Professor Mark Galeotti claims that Putin’s Russia is not so much a mafia state as a state with a nationalised mafia.
LONDON: When I met Vladimir Putin back in 1994, any thought that this introspective, uncommunicative person would be President of Russia in less than six years’ time was simply absurd. The occasion was the visit of Prince Charles to St Petersburg in May of that year, the first by a member of the Royal Family since the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. The four-day visit followed an invitation from the city’s first democratically elected mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, a lawyer turned politician who had been Putin’s professor at Leningrad State University 20 years earlier.
Royal visits require a huge amount of planning and during the six months before the visit I had been a member of the team from our embassy in Moscow which met regularly with Russian officials in St Petersburg, headed by Sobchak’s head of the Committee for External Relations, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. In March, Putin was promoted to become the First Deputy Chairman of St Petersburg’s government, which meant that he played a larger role than initially expected during the visit.
What we didn’t know at the time was that Putin was already a wealthy man. It later emerged that he had entered into legally dubious contracts with obscure firms to export raw materials, such as oil, timber and minerals, in return for food. As we ourselves experienced at the time, food shops were almost always empty because of supply chain problems and roaring inflation, so Putin’s efforts to bring the much needed nutrition into St Petersburg’s shops was warmly welcomed. The only problem was that the raw materials were duly exported but the food failed to arrive. A subsequent investigation by St Petersburg City Council discovered conclusive proof that $92 million handled by Putin’s department had vanished, along with a further $900 million of city money. After reviewing the evidence, the City Council concluded that the money had been stolen and urged Sobchak to dismiss Putin and his deputy, AlexandrAnikin. Sobchak, however, rejected the recommendation and instead abolished the City Council. The report’s author, Marina Salye, went into hiding in fear for her life and two of the investigators were later found dead. Sergei Yushenkov was murdered and Yuri Gladkov died of poisoning. The report on the investigation has been removed from official websites, but paper copies still exist.
By comparison with his income from organised crime, the food scandal was small fry. Putin was, in fact, an important liaison between the local government and St Petersburg’s criminal underworld. According to the distinguished author Karen Dawisha’s highly acclaimed book “Putin’s Kleptocracy”, as deputy mayor, Putin used his office to help launder mafia money and arrange foreign travel for known mobsters. He also collaborated with the infamous Tambov and Mayshev organised crime groups to gain control of St Petersburg’s gambling industry and the city’s fuel distribution network. All this enabled him to acquire a huge and expensive dacha in the exclusive Ozero Cooperative, a gated community on land bordering Lake Komsomolskaya close to St Petersburg, which Putin founded along with his KGB pals. Security for the site was entrusted to the Tambov gang and nobody dared to ask the question how this was possible on Putin’s official salary equivalent to a few thousand dollars a year.
After Sobchak’s defeat in the mayoral elections in 1996, Putin moved down to Moscow and a job in the Kremlin. After an astonishing rise, which included being head of the Security Services (FSB) and then Prime Minister, he was picked by the ailing Boris Yeltsin to succeed him as President, just as the millennium bells were ringing across Moscow. Following Putin’s rise to the top, members of the Ozero Cooperative assumed important positions in Russia’s government and business, becoming enormously rich in the process.
In a lecture at the Hudson Institute entitled “Crime, Kleptocracy and Politics: Developments in Modern Russia” (available on YouTube) the renowned Russia expert, Professor Mark Galeotti, claims that Putin’s Russia is not so much a mafia state as a state with a nationalised mafia. Putin’s Kremlin uses organised crime to carry out the tasks it wants to keep its fingerprints off, be it arms smuggling, assassinations, raising funds for black ops, or stirring up trouble in the former Soviet empire. Russian organised crime is alleged to have served as agents for Russia in eastern Ukraine, fomenting pro-Russian unrest and transporting arms and supplies to rebel groups prior to Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago. Earlier, in 2006, former KGB spy and Putin critic, Alexander Litvinenko, was murdered in London on the orders of Putin after threatening to expose the links between the Kremlin and Russia’s organised crime gangs. At the subsequent enquiry the prosecutor, distinguished lawyer Ben Emmerson, alleged that “a significant part of Russian organised crime is organised directly from the offices of the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a mafia state.” The 2010 WikiLeaks cables sensationally showed how Russian mafia bosses and Russia’s Security Services (FSB) colluded in illegal arms trading and Russian law enforcement agencies operated de facto protection rackets for criminal networks.
