Front Burner - Weekend Listen: Putin's Murders from Tortoise

Episode Date: August 10, 2024

Shortly before Vladimir Putin was re-elected for a fifth term as Russia’s president he eliminated his last possible rival for power, Alexei Navalny, who from all available evidence was murdered in an Arctic labour camp. The deaths of dozens of Putin's opponents, often in mysterious circumstances, have been a hallmark of his time in office. Tortoise’s Giles Whittell sets out to find out why so many of Putin’s enemies have met an early end.This is episode 1 of Putin's Murders from Tortoise. You can listen to episodes 2 and 3 wherever you get your podcasts by searching for The Slow Newscast.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi everybody, Jamie here. We have a very special bonus episode for you today from another podcast that we think that you might like. It's called Putin's Murders, and it's a three-part series from Tortoise. opposition in Alexei Navalny died suddenly. But for those who have followed how Putin holds onto and establishes power, this was not a surprise. Because Putin's story is a story of murder. Putin's Murders is a podcast from Tortoise that tells the story of Putin and the trail of deaths he seems to leave behind him. This is the first episode. Take a listen.

Early in the age of Putin, in the year 2000, Vladimir Milov was a deputy energy minister in the Russian government. Nowadays he lives in Lithuania, agitating for democracy back home. Last month, I asked him when it became clear to him that Vladimir Putin was a killer, that he'd do anything to strengthen his hold on power. And by way of an answer, Milov didn't talk about a particular assassination, although there are plenty to choose from. He talked about a song. You know what, symbolically, I think the nail in the coffin happened on the 4th of December 2000, when he signed into law the restoration of the Soviet anthem. It was a symbolic gesture, but it couldn't be any clearer in terms of indication where things are going.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, it's painfully clear where things have gone. It's a stirring tune, the Soviet anthem, no question about it. Somehow, the fact that it glorifies everything the Soviet Union stood for, Sputnik, yes, slave labour too, doesn't make it any less stirring. And now it's the Russian national anthem. Performed last month by a huge crowd in Red Square, the day after Putin gave himself six more years in power in a parody of an election. himself six more years in power in a parody of an election. That was Putin thanking his people at the end. It was part of a long rally, the kind that Putinism is built on, choreographed to the millisecond, subtle as an artillery barrage. And it took place barely a fortnight after he

eliminated his last possible rival for power, Alexei Navalny, in an Arctic labor camp. The next day, Putin mentioned Navalny by name for the first time ever in public. Yes, he has passed away. It is always a sad event. We have other cases where people in prison have passed away. Hasn't that happened in the United States? It has, and repeatedly. But things happen. There's nothing you can do about it. No kidding.

In a police state or a gangster state, take your pick, both are reasonable descriptions, there's no telling what the boss won't do, especially when he rejoices in an anthem composed for Stalin. A few days after Navalny's death, the exiled head of his anti-corruption organisation, Leonid Volkov, was attacked with a hammer outside his home in Lithuania. He was hit in the head. His arm was broken.

His leg was beaten so badly that he couldn't walk. Which is why, you know, I now have a Lithuanian police car standing outside my home because we are under special protection. This is Vladimir Mirov again. He's close to Volkov. The vicious circle begins again. They kill some protest leader,

but the movement goes on. So they think that they need to kill more of their opponents and threaten the others. They're looking for a way to shut the protest movement down. So why does Putin kill people? It may seem perverse to be asking about Putin the murderer when Islamist terrorists recently killed more than 130 innocent civilians in a concert hall outside Moscow. But it isn't perverse, and I'll try to explain why. From Tortoise, this is the Slow Newscast. Putin's Murders. Part 1. A Culture of Political Murder. Part 1. A Culture of Political Murder Putin's willingness to take life is, if you'll forgive the cliché, a defining feature of our age.

