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February 25th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
Masha Gessen is not so sure. A Russian-born writer who grew up in America and
now lives in Moscow, and the author of a new book about Putin, Gessen
believes that even as he consolidates his power, Russia is seeing the first
signs of the inevitable fall of what she describes as ‘this small and
vengeful man’.
The tumultuous events of last December, when tens of thousands took to the
streets of Moscow and cities across Russia in the biggest anti-government
rallies since the fall of the Soviet Union, were the harbinger of what she
describes as ‘a revolution’.
Putin will win the election. That, in itself, is not a mechanism for change,
Gessen says, ‘because it’s not an election. But I think it will be a
catalyst. I think it’s the beginning of the end for Putin. How long this
process will last is hard to tell. But I think it is more likely to be a
matter of months rather than years.’ She pauses. ‘At least, I hope so.’
Gessen’s book, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin,
provides a compelling and exhaustive portrait of a man who rose without
trace from being a minor KGB and St Petersburg bureaucrat to become what
Gessen describes as ‘the godfather of a mafia clan’, who has amassed a
personal fortune that in 2007 was estimated by one Kremlin insider to be $40
billion.
Read an extract from The Man Without a Face here
It is a brave journalist who undertakes to write a critical – not to say
overtly hostile – biography of Putin, in a country where press freedom is
severely circumscribed, self-censorship a useful survival mechanism, and
where those who have written disobligingly about Putin and his close allies,
or dug too deeply into the corruption endemic in Russian politics and
business, have often come to grief. In her years as a journalist, Gessen
herself has been threatened, intimidated and burgled.
I meet her in a smart coffee shop near her home in central Moscow. Gessen, who
is gay, lives with her partner, Darya, a cartographer, and her two children,
a 13-year-old son, Voya, whom Gessen adopted as a baby, and an 11-year-old
daughter, Yael, born by artificial insemination. Darya is now expecting her
first child. It is mid-morning, and the cafe is crowded with the young
metropolitan elite, fashionably dressed and happy to pay £5 for a latte,
chattering and smoking over their iPads and laptops.
Gessen, 45, is a slight, pale-looking woman with short dark hair, a hawkish
profile and an earnest demeanour. She is wearing a black tailored suit
jacket and blue jeans. Pinned to her lapel is the white ribbon that has
become the symbol of protest against the Putin regime ever since the
demonstrations in December.
The catalyst for the protests was alleged vote-rigging in the parliamentary
elections on December 4, which were won by Putin’s United Russia party. But
they spoke of a deeper anger about the concentration of wealth and political
power in Putin’s Russia, and the pervasive corruption that accompanies it.
‘More basically,’ Gessen says, ‘it’s about dignity. Every time a Russian comes
into contact with the state, whether it’s to get a driver’s licence or a
licence for his business, it’s unpredictable and it’s profoundly
humiliating. In that sense the election was almost a stand-in for that
contact with the state. It’s humiliating to vote and then have your vote
stolen in a blatant manner. In a way there’s nothing more humiliating. It’s
saying: you don’t exist.’
Gessen was born in Moscow. Her father, Sasha, was a computer scientist, her
mother, Yolochka, a translator and literary critic. In 1981, when Masha was
14, the family joined the growing exodus of Russian Jews, emigrating to
America and settling in Boston. After starting and abandoning a degree in
architecture, Gessen became a writer. In 1991, as the Soviet Union was
breaking up, she returned to Russia on a magazine assignment, reporting on
the country’s fledgling women’s movement. Over the next three years she
would return frequently on stories, finally moving back in 1994 to take a
job as chief correspondent on a news weekly, Itogi.
Moscow then, she says, ‘was the most exciting place in the world. Everything
was in flux and everything was up for discussion. People were having
serious discussions about the relationship between the individual and the
state, how the media should be constructed, what the constitution should be.
All of this was being seriously debated by any number of smart people, and
you felt like you could have a place in the debate. It was amazing.’
Gessen went on to write on every aspect of the new Russia, including reporting
on the war in Chechnya from beginning to end between 1994 and 1996,
initially for Russian news magazines, latterly for American publications
including the New York Times and Vanity Fair. She became a persistent critic
of Putin and his regime.
‘I was trying to crusade in American journalism and write about Putin for a
long time before it had become an accepted fact that he was not the
democratic hope that he had originally been seen as,’ she says. ‘I remember
in 2005 I was asked to write a piece about Putin as a threat to democracy. I
said, you’ve missed the story – he’s not a threat, there is no democracy.
And then I realised that the real story was to try and explain who this man
was. Because really, nobody knew.’
