By Lucy Komisar
Jan 15, 2015

Anne Applebaum wrote an article about Putin’s Russia in the Dec. 18, 2014 issue of the New York Review of Books that was filled with distortions. When I saw NYRB editor Robert Silvers at a  Dissent magazine  party in New York Dec. 5^th, I told him my opinion. He  said to send him my comments. But then he declined to print those comments and said that he would run this  editorial statement:

Lucy Komisar has written to us that she has a statement to make about the article by Anne Applebaum in our December 18, 2014 issue. This statement is available on her website, The Komisar Scoop. ” The Editors.

That was not altogether true. I sent comments to be published in the magazine, as is routine, not to be noted as a statement I would post on my website.

NYRB editor Silvers said his staff didn‘t have time to check out my assertions, though I sent him documentation supporting my comments.  Mr. Silvers told me that instead he  would post the above  statement Jan. 15^th  to be  received by subscribers a week later.

In fact, I believe that the NY Review should not so cavalierly reject  comments that criticize its writers. I‘d have preferred a healthy debate in the magazine‘s pages. I still wonder why editor Silvers wanted to protect neocon writer Anne Applebaum from criticism.

Here is the rejected comment I sent, followed by longer remarks interspersed in the Applebaum article. The NYRB would not include a link, so people who sought the editors’ comment may or may not have found it on line.

The comment, 500 words as Mr. Silvers specified, that wasn‘t published:

Anne Applebaum writing how Vladimir Putin and cronies looted Russia should add to the title, “How The West Drove The Getaway Car.” To suggest that looting occurred independently of the corrupt offshore system organized by Western banks finesses the truth.

Applebaum refers to KBG officers who acted as the Soviet Union seemed near collapse in the 1980s. “Assisted by the unscrupulous international offshore banking industry, they stole money that belonged to the Russian state, took it abroad for safety, reinvested it in Russia, and then, piece by piece, took over the state themselves.”

She writes that KGB leaders began transferring money that belonged to the Soviet Communist Party out of the Soviet Union and into offshore accounts tended by Swiss or British bankers. But American banks were also involved.

Applebaum notes that in 1999, the German Federal Intelligence Agency (BND) accused the St. Petersburg Real Estate Holding Company (SPAG) linked to Putin, of laundering money for Russian and Colombian criminals. “Among other things, the BND said that SPAG took money that had been sent out of Russia and was parked “offshore,” and helped its owners”among them the leaders of the Tambov gang, part of the St. Petersburg mafia, repatriate it back through purchase of property and other assets.

SPAG was registered in Germany and laundered money though Liechtenstein. According to a confidential BND document I obtained, “The Liechtenstein lawyers Dr. Eugen Heeb and Rudolf Ritter participate in a network of firms in Liechtenstein, Europe and overseas. They make this network available -amongst others – to South American drug cartels, e. g. the Ochoa clan and to the new Russian clientele.”

She writes about Mikhail Khodorkovsky as “the most famous victim of Russia‘s arbitrary justice.” And about a favored “reformer,” William Browder,” she says, “After he turned out to be an annoyingly activist shareholder,” Browder was barred from Russia in 2005.

But she ignores the offshore connection between Khodorkovsky and Browder. Khodorkovsky‘s company Menatep used TMC, a phony Isle of Man “sales” company, to buy the output of Avisma, his titanium sponge company, at fake low prices and sell it on the market at real prices, cheating minority shareholders and Russian taxpayers.

When Browder and his partners, billionaire investor Kenneth Dart and New York investor Francis Baker, bought Avisma from Khodorkovsky in 1997, they agreed the corrupt profit skimming would continue.

Baker told me that the Bank of New York moved the stolen money. He said that “monies put in one end of the machine came out totally clean at the other end of the machine,” adding that, “It was not a piddling amount.” He said, “They moved it through about 20 entities.”

So when Applebaum says, “while constantly speaking of “reform” in Western capitals, Putin was systematically destroying the nascent institutions of liberal democratic society, I wonder what society she is talking about. It sure wasn‘t “liberal democratic,” but Putin was using that great Western institution, the crooked offshore bank and corporate secrecy system, as global criminals and Western corporations still do, to loot Russia.

