Putin's People by Catherine Belton

Author:Catherine Belton
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

11

Londongrad

When Roman Abramovich headed out to serve as governor of the far east region of Chukotka, a remote, ice-locked area across the Bering Strait from Alaska, it was still the first year of Vladimir Putin’s presidency. His destination was a godforsaken place at the ends of the earth, 3,700 miles from Moscow, where trees rarely grew and the winds howled so viciously they swept dogs from their feet and hurled them across the street. Chukotka had always been sparsely populated, but its inhabitants had all but deserted the region following the Soviet collapse. The population had plummeted from 153,000 to 56,000 by the time Abramovich arrived, and those who remained were struggling to survive, ground down by poverty and alcoholism. He’d gone there, he said in a rare interview, because he was ‘fed up’ with making money all the time.1 He always presented the move as his own decision, claiming that he wanted to drive ‘a revolution towards civilised life’.2 Promising to change things for the better, he won the December 2000 election for governor with 92 per cent of the vote.

The local population of Chukotka worshipped the ground Abramovich walked on. The stubble-faced tycoon with a shy smile had grown up an orphan, raised by his grandparents in a bleak, hardscrabble northern Russian oil town. But now he was acting as benefactor to the region’s residents, shipping in a team of executives to work on improving living standards. They built new television and radio channels, a bowling alley, a heated indoor ice-rink and a movie house. He spent tens of billions of his own roubles in the process.3 It was as if he was bowing immediately in an act of fealty to Putin’s calls for big business to take on more social responsibility after the excesses of the nineties.

In fact, he hadn’t been given much choice. According to a tycoon close to him, he was sent to Chukotka on Putin’s orders,4 because Putin wanted the fortune Abramovich had made through his stakes in the oil major Sibneft and in Rusal, the aluminium giant that controlled more than 90 per cent of the nation’s output, to be at his command. It wasn’t enough that Abramovich’s charitable foundation Pole of Hope was ready to later donate $203 million to Petromed, the medical-equipment-supplies company connected to Bank Rossiya.5 Putin wanted to be able to access the rest of Abramovich’s cash too, and the laws of the time made it easier to jail officials than businessmen. ‘Putin told me that if Abramovich breaks the law as governor, he can put him immediately in jail,’ said the Abramovich associate.6 Abramovich’s investment of large amounts of his own fortune in Chukotka seemed to reduce his risk. But the threat of back tax charges similar to those levied against Yukos seemed always to hang over his Sibneft – especially as Abramovich’s personal investment in Chukotka was part of a two-way process that left him yet more firmly on the Kremlin’s hook. Soon after he became governor,

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