Gessen argues that as the product of a highly secretive institution, the KGB,
Putin has been able to control the details of his life, and shape his own
mythology, more than almost any other modern politician – certainly any
Western one.
Putin, she writes, was ‘a faceless man’ promoted by people who wanted to
‘invent’ a president. But that plan was subverted by the man himself and the
secret-police apparatus that formed him and continues to sustain him. Rather
than being the safeholder of a new era of democracy, as his sponsors had
hoped, Putin has turned Russia into ‘a supersize model of the KGB’, where
there can be no room for dissent or even independent action.
Vladimir Putin was born in 1952 in Leningrad (now St
Petersburg), a city still traumatised by the effects of the Second World
War.
His father had fought with the special forces, operating behind German lines,
returning home severely disabled and finding work as a skilled labourer. His
mother, who had almost died of starvation during the siege of the city by
the Nazis, worked in a series of backbreaking jobs. They had lost two
children before Putin was born.
The young Putin was a tearaway, ‘a real thug’, as he would later boast to his
official biographers, often scrapping in the courtyard of the overcrowded
apartment building where the family lived.
From an early age, inspired by the example of his father, Putin dreamt of
being a spy. ‘I was most amazed by how a small force, a single person,
really, can accomplish something an entire army cannot,’ he told his
biographers. ‘A single intelligence officer could rule over the fates of
thousands of people. At least, that’s how I saw it.’
Joining the KGB, he was sent to spy school in Moscow and then dispatched to
Dresden in what was then East Germany, tasked with cultivating future
undercover agents among foreign students. The Soviet Union was in the first
throes of perestroika, as Mikhail Gorbachev loosened the reins on Soviet
bloc countries and sowed seeds of resentment among the KGB leadership and
rank-and-file.
‘Everything Putin had worked for was now in doubt,’ Gessen writes. ‘Everything
he had believed was being mocked.’ He would not return home until after the
fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
‘I think a lot of his resentment goes back directly to that period,’ Gessen
says. ‘Having been in the KGB at a bad time, having been outside the country
when everything was changing… He’s a very vengeful man – that’s one of his
particular traits of character. And that vengefulness has carried through.
He’s pursuing a vendetta against everybody who was ever opposed to the
Soviet Union.’
Putin returned to St Petersburg, where he became assistant to the mayor, while
continuing in the KGB. For all the reforms that were taking place in Russia,
St Petersburg, Gessen writes, was ‘a state within a state’: a place where
the KGB remained all-powerful, where local politicians and journalists had
their phones tapped, and the murder of major political and business players
was a regular occurrence.
‘In other words, very much like Russia itself would become within a few years,
once it came to be ruled by the people who ruled St Petersburg in the
1990s.’ In other words, Putin.
In 1996 Putin went to Moscow to work at the Kremlin, rising to be head of the
FSB, the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB. It was here
that he came into the orbit of Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin had become the first
president of the new Russian Federation in 1991 and had been re-elected for
a second term in 1996, but he was slipping into a state of sorry decline.
His health was failing, his behaviour increasingly erratic – most people
assumed as a result of his heavy drinking. He had alienated most of the
politicians who had once supported him, and with no obvious successor in
view, feared that another party might come to power and imprison him.
Foremost in the dwindling circle of Yeltsin’s allies and supporters known as
‘the family’ was the oligarch Boris Berezovsky; indeed, many believed
Berezovsky to be the real power behind Yeltsin’s throne. Berezovsky knew
Putin from the early 1990s in St Petersburg when, in the first flush of
buccaneering capitalism, Berezovsky was aiming to expand his car dealership
and Putin was a minor city bureaucrat.
Putin arranged for Berezovsky to open a service station in the city, and
declined to take a bribe. ‘He was the first bureaucrat who did not take
bribes,’ Berezovsky told Gessen. ‘Seriously. It made a huge impression on
me.’
Berezovsky began to vigorously promote Putin, among ‘the family’ and to
Yeltsin himself. He would remember Yeltsin’s reaction on meeting Putin: ‘He
seems all right,’ the president said of his putative successor, ‘but he’s
kind of small.’ In August 1999 Yeltsin appointed Putin prime minister.
‘Yeltsin needed to appoint somebody who would guarantee his safety,’ Gessen
says. ‘The problem was that the pool of people from which they were choosing
was tiny. Anybody who was working as a politician, or even as a bureaucrat,
had defected. So they were looking at people who by definition were
unsuitable for the job. And Putin was one of those people. Perhaps he looked
like the best person; I think he was probably the worst.’
