Orders to Kill

by Amy Knight

  The Post-Stalin Leadership

  Stalin’s successors for the most part eschewed such violence. The post-Stalin regime was a collective leadership by men who were not inclined to live with the kind of fear that existed under Stalin. They had seen many of their colleagues disappear or be charged with crimes and executed and they wanted a semblance, at least, of security. Yes, they had first to get rid of the dreaded former police chief and fellow politburo member, Lavrenty Beria, who was executed in late 1953 after a faux trial for crimes against the state. After that, however, things settled down.14 Even Khrushchev, at the end of a bitter power struggle in 1964, was allowed to live peacefully at his dacha to the end of his days.

  The conventional wisdom in the West was that conflicts within the Kremlin had disappeared with the advent of Brezhnev, whose regime reflected outwardly a collective leadership that was always in consensus. Kremlinology, the science of deciphering what was really going on in the Soviet leadership, went out of fashion, and when there were signs of differing points of view reflected in the tightly controlled press, they were interpreted by Western analysts as simple policy disagreements. But the Soviet system had no accepted procedure for resolving such disputes and, given the complete absence of democratic elections, no means of deciding who would prevail when it came to appointments in the top leadership other than the machinations among this small, isolated group of men, who ruled from above.

  When two Politburo members, Fyodor Kulakov and Pyotr Masherov, died suddenly, some Western experts, myself included, suspected foul play. Kulakov, Central Committee secretary for agriculture (a hugely important portfolio), and a full Politburo member, was sixty when he died of an officially reported heart attack at his home in July 1978. Kulakov was widely thought of as a possible successor to Brezhnev and was a mentor of Mikhail Gorbachev, who was from Kulakov’s home region of Stavropol. Given the unusual circumstances that surrounded Kulakov’s death—there had been no indications that he was in ill health—rumors that he had either committed suicide or was murdered began to surface.

  In fact, there had been numerous signs that Kulakov was in disfavor with the Brezhnev leadership. At a Central Committee plenum earlier that same month, party agricultural policy came under heavy criticism, but Kulakov, as the main party spokesman for agriculture, was absent, although he appeared afterward at other party functions. Amazingly, although protocol dictated that all Politburo members attend Kulakov’s funeral and interment in the Kremlin wall, several, including Brezhnev, failed to show up. Perhaps Kulakov’s heart attack was a result of the pressure he was under. But his sudden death came at a convenient time for the Soviet leadership, given that Kulakov’s political future was already under a cloud.

  The circumstances of Masherov’s death in a car accident in October 1980 gave observers even more reason to suspect foul play.15 Masherov, sixty-two at the time, was Communist Party chief in the Belarus Republic and viewed as a promising political leader. He was a candidate (provisional) member of the Politburo and highly popular in Belarus. But his mentor, the former Belarus party chief Kirill Mazurov, had been unceremoniously dismissed from his post as a full member of the Politburo two years earlier after carefully orchestrated criticisms in the press. And many of Mazurov’s and Masherov’s protégés in the Belarus party apparatus had been replaced by Brezhnev favorites, a sure sign of Masherov’s declining influence. Significantly, the long-time head of the KGB in Belarus was suddenly dismissed in August 1980, and the new security chief was an outsider from Moscow.

  By the time of his death, Masherov’s leadership of Belarus was under heavy criticism in the party press for alleged economic failures as well as for “local patriotism” (too much independence from Moscow). But Masherov fought back, giving a startling interview to Pravda in June 1980, in which he made a thinly veiled jab at Brezhnev’s personality cult: “What is it that sometimes happens? People meet and sit around, but in fact one person speaks and makes decisions. The others merely agree with him. The result is imaginary collective leadership.”16 Masherov’s outspoken remarks doubtless incurred Brezhnev’s displeasure, to say the least, especially since he had made similar comments in recent speeches to party officials in Belarus.

  Masherov’s car was allegedly hit by a truck when he was traveling in the countryside outside of the Belarus capital, Minsk, which meant there were no witnesses to confirm the official report. (There was no public mention of what happened to Masherov’s driver.) In a surprising break with precedent, not a single member, or candidate member, of the Politburo attended Masherov’s funeral and no condolences were printed in Pravda, as would have been expected. Had Masherov not conveniently died, it was all but certain that he would have been forced out of his post.

