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- [00:04]
A
For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter and discounted books. Join the Declassified club@the restisclassified.com. Well, welcome back, club members Secret Squirrels, to the second part of this exclusive miniseries for club members. We are looking at the rise of Vladimir Putin, his time in the kgb, his ascent to power. This is running alongside our series on his we keep calling him his chef Gordon, although he's so much more.
- [00:49]
B
Yevgeny Prigozhin is the Gordon Ramsay of Moscow as we've just Gordon Ramsay, Gordon Ramsay. Gordon Ramsay became a mercenary warlord. That was our.
- [00:59]
A
That's right. That's right. We we also want to say thank you to any new Squirrels who have have joined. We we hope there's a whole scurry Gordon of squirrels who have have joined the club to listen to this series. So for any any new members, welcome and thank you for joining. We are of course joined again by Mark Galeotti, historian, researcher on Russia, master of all things Putin and organized crime and the nexus of both. And we really left off, I guess, last time with Putin trudging back to the Soviet Union from East Germany after the collapse of the East German regime. And I guess what he maybe suspects, but I guess doesn't quite know is as he does so time is is running out for the Soviet Union itself.
- [01:50]
B
So he's gone from one collapsing regime to another. But I guess, Mark, the coup in order to August 1991, which is going to be the kind of pivotal moment for the end of the Soviet Union, isn't really predicted by people, is it? I mean, the Soviet Union is kind of struggling along at this period with signs of stress and weakness. And then suddenly in August, there's this amazing moment of 1991 where card liners, including some KGB officers, try and remove Gorbachev from power because they fear who's going to kind of lead to the breakup of the Soviet Union and reform is moving too fast. And it's an amazing moment, isn't it? Because for a few days, I mean, a bit like Prigozhin's mutiny, the kind of future of this vast country hangs in the balance, doesn't it?
- [02:37]
C
Yeah, it does. And as you say, no one really expected that. I mean, this is while I was doing my PhD and I was spending a lot of time in country. And in fact, I had just returned back to the UK literally two days before the coup happened, to my great chagrin. I still believe, rather perversely, that Russia owns me a coup. So someday I expect to be able to collect on that. But one of the things I'd done, I mean primarily I was there talking to Afghan war veterans and similar people, but I also did the rounds of the embassies at the time asking amongst other questions because there was a lot of sort of conspiratorial talk whether anyone thought there was going to be a coup. And almost invariably the answer I was getting, well, look, maybe something is going to happen in mid winter when things are at their hardest. Because if nothing else, there was a great series of strikes by coal miners and real concerns about whether or not power would be available. And that's no small matter in the middle of a Russian winter. But no one was expecting it when it happened. And in fact, coincidentally, the Monday morning of the coup, I had anyway a meeting at Defence Intelligence staff which I thought in my naivete I thought, aha, this is great because I'm going to get the inside poop on quite what's going on. And I sort of turned up first thing in the morning and said, so what's the news? And they looked a little bit shifty and said, well, the communications intercept hasn't come in yet from Cheltenham gchq. Those were the pre Internet days, so we're watching cnn. So in other words, they were basically in exactly the same position at that point. I'm sure it quickly changed than others, but yes, I mean, no one had anticipated that there would be a coup, but to be perfectly honest, I don't think many people then anticipated that the coup would fail. Yeah, I mean, the coup plotters themselves. And it was interesting that, you know, you draw the parallel with Prigozhin's mutiny. I mean, similarly what happened in many ways was that so many people just thought they'd just wait and see. You know, we know that there's this big crowd that gathers in front of the White House, which is the name of the, you know, parliament building at the time, to defend Boris Yeltsin, the Russian president, and oppose the coup plotters, though nowhere near as many as who ultimately would say they were there. I mean, pretty much everyone I meet in Moscow these days will claim that they were in that crowd. They weren't. But for example, on that first day of the coup, there was a record level of police calling in sick. Precisely from that point of view of look, I don't want to burn my bridges either way, I don't want to go out and have to truncheon down my neighbor. But on the other hand, I don't want to overtly challenge this new regime. So let's just call in sick and see how it goes. So again, very similar parallel with what happened with Prigozhin.
