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Anne Applebaum
2643 words
9 Jan 2015
The Australian Financial Review
AFNR
English
Copyright 2015. Fairfax Media Management Pty Limited.
Geopolitics Russia's recent history is not about failed democracy, it's about the rise of another totalitarian regime, ruled by an old KGB elite loyal to Vladimir Putin, writes Anne Applebaum.
For 20 years now, the Western politicians, journalists, businessmen and academics who observe and describe the post-Soviet evolution of Russia have almost all followed the same narrative. We begin with the assumption that the Soviet Union ended in 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev handed over power to Boris Yeltsin, and Russia, Ukraine and the rest of the Soviet republics became independent states. We continue with an account of the early 1990s, an era of "reform", when some Russian leaders tried to create a democratic political system and a liberal capitalist economy.
Mostly we agree that those reforms failed, and sometimes we blame ourselves for those failures: we gave the wrong advice, we sent naive Harvard economists who should have known better; we didn't have a Marshall Plan. Sometimes we blame the Russians: the economists didn't follow our advice; the public was apathetic; Yeltsin was indecisive, then drunk, then ill. Whatever their conclusion, almost all of these analysts seek an explanation in the reform process itself, asking whether it was effective, or whether it was flawed, or whether it could have been designed differently. But what if it never mattered at all? What if "reform" was never the most important story of the past 20 years in Russia at all?
In her introduction to Putin's Kleptocracy, Karen Dawisha, a professor of political science at Miami University in Ohio, explains:
"Instead of seeing Russian politics as an inchoate democratic system being pulled down by history, accidental autocrats, popular inertia, bureaucratic incompetence, or poor Western advice, I conclude that from the beginning Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal . . . who used democracy for decoration rather than direction."
In other words, the most important story of the past 20 years might not, in fact, have been the failure of democracy, but the rise of a new form of Russian authoritarianism.'King of thieves'
Instead of attempting to explain the failures of the reformers and intellectuals who tried to carry out radical change, we ought instead to focus on the remarkable story of one group of unrepentant, single-minded, revanchist KGB officers who were horrified by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the prospect of their own loss of influence. In league with Russian organised crime, starting at the end of the 1980s, they successfully plotted a return to power. Assisted by the unscrupulous international offshore banking industry, they stole money that belonged to the Russian state, took it abroad for safety, reinvested it in Russia, and then, piece by piece, took over the state themselves. Once in charge, they brought back Soviet methods of political control – the only ones they knew – updated for the modern era.
That corruption was part of the Russian system from the beginning is something we've long known for a long time, of course. No "even playing field" was ever created in Russia, and the power of competitive markets was never unleashed. Nobody became rich by building a better mousetrap or by pulling himself up by his bootstraps. Instead, those who succeeded did so thanks to favours granted by – or stolen from – the state. And when the dust settled, Vladimir Putin emerged as king of the thieves.
Using a mass of evidence, Dawisha nevertheless argues the KGB's return to power begins not in 2000, when Putin became president, but in the late 1980s. At that time, the then leaders of the KGB, who distrusted Gorbachev, began transferring money that belonged to the Soviet Communist Party out of the Soviet Union and into offshore accounts tended by Swiss or British bankers.
By the autumn of 1991 – after the KGB-led coup in August to overthrow Gorbachev had failed – almost $US4 billion belonging to the Party's "property management department" had already been distributed to hundreds of Party, Komsomol and KGB-managed banks and companies that were swiftly establishing themselves in Russia and abroad. This was an enormous amount of capital in a country that had, at the time, a scarcely functioning economy and hardly any foreign currency reserves at all. In due course, these funds, and the people who managed them, were to become the real foundation for the economy of post-Soviet Russia.
From the very beginning, Russia's current president had a part in this process. In the late 1980s, Putin was a KGB officer in Dresden, East Germany. There is some evidence that he may have been helping the KGB prepare for what it feared could be the imminent demise of the Soviet empire. A few of Putin's Dresden contacts have become startlingly successful in the decades since 1989. Matthias Warnig, a Stasi colleague of Putin's, opened Dresdner Bank's first branch in St Petersburg in 1991, by which time Putin was living there. By 2000, he headed all of the bank's operations in Russia. In 2003, the bank participated in the dismemberment of Yukos, the oil company owned by the jailed magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Since 2006, Warnig has been managing director of the Russian-German Nord Stream pipeline project, a company that won permission to operate during the term of German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and that later hired ex-chancellor Schröder to serve on its board. In 2012, among other high posts, Warnig became a member of the board of directors of Bank Rossiya, one of the Russian banks now under US sanctions.
