The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult

by Anna Arutunyan

  The raids made a serious dent in Russia’s mobile phone business, with police confiscating about $100 million worth of phones. That and the fact that the simplified duties system was exposed and shut down virtually paralyzed local retailers like Yevroset. It became clear that something had to be done – and that’s when Economics Minister German Gref, whom Putin had appointed in 2004 to help clean up the customs business, got involved.

  According to Gervis, Chichvarkin met with Gref to try to convince him to simplify the customs process.

  Later that year, Gref held a two-hour meeting with top mobile phones retailers and struck a deal. Gref personally guaranteed that customs would process all their shipments on time, as long as the importers committed to paying customs duties in full. According to one retailer at the meeting, Gref went as far as urging them to call his office directly if there was the slightest delay.109

  Chichvarkin had a further incentive for transparency – his company was planning an IPO, a sale of shares to the public, in 2006. And though it was about twice as expensive to pay full duties legally, as opposed to discounted “bribes” that went to customs officials, the importers benefitted in the long term, with more foreign companies willing to do business under a legitimate import scheme.

  The only party that seemed to be losing out was Department K, which lost tens of millions of dollars a year from the legalization process. And Yevgeny Chichvarkin, who played a major role in convincing Gref to simplify customs legally, became a top enemy.

  “All of Chichvarkin’s problems began precisely when he tried to move his company towards more transparency,” Gervis said. And though he was now legally declaring all his shipments and paying full duties, it didn’t prevent Department K officers from trying to shake him down.

  In spring 2006, after legally passing through customs, a shipment of 167,500 Motorola phones was impounded by Department K officials. “Fuck you and your IPO,” an officer reportedly said then.110 A Department K representative then went to Yevroset and demanded $10 million to stop the harassment. But since Yevroset had moved to a fully legal scheme, the shake-down proved more difficult. Attempts by Department K to prove the shipment was contraband failed – Yevroset had declared it in full and paid all duties legally. And an attempt to declare the phones fake backfired – Motorola officially vouched for the shipment, and then reportedly complained to the US State Department.

  For security officers, there’s possibly nothing worse than having your own private racket get so out of control that the top boss learns of it. In the centuries-old norms that governed bribery in Russia, the key rule was brat’ po chinu – to take according to your rank. No matter what formal, legal norms governed administrative relations, the system of kormleniye was still very much in place, by virtue of the impossibility of administering such vast territories with their endless webs of clashing interests. From the widespread bribery in the administration of Nicholas I to rent-seeking former KGB officers of the early 1990s, using their connections to clinch lucrative deals with foreign capital entering the market, that one rule worked in a country where all others kept changing. Take according to your rank, and make sure to remain loyal to and share with your patron. If you happened to take too much, or fail to share accordingly, then you had better make sure that your little racket did not reach the ears of the sovereign.

  In the case of the Yevroset shakedown, Vladimir Putin did apparently learn of it. According to unnamed Yevroset sources cited in leading Russian publications, Putin learned of this from none other than US President George W. Bush – and, of all places, at the G8 Summit in St. Petersburg – the one venue where he could successfully nurture the illusion that his country was a civilized nation with rule of law.

  Putin was reportedly enraged.111

  That very summer, Putin already had the Tri Kita case on his mind. And now here was another contraband scandal that was jeopardizing hopes of Russia ever joining the WTO. Putin met immediately with Motorola officials, and then called in Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev and German Gref, ordering them to sort out the mess.112

  The mess was sorted, but it had to be done with the stealth and caution that was crucial to keeping the peace among restive siloviki factions constantly struggling for revenue – for Putin, as we have seen, is severely limited in the punishment he can levy on security officers. Just four rank and file investigators involved in the attempted shakedown of Yevroset were charged; one is still at large, and the other three were soon released on parole.

  Still, for disgruntled Department K officials, it was a slap in the face from the government that added insult to injury. Not only was a young entrepreneur who wore weird clothes getting rich at their expense (for the legal route that allowed Chichvarkin to import more phones had severely restricted their customs income), he was clearly basking in the favour of the sovereign, or at least thought he was. And Chichvarkin’s slight overestimation of that favour – and of Putin’s willingness and ability to protect him from the siloviki – may have contributed to his undoing.

  As a weapon against Chichvarkin, officials dug up the case of a former Yevroset employee who claimed to have been kidnapped and roughed up by Yevroset’s security service in 2003. And that was where an ambitious young cop named Denis Yevsyukov came in: turning up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  3.

  The “connection” with Denis Yevsyukov should not be overestimated. He played no pivotal role in the developing Chichvarkin scandal. His precinct got caught in the crossfire between Department K and Yevroset – but that was no reason, after all, for him to go on a supermarket shooting spree. However, the mounting checks on his precinct – and how with such checks, coming from rival law enforcement structures, the roof tends to cave in on you if you are the weaker clan – illustrates the resilient complexity of Russian corruption, its all-pervasiveness, and its sprawling domino effect on all spheres of life.

