by Craig Unger
On some level, it was not surprising that Surkov wrote a war story, given that life in Russia under Putin essentially means living a narrative of unending war, which is broadcast on Russian TV incessantly on programs about enemies of the state, Chechen terrorists, fascists taking over Ukraine, and the like, mixed with a dark romantic nostalgia for Russia’s lost imperial past.3
Still, Surkov’s war was fundamentally different from past wars:
This was the first non-linear war. In the primitive wars of the nineteenth, twentieth, and other middle centuries, the fight was usually between two sides: two nations or two temporary alliances. But now, four coalitions collided, and it wasn’t two against two, or three against one. It was all against all.
And what coalitions they were! Not like the earlier ones. It was a rare state that entered the coalition intact. What happened was some provinces took one side, some took the other, and some individual city, or generation, or sex, or professional society of the same state—took a third side. And then they could switch places, cross into any camp you like, sometimes during battle.
The goals of those in conflict were quite varied. Each had his own, so to speak: the seizing of disputed pieces of territory; the forced establishment of a new religion; higher ratings or rates; the testing of new military rays and airships; the final ban on separating people into male and female, since sexual differentiation undermines the unity of the nation; and so forth.4
Perhaps what was most striking about Surkov was that he had made the stupendously unlikely journey from Moscow’s dark, bohemian avant-garde art world to the highest reaches of the Kremlin. Think of an avid Lou Reed fan, an Andy Warhol devotee, or a performance art aesthete doing the job of Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, or a master “political technician” who takes on a portfolio at the Kremlin that “include[s] ideology, media, political parties, religion, modernization, innovation, foreign relations, and modern art.”5
A gangsta rap fan who has a Tupac Shakur photo on his desk, Surkov had run the gamut in his career from metallurgy to directing theater. All the while, he immersed himself in the netherworld of the Moscow art scene, where performance artist Oleg Kulik imitated rabid dogs “to show the brokenness of post-Soviet man” and camp drag artist Vladik Mamyshev-Monroe played out a post-Soviet Andy Warhol/RuPaul routine impersonating the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Adolf Hitler, and Rasputin.6
Then, in the nineties, Surkov reinvented himself and became a PR man for the dashing oil and banking billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky.7 His first ad campaign for Khodorkovsky showed the oligarch holding bundles of cash and sent the message, “I’ve made it; so can you!” According to Peter Pomerantsev in the Atlantic, to the post-Soviet world, “the shape-shifting power” of PR and advertising, the magical ability to create new realities and to alter the way reality is perceived, was completely new. Surkov had discovered a new niche and had become a superstar.
By 1999, Surkov had joined the Kremlin as “political technologist,” playing a role for Vladimir Putin that was akin to Karl Rove’s position with George W. Bush, or the role Steve Bannon later played, albeit briefly, with Donald Trump. “I am the author, or one of the authors, of the new Russian system,” Surkov asserted.8
As a political operative, Surkov’s innovation was to merge theatrical techniques from the world of performance art with an unparalleled mastery of the dark arts of marketing and PR and apply the result in service to Putin’s highly centralized, top-down bureaucracy.
Among other things, Surkov created Putin’s image, much as he had done with Khodorkovsky, and when Putin arrested and jailed Khodorkovsky for fraud, the ever adaptable Surkov devised a campaign for that too, showing the formerly glamorous oligarch behind bars. Essentially, he helped turn Russia into one great reality TV show that could be reshaped on command to serve Putin’s needs.9
To accomplish this, Surkov regularly met with the top brass of Russian TV to tell them who was to be banned from appearing on TV and who to attack or defend. He created fake far-right political parties such as the Nashi, the Russian counterpart of the Hitler Youth, that plagiarized Joseph Goebbels, the pitiless Nazi propagandist.10 He took one rival candidate who was something of a democratic socialist and painted him, rather convincingly, as a Stalinist. He had Russian TV produce terrifying but phony TV stories about the imminent extermination and persecution of various groups. In other words, Surkov created a false reality consisting of fake news and alternative facts.
