Putin’s former bodyguard challenges opposition leader Navalny to a duel

What happened

One of Russia’s most influential security officials, Viktor Zolotov, a former bodyguard of President Vladimir Putin and current head of the National Guard, has challenged opposition leader Alexei Navalny to a duel in a video filled with crude insults.

• The formal reason for Zolotov’s video was Navalny’s claim that the leadership of the National Guard is stealing money from contracts for food supplies. The video itself is surreal: in his full dress uniform Zolotov looks like the leader of a tinpot dictatorship. He spends 7 minutes listing his objections, promising to turn Navalny into “tenderized meat.” It’s a shame, Zolotov says, that “no one has yet hit him [Navalny] in the ass hard enough so he will feel it in his kidneys.” Explaining his anger, Zolotov says he’s a Russian officer, and won’t stand for any insults. He then demands a duel. The whole thing looks more than a little stupid; not least because Navalny can’t respond until the end of September (he was jailed for a month at the end of August for planning an unsanctioned rally).
• The video was posted the website of the National Guard, which Zolotov runs. This is a new security force, often known as Putin’s Praetorian Guard, created in 2016. There are about 170,000 people serving in the National Guard, which reports directly to the president. Its main purpose is to maintain domestic order: for example, by breaking up unsanctioned protests like those organized by Navalny. Zolotov himself served in the KGB in the 1980s and was a bodyguard for Soviet leaders, including Boris Yeltsin. Famously, Zolotov can be seen in a photo where Yeltsin is speaking to Muscovites from atop a tank during the failed military coup of 1991. Zolotov has known Putin since at least the early 1990s, when Zolotov was the bodyguard of Putin’s boss, St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak. Between 2000 and 2013, Zolotov was the head of Putin’s personal security service.
• The most interesting part of Zolotov’s rant was not the insults, but the fact that such a senior security official addressed Navalny as an equal: Zolotov even described Navalny as “a person with presidential ambitions”. Navalny has never before been legitimized by those in power. Remember Putin makes a point of never using Navalny’s name in public.
• The Bell’s sources in the government could not say if the video was Zolotov’s own idea, or if he sought Kremlin approval in advance. But a source inside the National Guard told The Bell that Zolotov himself decided to call out Navalny because of Navalny’s investigation. In his muckraking research, Navalny highlighted Zolotov’s children’s expensive apartments and claimed their father uses his children to hide his own wealth. “He doesn’t like personal attacks and attacks on his family. This was a personal insult, a defamation, therefore Viktor Vasilevich [Zolotov] responded personally,” a source in the National Guard told The Bell.
• As strange as it might seem, these explanations sound like the truth. All investigative journalists in Russia know that articles about the families or children of influential officials elicit a very aggressive reaction. This was the case after articles about Putin’s daughters or about his supposed former son-in-law, Kirill Shamalov. After Shamalov’s marriage to Putin’s daughter, Katerina Tikhonova, Shamalov joined the Russian Forbes list. After the divorce Shamalov is expected to leave the list. Investigating official corruption is accepted as normal within the elite and such investigations can even used as a way to attack one’s enemies, but children are off-limits. This phrase has been heard over and over again from Kremlin officials by The Bell’s editors.

Why the world should care

General Zolotov’s monologue looks so strange that it is tempting to come up with some kind of conspiracy theory. These have ranged from a budding coup to a special operation to promote Navalny (the second analysis is very popular among Moscow-based conspiracy theorists). But not everything in Russia can be explained by secret Kremlin orders. The most simple explanation, that the general was upset by those who broke the rules of the game to which he was accustomed, seems also to be the most probable one.

Peter Mironenko

This newsletter is made with the support of the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley.