Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? - Softcover

Dawisha, Karen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476795207 ISBN 13: 9781476795201

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2015

Synopsis

The raging question in the world today is who is the real Vladimir Putin and what are his intentions. Karen Dawisha’s brilliant Putin’s Kleptocracy provides an answer, describing how Putin got to power, the cabal he brought with him, the billions they have looted, and his plan to restore the Greater Russia.

Russian scholar Dawisha describes and exposes the origins of Putin’s kleptocratic regime. She presents extensive new evidence about the Putin circle’s use of public positions for personal gain even before Putin became president in 2000. She documents the establishment of Bank Rossiya, now sanctioned by the US; the rise of the Ozero cooperative, founded by Putin and others who are now subject to visa bans and asset freezes; the links between Putin, Petromed, and “Putin’s Palace” near Sochi; and the role of security officials from Putin’s KGB days in Leningrad and Dresden, many of whom have maintained their contacts with Russian organized crime.

Putin’s Kleptocracy is the result of years of research into the KGB and the various Russian crime syndicates. Dawisha’s sources include Stasi archives; Russian insiders; investigative journalists in the US, Britain, Germany, Finland, France, and Italy; and Western officials who served in Moscow. Russian journalists wrote part of this story when the Russian media was still free. “Many of them died for this story, and their work has largely been scrubbed from the Internet, and even from Russian libraries,” Dawisha says. “But some of that work remains.”

About this title

About the Author:

Karen Dawisha is the Walter E. Havighurst Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and the director of the University’s Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies. She has written five previous books, eight edited volumes, and numerous journal articles, and continues to do research and teaching in the areas of post-communist transitions and Russian politics.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Putin’s Kleptocracy Chapter One

The USSR at the Moment of Collapse

IN DECEMBER 2012, in a judicial hearing in London into the death of Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former operative for the Russian FSB who for some time had been a virulent critic of President Vladimir Putin, Hugh Davies, the counsel to the inquest, stated that evidence possessed by the British government established “a prima facie case in the culpability of the Russian state in the death of Alexander Litvinenko.”1 In July 2014, as relations with Russia deteriorated, British prime minister David Cameron announced he would let the public inquest proceed. At the center of the inquiry was a claim by Litvinenko’s widow that, at the time of his 2006 death by polonium-210 poisoning, he was providing evidence to Spanish authorities about “Russian mafia links to the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin.”2

The inquest pointed to the tangled web of relations between the Russian state and the mafia, relations that were known to Western governments and much discussed in U.S. cables released by Wikileaks. In particular, a series of events in Spain underlined what had become an interlocking network of associations and clan-based politics centered on Putin. First there was the arrest in Spain in 2008 of the reputed leaders of the St. Petersburg–based Tambov-Malyshev organized crime group,I including Gennadiy Petrov and Aleksandr Malyshev. Then there was the warrant for the arrest of Vladislav Reznik, who was the cochairman of the ruling United Russia Party and chairman of the Duma’s Finance Committee.3, II Finally, there was the revelation that Communications Minister Leonid Reyman owned a beachfront house in the same resort in Majorca as Petrov, who introduced him to potential Spanish partners, and that Reyman himself was under investigation by Spanish authorities.5

All those under investigation in Spain came from St. Petersburg, and all were close associates of Putin, as they rose up together from the early 1990s onward. This incident goes to the heart of whether, as Spanish prosecutors stated in classified briefings to U.S. and other Western governments, made public via Wikileaks, Russia under Putin had become a virtual “mafia state”6 in which state structures operate hand in glove with criminal structures to their mutual benefit, with the mafia operating within guidelines established by top Kremlin elites for the purpose of strengthening Putin’s hold on power, silencing critics, and maximizing mutual economic benefits.

Briefing U.S. officials behind closed doors, the Spanish prosecutor called Russia, Chechnya, and Belarus “mafia states” and stated that in such countries “one cannot differentiate between the activities of the government and OC [organized crime] groups.” Further, the security services “control OC in Russia. . . . The FSB is ‘absorbing’ the Russia mafia” and using them for black operations as a price for operating on Russian territory. But at the same time, the prosecutor told U.S. officials, Russian organized crime responds to pressure by taking advantage of “the corruption of high-level ministers.” Extensive wiretaps showed that these Russian organized crime leaders had a “ ‘dangerously close’ level of contact with senior Russian officials.”7 The secret cable reported Spanish press allegations that the Spanish government had compiled a list of Russian procurators, senior military officers, and politicians, including current and former ministers, who were involved with Petrov and Russian organized crime. The list included at least four sitting ministers, including the Russian minister of defense at that time, Anatoliy Serdyukov, who was notable for his “very close ties” to Petrov.8 The cable that was released also referenced other classified lists of compromised officials that were not part of the Wikileaks documents but indicate that the U.S. government has had a very specific idea of the officials involved in links between the Russian government and Russian organized crime since at least 2008.III

