John Sweeney’s book is not a disinterested biography of Vladimir Putin, the eponymous “Killer in the Kremlin”. It is, instead, a polemic relating not only to Russia’s president but to many other aspects of the politics of Russia and Ukraine. At its best it points to some of Putin’s most execrable traits and at its worst elevates the author to the position of the book’s leading character.
It contains serious research especially into the attack on the Skripal father and daughter and the murder of Aleksandr Litvinenko in the UK but also includes errors of fact and contradictory statements that a good editor should have spotted.
I share many of the author’s views on the current Kremlin regime, especially that the invasion of Ukraine was not only morally indefensible but was also a serious military mistake. There is one section of the book, however, that I found to be infuriatingly selective with the truth.
Sweeney writes: “The Chechens had humiliated the might of Russia in the First Chechen War (1994-1996), which Yeltsin had started in a drunken rage. The Russian Army had fought the war with great brutality and greater incompetence. The Chechens fought them to a kind of stalemate, partly because Yeltsin, when he had sobered up, realised that he had been stupid and cruel.”
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The “drunken rage” may exist in Sweeney’s imagination and the “might of Russia” that he refers to was non-existent at the time. Untrained conscripts were sent to their deaths against tough Chechen fighters led by experienced commanders, including Dzhokhar Dudayev and Aslan Maskhadov, who had been senior Soviet officers.
I met and interviewed these kids. To suggest they behaved with great brutality is simply wrong. Some of them had never fired a rifle in their lives. One spoke of his BTR (armoured personnel carrier) breaking down and being towed into battle by a lorry. The local unit from the city of Samara was one of the first to be sent to its doom. It was almost wiped out. Samara’s military hospital housed the wounded and I can still hear in my mind’s ear the struggled breathing of a kid who had been shot through the throat.
Yes, Yeltsin had been “stupid and cruel” but not only to the Chechens but also to his own conscript soldiers. Because of this something unprecedented in warfare took place. The mothers of the Russian soldiers went into action. Some of them went straight to Grozny and demanded possession of their captured sons. They were successful with the help of Chechen mothers. The organisation Soldiers’ Mothers set up shop within hailing distance of the Lubyanka headquarters of the KGB’s successors. They successfully encouraged desertion from the army, they gave legal aid to the deserters and if anyone won the first Chechen war it was these brave women.
Yes, there was brutality in the later stages of the war but it took the form of massive artillery shelling and aerial bombardments.
The second Chechen war was different. Putin, he writes, used the series of apartment bombings in Moscow as “a casus belli to prosecute the Second Chechen War in the autumn of 1999″ but he did not need to, as a casus belli already existed. A Saudi jihadist leader known as Khattab, incorrectly described by Sweeney as a “Chechen warlord”, had led an incursion into neighbouring Dagestan, thus breaking the treaty that ended the first conflict. It should also be remembered that the second Chechen war began under Yeltsin’s presidency.
Sweeney’s polemic largely consists of digging up everything possible that shows Putin in a bad light, which admittedly is not a difficult task, but suggestions that he was simultaneously a paedophile and a womaniser, a supplier of arms to the Baader-Meinhoff gang, a hypochondriac and the richest man in the word are all open to question.
He does, however, accurately sum up one of Putin’s great vices as “a tolerance of a monstrously corrupt regime”. But the corruption did not begin with Putin. It thrived during Yeltsin’s time in power, it was there in the background in the Soviet era and emerged into the foreground in the early 1990s in the immediate aftermath of the USSR’s demise.
One man who exposed that corruption throughout those years was a brave Russian journalist called Yuri Shchekochikhin. Sweeney praises Yuri’s bravery and vividly describes his shock of grey hair, his mischievous smile. Shchekochikhin, he writes, had a great “nose for a story and, I’ve been told, a fondness for Armenian brandy.”
I can vouch for the Armenian brandy. I knew Yuri and often shared a glass or two with him in his office when he was a Duma deputy for the Yabloko party and deputy editor of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
Yuri died in horrific circumstances, having been poisoned while investigating corruption in a large furniture company run by former members of the KGB and while inquiring into the planting of a bomb in the city of Ryazan, which has been linked with the bombs in apartment blocks in Moscow shortly before the onset of the second Chechen war.
This brings us to another Russian whose career was brought to a premature end. Boris Nemtsov was shot dead late at night while walking near the Kremlin. His death made a striking impression on Sweeney: “Nemtsov was an extraordinary man, the sweetest, funniest and most human Russian I’ve ever met. His brutal snuffing out caused me to sink into a profound depression.”
While unreservedly condemning his brutal murder I should admit that Nemtsov did not make a similar impression on me. When I spoke to him of the bravery of Yuri Shchekochikhin, Nemtsov scoffed and put down his death, not to poisoning, but to his “fondness for Armenian brandy”. It was a comment that lowered him in my estimation.
Sweeney may be correct in suggesting that Putin has been an expert conman and that his victims included former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, UK prime minister Tony Blair and the billionaire oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Despite his extremely unsavoury reputation, Berezovsky was given asylum in London, having become one of Putin’s enemies. The phrase “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” comes to mind.
Berezovsky was found dead in his English mansion in 2003. The local police ruled out murder but there are now allegations that he was killed. This is hardly surprising. If you allow your capital city to become the headquarters of Russian, Ukrainian, Uzbek and other former Soviet shady individuals, this is the sort of thing you can expect to happen.
Perhaps the only positive result of the invasion of Ukraine has been the long overdue introduction of sanctions on many oligarchs who have used “Londongrad” as their playground.
