Moscow rules in London: how Putin’s agents corrupted the British elite

In the past year alone, Russia-watchers have been treated to books entitled The Code of Putinism; Putin’s World; Putin vs the People; The Putin System and We Need to Talk About Putin — just to mention the ones with Putin’s name in the title. In addition, Robert Service’s Kremlin Winter, Sergei Medvedev’s The Return of the Russian Leviathan and Andrew Monaghan’s Dealing with the Russians have also offered their own insights into the history, politics and future of Putin’s Russia.

In this crowded field, is there a place for Putin’s People? Happily, there is. Catherine Belton is a former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times — and before that worked for the estimable Moscow Times, proving ground for a whole generation of Russia experts. Her book is fast-paced, thoroughly researched and packed with new — or at least not widely known — facts. Her purpose is not just to chronicle the rise of a mid-level KGB apparatchik to the heights of power but also to trace how his cronies helped effect a hostile takeover of a whole country and its finances.

This is the best kind of journalist’s book, written with an eye for a well-turned story and compelling characters, and steering mercifully clear of academic theorising. And what tales Belton has to tell. The most fascinating part covers the early part of Putin’s rise in the 1980s, when the security institutions of both the Soviet Union and East Germany were already thoroughly corrupted. The Kommerzielle Koordinierung of the East German foreign trade ministry, for instance, known as the KoKo, was established, says Belton, primarily to ‘earn illicit hard currency through smuggling, to bankroll the Stasi acquisition of embargoed technology’:

A string of front companies was set up across Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, headed by trusted agents, some with multiple identities, who brought in vitally needed hard currency through smuggling deals and the sale of illicit arms to the Middle East and Africa.