The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult

by Anna Arutunyan

  “My experience tells me that Dymovsky’s questionable moral qualities are written on his forehead in capital letters,” Valery Zorkin, the powerful chairman of no less than Russia’s Constitutional Court, penned in a column in the official Rossiyskaya Gazeta that December. “Not even a brilliant PR team, attached by someone to put the spin on Dymovsky, could erase those letters. And that someone deliberately attached this PR team to Dymovsky is pretty clear…. It is important to understand that there is a [anti-police] campaign under way.”135

  To understand all this talk of a shadowy plot, I went to Kirill Kabanov, the former FSB colonel, who still carried a gun when he went to work in the National Anti-Corruption Committee, an NGO with apparently friendly links to the Presidential Administration.

  Yes, he said, there were ulterior motives in the reform campaign – rather, a hardliner group, as he saw it, was taking advantage of the presidential reform campaign to strengthen its position.

  “The Interior Ministry has a problem. There’s a group, sometimes called the ‘smaller politburo’. A hardliner group. It believes that Nurgaliyev’s position is not supportive enough of the siloviki. This group is trying to shake up the system, to get better control of the president and the prime minister.”

  This “smaller politburo,” he told me, was connected to a former KGB associate of Putin’s, the current drug tsar Viktor Ivanov, head of the Federal Service for Drug Control.

  And it was very possible that this hardliner, FSB-backed group was using Dymovsky, without his knowledge, for its own purposes.

  “These people are starting to put the spin on him. I have one question about Dymovsky. Here he is in Moscow, here he is at a press conference. He gets out of the building and gets into a brand new Audi A8 with a Moscow licence plate.”

  “Did that mean Dymovsky had a patron?” I asked.

  “No, he’s being used.”

  It was not difficult to find who was “behind” Dymovsky. One was a tall, blond, weather-beaten man in his early 40s named Marat Rumyantsev – a contractor for the security services. Another was a former police colonel who identified himself only as Alexei. And like many who had flocked to Dymovsky, they appeared genuinely dismayed at just how commonplace the violations described in his video had become.

  They agreed to meet at a Moscow restaurant – and arrived in an Audi minivan.

  “When you read about the people behind Dymovsky, these terrifying PR technologists with millions of dollars, that’s us,” Marat Rumyantsev told me. “On the third day they announced that America was behind Dymovsky. We were on the floor laughing. My wife was asking me, ‘when are they going to start paying you?’”

  It was Marat and Alexei who picked up Dymovsky in Moscow, where he ran from Novorossiysk after posting his video, fearing retribution from his bosses.

  “I was one of the first people that called him. I told him, you did something I’ve always wanted to do, but I didn’t have the guts,” Alexei said. “He came to Moscow in a t-shirt when it was -5 degrees outside. I bought him a sweater and some clothes so he could look decent at a press conference. I got him settled in a hotel. All with my own money. My wife was upset.”

  Alexei was a fifteen-year veteran of the Moscow police force, a colonel who retired after getting fed up with being rapped on the knuckles for tracking criminals with friends in high places.

  But just who, exactly, was Marat Rumyantsev? And though he was clearly sincere, what stopped him from being used, unknowingly, in the interests of more powerful officials?

  Kabanov described to me how security structures often co-opted public initiative groups to work to their advantage. It was very possible, he said, that Vadim Karastelyov’s Belaya Lenta, which Dymovsky joined as a leader, could have been approached without even knowing who that patron was. “Let’s say there’s a NGO or a protest group. This siloviki group moves in and says, ‘We’ll help you.’”

  While Alexei said that he started his own private security agency after leaving the force, Marat Rumyantsev was slightly more evasive about his background. In the late 1980s, he had served in the army, then the Special Forces of the Defence Ministry’s Chief Intelligence Directorate (GRU). He even tried to join Alfa Group – the elite forces of the KGB – but his first and last day on the job was August 19, 1991, the day of the coup that put an end to everything.

  In 1992, he did a six-month stint in the police organized crime unit, but left the force after being forbidden to go after a protected drug dealer.

  “Then I went back where I came from,” he said. “The Special Forces. Reserve officer.”

  Before I had time to bring up the issue of being used, Marat brought it up himself. “I’ve had this feeling several times – what if this is some kind of project, and we’re being used in it without our knowledge?”

  Alexei said he was convinced that they were being used, but said he was certain that Dymovsky himself was too unmanageable. “If anyone is behind Dymovsky, it’s God himself.”

  It was becoming clear that whether or not these officers were part of a higher-up plot to take control of the Interior Ministry was immaterial. Or, to be more precise, whether or not there was a plot, they did not knowingly play a role in it. Instead, they presented a different kind of threat entirely: if a plot were to materialize, they could be used as formidable fodder. For, as foes of the government, they felt far more desperate, more betrayed, and more disenfranchised than any so-called “liberal opposition” could claim – nor did they want anything to do with the liberal human rights activists who, Marat said, were also trying to use Dymovsky to promote themselves.

  “As a citizen of this country, I’m certain that everything that’s being done right now is a diversion to destroy the Russian Federation,” Marat Rumyantsev told me.