The questions arising from this fascinating story are many: What kind of system has Putin created? When did these plans emerge? Who is at the center of them along with Putin? What kind of control does Putin have over the plans themselves? I suggest that the antidemocratic and politically illiberal aspects of the plans were present from the beginning, as were the efforts to create a liberal economic system that would allow Russians to enjoy the fruits of their labors more than at any time in their history. The plan was always that those closest to power would be in a position to enjoy those fruits on an unprecedented scale. The story starts when the Soviet Union was still standing, if declining, in the 1970s and 1980s.

Beginning in the 1970s, when the Soviet leadership started to enter the world economy to sell oil in exchange for technology (some of it bought illegally at high prices) and grain to offset the structural problems in their own economy, they began to accumulate funds in hard currency abroad. Conflicts in the Middle East quadrupled the price of oil in the 1970s, thus massively increasing the amounts in Soviet overseas accounts. These accounts were under the strict day-to-day control of the KGB and were used to fund foreign operations, underwrite friendly parties and movements, and purchase goods for import. The strategic decisions about how the money would be spent were made by the Communist Party hierarchy, while the KGB was in charge of implementation. However, under Soviet president Mikhayl Gorbachev there is reason to think that the KGB declined to repatriate funds and only increased the economic crisis of a leadership in which they had no confidence. Indeed even more funds began to flood out of the USSR in the late 1980s for safekeeping abroad. As one well-placed Russian cooperative owner observed in 1989, “The West thinks the KGB is gone. They [the KGB] are no longer concerned with investigating people, but they are very involved in destabilizing perestroika. Last week the KGB created a new division of forty agents to do nothing but start joint ventures with Western firms. This is their experimental sociological work. If the crowds rush in tomorrow to kill Gorbachev, the KGB will do nothing because they are concentrating on their scientific experiments.”9

When the newly elected Russian president Boris Yel’tsin banned the CPSU after the failed 1991 August coup against Gorbachev, the CPSU’s guidance ceased, and the control over this vast mountain of foreign money fell to KGB agents who had access to foreign operations and accounts. Some of the money stayed abroad and disappeared, but when the USSR collapsed and assets became available for purchase inside the country, this money was available for investment to those who controlled the accounts. Thus were born, it is estimated, most of Russia’s oligarchs and commercial banks. By the early 1990s KGB veterans who knew the details of these accounts needed like-minded officials in key positions who could help control who would get to invest in Russia and who would not.10 For this they found willing allies among the KGB and Party veterans who flooded into the new cooperative movement in the late 1980s11 and who then sought to build capitalism, enrich themselves, and control market entry. Among these was the rather more junior KGB official Vladimir Putin. And in trying to control what kind of economy would emerge, they were up against a formidable and historic collapse.

Some people visualize Russia in the late 1990s as a country that went through a “Wild West” period, or something similar to Al Capone’s reign in Chicago. But in 1999 a prominent expert stated in testimony before the U.S. Congress:

For the U.S. to be like Russia is today, it would be necessary to have massive corruption by the majority of the members of Congress as well as by the Departments of Justice and Treasury, and agents of the FBI, CIA, DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency], IRS, Marshal Service, Border Patrol, state and local police officers, the Federal Reserve Bank, Supreme Court justices, U.S. District court judges, support of the varied Organized Crime families, the leadership of the Fortune 500 companies, at least half of the banks in the U.S., and the New York Stock Exchange. This cabal would then have to seize the gold at Fort Knox and the federal assets deposited in the entire banking system. It would have to take control of the key industries such as oil, natural gas, mining, precious and semi-precious metals, forestry, cotton, construction, insurance, and banking industries—and then claim these items to be their private property. The legal system would have to nullify most of the key provisions against corruption, conflict of interest, criminal conspiracy, money laundering, economic fraud and weaken tax evasion laws. This unholy alliance would then have to spend about 50% of its billions in profits to bribe officials that remained in government and be the primary supporters of all of the political candidates. Then, most of the stolen funds, excess profits and bribes would have to be sent to off-shore banks for safekeeping. Finally, while claiming that the country was literally bankrupt and needed vast infusions of foreign aid to survive, this conspiratorial group would invest billions in spreading illegal activities to developed foreign countries. . . . The President would not only be aware of all these activities but would support them.12

This statement was made in testimony to the U.S. House Committee on Banking and Financial Services by Richard L. Palmer, who had been CIA chief of base and chief of station in countries of the former Soviet Union. When Palmer gave his testimony in September 1999, Putin was not yet president, but he was prime minister, he had been head of the successor organization to the KGB, the Federal Security Service, and he had been investigated on a number of occasions for high-level corruption and criminal activity.