Anne Applebaum’s article with my comments interspersed and parts of the article bold-faced to point out what I cite.

Anne Applebaum
Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?
by Karen Dawisha
Simon and Schuster, 445 pp., $30.00

Anne Applebaum‘s article about Vladimir Putin, “How He and His Cronies Stole Russia,” should have a few words added to the title: “And How The West Drove The Getaway Car.”

Indeed, Putin and his collaborators looted Russia. But to suggest that this occurred independently of the corrupt offshore system organized by Western banks and in spite of allegedly well-meaning Western advisors the U.S. sent to Russia is a distortion of the truth.

For twenty years now, the Western politicians, journalists, businessmen, and academics who observe and describe the post-Soviet evolution of Russia have almost all followed the same narrative. We begin with the assumption that the Soviet Union ended in 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev handed over power to Boris Yeltsin and Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of the Soviet republics became independent states. We continue with an account of the early 1990s, an era of “reform,” when some Russian leaders tried to create a democratic political system and a liberal capitalist economy. We follow the trials and tribulations of the reformers, analyze the attempts at privatization, discuss the ebb and flow of political parties and the growth and decline of an independent media.

Reform? Liberal capitalism? The “loans for shares” scam, invented by “reformer” Anatoly Chubais, made it possible for the “oligarchs” to loot Russia. They “lent” money to the Yetsin government, which used it for an upcoming election campaign. When Yetsin & co did not pay back the loans, the oligarchs got Russia‘s mineral and factory wealth at bargain prices. Such “reformers‘ were lauded by the Clinton Administration and the Western press, because privatization by any means necessary was the ideological goal.

Mostly we agree that those reforms failed, and sometimes we blame ourselves for those failures: we gave the wrong advice, we sent naive Harvard economists who should have known better, we didn‘t have a Marshall Plan. Sometimes we blame the Russians: the economists didn‘t follow our advice, the public was apathetic, President Yeltsin was indecisive, then drunk, then ill. Sometimes we hope that reforms will return, as many believed they might during the short reign of President Dmitry Medvedev.

Whatever their conclusion, almost all of these analysts seek an explanation in the reform process itself, asking whether it was effective, or whether it was flawed, or whether it could have been designed differently. But what if it never mattered at all? What if it made no difference which mistakes were made, which privatization plans were sidetracked, which piece of advice was not followed? What if “reform” was never the most important story of the past twenty years in Russia at all?

Na¯ve Harvard economists? Could she be referring to Andrei Shleifer and Jonathan Hay of the Harvard Institute for International Development who went to Russia to help set up capital markets and had their US AID grant cancelled in 1997. According to AID,  Shleifer and  Hay had improperly used U.S.-funded staff and resources for the benefit of investment projects run by Shleifer’s wife, Nancy Zimmerman, and Hay‘s girlfriend, Beth Hebert. The U.S. sued Shleifer, Hay and Harvard. They settled for at least $31 million.

Shleifer is still at Harvard because of the power of his krysha (roof), protector, Lawrence Summers who was then Harvard‘s president. Hay sought reduced notoriety in London. Na¯ve is not the word for what they did.

Applebaum wonders if the “reform process” was flawed. Well, yes, if you send “reformers” who are crooks. Yes, Putin would continue the corruption, but the “reformers” promoting the corrupt “loans for shares” laid the groundwork. The inventor of that scam, Anatoly Chubais, went to work for Shleifer and Hay when Yeltsin fired him.

Karen Dawisha‘s  Putin‘s Kleptocracy  is not the first book to ask this question. Indeed, she makes extensive use of the work of others, both fellow political scientists as well as journalists working across the US and Europe. Some have found fault with this method, but the resulting work has a certain admirable relentlessness. For by tying all of these disparate investigations together so thoroughly, so pedantically, and with so many extended footnotes”and by tracking down Western copies of documents that vanished from Russia long ago”the extent of what has always been a murky story suddenly becomes more clear. In her introduction, Dawisha, a professor of political science at Miami University in Ohio, explains:

Instead of seeing Russian politics as an inchoate democratic system being pulled down by history, accidental autocrats, popular inertia, bureaucratic incompetence, or poor Western advice, I conclude that from the beginning Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal…who used democracy for decoration rather than direction.

