The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult

by Anna Arutunyan

  In the first days of December, just ahead of the parliamentary elections, the choice unexpectedly fell on Medvedev. Aside from the Tri Kita scandal, the clan war alleged by Cherkesov was widely believed to stem from anxiety about who Putin would evendually pick as his successor, as factions vied for superiority in the leader’s eyes. But the reverse could also have been true: a clan war within the security forces of the magnitude described may have been taken into account in the decision to pick a successor. Perhaps Putin felt threatened by a chagrined FSB; perhaps Ivanov presented more of an independent, less manageable figure than Medvedev – who would docilely step aside in 2011 and make way for Putin to return to the presidency. Political decisions were taken by weighing courtly factions and their commercial interests, much as they were for hundreds of years.

  Could Putin have acted in any other way? It is an enticing, but ultimately useless, question. However, it would be helpful to return to the origins and remember that the Tri Kita case exploded just months after Putin was inaugurated in May of 2000. The young president was already facing competing clans, which included men like Yuri Zaostrovtsev, who had arrived at his post long before Putin rose through the ranks to the top office. And however much he was compared to a Tsar from the beginning, he could not transcend the system that had brought him to power. For even a Tsar was made by his courtiers.

  Pavel Zaitsev did not believe the entire FSB corps to be corrupt. Honest people worked there, he said, but “you don’t hear anything about them.” He still does not know whether the meeting between Putin and businessman Sergei Zuyev ever took place. But he harbours a hope that it did – and that what Putin heard during that audience made him resolved to untangle the mess that that he had inherited.

  Chapter 7

  Agent Loyal and his Little Racket

  “One method was particularly common: when an oprichnik and a zemets who have regular interactions with one another meet, the oprichnik grabs the zemets by the neck, drags him to court, and claims that the man defamed him and the Oprichnina in general; and though the Grand Prince [Tsar Ivan the Terrible] knows that this is not the case, the plaintiff is proclaimed an honest man, and he is given the estate of the defendant, and the defendant is beaten and taken through the streets, and then beheaded or thrown into prison for life.”

  - Livonian officials Johann Taube and Elbert Kruse, in their 1582 treatise on Tsar Ivan the Terrible, whom they had served as Oprichniki for several years before fleeing Muscovy

  “And the system replicates itself. The main principle through which you come to power is the principle of loyalty….”

  - Kirill Kabanov, FSB colonel turned anti-corruption crusader

  What we protect is what we possess.

  - A cynical Russian proverb

  1.

  ON THE NIGHT of April 27, 2009, Major Denis Yevsyukov, a cold-eyed, 31-year-old police precinct head in the southern Moscow neighbourhood of Tsaritsino, walked into his local supermarket. He was a regular there, and like many modern cops, he had developed a habit of piling groceries into his cart and walking out without bothering to pay. And because he was a cop, no one bothered to say anything about it to him.

  But on that night, moderately drunk, he walked in with his gun in his hand. He casually shot the first person he came across, and lazily motioned for a woman to get down on the floor. But then he picked her up and held her at gunpoint as he walked down the aisles looking for other victims. The woman managed to free herself, but Major Yevsyukov did not go after her. He calmly reloaded his gun and continued shooting. And though he killed two people and wounded seven that night, he didn’t remember firing a single shot.

  He would also never recall the three hours prior to the incident, when he and his wife, Karine, celebrated his birthday at a nearby café called Golden Time. He did not remember the stranger who drove up to the café to talk to him, nor the fact that, as evidenced by his wife in court, he had turned silent, “green,” and catatonic after that conversation. He didn’t remember going home, changing into his uniform, and taking a cab to the supermarket.

  Jailed for life in a rush trial, Yevsyukov insisted that he had had a memory lapse, and no motive for what he did has since been uncovered, generating a string of vague conspiracy theories hinting at everything from hypnosis to a vast plot to take down Russia’s long-time Interior Minister, Rashid Nurgaliyev.

