‘Russia has been hijacked’
Catherine Belton, author of Putin’s People, on how the security services took over Russia
Catherine Belton knows more about Vladimir Putin than most. Having learned Russian while studying modern languages at Durham University in the UK, she found herself fascinated by the “end of empire” she witnessed as the fall of the Berlin Wall heralded the subsequent Soviet collapse. It was only natural that her curiosity would lead her to the Russian capital, where she began covering the day-to-day goings-on in the Kremlin for the now-defunct Moscow Tribune in the late 1990s — just as a young Putin was beginning to make his mark in Russian politics.
By the time Belton’s acclaimed book, Putin’s People, was published in 2020, Russia had become a very different place. And by the time she made its Russian translation available for free earlier in March, the country had undergone yet another transformation. But, in Belton’s account, the signs of what was to come had been there from the start.
During Putin’s first term in office, when she began research for what was originally intended to be a study of the politically motivated arrest, trial and subsequent imprisonment of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Belton started noticing trends that would come to define Putin’s rule. Once Russia’s richest man, Khodorkovsky had made a fatal error that set him apart from other oligarchs of the time: he had used his vast fortune to fund opposition parties who dared challenge Putin, who at the time was promoting an image of himself as a “reluctant” president who needed to consolidate his authority. Khodorkovsky was the first of many to discover what has since become an axiom of Putin’s rule: opposition will not be tolerated.
The “demonstrative takedown” of Khodorkovsky, as Belton calls it, marked a “turning point that changed the entire way Russia was run”. It had brought a secret service mindset to the fore of Russian politics, ready to use dirty tactics to cow would-be opponents into submission. It was at that point that the focus of Belton’s future book shifted from the Khodorkovsky case to the wider machinations of the Kremlin and the former KGB men who occupied it.
“I was trying to explain why the Putin system operates the way that it does, and it became more and more clear to me that they were using old KGB methods”,
the West “didn’t care about morals or scruples or laws as long as they were making money”.
These events, Belton says, highlight Putin and his associates’ “cynicism against their own people” and willingness to sacrifice the lives of their own citizens for political gain.
“You suddenly got the sense that Russia was trying to expand its role on the world stage — not through creating a vibrant, competitive economy, but by trying to undermine and disrupt democracies and fielding its own candidates in elections”, Belton says.
In the leadup to the annexation of Crimea, she argues, Putin had been progressively emboldened by the West, as foreign investors continued to turn a blind eye to increasing post-Khodorkovsky crackdowns on dissent within Russia as long as they were getting access to the country’s natural resources.
Yet as a “very reciprocal person”, Putin had simultaneously become increasingly resentful of what he considered the West’s rebuttals of his overtures since the very start of his presidency, says Belton. The realisation came that he could use the West’s greed to enrich Russia — or at least his own inner circle — while at the same time exploiting perceived weakness in Western societies to further his geopolitical ambitions.
Those ambitions did not come from nowhere. As a “KGB officer whose career was born out of the collapse of the Soviet Union and a great sense of humiliation”, Belton says, “Putin had always wanted to restore Russia’s role on the world stage. Unfortunately, he chose the way of either undermining and disrupting other democracies or, as in Ukraine, directly invading”.
That desire to restore Russia’s former status appeared to take on a new dimension during Putin’s extreme isolation through the Covid pandemic, Belton suggests. Seemingly gripped by paranoia about the virus, he remained cooped up in his residence long after life in Russia had returned to normal, meeting even with his closest allies only via video conference or after they had undergone a mandatory two-week quarantine.
Belton cites the view of many analysts that Putin spent this time “poring over the history books” convincing himself that Ukraine was “part of Russian civilisation”, with those who had access to him only fuelling his paranoia and further distorting his worldview.
This period of isolation and Putin’s resulting delusion, she says, represents one of the “great tragedies of history”.
“Russians should know how their country has been hijacked by this ruthless clan of KGB men in all the exact detail”, as well as the “depths of cynical ruthlessness” to which the book’s “so-called ‘heroes’” have sunk, she says.
“All the power, the entire might of the security state is with Putin and against these people”, Belton says of those who came out to pay their respects to Navalny in recent weeks. And yet, she says, “it feels like the start of something”.
At the very least, Navalny’s supporters — many of whom now see his widow Yulia as the new figurehead of the Russian opposition — have the chance to “ruin the picture and rain on Putin’s parade” starting with the Noon Against Putin protests planned for this weekend’s presidential elections.
For Belton, it was a “great honour” when Navalny quoted from her book in his investigation into Putin’s billion-dollar Black Sea palace. Navalny’s chief of staff, Leonid Volkov also added his endorsement last week upon the book’s release for free in Russian. Belton says she was struck by the response to Volkov’s endorsement — in particular, from Russians expressing their surprise that there are still some foreigners who see Russia as more than the bloodthirsty regime in power.
“Your country is a country that’s been seized by a KGB elite that’s fused with the mafia. And it’s a very particular KGB elite — a ruthless one from St. Petersburg, the very harshest clan”, she says. Yet, despite Russia being held hostage by this clan for almost 25 years, Belton is adamant she continues to believe in the country. “This is a country that can be different”, Belton says, adding that Putin is not Russia and Russia is not Putin.