  There is, of course, no way to get inside Yevsyukov’s head to gauge what role, if any, the checks on his precinct in spring 2009 played in his growing psychosis. Igor Trunov, the lawyer representing Yevsyukov’s victims, called the connection tenuous and far-fetched, saying that though he’d received Chichvarkin’s report before it was published, he decided not to pursue it. One of Yevsyukov’s lawyers, Tatyana Bushuyeva, told me the connection was intriguing for lack of other motives. Yevsyukov’s other lawyer, Mikhail Vokin, was reticent and warned me sternly against asking too many questions. He did, however, pass on my own questions to Yevsyukov in his jail cell, and relayed his one-word answer: “Nonsense.”

  Nevertheless, it is a fact that just months before Yevsyukov’s shooting spree, there was growing interest in his police precinct from investigators, police officers, and even the FSB. And while Viktor Ageyev, Yevsyukov’s boss and key patron, resigned the day after the shooting, he had actually submitted his resignation on April 22 – less than a week before the shooting incident. In other words, an important resignation that appeared to be the direct result of Yevsyukov’s shooting spree was in fact anything but.

  The reasons for the growing interest in Yevsyukov’s police precinct have very much to do with Chichvarkin, Yevroset, and the small incident in 2003.

  In 2002, Yevroset had started having problems with one of its couriers, Andrei Vlaskin. That year, Vlaskin, according to Yevroset, started stealing telephones from Yevroset and selling them on the side, making about £20,000 a month – a racket he kept up for at least eighteen months.113 The reason he got away with it for so long was the same one that made any racket, on any level, possible: the phones were illegal to start out with, since no import duties had been paid. In those years, everything was contraband – for the laws regulating customs and commerce were so cumbersome and so detached from reality that adhering to them would have made business impossible. Shady, informal methods governed business relations in Russia instead.

  In that messy, twilit world, it’s hard to identify the line between what is acceptable and what is
n’t, what is criminal and what is legal. According to Yuri Gervis, Yevroset’s security department filed a complaint against Vlaskin with the Southern District Police Department, where Yevsyukov then worked as a police detective. Various sources suggested114 that Yevsyukov personally handled the complaint and initiated the case in summer 2003. Yevroset security head Boris Levin said that Yevsyukov’s handling of the case was routine: the paperwork was signed by him or his underlings.115

  But according to investigators who, as Chichvarkin claims, were bent on building up a kidnapping case against Yevroset, the firm’s security department used friendly, informal relations and some £40,000 in bribes to involve Yevsyukov’s police department in Vlaskin’s detention.116

  The officers at the Southern District Police Department launched a case against Vlaskin, who went on the run. According to an investigative source, it was Yevsyukov who was responsible for the search for Vlaskin.117 Police found him in Tambov and transferred him to the Southern District Police Department in Moscow. There, one of Yevsyukov’s colleagues, Alexander Kurta, personally handed over Vlaskin to Boris Levin, Yevroset’s vice president and the head of its security service.

  Vlaskin claimed he was handcuffed and taken to a rented apartment in southern Moscow, where he was chained to a radiator and, according to various sources, “pressured” to pay back what he’d stolen – some $409,000 plus an additional 570,000 roubles.118 Chichvarkin has denied his own involvement in the kidnapping. According to Gervis, the pressure on Vlaskin was mild – and once a deal was struck to sell Vlaskin’s property in Tambov, Yevroset helped him do it. They also bought him a Moscow apartment in compensation. Yevroset security head Boris Levin would later be cleared of kidnapping charges, but did not deny that he held Vlaskin and in one instance, as he put it, forced him to return stolen property using measures that were outside of the “lawful protocol.”119

  Whatever the case, an obscure complaint was made by Vlaskin and filed away. Usually, a murky kidnapping like this where there were no good or bad guys, was forgotten.

  But in 2008, some five years later, officials at the Interior Ministry’s K Department pulled the complaint out from the files. On September 2, armed, masked police officers raided the offices of Yevroset and arrested Boris Levin on kidnapping charges. According to Yuri Gervis, Department K officials once again came to Yevroset, demanding a sum that was half of the company’s capitalization to close the case.

  There are several possible reasons why they did this.

  The most obvious was revenge – still smarting over their failed extortion attempt in 2006, they came across a bona fide kidnapping case that presented an excellent opportunity as an airtight extortion weapon. But there was another potential motive. During that time, Chichvarkin was embroiled in a bitter debt dispute with MTS, one of the big three cellular providers in Russia, which was making overtures to buy out Yevroset on the cheap. Some media commentators have pointed to a connection between the kidnapping charges and a takeover attempt by MTS,120 but there is no proof of this.

  Whatever their motives, in order to make a more damning case against Yevroset, Department K officials worked through the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor’s Office to try to prove not only that Vlaskin was kidnapped, but that the original case against him, for stealing phones, had been fabricated. And that the police department that fabricated the case was none other than Yevsyukov’s.