Few doubt that after the wild years of Boris Yeltsin’s failed attempt to rapidly transform a Communist command economy into a Democratic demand one, Putin brought a much-needed level of stability to the nation. Although the price was high, the Russian people were happy to accept it following 8 years of chaos, a period which destroyed their faith in democracy. After all, being ruled by an autocrat is in the Russian DNA. But just as in the Stalin era, freedom of expression is non-existent and once again the threat of being arrested for any criticism of the infallible leader in the Kremlin reigns supreme.
The hardening of Putinism was a gradual process with a tacit pact between the Kremlin and the Russian people: if you don’t meddle in politics you will have a more or less peaceful life. Nowadays, however, with war raging across the border, Putin’s regime has surpassed even the heavy-handedness of any post-Stalin Russian leaders. The independent outlet “Proekt” has identified at least 11,442 people tried under criminal cases and 116,000 more under administrative proceedings during the five years 2018 to 2023, just for expressing their opinions or participating in demonstrations against the “special military operations” in Ukraine. Of these, 5,613 citizens were tried for “extremism” or “discrediting the authorities” during the same period. Compare this with just 3,234 similar cases recorded in the Soviet Union under autocrats such as Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov in the 23 years between 1962 and 1985.
The distinguished Russian journalist and expert on Russian politics, Andrei Kolesnikov, now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argues that “the Putin regime is waging war on two fronts: external and internal. Even if the hot phase of the war ends, the suppression of internal civil society will not.”He predicts that “the system will remain the same, or become even harsher”. Unsurprisingly, Kolesnikov has been declared a “foreign agent” by the Kremlin.
“Putinism has failed to establish itself,” argues Eastern Europe expert, IntigramMamedov, “and has not managed to create an image of the future. Instead of acting to achieve some goals, as was done under communism, Putinism bases its current policies on the past, nostalgia, and historical traumas” he argues. Some philosophers identify Putin with “retropia”, the dream of an ideal future state with nostalgia for an unreal past. The entire rhetoric of Putinism revolves around past imperial glory and “the defence of traditional values” against the “decadent” liberal West.
But the foundations of Putin’s regime are shaking, according to the Carnegie Centre political scientist Tatiana Stanovaya, who claims that the country is going through a phase of “wild Putinism”, a trend in which clashes between different Russian factions are becoming more and more open because Putin has tired of mediating internal disputes and thinks only about “war and the clash of civilisations”. Stanovaya predicts that “as the law has become not worth the paper it is written on” in recent years, and a very unstable scenario is opening up, “imprisonments, compromising evidence and attacks will become the main way of survival, often under conservative and anti-Western slogans”.
Last Tuesday the Putin era turned 25 years, longer than any Kremlin leader since Joseph Stalin, and it is now more than 30 years since we worked together to arrange the visit of the future king. In a three and a half minute seasonal address to the nation last week, Putin said that Russia should be “proud” of what the country has achieved during his quarter-century in power. “And now, on the threshold of the New Year, we are confident that everything will be fine, we will only move forward. We know for sure that the absolute value for us was, is and will be the fate of Russia, the wellbeing of its citizens” he claimed. Paying tribute to Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine, describing them as heroes, Putin said that “we are proud of your courage and bravery. We believe in you.”
No mention, of course, of Russia’s war dead, which topped 198,000 in December with more than 550,000 wounded in the Ukrainian “meat-grinder”. During December alone, an average of 1,523 Russians were killed in Ukraine every day, all for Putin’s insatiable yearning to recreate the Russian empire. Nor was there any mention during Putin’s address of food prices surging to 11.4%, the steepest since the start of his full-scale invasion, of interest rates held at a record 21%, or of mortgages of 25%.
But this doesn’t worry billionaire Putin and his super-rich circle of friends ruling Russia. For them Putinism, an anti-liberal, anti-Western, paternalistic, harshly authoritarian and kleptocratic ideology, is just fine.
* John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently a visiting fellow at the University of Plymouth.