In other words, the most important story of the past twenty years might not, in fact, have been the failure of democracy, but the rise of a new form of Russian authoritarianism. Instead of attempting to explain the failures of the reformers and intellectuals who tried to carry out radical change, we ought instead to focus on the remarkable story of one group of unrepentant, single-minded, revanchist  KGB  officers who were horrified by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the prospect of their own loss of influence. In league with Russian organized crime, starting at the end of the 1980s, they successfully plotted a return to power. Assisted by the unscrupulous international offshore banking industry, they stole money that belonged to the Russian state, took it abroad for safety, reinvested it in Russia, and then, piece by piece, took over the state themselves. Once in charge, they brought back Soviet methods of political control”the only ones they knew”updated for the modern era.

That corruption was part of the Russian system from the beginning is something we‘ve long known for a long time, of course. In her book  Sale of the Century  (2000), Chrystia Freeland memorably describes the moment when she realized that the confusing regulations and contradictory laws that hog-tied Russian business in the 1990s were not a temporary problem that would soon be cleaned up by some competent administrator. On the contrary, they existed for a purpose: the Russian elite  wanted  everybody to operate in violation of one law or another, because that meant that everybody was liable at any time to arrest. The contradictory regulations were not a mistake, they were a form of control.

Dawisha takes Freeland‘s realization one step further. She is arguing, in effect, that even before those nefarious rules were written, the system had already been rigged to favor particular people and interest groups. No “even playing field” was ever created in Russia, and the power of competitive markets was never unleashed. Nobody became rich by building a better mousetrap or by pulling himself up by his bootstraps. Instead, those who succeeded did so thanks to favors granted by”or stolen from”the state. And when the dust settled, Vladimir Putin emerged as king of the thieves.

To tell this story, Dawisha uses many sources, including the evidence presented in several major court cases, a number of which fizzled out for political reasons; material collected by Russian and European investigative reporters, some of which has now vanished from the Web; and Russian legal journals, many of which are now out of print. She has also conducted dozens of interviews with businessmen and bankers all over the world. As noted, some of what she digs up has been described elsewhere, not only in Masha Gessen‘s emotive account of Putin‘s rise to power,  The Man Without a Face  (2012), but also in Clifford Gaddy and Fiona Hill‘s  Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin  (2013) and Peter Baker and Susan Glasser‘s  Kremlin Rising  (2005).¹

Dawisha doesn‘t, like Gessen, seek to convey the emotions of Russian politics, and she is less interested than Hill and Gaddy were in Putin‘s personal biography. Instead, she turns a relentless focus on the financial story of Putin‘s rise to power: page after page contains the gritty details of criminal operation after criminal operation, including names, dates, and figures. Many of these details had never been put together before”and for good reason. Cambridge University Press declined to publish this book after initially agreeing to do so for fear of violating UK libel laws. Although she soon found a US publisher”US libel laws are less constricting”Dawisha‘s troubles give some hint of the difficulties faced by many who try to write about Russia, and particularly those who try to describe the corrupt practices of men with very deep pockets and very expensive lawyers on their payroll.

Using this mass of evidence, Dawisha nevertheless argues that the  KGB‘s return to power begins not in 2000, when Putin became president, but in the late 1980s. At that time, the then leaders of the  KGB, who distrusted Gorbachev, began transferring money that belonged to the Soviet Communist Party out of the Soviet Union and into offshore accounts tended by Swiss or British bankers. At least initially, these transfers took place with the Party‘s knowledge. In August 1990, the Central Committee called for measures to protect the Party‘s “economic interests,” including the construction of an “invisible” structure, accessible only to “a very narrow circle of people.”  KGB operatives who already had experience with managing foreign bank accounts”they‘d been funding foreign Communist parties for decades”were put in charge.

By the autumn of 1991”after the  KGB-led coup in August to overthrow Gorbachev had failed”almost $4 billion belonging to the Party‘s “property management department” had already been distributed to hundreds of Party-, Komsomol-, and  KGB-managed banks and companies that were swiftly establishing themselves in Russia and abroad. This was an enormous amount of capital in a country that had, at the time, a scarcely functioning economy and hardly any foreign currency reserves at all. In due course, these funds, and the people who managed them, were to become the real foundation for the economy of post-Soviet Russia. Again, this was not robber baron capitalism, or indeed capitalism at all: instead, a small group was enriched by the state and thereby given the means of acquiring its property.

Applebaum, who otherwise writes with detail, refers sketchily to the KBG officers who as the Soviet Union seemed near collapse in the 1980s, plotted a return to power. “Assisted by the unscrupulous international offshore banking industry, they stole money that belonged to the Russian state, took it abroad for safety, reinvested it in Russia, and then, piece by piece, took over the state themselves.

She writes, “That corruption was part of the Russian system from the beginning is something we‘ve long known for a long time, of course.” She points out that “leaders of the KGB, who distrusted Gorbachev, began transferring money that belonged to the Soviet Communist Party out of the Soviet Union and into offshore accounts tended by Swiss or British bankers.

Why not more detail? American banks played a role. The Bank of New York was heavily involved in moving Russian money. And driving the getaway car makes one an accomplice.

Top KGB official Yevgeny Primakov oversaw sending money out of Russia. Trading companies sold state resources and put the money in Western tax havens from Switzerland to Hong Kong and from Cyprus to the Cayman Islands. Some of that money would be used to set up the new Russian banks, including Menatep, whose titular head was Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

The Russians started creating shell companies at a California post office box in the late 1980s. They liked being able to put cash in the Caribbean, perhaps the British Virgin Islands, and then move it back to Russia through the U.S. as “American” investments.

From the very beginning, Russia‘s current president had a part in this process. In the late 1980s, Putin was a  KGB  officer in Dresden, East Germany. There are conflicting accounts of what he was doing there. In his official and unofficial biographies, Dawisha writes, quoting Putin‘s German biographer Alexander Rahr, this period is covered in a “thick fog of silence.” But there is some evidence that he may have been helping the KGB  prepare for what it feared could be the imminent demise of the Soviet empire. Indeed, when he became president in 2000, German counterintelligence launched an investigation into whether or not Putin had been recruiting agents who would remain loyal to the  KGB  even after the collapse of communism. As Dawisha explains, “the Germans were concerned that Putin had recruited a network that lived on in united Germany.”

The scale of this effort is not known, but certainly a few of his Dresden contacts have become startlingly successful in the decades since 1989. Matthias Warnig, a Stasi colleague of Putin‘s, opened Dresdner Bank‘s first branch in St. Petersburg in 1991, by which time Putin was living there. By 2000 he headed all of the bank‘s operations in Russia. In 2003, the bank participated in the dismemberment of Yukos, the oil company owed by the jailed magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Since 2006, Warnig has been managing director of the Russian–German Nord Stream pipeline project, a company that won permission to operate during the term of German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and that later hired ex-Chancellor Schröder to serve on its board. In 2012, among other high posts, Warnig became a member of the board of directors of Bank Rossiya, one of the Russian banks now under US sanctions.

I am especially interested in the parts about Khodorkovsky, who is described with sympathy. Applebaum writes that Dresdner Bank‘s first branch in St. Petersburg in 2003, “participated in the dismemberment of Yukos, the oil company owed by the jailed magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who she describes as “the most famous victim of Russia‘s arbitrary justice.” She points out that he was “arrested in 2003, after which his oil company, Yukos, was liquidated. Yukos‘s assets were then transferred to another company, Rosneft, which happened to be owned by another one of Putin‘s friends. Khodorkovsky‘s arrest was intended as a lesson to others: here is what will happen, even to the richest men, if they step out of line.”

She neglects to mention the Isle of Man transfer pricing scheme that Khodorkovsky used to siphon profits from Yukos. Not an excuse for seizing the company, but MBK was hardly an honest innocent.

The other victim she cites is William Browder, who she points out set up a Russian investment fund that invested heavily in Gazprom. Based on the complimentary tweets and other writings Applebaum and Browder have posted in recent years, they admire each other greatly.

Applebaum writes, “After he turned out to be an annoyingly activist shareholder ”he kept asking why the company‘s accounts were so untransparent”Browder was barred from the country in 2005. His companies in Russia were subsequently destroyed by a particularly Putinist form of corporate raiding: tax officials and police attacked their offices, reregistered them, declared them bankrupt, stole their money, and arrested and harassed their employees.”

