Propaganda and Collusion in the Trump-Russia Affair, Part 6
Propaganda and Collusion in the Trump-Russia Affair, Part 6
Vladimir Putin has an origin story. It's much seedier than you think.
“It’s enough that he let us leave.”
—An apparently relieved attendee on the July 2000 meeting between recently-elected president Vladimir Putin and Russia’s top oligarchs
The last part of this series focused on billionaire Oleg Deripaska, arguably the central figure in the Russiagate affair, and his roots in Russia’s criminal underworld. During the 1990s, he teamed up with a collection of mob and mob-adjacent figures to take over the bulk of the country’s aluminum industry. Deripaska maintains it was a forced partnership. But as we saw, the actual history of his dealings with these individuals appears to undermine his claim.
In time, Deripaska would exchange his patrons in the mafia for new ones in the Kremlin, most notably Vladimir Putin. During the latter’s presidency, Deripaska began working to advance Russia’s interests on the world stage. It was in his role as a Kremlin proxy that he would eventually undertake his scheme to compromise the presidency of Donald Trump.
But before we get to Deripaska’s foreign activities, we must first examine Russia’s emergence out of political anarchy to become the centralized dictatorship it is today. The kind of influence the Kremlin brought to bear on the 2016 U.S. presidential election was merely one part of a wider operation that was global in scope. A campaign of this sort would have been impossible under Boris Yeltsin, who preceded Putin as president (1991-99). It required a centralized state and regime able to corral toward a common purpose the feuding interests that ran wild in the 1990s.
Putin came to office in the wake of the USSR’s cataclysmic and humiliating collapse. It was a trauma both personal for Putin himself and collective for the nation writ large, one that left him determined to restore Russia to greatness. To do that, he needed to reassert the Kremlin’s control over the wayward oligarchs, regional governors, and security agencies whose power-grabs and internecine conflicts had so destabilized the country during the Yeltsin years.
This is the story of how he did it.
Time of Troubles
For most of its history, Russia has cycled between periods of chaos and disorder followed by brutal, centralized dictatorship. The Yeltsin era, much like the Time of Troubles (1598-1613) and the years of revolutionary crisis and civil war (1905-20), was a quintessential example of the former.
In the late 1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms set in motion a process which saw the economy collapse, the USSR dissolve, and, in late 1991, Russia become an independent country with Yeltsin at its head. By that point, Russia faced a multitude of overlapping crises.
The first was a crisis of the economy, which had completely collapsed, a situation that would persist through the end of Yeltsin’s presidency in 1999.
The second was a crisis of the state, which had lost its former monopoly on violence to innumerable criminal gangs and private security companies. That crisis, we saw in Part 5, would be resolved during the latter half of the 1990s, as the Russian state edged out rival violence-wielding organizations and reestablished its authority.
Still, the reconstitution of the state did nothing to solve the third crisis, which was one of regime, or the rules that determine who gets power and how. During the first post-Soviet decade, the centralized dictatorship that came to define the Putin era was a long way off. The state may have recovered its monopoly on the use of force, but the question of who controlled the state remained very much up for grabs. Yeltsin, as president, was merely one power-center among many vying for dominance.
First, there was the political opposition in Moscow, which bitterly opposed Yeltsin and continually endeavored to undermine him. Then there were the regional governors. This was a group Yeltsin had infamously won over during his onetime rivalry with Gorbachev by offering them “as much sovereignty as you can swallow.” The result was a massive devolution of power to the regions, many of which came to operate as independent countries in all but name.
There were also the oligarchs, a select group of businessmen whose support Yeltsin secured by letting them buy prized state companies for a song and control the levers of power in the Kremlin.
But there remained another faction too, one which had mostly been relegated to the fringes. It was a network of former KGB officers resentful over the fate that had befallen their country and themselves. They chafed over the loss of Russia’s superpower status. They also felt slighted in the contest for Soviet-era lucre and were itching for their due share of the spoils. As they saw it, their status as protectors of the motherland rendered them a superior class entitled to exclusive privileges. And yet here they were, forced to watch from the sidelines as the country’s best assets were stolen from under them by a group of scheming oligarchs whose loyalty to Russia was dubious on a good day.
Some of those oligarchs, in fact, had been hand-picked by the KGB old guard to amass wealth on their behalf and deploy it according to their directives. But in the years that followed the USSR’s collapse, they managed to free themselves from the tutelage of their former mentors—who, to their bitter dismay, found themselves languishing far behind their onetime protégés in the struggle for wealth and power.
One such oligarch was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had reportedly been set up in business by the KGB in the late-Soviet period. But by 1993 he had cast off whatever ties might have previously bound him to his erstwhile overseers. During the ensuing decade, Khodorkovsky used his connections in the Yeltsin administration to privatize an oil company for a ridiculously low sum. He would eventually become the richest person in Russia.
Needless to say, Khodorkovsky’s former KGB patrons were not pleased. In time, they would exact their revenge.
