Deception (45 page)

17
Though this reflects a rise of one-third from the
3
per cent spent in
2008
/
9
to
4
per cent in
2009
/
10
. It is a larger slice of a larger cake too: the Security Service has twice the staff and three times the budget it had in
2001
.
http://isc.independent.gov.uk/committee-reports/annual-reports

18
SB a Lech Wal
ę
sa. Przyczynek do biografii (The SB and Lech Wal
ę
sa: A Biographical Contribution
) by Slawomir Cenckiewicz and Piotr Gontarczyk (Institute for National Remembrance, Warsaw,
2008
)
http://www.ipn.gov.pl/portal/pl/229/7615/SB_a_Lech_Walesa_ Przyczynek_do_biografii.html

1
Looting and Murder

1
Extensive documentation on this is available at
www.russian-untouchables.com
and
www.lawandorderinrussia.org
. A film telling the story is available at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aj2NLFL-lE
and (full-length rental version) at
http://vod.journeyman.tv/store?p=4455
. A thorough legal presentation of the Hermitage case can be found here
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20910344/DECLARATION-OF-NEIL-MICKLETHWAITE
A much more critical account is ‘Sergei Magnitsky, Bill Browder, Hermitage Capital Management and Wondrous Metamorphoses'
http://marknesop.wordpress.com/2011/01/19/sergei-magnitsky-bill-browder-hermitage-capital-management-and-wondrous-metamorphoses/
but Mr Browder rebuts this criticism, to my mind convincingly.

2
An accurate but unflattering account of Mr Browder's approach comes from my successor in Moscow, Gideon Lichfield. ‘A Russian Odyssey', Stanford Business, November 2006.
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/bmag/sbsm0611/feature_browder.html

3
http://hermitagefund.com/about/hermitageeffect/

4
http://hermitagefund.com/about/hermitageeffect/Harvard%20Business%20School%20—%20Hermitage%20Case%20Study.pdf

5
An excellent account of this comes in Putin's
Oil: The Yukos Affair and the Struggle for
Russia by Martin Sixsmith (Continuum, 2010). Yukos was bankrupted by bogus tax demands and its assets handed over to Kremlin cronies; its owner was sentenced to lengthy jail terms after successive farcical court hearings, at which he has denounced the regime and the lawlessness it stokes and thrives on, for example in the statement he and his co-defendant Platon Lebedev issued during their trial, on 2 November 2010
http://www.khodorkovskycenter.com/mikhail-khodorkovsky-full-transcript-his-final-words

6
‘Bewilderment As Browder Barred As Security Threat' by Catherine Belton, St Petersburg Times, 21 March 2006.
http://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=17062

7
The clip can be seen here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcnF0Cu8Wtc
‘
Putin ne smog obyasnit, pochemu v Rossiyu ne puskayut samogo predannogo zarubeznnogo invevestora'
(‘Putin can't explain why Russia won't let in the most successful foreign investor'), unsigned article, 17 July 2006
http://www.newsru.com/arch/finance/17jul2006/browder.html

8
The attorneys' names are Ekaterina Maltseva, and a husband and wife team: Andrei Pavlov and Yulia Mayorova. In other cases related to the same fraud, this couple has represented claimants against Hermitage. But on this occasion they were claiming to represent it.
http://russian-untouchables.com/eng/240m-theft-from-budget/

9
A video giving an account (critical – and to me unconvincing) of Hermitage's activities can be found (in Russian) here
http://www.mk.ru/video/politics/1013-skeletyi-uilyama-braudera-.html

10
http://www.assembly.coe.int/documents/workingdocs/doc09/edoc11993.pdf

11
An excellent account of Mr Magnitsky's treatment in prison can be found here in Russian
http://www.rb.ru/inform/127947.html
and here in English ‘Report of the public oversight commission for human rights observance in Moscow detention centers: Review of the conditions of the detention of Sergei Magnitsky in the pre-trial detention centres of the City of Moscow'
http://online.wsj.com//files/22/66/45/f226645/public/resources/documents/WSJ-20091229-MagnitskyReport.pdf
. The extracts from Mr Magnitsky's own writings can be found here:
http://russian-untouchables.com/docs/Prison-Diaries-Magnitsky-General-Prosecutor-Complaint.pdf

12
Ibid. Medical care in Russian prisons is generally lamentable, but high-profile prisoners seem to have a particularly bad time. A lawyer for Yukos, Vasily Aleksanyan, contracted HIV and tuberculosis while in prison, lost his sight and got cancer, before he was released thanks to a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights.

13
http://russian-untouchables.com/docs/Alekseyeva-Complaint-Eng29Mar2010.pdf

14
http://russian-untouchables.com/eng/2011/07/russia-blames-medics-for-hermitage-lawyer-death/

15
The video is available on Mr Browder's website
http://russian-untouchables.com/eng/
or at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7yBOEPYJTc

16
A list of all sixty can be found here
http://www.csce.gov/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Files.Download&FileStore_id=1744
The criteria for inclusion on the list is that the person signed a document associated with the case.

17
These purported terrorist attacks created a climate of panic in which the then unknown new prime minister, Vladimir Putin, rapidly became the most popular politician in the country thanks to his seemingly tough response. A botched attack on an apartment block in Ryazan turned out to have been the work of the FSB, which explained its actions, deeply unconvincingly, as an anti-terrorist drill. Those brave Russians who have tried to investigate this mysterious affair have ended up dead. See
The New Cold War
, chapter 2.

2 The Pirate State

1
A thorough and lively account of these and other abuses is in Luke Harding's
Mafia State
(Guardian Books, 2011). It also details the persistent harassment campaign mounted against him and his family.

