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Books of the time
By Jennifer Szalai
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Over the years it took journalist Catherine Belt directly to study and write “Putin’s People,” his voluminous but sublime account of coins and tools in the Kremlin, one or more of his interviewees tried tactics to undermine his work. One of them, “a great close friend of Putin,” is alarmed by his questions about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s activities as K.G.B. Dresden, in the 1980s, insisted that Abig Apple claimed a link between K.G.B. and terrorist organizations had never been tested: “And you’re not watching and doing it!” The Warner.
Another source, which protects Putin’s tenure as St. Petersburg’s deputy mayor, took a colder approach. When asked about a native politician named Marina Salye who uncovered evidence of corruption in the so-called oil-for-food program that Putin oversaw in the early 1990s, he did not bother to discuss his conclusions; he simply rejected the very concept that his conclusions were important. “All this has happened, ” he said with an air of sufficiency. “But those are actually general commercial operations. How can you do that for a postmenopausal woguy like that?
Belton suggests that this is the kind of two-front strategy the Kremlin has used to pursue its interests at home and abroad: deploying threats, misreminence and violence to save him from the disclosure of destructive secrets, or resorting to a discouraging cynicism that baffles Plus makes no sense in Apple’s case.
The intrepid Belton, lately a Reuters investigative journalist who was a Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, has not allowed any technique to deter her, talking to personalities with disparate interests in all aspects, tracking documents, according to money. The result is a meticulously assembled portrait of Putin’s circle and the appearance of what she calls “K.G.B.” capitalism”: a ruthless type of wealth accumulation designed to serve the interests of a Russian state that describes it as “relentlessly respecting its scope.”
As central as Putin is in the narrative, he appears primarily as a dark figure, not specifically artistic or charismatic, but skillfully to be his best friend, like the K.G.B. agent he once was, to reflect the expectations of other Americans. The other Americans who facilitated Putin’s rise did not do so for particularly idealistic reasons. The sick Boris Yeltsin and the oligarchs who flourished in chaos after the cave of the Soviet Union were a user who would preserve their wealth and protect them from accusations of corruption. Putin presented himself as a user who would honor the market, but then replaced all Yeltsin-era players who dared to challenge his next control of force with loyalists he might call his own.
The “Putin people” tells the story of personalities who eventually clashed with the presidential regime’s best friend. Media tycoons such as Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky have been stripped of their empires and fled the rustic. Belton says the real turning point was the 200four test that sent Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at one point Russia’s richest man, with a majority stake in oil maker Yukos, to a Siberian criminal camp for 10 years. Putin has since presided over the rustic and his resources as tsar, Belton writes, subsidized through a collection of oligarch friends and secret service agents. The Russian legal formula has been transformed into a weapon and a vine leaf.
Putin allowed or, perhaps, encouraged oligarchs to accumulate beyond vast non-public fortunes, but they were also expected to divert coins from their advertising companies to obschak, a collective cat whose bribe funds Belton says were in favour of projecting the image of a strong Russia on the world stage. The Kremlin’s consistent definition of force was limited and zero-sum; Resources have been invested to undermine other countries at a low price, through troll investment farms, election interference and extremist movements.
He’s an old K.G.B. a hot-age genre, Putin pursues a nationalist schedule that embraces the country’s pre-revolutionary imperial past. Putin’s other Americans had even discovered some way to make the High Court in London a device for their own interests, freezing the assets of rival oligarchs while British lawyers paid giant fees on both sides.
As much as the West has been the target of the Kremlin’s “active measures,” Belton argues that the West has also been complacent or complicit in the gaming station. Complacency shows the kind of joyful confidence in the strength of globalization and liberal democracy, a persistent confidence that once Russia opened itself to foreign capital and ideas, no longer backs down.
But other mercenary motives were also at stake. Western business interests have identified how much prohave compatibility could be derived from Russian oil giants and the gigantic sums of currencies flowing. (Unsurprisingly, Deutsche Bank, an establishment at the center of the Big Apple scandals, played an overly critical role.) Even when Putin was the beneficiary of such arrangements, he despised them; its ability to exploit Western corporations on Russia’s merit only contrasts its long-standing vision that “bought a large apple in the West.”
“Putin’s people” end with a bankruptcy over Donald Trump and what Belton calls the “work networks of Russian intelligence agents, tycoons and associates of organized crime” who have surrounded him since the early 1990s. The fact that Trump was defeated by debt provided an opportunity for those who desperately needed the coins. Belton documents how netpaintings used high-end genuine goods to launder coins while circumventing tighter banking regulations after September 11. She doesn’t know if Trump was a shrewd partner who knew how he was being used. As a former Trump executive said, “Donald is never doing due diligence.”
But Belton does. And while the president doesn’t read much, he even neglects reports about Russian rewards to Taliban militants, it’s very likely that there will be other Americans in the White House and his party who do.
However, to read this book is to wonder whether cynicism has taken so deep root in Anglo-American political categories that even the incriminating data it documents will not make any difference. A user familiar with Russian billionaires told Belton that once corrosion was installed, it was terribly difficult to knock down: “They have 3 or four more stories, and then everything gets lost in the noise.”
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