‘Russian elites are still sharks’

Journalist Catherine Belton on how Putin remade Russia in the KGB’s image and then took on the West

British journalist Catherine Belton spent more than 15 years working as a reporter in Russia for the Financial Times, The Moscow Times, and Businessweek, and she now covers Russian politics and the war in Ukraine for The Washington Post. In 2020, Belton published her first book, “Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West,” which immediately became a bestseller. Following the death of Alexey Navalny, she published a Russian-language edition of the book that’s available for free. For Meduza, American journalist Tanya Lukyanova spoke with Belton about how she managed to untangle the logic behind the system that has allowed Putin to rule Russia for more than 20 years.

As Catherine Belton was finishing school, the Berlin Wall was coming down. Entranced by the Soviet empire’s collapse, she went on to study Russian and German at university, “and the fascination just continued to expand from there,” she said in an interview with Meduza.

Belton would go on to work as a journalist based in Russia from 1998 until 2014, covering the country “pretty much nonstop” during Vladimir Putin’s first two presidential terms. From 2007 to 2012, the period when Putin temporarily relinquished the presidency to Dmitry Medvedev and served as prime minister, Belton worked for the Financial Times as a Moscow correspondent covering the world of business.

“It was a different era then,” she explained. “Russian billionaires [and] government officials all wanted to be on the pages of Businessweek and the Financial Times — presenting their country, presenting their companies, and trying to be integrated into the global economy.”

Belton’s wealth of experience reporting on Russia eventually led her to write a book, Putin’s People, which was published to international acclaim in 2020. As she told Meduza, the book began as an investigation into the system Putin had built by taking over the country’s strategic cash flows and placing them in the hands of loyal allies. “We didn’t really understand what made Putin tick and why he ran the economy the way he did,” Belton explained. “But as I was reporting that, it really became very obvious that he was replicating a system that was rooted in the KGB.”

As Belton’s reporting revealed, the wealth Putin and his cronies had amassed was just one small piece of the puzzle:

“A lot of the stealing that was going on wasn’t about Putin lining his own pockets: It was [about] gathering strategic slush funds and replicating a system of KGB frontmen and intermediaries, who would then be able to funnel wealth into the West. And then eventually, as they had in the 1970s and 80s, they’d use that wealth to divide and disrupt and undermine their rivals in the West.”

The Naked Pravda talks to Catherine Belton

Belton is still in regular contact with the sources she interviewed for her book. Some of these members of the Russian elite, she said, were “horrified” when Putin launched the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which they perceived as a “catastrophe for the 30 years of empire building and all the ties that they [had] built into the West.” But with the full-scale war now in its third year, she now fears that some Russian elites and billionaires smell blood in the water:

“I’m now afraid [that] they see Western weakness, the paralysis in the U.S., and perhaps think that the war now presents an opportunity to redraw the post-Cold War map and have this new alliance of Russia, India, and China, which they believe is going to replace a weaker West. So unfortunately, most of the Russian billionaires and elites are still sharks.”

Putin, meanwhile, appears increasingly entrenched in his political views. “You can see that Putin has really held on to certain beliefs,” Belton pointed out. “He was part of this progressive faction of the KGB that blamed communism for failing the project of the Russian Empire. He blamed the Bolsheviks for tearing the country up into republics that didn’t exist before (i.e. Ukraine). So even then he was an imperialist.”

The Russian president has also continued to keep his friends close, surrounding himself with sycophants who often share his intelligence officer roots. Though their influence may wax and wane, these officials have traditionally made up a “collective Putin,” Belton explained:

“There are other people in the administration who had security service backgrounds who were either prompting or advising him to act in a certain way — [Security Council Secretary] Nikolai Patrushev, for instance, who had always been more senior than him [...] At various stages of Putin’s career, he seems to have been clearly manipulating Putin and trying to make sure that he stayed in power.”

“I think Patrushev is still very much a leading ideologue,” she added.

According to Belton, Putin’s bitter resentment towards the West is based on a mixture of grievances, some of which she considers valid and others she views as “exaggerated and amplified” by his KGB background and personal paranoia. “It’s certainly true that after Putin came to the presidency, he did make overtures towards partnership with the West,” she pointed out. “And I was told by people close to him then that Putin is a ‘transactional guy.’ He was expecting favors in return — in the typical, mafia-style leadership — but he didn’t get any. He just got, in his view, a kick in the head.”

The West, in turn, was too dismissive of Putin and therefore failed to see Russia — and Russian corruption in particular — as a security threat. “Everyone thought that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, all that remained for Russia to do was to integrate into the Western rules-based order,” Belton recalled. “We thought that the more Russian cash came into the West the better, because Russia was going to have to adapt to our governance standards and so on.”

With this assumption in mind, Western countries readily accepted the money Putin’s system siphoned out, believing that corruption made Russia weak, when really it was a means of consolidating power. Once seen as independent, Russian billionaires became “beholden to the Kremlin for maintaining their wealth,” Belton explained. And having failed to grasp that an economy under Putin didn’t function like one of their own, Western countries “just decided to lie back and take the money.”

“Putin realized very early on that this was a big weakness in the way the West works, that we’d just take profits and not think about the consequences,” Belton said.

Russia’s oligarchs did not take kindly to Belton’s book. Just before the one-year statute of limitations under U.K. libel law, billionaire Roman Abramovich sued the journalist and her publisher for defamation. Billionaires Mikhail Fridman, Peter Aven, and Shalva Chigirinsky followed suit, as did Russian state oil giant Rosneft.

“I was very fortunate because my publisher, HarperCollins, stood very strongly behind me, and they covered all the legal costs,” Belton told Meduza. “I think had it just been me, I would have been forced to withdraw the book after seven years of work. I wouldn’t have been able to withstand such a barrage.”

Abramovich settled his claim against Belton in December 2021, after the journalist and her publisher agreed to make revisions to the text. “We changed some small things, which I’m still a bit upset about, but we basically didn't change the sense of the narrative,” she said. The other defendants subsequently settled or dropped their claims.

“In some ways, there’s a silver lining,” Belton added. “Because the pile on was so enormous, it attracted a lot of media attention. And people could really see how Russian billionaires and the Kremlin had been using the legal system and legal threats to silence and intimidate journalists from covering some of their activities.”

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Earlier this month, Belton announced that she had made the Russian-language edition of Putin’s People available for free. “Although the general trajectory of Putin’s presidency is well known, I wanted Russians to be able to read the details from Kremlin insiders who have not spoken before,” she explained. “[I] would like it to be more widely known and shared within Russia that we know what Putin presents now is not Russia’s true face, but one that has been distorted and manipulated by his cabal.”

Belton was still hammering out the details of the release when Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny suddenly died in prison. The sea of mourners who turned up for Navalny’s funeral pushed her to publish the free edition of Putin’s People right away. “The fact that tens of thousands were coming out and openly defying the police presence, chanting ‘No to war,’ and, in many ways, showing that Navalny’s legacy was living on no matter what — that this other Russia we all loved still exists despite the heavy Kremlin propaganda and the fear tactics — really inspired me,” she said.

Interview by Tanya Lukyanova

Summary by Eilish Hart