Putin’s People: KGB Through and Through

We all have dreams of what we want to be when we grow up. Some kids grow up wanting to be professional athletes, some actors and actresses. But Vladimir Putin’s dream was very different, he wanted to be in the Soviet Union’s main security agency commonly referred to as the KGB. The KGB was notorious for secret executions, as well as an elite spy network that counteracted the Western influence for years during the Cold War.

That’s exactly where Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People starts out. Once Putin finally realized his dream of joining the KGB after multiple rejections, he was stationed in East Germany’s Dresden. Putin’s exact role there is not exactly clear, primarily because when the Berlin wall fell in 1989, the KGB agents stationed in Dresden as well as across East Germany began to “destroy” everything they had according to Vladimir Putin himself in Putin’s People. This moment seems to be the launching point in Belton’s book, which depicts Putin’s journey from agent in Dresden to one of the most powerful figures in the world. Even though we will never know the full extent of what happened in Dresden, what we do know is that Putin never looked back after the wall fell. He went on to hold various positions that he utilized to enrich his friends as detailed by Belton. But even though Catherine Belton goes into detail about how Putin developed these various schemes to enrich his friends (such as the infamous food for oil scheme), Putin seems to have realized that having rich friends makes him more powerful, and provides a layer of protection for him to achieve his goals. One of those goals is to never experience the embarrassment at the hands of the West that he felt on the day the wall fell. It’s this fear of embarrassment that drives his current military campaign ‘against the West’ in Ukraine.

While Putin went on to the political world after the collapse of the U.S.S.R., it’s important to note how he used his power to rebuild the Soviet spy network that collapsed with it. After Dresden, Belton goes on to detail how Putin advanced to local politics in the city of St. Petersburg. He created a scheme where the city of St. Petersburg sold the natural oil occurring around the city, and in return would bring food for the people of the city. However, the money never really made it back to the people of St. Petersburg and was instead placed in off-shore bank accounts that eventually got to the hands of Putin’s closest allies. This became known as the “Oil for Food Scheme”, and according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the scheme yielded over five hundred million dollars to Putin’s allies. While Belton frames this scheme well, she also does a fantastic job of detailing the why. The KGB collapsed alongside the Soviet Union, but the people who worked for the organization never gave up on it. They opened these off-shore bank accounts, generated money through various schemes, and continued their network. Belton even details that during her time as a correspondent at the FInancial Times in Moscow, some sources told her they knew the Soviet Union was collapsing and that they began working on maintaining their network even over a year before the eventual collapse; anything to keep the fight against the West going.

These various schemes on the surface seem like a man in a potential position of power choosing to focus his time on enriching his friends, but who those friends are and what they do with the money is the real story. There are many media outlets even today that say Putin is heavily affected by sanctions on Russian oligarchs because the money sanctioned is his. While true to some extent, Belton recounts these various schemes to raise money not to show that Putin wanted wealth, but to show it was a much more premeditated attempt by the former agents of the KGB to make themselves relevant and powerful again to continue their fight against the West.

Since after the fall of the Soviet Union the Russian public heavily distrusted the KGB, Putin has always downplayed his involvement while in Dresden. However, Putin has always had this ‘anything it takes’ mentality. Whether it was to get that job in the KGB after being rejected initially, or while working his way up in the Kremlin, Putin had this same mentality. According to the U.S. State Department, the KGB provided weapons, as well as other forms of assistance to any group looking to harm the West. Belton goes into detail about a source she had, who told her the Dresden KGB office directly helped North African terror groups smuggle guns into Germany that they eventually used to carry out attacks on Americans. For Putin, it has always been his primary goal to limit Western influence.

It’s exactly this goal of fighting the West at all costs which separated Putin from his predecessor from the get go. While Boris Yeltsin was the one who opened the door for Putin, giving him his first job in the Kremlin and eventually endorsing him to be his successor, the two could not have a more different view of the world and of Russia’s place in it. Belton details how Yeltsin wanted a Russian economy that encouraged free markets and innovation, a more democratic country than the Soviet Union had been. Putin had Yeltsin fooled. Putin’s goals are quite different. The direction Russia was headed in after the collapse of the Soviet Union is very different from its trajectory today. While Yetlsin sought to modernize Russia to compete with the world economically, Putin seeks to limit Western influence in the world at any cost necessary. As demonstrated by Belton throughout her research, Putin gets what he wants done using force and fear without caring about the consequences. One clear example of this is when Putin was working as the campaign manager for the then Mayor of St. Petersburg. It is believed that Yeltsin actually reached out to Putin as he was scared the mayor would eventually run for President against Yeltsin. Allegedly, Yeltsin asked Putin for him to throw the election and derail his political career. While this cannot be confirmed, the mayor lost the race by under 1% of votes, and just one month later Putin was given a very prominent role in Yeltsin’s government in the Kremlin. What Yeltsin didn’t know, was that he set off a domino effect which no one would be able to stop.

