The most prominent of these recent victims, Andrei Kozlov, 41, had just attended a football game and, together with his bodyguard, was emerging from the sauna at the Spartak clubhouse on Oleniy Wal in Moscow. Before Kozlov, the deputy director of Russia's central bank, could reach his armor-plated official car, two shots were fired. Kozlov and his bodyguard were both killed.
Kozlov, a committed liberal who, in 1995, was elected deputy head of the central bank at age 30, wanted to establish international standards in the Russian banking system. He introduced a law that would provide insurance for savings deposits. Many Russian banks are still fraught with underworld activity or used by organized crime to launder money.
Kozlov, who was in charge of the government's bank supervision agency, had declared war on this underworld element in the banking system. In the space of only three years, he withdrew the licenses of 260 banks, thereby quickly increasing the number of his enemies.
Most killers remain anonymous
Investigators say that the Kozlov murder was extremely professional. The killers and their clients were intimately familiar with the high-ranking official's schedule. Critical Moscow business magazine Expert suspects that Kozlov could have angered both conventional criminals and corrupt high-ranking officials within the government security services.
Most killers, and certainly most of those who order the killings, are rarely identified. The work of investigators is hindered by corruption within law enforcement agencies, low pay for their officials and poor technical equipment. Since 1991, many qualified officials in the police force and intelligence services have taken jobs in the better-paying private security industry. Russia's investigators have not recovered from this loss of some of their best people.
In an interview with DER SPIEGEL last week, Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov pointed out: "some contract killings, such as that of politicians Galina Starovoytova, have been solved." Kozlov's murderers have also been found, says Ivanov, but not their backers. "Unfortunately it is often the case that the perpetrators receive their dirty money from middlemen and don't even know who their real clients are," Ivanov conceded.
Only in rare cases can the suspicion be eliminated that professional murders are mainly the work of those who learned to kill professionally -- the successors to the Committee for State Security, or KGB.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, 2.9 million people, or 1 percent of the population, were on the immense KGB's payroll. Thousands of agents abroad and hundreds of thousands of domestic informers received their orders from the Lubyanka, the popular name of the KGB headquarters complex, as did special regiments of tanks, ships and aircraft. For years, the KGB's own football club, Dynamo, dominated the Soviet league. The KGB was essentially a state within a state.
Beginning in 1967, party leader Yuri Andropov proved to be especially adept at using the KGB to contain dissidents and spy on the Soviet people with limited bloodshed. Andropov was also the first head of the KGB who managed to make it into the Kremlin, although his tenure there was brief. He died after only two years in office, and was succeeded one year later by his protégé, Mikhail Gorbachev.
Job cutbacks for the KGB
Gorbachev was careful not to force his perestroika on the men at the Lubyanka. In fact, he convinced many of them to support his new direction. The "Kagebechiks," as KGB members were called, were by no means unanimous in their support for the old regime. After all, no other institution in the Soviet realm was quite as well informed about the dismal state of the government, economy and public sentiment as the intelligence service.
At the time, Moskovskiye Novosty registered, with some concern, that "the focus of the power oligarchy began shifting toward the KGB." Thousands of agents ran for office in the regional parliaments or became involved in business. KGB members assumed control over many banks and companies. After the attempted coup in 1991, the agency suffered a brief setback. Boris Yeltsin, Russia's new strongman, dismantled the KGB and ordered job cutbacks.
Many agents began looking for new lines of work. According to a 1997 analysis by German's foreign intelligence agency, the Russian intelligence services had entered into a "mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship" with organized crime. Agents joined the Russian mafia and former KGB soldiers became contract killers at home and abroad.
Others took jobs with the oligarchs who, like Boris Berezovsky, had accumulated vast fortunes in the wild 1990s. One of those agents with Litvinenko, Vladislav Surkov -- a member of military intelligence who took a job with the then Chairman of Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky -- now works in Putin's presidential office.
The Litvinenko case clearly has Moscow concerned, and may even be trying to hinder the investigation. Moscow announced on Tuesday that it will not extradite possible suspects to Britain for trial, the prosecutor general said.
Political artiste par excellence
But does that mean, as Alexander Litvinenko alleged on his deathbed, that Putin was responsible for his death? Both Putin's supporters and his adversaries largely agree that is unlikely to be the case. Prominent author Viktor Yerofeyev, more a critic than a friend of the Kremlin, believes that the string of murders have not done Putin any good. He says that there are some with influence who would like to see Russia distance itself from Europe.