It's arguably the defining feature of his age. He has no compunction about the targeted killing of anyone who might conceivably challenge him. He has no compunction about the mass killing of civilians who stand in the way of his empire building in Ukraine, the people of Mariupol, for instance. And there's another reason the question is important. Putin has no need to kill anyone, no need really to make them fear him as they do,

because within Russia, he's insanely popular. His official approval ratings are close to North Korean levels, but sensible analysts say he would have won more than 60% of the popular vote last month without any of the mind control and media control that his propaganda machine delivers. And this has been true of all the elections he has rigged. He could have won them fair and square.

Boris Bondarev, an arms control expert and the only Russian diplomat to resign and publicly condemn the Ukraine war since the invasion, offers an important reminder. The 90s were very turbulent years and it was a shock and trauma for many people and they didn't like it. I think a lot of people, especially senior generations, they were happy to see that

the fears of freedom and uncertainty have been replaced by order and promise of order, promise of steady, stable life. And that's why people were okay with Putin with his growing authoritarian rule, because he said and he keeps saying a lot of right things. So the question remains, why all the killing? To trace the roots of what Milov calls Putin's culture of political murder, you actually have to go back further than the year 2000 and the

adoption of that anthem. Those are the sounds of rescue workers picking over a giant heap of rubble on September 13th, 1999. A couple of hours earlier, the rubble had been a block of flats in southern Moscow. It blew up shortly before dawn. 118 people died. I can remember pretty clearly the smells of ash and dust that went with those sounds. I'd arrived in Moscow as a reporter two weeks earlier, and the ritual of an early start to see the latest bomb site was already familiar. Here's the timeline.

August 31st. An explosion at a fancy shopping centre near the Kremlin injures 29 people. September 4th. a blast in southern Russia kills 64. On the 9th, a bigger one destroys an apartment building in southeastern Moscow, 94 dead. On the 16th, a fifth bomb kills 18 more in Volga-Donsk, which is where the Volga meets the Don. Bombs seem to be going off all over the place. Bill Browder, the financier who later became known as the campaigner for the Magnitsky Act,

was in Moscow at the time. They kept on blowing up, and it was one of these things where it had this profound terror on anybody in Moscow. It didn't matter where you lived. You just thought, I'm going to go to bed tonight. And is my building going to be one of the ones that blows up? Who planted the bombs? The difficulty in answering that question is that they destroyed most of the evidence. And what they didn't destroy was quickly cleared away.

There was initially an assumption very widely circulating in the public. It was also discussed on the television, which was relatively free at the time, that special services might be behind it. And you know what? We also discussed this with colleagues in the government. And the perception was like, if this was FSB who did it, who did the apartment bombings, then at some point they will get caught. The FSB is, of course, the Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB. And they did get caught. It eventually happened on September 23 in Ryazan. So you heard about this accident in Ryazan when they were caught with some sacks. So they say it was sugar, but initially it was reported that these are explosives.

People discuss this as a standalone accident. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, right? Since then, Vladimir Milov and many others have had plenty of time to think about the incident at Ryazan, a two-hour drive from Moscow. What's known is that local police were called to an apartment building where two men had been seen leaving sacks of white powder in the basement. The powder was tested and turned out to be hexogen explosive more powerful than TNT. The men were followed and eavesdropped, phoning their head office. And the call was traced to the headquarters of the FSB. Now that was a story, even in Russia, especially in the Russia of 1999, which still had what passed for a free press. So the head of the FSB, a man called Nikolai Patrushev, was asked

what his men were up to. For two days, there was apparent silence and a total lack of understanding, and the government provided no comment. They were clearly figuring out what to say. Then, when a microphone was thrust in his face in a corridor, Patrushev said the white powder had in fact been sugar, planted as a test of Ryazan's preparedness, a test the city had passed with flying colours. It was to be congratulated. No one following the story believed him,