After leaving Germany, Putin returned to St Petersburg, eventually making his way, with KGB patronage, into the St Petersburg city government, where he was responsible for "foreign liaisons" – and where he could put some of his foreign contacts to immediate use. In 1991, Marina Salye, a member of the St Petersburg city council, accused Putin of having knowingly entered into dozens of legally flawed contracts on behalf of the city, exporting hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of commodities – timber, coal, steel – in exchange for food that never arrived. Her attempts to censure him came to nothing. At a higher level, Putin had protectors.Links to organised crime
Back in this very early post-Soviet moment – when Western advisers were still streaming into the country to give lectures on the rule of law and judicial reform – Putin personally organised, or helped organise, several institutions that exist to this day. One of the best known is Bank Rossiya, which was founded in St Petersburg in 1990, using money from the Communist Party's Central Committee. From the beginning, according to Spanish police investigators, Bank Rossiya facilitated co-operation between Putin, other city officials and Russian organised crime, allowing the two groups to invest together.
Dawisha describes the origins of the Twentieth Trust, a "construction company" linked to Putin. According to Russia's own Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Twentieth Trust received money from the budget of the city of St Petersburg and subsequently transferred that money abroad.
Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper, discovered that the company had purchased property in Spain where it constructed villas using Russian army labour. These kinds of reports led Spanish police to become suspicious of Russian activity in Spain, and in the 1990s they began monitoring the Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, as well as several well-known leaders of Russian organised crime, all of whom had houses on the southern coast of Spain. In 1999, to their immense surprise, their recorders picked up an unexpected visitor: Putin. He had arrived in Spain illegally, by boat from Gibraltar, having eluded Spanish passport control.
By the time he made this secret visit to Spain – apparently one of many – Putin had already graduated to the next phase of his career: until August 1999, he was the boss of the FSB, the KGB's successor organisation. He had moved from St Petersburg to Moscow, taking many of his cronies and all of his criminal connections with him.
At that time, they were not the only such group to have parlayed state and KGB money into wealth. Yeltsin had also in effect given his blessing to the creation of several large fortunes, including Berezovksy's. But as Yeltsin became increasingly ill and unavailable, Putin persuaded Berezovsky and others in the Yeltsin inner circle he and his FSB colleagues would be the guarantors of their wealth in the event of Yeltsin's demise.
They duly anointed Putin prime minister and then president – the wishes of voters and democratic process had little to do with it. But having obtained high office, he turned the tables on them. Soon after taking over, he made it clear he intended to remove the Yeltsin-era elite and to put a new elite in its place – mostly from St Petersburg, equally corrupt, but loyal exclusively to him. Among others, he removed the chief executive and chairman of Gazprom – the old Soviet gas ministry, now a private company – and replaced them with Dmitry Medvedev, a St Petersburg lawyer and Putin's colleague since his days in the mayor's office, and Aleksei Miller, his former deputy at the St Petersburg Committee for Foreign Liaison. Public relations coup
Very quickly, Gazprom became a source of personal funds for Putin's projects, useful, for example, when he needed a large chunk of money to bribe the president of Ukraine. Gazprom's new leadership grew in wealth and power, and they knew exactly who they had to thank for it. This was not the first time this kind of policy had been deployed in Russia: "change the elite" is an old Stalinist tactic.
But having changed the elite, having taken hold of the most important Russian companies and established himself as godfather to all of the other oligarchs, Putin did not change his ways. After he became president in 2000, it is true that Putin did preserve some of the language of "reform" in his public statements. He appointed "reformers" to top jobs. He kept open lines of communication with the West, particularly after September 11, 2001, when he saw the possibility of a tactical alliance with the West against Muslim radicalism in Central Asia. He remained open to relationships with NATO and with American and European leaders. In 2004, he even declared that "if Ukraine wants to join the EU and if the EU accepts Ukraine as a member, Russia, I think, would welcome this because we have a special relationship with Ukraine". He regularly attended meetings of the G8, an organisation including the US, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Italy and Russia, whose rules and raison d'etre had been altered specifically to allow Russia to join.
