All but the least attentive in the United States are familiar with the broad outlines of the story: Around 1990, or perhaps earlier, shady characters associated with the Russian mafia or the Russian state (or both) begin to cultivate Donald Trump as an intelligence asset. They curry favor by facilitating bailouts and offering lucrative contracts for management fees and naming rights for Trump-branded properties in SoHo, Panama, Moscow, and elsewhere. In 2000, Trump forms an exploratory committee, with Roger Stone as chairman, to consider a presidential run. In November 2013, Trump is in Moscow for the fateful Miss Universe pageant, where, according to unconfirmed intelligence reports compiled by Christopher Steele, he is fooled into salacious doings with a pair of Russian prostitutes (“the best in the world,” Vladimir Putin would later say). These were recorded to be used as kompromat, to use the term hallowed by conspiracy-loving elements of the Twitterati after the 2016 election.
Around this same time, Breitbart executive Steve Bannon met with Republican operatives and billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer to discuss, according to the New York Times, “the possibility of using personality profiling to shift America’s culture and rewire its politics.” This would end in the founding of Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm specializing in “psychographics” and “microtargeting.” In 2015, groups believed to be associated with — note the ambiguity of both verbs — Russian intelligence services broke into the Democratic National Committee servers, and in 2016, hacker Guccifer 2.0 posted a trove of the organization’s stolen emails on WikiLeaks. At the same time, the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm with rumored links to the Kremlin, used fake accounts on Twitter and Facebook to diffuse conspiracy theories, organize rallies, and discourage sensitive parts of the Democratic Party electorate from voting. The final big piece of the puzzle is the notorious Trump Tower meeting of June 9, 2016, instigated by a music publicist on behalf of an Azerbaijani pop star with the promise of sharing damaging information on Hillary Clinton provided by the “crown prosecutor” of Russia (a position that does not actually exist).
The weak, often xenophobic version of this story penetrated popular culture through commentators such as Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann and legions of “citizen journalists” on Twitter, who touted “sources” informing them of backroom dealings, sealed indictments, and, in a chef’s kiss moment of weirdness courtesy of Louise Mensch, secret machinations to swear in Orrin Hatch as president once the FBI began its Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations prosecution against the Republican Party as a whole. There is a strong version, though, and former Financial Times Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton has laid it out in Putin’s People, an intensely researched, ominous look at the rise of what she calls “KGB capitalism” and its implications for democracy in Russia and abroad.
Her book presents a fundamental conflict between Russia’s liberalization under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin and the aims of former KGB men who retained access to the levers of power even after the organization’s dissolution in 1991. This was also a conflict between two cities: Moscow, where a well-connected generation of tycoons used sophisticated financial instruments to make off with state enterprises on the cheap, and St. Petersburg, where organized crime and law enforcement divvied up resources under the eye of the deputy mayor, ex-KGB man Putin. By extending export licenses to allies in exchange for kickbacks and overseeing the use of St. Petersburg’s oil terminal and seaport, which became a smuggling hub for Colombian drug traffickers, Putin and his KGB backers amassed a small fortune before he moved to Moscow in 1996 to take a new position with the Presidential Property Management Department. Within two years, Putin had been appointed head of the FSB, the KGB’s successor agency, and a year later, Yeltsin named him prime minister. Putin announced he would run for the presidency that same day.
Yeltsin’s inner circle insisted that Putin rose thanks to his merits, but others perceived a plan, and former FBI informant Robert Eringer (a man well worth Googling) claimed he heard a KGB colonel declare at a private dinner in Moscow that his organization would soon have its man in the top office, and his mandate would put the spooks back in control. As Belton writes:
Part of the old guard, particularly those waiting in the shadows in the security services, had been looking for ways to oust Yeltsin since the beginning of his rule. They had long viewed his overtures to democracy with disgust, and when he appealed to Russia’s regions to take as much freedom as they could swallow, they saw it as part of a Western plot to weaken, and ultimately destroy, the Russian Federation. Still set in the zero-sum thinking of the Cold War, they regarded Yeltsin as being in thrall to the US government, which they liked to believe had helped to install him and destroy the Soviet Union in the first place.
When Yeltsin handed power over to Putin in December 1999, Russia seemed to be moving inevitably toward liberal democracy, open markets, and reconciliation with the West. Elections were free or free-ish, civil society institutions had begun to flourish, the government permitted open debate, and the country had repudiated the worst of its past. The illusion that things would continue in that direction was widespread, typified in George W. Bush’s 2001 declaration that he had looked Putin in the eye, “was able to get a sense of his soul,” and understood that he was a man “deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.”
The end of the idyll came in the early 2000s, first with the arrest of billionaire oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and then with Russia’s presumed interference in Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, particularly its involvement in an attempt to assassinate Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko. For the U.S., Putin was crushing democracy, seeding corruption, and aiming to restore the dominion Russia had held over its neighbors in Soviet times. For Putin, U.S. funding for democracy in Ukraine was an encroachment in his sphere of influence.
It is hard to say either party was wrong. The list of countries where American efforts to promote democracy have led to death, instability, and suffering is long, and for Putin and those close to him, these ill-starred interventions are not failures of good intention but part of a deliberate plan to ensure the U.S.’s continued dominance. Putin believes that Russia is entitled to do the same. The most intriguing and hardest to verify assertion in Belton’s book is that Putin’s widespread confiscation of private enterprises and his redistribution of them to his allies not only made him and his cronies very rich but also served the broader purpose of creating hidden slush funds for influencing policy abroad. Belton claims that through mafia money launderers, dodgy real estate deals, London financiers, and fly-by-night banks run out of hovels in Eastern Europe, Putin and his men have funded far-right and far-left parties from Syriza in Greece to the Tories in Britain.
The last chapter of Putin’s People, “The Network and Donald Trump,” introduces a gallery of grifters with alleged or proven ties to Putin who appear in Trump’s orbit with dubious regularity. There is lots of damning innuendo here, but not so much proof. At a minimum, Trump has been happy to surround himself with goons and has benefited from unusual demonstrations of financial largesse, including lines of credit from Deutsche Bank, with whom he’d defaulted on a payment totaling half of a $640 million loan. But then, the old chestnut, “If you owe the bank a thousand, the bank owns you; if you owe the bank a hundred million, you own the bank,” is one Trump seems to have long been familiar with.
It is not for lack of footwork that Belton’s conclusions leave readers baffled: Her material is dense, complex, and rife with the hearsay that is often the only evidence available for investigators of espionage and organized crime. (Moreover, an unsettling number of characters in her book wind up shot or take a fall from their balconies.) Still, it seems likelier that the Putin and Trump share a genuine sympathy: Both are contemptuous of transnational governing bodies, both favor power politics over common accord, and an America First approach that prioritizes (or pretends to prioritize) domestic interest over foreign involvement jibes well with Putin’s project of an expansionist Eurasian power bloc to rival the U.S., the European Union, and China. Conspiracy or no, that is disturbing enough.
Adrian Nathan West is a literary translator, critic, and the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and the forthcoming Philosophy of a Visit.