Putin, she says, was ‘a grey, ordinary man’ with no articulated political
vision and no identifiable political ambition, on to whom everybody could
project whatever they wished to see in him. Berezovsky, who had thrown his
Channel One television station behind Putin, believed that ‘being devoid of
personality and personal interest’, he would be both malleable and
disciplined.
The Foundation for Effective Politics, the organisation set up to promote
Putin, was made up primarily of young, idealistic liberals who were prepared
to overlook his KGB past. ‘The reason the ground was primed for him was that
people needed to feel a sort of limited nostalgia for the Soviet Union, and
someone who was very sure of what he was doing and saying,’ Gessen says.
‘Everyone was tired of Yeltsin, his erratic behaviour, his total
unpredictability, the fact that he was a total embarrassment on the
international stage.’
Putin was promoted as a young, energetic leader – a man, as Gessen puts it,
who ‘wore good European suits and spoke a foreign language’, who would
shepherd Russia into a bright future of economic reform and stable
democracy, but also a strong man who could solve the country’s domestic
problems and restore its international standing.
Within weeks of his appointment as prime minister Putin had demonstrated just
how decisive he could be. In September 1999 Russia was shocked by a series
of bombings of apartment blocks that killed more than 300 people and left
more than 1,900 injured. The bombings were immediately blamed on Chechen
terrorists – and provided an opportunity for Putin to demonstrate his
credentials as a strong leader.
On September 23 a group of 24 governors – more than a quarter of the
federation – had written to Yeltsin asking him to yield power to Putin. The
same day, Yeltsin issued a secret decree authorising the army to resume
combat in Chechnya, and Russian planes began bombing the capital, Grozny.
The following day Putin issued his own order authorising Russian troops to
engage in combat – even though the prime minister has no legal authority
over the military – and made one of his first television appearances,
promising to hunt down the terrorists: ‘Even if we find them in the toilet.
We will rub them out in the outhouse.’
‘His popularity,’ Gessen writes, ‘began to soar.’
The suggestion that the apartment-block bombings were a ‘false flag’ operation
by the FSB has long been bruited in conspiracy circles. In her book, Gessen,
who describes herself to me as ‘probably the least conspiratorially minded
person in this country of conspiracy theories’, comes to the conclusion that
the FSB was, indeed, behind the bombings – and that Putin would very likely
have been aware of the fact.
‘We have this expression in Russian: both is worse,’ she says. ‘Which is worse
– if he knew about it or didn’t know about it? Both is worse. All the
evidence points to the fact that these explosions were organised by the FSB,
and he was the head of the FSB until three to six weeks before the bombings
began. If he wasn’t aware of them that’s damning; more likely, of course, he
was. Certainly he would have been aware if it was carried out by the FSB
after the fact; and certainly he would have personally made the decision not
to investigate.’
Putin has never commented on the speculation that the FSB was implicated in
the bombings. Nor has the suggestion ever gained any traction among the
Russian populace. One television channel that did investigate the bombings
was NTV, part of a media conglomerate, Media-Most, owned by Vladimir
Gusinsky. (Gusinsky was also the publisher of Igoti, the magazine that
Gessen was working for at the time.)
Within days of Putin’s inauguration as president in May 2000, armed militia
raided the offices of Media-Most, intimidating staff and seizing papers. The
raid, Gessen writes, was a threat: its alleged initiator, Putin. Within a
matter of weeks, Gusinsky was arrested on trumped-up charges stemming from
the privatisation some years earlier of a company called Russkoye Video.
Gusinsky spent three days in jail and then fled the country, having apparently
agreed to cede his majority share in his media empire to the state gas
company, Gazprom. ‘In other words,’ Gessen writes, ‘this was a classic
organised-crime contract, formalising the exchange of one’s business for
one’s personal safety: and the state was party to it.’
When Gessen began investigating the Russkoye Video story, uncovering documents
that implicated Putin, she was threatened over the telephone by the
prosecutor involved in the case. ‘He told me I’d be sorry. Just like that.’
A ‘workman’ suddenly appeared at her apartment door – 24 hours a day. Her
telephone was mysteriously cut off.
‘These were again old KGB tactics. Nobody touched me; except for that phone
call nobody said anything to me. But that sense of invasion… it was
terrifying. And it made me realise how quickly you can be made to feel
unsafe in your own home.’
Getting rid of Gusinsky was the first step in Putin consolidating power by
seizing control both of the media and the levers of politics. He introduced
laws that effectively abolished elections to the upper house of parliament,
and appointed presidential envoys to become overseers of elected regional
governors. (In 2004, in his second term as president, he changed the law so
that governors were directly appointed by the Kremlin.)