She doesn‘t point out an interesting connection between Khodorkovsky and Browder. It concerns AVISMA, a Russian titanium sponge company that Khodorkovsky obtained for kopeks on the ruble in the corrupt Yeltsin “loans for shares” scam promoted by that other reformer,” Anatoly Chubais.

Khodorkovsky‘s company Menatep bought a piece of Valmet, an offshore incorporator in the Isle of Man, which set up TMC, a phony “sales” company that would buy AVISMA‘s output at fake low prices and sell it on the market at real prices, cheating minority shareholders and Russian taxpayers. (It was the same scheme he used for Yukos.)

When Browder and his partners, billionaire investor Kenneth Dart and New York investor Francis Baker, bought AVISMA from Khodorkovsky in 1997, the deal was that the corrupt profit skimming would continue. In fact, when Isle of Man middleman Peter Bond failed to turn over the purloined cash, Browder and his partners went to court in the Isle of Man declaring that they were owed that cash. Their legal papers detailed the scam. (Curiously, one of the names on the suit was Jonathan Hay. Browder et al had trades AVISMA shares for stock in a Russian firm, VSMPO. Then they  put Hay and two others on the VSMPO board.) Browder and his colleagues got a settlement from Bond.

But when  VSMPO’s American lawyer discovered the profit-skimming, the company sought to recover the stolen cash. Its suit pointed out that Valmet funneled these monies through bank accounts maintained at BoNY (Bank of New York) to entities unknown. It said accounts at the Bank of New York were established with the assistance of a BoNY officer Natasha Gurfinkel Kagalovsky who knew about the fraud because she was married to the vice-chairman of Menatep Bank, Konstantin Kagalovsky. She was fired when the Bank of New York money laundering scandal was exposed in 1999.

Baker acknowledged to me that the Bank of New York moved the stolen money. He said that “monies put in one end of the machine came out totally clean at the other end of the machine,” adding that, “It was not a piddling amount.” And, “When it got to our shores, there was the old Bank of New York,” he said. “They moved it through about 20 entities. The bank was very complicit with that.”  VSMPO got a settlement.

After leaving Germany, Putin returned to St. Petersburg, eventually making his way, with  KGB  patronage, into the St. Petersburg city government, where he was responsible for “foreign liaisons””and where he could put some of his foreign contacts to immediate use. In 1991, Marina Salye, a member of the St. Petersburg city council, accused Putin of having knowingly entered into dozens of legally flawed contracts on behalf of the city, exporting hundreds of millions of dollars‘ worth of commodities”timber, coal, steel”in exchange for food that never arrived. Her attempts to censure him came to nothing: the council called for his resignation but nothing happened. At a higher level, Putin had protectors. Salye, spooked by threats, went into hiding and disappeared from Russian politics.

Not that it mattered much, since Putin and his friends had other irons in the fire. Back in this very early post-Soviet moment”when Western advisers were still streaming into the country to give lectures on the rule of law and judicial reform”Putin personally organized, or helped organize, several institutions that exist to this day. One of the best known is Bank Rossiya, which was founded in St. Petersburg in 1990, using money from the Communist Party‘s Central Committee. From the beginning, according to Spanish police investigators, Bank Rossiya facilitated cooperation between Putin, other city officials, and Russian organized crime, allowing the two groups to invest together.

Rule of law? Promoted by Shleifer and Hay?

Dawisha also describes the origins of the Ozero Dacha Consumer Cooperative, a small group, again including Putin, that conducted property investments but soon branched into other businesses, making use of mysterious sources of cash. At a time when others had no access to capital, they were flush. Most of the members of the cooperative are now millionaires and several are billionaires.

The St. Petersburg Real Estate Holding Company (SPAG) was a third institution linked to Putin. In 1999, the German Federal Intelligence Agency (BND) completed an investigation into  SPAG, and published a report that accused the organization of laundering money for Russian and Colombian criminals. Among other things, the  BNDsaid that  SPAG  took money that had been sent out of Russia and was parked “offshore,” and helped its owners”among them the leaders of the Tambov gang, a part of the St. Petersburg mafia”repatriate it back into the country through the purchase of property and other legitimate assets. Notably, when Schröder became chancellor of Germany, this investigation was slowed down; Putin‘s name had, in any case, been kept out of it. Several other company founders were indicted by courts in Liechtenstein. Vladimir Kumarin, the former Tambov gang leader, has been in prison since 2012.

