Navalny's documentary is gripping because it reveals both the immensity of the tsar's wealth but also the shabbiness of his soul.
Dictators murder decor like they murder people. Idi Amin's sordid bungalow, Saddam's pre-cast cement palaces in Northern Iraq, Kim Il Sung's waxwork house, I've seen them all and they smack – how can I put this diplomatically? – of Cupid Stunt. [...]
The palace estate stretches out for 70 million square metres, is owned by the FSB, fully leased until 2068 for 'research and educational activities', boasts state-of-the-art communication towers, its own gas station and boilers. There is an almighty fence to keep out the riff-raff, an amphitheatre, a secret tunnel leading from the palace to the beach, a window cut in bare rock so that the dictator can admire a sea view just like a Bond villain from his lair.
British investigative journalist and author (born 1958)
The reality was for a long time that Putin, when facing off against Navalny, felt fear. People forget that before the 'swaggering... sneery... dismissive' strong man Putin, witnessed during the time of the Iraq War by Alastair Campbell, there existed a weak man Putin, who carried the bags of Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St Petersburg; who meekly said 'yes, boss, no boss' to Boris Berezovsky when the oligarch was fishing around for a replacement for Boris Yeltsin; who conned the Yeltsin family too with his subservient act; then did the same thing for Blair and George W. Bush. The tricky thing to get your head around is that weak man Putin was a performance but it was also part of the truth, that when up against an unflinching enemy, he has history of backing down, of being far more fearful than the far better understood sneery side of his character would suggest.
To the layman, to someone like, say, Vladimir Putin, Novichok is famously untraceable, being lethal in tiny amounts, clear and smelling of nothing. That is so to the naked eye and, er, naked nose. But a good chemistry prof with a very good lab can detect the presence of the modified protein in parts per billion, so, actually, if you know what you are doing, Novichok is not untraceable at all. If you are on the case with your protein structures, it is like following a burglar's footprints in the snow.
[...] the two 'sports health technicians' who visited Salisbury to admire the famous '123-metre spire' were morons sent by morons. [...] Did no one close to Putin have the courage to say to him, 'Listen, Boss, if we use Novichok against Skripal there is a very good chance that the British will work it out'.
Clearly no one had. Perhaps Putin doesn't care. Perhaps showing hat he is willing to take extreme risks to kill people he considers traitors is the point.
Russia and the true nature of Russian power is fabulously hard to read. You can watch the Bentleys swish by and drink cocktails in the Metropol Hotel and not get it that you are living inside a twenty-first century kleptocracy which will crush you if you choose not to accept its crooked rules. All becomes much clearer, much faster, close to light-speed fast, when you challenge the source of that power, the secret police state within a state.
[...] the evidence is compelling that Putin's record was murderous from the get-go. What I suspect happened is that the Blair government didn't want to examine his scoresheet by February 2000 – the Skuratov kompromat, the Moscow apartment bombs, levelling Grozny – too closely because it was so depressing. They were hyper-focused on the immediate geo-strategic nightmare in front of their eyes, that posed by radical Islam, not realising that another, greater threat to Western security was sitting in the Kremlin. Like Jack in the panto, Blair and Campbell traded the cow for some magical beans and realised too late, that they had been taken for a ride by a psychopathic conman.
The particularly horrible thing the Russian army did [in Chechnya] was the 'Slon', Russian for 'The Elephant' from the Soviet issue gas mask which has a corrugated tube hanging down from the face mask to the filter which looks like an elephant's trunk. They would tie a Chechen captive's arms behind his back, place him on the chair, fix 'The Elephant' over his face, unscrew the filter and then squirt CS gas up the tube so the victim would start to drown in his own tears, vomit and snot. One Chechen victim told me for our BBC Radio 5 documentary, Victims of the Torture Train: 'Once the gas mask was on, they would choke you, so you were gasping to breathe. And they would squirt CS gas down the breathing hole. It was so bad just the sight of the gas mask in the room would make people confess to anything'.
Imagine my horror when I went to a police station in newly liberated Kherson in Ukraine twenty-two years later which had been used as a torture chamber. And there, in the basement, was an Elephant gas mask, without the filter.
