"Putin's people" - the odyssey of a KGB officer who remained in Dresden forever

Dozens of books about Putin and Russia under his rule have been published in the West

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Photo: EPA
Photo: EPA
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

Albert Einstein once gave an assistant exam questions intended for students at Princeton University.

The assistant glanced over them and asked in surprise: "Didn't they answer these questions last year?"

Einstein answered in the affirmative and added: "The answers have changed since then."

Dozens of books about Putin and Russia under his rule have been published in the West.

The titles are, for the most part, pompous: Putinovand kletpocracy, Mafia state, Code of Putinism.

Is it possible today to give new answers to old questions about the Russian government?

Can the untold be told about the Russian leader and his environment? Is there any news in the conflict between Russia and the West?

New book Putin's Men: How the KGB Reclaimed Russia and Moved West (Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Turned on the West) - is an attempt to give new answers to old questions.

The author of the book is Catherine Belton, a former correspondent of the Financial Times from Moscow, who spent 16 years in Russia.

Working for the Financial Times in Moscow, as she admits in an interview with the BBC - the first in her life where she doesn't ask questions, but answers them - helped her get to know oligarchs, officials, members of the special services and insiders from the Kremlin.

The book was conceived as a journalistic investigation, with many references and sources, most of which remained anonymous.

Belton says she took up the research because other books about Putin, in her opinion, are a little superficial.

As examples of good books, with numerous sources and research, he cites works devoted to Russia from the 1990s, by David Hoffman Oligarchs (2001) and Hristine Freeland Sale of the century (2000)

In her book, members of the special services, criminals, oligarchs, officials and political émigrés constantly change roles.

What does not change is the struggle for power and resources, the withdrawal of Russian capital to the West, which is used, among other things, for confrontation with the West.

The Russian and Western heroes of the book are presented as unscrupulous and greedy.

None of them are likeable.

"Leverators" and technology?

Belton shows how a KGB officer developed, while failing to change.

Meanwhile, he became the president of Russia.

One of the most controversial parts of the book takes place in Dresden, in the second half of the 1980s, when Putin worked there.

The author takes the reader back to Dresden to explain the motives and methods of the Russian president's work, as well as his views on the world and his fears.

It is believed that the future Russian president did not do an overly interesting job in East Germany - something like an office job, without any hints of Bond glamour.

Dresden at the time was allegedly a city on the periphery of the activities of the KGB and the East German secret police, the Stasi.

However, in Belton's book, not everything seems like that.

Around the time Putin came to Dresden, West Germany became the main source of smuggling high-tech goods into the USSR and East Germany, Belton writes.

Shortly before that, Vladimir Vetrov, an employee of the military-technical intelligence service, passed on to the West detailed information about Soviet industrial espionage in the West.

As a result, 47 Soviet intelligence officers were expelled from France alone.

The focus of action of the Soviet special services shifted to Germany.

"Dresden was one of the places where secret technologies of the West were stolen that the USSR could not import because of the embargo.

"In Dresden there was a Robotron factory where they cloned the IBM computer. This factory has numerous agreements that have been documented by the German authorities," says Belton.

The history of East German Robotron, where they tried to copy IBM technologies back in the 1970s, is quite well studied in Germany, as well as its business ties with Soviet enterprises.

"Dresden was the meeting place of members of the Red Army Faction (RAF, a left-wing terrorist group from West Germany - BBC note) with the KGB and the Stasi," the author continues.

The RAF has dozens of murders and hostage-taking behind it.

From the disclosed Stasi documents, it can be seen that the RAF received financial and organizational support from the West German special services, which helped members of the group to transfer to East Germany.

To this day, it is not clear what the Soviet special services knew and what role they played in these processes.

However, in the book, Belton cites conversations with a former member of the RAF who told her about meetings with Putin in Dresden.

These rather serious accusations against Putin, as well as the names of the author's interlocutors, cannot be verified.

Putin was tight-lipped when he talked about Dresden where, he says, he performed ordinary intelligence activities such as collecting, obtaining, processing and sending information to the center.

The description of the work of Putin and his colleagues in Dresden is commented by the author of the book, Horst Jemlich, assistant head of the Dresden Stasi department for coordination of work with Soviet intelligence.

"I know that Putin and his team cooperated with the West where they had contacts.

"They mostly did recruiting here [in East Germany]," says Jemlich.

"Their target group was students who were going to the West".

In the book, Belton builds a general picture of the then environment that surrounded the future president of Russia in Dresden.

In one way or another, he worked in that environment. recruiting for the sake of obtaining information from the West, organization of work aimed at the production of Western technologies accompanied by dubious financial operations and funds intended to support various organizations from which the KGB and Stasi benefited - from the RAF to legal communist parties.