2
World Report 2011: Russia
http://www.hrw.org/en/world-report-2011/russia

3
See my article ‘Licence to Loot',
The Economist
, 17 September 2011
http://www.economist.com/node/21529021

4
See ‘Frau Fixit: Germany, Central Europe and Russia' The Economist, 18 November 2010
http://www.economist.com/node/17522476

5
The Return: Russia's Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev
by Daniel Treisman, (Simon Spotlight Entertainment, London, January 2011), published in America by Free Press.

6
‘Neo-Feudalism Explained' by Vladimir Inozemtsev,
The American Interest
, March–April 2011.
http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=939

7
http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2010/02/10PARIS170.html

8
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2008/10/08LONDON2643.html

9
http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2009/11/09MOSCOW2749.html_.
A similarly worded but slightly different version of the cable can be found at
http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=09MOSCOW1051

10
http://www.cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=10MOSCOW317

11
‘The Concealed Battle to Run Russia' by Amy Knight,
New York Review of Books
, 13 January 2011
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jan/13/concealed-battle-run-russia/

12
The New Nobility, The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB
by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan (Public Affairs Books, 2010). The authors run the
www.agentura.ru
website, a magpie's nest of news and analysis, mostly in Russian, all of it well-informed, about the inner workings of the secret state.

13
Ibid. p. ix.

14
Quoted in ibid, p. 5.

15
The draft ‘de-Stalinisation' programme from the President's Human Rights Council can be found here
http://www.president-sovet.ru/structure/group_5/materials/the_program_of_historical_memory.php

         
See for example
Natsionalnoye primireniye nevozmozhna bez suda i pamyati
(National Reconciliation is impossible without a trial and memory)
http://www.rg.ru/2011/04/08/repress.html

16
‘Stalin against Putin' (unsigned) Vedomosti, 28 April 2011
http://www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/article/259344/stalin_protiv_putina

17
‘Reading Russia: The
Siloviki
in Charge' by Andrei Illarionov.
Journal of Democracy
, Vol. 20, no. 2, April 2009
http://www.cato.org/pubs/articles/andrei_illarionov_the_siloviki_in_charge.pdf

18
Inozemtsev, op. cit.

19
‘The mindset of Russia's security services', Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, 29 December 2010
http://www.agentura.ru/english/dossier/mindset/

20
An English version can be seen here
http://www.viddler.com/explore/Eastculture2009/videos/4/
The script (in English) can be found here.
http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/80211155439.htm

21
Soldatov and Borogan, ‘The mindset'.

22
See for example:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/
8244470/Gazprom-held-back-by-its-corrupt-nature.html;
http://www.iie.com/ppublications/papers/aslund508.pdf
; and
http://www.europeanenergyreview.eu/data/docs/Viewpoints/Putin%20and%20Gazprom_Nemtsov%20en%20Milov.pdf

23
Mr Navalny's site is
www.navalny.ru
; Mr Nemtsov's is
www.nemtsov.ru
; Mr Milov's is
http://www.milov.info
All are in Russian only at the time of writing.

24
‘
Olga Kryshtanovskaya: Putin vernetsya kak don mafii'
(‘Olga Kryshtanovskaya: Putin returns like a mafia don') by Andrei Polunin,
Svobodnaya pressa
, 8 February 2011
http://svpressa.ru/politic/article/38451/

25
‘
Nelzya dopustit, chtobi voini prevratilis v torgovtsev'
(‘We must not allow warriors to become traders') Kommersant, 9 October 2007
http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/812840

26
The episode was well analysed here by the Jamestown Foundation's Jonas Bernstein, ‘Shvartsman's Description of Siloviki Business Practices – Truth Or Fiction?'
Eurasia Daily Monitor
, 7 December 2007
http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=33224
and in ‘Former Russian Spies Now Prominent in Business' by Andrew Kramer, New York Times 18 December 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/business/worldbusiness/18kgb.html

27
The survey is by the INDEM thinktank and available (in Russian) here:
Sostoyanie bitovoi korruptsii v Rossiiskoi Federatsii
(State of Domestic Corruption in the Russian Federation)
http://www.indem.ru/corrupt/doklad_cor_INDEM_FOM_2010.pdf

28
See for example ‘A Stain On Mr Clean' by Christian Caryl and Mark Hosenball. Newsweek, 3 September 2001
http://www.newsweek.com/2001/9/2/a-stain-on-mr-clean.html

29
Die Gangster aus dem Osten (The Gangsters from the East)
by Jürgen Roth (Europa Verlag, 2004). It urgently needs updating and publication in English. Also worth reading is
Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob has Invaded America
by Robert Friedman (Berkeley, 2002).

30
In the course of another investigation, I tracked down a foreign engineer who had been involved in a commercial court case against one of the ‘four' – in those days much less powerful – involving a broken contract. In the course of the litigation, he had uncovered compelling evidence of links between this individual and organised crime. This led to a prompt settlement of the case when he threatened to disclose it. When I approached him, he was long retired and running a provincial hotel. He said that it was more than his life was worth to share his research with me. A good example of the tangled, fascinating but inconclusive investigative reporting surrounding the regime's business interests comes from ‘Factories, tanks, offshore firms and neighbours' by Roman Anin, Novaya Gazeta, 22 April 2010
http://en.novayagazeta.ru/data/2011/42/2.html

3
Deadly Games and Useful Idiots

1
For example my article ‘Walk on the dark side' about the criminal Russian IT company RBN.
The Economist
, 30 August 2007
http://www.economist.com/node/9723768

2
‘Reset Regret: Moral Leadership Needed to Fix US–Russian Relations' by Ariel Cohen and Donald Jensen, 30 June 2011.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2011/6/Reset-Regret-Moral-Leadership-Needed-to-Fix-US-Russian-Relations