Studying how 'counter-terrorism' functions in Putin's Russia is worth the substantial effort. In March 2024, 144 Russians were massacred by members of Islamic State-Khorasan Province in the Crocus City Hall shopping mall in Moscow. The authorities tried to shift the blame on to the Ukrainians with absurd and unbelievable evidence. It turned out that the United States intelligence community had warned their Russian counterpart that IS-K were planning an attack in that very shopping mall, but the Moscow authorities were caught napping. Quite how the IS-K killers could succeed in killing so many innocent people becomes less puzzling when you understand how Russian counter-terrorism officers spend their time: not infiltrating extremist organisations but planning the blinding of the leader of the opposition.
His first downfall came in late 2004 when Putin sacked him. Kasyanov was considered to have been a good prime minister, but in the late nineties he was first nicknamed 'Misha Two Per Cent', a reference to the two per cent stake he allegedly took from government deals. Kasyanov says Putin himself brought up the nickname during their last meeting in December 2004: 'Remember that name if you ever decide to go over to the opposition', was Putin's threat. His second downfall was the sex tape during which the couple, as every political couple does the world over, slagged off their allies, Navalny included. Kasyanov carried on for a bit, a bird with a broken wing, but his career in Russian politics was dead.
That left only one man standing: Navalny.
The gossip inside the Moscow beltway is that the assassination [of Boris Nemtsov] was commissioned by Putin's psychopathic quisling in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, and that Putin was furious with him for ordering the hit. I don't know whether that is true or not. It's possible that Kadyrov did have Nemtsov killed of his own volition; it's also possible that Kadyrov over-interpreted a Putin criticism, a bit like Henry II's comment, 'Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?' on Thomas a Becket; it's possible that Putin had Nemtsov killed and his goons switched on the fog machine and pointed it at Kadyrov. Readers who find this unsatisfactory are asked to go back to the sentence in the introduction of this book: 'It's hard to check facts in Russia because if you do it properly you end up dead' and start again.
Roughly a year before [his assassination], I had interviewed Nemtsov about Putin's grotesquely corrupt Winter Olympics in Sochi, asking him about the $5 billion road-rail link resort from the coast to the mountain ski resort. Nemtsov replied that: 'It would have been cheaper to have lined this road with Louis Vuitton handbags'. Before meeting Nemtsov, I had spent time with the comically stupid Putinist mayor of Sochi. He had knocked back my question about how gay Olympians would be treated in a city where the Kremlin's homophobic laws held sway by proclaiming: 'There are no gays in Sochi'. When I told Nemtsov about this, he laughed and laughed and laughed for so long we had to trim it down in the edit. He had a beautiful sense of the ridiculous and when I heard he had been shot, I burst into tears.
It's hard to convey just how poor ordinary Russians are, but I got a flavour of that in 2007 when I made a BBC TV documentary, Vodka's My Poison. They called it the yellow death. It started in the summer when dozens of people turned up in casualty, a vile shade of yellow. The dozens turned to hundreds, then thousands. The better cases recovered, but will die long before their time. The worst cases? Natasha was not yet thirty, she had a seven-year-old boy called Maxim and she had less than a year to live. Her whole body had gone yellow, an instantly recognisable feature of toxic hepatitis. Something had destroyed her liver and now all the natural toxins in the body were stacking up. Her own body was poisoning her and there was nothing medicine – or at least nothing state medicine in Russia – could do about it. How come? Putin put up the price of vodka threefold in one strike. Craving alcohol, Natasha and her friends had added a new brand of handwash to their moonshine. The handwash was cheap and highly alcoholic, but also lethal. I remember the gloom in the hospital basement, steel doors slamming shut, dark yellow wraiths living out their last weeks, the lack of medicine, of care, of money, of light, of hope. It made me angry; it still does; and what I felt would be a fraction of the rage that consumed someone like Navalny who had a clear grasp of where the extraordinary riches of the Russian state were being siphoned off.
A sea of fireflies, a watch, a yacht, a private jet for corgis, a multi-million-dollar duck house: Chaika, Peskov, Shuvalov and Medvedev and the rest have between them stolen billions of dollars of public money and diverted it to their own grubby and greedy ends. Putin's Russia is, not surprisingly, the most unequal big country on earth, where one per cent of the population own 58 per cent of its wealth, far worse than Brazil, India, the United States, Germany, China and the United Kingdom.