Although they lamented the loss of their status and influence, one thing they did have was money. They also retained their extensive networks both inside Russia and abroad. As Financial Times reporter Catherine Belton documents in her excellent book, Putin’s People, the KGB officers had stashed billions of dollars in assets abroad during the Soviet Union’s dying years. And they were waiting for an opportunity to reclaim what what was theirs.
Enter Putin
With Yeltsin in poor health and nearing the end of his final term as president, he and his oligarch allies had a problem. They had obtained their wealth through blatant theft, and everyone knew it. This left them in desperate need of a successor who could protect them from prosecution and allow them to keep their ill-gotten gains.
Given how politically-toxic they had become, however, any candidate they supported would necessarily be tainted by association and have little chance of winning an election—which, back then, still carried the real prospect of defeat for the incumbent. Their only move was to launch a hail-Mary and hope against hope that it worked.
That hail-Mary, it turned out, was Putin. Putin had once served as a junior KGB officer in Dresden during the Cold War. Although he officially retired from duty after the USSR’s collapse, he continued to work covertly on behalf of the old security apparatus. In fact, when he accepted a job as deputy to Anatoly Sobchak, the charismatic and reform-minded mayor of St. Petersburg, in June 1991, it was his KGB superiors who had allegedly secured him the post, Belton found.
Thereafter, Putin used his position in the mayor’s office to help an alliance of former KGB officers and the Tambov organized crime group take over the choicest parts of the local economy. It was a brutal and often bloody business, one at which he excelled.1
In 1996, Sobchak lost his bid for reelection, leaving Putin out of a job. It would not be long before he found gainful employment.
Within weeks, he was ushered to Moscow at the behest of Yeltsin’s team. Aware of his reputation as an effective yet loyal manager, they intended to groom him as the president’s successor. With stunning speed, he progressed through a series of increasingly prominent roles—deputy chief and then chief of the Presidential Property Management Department (March 1997-June 1998), head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the main successor agency to the KGB (July 1998-August 1999), and, finally, prime minister (August-December 1999).
Still, while they could appoint him to as many positions as they liked, making him electable was another matter. With his boss’s popularity ratings hovering in the single digits, transforming Putin into a popular politician seemed an impossible task.
A few of Putin’s KGB pals had an answer. To be sure, they detested Yeltsin for letting the Soviet Union collapse and relegating Russia to second-tier status. They despised the oligarchs for stealing what they saw as rightfully theirs to steal. They nevertheless knew that Putin was their ticket to winning power and were willing to do whatever it took to get him there.
The Plot
Unless you were paying attention at the time, it is hard to convey the sense of panic that gripped Russia in September 1999. I was a senior in college, dead-set on doing a PhD on post-communist politics and following events there obsessively. I vividly recall waking up each day and rushing to my doorstep to get the Financial Times, which, back then, was heads and shoulders above any other English-language outlet in the quality of its Russia coverage.
That month, large block-lettered headlines screamed forth news of a series of apartment blasts, two in Moscow and a third in the southern city of Volgodonsk. Giant residential buildings were reduced to rubble with hundreds dead and scores more injured.
Putin had just become Russia’s sixth prime minister in the previous fifteen months, a period marked by spiraling economic crisis, political instability, and Kremlin corruption scandals. At the time, he remained a virtual unknown. The apartment bombings would make his career.
Though officially blamed on Chechen terrorists, the explosions were almost certainly the work of Putin’s allies in the FSB. We know this because later that month, local police, tipped off by a witness, foiled an attempt by three FSB officers to blow up another building in Ryazan, a few hours southeast of Moscow. The staged attacks were an attempt to rally the public behind Putin to support his presidential campaign.
Incredibly, it worked. Ordinary Russians watched helplessly as a succession of apartment blocks, just like the ones most of them called home, were decimated, with nobody knowing where the supposed terrorists would strike next.
The public craved a strong leader, and Putin played the part to the hilt. In closely choreographed TV appearances that cast him as decisive and in control, he vowed to exact vengeance on the perpetrators, pledging to “wipe them out in the shithouse.” Under his direction, the military launched an invasion of Chechnya, the breakaway province in the southern Caucasus region where the “terrorists” were ostensibly based.
An ailing country had found its savior. On New Year’s Eve, 1999, Yeltsin resigned and appointed him interim president. By that point, Putin was by far the country’s most popular politician, his victory in the upcoming presidential election a foregone conclusion.
Putin Turns the Tables
Despite Putin’s overwhelming popular support, the oligarchs still assumed they could control him. It was they, after all, along with their allies in the Yeltsin administration, who had plucked him from obscurity and put him on the path to the presidency, a favor for which he would forever remain in their debt.
They could not have been more wrong. Putin’s loyalties—his very identity, in fact—lay not with Yeltsin or the oligarchs but his old KGB cronies. They were his community, his family, and together they formed an exclusive and superior class of men. Soon they would crush the undeserving billionaires for their crimes against the motherland and take back everything these impertinent bandits had stolen from them. Most importantly, they would restore Russia to its proper place as a global superpower.