The last element, which for Belton becomes the main one in the chain that shaped the view of the world and the methods of operation of the special services, was reflected in the support and financing of people useful to the KGB.

Real face

Belton estimates that the coming of Putin, or another KGB member, to power was inevitable.

The methods are also clear. It is difficult for a person to give up habits.

If he was involved in smuggling before, used black funds, and thus fulfilled work tasks, why would he now renounce offshore activities and cooperation with dubious but efficient people?

And if the task was to destabilize the West, then why not use this method and replace the previous ideology with a new one?

Belton even connects Putin's actions in Ukraine in 2014 with Dresden and the psychological trauma that occurred in East Germany.

"The rhetoric and state propaganda that accompanied the military actions (Russia in Ukraine - BBC note) seem to have been a reflection of the acute paranoia that has followed Putin and his people since the time of the Orange Revolution in 2004 and immediately before.

"Then Putin watched the collapse of the Soviet empire from the KGB mansion in Dresden, over the Elbe," writes Belton and adds that in 2014, Putin's regime unexpectedly showed its true colors.

Vladimir Yakunin explains the logic of the behavior of the Russian president and his people to the author of the book.

A former employee of the First Main Administration of the KGB, one of the co-founders of the Ozero cooperative and the former head of Russian Railways tells a British journalist about the treachery of the CIA and is proud of the fact that he is on the sanctioned list.

He adds that the US authorities have long been out of touch with everything that is happening in Russia if they consider Gennady Timchenko and Yuriy Kovalchuk to be Putin's bankers.

"The Russian president has access to the financial resources of the entire country," Yakunin notes.

According to him, in the struggle with the West, Russia assumed the role of a humanitarian, traditional society, which was opposed to an absolute consumer society.

He believes that Moscow is using this struggle with the aim of becoming a world leader again.

And the culprit of the conflict with the West is Moscow's now frequent remarks: the expansion of NATO to the East, the deployment of anti-missile defense in Romania and Poland, the flower revolution.

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Corrupt the West

Belton writes in an ironic way about the strategic mistakes of the West in relation to Putin.

In her opinion, the West did not immediately realize how many changes had taken place after Putin came to power.

Of course, it was hard not to notice how the descendants of the KGB, who were part of Putin's entourage, gained control over Russia's strategic energy complex.

However, to a Western observer, Belton writes, other affairs in Russia seemed independent.

Oligarchs from the Yeltsin era were considered by many in the West to be a pro-Western force in the Russian economy.

Most importantly, the West expected that Russia's growing middle class would demand a greater share in the country's political life, and special hopes were placed on Russia's inclusion in Western markets.

However, none of that changed Russia - on the contrary, Russia was changing the West, the author writes.

In the West, they hoped that the Russian oligarchs who moved to London would become an independent driving force, initiators of change, but they became more and more dependent on the Kremlin.

"They turned into vassals of Putin's authoritarian and kleptocratic states... and gradually began to corrupt the West," writes Belton.

Western politicians, businessmen and lawyers are presented in the book as greedy conformists, who hardly care about the origin of the money of their Russian clients and partners.

The former Western partners of the once largest Russian oil company Yukos try without any remorse to grab a piece of Khodorovsky's empire for themselves when he ends up in prison.

Members of the British House of Lords join the boards of directors of Russian state corporations for half a million pounds, Russians use dubious means to buy elite real estate in Kensington, as well as in other prestigious parts of the British capital.

"In London it is possible to buy everything and everyone. The Russians came to London to corrupt the British political elite," the Russian oligarch, also anonymous, firmly declares in the book.

One of the main mistakes, according to Belton, is understanding Russian money exclusively as stolen money, which was laundered for the purpose of personal enrichment and legalization in the West.

They realized late that these were black funds for Russia's strategic operations to destabilize the West.

"They didn't get the point. The battle with the West was simmering long before that.

"It was prepared before the collapse of the USSR, when certain structures of the KGB tried to preserve their networks of agents even after the transition to a market economy, thus helping Putin to come to power," writes Belton.

An unreliable witness

One of the people who told the author of the book about Vladimir Putin's regime a lot was the fugitive oligarch Sergei Pugachev.

Pugachev was also known as a Kremlin banker during Boris Yeltsin's rule.

The billionaire claims that he brought American political scientists who helped Yeltsin to be re-elected president in 1996.

That winter, the rating of the Russian president was around three percent, and in the summer, in the second round of elections, he won almost 54 percent of the vote.

These elections were remembered for the memorable slogans of Yeltsin's campaign: "Vote or lose!, God forbid!, Buy food for the last time!"

Admittedly, it is still not known exactly who initiated the arrival of overseas guests and how important their role was in those elections.