Last week's events directed a brighter spotlight at a man who is all too familiar with, and indeed an unmatched master at playing, the intrigues of Moscow's powerful. Anatoly Chubais, the current head of powerful electric utility Jes AG, was the head of the Kremlin administration under former President Boris Yeltsin. Chubais is a political artiste par excellence. He has kept his head above water throughout the ebb and flow of Russian politics in the last 15 years, even surviving a mine attack one and a half years ago. The presumed attacker, Vladimir Kvachkov, 58, a former special agent and a colonel in the military intelligence agency, is currently on trial in Moscow.
In the early 1990s, Chubais served as privatization minister in the government of former Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar. Gaidar was also hospitalized last week after collapsing during a visit to Dublin. After drinking a cup of tea and eating a bowl of fruit salad, the politician spent half an hour spitting up blood and temporarily lost consciousness.
In a frightening parallel to the Litvinenko case, doctors have been unable to determine the cause of Gaidar's ailment, though he has been released from hospital. In a live, televised interview, Chubais said that Gaidar's illness could "hardly have been triggered by natural causes," adding that it was nothing short of a "miracle" that the "a deadly Politkovskaya-Litvinenko-Gaidar triangle" was not completed -- a feat Chubais claimed "supporters of an unconstitutional and violent power shift in Russia" had attempted to accomplish.
Chubais's and Yerofeyev's intimations are backed by a theory that has been hotly discussed among foreign political scientists for some time: that Putin is not the omnipotent Kremlin leader the West likes to perceive him as. The theory holds that the influence of other powerful groups is greater than has been assumed. Proponents believe that, in the run-up to the 2007 parliamentary elections and the 2008 presidential election, elements within the intelligence community are concerned that Putin's overtures to the West could adversely affect their spheres of influence. The solution for these members of the Russian intelligence community, say the theorists, is to destroy the president's image abroad.
In his television interview last week, Chubais may have been deliberately using the adjective "silovoi," a term Russians interpret as a clear allusion to the Russian intelligence services. The men surrounding Putin are known as "Siloviki," or powerful people. Igor Sechin, the publicity-shy deputy head of the presidential administration, is considered their secret leader. Putin and Sechin have known each other for 15 years. Sechin worked as Putin's chief of staff when the president was still deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. When Putin became the Russian president, Sechin followed him to Moscow to become his chief of staff.
The Russian banana republic
The two men share a common past in intelligence. In the Soviet days, Putin worked as a KGB colonel in Dresden while Sechin served as an interpreter in the Mozambiquan civil war. Sechin is adept at painting his enemies in a dim light to promote his own image. In June 2003, he allowed political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky to leak a dossier warning against a power grab by the country's oligarchs. The document identified Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of oil conglomerate Yukos, as the leader of the conspiracy. Khodorkovsky was arrested a few months later and his company dismantled.
Rosneft, a state-owned company, acquired Yukos's crown jewel, the west Siberian energy company Yuganskneftegaz, in a shady auction. Sechin was Rosneft's chairman. Since then the Kremlin strategist has been looking for ways to secure his power and accumulated wealth beyond the end of Putin's constitutionally limited term in office in March 2008. Sechin's close associates insist that Sechin, who holds a degree in Romance languages, is motivated by the concern that things could fall apart in Moscow, much as they did at Rome's downfall, when Putin leaves office. Sechin is said to consider the two potential successors Putin favors -- Deputy Premier Dimitry Medvedev and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov -- incapable of holding Russia together in the future.
But perhaps the whole thing is far less complicated after all. The head of influential radio station Echo Moskvy -- who has good connections with the Kremlin normally shies away from inciting panic -- sees "Latin American-style death squads" at work in his country, groups he believes "could consist of former intelligence agents and veterans of the Chechnya and Afghanistan wars." If he's right, Russia is on its way to becoming a banana republic, perhaps not unlike El Salvador in the 1970s. Under that theory, Putin has completely lost control over what happens in his country.
ERICH FOLLATH, VERONIKA HACKENBROCH, HANS HOYNG, THOMAS HÜETLIN, UWE KLUSSMANN, CHRISTIAN NEEF, JAN PUHL, MATTHIAS SCHEPP
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
Post to other social networks:
Stay informed with our free news services:
| All news from SPIEGEL International | Twitter | RSS |
| All news from SPIEGEL Magazine section | RSS |
© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2006
All Rights Reserved
Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH
