Back when the future president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, was still working at the Mayor's Office of Saint Petersburg, shiny new Mercedes cars were not quite as ubiquitous on the streets of the city as they are now. However, there were two parked in the yard of a newly renovated building that was to be converted to South Africa's consulate. Vladimir Putin and Sergey Shoigu © RIA/Scanpix One of them belonged to Anatoly Sobchak, the then Mayor of Saint Petersburg. The other one was Putin's, who was at the time in charge of liaisons with foreign countries. One day, the Mayor's Office received a phone call; the caller, after introducing himself, said he was interested in procuring new cars and asked if someone at the city administration could recommend a good local Mercedes-Benz dealership. In fact, there were no Mercedes-Benz dealerships in Saint Petersburg.
"From the next day, Putin stopped driving his Mercedes. But Sobchak did not," says Karen Dawisha, an American analyst and the author of Putin's Kleptocracy. Who Owns Russia? Related articles: Putin's Russia. The dangerous illusion of independent and western oligarchs (5) Putin’s Russia: What did Nemtsov’s assassination reveal about the current regime? "But he [Putin] did not sell his Mercedes either. It remained in the yard.
This is just to say that from a very early stage they understood that Putin was interested in acquiring wealth, but was going to be very careful in announcing that," she adds.
Dawisha learned this little anecdote from someone in the intelligence community who at the time was working in Saint Petersburg and watching Putin. The analyst says that American and Western European intelligence services had their eye on Putin from a very early stage. Still, they pushed a panic button when, in 1998, he was appointed to head the Federal Security Service (FSB)."But then it was a matter of months until he was prime minister, named by [President Boris] Yeltsin as his heir apparent. And immediately after that were the apartment bombings and the beginning of the war in Chechnya, which was too late [to react]," Dawisha summarizes how P
Putin's meteoric rise to power caught Western intelligence quite unprepared.
Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin © Reuters/Scanpix Finally, on 11 September 2001, the United States was shocked to its core by terrorist attacks in New York and Washington and threw all its resources into war on terror. Putin was left alone to build his kleptocratic regime run by the siloviki, former agents of the Russian security agencies.
The meaning of exposés on preposterous wealthIn her book, Dawisha analyses the development of Russia's current power elite since the collapse of the USSR. The conclusion she draws is that siloviki from the KGB built a regime based on the silovarch class: former KGB agents turned into state-backed oligarchs who use national resources to build their personal wealth and influence.However, the solidity of this class seems to have started cracking after Russia's economy took a hit from targeted Western sanctions, a response to Moscow's aggression against Ukraine, and record-low oil prices which caused the rouble's exchange rate to plummet.
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