One of the biggest stars of Russian television in the 1990s, Yevgeny Kiselyov, was skeptical of their mission.

"There was a legend that Yeltsin's victory was brought about by certain American political scientists and advisers. Indeed, there were American advisers brought by Oleg Soskovec, they stayed at the Prezident Hotel on Yakimanka and did nothing.

"From time to time Yumashev or Dyachenko visited them out of politeness, they listened to all the nonsense they said because they had no idea about the state of Russian public opinion, nor about the political situation," Kiselyov said in an interview with the BBC.

Sergei Pugachev says that he met Putin in the early 1990s, and that already at the end of that decade, they worked together and saw each other every day when Putin became an assistant to Pavel Borodin, the chief of staff of the President of Russia.

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Pugachev shamelessly calls Putin his protégé and says that he chose him as Yeltsin's successor because he thought it was possible to control him.

He claims to have persuaded Yeltsin's daughter Tatyana and her future husband, Valentin Yumashev, the head of the president's administration, to appoint Putin as prime minister, and then to convince Yeltsin to resign early.

Tatjana Jumaševa characterized Pugačova's words as complete nonsense.

In Russia, criminal proceedings were initiated against Pugachev on charges of deliberately bringing Mezhprombank to bankruptcy.

At the High Court of Justice in London, Moscow managed to freeze Pugachev's assets in England.

The court forbade Pugačov to leave the territory of England and Wales, but he still fled to France, and in Britain was sentenced to two years in prison for contempt of court.

The British judge who convicted Pugačov declared him an unreliable witness.

"It is clear that his statements on many topics change depending on what he considers to be the most favorable version of events at the given moment," she explained.

Can the words of such a man be trusted?

"He's no angel, he hid the accounts from the English court," Belton replies.

"Pugachev thought that all those rules of the English court were a trifle compared to what happened to his empire".

"However, there are photos showing Pugachev's children talking to Putinov, where he is having dinner with Sechin, Patrushev, Ustinov and Viktor Ivanov," Belton adds.

She explains why she considers him a fairly reliable source.

"There are tapes after his escape to France discovered by British detectives of him speaking openly with high-ranking people."

Hard choice and anonymous sources

Special attention is paid to the part of the book with many anonymous sources who recount anecdotes - such as the visit of an unnamed foreign investor to thuggish Petersburg in the XNUMXs, who, instead of the mayor's office, was taken to the cottage of thugs in tracksuits and slippers for negotiations.

Many reviewers, enthusiastic about the book, do not pay attention to this part. Katherine Belton doesn't see the problem either.

"It's more important to get the story than to make people go in front of the camera," she says.

He adds that for many interlocutors, the issue of anonymity was of key importance due to personal safety.

According to another anonymous source, he also writes about the terrorist attack in the center of Moscow, on Dubrovka, as an operation by the Russian special services that went wrong.

"This was a difficult choice. In principle, I did not plan to write about Dubrovnik, Beslan and the explosions.

"I wanted to write about money, about how the Kremlin has established control over the economy," Belton admits.

She adds that this part was the most shocking for her in the process of writing the book.

She says that she felt the duty to share her doubts when she heard the version of a well-known person who knew the details of the operation in the theater center on Dubravka.

"We do not claim that all of this is 100 percent true, but when a man from such a narrow circle of society is ready to speak in confidence, it is our obligation and responsibility to report it," Belton explains the desire to share a shocking story that is impossible to verify. as well as some others in her book.

As a former journalist, Belton reached out to authorities for comment.

Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the insider's story complete nonsense.

Catherine Belton's book became a bestseller and was enthusiastically received by critics.

The British newspapers The Times and the Financial Times called it the best book about modern Russia, Putin and his environment.

The Guardian newspaper compares it to the novels of John Le Carré and writes that this work represents a meticulously researched anatomy of the Putin regime.

Spectator writes that the author not only documented the rise of a KGB member to the top of the government, but also examined how his environment captured the entire country and its finances.

"Belton paints a portrait of a leader and his disastrous views of the world from the late nineties, in which mafia ideals and patriotic fantasies are equated and mixed, where the rules apply only to a part of the people, and heroes with dangerous paranoia survive," writes Spectator.

The author says that she did not "want people to think that this is an anti-Russian book".

"I write about a group of people who got hold of power, I describe their ways of working and thinking. Those are remnants of the eighties," he says.

Mihail Zigar in the book All people of the Kremlin says that Putin's story is, in fact, the story of how a man accidentally became king.

First he became a successful reformer - King Lionheart, then a hedonist - King Magnificent and finally, a king who understood that he was part of history and became Tsar Ivan the Terrible.

For Catherine Belton, Putin, a lieutenant colonel in the KGB, ultimately remained a lieutenant colonel in the KGB, even if he became the "king".

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