Of course, propaganda was nothing new. After all, even in the most liberal democracies, it is a truism that politicians lie. Public servants of all stripes—even the most benign—use “spin doctors” to advance their agendas. But it is also true that even the most egregious politicians usually lie in a way that advances a coherent and cohesive narrative to support their policies and agendas.
The character of Surkov’s lies, however, was very different. As British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis observed, “Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater. He sponsored all kinds of groups, from neo-Nazi skinheads to liberal human rights groups. He even backed parties that were opposed to President Putin.”11
Having done all that, Surkov proceeded to do something that no American political operative would ever do: Rather than fight for control of the narrative with his and Putin’s adversaries, Surkov set out to destroy the very idea of reality. And by undermining the whole notion of truth, of what actually happened, Surkov was able to create a never-ending conflict about perception that helped the Putin regime’s ability to control and manage Russia. The result was that the opposition was completely befuddled because the ceaseless flood of contradictory stories meant that no one knew what the enemy was up to or even who they really were, or what was really going on. Meanwhile, supporters who listened to lie after lie were allowed to choose whichever fiction they preferred to believe—and to dismiss the rest as fake news.
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Surkov’s information warfare tactics were enormously successful at home, where Russians were desperate for stability and a tough guy to stand up to the West.12 And so the state-controlled media portrayed Putin as the head of a great civilization that would reclaim its former glory, liberate lands in the former Soviet Union, and not give in to the “gay-dominated and degraded” West.13
But Surkov’s tactics were also exportable and as such became part of an arsenal Putin used in his quest to restore Russia’s imperial glory. To understand Putin’s overriding strategy, one has to look at Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia, who published a controversial two-thousand-word paper14 in February 2013 that became known as the Gerasimov Doctrine* and concluded that costly armed invasions often fail to advance strategic goals—as Russia found out in Afghanistan in the eighties, and as the US has discovered in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. “In the 21st century we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace,” Gerasimov wrote. “Wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template . . . The very ‘rules of war’ have changed. The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness.”15
Gerasimov went on to assert that in today’s undeclared war, the same objectives are often pursued by nonmilitary means.16 As a result, he argued, it made sense to put conventional warfare on the same spectrum as “hybrid warfare” and “active measures” and the like. And so, after the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, Putin launched a massive global offensive, intending to weaken not just the United States but Britain, NATO, the European Union, and, indeed, the entire Western Alliance, to roll back the gains they had made since the Cold War.
To that end, Russia began to pour money into pro-Russian parties in the former Soviet states of Georgia, Estonia, and Lithuania, all of which later came into power.17 It began to do the same with right-wing
candidates in the US and Western Europe who shared Putin’s goal of dismantling the Western Alliance. There were spies, hackers, and informational warriors, sophisticated assaults on Facebook and other social media. The Mafia was just one weapon in Russia’s arsenal. There were many, many more.
Meanwhile, the Mafia went about ensnaring the powers that be with good old-fashioned kompromat that targeted their baser instincts (sex, money) and turned these would-be masters of the universe into puppets serving Russia’s interests. These were the kinds of operations that were years—sometimes decades—in the making.
One of the more successful efforts of that kind between Mogilevich and the Kremlin dated back to 1994, when Mogilevich allegedly arranged for a one-million-deutschmark payoff to Viktor Orbán, then a rising young star in Hungarian politics. Throughout his early days in politics, and even in his first term as prime minister starting in 1998, Orbán had been free with his criticism of the Kremlin, denouncing other European governments as “Moscow’s puppets” and censuring support of pro-Russian projects as treasonous. But in 2009, Orbán abruptly reversed field and stopped criticizing Russia. When he became prime minister again in 2010, he immediately became a key Putin apologist.
