doing good for Russia: the much-needed medical equipment was an unquestionable good; on top of that, his new partners would be investing large amounts of money into the Russian economy. Sure, they were skimming off the top—more than a third of the money donated—but they were investing it in Russia, not lining their own pockets. And also, “we knew this was not money made by backbreaking labor. You can’t come by that kind of money honestly.”
The first donor was Roman Abramovich, a secretive Russian oligarch, and future owner of the Chelsea Football Club. He donated $203 million, of which about $140 million bought equipment for the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg (run by Putin’s friend the minister of health, who had once helped ferry Sobchak out of the prosecutor’s office and out of Russia) and over $60 million stayed in a European bank account. His donation was followed by a number of smaller ones. By 2005, about $200 million had accumulated in this bank account. Kolesnikov and his two partners—one had started out with him in St. Petersburg and the other had brought him into this new line of business—formed a new company called Rosinvest, a wholly owned subsidiary of a Swiss company, which did business through a third company, also Swiss, ownership of which was fixed in bearer shares. In other words, whoever was in physical possession of the papers was the legal owner. Each of the three men got 2 percent of the shares; the remaining 94 percent was handed over to Putin himself.
The newly formed company had sixteen different investment projects, mostly in industrial production; they were well chosen, naturally afforded a variety of tax and legal benefits, and brought a handsome profit—94 percent of which belonged to Putin. All along, there was also what Kolesnikov thought of as a small personal project of Putin’s, a house on the Black Sea budgeted at $16 million. “But things kept getting added,” Kolesnikov told me. “An elevator to the beach, a marina, a separate high-voltage line, a separate gas pipeline, three new motorways that led directly to the palace, and three helicopter pads. The building itself was changing, too: an amphitheater was added, then a winter theater. And then it all had to be decorated too: furniture, artwork, silverware. It’s all very expensive!” Kolesnikov traveled to the Black Sea coast twice a year to monitor the project; last time he was there, in the spring of 2009, what had been a house had become twenty buildings, and the total budget had long since passed the billion-dollar mark.
Something else had happened a few months earlier. In the aftermath of the world financial crisis, Kolesnikov’s partner informed him that Rosinvest would no longer be making investments: its only purpose now was the completion of the Black Sea palace. Kolesnikov, who had not exactly been a stickler for legalities but had been very proud of his work and sincerely convinced that he was creating wealth for his country, was deeply offended. He fled Russia, taking the company’s documentation with him, and paid a Washington law firm a considerable sum of money to review the papers and verify his story. And then he went public with the story of what became known as Putin’s Palace. But the story, while it attracted a fair amount of attention when I wrote about it in Russia, drew little reaction from the government: first Putin’s press secretary dismissed it as rubbish and then, when copies of some building contracts were published by
IT WOULD BE fair to assume that the palace scheme was just one of many similar schemes for squeezing wealth out of Russia. The question is: What is the nature, the motivating principle, behind these schemes? In other words, the question is, once again: Who is Mr. Putin?
There is the story of Putin the bureaucrat who did not take bribes—a key narrative that explains Boris Berezovsky’s attraction to him, which, in turn, was key to making Putin president. Berezovsky’s right-hand man, Yuli Dubov, who had long since become one of the London exiles, told me one of the most striking of the upstanding- Putin stories. Once, in the early 1990s, Dubov was having trouble with some of the documentation for the car service station Berezovsky was opening in St. Petersburg. He needed Putin to make a phone call to facilitate the process, and to this end he scheduled lunch with him. Dubov arrived at city hall early, as, uncharacteristically, did Putin. As they both waited for their appointed time to be able to leave for lunch, Dubov broached the subject of the phone call. Putin immediately took care of the matter, but then refused to go to lunch: “Either you have me help you with your business, or you take me to lunch,” Dubov remembered him saying. This was clearly not just a bureaucrat who did not take bribes: this was a bureaucrat whose entire identity rested on his incorruptibility.
And then there was the Putin on whose guard $100 million worth of contracts evaporated, as Marina Salye documented. The remarkable part of this story is not the occurrence of theft—it is abundantly clear that some theft occurred absolutely everywhere in Russia in those days and in similar situations, which was the reason Salye’s revelations never gained momentum—but that
But it is as if Putin could not resist taking it all. And I think this is literally true. On several occasions, at least one of them embarrassingly public, Putin has acted like a person afflicted with kleptomania. In June 2005, while hosting a group of American businessmen in St. Petersburg, Putin pocketed the 124-diamond Super Bowl ring of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. He had asked to see it, tried it on, allegedly said, “I could kill someone with this,” then stuck it in his pocket and left the room abruptly. After a flurry of articles in the U.S. press, Kraft announced a few days later that the ring had been a gift—preventing an uncomfortable situation from spiraling out of control.
In September 2005, Putin was a special guest at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. At one point his hosts brought out a conversation piece that another Russian guest must have given the museum: a glass replica of a Kalashnikov automatic weapon filled with vodka. This gaudy souvenir costs about $300 in Moscow. Putin nodded to one of his bodyguards, who took the glass Kalashnikov and carried it out of the room, leaving the hosts speechless.
Putin’s extraordinary relationship to material wealth was evident when he was a college student, if not earlier. When he accepted the car his parents won in a lottery, though the prize could have been used to greatly improve the family’s living conditions, or when he spent almost all the money he made over the summer to buy himself an outrageously expensive coat—and bought a cake for his mother—he was acting in ways highly unusual and borderline unacceptable for a young man of his generation and social group. Ostentatious displays of wealth could easily have derailed his plans for a KGB career, and he knew this. The story told by the former West German radical—of Putin demanding gifts while in Dresden—completes the picture. For a man who had staked most of his social capital on conforming to the norm, this was particularly remarkable behavior: it seems he really could not help himself.
The correct term is probably not the popularly known
Andrei Illarionov discovered this less than a month after becoming Putin’s economic adviser: just days after his inauguration, Putin signed a decree consolidating 70 percent of the country’s alcohol manufacturers in a single company and appointing a close St. Petersburg associate to run it. At the time, oil prices had not yet taken off and alcohol was arguably the country’s most lucrative business. As Illarionov found out, no one on the new president’s economic team had been consulted about or even informed of the decision. Over the next few months, Illarionov would grow accustomed to this: Putin continued to talk a good economic line to the public and the media, and continued to appear to listen to his sterling team of liberal advisers, while consistently broadsiding them with decisions that consolidated all of the country’s resources in the hands of his cronies.
Is this what happened with Khodorkovsky? Did Putin have him arrested because he wanted to take possession of his company rather than for reasons of political and personal competition? Not exactly. He put Khodorkovsky behind bars for the same reason that he abolished elections or had Litvinenko killed: in his continuing attempt to turn the country into a supersize model of the KGB, there can be no room for dissidents or even for independent actors. But then, independent actors are inconvenient in part because they refuse to accept the rules of the mafia. And once Khodorkovsky was behind bars, the opportunity to rob him presented itself. In seizing this opportunity, Putin, as usual, failed to distinguish between himself and the state he ruled. Greed may not be his main instinct, but it is the one he can never resist.