  The KGB’s Hidden Hand Abroad

  There were also assassinations or attempted killings by the KGB beyond Soviet borders. Nikolai Khokhlov was a KGB officer who defected to the United States in 1954 and testified before the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee about the operations of the KGB. While in Frankfurt, Germany for a speaking engagement in 1957, Khokhlov was poisoned by radioactive thallium, the same substance that would be suspected at first in the 2006 murder in London of former KGB/FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko. Khokhlov became violently ill and almost died, but he survived after being transferred to a U.S. military hospital. Khokhlov later wrote: “I … was an exhibit of the achievements of Soviet science. Totally bald, so disfigured by scars and spots that those who had known me did not at first recognize me.… I was nevertheless also living proof that Soviet science, the science of killing, is not omnipotent.”17 The Kremlin’s message was simple: defectors from the KGB were traitors and thus subject to retribution no matter where they were.

  The KGB also had a role in the killing of Bulgarian dissident and writer Georgii Markov, an employee of the BBC and a contributor to Radio Liberty, who was stabbed with a poison-tipped umbrella at a bus stop near London’s Waterloo Bridge in 1978. Markov’s critical reporting on the Bulgarian Communist Party and its leader Todor Zhivkov made him an enemy of the Bulgarian regime. A letter sent from the Bulgarian secret services to the KGB in 1975 complained that he mocked the Communist Party in Bulgaria and encouraged dissidence in the country. And declassified documents from the Bulgarian secret service files show that its representatives visited Moscow before the murder to discuss the case with technical experts from the KGB poison laboratory.18 While the actual perpetrator of the crime was apparently working for the Bulgarians, the KGB supplied the poison, ricin, that was injected into Markov. The Soviets controlled all of Eastern Europe, including Bulgaria, at this time, and they had a strong motive in preventing any dissidence that threatened their puppet regimes.

  After the Soviet Collapse

  The post-1991 period, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, a self-proclaimed democrat, issued in a new era, one of political and economic freedom and the hoped-for rule of law. But Yeltsin, whatever his goals, was not able to make a smooth transformation from the Soviet system of state control. Yes, he outlawed the Communist Party and disbanded, with much fanfare, the KGB. But the remnants of these institutions did not disappear: they re-emerged in a different guise. And meanwhile, a struggle ensued among the newly born capitalists for the spoils of the Soviet regime. “Mafia” gangs began to appear, along with consequent bloodletting. Entrepreneurs like Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky had to hire around-the-clock bodyguards. In fact, Vladimir Gusinsky, head of Most Bank and NTV, reportedly had a private security service that numbered a thousand men, many of whom were former KGB officers. Moscow and other cities in Russia became a free-for-all, with constant reports of murders or assassination attempts. Berezovsky himself was seriously wounded in June 1994 when a bomb was detonated in Moscow as his car drove by. (His driver was decapitated.) But these were not political murders. They were crimes that aimed at settling financial scores, although former or current employees of the security police were usual
ly involved.

  In October 1994, a journalist named Dmitry Kholodov opened a booby-trapped briefcase in his office at the newspaper Moskovskii komsomolets and was blown up. Kholodov had been working on a story about corruption at high levels in the Russian armed forces, touching even the Minister of Defense, Pavel Grachev, and was due to testify about the allegations before the Russian parliament. His editors at the paper suspected that Grachev was behind the murder, but, despite two trials, no one was ever convicted.

  Then in March 1995 a murder occurred that shook Russia to its core: Vladislav Listev, one of Russia’s most popular television commentators, was gunned down in the stairway of his Moscow apartment building. Listev had just been made director general of the Russian television channel ORT and had announced a general moratorium on advertising, which meant cutting out middlemen from this lucrative business. These men included Boris Berezovsky, a major shareholder. Berezovsky was one of the initial suspects in the killing, and he came close to being arrested. But he managed, in a desperate gambit, to gather political supporters and convince Yeltsin of his innocence, sending the president a long videotaped message in his defense.

