Exit wound полностью

‘Br-in…’ She almost choked on the word. ‘Brin was one of those people who found themselves in the right place at the right time the day the Soviet Union ceased to exist – the first of January 1992. He was in his mid-thirties, an ardent Communist and, until Gorbachev and Yeltsin pulled the plug on the old system, a man at the very height of his career – or so he believed. Back then, even he couldn’t have guessed quite how big and successful he would eventually become. None of Russia’s oligarchs could…

‘Brin was extremely ambitious. He came to Moscow from the fourth largest city in Russia – Gorky, which is now known as Nizhny Novgorod. During the Communist era, Gorky was a closed city – the reason many dissidents were sent there. Once you arrived in Gorky, it was almost impossible to leave, such was the ring of security the KGB placed around it. And for good reason: Gorky was a strategic industrial centre for weapons production, something Brin knew a great deal about.’

She paused and gazed into the middle distance for a few moments, watching the smoke she exhaled blending with the grey wall of the cafeteria.

‘Brin was not an engineer. He was an administrator, and he was KGB. He was responsible for the production of a large part of the programme. And by all accounts he was good at it. Russians build weapons differently from the way they are built in the West.

‘In the USSR we had bureaux, as we called them, places where the weapons were conceived, designed and prototyped. The bureaux were usually in Moscow or Leningrad and the production facilities were almost always in areas very far removed from the centre – places like Gorky.

‘Brin did such a brilliant administrative job at the production centre that he was transferred before long to the design bureau in Moscow. He was only thirty-eight and already a KGB colonel, and assigned to one of the most important defence projects in the USSR – a strategic missile system that, when built, would have had the power to wipe America off the map. It never came to that, thank God, because soon after he arrived in Moscow the Soviet Union ceased to exist and the Cold War ended.’

She looked into my eyes. ‘You have to imagine what it was like on that January morning – the day Russians returned to work after the country that they had known and sworn allegiance to for more than seventy years had effectively evaporated. For some, the phones stopped ringing, orders stopped coming in, and they simply went home. Brin was not one of them. With his friends in the KGB – soon to become the FSB – he was able to purchase stock in the company.

‘Within a very short space of time, he had complete control of it. Many Russians who worked in the defence industry thought that it would go into a terminal decline as the Cold War ended. Not Brin. With the liberalization of the Russian economy, he soon started to acquire other missile companies, some for next to nothing. By 2003, with the blessing of Putin’s government, he had built M3C into what it is today: a one-stop shop for anyone needing anything from the smallest handheld weapon to a nuclear missile. The nuclear variety were not on sale outside Russia, of course, but that never stopped Brin selling the technology within them to pariah states that had the money to pay – under-the-table deals that were allowed to proceed because they had the blessing of Putin and his cronies in the FSB.’

‘How did you get involved?’

‘Chechnya…’ She was lost to me again for a few seconds. ‘Chechnya was good for M3C. War has been good for M3C, full stop. The conflict saw the Russian government pour billions of roubles into weapon systems devoted to the systematic eradication of the Chechen people. I was in Chechnya as a reporter for Novaya Gazeta.’ She sighed. ‘At first, it was the humanitarian narrative that pulled me in. Later, I realized that the corruption that sustained it – fuelled it, in fact – was the story I was supposed to tell.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Putin started the Chechen war. It suited his purposes to have a conflict on our doorstep – to get ordinary Russians focused on an external enemy, rather than the real enemy, the corruption that lies at the heart of Russia itself. Corruption in our country is a cancer, fostered by alliances between powerful figures in our government, oligarchs who control our economy and criminals – mafiosi. Having started it, Putin and his government needed to sustain the war in Chechnya.’

‘So why single out Brin?’

‘Chechnya made Brin a billionaire many times over and he, in turn, made sure that the people who were keeping the war going were also very well rewarded. I can’t get them all.’

‘This is the story you want to tell?’

‘It’s the story I’m compelled to tell. The trouble is, ordinary Russians are bored – they think they’ve heard it all before. They have become anaesthetized to scandal. But they haven’t heard this story – not by a long chalk…’