- [05:30]
B
It's interesting because I remember talking to, and I better leave them nameless, someone who is in the MI6 station in Moscow at that time of the coup. And they realized something was happening because the day before their surveillance was withdrawn and they realized that something was going on because normally they'd have heavy surveillance on them at the station and then suddenly, just that one evening, it wasn't there. And that was pretty unusual for them. But it doesn't sound like having spoken to kind of MI6 and CIA people who were in Moscow at the time that anyone really had any intelligence that it was coming. So, you know, it's always that interesting question, was there an intelligence failure? Well, there wasn't really any intelligence and I think one of the reasons was it was all kind of quite haphazard and improvised by the coup plotters themselves, wasn't it? It wasn't a particularly well organised or well executed coup. It was probably kind of last minute and slightly chaotic. And as a result, after three days, it effectively collapses.
- [06:28]
C
You're absolutely right that it's fairly haphazard. But in some ways it's almost like here's a parallel with Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, because there is expectation that they didn't need for it to be that carefully organized. There was this assumption that after decades of party rule, a certain degree of deference of timidity was bred in the bone and that all they needed to do was make an announcement, say that there was this new emergency committee in charge because Gorbachev was, quote, unquote, ill put some tanks in some main squares and everyone would just realize that times had changed and they had to obey the new order. Fortunately, the Russians themselves weren't willing to go along with that, let alone many of the other non Russian constituent peoples. But also, I mean, they were in some ways unlucky for all the, all the most obvious reasons. They thought that they knew where Boris Yeltsin, who had been in Kazakhstan, when just flying back that morning. They thought they knew where he was going to land, which airport. But Boris Yeltsin being Boris Yeltsin, had been on a bender and had been therefore slept late and therefore his plane ended up landing at a different airport. Now, you know, one can say, well, they should have had contingencies. But again, I think these were people who had been used to, you know, Again, as you said, it included the Chairman of the kgb, the Minister of defence and so forth. These are people who had been got used to being lords of creation and they weren't really expecting that in fact, maybe the world was not going to shape itself to their convenience.
- [08:02]
A
What is Putin doing during all of this? And maybe deeper, I mean, what is he thinking about what's unraveling in front of him?
- [08:12]
C
Well, if you want the official line, it's that this was a point when Putin was shocked, shocked to discover that the KGB was not a nice organization and that he handed in his resignation. I somehow find this hard to believe for several reasons. One is that there's no real reason to regard Putin as being some kind of committed democrat and reformer. Secondly, actually it would have been quite hard for him to hand in his resignation at that time because the KGB was a bit busy in Leningrad. And again, more likely he would have just bided his time even if he was unimpressed with what's happened. The interesting thing was he clearly wasn't tasked with doing anything. And again, this comes back to, I mean, take Gordon, your point about the lifting of surveillance. I mean, there was an element in which the sort of the KGB withdrew resources from other functions because it anticipated doing a lot, but then there was so much division at the top level. I mean, there were basically literally cases where you had pro coup KGB officers at one end of corridor and anti coup officers at the other end and each of them basically spying on the other. I think in those circumstances there was a sufficient functional paralysis that people like Putin were basically not forced to actually make a decision. And since immediately after the KGB was illegalized by Yeltsin, in some ways one can ask a question of whether Putin jumped or was pushed. All we can say is that by the end of 1991 he's definitely out of the KGB in terms of full time employment. Whether it was because of a principled stand, well, that's between him and his confessor.
- [09:58]
A
Listen to the full story of Vladimir Putin's time in Soviet East Germany and discover his criminal connections by signing up to the declassified club@therestisclassified.com.