
With his tail between his legs, Putin in 1991 headed back from Dresden to St Petersburg – the old, new name for Leningrad – doing bits and bobs for the Russian secret state, spying on students, recruiting new candidates for the KGB, running errands, marking time.
President Mikhail Gorbachev was struggling hard to make sense of the Soviet Union’s catastrophic internal contradictions when in August 1991, while on holiday, he fell victim to a coup. A gang of sclerotic KGB officers and army generals set out to kill off the democratic mood of glasnost and perestroika, locked up Gorby in his holiday villa and switched off Russian TV news to be replaced by a film of Swan Lake, on repeat.