Applebaum notes that the St. Petersburg Real Estate Holding Company (SPAG) linked to Putin, was accused in 1999, by the German Federal Intelligence Agency (BND) of laundering money for Russian and Colombian criminals. “Among other things, the BND said that SPAG took money that had been sent out of Russia and was parked “offshore,” and helped its owners”among them the leaders of the Tambov gang, a part of the St. Petersburg mafia”repatriate it back into the country through the purchase of property and other legitimate assets.

Offshore? What Western banks did that? SPAG was registered in Germany and laundered money though Liechtenstein. According to a confidential BND document I obtained, “The Liechtenstein lawyers Dr. Eugen Heeb and Rudolf Ritter participate in a network of firms in Liechtenstein, Europe and overseas. They make this network available -amongst others -to South American drug cartels, e. g. the Ochoa clan, and to the new Russian clientele.” It noted that, “Rudolf Ritter is the brother of the Vice Head of Government and Minister for the Interior, the Economy, Health and Social Matters, Dr. Michael Ritter.”

And she says, “According to Russia‘s own Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Twentieth Trust received money from the budget of the city of St. Petersburg and subsequently transferred that money abroad. Abroad? How, via Western offshore banks? Worth mentioning.

And of course there was $7.5 billion allegedly funneled through the Bank of New York, in 1999 with the help of two executives of its Eastern European Division. One of them was Natasha Gurfinkel Kagalovsky whose husband just happened to be an official of Bank Menatep, run by Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Dawisha also describes the origins of the Twentieth Trust, a “construction company” also linked to Putin. According to Russia‘s own Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Twentieth Trust received money from the budget of the city of St. Petersburg and subsequently transferred that money abroad.  Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper, discovered that the company had purchased property in Spain where it constructed villas using Russian army labor. These kinds of reports led Spanish police to become suspicious of Russian activity in Spain, and in the 1990s they began monitoring the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, as well as several well-known leaders of Russian organized crime, all of whom had houses on the southern coast of Spain. In 1999, to their immense surprise, their recorders picked up an unexpected visitor: Putin. He had arrived in Spain illegally, by boat from Gibraltar, having eluded Spanish passport control.

By the time he made this secret visit to Spain”apparently one of many”Putin had already graduated to the next phase of his career: until August 1999, he was the boss of the  FSB, the  KGB‘s successor organization. He had moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow, taking many of his cronies and all of his criminal connections with him. At that time, they were not the only such group to have parlayed state and  KGB  money into wealth. President Yeltsin had also in effect given his blessing to the creation of several large fortunes, including that of Boris Berezovksy. But as Yeltsin became increasingly ill and unavailable, Putin persuaded Berezovsky and others in the Yeltsin inner circle that he and his  FSB  colleagues would be the guarantors of their wealth in the event of Yeltsin‘s demise.

They duly anointed Putin prime minister and then president”the wishes of voters and democratic process had little to do with it. But having obtained high office, he turned the tables on them. Soon after taking over, he made it clear that he intended to remove the Yeltsin-era elite and to put a new elite in its place”mostly from St. Petersburg, equally corrupt, but loyal exclusively to him. Among others, he removed the  CEO  and chairman of Gazprom”the old Soviet gas ministry, now a private company”and replaced them with Dmitry Medvedev, a St. Petersburg lawyer and Putin‘s colleague since his days in the St. Petersburg mayor‘s office, and Aleksei Miller, his former deputy at the St. Petersburg Committee for Foreign Liaison. Very quickly, Gazprom became a source of personal funds for Putin‘s projects, useful, for example, when he needed a large chunk of money to bribe the president of Ukraine. Gazprom‘s new leadership grew in wealth and power, and they knew exactly who they had to thank for it. This was not the first time this kind of policy had been deployed in Russia: “Change the elite” is an old Stalinist tactic too.

