Putin’s People. Catherine Belton

during a state visit to the UK (© Pool Photograph/Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)

       Mourners at the school in Beslan where 330 hostages died in a terrorist attack (Shutterstock)

       The school gymnasium in Beslan (Shutterstock)

       Semyon Mogilevich (Alexey Filippov/TASS via Getty Images)

       Moscow police raiding the dacha of Sergei Mikhailov (Kommersant Photo Agency/SIPA USA/PA)

       Vladimir Yakunin (Mikhail Metzel\TASS via Getty Images)

       Roman Abramovich at a Chelsea football match (AMA/Corbis via Getty Images)

       Putin sheds a tear speaking after his reelection in 2012 (Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images)

       Gennady Timchenko and Putin playing hockey (Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)

       Donald Trump inside his Taj Mahal casino (Joe Dombroski/Newsday RM via Getty Images)

       Donald Trump with Tevfik Arif and Felix Sater (Mark Von Holden/WireImage)

       Dramatis Personae

      Putin’s inner circle, the siloviki

      Igor Sechin – Putin’s trusted gatekeeper, a former KGB operative from St Petersburg who rose in power as deputy head of Putin’s Kremlin to lead the state takeover of the Russian oil sector. Later became known as ‘Russia’s Darth Vader’ for his ruthless propensity for plots.

      Nikolai Patrushev – Powerful former head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor agency to the KGB, and current Security Council chief.

      Viktor Ivanov – Former KGB officer who served with Putin in the Leningrad KGB and oversaw personnel as deputy head of Putin’s Kremlin during his first term, leading the Kremlin’s initial expansion into the economy.

      Viktor Cherkesov – Former senior KGB officer who ran the St Petersburg FSB and was a mentor to Putin, moving with him to Moscow, where he remained a close adviser, first as first deputy head of the FSB and then running the Federal Drugs Service.

      Sergei Ivanov – Former Leningrad KGB officer who became one of the youngest ever generals in Russia’s foreign-intelligence service in the nineties and then rose in power under Putin’s presidency, first as defence minister and then as Kremlin chief of staff.

      Dmitry Medvedev – Former lawyer who started out working as a deputy to Putin in the St Petersburg administration when he was in his early twenties, and followed closely in Putin’s footsteps thereafter: first as a deputy head of the Kremlin administration, then as its chief of staff, then as Putin’s interim replacement as president.

       The custodians, the KGB-connected businessmen

      Gennady Timchenko – Alleged former KGB operative who rose through the ranks of Soviet trade to become co-founder of one of the first independent traders of oil products before the Soviet fall. Worked closely with Putin from the early nineties, and according to some associates, before the Soviet collapse.

      Yury Kovalchuk – Former physicist who joined with other KGB-connected businessmen to take over Bank Rossiya, a St Petersburg bank that, according to the US Treasury, became the ‘personal bank’ for Putin and other senior Russian officials.

      Arkady Rotenberg – Former Putin judo partner who became a billionaire under Putin’s presidency after the state awarded his companies multi-billion-dollar construction contracts.

      Vladimir Yakunin – Former senior KGB officer who served a stint undercover at the United Nations in New York, then joined with Kovalchuk in taking over Bank Rossiya. Putin anointed him chief of the state railways monopoly.

       ‘The Family’, the coterie of relatives, officials and businessmen closely surrounding the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin

      Valentin Yumashev – Former journalist who gained Yeltsin’s trust while writing his memoirs, and was anointed Kremlin chief of staff in 1997. Married Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana in 2002.

      Tatyana Dyachenko – Yeltsin’s daughter who officially served as his image adviser, but was essentially gatekeeper to the president.

      Boris Berezovsky – Former mathematician who made his fortune running trading schemes for carmaker AvtoVAZ, the producer of the boxy Zhiguli car that epitomised the Soviet era, and inveigled his way into the good graces of Yeltsin and his Family. When he acquired the Sibneft oil major, he became the epitome of the intensely politically-wired oligarchs of the Yeltsin era.

      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.

      Vyacheslav Ivankov (‘Yaponchik’) – Mobster dispatched by Mogilevich to Brighton Beach, New York, to oversee the Solntsevskaya’s criminal empire there.

      Yevgeny Dvoskin – Brighton Beach mobster who became one of Russia’s most notorious ‘shadow bankers’ after moving back to Moscow with his uncle, Ivankov, joining forces with the Russian security services to funnel tens of billions of dollars in ‘black cash’ into the West.

      Felix Sater – Dvoskin’s best friend since childhood. Became a key business partner of the Trump Organization, developing a string of properties for Trump, all the while retaining high-level contacts in Russian intelligence.

       Prologue