He also carried off an extraordinary public relations coup, and one with far-reaching significance: for four years, between 2008 and 2012, Putin put a seemingly pro-Western, apparently business-friendly, decoy president in charge of the Kremlin: Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev's reassuring presence not only inspired Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's "reset" in American foreign policy, but lulled almost everyone in Europe into accepting a gangster state as a difficult, but legitimate partner.
Yet during this same period, as during his own presidency, Putin never abandoned the mafia methods Dawisha has painstakingly described. Though Dawisha argues that Putin always intended to recreate an authoritarian, expansionist Russia, one could also argue that an authoritarian, expansionist Russia was the inevitable result of Putin's need to protect himself, his cronies and their money.
While constantly speaking of "reform" in Western capitals, Putin was systematically destroying the nascent institutions of liberal democratic society. Whatever embryonic political movements had come to life in the 1990s were crushed in the 2000s.
Instead of a genuine media and a real civil society, Putin and his inner circle slowly put into place a system for manufacturing disinformation and mobilising support on a new and spectacular scale. Once the KGB had retaken the country, in other words, it began once again to act like the KGB – only now it was better funded and more sophisticated.
Today's Russian "political technologists" make use of their state-owned media, including English-language outlets such as the TV news channel Russia Today; armies of paid social media "trolls" who post on newspaper comment pages, as well as on Twitter, Facebook and other sites; fake "experts" whose quotes can be presented with fake authority; and real experts to whom Putin's officials have granted special access, or have simply paid. Former Western ambassadors to Moscow, businessmen who have been recruited to Russian company boards, European politicians as high-ranking as Schröder and Silvio Berlusconi – all have been well compensated, directly or indirectly, for offering their support.Undermining the West
Using these different sources, the Kremlin began putting out messages designed not necessarily to make Russia look good, but rather to undermine the Western establishment and Western institutions, including the European Union and NATO. Using both money and information, they seek to empower the Western far right, the anti-establishment left, and the international business community all at the same time. Thus Russia Today supports Occupy Wall Street. A Russian oligarch organises a meeting in Vienna attended by the French National Front, Hungary's nationalist political party Jobbik and Austria's Freedom Party.
Whispering campaigns, conducted in the world's financial capitals – especially Frankfurt and the City of London – hint at the dire things that will happen if sanctions against Russia are not lifted. This system hasn't come about spontaneously, in reaction to events on Kiev's Maidan, although to those who haven't followed the evolution of Russian politics over the past 20 years – or to those who have followed only the narrative of "failed reforms" – it might perhaps appear that way. Indeed, in the months since Putin's invasion of Crimea, it has become fashionable to suggest that the harder-line face that Putin has more recently shown to the world is somehow, once again, the West's "fault", that we have provoked Russia into autocratic behaviour through our talk of democracy in Ukraine or that – once again – the "reform process" was somehow brought to a halt because the Russians felt threatened by the expansion of NATO or by Western policy in the Balkans.
But after reading Dawisha's book, and after absorbing the implications of the stories she has so carefully pulled together from so many sources, it is simply not possible to take this argument seriously. Since 2000, Russia has been ruled by a revanchist, revisionist elite with origins in the old KGB. This elite had been working its way back to power since the late 1980s, using theft on a grand scale, taking advantage of the secrecy provided by Western offshore havens and co-operating with organised crime.
Once in power, the new elite sought to maintain control using the same methods that the KGB always used to maintain control; through the manipulation of public emotion; by undermining the institutions of the West, and the ideals of the West in any way that it can. Based on its record so far, it has every reason to expect continued success.
New York Review of Books
Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? by Karen Dawisha, published by Simon and Schuster. Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post and Slate, and runs the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute. Her most recent book is Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956. © 2014 The New York Review of Books, distributed by New York Times Syndicate.
$4 billion The amount of state funds shifted to Party, Komsomol and KGB-managed banks and companies in Russia and abroad, after the failed coup attempt against Gorbachev in 1991.