Of course, there were those in the Russian government who were aware of the problem and had tried to correct it. On February 18, 1992, for example, the Yel’tsin-Gaidar government signed an agreement with an American corporate private investigation firm, Kroll Associates, to track down and help repatriate money illegally held or taken abroad by former Communist Party and Soviet government agencies, including the KGB. The money had allegedly left the country prior to the August 1991 attempted coup against the reformist-oriented Gorbachev by conservatives in the highest echelons of the ruling Communist Party and the KGB.13 A group of Central Committee officials, including the head of the Party department dealing with the defense industry, the head of state television and radio, and the deputy head of the committee in charge of privatizing state property, were all dismissed after revelations about their involvement in embezzlement and capital flight. Several of them had also been involved in efforts during the Gorbachev period by a so-called patriotic wing of the special services to organize various provocations to undermine Gorbachev and prove that his reforms needed to be halted. Yegor Gaidar, who at that time was the minister of finance, stated that this kind of activity was not only illegal but constituted continued political resistance to the government’s economic reform efforts: “Last year saw large-scale privatization by the nomenklatura [the high-ranking elite], privatization by officials for their own personal benefit.”14 The New York Times reported that the office of the Russian procurator general had been “unable to penetrate the maze of hidden bank accounts and secret investments, left behind by party officials acting in some cases . . . with the cooperation of the K.G.B. . . . One estimate for the party’s hidden assets is $50 billion.”15 Kroll, which had also led the hunt for stolen funds from the Marcos regime in the Philippines and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, was reported to have “found that thousands of mostly offshore bank accounts, real estate holdings and offshore companies had been set up to launder and shelter these funds and what had been the Soviet Union’s gold reserves.”16, IV

In response to this report and their own investigations, the Yel’tsin government passed a law giving it the right to confiscate funds taken abroad illegally. Yel’tsin was receiving monthly updates from Kroll; the lower house of the Russian Supreme Soviet, the Council of Nationalities (as it was called until December 1993), demanded that the Foreign Intelligence ServiceV provide a report on Kroll’s progress, which Izvestiya reported was provided in a closed session by First Deputy Director Vyacheslav Trubnikov.18 The Supreme Soviet Presidium had decreed that a special commission be established by the procurator general to investigate corruption, abuse of power, and economic offenses. Its report was presented to the Supreme Soviet in September 1993. In it Kroll’s efforts were noted; the document recounted widespread instances of “bribery of officials, blackmail, and the illegal transfer of currency resources to foreign banks,” with specific ministers sanctioned by name, including Minister of Foreign Economic Relations Pyotr Aven (whose activities in approving Putin’s early contracts as head of the St. Petersburg Committee for Foreign LiaisonVI are dealt with below). The report also criticized the Ministry of Security (the precursor of the FSB) for the fact that while it had opened three hundred investigations in the first six months of 1993 alone, only “two criminal cases had been instituted in practice.”19 In theory, in both Yel’tsin’s camp and in the Communist-dominated legislature, everyone was seeking to stanch the flow. But nothing happened in practice. As one of Kroll’s investigators stated, the report raised “suspicions about certain players and institutions [in the former Soviet Union]. Our problem is that when we sent it to Moscow, it was never followed up.”20

This image of high-level culpability was reinforced when U.S. law enforcement intercepted telephone calls in the United States from the highest officials in President Yel’tsin’s office, Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin’s staff, and other ministers to and from the head of the Russian firm Golden ADA, established in San Francisco, linking the firm to various scams that collectively added up to almost $1 billion.21 The size of the scams is suggested by the fact that in 1994 Golden ADA had a declared taxable income in the United States of $111,485,984, according to U.S. court documents.22 FBI records show that the FBI turned over to Russia information linking Golden ADA with Yevgeniy Bychkov, the chairman of the Russian Committee for Precious Gems and Metals, and Igor Moskovskiy, a deputy minister of finance. Eventually, in 2001, with documents provided by FBI wiretaps, as the FBI website wryly states, both “were convicted of abusing their state positions and immediately granted Stat...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1476795207
• ISBN 13: 9781476795201
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464