Belik was a veteran of the KGB’s foreign-intelligence service, and in St Petersburg he’d overseen a network of firms trading in rare-earth metals. He’d been a mentor of sorts to Putin as he managed the city’s economy, while according to one close ally Putin also stayed in touch with former KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov.[111] But although Putin’s men had dominated much of the city’s economy, the amounts of cash they were dealing with in St Petersburg were minuscule compared to what the young Western-leaning tycoons like Khodorkovsky were taking over in Moscow. They were far away from the action as the new oligarchs of the Yeltsin era began to carve up the country’s industrial wealth. For many of the St Petersburg KGB men, what was going on in Moscow represented the collapse of the Russian state. Vladimir Yakunin, for one, saw the country as being seized by a cabal of corrupt members of the Party elite and by men like Khodorkovsky who he called ‘criminals’.[112] The KGB men saw Yeltsin as a drunken buffoon, a mid-ranking Communist Party official who danced to the tune of the West and who was now handing over the country’s strategic enterprises for a song to a corrupt gang of rapacious businessmen. ‘People had given their lives. They’d served honestly and put their lives at risk. But all they got was a finger up their ass from a drunk bastard who by the way was no better than a local Communist Party leader,’ said a former KGB officer who worked with Putin in St Petersburg.[113]
Though it seemed far from likely then, Putin’s move to Moscow was the first step towards changing that equation. His promotion had happened at a moment when he should in fact have been down and out. In the summer of 1996, Anatoly Sobchak had just lost his campaign for re-election as St Petersburg’s mayor. Putin, as his campaign manager, had been partly responsible. Sobchak lost by a whisker: by 1.2 per cent – the equivalent, his widow Lyudmilla Narusova later said, of the occupants of one large apartment building. Whispers circulated that Sobchak’s defeat had been organised by Yeltsin, who wanted him out, as the flamboyant and charismatic Sobchak could have posed a challenge to Yeltsin’s own battle for re-election as president a few months later. Narusova was convinced of that: ‘He’d become too independent. Yeltsin saw him as his competitor, and therefore the order was given that the elections were to be a farce.’[114] Before the campaign had even begun, Sobchak was targeted by a criminal investigation over bribery allegations. Many believed it was part of a dirty tricks campaign by the old-guard security men surrounding Yeltsin.[115]
The allegations undoubtedly impacted the outcome of the election, and Putin resigned from the St Petersburg administration immediately after the loss. Kremlin spin doctors telling the official story of Putin’s career have always stressed his loyalty to Sobchak in stepping down, and the risk he took in facing unemployment because of his principles. But in fact he was out of work for less than a month before he was invited to Moscow, initially to take up a prestigious position as a deputy head of the Kremlin administration. He had been helped along the way by Alexei Bolshakov, a dinosaur from the Leningrad defence establishment and most likely from the KGB, who’d somehow become Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister.
Although Putin’s appointment was unexpectedly blocked by Anatoly Chubais, the Western-leaning privatisation tsar who’d become Yeltsin’s new chief of staff, he was not abandoned. Instead, he was asked to head the Kremlin’s fabled foreign property department, which had inherited all the Soviet Union’s vast overseas holdings after the collapse – the stately trade and diplomatic missions, the network of arms bases and other military installations, clandestine or otherwise. Though it was an empire in which much had already gone unaccounted for, it represented a strategic core of the nation’s imperial wealth, and for Putin this was a prestigious promotion indeed.
It was the beginning of a dizzying rise. Within seven months of his move to Moscow, Putin was promoted further still. First, he was made head of the Control Department, a core institute of Kremlin power, where he was charged with making sure the president’s orders were carried out across the nation’s unruly regions. ‘They didn’t just take Putin from the street,’ said one close ally. ‘He was known in Moscow as an adviser to Sobchak, as an influential person in St Petersburg … I think this transfer was planned.’[116] Then, a year later, he was promoted to become the Kremlin’s first deputy chief of staff in charge of the regions, the third most powerful role in the Kremlin after the president. After just three months in that role he was appointed to head the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, for the whole of Russia. He was only a lieutenant colonel at the time, and it was unheard of for anyone other than a general to head the FSB. The FSB generals were said to be aghast, but Putin’s allies insisted that his status as first deputy chief of staff gave him a rank equivalent to a general. It was just that it was in civilian terms, they said.[117]
Yeltsin’s son-in-law Valentin Yumashev, a good-natured former journalist who’d risen to become Yeltsin’s chief of staff, insisted that Putin’s miraculous rise was down to his outstanding qualities. ‘Among my deputies, he was one of the strongest,’ he told me. ‘He always worked brilliantly. He formulated his views exactly. He would analyse the situation exactly. I was always happy I had such a deputy.’[118] But for others who had known him in St Petersburg, Putin’s elevation was taking on a surreal quality. Some of his former associates questioned whether he was being propelled by the KGB generals who’d mentored his career from the beginning. ‘You could make the case that he’d first been given the task to infiltrate the democratic community through his work with Sobchak,’ said one. When Sobchak had become surplus to requirements, had Putin played a role in helping make sure he lost? ‘It’s totally possible that Putin was following the orders of the Kremlin, and that when he completed this task he entered the Kremlin and became so important,’ said the former associate. ‘If you suppose this was a special operation to liquidate Sobchak as a contender, then everything becomes clear.’[119] But others argued that Sobchak had become increasingly controversial in St Petersburg in any case, mainly due to what many saw as his arrogance. It hadn’t taken much to make his bid for re-election touch and go.
However he got there, once Putin assumed his role as director of the FSB, he soon began to clean up the stains from his St Petersburg past. One of his greatest enemies from those days was Yury Shutov, a former Sobchak deputy who’d clashed with Putin and had been collecting compromising material on him – on the oil-for-food deals, on the privatisations of the city’s assets and on his ties to the Tambov group. Soon after Putin’s appointment, Shutov was arrested at gunpoint. He’d long been a deeply controversial figure and rumours of his ties to the St Petersburg underworld ran deep. But once Putin became FSB chief, the suspicions turned into legal charges. He was charged with ordering four contract killings and attempting two others. Though he was briefly freed by a local court which ruled that there was no legal basis for a criminal case, Shutov was swiftly arrested again, and dispatched to Russia’s toughest penal colony, known as the Beliy Lebed, or White Swan, in Perm, in the depths of Siberia. He never emerged from it. The material he’d gathered on Putin’s ties to Tambov simply disappeared, said Andrei Korchagin, a former city official who had known Shutov well: ‘He was Russia’s first and only real political prisoner.’[120]
An even more disturbing omen came just four months after Putin’s appointment as FSB chief. Galina Starovoitova, the same stout and tweedy human rights activist with soft brown hair who Putin had approached for work after his return from Dresden to Leningrad, was shot dead at the entrance to her apartment building late one evening in November 1998. She was by then St Petersburg’s leading democrat, its most vocal crusader against corruption. The whole city was in mourning after her death, the nation in shock. Many commentators linked her killing to tension surrounding elections to the local parliament that were to be held the following month. But one of Starovoitova’s former aides, Ruslan Linkov, who was with her at the time of the shooting but somehow escaped with his life, believed she was killed because of her corruption investigations.[121] One of her closest friends, Valeria Novodvorskaya, another leading democrat, was convinced the St Petersburg security men had ordered her murder: ‘They were clearly behind the scenes. They held the hand of the killers.’[122] A former partner of Ilya