Fairfax Media Management Pty Limited
Document AFNR000020150108eb1900002
Anne Applebaum
2643 words
9 Jan 2015
The Australian Financial Review
AFNR
English
Copyright 2015. Fairfax Media Management Pty Limited.
Geopolitics Russia's recent history is not about failed democracy, it's about the rise of another totalitarian regime, ruled by an old KGB elite loyal to Vladimir Putin, writes Anne Applebaum.
For 20 years now, the Western politicians, journalists, businessmen and academics who observe and describe the post-Soviet evolution of Russia have almost all followed the same narrative. We begin with the assumption that the Soviet Union ended in 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev handed over power to Boris Yeltsin, and Russia, Ukraine and the rest of the Soviet republics became independent states. We continue with an account of the early 1990s, an era of "reform", when some Russian leaders tried to create a democratic political system and a liberal capitalist economy.
Mostly we agree that those reforms failed, and sometimes we blame ourselves for those failures: we gave the wrong advice, we sent naive Harvard economists who should have known better; we didn't have a Marshall Plan. Sometimes we blame the Russians: the economists didn't follow our advice; the public was apathetic; Yeltsin was indecisive, then drunk, then ill. Whatever their conclusion, almost all of these analysts seek an explanation in the reform process itself, asking whether it was effective, or whether it was flawed, or whether it could have been designed differently. But what if it never mattered at all? What if "reform" was never the most important story of the past 20 years in Russia at all?
In her introduction to Putin's Kleptocracy, Karen Dawisha, a professor of political science at Miami University in Ohio, explains:
"Instead of seeing Russian politics as an inchoate democratic system being pulled down by history, accidental autocrats, popular inertia, bureaucratic incompetence, or poor Western advice, I conclude that from the beginning Putin and his circle sought to create an authoritarian regime ruled by a close-knit cabal . . . who used democracy for decoration rather than direction."
In other words, the most important story of the past 20 years might not, in fact, have been the failure of democracy, but the rise of a new form of Russian authoritarianism.'King of thieves'
Instead of attempting to explain the failures of the reformers and intellectuals who tried to carry out radical change, we ought instead to focus on the remarkable story of one group of unrepentant, single-minded, revanchist KGB officers who were horrified by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the prospect of their own loss of influence. In league with Russian organised crime, starting at the end of the 1980s, they successfully plotted a return to power. Assisted by the unscrupulous international offshore banking industry, they stole money that belonged to the Russian state, took it abroad for safety, reinvested it in Russia, and then, piece by piece, took over the state themselves. Once in charge, they brought back Soviet methods of political control – the only ones they knew – updated for the modern era.
That corruption was part of the Russian system from the beginning is something we've long known for a long time, of course. No "even playing field" was ever created in Russia, and the power of competitive markets was never unleashed. Nobody became rich by building a better mousetrap or by pulling himself up by his bootstraps. Instead, those who succeeded did so thanks to favours granted by – or stolen from – the state. And when the dust settled, Vladimir Putin emerged as king of the thieves.
Using a mass of evidence, Dawisha nevertheless argues the KGB's return to power begins not in 2000, when Putin became president, but in the late 1980s. At that time, the then leaders of the KGB, who distrusted Gorbachev, began transferring money that belonged to the Soviet Communist Party out of the Soviet Union and into offshore accounts tended by Swiss or British bankers.
By the autumn of 1991 – after the KGB-led coup in August to overthrow Gorbachev had failed – almost $US4 billion belonging to the Party's "property management department" had already been distributed to hundreds of Party, Komsomol and KGB-managed banks and companies that were swiftly establishing themselves in Russia and abroad. This was an enormous amount of capital in a country that had, at the time, a scarcely functioning economy and hardly any foreign currency reserves at all. In due course, these funds, and the people who managed them, were to become the real foundation for the economy of post-Soviet Russia.
From the very beginning, Russia's current president had a part in this process. In the late 1980s, Putin was a KGB officer in Dresden, East Germany. There is some evidence that he may have been helping the KGB prepare for what it feared could be the imminent demise of the Soviet empire. A few of Putin's Dresden contacts have become startlingly successful in the decades since 1989. Matthias Warnig, a Stasi colleague of Putin's, opened Dresdner Bank's first branch in St Petersburg in 1991, by which time Putin was living there. By 2000, he headed all of the bank's operations in Russia. In 2003, the bank participated in the dismemberment of Yukos, the oil company owned by the jailed magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Since 2006, Warnig has been managing director of the Russian-German Nord Stream pipeline project, a company that won permission to operate during the term of German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and that later hired ex-chancellor Schröder to serve on its board. In 2012, among other high posts, Warnig became a member of the board of directors of Bank Rossiya, one of the Russian banks now under US sanctions.