And what was behind Orbán’s dramatic turnabout? In 2008, Mogilevich had been jailed on tax evasion charges, and Dietmar Clodo, the Mogilevich associate who claimed to have paid off Orbán,18 believes that Mogilevich handed over kompromat videos to the FSB in exchange for the Kremlin’s agreement to overlook the tax issues.19 In other words, thanks to Mogilevich, Putin had Orbán exactly where he wanted him.
“Whatever happened to Orbán in such a short period of time?” asked The Insider in a story whose headline may have provided the answer: “A Suitcase Full of Cash from the Solntsevo Mafia: Does Putin Have a Video Kompromat on the Hungarian Leader?”20
The biggest advantage to this new type of warfare was that it is hard to rouse opposition to an enemy no one can see. Indeed, the most striking facet of this new phenomenon may have been that a massive new global struggle had begun and barely anyone seemed to notice. Vladimir Putin had begun assaulting the sovereignty of various nations—a Virtual War, if you like—and almost no one was reporting on it in newspapers, on TV, on the radio, or on the Internet. The big unanswered question was what would happen when he took on the United States of America.
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In early February 2013, about thirty or thirty-five guests gathered in a ballroom at the Hotel Ukraine in Moscow, aka the Radisson Royal, an immense thirty-four-story neoclassical skyscraper in the Stalinist style overlooking the Moskva River. Semion Mogilevich had taken over an entire floor of the hotel21 to celebrate the fifty-fifth birthday of the legendary Sergei Mikhailov, aka Mikhas, presumed longtime leader of the Solntsevo crime gang. The entire restaurant had been reserved for the occasion.
Mogilevich and Mikhailov had been enjoying such revelries for three decades, through good times and bad. They first hung out at the Legendary Hotel Sovietsky in the mideighties with Viktor Averin, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov,22 and Vyacheslav Ivankov.23 In 1995, there had been the horrendous assassination attempt on Mogilevich in Prague. The next year came the Mafia summit convened by Birshtein in Tel Aviv.
A lot had changed over the years. In 2009, Vyacheslav Ivankov had been gunned down by a sniper in Moscow, his murder presumably the fallout from a gang war with a Georgian crime boss, prompting a legendary funeral. A New York Times account of the funeral described Yaponchik as “royalty” among “these heavily tattooed crime barons,” “the last of a mafia-like criminal class known as the Vory v Zakone, or Thieves-in-Law.”24
But in general they had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The amount of money they had made was staggering. Mogilevich was said to be worth more than $10 billion.25 After three decades running Solntsevo, Mikhailov had acquired a patina of respectability as a highly charitable businessman who had to fight accusations of criminal behavior by making one contribution after another to the Russian Orthodox Church, hospitals, orphanages, and the like.26 And they were plugged in to the highest levels of the Kremlin as well as many of the former Soviet states.
And now they were gathered together for an intimate evening. The following account of that evening is based on a report27 by Russian journalist Anastasia Kirilenko in The Insider and other sources including one who has had direct contact with the Russian underworld over many years, and who said the guests that evening “would not have been invited if they had not been well-known [to Mogilevich]. This was family. There were no strangers.”28
In that context, the presence of two unnamed Americans was particularly striking, the source said, because they presented themselves as associates of Donald Trump, who was trying to build Trump Towers in Moscow and possibly Kazakhstan,29 potentially with Mikhailov’s Solntsevo gang as a partner.
Mikhailov and Viktor Averin didn’t speak English, the source said, but they made sure that a third party monitored the Americans to find out whether they were full of hot air or whether there was something behind them. In other words, the leaders of the Solntsevo crime gang, one of the largest and most powerful gangs in the world, appear to have been doing due diligence to see if Trump’s operation was up to snuff. As they listened attentively, the source said, they heard the Americans talking about a meeting they had had with Trump’s daughter Ivanka. Then they discussed the possibility of making a return trip to Moscow “and getting together with Vova.”30
“Vova” was said to be a reference to Vladimir Putin.