But having changed the elite, having taken hold of the most important Russian companies, and having established himself as godfather to all of the other oligarchs, Putin did not change his ways. After he became president in 2000, it is true that Putin did preserve some of the language of “reform” in his public statements. He appointed “reformers” to top jobs. He kept open lines of communication with the West, particularly after September 11, 2001, when he saw the possibility of a tactical alliance with the West against Muslim radicalism in Central Asia. He remained open to relationships with  NATO  and with American and European leaders. In 2004, he even declared that “if Ukraine wants to join the EU and if the EU accepts Ukraine as a member, Russia, I think, would welcome this because we have a special relationship with Ukraine.” He regularly attended meetings of the G8, an organization”including the US, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, the UK, and Russia”whose rules and raison d‘etre had been altered specifically in order to allow Russia to join.

He also carried off an extraordinary public relations coup, and one with far-reaching significance: for four years, between 2008 and 2012, Putin put a seemingly pro-Western, apparently business-friendly, decoy president in charge of the Kremlin. The reassuring presence of Dmitry Medvedev not only inspired Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton‘s “reset” in American foreign policy, but lulled almost everyone in Europe into accepting a gangster state as a difficult but legitimate partner. During the four years of the Medvedev presidency  NATO‘s military readiness declined further, Western financial institutions became more dependent on Russian money, and Western politicians turned their attention to other matters.

Yet during this same period, as during his own presidency, Putin never abandoned the mafia methods Dawisha has so painstakingly described. Instead, he reshaped Russia‘s political system in order to ensure that they could continue. Though Dawisha argues that Putin always intended to recreate an authoritarian, expansionist Russia, one could also argue that an authoritarian, expansionist Russia was the inevitable result of Putin‘s need to protect himself, his cronies, and their money.

Either way, no one now doubts that, despite the talk of “reform,” he made no attempt to encourage truly entrepreneurial capitalism inside Russia or to create a legal system that would allow small businesses to grow. Courts became increasingly politicized and markets ever more distorted. Oligarchs and businessmen at all levels who did not play by his rules were destroyed. The most famous victim of Russia‘s arbitrary justice was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was arrested in 2003, after which his oil company, Yukos, was liquidated. Yukos‘s assets were then transferred to another company, Rosneft, which happened to be owned by another one of Putin‘s friends. Khodorkovsky‘s arrest was intended as a lesson to others: here is what will happen, even to the richest men, if they step out of line.

During what seemed at the time to be a golden era of Russian–Western political relations, the economic picture for foreign investors was also mixed. Some Western businesses flourished in Russia, but only so far as it suited Putin and his cronies. Westerners who annoyed the regime”or Westerners whose businesses were coveted by powerful Russians”could be destroyed with tax demands, lawsuits, and worse.

This was the fate of Bill Browder”grandson of Earl Browder, leader of the American Communist Party”who set up a Russian investment fund that invested heavily in Gazprom. After he turned out to be an annoyingly activist shareholder”he kept asking why the company‘s accounts were so untransparent”Browder was barred from the country in 2005. His companies in Russia were subsequently destroyed by a particularly Putinist form of corporate raiding: tax officials and police attacked their offices, reregistered them, declared them bankrupt, stole their money, and arrested and harassed their employees. Browder‘s lawyer, Sergey Magnitsky, was eventually beaten to death by guards in a Russian prison.

Browder is discussed earlier in the report of how he took over Khodorkovsky‘s profit-skimming operation and cheated Russian citizens and minority shareholders (including Americans) of profits from AVISMA.

At the same time”while constantly speaking of “reform” in Western capitals”Putin was systematically destroying the nascent institutions of liberal democratic society. Whatever embryonic political movements had come to life in the 1990s were crushed in the 2000s. Refusing to tolerate any real political opposition, Putin instead sponsored phony political parties whose leaders were ultimately loyal to himself. He eviscerated independent media, especially television, which he considered to be an essential tool of social manipulation. Although he left a few very small “dissident” newspapers open, presumably in order to placate the tiny middle class, he pushed back hard when they went too far. Anna Politkovskaya, an extraordinarily brave reporter who wrote about Putin‘s war in Chechnya, was one of several Russian journalists to be brutally killed in gangland-style murders.

When Applebaum says, “while constantly speaking of “reform” in Western capitals, Putin was systematically destroying the nascent institutions of liberal democratic society, I wonder what society she is talking about. Well, maybe it‘s not “liberal democratic,” but Putin was using that great old Western institution, the offshore bank and corporate secrecy system, as the rest of the globalized criminal system does and as Western corporations do to cheat shareholders and taxpayers.