After leaving Germany, Putin returned to St Petersburg, eventually making his way, with KGB patronage, into the St Petersburg city government, where he was responsible for "foreign liaisons" – and where he could put some of his foreign contacts to immediate use. In 1991, Marina Salye, a member of the St Petersburg city council, accused Putin of having knowingly entered into dozens of legally flawed contracts on behalf of the city, exporting hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of commodities – timber, coal, steel – in exchange for food that never arrived. Her attempts to censure him came to nothing. At a higher level, Putin had protectors.Links to organised crime
Back in this very early post-Soviet moment – when Western advisers were still streaming into the country to give lectures on the rule of law and judicial reform – Putin personally organised, or helped organise, several institutions that exist to this day. One of the best known is Bank Rossiya, which was founded in St Petersburg in 1990, using money from the Communist Party's Central Committee. From the beginning, according to Spanish police investigators, Bank Rossiya facilitated co-operation between Putin, other city officials and Russian organised crime, allowing the two groups to invest together.
Dawisha describes the origins of the Twentieth Trust, a "construction company" linked to Putin. According to Russia's own Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Twentieth Trust received money from the budget of the city of St Petersburg and subsequently transferred that money abroad.
Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper, discovered that the company had purchased property in Spain where it constructed villas using Russian army labour. These kinds of reports led Spanish police to become suspicious of Russian activity in Spain, and in the 1990s they began monitoring the Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, as well as several well-known leaders of Russian organised crime, all of whom had houses on the southern coast of Spain. In 1999, to their immense surprise, their recorders picked up an unexpected visitor: Putin. He had arrived in Spain illegally, by boat from Gibraltar, having eluded Spanish passport control.
By the time he made this secret visit to Spain – apparently one of many – Putin had already graduated to the next phase of his career: until August 1999, he was the boss of the FSB, the KGB's successor organisation. He had moved from St Petersburg to Moscow, taking many of his cronies and all of his criminal connections with him.
At that time, they were not the only such group to have parlayed state and KGB money into wealth. Yeltsin had also in effect given his blessing to the creation of several large fortunes, including Berezovksy's. But as Yeltsin became increasingly ill and unavailable, Putin persuaded Berezovsky and others in the Yeltsin inner circle he and his FSB colleagues would be the guarantors of their wealth in the event of Yeltsin's demise.
They duly anointed Putin prime minister and then president – the wishes of voters and democratic process had little to do with it. But having obtained high office, he turned the tables on them. Soon after taking over, he made it clear he intended to remove the Yeltsin-era elite and to put a new elite in its place – mostly from St Petersburg, equally corrupt, but loyal exclusively to him. Among others, he removed the chief executive and chairman of Gazprom – the old Soviet gas ministry, now a private company – and replaced them with Dmitry Medvedev, a St Petersburg lawyer and Putin's colleague since his days in the mayor's office, and Aleksei Miller, his former deputy at the St Petersburg Committee for Foreign Liaison. Public relations coup
Very quickly, Gazprom became a source of personal funds for Putin's projects, useful, for example, when he needed a large chunk of money to bribe the president of Ukraine. Gazprom's new leadership grew in wealth and power, and they knew exactly who they had to thank for it. This was not the first time this kind of policy had been deployed in Russia: "change the elite" is an old Stalinist tactic.
But having changed the elite, having taken hold of the most important Russian companies and established himself as godfather to all of the other oligarchs, Putin did not change his ways. After he became president in 2000, it is true that Putin did preserve some of the language of "reform" in his public statements. He appointed "reformers" to top jobs. He kept open lines of communication with the West, particularly after September 11, 2001, when he saw the possibility of a tactical alliance with the West against Muslim radicalism in Central Asia. He remained open to relationships with NATO and with American and European leaders. In 2004, he even declared that "if Ukraine wants to join the EU and if the EU accepts Ukraine as a member, Russia, I think, would welcome this because we have a special relationship with Ukraine". He regularly attended meetings of the G8, an organisation including the US, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Italy and Russia, whose rules and raison d'etre had been altered specifically to allow Russia to join.