but that left a terrible alternative explanation, that what seemed to have happened, had happened. So why would Russian security services go to the extraordinary risk of blowing up Russian people? And on whose orders? Well, Putin, at the time, was Prime Minister of Russia. His previous job? Head of the FSB. But politically, he was a complete unknown. The fifth Prime Minister of Russia in a year and a half. And that had been a year and a

half of political mayhem. At the end of a decade, for everyone except the oligarchs, of destitution and humiliation. He'd been in post barely two months. If somebody had told us back then that his rule will last for at least another quarter of a century. Everybody would be shocked and puzzled. But he was obviously an unremarkable man, a totally unremarkable man. He was a very shy person, not really. I mean, he was not trying to enter initially into conflicts with various groups. And then one day they claimed that they had identified the apartment bombers. They were Chechens.

And in retaliation, Putin then decided to launch the second war with Chechnya. And of course, everyone was so hungry for revenge that they believed Putin, who said he was going to bomb them in the shithouse. And everyone was rooting for him to bomb them in the shithouse. And he was rooting for him to bomb them in the shithouse. And he started bombing Chechens left, right and center.

On his arrival in the Kremlin, Putin's approval rating stood at about 2%. Once he'd seized the moment and gone to war in Chechnya, they were north of 50%. And they've barely been below 60 in the 24 years since. Did he, in practice, give the order to kill hundreds of his fellow Russians? and they've barely been below 60 in the 24 years since. Did he, in practice, give the order to kill hundreds of his fellow Russians? We'll get to that. Could he, in principle, have given the order to kill hundreds of his fellow Russians?

Turn a few pages further back in the Putin dossier, and there are clues. Industry Connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples,

I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money Sciences in Vienna. He's also the author of McMafia, for which he made a study of the Tambov organised crime syndicate in St. Petersburg in the early 90s. At that time, the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg responsible for what was called external affairs was Vladimir Putin. External affairs included liaising with outfits like the Tambov Group, as they fought for control of the port and everything potentially lucrative that flowed through it. Oil, timber, allegedly drugs, you name it. This was not a job for the faint-hearted, and Putin was not faint-hearted. He wasn't an executioner per se, but, well, here's Misha Glennie.

Look, he was trained as a KGB officer deployed in Dresden. KGB officers know that ordering or actually carrying out an execution is part of their brief. And by the time he gets to St. Petersburg, I'm sure he's internalized that fully. And the brief of the KGB agent is, to a large extent, unchanged since the Russian Revolution. It is, as Vladimir Milov puts it, to execute red terror against the enemies of the revolution. It sounds mad in 2024,

but Putin grew up enthralled to the cult of the secret agent, just as his Western counterparts did to the cult of 007. On both sides, the license to kill was integral to the glamour, integral to the role. The KGB and its successors were and are probably the most ideological structure within the Russian circles of power, they are the, you know, the warriors of totalitarianism that are committed to defend it till the bitter end. And perhaps beyond. A deep wound in the KGB's collective psyche was the failure of its coup against Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin in August 1991. It was organized by KGB.

The de facto leader of the coup d'etat was Vladimir Kryuchkov, the chairman of the Soviet KGB at the time. And their philosophy is that, listen, we lost the country once because KGB did not have enough power over anything else. And we have to restore the system where KGB has much

more influence on say. This was a system that lionized its executioners and recruited them from all over the world. Leon Mercada, the Spanish communist dispatched with his ice pick to Mexico City to kill Leon Trotsky in 1940. Georgi Markov's Bulgarian killer with a poison-tipped umbrella on London's Waterloo Bridge in 1978, and Putin with a nine-millimeter Makarov? Not exactly. The question isn't whether he killed people himself, but whether he had people killed, and the signs are that he did, and does, without much hesitation. and the signs are that he did, and does, without much hesitation. In 1997, a St. Petersburg administrator named Mikhail Manovich tried to restore to the city some of the voting rights

it had lost in various privatisations on Putin's watch. He was shot with a sniper's rifle through the windscreen of his car on the way to work. Three years later, Putin's mentor, Anatoly Sobchak, was dispatched by Putin to Kaliningrad on the Baltic coast. Sobchak was Putin's ex-boss, a former St. Petersburg mayor who'd been accused of corruption. If he was convicted, it wouldn't look good for Putin, who was by then president-elect. Sobchak died of a reported heart attack while in Kaliningrad, although his widow paid for an independent autopsy, which found no sign of the telltale bruising usually left by cardiac arrest. Both murders shielded Putin from investigation.