  But nearly a year later, the exiled telecoms tycoon Yevgeny Chichvarkin, sitting without work in London after being hounded out of Russia by a whole slew of corrupt Interior Ministry officers, revealed what he thought was almost certainly part of the motive for what Yevsyukov did that night. Chichvarkin claimed that Yevsyukov was inadvertently woven into his own case. Unravelling the thread of this complex story reveals the all-pervasive nature of a protection racket philosophy that runs from the bottom to the top of Russian officialdom. And the story of a cop who went on a shooting spree turned out to be a major footnote in one of the biggest contraband scandals of the decade.

  Yevsyukov’s lethal meltdown occurred amid the mounting social frustration over Russia’s criminalized law enforcement, with President Dmitry Medvedev launching a momentous reform campaign to civilize the police force. Just a day after the shooting, Medvedev sacked Moscow’s chief of police Vladimir Pronin; four more heads would roll in Yevsyukov’s own district as institutions were given a signal to brace for a major show trial. A swift investigation ensued, and by February 2010 a quick trial jailed Yevsyukov for life, an unprecedented sentence for a cop in a system where uniformed assailants, rapists, and murderers were frequently given only a few years in prison, often suspended.

  The hype that accompanied the launch of Medvedev’s reform campaign masked a very important circumstance: Yevsyukov, in carrying out his casual thefts at the supermarket, was not unusual. In 2009 alone, some 2,500 official crimes were attributed to police officers. Throughout the decade, not a year would go by without a criminal ring of police officers getting implicated in everything from extortion to kidnapping and rape.

  Yevsyukov himself, his colleagues alleged, rose through the ranks using the renowned “envelope” method. Engaging two rookies to collect protection cash from a series of kiosks and stores, he would also earn an additional £3,000 from the families of suspected criminals, offering to close the case for a fee by registering the suspect as a cadaver.

  Former police operative Andrei Romanov, one of several who was fired by Yevsyukov after his promotion, alleged that Yevsyukov would generously share the loot with their bosses – Southern District Chief Viktor Ageyev and his deputy, Oleg Baryshnikov.102 (Ageyev, who would go on to resign, neither confirmed nor denied these printed allegations.) By sending envelopes higher up within the ranks, he generated impressive revenue for his police department, and thus was not passed up for promotions.

  Police officers running protection rackets were so widespread in Russia by 2010 that they didn’t even raise eyebrows anymore. The practice had emerged sporadically throughout Russian history; it was not unheard of in Soviet Russia. During the early 1990s, as businesses starting hiring cops to protect them from racketeers, the police and FSB replaced criminal protection groups.

  “It’s much easier for a firm to use police officers to put pressure on competitors than private security,” Andrei, a retired police colonel who went into private security, described. “They virtually have a price list for this type of service. In the past, it was done more through relatives or friends of friends. Now it’s enough to just show up and ask for whatever it is you need. Say a cop checked you for something. You resolved the issue [assuming through a bribe]. And after that you can come back to the cop because he knows you and you’ve given him money. You just go up to him and say, ‘Hey, you want to earn some more money?’”

  But it was Yevsyukov’s treatment of his local supermarket, located under his precinct’s jurisdiction, or domain, that was most striking. Store employees tried to stop him once, but he threatened them. “Since he identified
himself as a police officer, no one dared to stop him,” one of the store’s employees, identified as Svetlana Alexandrovna P., said in her witness statement to investigators.103

  And if running a protection racket was common, so was acquiring the objects you were charged with protecting. “It’s a common phenomenon, with precinct heads casually looting stores and shops on their territory,” Igor Trunov, a lawyer who represented victims of the shooting, recalled from previous cases. “The higher the rank, the bigger the ‘loot.’”104

  Looting, in fact, was only part of a far more complicated system, which bore all the hallmarks of medieval Russian kormleniye, that precinct cops practiced on their territory.

  “We have two markets in our town,” a police major from a provincial Russian town who asked not to be identified told me. “Two cops worked the markets. They were responsible for fruit shipment. Every month, they would receive a levy of fruit.”