He also carried off an extraordinary public relations coup, and one with far-reaching significance: for four years, between 2008 and 2012, Putin put a seemingly pro-Western, apparently business-friendly, decoy president in charge of the Kremlin: Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev's reassuring presence not only inspired Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's "reset" in American foreign policy, but lulled almost everyone in Europe into accepting a gangster state as a difficult, but legitimate partner.
Yet during this same period, as during his own presidency, Putin never abandoned the mafia methods Dawisha has painstakingly described. Though Dawisha argues that Putin always intended to recreate an authoritarian, expansionist Russia, one could also argue that an authoritarian, expansionist Russia was the inevitable result of Putin's need to protect himself, his cronies and their money.
While constantly speaking of "reform" in Western capitals, Putin was systematically destroying the nascent institutions of liberal democratic society. Whatever embryonic political movements had come to life in the 1990s were crushed in the 2000s.
Instead of a genuine media and a real civil society, Putin and his inner circle slowly put into place a system for manufacturing disinformation and mobilising support on a new and spectacular scale. Once the KGB had retaken the country, in other words, it began once again to act like the KGB – only now it was better funded and more sophisticated.
Today's Russian "political technologists" make use of their state-owned media, including English-language outlets such as the TV news channel Russia Today; armies of paid social media "trolls" who post on newspaper comment pages, as well as on Twitter, Facebook and other sites; fake "experts" whose quotes can be presented with fake authority; and real experts to whom Putin's officials have granted special access, or have simply paid. Former Western ambassadors to Moscow, businessmen who have been recruited to Russian company boards, European politicians as high-ranking as Schröder and Silvio Berlusconi – all have been well compensated, directly or indirectly, for offering their support.Undermining the West
Using these different sources, the Kremlin began putting out messages designed not necessarily to make Russia look good, but rather to undermine the Western establishment and Western institutions, including the European Union and NATO. Using both money and information, they seek to empower the Western far right, the anti-establishment left, and the international business community all at the same time. Thus Russia Today supports Occupy Wall Street. A Russian oligarch organises a meeting in Vienna attended by the French National Front, Hungary's nationalist political party Jobbik and Austria's Freedom Party.
Whispering campaigns, conducted in the world's financial capitals – especially Frankfurt and the City of London – hint at the dire things that will happen if sanctions against Russia are not lifted. This system hasn't come about spontaneously, in reaction to events on Kiev's Maidan, although to those who haven't followed the evolution of Russian politics over the past 20 years – or to those who have followed only the narrative of "failed reforms" – it might perhaps appear that way. Indeed, in the months since Putin's invasion of Crimea, it has become fashionable to suggest that the harder-line face that Putin has more recently shown to the world is somehow, once again, the West's "fault", that we have provoked Russia into autocratic behaviour through our talk of democracy in Ukraine or that – once again – the "reform process" was somehow brought to a halt because the Russians felt threatened by the expansion of NATO or by Western policy in the Balkans.
But after reading Dawisha's book, and after absorbing the implications of the stories she has so carefully pulled together from so many sources, it is simply not possible to take this argument seriously. Since 2000, Russia has been ruled by a revanchist, revisionist elite with origins in the old KGB. This elite had been working its way back to power since the late 1980s, using theft on a grand scale, taking advantage of the secrecy provided by Western offshore havens and co-operating with organised crime.
Once in power, the new elite sought to maintain control using the same methods that the KGB always used to maintain control; through the manipulation of public emotion; by undermining the institutions of the West, and the ideals of the West in any way that it can. Based on its record so far, it has every reason to expect continued success.
New York Review of Books
Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? by Karen Dawisha, published by Simon and Schuster. Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post and Slate, and runs the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute. Her most recent book is Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956. © 2014 The New York Review of Books, distributed by New York Times Syndicate.
$4 billion The amount of state funds shifted to Party, Komsomol and KGB-managed banks and companies in Russia and abroad, after the failed coup attempt against Gorbachev in 1991.
Fairfax Media Management Pty Limited
Document AFNR000020150108eb1900002