Then he moved on his old ally Berezovsky. The man who had helped to make Putin
had fallen out with him almost as soon as Putin became president, attacking
his constitutional reforms and using his television station, Channel One,
to criticise Putin over his handling of the Kursk submarine disaster in
August 2000.
After clashing with Putin, Berezovsky was obliged to flee to France, and then
to Britain, where he now lives. A warrant for his arrest was filed in Russia
and his shares in Channel One appropriated by the state. Within a year of
Putin coming to office, all three federal television networks would be under
state control.
In a sense, Gessen says, Putin’s methods are in a long and ignoble
tradition of Russian politics: the exercise of fear. ‘That’s true of his
private way of conducting politics, and it’s true of his public rhetoric. He
is the heir to the great Russian tradition of “we are a country under siege”
political rhetoric, which has been used throughout Russian history.
‘And I think Putin believes that. It’s an assumption he was born and bred
with, and he’s never thought to challenge it. I don’t think he is a very
smart man, nor a very educated man. He’s an average Soviet functionary with
stronger than average emotions, and higher than average vindictiveness.
‘He’s a tiny, mean guy who will bite you if you get too close; and that’s the
kind of country he’s tried to build. And that’s been the extent of Russian
foreign policy for the last 12 years. What is Russia’s foreign policy
agenda? You can’t figure it out from who Russia becomes friends with or
sells arms to or negotiates with, because it’s really simple. Russia wants
to be feared. That’s it.’
Gessen likens Putin to ‘the godfather of a mafia clan’ ruling Russia. And
‘like all mafia bosses, he barely distinguishes between his personal
property, the property of his clan and the property of those beholden to his
clan.’
Corruption has been virtually institutionalised under his regime. Last year
the Transparency International ‘Corruptions Perception Index’ ranked Russia
joint 143rd out of the 182 countries listed, along with Nigeria and
Mauritania.
Putin’s own acquisitiveness is typified, Gessen says, in two apparently minor
but telling incidents. In 2005, while hosting a group of American
businessmen in St Petersburg, Putin pocketed a diamond-encrusted ring
belonging to Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots American
football team, after asking to try it on, and allegedly saying, ‘I could
kill someone with this.’ After a flurry of articles in the US press, Kraft
announced the ring had been a gift, preventing an uncomfortable situation
from spiralling out of control.
Later that year, Putin was a guest at the Guggenheim museum in New York. At
one point his hosts brought out a conversation piece – a glass replica of a
Kalashnikov automatic weapon filled with vodka (which can be picked up in
Russia for about $300). According to Gessen, Putin nodded to his bodyguards,
who took the piece away, ‘leaving the hosts speechless’. ‘I do suspect it’s
a compulsion,’ she says. ‘And another reason I suspect it’s a compulsion is
because of the palace.’
‘The palace’ is the property on the Black Sea which, it is alleged, Putin had
built for himself with money earmarked for public spending. The story begins
with a company called Rosinvest, which had been set up by a businessman
named Sergei Kolesnikov and two partners to invest money donated by wealthy
businessmen in various government projects. Ninety-four per cent of the
company was owned by Putin.
The company initially invested in 16 different projects, mostly in industrial
production, and all returning a handsome profit. A side project was a small
personal project of Putin’s, a house on the Black Sea budgeted at $16
million. But, Kolesnikov told Gessen, ‘things kept getting added’: an
amphitheatre, a lift to the beach, a marina…
By 2009 the budget had passed $1 billion. Kolesnikov was informed by his
partner that Rosinvest would no longer be making investments; its only
purpose now was the completion of the Black Sea palace. Kolesnikov fled
Russia, taking the company’s documentation with him, before going public
with the story.
Putin’s office dismissed it as rubbish. In March 2011 it was reported that the
villa had been sold to a businessman named Alexander Ponomarenko. He said he
had bought the complex, which he described as ‘a holiday centre’, from a
friend of Putin’s, Nikolai Shamalov.
‘First they denied its existence, then they denied Putin’s association with
it; and then they sold it,’ Gessen says. ‘But the question is, what was
Putin going to do with a palace on the Black Sea anyway? He could have used
state money to build a palace for receptions. This is normal Russian
practice – use public money to build gaudy palaces that will be used once a
year. But no, he was building a private property. He clearly doesn’t plan on
retiring, but if he did he wouldn’t stay in Russia. So it looks more like
compulsive behaviour than long-term planning, which I think he’s incapable
of anyway.’
