As discussed in Chapter 1, this is an adhocracy in which everyone is constantly trying to second-guess and please the boss. In part that is simply because of a fear of what would happen if they don’t, or an immediate pay-off if they get it right. But at the top of the system, it also reflects a primal loyalty between Putin and his guys. He had nothing against Ulyukayev; indeed, he seemed a little uncomfortable with how things turned out, but he let Sechin have his revenge, because he is one of Putin’s guys. He has their backs, even if it means letting the rest of Russia burn.
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