  In the end, as Paul Klebnikov noted in his 2000 book about Berezovsky, Godfather of the Kremlin, the investigation of Listev’s murder was a farce. The killers were never found.19 (As mentioned, Klebnikov himself became the tragic victim of an assassination in Moscow in 2004.) This was to mark the beginning of a pattern of unsolved murders. Russian authorities had the formidable power of a massive and sophisticated system of law enforcement. But the Kremlin had no will to pursue these cases, and in some cases actually had reasons to obstruct investigations. Yeltsin says in passing in his memoirs Midnight Diaries: “I was concerned that year in and year out these murders remained unsolved.”20 In fact, he was concerned mostly with enriching himself financially and staying in power.

  Enter Vladimir Putin

  The murders formed a backdrop for Vladimir Putin’s emergence as an important figure in Moscow’s power hierarchy. At the time of the Listev affair, Putin, a former KGB officer, was a deputy to St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak and chairman of the Committee for Foreign Liaison, which governed the city’s foreign trade. According to Karen Dawisha, author of Putin’s Kleptocracy, Putin used his position for his personal financial gain, as did Sobchak and Putin’s friends from the KGB. He routinely engaged in bribe taking, money laundering, and kickbacks for contracts awarded non-competitively. Both he and Sobchak were subjects of investigations by prosecutorial bodies in St. Petersburg and Moscow.21

  After Sobchak was defeated in the May 1996 mayoral election by Vladimir Yakovlev, Putin needed to get out of St. Petersburg fast. Having made entreaties to people he knew in Moscow, he managed to obtain a position in the Kremlin as deputy head of the Presidential Property Management Department. In this capacity, Putin was responsible for Kremlin property abroad, which had earlier belonged to the Soviet Communist Party and was worth billions. In Dawisha’s words: “property abroad was very thoroughly plucked before the state got its hands on it. And it was [Putin] who did the plucking.”22

  Putin had a keen sense of where he needed to be to get ahead in the tumultuous Yeltsin years and was skilled at self-promotion. In 1997, he moved to the Kremlin’s Main Control Directorate, responsible for the implementation of federal laws and executive orders and also the use of budget resources by various Russian regional governments. This meant that he was in charge of the files of those in St. Petersburg who had been investigating his and Sobchak’s earlier illegal activities in the city. Just as Sobchak was about to be arrested, Putin used his position to fly him out of the country secretly.

  After a brief stint as first deputy chief of staff under Yeltsin in the spring of 1998, Putin received a further promotion. He was appointed chief of the FSB in July, replacing Nikolai Kovalev, who reportedly was dismissed because of the operations of the FSB’s Directorate for Combating the Activities of Organized Criminal Groups (URPO). This directorate had been implicated in graft and in extrajudicial killings.

  It is not clear why Putin was chosen for the FSB leadership, given that his KGB career had been undistinguished. According to two Russian historians, Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky, his appointment did not go down well with staff employees: “He was merely a lieutenant colonel. In a military organization, where people took such things seriously, Putin’s military rank could not be mentioned without either amusement or resentment. The nature of Putin’s former work at the KGB was also cause for derision. Putin had worked in East Germany, where foreign intelligence employed its flunkies.”23

  Boris Nemtsov, a member of Yeltsin’s government at the time, recalled: “No one knew who Putin was. He was so unremarkable that no one reacted to him, even my secretary.” When Putin called Nemtsov’s office on one occasion, his secretary kept Putin waiting on the line and told Nemtsov: “Someone named Putin is calling. He says he is the chief of the FSB. What should I do with him?”24

  It was apparently because Putin was not well connected to the central FSB leadership that Yeltsin’s inner circle chose him for the job. He would be loyal to Yeltsin, not to Lubyanka (FSB headquarters). Putin set about immediately to purge many of the higher FSB command and to replace them with his old KGB colleagues from St. Petersburg. He also engineered the ouster of Procurator-General Iurii Skuratov, who was cooperating with Swiss authorities in a criminal investigation of the Presidential Property Management Department, which had siphoned off millions of dollars in the making of contracts to renovate the Kremlin and deposited the money in bank accounts for Yeltsin and his family in Switzerland. Putin’s agents videotaped Skuratov (or someone resembling him) engaged in sex with two call girls, and then Putin, on behalf of Yeltsin, demanded Skuratov’s resignation. After Skuratov refused, the video was shown on Russian television. He was forced to resign, and the corruption investigation involving Yeltsin was called off.

