We Need to Talk About Putin: Why the West Gets Him Wrong

Chapter 9: Putin’s Enemies Don’t Always Die

On 12 August 2000, torpedo propellant exploded inside the K-141 Kursk nuclear submarine while it was on exercises in the icy waters of the Barents Sea. Most of the crew were killed instantly, but twenty-three were still alive as the boat sank to the seabed. The Russians lacked the necessary rescue submarines, but when the British and Norwegian navies offered to help, rather than run the risk of allowing foreigners to take a peek at one of his most advanced vessels, Putin let the sailors die.

On 13 February 2004, Chechen rebel president-in-exile Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev was driving home from his mosque in Doha, Qatar, with his son and two bodyguards, when a massive bomb tore through his 4x4. Yandarbiyev died in hospital, and several GRU officers were later convicted of the killing.

On 1 November 2006, former FSB officer and then whistle-blower and defector Alexander Litvinenko fell ill in London. Over the next twenty-two days highly radioactive polonium-210 ate him to death. The British government’s view is that this was a state execution carried out by the FSB.

On 27 February 2015, as discussed earlier, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down in Moscow by Chechen security officers. Although there is no evidence that Putin either wanted or welcomed the assassination, it is hard not to conclude that the toxic language the Kremlin had recently adopted, calling the opposition ‘a fifth column’ and even a ‘bunch of national traitors’, as well as the tolerance shown to Chechen leader Kadyrov when he had had people killed or beaten in the past, had created an environment conducive to such outrages.

On 4 March 2018, Sergei Skripal, a GRU officer turned MI6 agent who was then living in Salisbury, fell ill from exposure to what turned out to be a nerve agent called Novichok, dispensed by two Russian agents. He and his daughter survived, but an innocent woman who found the perfume bottle in which the Novichok had been hidden later died.

And so the list continues; from Chechen civilians whose cities were blasted with fireballs from thermobaric rockets during the Second Chechen War, to journalists and critics who knew or said too much falling mysteriously ill, this is a Kremlin that kills. Through direct action or indirect encouragement, stubborn inaction (as with the Kursk), or through creating an environment in which officials and oligarchs feel they can get away with murder.

For all this, though, Putin is not an indiscriminately murderous tyrant, and whatever the press may suggest, personal or wholesale murder is certainly not his regime’s tool of choice. The trouble is that these days it is all too easy to see the Kremlin’s bloody hand in the death of every prominent Russian. Sometimes, it might be the Kremlin, but more likely it is the result of some private feud – Russians are far more likely to be killed as a result of business and criminal rivalries than anything to do with the regime. As with Nemtsov’s murder, and many others, people die not because Putin wants them dead, but because some other powerful figure does, and Putin doesn’t care enough to stop them. (And more likely still, it is because the Russian was overweight, in poor health and in his sixties, with a bad diet and too much alcohol having taken their toll; the life expectancy of a Russian man is just sixty-seven, compared with seventy-nine in the UK.)

Putin does not see everyone who is not for him as being actively against him. The flip side of his very personal approach to his friends and his henchmen is visible in how he treats those who fall foul of him. In 2001, while speaking to the liberal journalist Alexei Venediktov, he drew a clear contrast between enemies and traitors: ‘Enemies are right in front of you, you are at war with them, then you make an armistice with them, and all is clear. A traitor must be destroyed, crushed.’ Disarmingly, he added, ‘You know, Alexei, you are not a traitor. You are an enemy.’ He expects foreign journalists and liberal ones at home to write nasty things about him, and while they may sometimes find themselves being harassed, on the whole the Kremlin simply treats it as par for the course – after all, that is what they expect enemies to do.

Putin’s particular venom is directed towards those he considers traitors, those who were once insiders but who changed sides. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, for instance, had become vastly wealthy within the system and was offered the chance to retain his position, but chose to challenge the Kremlin. The Chechens were Russian citizens who were trying to break free, so they had to be crushed. The Ukrainians are, to Putin, essentially Russian subjects, so cannot be allowed to turn their backs on Moscow. This may even explain the attempted assassination of Skripal: it is not simply that he was a Chekist who betrayed the Motherland – and for money, at that – but that he had been pardoned, as part of a spy swap in 2010. As far as the Russians are concerned, the unspoken agreement is that if you are pardoned, your slate is wiped clean, but in return, you’re out of the spying game. You will, of course, be debriefed, and you may give the odd lecture about how things were in your day, but that’s it. As it has become clear that Skripal was rather more active than that, travelling around Europe to advise security services and maybe even identifying former colleagues for surveillance or recruitment, to Putin he was breaking the rules. Although he has denied any Russian role in the assassination attempt, Putin has not shown any regret, describing Skripal as ‘simply a scumbag’ and a ‘traitor to the Motherland’.

And as we know, Putin feels a traitor must be destroyed, crushed. Or, as he put it in 2010, ‘Traitors will kick the bucket. These people betrayed their friends, their brothers-in-arms. Whatever they get in exchange for it, those thirty pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them.’

Most enemies are not traitors, though. Putin doesn’t want to be a tyrant if he can avoid it, and as we have already seen, there is a surprising amount of room in his Russia for a sort of limited freedom. Television, with the exception of the plucky Dozhd Internet channel, is either state-controlled or state-dominated, but there is a great deal of intelligent questioning and even genuinely investigative journalism in the print and online media. Russia is a dangerous place to be in the media – being a local journalist there is as risky as being a war correspondent elsewhere – but still people are willing to poke into the dark corners and shine a light on them. When the real identities of the two GRU assassins who went after Skripal were announced, although much of the international attention was on Bellingcat, the Western investigative website which outed them, they couldn’t have followed the clues without the involvement of Russian investigative journalists.

Just as there is still real journalism, there is a lot of real politics – so long as you don’t call it politics. When non-governmental organisations start to pose a challenge to the state, they face pressure or outright closure, but on a local level Russia is full of parents’ and residents’ associations, pressure groups, environmental lobbies and other expressions of grassroots civil society. Sometimes they are ignored, sometimes they are squashed, but they often bring about real change. The secret seems to be to focus on specific outcomes and always, always use every opportunity to make it clear that they are not political or complaining about the government as such, whether local or national, just this one issue here or that one problem there.

Again, it’s all about the ponyatiye, the unspoken understandings. If you follow the unspoken rules, you should be OK. It’s when you cross them that you become not an enemy, but a traitor. Putin is a merciful autocrat. He doesn’t want to kill you – unless you force him to.