  Responsible, in this case, meant that the cops were protecting the market. But protecting from whom? From the law, it turns out. Russia’s Criminal Code is full of ambiguities, particularly the section regulating private entrepreneurship and licensing. Cops would shake down local residents trying to sell produce off their land plot, and even if the sellers had a licence, any cop who wanted to find a minor violation could do so. For the smallholders, paying off the police would be impossible, but it was usually difficult to produce a licence that a cop would accept as error-free.

  That left more well-established fruit traders, often from southern ethnic republics or former Soviet states, being faced with: “Don’t have the right documentation for the watermelons? That’ll be one hundred kilos of watermelons, or we’ll have to shut you down,” as the police major said, explaining the shake-down process. Larger sellers already took account of these expenses in their budgets.

  The police major doubted that Yevsyukov had randomly walked off without paying. Set-ups like these were common, but they meant that there had to have been some form of mutual agreement between the supermarket director and the police precinct.

  These routine violations, however, didn’t explain what pushed a successful police officer like Denis Yevsyukov, building his career as a resourceful, up-and-coming racketeer, over the edge.

  And the mysterious three hours that disappeared from his memory on April 26 had a peculiar effect on his show trial legacy. Yes, a cop was finally behind bars for his brutality. But both Yevsyukov’s defence and his victims seemed to agree that real closure could only come from a motive – and the investigators had failed utterly in uncovering one.

  “We don’t have a single opinion about the motive of the crime,” Trunov told me. “It’s clear that there was a motive. Experts have reported that he was sane, that he wasn’t drunk and that he wasn’t under the influence of drugs. Attempts to blame hypnosis are unrealistic, because it is impossible for someone to be in a state of hypnosis for so long. In light of this information vacuum, anything is possible.”

  Yevsyukov’s lawyer, Tatyana Bushuyeva, would go on to appeal the court ruling precisely because she was dissatisfied with the investigators’ failure to produce a motive.

  “The investigators were not interested in this at all,” she said. “Those three hours were a black hole. But the investigators did not even try to reconstruct the events in that interval.”

  2.

  On the evening of December 22, 2008, Yevgeny Chichvarkin, the boyish telecoms billionaire, a one-time favourite at the Kremlin court and a man on whose behalf Vladimir Putin himself had once ordered a shake-up of the Federal Customs Service back in 2006, realized that his time in Russia was up.

  Sitting in the offices of Altimo, which had just purchased his debt-ridden Yevroset retailer, he could see a car with police operatives holding vigil outside, waiting for him to come out. Just five days ago, it had become clear that Chichvarkin was no longer a witness but a suspect in a long-expired kidnapping case that police investigators pulled out from the archives just for that occasion. In September, police had already arrested Chichvarkin’s vice president and head of security at Yevroset, Boris Levin, and had been interrogating him throughout the autumn. There was no question that the operatives waiting for Chichvarkin in the parking lot weren’t just there for a chat.

  So, with the help of Altimo’s vice president, Oleg Malis, Chichvarkin quietly walked out of the back entrance of the offices towards a car provided by the company. He got in the back seat and lay down on the floor as the driver sped off towards Domodedovo Airport.105 In a few hours, he would join a growing diaspora of rich Russians living in self-imposed exile in London.

  Except that there was one catch: in contrast with the political exiles who chose to avoid the fate of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and flee while they could, there was absolutely nothing political in the pressure that finally forced Chichvarkin to jump in the car and head for the airport.

  By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, Russia had one of the fastest-growing telecoms markets in the world, with a turnover of $4.5 billion in 2004.106 Mobile phones, flash cards, smart phones, and laptops could be purchased on virtually every street corner of Moscow – one had to only look around for the familiar yellow band of Yevroset to find the top mobile retailer.

  In 1997, Yevgeny Chichvarkin was just twenty-two when he invested $2,500 in what would become one of Russia’s leading mobile phone retailers. But while mobile phones had become widely available in Russia, they became truly legal only in 2005, thanks to efforts of officials and businessmen that included Chichvarkin. Until then, they had constituted one of the largest siphoning scams under the auspices of the Federal Customs Service – which, in turn, generated the largest share of budget revenue for the Russian government. A combination of murky laws and bribe-hungry officials created a situation where businessmen like Chichvarkin functioned in a semi-legal grey area.

  To understand how the customs racket worked – and what changed in 2005 to cause a few enraged police officials to go after Chichvarkin – we should go back to the Soviet Union.

  “There was nothing new in the contraband criminal cases that started appearing, as society adopted market practices,” said Yuri Gervis. The former FSB officer who investigated contraband cases in the early 1990s went into private law practice, and then represented Yevgeny Chichvarkin precisely because his case was connected to customs. “Contraband is simply the transportation of objects without declaring them with the intent of hiding them from customs” and evading duties.

  Starting in the period under Leonid Brezhnev, by the 1980s contraband became rampant. Diplomats and officials who had access to foreign travel would transport currency, furniture, jewellery and rare art, buying antiques in the Soviet Union and selling them abroad. Gervis recalled a particular oak chest that wound up being confiscated at the border multiple times in 1990. After each confiscation, it would wind up in a Soviet shop, where different people would purchase it and try to ship it out again. Well-connected people sent out valuables to relatives through travelling officials. In turn, deficit commodities like tobacco, jeans and Western cosmetics would be secretly brought in from across the border – a shipment of Philip Morris cigarettes was once hidden in a load of toilet paper.

  But then in 1991, Communist rule collapsed and the ideological norms that governed the criminal code disappeared. Private commerce became legal, and so did import and export. But because a whole business had developed around the criminalization of contraband, it continued.

  “The criminal code changed, and instead of being called contraband, it was called evasion of customs duties,” Gervis recalled. Whatever it was called, the bribes were still being paid, and customs officials profited. And another important aspect of the customs service remained the same: besides petrodollars, customs duties provided the single largest source of income for the Russian government. And its officers, seeing themselves as servants of this government, as “men of the sovereign,” saw no reason why they shouldn’t profit.

 
“The chief role of the Federal Customs Service is to replenish the budget. That is why there is so much attention to it from the FSB and the Interior Ministry,” Gervis said.

  And as these officers watched new, up and coming businessmen getting rich with no new system of values and an entirely dysfunctional network of legal norms, there was nothing wrong, in the eyes of the officers, with profiting from those businessmen.

  “For a businessman, it makes no difference how this regulation is carried out,” Gervis said. “Either way it is a tax, an obrok. Just like in the days of the Tartar-Mongolian yoke.”

  By 2005, an informal system of duties that both customs officials and businessmen seemed to benefit from crystallized at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, the largest import hub for mobile telephones in Russia. In return for kickbacks from mobile phone importers, the head of airport customs created a simplified system of customs duties based on price range: phones costing up to $100 were all registered as costing just $20, between $100 and $200 as just $30, and so forth. For a $4.5 billion market, this constituted from $150 to $300 million in “duties.”107

  Protected by the Interior Ministry, the system worked, in as much as all parties felt that they were getting rich enough. Police officials would regularly “confiscate” telephones just like precinct officers getting a share of the watermelons sold at a market under their “protection.” Because the phones weren’t entirely legal to begin with, importers like Yevgeny Chichvarkin couldn’t complain.

  But then in spring 2005, the “tax burden” started getting out of hand as new Interior Ministry departments started trying to get into the racket. An officer from the newly-created Department K, which oversaw the communications sector, arrived at Sheremetyevo and demanded a bigger cut: $1 from each mobile phone. Some businesses balked at the additional “tax,” which would generate an income of $20 million for Department K, and refused to pay. In response, Department K officials launched an investigation against Sheremetyevo customs, and the whole simplified scheme was taken down. Yakov Ardashnikov, the businessman who had refused to pay the additional cut, fled to Israel to escape contraband charges, while Valery Kuzmin, deputy head of Sheremetyevo customs, would go on to be sentenced to nine years in jail for involvement in the contraband shipment of mobile phones sold in Yevroset stores.108