  What had turned the police profession into a money-making operation?

  “An order was given at some point that there’s no more money for salaries. In return, we are shown that we can do whatever we want, we are told, ‘don’t be afraid, nothing will happen to you, the System won’t betray you.’ This started in 2000, and it came from a person we all know, a man who will not betray his own kind. Vladimir Putin. Ever heard of him?”

  4.

  In the case of Major Alexei Dymovsky, truly, the medium was the message. Talking directly to (or at) Putin about the violations committed by one’s superiors was itself an act of defiance. It was also the only thing he did to turn himself from a provincial police officer into a dissident and a celebrity.

  In fact, the whole story of Dymovsky, distilled to the basics, was a one-sided conversation with his sovereign.

  And it didn’t begin with the video, but with an unsuccessful phone call to Putin’s 2007 phone-in show. It was the last one that Putin held as president, and Dymovsky wanted to ask him when he would put an end to corruption in the police. The operators, quite obviously, did not put him through.

  But Putin’s silence in the wake of Dymovsky’s video was also telling. A small-time provincial officer, extending a trembling hand, wanted to discuss police problems with the one man he felt was responsible for corruption, who could thus put an end to it. “Eye to eye,” man to man.

  And Putin utterly refused the invitation.

  After that refusal was made clear, Dymovsky told a radio station – and Putin by proxy – that he no longer wanted to meet with him. “I want to officially state that I will not meet with the prime minister because I consider it to be an insult to my honour,”136 Dymovsky announced. Since the prime minister didn’t want to talk with his people – which he clearly demonstrated by ignoring Dymovsky’s video – Dymovsky had no reason to talk to him either.

  Subsequently, Dymovsky would refuse to meet with politicians who he said were trying to use him to promote themselves. And that too was telling – telling in the sense that Dymovsky seemed to have something to say to Putin, but not to other “elected” officials, the faces of Russia’s flimsy, powerless institutions.

  By
the time Dymovsky arrived in Mezhdurechensk in May 2010, eager to speak out on a social conflict simmering in that mining town, the furore around his name had died down. But Dymovsky was convinced that it was just the beginning.

  “Someone is artificially creating tensions between the people and the police,” he told me, echoing what Marat Rumyantsev had described a few months before. “Once the first shot is fired, it will all sweep over Russia. People will die. A civil war will begin. In the ensuing conflict, those with means will take their things and run. And military troops from NATO and the European Union will enter Russia and divide it. That’s what all this is for.”

  This was no longer the fumbling cop I’d seen in the video, as if the gloss of publicity and the deprivations of prison had chiselled his face and added a melancholy cast to his look. Dymovsky would shed tears at intervals, but he spoke clearly and with a deep sense of mission. It just wasn’t clear what, exactly, that mission was.

  That what he was seeing around him was the result of a deliberate plot and not of chaos and disarray seemed clear to Dymovsky. It was as though he could not reconcile himself to the notion that Putin was somehow not in control of the way security officers interacted with each other, that he was not all-powerful. And for that reason, it seemed, in Dymovsky’s mind he was equated with a traitor.

  “Why couldn’t Putin fly out here instead of hanging out at Abramovich’s dacha? Why couldn’t he talk to the people? Our government is afraid of the people. And the people are afraid of lawlessness.”

  Clearly, though, the mechanisms for change did not seem to be in the hands of Major Dymovsky, and he admitted as much.

  “There will come a time when they [the corrupt officials running Russia] will reap what they sow. I know it. It can’t go on forever. It can’t get any worse.”

  PART III

  THE BOYARS

  Chapter 9

  Doing Business with Putin

  At that moment Boris clearly realized what he had before surmised, that in the army, besides the subordination and discipline prescribed in the military code… there was another, more important, subordination…. More than ever was Boris resolved to serve in future not according to the written code, but under this unwritten law.

  - Leo Tolstoy, “War and Peace”

  “At that point I realized there was something deeply wrong in terms of my own situation with Putin. He clearly wasn’t my friend.”

  - William Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital

  1.

  BY THE TIME William Browder understood why he had fallen from Vladimir Putin’s good graces, it was far too late, and his lawyer was dead.

  The notorious death of the lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, would set in motion one of the biggest international scandals since the Cold War; a scandal that would affect everything from trade relations to the fate of hundreds of Russian orphans, and a scandal from which no one would emerge entirely blameless.

  But the story began as many did in Russia: with a businessman looking for opportunity in what many believed to be a developing economy transitioning towards democracy.

  For William Browder, an astute investment analyst who founded the Hermitage Capital Management fund in Russia in 1996, getting rich on undervalued Russian stock was just one of the ways he was helping to improve the investment climate. Buying shares on the cheap from Russian companies and then exposing corruption to improve their transparency and to raise their stock prices wasn’t only legal, it seemed like the right thing to do. Browder was using his Western know-how to bring better corporate practices to Russia’s emerging market, and the fact that he was making millions of dollars in the process underlined the win-win confluence that only a free market could foster.

  Browder was also convinced (or perhaps had convinced himself) that he had an “alignment of interests” with Vladimir Putin, who seemed eager to rein in the robber baron oligarchs and fix the fraud they left behind as a matter of policy and national interest.

  Armed with that alignment, Hermitage Capital exposed real or perceived scams at major companies that could harm minority shares. Browder learned to take on powerful interests long before Putin became president. In 1997, Hermitage Capital succeeded in preventing oligarch Vladimir Potanin from issuing additional stock at the Sidanco company, stock which could have diluted Hermitage Capital’s 2 percent of shares.137 An exposé of Gazprom led to CEO Rem Vyakhirev getting fired in 2001, and after Hermitage Capital complained of asset-stripping plans at Russia’s electricity giant, RAO UES, the government cancelled the plans. Though there is evidence that dozens of lawsuits filed by Hermitage Capital were lost, according to Browder, between 1999 and 2003 the government would step in to fix every major fraud his company publicized.138

  In return, Browder touted Russia’s investment climate, heaping praise on the government and Vladimir Putin in particular, so much so that he came to be dubbed as a “cheerleader” and even a “Putinista.”139

  “My original feelings about Putin were based very narrowly on what he did for us in the first three years of his regime,” Browder told me in October 2011.

  He said he was horrified at what the oligarchs had done to the country and was glad to see Putin taking a tougher stance. “When Putin came to power one of his big policies was to correct that. It was hard to be human and not feel some degree of relief to see someone who seemed to be focused, determined and organized to take that on.”

  But Browder was also particularly thrilled to see Vladimir Putin in his corner.

  “Since I was fighting with a number of these oligarchs who were stealing money from the companies I was investing in, I was delighted when Putin would step into the fight on our side,” he told me.

  But then things started going horribly wrong. On November 13, 2005, upon his return to Moscow, he was stopped at the border and sent back to London – declared, in a terse statement eventually issued by the Foreign Ministry, as a threat to national security.

  For weeks, Hermitage Capital kept the deportation a secret, as if, much like the first random victims of the Stalinist purges, they were hoping that it was some sort of mistake, that perhaps Putin wasn’t aware of the error. There was another man, a human rights activist, deported just two days later named Bill Bowring – maybe the names were confused.

  On December 26, weeks after the mysterious deportation, Browder made a particularly glowing speech about Putin. In a half-hour interview with CNBC, he said that Putin had heard the investors and was eager to work with them; that the Yukos affair – in which Russia’s richest and possibly most transparent oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was jailed on fraud and tax evasion charges – was nothing to get emotional about.

  But this overture of flattery – of the kind that Putin liked, because he did indeed like foreign investors – had no effect. The state of apparent disfavour that Browder suddenly found himself in would continue to spiral out of control.

  By November 2009, his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, would be writing letters like the following to the head of the Butyrka pretrial detention centre where he was being held on tax evasion charges:

  “On November 12 I was deprived of the ability to take hot food for 24 hours and was deprived of an 8-hour period of sleep. This, evidently, became the reason for an acute increase in the pain in my pancreas and the appearance of some rather unpleasant pain in the area of my liver…. In connection with this I ask to be given recommendations for what kind of medications, if any, I should take…. Apart from that, I ask to finally be informed of when I shall be administered an ultrasound that had been scheduled for August.”

  Magnitsky, in pretrial detention since November 2008 on charges of helping Hermitage Capital evade taxes, was held for four more days in a tiny cell with no hot water, his cot less than a metre away from a hole in the floor that served as a toilet.

  On November 16, 2009, two doctors, who had been kept from seeing Magnitsky for well over an hour after they arrived, finally discovered him on the floor of his cell, having died from pa
ncreatitis that prison doctors, reportedly on orders from Magnitsky’s investigators, had refused to treat. There was some evidence that he was beaten shortly before his death.

  Despite a national outcry over the death, the disaster that began when Browder was barred entry from Russia did not end there.

  By 2013, Russian authorities were trying to get Interpol to declare Browder a wanted man. Magnitsky, in a case unprecedented in Russian history, was tried as a dead man – and found guilty.

  This macabre retribution appeared to be a response to Browder’s own revenge. In 2011, he had started lobbying US Congress for a bill that would bar sixty Russian officials from entering America and freeze their assets there. It would become known as the Magnitsky Act, which was passed in late 2012. Considering how members of Russia’s elite had a penchant for vacationing in America and sending their children to study there, the bill was a slap in the face for the Kremlin. Putin, who had been banking on improved trade relations resulting from the repeal of the Cold War-era Jackson-Vanik Amendment, would retaliate with an Anti-Magnitsky Law. It was a tit-for-tat bill, except that it included a clause widely seen as hurting Russians more than Americans: a ban on the adoption of Russian orphans by Americans, in a country whose citizens were not particularly eager to adopt.

  Why did Browder’s initial “alignment” of interests with the Kremlin turn into a collision? If Browder had inadvertently stumbled into a world where dead men were tried for tax fraud, where orphans paid the price for international business feuds, what kind of world was it, and why was it so resilient?

  2.

  In 2007 Browder, having been barred from Russia, was living in London, watching as his once $4.5 billion investment fund struggled to survive. But he seemed to know enough about how Russian power worked to understand that only personal connections and clout could help bring him back into the country.