The following anecdote, which Belton recounts in her book, is revealing—not just of their premeditated plan to install Putin as president but also the common identity they shared from their time in the KGB:
One evening in Moscow, soon after a financial crash that obliterated the Russian economy in August 1998, a small group of KGB officers and one American gathered for a private dinner. Among them were the former KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov; Robert Eringer, a former security chief for Monaco who’d dabbled as an informant for the FBI; and Igor Prelin, an aide to Kryuchkov and one of Putin’s senior lecturers at the Red Banner spy institute. According to Eringer, Prelin told the other guests that soon the KGB would return to power: ‘He said, “We know someone. You’ve never heard of him. We’re not going to tell you who it is, but he’s one of us, and when he’s president we’re back.”’
When the election finally took place, Putin won in a landslide. It would not be long before he made his agenda terrifyingly clear.
In June 2000, the Russian business scene was rocked by the sensational arrest of media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky, the only oligarch who had opposed Putin’s presidential campaign. In exchange for his freedom, he would be forced to sell his empire and leave the country.
Within weeks of Gusinsky’s arrest, the oligarchs, still shaken by the news, received an invitation to meet with the president. The location, they learned, was Stalin’s old dacha in the densely wooded forests outside Kuntsevo, near Moscow. It was the very place from where the Soviet dictator had once directed the annihilation of his enemies in the Great Purge, and you can bet it was chosen to send a message. While there, Putin informed the oligarchs that they could keep the assets they had stolen so long as they stayed out of politics.
There was a subtext, however: They were no longer in charge; Putin was. What’s more, their fortunes and very freedom could be eliminated in an instant.
They got the picture. “It’s enough that he let us leave,” one of the attendees commented afterward, according to Simon Shuster of TIME.
But not all of the oligarchs could bring themselves to accept the new arrangement. Two, in particular, refused to buckle. For this they would pay a heavy price.
In the months that followed, Boris Berezovsky, once one of Putin’s staunchest backers, began to harshly criticize the president both directly and through his media company. Like Gusinsky, he too would have to relinquish his assets and flee abroad. Most infamously, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the aforementioned billionaire who allegedly got his start thanks to the KGB’s support, also underestimated the new president. He was arrested and tried, had his oil company seized, and spent most of the ensuing decade in a Siberian labor camp.
In time, Putin would subjugate the regional governors too. Russia is a patchwork of nationalities, and official provinces such as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan bear the names of the titular groups who reside there. Thanks to centuries of genocide and ethnic cleansing, however, in few of these regions do the titular non-Russian communities make up a majority. Their bids for autonomy in the 1990s were driven more by power-hungry governors than popular movements.
This made it relatively easy for Putin to restore central control. It was a gradual process, but with the security apparatus and prosecutor’s office in his hands, he faced little resistance from provincial leaders. By 2004, the Russian parliament, itself now under the president’s thumb, abolished direct elections for governors, giving Putin the ability to appoint his own supplicants in their place.
By subduing violence-wielding actors such as the Chernoys,2 the Russian state had finally reemerged. By bringing the oligarchs, governors, and security agencies to heel, its autocracy had, too. Both developments were prerequisites for the global influence operations Putin’s regime would carry out in the coming years.
The anarchic conflicts within and between these groups had been a defining feature of the Yeltsin era. But now, all three had been successfully tamed and could work toward a singular goal: Subverting the West and reasserting Russia’s imperial power. The fact that their members continued pursuing their own agendas, while true, is beside the point. Whether they hail from the criminal underworld, private business, or the security state, they can be called upon at any moment to undertake “active measures” at the Kremlin’s behest.
Deripaska, for his part, was smart enough to recognize the new reality. He publicly pledged his loyalty to the president from the get-go. With Putin firmly in charge and bent on renewing Russia’s global dominance, it was only a matter of time before Deripaska was summoned to help undermine the Kremlin’s number-one geopolitical foe.
How he came to do so is a story that remains to be told. Next time, we will examine the evidence that Deripaska acts as a Kremlin-proxy and look at his various activities to this effect around the world.
Other entries in this series:
Propaganda and Collusion in the Trump-Russia Affair, Part 1
Propaganda and Collusion in the Trump-Russia Affair, Part 2
Propaganda and Collusion in the Trump-Russia Affair, Part 3
Propaganda and Collusion in the Trump-Russia Affair, Part 4
Propaganda and Collusion in the Trump-Russia Affair, Part 5
Propaganda and Collusion in the Trump-Russia Affair, Part 7
Propaganda and Collusion in the Trump-Russia Affair, Part 8
For more on this, see the extraordinary book, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? by the late political scientist, Karen Dawisha
You will recall the Chernoys from Part 5 as Oleg Deripaska’s patrons to whom he owed his start in the aluminum business.