  In January 2009, investigators started confiscating criminal cases from the Southern District Police Department. Many of the cases had been instigated but never pursued – and among them was Vlaskin’s. On February 2, 2009, investigators arrived at the department for another batch of documents, only to find that the hundreds of folders they were looking for were dumped in the rubbish bins behind the building. When the investigators tried to take the folders, they themselves were removed – practically by force – from the premises.121

  After the rubbish incident, investigators called in the head of the department – Viktor Ageyev – for interrogation. Most of Yevsyukov’s colleagues were interrogated over the Vlaskin case as well during that period, and it seemed that Yevsyukov might be next.

  Indeed, Yevsyukov was eventually questioned in connection with the Vlaskin case – but only after his arrest for the shooting spree, in July 2009.122 Yevsyukov’s lawyer, Tatyana Bushuyeva, told me she knew of this questioning. She also said that Yevsyukov was held in a cell with someone she said was the “former head of security of Yevroset” – apparently part of a common practice where acquaintances were placed in the same cell to get them to talk about each other’s case.

  But lawyer Mikhail Vokin, asked about the reports that Yevsyukov had been questioned, denied them, saying he was under oath to keep the investigation secret.

  “In March, two FSB agents were attached to investigators conducting a probe of the Southern Police District department,” Gervis told me. “There was pressure, and there were demands to hand [over] their superiors.”

  On April 22, Viktor Ageyev filed his resignation papers, apparently in connection with the investigations at his department. Four days later, on the evening of April 26, his subordinate, Denis Yevsyukov, by that time the head of the Tsaritsino Precinct, snapped and shot nine people in a supermarket.

  4.

  At the end of the day, it is immaterial whether or not the chain of events described above went to Yevsyukov’s head and caused him to snap – it cannot be proven either way.

  Instead, it demonstrates something more interesting – an environment where there are no good guys among the players. A whole network of warring power factions, who, from top to bottom, from police generals to FSB colonels to investigators of the prosecutor’s office, down to the rookies in the local police precincts getting their obrok in watermelons, are all functioning according to the same pattern: the protection racket. Instead of protecting confusing, constantly changing laws, they are protecting the interests of their patrons.

  Who are those patrons?

  That is the biggest question. In a classical, absolutist monarchy, their chief patron would have been the sovereign, their king and country – which would have been the same thing. But Putin’s Russia, which has many of the trappings of an absolutist monarchy, refuses to see itself as such. The scholar Lilia Shevtsova has underlined the contradictions that this presents: Putin has preserved personified and undivided power, she writes. However, describing Yeltsin’s rule as “elected monarchy” she applies the same metaphor to Putin’s rule, “accenting the contradictions between personified power and the elective method of legitimizing it.”123

  A maddening dissonance ensues: Putin had a theoretical option of “building a responsible system of governance based not on the irrational and mystic power embodied in the leader but on the rule of law.”124

  But he either could not, or would not do so.

  Those words were written in 2004; by 2013 that dissonance has only grown, amid contradictory laws that fail to work and Putin’s constant calls to fight corruption. Why, despite yearly orders from Putin – his personal orders, harsh, determined and ominous – does corruption only grow?

  Given the messy framework of laws, the instructions given to the siloviki must be interpreted on a completely different level. What, from their perspective, is corrupt, and what is untouchable? Studying people’s attitudes towards bribery in post-Soviet Russia, sociologists Caroline Humphrey and David Sneath came across that same idea of sacredness that Russian political scholars are all too aware of: “The Soviet State… had a quasi-sacred character of invincibility and unquestionability, underpinned by harsh, numerous and well-organized internal security services.”125

  What follows from this is a rationalization of corruption not as the violation of rule of law (which doesn’t exist), but as the whole sphere of private commerce in itself. Private commerce becomes corruption by definition. Given the concept of the government as “the all-encompassing domain of power and control, and the generator of legitimacy
… any activities beyond the purview of the state [are] slotted into an opposed and subversive category of the spontaneous, uncontrolled, self-interested and morally dubious.”126

  But state power in Putin’s Russia was only sacred when it wanted to see itself as such – in all other cases, it was a “democracy” with “rule of law.” And amid that dissonance, feudal relationships dictated to what extent commercial activities were balanced with their service to the state: the vassal of your vassal is not your vassal.

  Order, in this case, pertains to the interests of state power – all else, whether it’s a businessman or a rival agency taking more bribes than they’re worth, is fair game.

  The “all-encompassing” aspect of the Russian government isn’t just a mystical concept. It is primarily an economic one – especially if we remember that oil, gas and customs duties, not individual income taxes, constitute the bulk of federal revenue.

  Seeing themselves as part of that all-encompassing economic entity, the milch cow for an enormous, chaotic and poverty-stricken country, security officers cannot help but see businessmen like Chichvarkin as sources of their own private income.

  And this brings us once again to that unverified incident in 2006 when Putin called in Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev and Economics Minister German Gref and told them to sort out the Department K racket.