Neither one has ever been solved. So who's alive and willing to talk openly about those years? solved. So who's alive and willing to talk openly about those years? Unfortunately, almost no one. I did, though, talk to an old contact whom I can't name and who hasn't talked to the press before. He claims to have had dealings with Putin at the start of the 90s. He talks of a contract signed at the Astoria Hotel and celebrated at the nearby Grand with a massage. This person was quite clear about the money flows. There was a fixed percentage for him and for his client, with the rest, well, the rest was for someone whose name was unmentionable on the phone. For what it's worth, this person was also quite clear in his own mind

that Vladimir Putin was behind the deaths of Manovich and Sobchak. Let's fast forward to 1999. Putin is prime minister. He promises the Russian people he will avenge them for the apartment bombings by bombing the Chechens in the shithouse. And he does something else that sets him apart from all his predecessors. Here's Vladimir Milov again. Usually, when you have some prime minister or key figure appointed, he brought like three, four people as his aides, advisors, with whom he worked for all his life. And that was it. But Putin, just in a couple of months as a prime minister, he appointed like hundreds of people to major positions in the government, in the Kremlin administration,

the agencies, many of whom had absolutely no relevance to any professional issues whatsoever, but they were from KGB. And that was really, it felt like something is coming, like there's a power grab going on. These ex-KGB people were known as the Siloviki, all trained as spies like Putin, all warriors of totalitarianism. All clear, as Mishigleni puts it, that ordering or carrying out executions is part of their brief. Considering how many Putin brought with him into the Kremlin, it's remarkable in a way how little changed at first. Initially, he tried to play the nice guy for everybody. If you could hear his first speeches

in 1999-2000, they were filled with absolutely pro-democracy rhetoric. In 2001, the younger President Bush met Putin in Slovenia. I looked the man in the eye. I found it to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul. Over the next three years, Vladimir Milov joined Putin's government

and left it, but he clung to the idea that a version of liberal democracy was still possible in Russia. We still had hopes in the upcoming 2003-2004 federal election. We hope that liberal parties will get more gains in the parliament and Putin will not

be able to consolidate power completely. After all, there was still the fact of the election. And even though Putin had taken over most of the big TV networks by then, there was still some independent reporting in the Moscow newspapers. And there were some independent minds in parliament. newspapers. And there were some independent minds in parliament. And they came together on the subject of those bombings of 1999. People started looking into them again. But there was a catch. Putin didn't want this issue of apartment bombings to surface in the election campaign. Take Duma members Sergei Yushchenkov and Yuri Shikachikhin, who were part of the voluntary non-government commission of Duma deputies to investigate the bombings. They were both killed. Sergei Yushchenkov was shot dead near his home in 2003.

Yuri Shikachikhin was poisoned three months later, some say with radioactive polonium. It was a wake-up call for anyone in Russia who still thought Putin could be tamed. And another wake-up call was coming for the outside world. Moscow is in shock today and a sharp chill of fear has ripped across Russia. One of Vladimir Putin's fiercest critics gunned down in broad daylight, four bullets in the back, in the very shadow of the Kremlin. In episode two of Putin's Murders, follow the money. This episode was reported by me, Giles Whittle.

The producers were Matt Russell and Patricia Clark. The sound design was by Dominic DeLarge with artwork by John Hill. The editor was Jasper Corbett. Tortoise. All right, that was the first episode of Putin's Murders. To listen to episodes two and three, just search for The Slow Newscast wherever you get your podcasts. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.