Читать книгу Putin’s People онлайн | страница 5

Alexander Voloshin – Former economist who started out working with Berezovsky on privatisations and other schemes, and was transferred to the Kremlin in 1997 to work as Yumashev’s deputy chief of staff. Promoted to chief of staff in 1999.

Roman Abramovich – Oil trader who became Berezovsky’s protégé and later outmanoeuvred him to take over Berezovsky’s business empire. ‘Cashier’ to the Yeltsin Family and then to Putin.

Sergei Pugachev – Russian Orthodox banker who was a master of the Byzantine financing schemes of Yeltsin’s Kremlin, and then became known as Putin’s banker too. Co-founder of Mezhprombank, he straddled the worlds of the Family and the siloviki.

The Yeltsin-era oligarch who crossed Putin’s men

Mikhail Khodorkovsky – Former member of the Communist Youth League who became one of Russia’s first and most successful businessmen of the perestroika era and the 1990s.

The mobsters, footsoldiers for the KGB

St Petersburg

Ilya Traber – Former Soviet submariner who became a black-market antiques trader in the perestroika years, and then an intermediary between Putin’s security services and the Tambov organised-crime group, controlling St Petersburg’s most strategic assets, the sea port and the oil terminal.

Vladimir Kumarin – Tambov organised-crime boss who lost an arm in an assassination attempt and became known as St Petersburg’s ‘night governor’, joining in business with Putin’s men, most notably with Ilya Traber.

Moscow

Semyon Mogilevich – Former wrestler, known as ‘the Brainy Don’, who at the end of the eighties became banker to the leaders of Russia’s most powerful organised-crime groups, including the Solntsevskaya, funnelling cash into the West and setting up a criminal empire of drugs and arms trafficking of his own. Recruited in the seventies by the KGB, he was ‘the criminal arm of the Russian state’.

Sergei Mikhailov – Alleged head of the Solntsevskaya organised-crime group, Moscow’s most powerful, with close ties to many of the KGB-connected businessmen who later cultivated connections with New York property mogul Donald Trump.