Putin, she says, has created a Russia where there is no meaningful opposition.
The candidates who will run against him in next week’s elections are
generally regarded as toothless, or in the case of Mikhail Prokhorov, the
multi-millionaire businessman, widely dismissed as a Kremlin stooge.
Gessen believes the only opposition figure with any credibility or authority
is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oligarch who is currently languishing in a
penal colony near the Chinese border.
Khodorkovsky made his fortune from banking and from the oil company Yukos,
which he acquired for $300 million in 1995 when Yeltsin began auctioning off
state assets – a red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalist whose creed was expressed
in a book that he co-authored in 1992, Man With a Rouble: ‘Our guiding light
is Profit, acquired in a strictly legal way. Our lord is His Majesty Money,
for it is only He who can lead us to wealth as the norm in life.’
But having become the richest man in Russia, Khodorkovsky began to display a
social conscience. He established an education foundation, Open Russia,
funded training for journalists, and began to speak out against corruption.
In 2003, at a meeting between Putin and Russia’s wealthiest businessmen that
was open to the media, Khodorkovsky challenged the president of the
state-owned oil giant Rosneft over the glaringly high price that Rosneft had
paid to take over a smaller, privately held oil company. The president of
Rosneft remained silent. Instead, Putin rounded on Khodorkovsky, accusing
Yukos of bribing tax inspectors and issuing a veiled threat to take over the
company.
Khodorkovsky left for America on a business trip, but then returned, despite
warnings that he would soon be arrested, and began a speaking tour, giving
talks about business, democracy and the need for ‘a civil society’ in
Russia. In October 2003 he was arrested, and 18 months later, in what Gessen
describes as ‘the show trial to end all show trials’, he was indicted on
charges of fraud and tax evasion, and sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment.
In 2009 he was found guilty of a new set of charges, of stealing his own
oil, and sentenced again – to 14 years.
With Khodorkovsky in jail, Yukos was soon facing bankruptcy proceedings. In
what looked suspiciously like a rigged auction, its most attractive asset, a
company called Yuganskneftegaz, the owner of some of Europe’s largest oil
reserves, passed into the hands of a shell company financed by Rosneft – the
very company that Khodorkovsky had attacked. The price was less than half
the estimated worth of Yuganskneftegaz at the time. The auction lasted only
two minutes.
Gessen describes Khodorkovsky as ‘the Nelson Mandela of Russia. He’s as
amazing a figure as Russia has at this point. The bare facts of the matter
are that he essentially made a conscious decision to go to prison – which is
not to say he fully realised how awful and for how long this would be. He
could have stayed outside the country. And he continues to be engaged in its
fate and in its future. And his voice has probably more moral authority at
this point than anybody in this country.’
Masha Gessen doubts that The Man Without a Face will be published in
Russia. An editor at a Moscow publishing house expressed interest, but was
unable to persuade her company to go ahead with it. ‘The way that business
functions here is that there are so many rules and regulations that every
business is perennially in violation of something. Basically what she was
told was, there are 300 people working here. All of them have some
irregularity in the way they are drawing salary, so all of them are going to
lose their jobs if there’s an inspection, which we will have if we publish
the book.’
Gessen says she was asked for a copy of the book by ‘somebody close to the
Kremlin… He said he didn’t get all the way through, but he liked the
writing.’ She gives a slight smile. ‘I didn’t push him any further.’ She
acknowledges that she is probably watched, and her telephone tapped. ‘But
that’s nothing extraordinary. I’ve not had any threats in connection with
the book; nor in connection with anything else – not in a while.’
None the less, one has to wonder why she has chosen to remain in Russia when
she could as easily – and more safely – live in America. ‘That’s true. But
my partner is Russian, so that would be a very difficult transition. [She
doesn’t qualify for American citizenship]. It’s not like we can just pick up
and go. It’s not a question to be handled lightly. Or else it’s a decision
to be made at short notice when we feel likely we’re in real danger.’
She pauses. ‘There is a theory that is popular among journalists that to Putin
there are enemies and there are traitors. And enemies have a right to exist;
he might not like them, but they have a right to exist. Traitors don’t have
a right to exist. It’s a nice theory. I like it because I’m such a clear-cut
enemy that I should be safe.’
Read an extract from The Man Without a Face here
‘The Man Without a Face’ (Granta, £20) is available for £18 plus £1.25 pp
from Telegraph Books
(0844-871 1515; books.telegraph.co.uk).
Masha Gessen will be appearing at the Telegraph
Hay Festival in June (hayfestival.org)
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