The Americans, the source said, were not introduced to everyone by name. One of them, however, was described as being five foot eight or nine, heavyset, with curly hair and a receding hairline, “definitely not slim, and having a California smile.”
Later, the source thought that he was likely Felix Sater, “because [he] saw his pictures.”
According to The Insider, Dietmar Clodo, the man who claimed to have paid off Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán when he was a young politician, maintained Sater had a long relationship with Mogilevich dating back to the nineties and served as an important contact for Mogilevich in the United States. “Felix Sater from Bayrock counted Seva [Semyon] Mogilevich, Mikhas, and Yaponchik among his friends,” Clodo said.31 “Sater served as shammes to Seva when he resided in the US.” (“Shammes” is a Yiddish word for caretaker of a synagogue and colloquially is sometimes used to mean “errand boy.”)
If true, that means that Sater really did have a triple life. If true, it means that he was not just a pump-and-dump con man/convicted felon who had reinvented himself as a government cooperator, but that even as he was working for the FBI and other agencies, Sater was possibly working for Mogilevich in the background.
But Sater said that such allegations were completely false. “I wasn’t [in Moscow] in 2013, and my passport doesn’t have a Russian visa for that year,” Sater told me.32 “I testified before the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the Senate Judiciary Committee that the only relationship I had with Mogilevich was helping the FBI figure out the scam in the YBM Magnex deal. The whole thing between Mogilevich and me is a lie, a fallacy, a falsehood.”
The source had more. He claimed Mogilevich had a relationship with Donald Trump that dated back many years as well. “It didn’t sound to me that this was the first business they did,” he told me. “I know that Seva met Trump when he was in America.”
He added that their US meeting took place back during the days of YBM Magnex. The relationship between the two men, the source said, had nothing to do with politics. “I don’t think that anybody really believed that an idiot like Trump could even become mayor of a Texan village. A big businessman, let’s get something on him.”
And exactly how sure was he that Trump and Mogilevich had met?
“One hundred percent,” he said.33
President Trump, of course, has denied any relationships with Russia, which presumably includes Mogilevich. The
re is no way to verify what relationship Trump and Mogilevich may have had—if any.
In the past, at gatherings like this one, Iosif Kobzon—aka the Russian Sinatra—had often provided the entertainment. The favored crooner of Russian TV and variety shows, Kobzon, with his all-too-noticeable hairpiece, was a favorite of Putin’s, renowned for his alleged Mafia ties,34 and straight out of central casting as a Russian version of Johnny Fontane in The Godfather. But now it was time to pass the torch to a younger generation. This time, according to The Insider, the entertainer was Emin Agalarov, an Azerbaijani-Russian singer-businessman. The son of Azerbaijani real estate billionaire Aras Agalarov, Emin could not be reached for comment and his attendance could not be verified.
Emin had been educated in the US, graduating from Tenafly High School in New Jersey and Marymount Manhattan College in New York before going on to work with the Crocus Group, a large real estate development company his father started, where he was in charge of restaurants, entertainment complexes, and a resort on the Caspian Sea.35
In Russia, the Agalarovs already had plenty of clout. The elder Agalarov had started out modestly enough in the late eighties, with a company called Saffron that exported Russian souvenirs—matryoshka Russian nesting dolls and the like—and computer equipment. In 1990, Agalarov started COMTEK Expositions Inc., a Soviet-American joint venture,36 with, among others, Boris Kogan. A resident of Trump Tower who became a notorious arms dealer,37 Kogan, who died in 2017, was the cofounder of a company, the Kaalbye Group, that has been accused of sending arms to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Kaalbye has denied the charges.38
By the time privatization began in the early nineties, Aras was so well connected that he was able to get in on the ground floor of lucrative stock listings, including that of SurgutNefteGaz,39 the gas and oil giant largely owned by Putin.40 That privilege was granted only to a select few.