Although the loss of empire and the loss of the decades-long Cold War hit men like Yakunin hard, he was among those who moved fast to embrace Russia’s new capitalism. And while he said he hankered for the days of certainty, for the morality and values that he believed lay at the foundation of Communism, that did not stop him from leaping into business before the Soviet Union had even collapsed, to pocket vast amounts of cash both for himself and, more importantly, to help preserve the networks of the KGB.
For four years after the Soviet collapse, Yakunin remained an officer in the security services, never resigning his post. Although he insisted that he hadn’t been taking orders, he admitted that the aim of his and his partners’ business activities was partly to preserve what they could: ‘We needed to redirect ourselves. We needed to create commercial enterprises that would earn money … We were all part of this process. The traditions of communication and cooperation remained.’
Yakunin joined forces with associates from St Petersburg’s prestigious Ioffe Institute for Technology and Physics, where he’d worked overseeing the institute’s international connections before being sent to New York. Among them was Yury Kovalchuk, then thirty-nine and a leading physicist of his day. Kovalchuk had a high forehead and a hawk-like gaze, and he worked closely with Andrei Fursenko; both of them were deputies in the Ioffe Institute’s work on sensitive semiconductor technologies deployed in laser and satellite systems. This was an area at the heart of the KGB’s special interest, in which all manner of smuggling schemes had been deployed to bypass embargoes and steal technology from the West (Yakunin was believed to have worked on technology smuggling when he served undercover in New York). Their expertise landed Yakunin, Kovalchuk and Fursenko a lucrative assignment: a deal to sell a batch of rare-earth metals, including rare and strategic isotopes used in the aerospace and military industries, and in semiconductor technology.[101] They were given the deal by a senior general in the KGB, said Yakunin. Once they’d pulled it off, one of the joint ventures they’d created, Temp, landed 24 million roubles in profits.[102] It was a huge sum in those days, and it helped them take over Bank Rossiya.
The three men had set up a string of such joint ventures in the final months before the Soviet collapse, as the KGB stepped up preparations for the transition to a market economy, and they’d already been working closely with Bank Rossiya. In the aftermath of the failed August coup, said Yakunin, they had briefly feared that they might go out of business when their accounts in Bank Rossiya were frozen, along with the rest of the property of the Communist Party. But their connections, and the cash they made in the rare-earth metals deal, saved them. High-ups in the local Party and the KGB gave them the nod to take over Bank Rossiya and bring it back to life. ‘We were people who were well-known in the party structures of the city of Leningrad,’ said Yakunin. ‘We had many contacts, and people trusted us. We were allowed to take a controlling stake in Bank Rossiya precisely because these people trusted and respected us.’[103]
From the beginning, Bank Rossiya had been strategically connected to the foreign-relations committee run by Putin. Its offices were in the Smolny Institute, which had become the city’s mayor’s headquarters, and it began to play a key role in the creation of the obschak, the common cash pot for Putin’s men. The city’s KGB-connected businessmen, including Yakunin, Kovalchuk and Fursenko, almost religiously continued to follow the prescriptions of the KGB laid out in the twilight years of the Communist regime, when trade was to be ordered through joint ventures with foreign entities. All joint ventures were set up on the approval of Putin’s committee, and most were directed to open accounts with Bank Rossiya. In one instance, millions of dollars were siphoned from the city budget through Bank Rossiya’s accounts into a network of such companies linked to Putin’s men. The cash had been funnelled through a fund known as Twentieth Trust. At one point the scheme had threatened to embroil Putin in a criminal case. Like many of the slush funds created by Putin’s men, the money had gone towards strategic needs such as funding election campaigns, and also for personal acquisitions such as luxury properties in Finland and Spain for city officials.[104]
As Putin and his KGB men became more secure in their control of the city’s economy, they began to dream their own bourgeois dreams. One transfer in particular paid for a five-star hotel trip for Putin and the head of Twentieth Trust to Finland, where they met an architect from the St Petersburg government and most likely discussed plans for the building of a group of dachas, according to a senior police officer who investigated the case.[105] ‘Soviet people always have a dream to have a dacha,’ said a Putin associate from then.[106] ‘The understanding was that it was not just important to have a good piece of land, but also to have the right neighbours.’
The patch Putin chose to while away his weekends in peace and tranquillity was far down a highway snaking north from St Petersburg through the forests and lakes of Karelia. Near the border with Finland, an unsignposted road led to a snug group of wooden houses on the shores of the Komsomolskoye lake, renowned for its excellent fishing. Before Putin moved in, the road had been no more than a dirt track. But soon after the new inhabitants arrived it was asphalted over, and lights were installed.
The villagers who’d lived peacefully for generations on the coveted stretch of land on the lakeshore saw new, more powerful electrical lines installed, though none of the power reached their homes. Instead they were asked, one by one, to move away, and were either given money to leave or provided with new ready-built houses further inland. Their powerful new neighbours built imposing Finnish-style chalets on vast tracts of land. They formed a group that became known as the Ozero dacha cooperative, and took over the lakeshore, from which their former neighbours were cut off by a high new fence. When the newcomers had parties, the old inhabitants could only watch the festivities and fireworks from afar. They knew not to object. ‘My mother told me a simple thing: don’t fight the strong and don’t sue the rich,’ said one of them.[107] The only inhabitant who tried to fight lost every stage of her trial.
The men who moved to Lake Komsomolskoye with Putin were the blue blood of his KGB acquaintances. Mostly shareholders of Bank Rossiya, they included Yakunin, Fursenko and Kovalchuk. All of them had been connected to Putin since even before the St Petersburg days. ‘These were people who were close to Putin from before,’ said one former Putin associate.[108] ‘They hadn’t got there because of their work or their knowledge – but just because they were old friends.’
This was a principle that was later expanded across the entire country. After Putin became president, he and his allies from the Ozero dacha group began to capture strategic sectors of the economy, creating a tight-knit network of loyal lieutenants – trusted custodians – who took control of the country’s biggest cash flows and excluded everyone else. Bank Rossiya was to form the core of the financial empire behind this group, and it was to spread its tentacles throughout Russia, and deep into the West too.
Those who’d worked with Putin at the sea port and the oil terminal also followed him when he vaulted to power. Timchenko was prime among them, first in the shadows working, according to two former associates, as an unofficial adviser, and then becoming the nation’s biggest oil trader. The men who ran the St Petersburg sea port under Traber’s watch were to take the first senior positions in Gazprom, the state gas giant, as Putin began to take over the country’s biggest and most strategic assets. Then, when Putin made his first moves to take back the nation’s oil industry from Western-leaning oligarchs like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Timchenko and Akimov were part of the core group who benefited.
But in those days in the nineties, when they were just starting out, it was difficult to imagine that they would ever make it so far. The members of the Ozero dacha cooperative kept themselves to themselves, rarely speaking to the former neighbours who they’d moved away from the shores of the lake. But after Putin moved to Moscow, the weekend visits became rare. The houses they’d built were left empty, like ghosts on the edge of the lake. ‘It became too small for them here. They had absolutely different opportunities in Moscow,’ said one of the neighbours.[109]
*
When Putin was suddenly appointed to a senior position in the Kremlin in Moscow in the summer of 1996,