Anyone who thinks that Putin and the West have not had an active partnership is wrong.

(end of my comments)

With the media out of the way, Putin also took on “civil society,” meaning any charitable, educational, or advocacy organizations over which he did not exert direct control. This included the slow suffocation of apolitical groups such as Memorial, the historic human rights organization that has produced internationally admired accounts of the crimes of Stalin, the history of the Gulag, and more generally the history of repression in Russia. Because Memorial had received foreign funding”from organizations such as the Ford Foundation”it was told that it had to be registered as a “foreign agent,” a phrase that heavily implies foreign espionage. More recently, the Russian Justice Ministry has filed a lawsuit that seeks to shut down Memorial altogether, on spurious administrative grounds.²

In place of a genuine media and a real civil society, Putin and his inner circle slowly put into place a system for manufacturing disinformation and mobilizing support on a new and spectacular scale. Once the  KGB  had retaken the country, in other words, it began once again to act like the  KGB”only now it was better funded and more sophisticated. Today‘s Russian “political technologists” make use of their state-owned media, including English-language outlets such as the  TV  news channel Russia Today; armies of paid social media “trolls” who post on newspaper comment pages, as well as on Twitter, Facebook, and other sites; fake “experts” whose quotes can be presented with fake authority; and real experts to whom Putin‘s officials have granted special access, or have simply paid. Former Western ambassadors to Moscow, businessmen who have been recruited to Russian company boards, European politicians as high-ranking as Schröder and Silvio Berlusconi”all have been well compensated, directly or indirectly, for offering their support.

Using these different sources, the Kremlin began putting out messages designed not necessarily to make Russia look good, but rather to undermine the Western establishment and Western institutions, including the European Union and  NATO. Using both money and information, they seek to empower the Western far right, the anti-establishment left, and the international business community all at the same time. Thus Russia Today supports Occupy Wall Street. A Russian oligarch organizes a meeting in Vienna attended by the French National Front, Hungary‘s nationalist political party Jobbik, and Austria‘s Freedom Party.³  Whispering campaigns, conducted in the world‘s financial capitals”especially Frankfurt and the City of London”hint at the dire things that will happen if sanctions against Russia are not lifted. In an article recently published by  The Interpreter, an online publication dedicated to exposing Kremlin disinformation, the journalists Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss argue that since at least 2008 Kremlin military and intelligence thinkers have been talking about information not in the familiar terms of “persuasion,” “public diplomacy” or even “propaganda,” but in weaponized terms, as a tool to confuse, blackmail, demoralize, subvert and paralyze.⁴

This is not a system, in other words, that has come about spontaneously, in reaction to events on Kiev‘s Maidan, although to those who haven‘t followed the evolution of Russian politics over the past twenty years”or to those who have followed only the narrative of “failed reforms””it might perhaps appear that way. Indeed, in the months since Putin‘s invasion of Crimea, it has become fashionable to suggest that the harder-line face that Putin has more recently shown to the world is somehow, once again, the West‘s “fault,” that we have provoked Russia into autocratic behavior through our talk of democracy in Ukraine or that”once again”the “reform process” was somehow brought to a halt because the Russians felt threatened by the expansion of  NATO  or by Western policy in the Balkans.

But after reading Dawisha‘s book, and after absorbing the implications of the stories she has so carefully pulled together from so many sources, it is simply not possible to take this argument seriously. Since 2000, Russia has been ruled by a revanchist, revisionist elite with origins in the old  KGB. This elite had been working its way back to power since the late 1980s, using theft on a grand scale, taking advantage of the secrecy provided by Western offshore havens, and cooperating with organized crime.

Once in power, the new elite sought to maintain control using the same methods that the  KGB  always used to maintain control: through the manipulation of public emotion, and by undermining the institutions of the West, and the ideals of the West, in any way that it can. Based on its record so far, it has every reason to expect continued success.

Applebaum article on NYRB

My article about the AVISMA scam on 100Reporters. The assertions were vetted by 100Reporters’ pro bono law firm, Arnold & Porter.

The same  article on The Komisar Scoop, with more links to documents.

 

  tax evasion