The United States uses a theory called the Domino Effect to justify a lot of its interventions across the world since the twentieth century. It is the theory that says that what happens in one country will have a ‘domino’ effect on the neighboring countries. In one of his most famous speeches, President Eisenhow used the ‘domino effect’ as the reason for the strategic importance of South Vietnam to the United States. This is exactly what worried Putin when in 2005, Ukraine elected a very pro-Western President that wanted to integrate Ukraine into the Western world. Belton claimed that it was, “Putin’s worst nightmare.” He was scared the West would try to do the same thing to him that he believed they were able to do in Ukraine. To say Putin’s claims are unconfirmed would even be an exaggeration, and in my honest opinion as an American I wish we had anything close to that much influence. Yet, Putin seems to have made a decision that day, not just on the importance of Russia’s neighboring countries, but about Ukraine specifically. A decision he to this day has not let go of.

Years later in 2014, the work Putin was putting into Ukraine had backfired once more. Then Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, made a last second U-turn to accept a trade deal with Russia and decline the offer from the European Union. This decision greatly upset the people of Ukraine and they decided to take to the streets in protest. Again, Putin was embarrassed in his own backyard, and again, he believed there was interference by the West. This caused Putin to retaliate almost immediately, invading the Crimean Peninsula militarily.

When exploring Putin’s experience in Ukraine, his relationship with Donald Trump stands out. Belton discusses how Trump has had a relationship with the Russians for years, as they consistently helped him out in his business dealings, sometimes making little financial sense for the investors. Belton even goes so far as to claim that Putin’s KGB friends funded and supported Trump for years in the hope that one day they could use him to repay the favors. According to recent leaks in the Guardian, an ex-KGB spy confirmed this notion. He claimed the Russians have been working President Trump for years just waiting for the right moment to pounce. This worked out for Putin, as Trump was everything the previous U.S. Presidents were not. He questioned the democratic norms the United States was built on for years, and the norms that the United States tried to instill in the rest of the world for generations.

While Trump just being President at all completely delegitimizes American influence, it is worth noting that while President, Trump threatened to and then withheld U.S. aid to Ukraine (and was eventually impeached for it). This was all over an alleged policy issue, but I’m much more suspicious given the fact that Trump is known to have had dealings with Putin’s ex-KGB friends for years, and Putin’s obsession with Ukraine as a proxy war with the West.

Belton’s book finishes here, but the story of Putin in Ukraine does not. In 2022, he launched a full on military invasion of Ukraine. There has been lots of speculation on why he decided to do this, but after reading Belton’s book I think a lot of the discourse is wrong. For example, the Atlantic Council recently published an article claiming Putin’s fear of democracy led him to invade Ukraine. Yet, as Belton correctly outlines, Putin never cared about morals or money but rather about the honor of his great Russia, and about its continued fight against the West. This war proves exactly that: his oligarch friends are having billions in assets seized, and being forced to sell their most prized possessions (such as Roman Abramovich, Yeltsin friend who backed Putin to succeed him, having to sell Chelsea F.C.). It’s not the ideas that the West carries that scares Putin, it’s the idea of submitting to the West again.

The true strategy is not the domino effect fear, or the desire to reunite the old Soviet Union, but simply to not get embarrassed and in Ukraine again. This invasion of Ukraine has caused neighboring Finland to join N.A.T.O, something Putin must hate but could not possibly be surprised by. He knows this war is a net loss for him, but he does not care. All that matters is his ego and the ego he holds for his country, which he believes must continue to stand up to Western influence around the world. Unlike his predecessor, Putin would rather his people die and suffer than admit Western ideology was correct. It’s Putin’s KGB values that to this day dictate Russian strategy, with a focus on bringing that honor that Putin once felt for the Soviet Union back. In Putin’s eyes, the Cold War did not end simply because the Soviet Union collapsed. As Belton details, it was Putin’s mission to bring back the KGB networks that used to be in place, and once they were in place he started to utilize them just like they were utilized in what we call the Cold War. If there was another chapter in Belton’s book I believe it would be about exactly this: Putin’s goals in Ukraine, and about how he does not care if it is a losing fight. All that matters is not being embarrassed again by what he sees as Western influence in his backyard.

References

1. Belton, Catherine. Putin’s People. HarperCollins, 2020.
2. “The $100 Million Deal that Disappeared.” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 19 Apr. 2012, www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2012-04-19/putin-and-the-100-million-deal-that-disappeared.
3. Herszenhorn, David M. “The Secret History of Vladimir Putin’s Rise to Power.” Politico, 20 Jun. 2020, www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/20/vladimir-putin-dresden-kgb-330203.
4. “Indictment — United States of America v. Internet Research Agency, et al.” US Department of Justice, 16 Feb. 2018, www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download.