  Meanwhile, by the summer of 1999, Yeltsin’s presidency was under siege. The Duma, led by the Communists, was preparing impeachment proceedings against him, and his public approval rating—thanks to the botched 1994–96 war in Chechnya, Russia’s 1998 economic crisis, and Yeltsin’s increasingly capricious style of governance—had plummeted. Yeltsin’s abrupt dismissal of his popular prime minister, Evgenii Primakov, in May 1999 raised a further outcry against him.

  Putin became more and more essential to Yeltsin and the “family” of supporters that surrounded him in the Kremlin. Yeltsin had unexpectedly appointed Putin head of the Security Council at the end of March and was entrusting him with the volatile situation in the North Caucasus, where bombings and kidnappings were occurring with increasing frequency. The Yeltsin team was even considering emergency rule in order to stave off an electoral defeat of his political party, Unity, by the Fatherland-All-Russia party, which Primakov led, along with Moscow mayor Iurii Luzhkov. It was in these crisis circumstances that, on August 9, 1999, Yeltsin appointed Putin prime minister and thus his designated successor as president. In a televised speech, Yeltsin had words of praise for Putin: “I have decided to now to name the person who is, in my opinion, able to consolidate society and, drawing support from broadest political forces, to ensure the continuation of reforms in Russia.… I have confidence in him.”25

  It is sadly ironic that Paul Klebnikov had a similarly favorable impression of Putin when the latter became Yeltsin’s heir apparent. In response to suggestions that Putin was behind the September 1999 bombings in Russia, Klebnikov observed: “There is nothing in the man’s past to indicate that he would commit such a monstrous crime to gain power. On the contrary, Putin’s past career betrays an unusual dedication to a fixed code of conduct (albeit an authoritarian one); there is nothing to suggest the bottomless cynicism necessary to massacre one’s own people to promote one’s career.”26 If Klebnikov had lived to witness the next decade of Putin’s rule, he would perhaps have taken back those words.

  Putin and FSB Chief Bortnikov.
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  (Photograph courtesy of Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images)

  2

  HOW THE SYSTEM WORKS: PUTIN AND HIS SECURITY SERVICES

  Our best colleagues, the honor and pride of the FSB, don’t do their work for the money … there is one very special characteristic that unites all these people, and it is a very important quality: it is their sense of service. They are, if you like, our new nobility.

  —FSB Chief Nikolai Patrushev, in a speech to his agency, December 2000.

  There’s no super-repressive regime. There are no mythical Cheka agents that we need to be scared of. It’s just a bunch of crooks.

  —Russian anti-corruption blogger Aleksei Navalny, 2011

  Russia under Putin has been variously described as a “managed democracy” (early on in Putin’s tenure as president), an “authoritarian state” (somewhat later), and, more recently, a “kleptocracy.” But the most accurate term for today’s Russia is “police state.” American political scientist Brian Taylor observed in his book State Building in Putin’s Russia: “the term ‘police state’ resonates because state power, as the sociologist Max Weber recognized, ultimately rests on the ability to coerce. The behavior of its coercive organizations, such as the military, the police and the secret police, tells us much about the character of a state.…”1 Russia is run by police and security officials who are above the law and report only to President Vladimir Putin, himself a former secret police officer. (The Russian military tends, by tradition, to stay out of politics.) These officials have, for the most part, not reached their positions because of objective qualifications, such as education and experience, but because of personal and family connections—Putin’s version of what was in Soviet days called a patronage network. As journalist Masha Lipman expressed it back in 2002, Putin “staffed his government structures with numerous mediocrities, people with no record of achievement and no vision of the task that had suddenly befallen them. Their only ‘merit’ was their loyalty and their origin in Putin’s home base, St. Petersburg.”2