Secrets behind Putin’s power
Quite how a little-known former KGB officer became the leader of Russia has long been shrouded in secrecy. But one man was at the heart of Vladimir Putin’s rise to power and has unseen film footage to prove it. Now he’s about to reveal the truth – and fears for his life
IT REMAINS one of the most troubling mysteries of the modern era: how Vladimir Putin rose from obscurity to become the president of Russia. A remarkable new documentary, using intimate footage of the Russian president and his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, which has never been seen before, provides tantalising answers to this and other questions that have long puzzled historians and Kremlin watchers.
The film, Putin’s Witnesses, was made by Vitaly Mansky (54) who in 2000, when Putin first became president, was head of documentaries for the main state TV channel, Russia 1. The film offers a startling and unparalleled glimpse behind the Kremlin curtain as the secret operation “Successor” – to bring Vladimir Putin to power – came to fruition.
It consists of footage shot personally by Vitaly – and secretly kept by him ever since – as, at the same time, he made official documentaries about Putin, Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev.
“The film delivers almost impossibly close access to Putin, his colleagues and outgoing president Boris Yeltsin,” wrote the film magazine Screen International. “It’s hard to believe the footage in Putin’s Witnesses could be real.”
Vitaly – whose previous major film,
Under the Sun, shot surreptitiously in North Korea, won numerous awards – offers us a ringside seat at a turning point in modern history.
On 31 December 1999 Yeltsin made the shock televised announcement he was resigning as president. Positioned in front of a traditional New Year’s tree decorated with baubles, sparkling lights and tinsel, he looked bloated as he stammered his way through his speech.
If Russians were blindsided, Vitaly was stunned. He had close connections in the Kremlin. He was in the middle of shooting a documentary on Yeltsin, which gave him access to the president and his family. Yet he hadn’t heard a whisper.
“We knew Yeltsin had taped his annual New Year’s Eve announcement on 27 December,” Vitaly tells me. “But on 31 December the Kremlin called again for the cameramen and they taped this new announcement.
“Afterwards the cameramen were held incommunicado. They couldn’t call anybody, relatives or anyone. It was an incredibly secret operation, on a state level.”
Yeltsin (68) told Russia’s 145 million people he’d appointed his acting prime minister, Vladimir Putin (then 47), to be the acting president until early elections at the end of March 2000.
Yeltsin praised the dour and inscrutable Putin as “a strong man who’s worthy of being president”.
Putin, previously the head of the Federal Security Service, the FSB – the successor to the KGB – had become popular in the four months he’d been prime minister because of his brutal prosecution of the war in Chechnya.
Putin’s succession was sanctified that day by Aleksy II, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox church, at a ceremony in the Kremlin. At midnight, speaking to the nation for the first time as acting president, Putin sought to reassure those worried that he’d emerged through the ranks of the Soviet KGB.
“The freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom of the press, the freedom of property rights – these fundamentals of civilised society – will be reliably protected by the state,” he insisted.
The next day, 1 January 2000, in what appeared to be a quid pro quo, Putin signed a decree granting Yeltsin, whose rule had become clouded by accusations of corruption against him and his family, immunity from prosecution. He also gave his predecessor a large pension, a country house, bodyguards and healthcare for him and his family.
VITALY was at first supportive of Putin’s accession to the presidency because he’d seen at close quarters that Yeltsin was too infirm to govern. But by 2004 he’d resigned from Russia 1 because his programme ideas were being censored as Putin exerted control over the media. He and his family now live in exile in Riga, Latvia, having left Russia in 2014.
Meanwhile his fellow Russians, who’d briefly tasted freedom under Yeltsin in the chaotic ’90s, now live in the increasingly dictatorial grip of a president who’s been in power for nearly two decades.
And the world has to deal with a ruthless strongman who’s invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea, interferes in the elections of other countries, poisons its foes on foreign soil and may well have kompromat [compromising material] on the US president.
As soon as he heard Putin was to be acting president Vitaly started gathering footage for a documentary, Who is Mr Putin? It aired on Russia 1 just before the March 2000 election. Putin won on the first ballot with 53% of the vote.
“My team meticulously documented the candidate for president,” Vitaly says, heavy with irony, in the voiceover to Putin’s Witnesses, “in his unremitting toil for the benefit of the people”.
With unprecedented access to Putin, his friends and colleagues, the film humanised the former KGB officer for the Russian people. For instance, Vitaly set up what he knew would be a touching and emotional scene as Putin visited his old schoolteacher in her apartment in St Petersburg.
The film also showed Putin – in stark contrast to the drunken and erratic Yeltsin that Russians had come to despise – as a vigorous and decisive leader, comforting wounded troops, touring factories, denouncing the Chechen rebels.
“The desire for a young, capable president was everyone’s,” Vitaly says.
But he now deeply regrets the key role he played in helping Putin become president.
“Today it’s impossible to understand how we couldn’t see it,” he admits as he
‘It was an incredibly secret operation, on a state level’
(Turn over)
sits in his sparse, modern apartment in Riga sipping tea.
Vitaly, bearded and melancholy, knows the revelations in the documentary increase the danger he faces. The authorities won’t allow the film to be shown in Russia, but he was well known in his home country and it’s dangerous to be too outspoken in your opposition to Putin.
But although he’s well aware his life is in peril there’s nothing he can do.
“I try not to think about this,” he says. “I’m in good moral and physical health. I have no suicidal thoughts. So if something happens to me it won’t be an accidental death.”
HE SAYS he initially found Putin “charming”. They spent a lot of time together: in the year following the election Vitaly shot another documentary in which Putin also participated, on life in the Kremlin. “He had a very handsome way of communicating,” Vitaly tells me. “He’d ask about my wife, my connections, my children, and, of course, you’re flattered. You buy it. Putin’s quite a nice chap, you think. But was he expressing some kind of human feeling or was I communicating with a professional pick-up artist?”
Yet whatever soothing platitudes about democracy Putin came up with publicly in the presidential campaign, he made no bones about his KGB ideology when he spoke directly to Vitaly. “Decisions should be taken in the interests of the state,” he told him, “whether they cause a positive or negative reaction.”
“He’s saying the interests of the state come first, the people second,” Vitaly says.
But Vitaly noticed a degree of uncertainty as Putin struggled to find his feet. He says he could order the Russian leader around, telling him where to stand, suggesting what they should shoot, even questioning his decision to bring back the Soviet flag. “At that time he was still a bit shy and uneasy with people,” Vitaly says. “But he also understood he’d been chosen to play a role.”
He includes a scene in Putin’s Witnesses he never could’ve shown at the time. After the election results became clear Vitaly, who was filming that night in Yeltsin’s residence, suggested Yeltsin phone Putin to congratulate him. He’s told Putin will call him back, but as they wait and wait, and Yeltsin grows more annoyed and frustrated, he never does. It’s an illustration of power and how, in an instant, Putin showed Yeltsin he no longer had it.
Some believe Putin was an accidental president who was in the right place at the right time. Others suspect the so-called “Family” – key members of Yeltsin’s household and the billionaire oligarchs he’d enriched, including Boris Berezovsky – contrived the succession. Vitaly insists it was no accident.
“It all happened in closed rooms with no third person present,” Vitaly says. “But Putin was head of the FSB in 1998. The head of the FSB knows everything that happens in the country. He knew the results of the secret questionnaire that had been created to find what people wanted in their next president. And, at a certain moment, he presented himself, answering all the criteria.”
Yeltsin’s family couldn’t hide their relief as it became clear Putin would win on the first ballot, toasting the result with champagne. They knew the new leader would secure their safety and prosperity.
“That was the essence, the meaning of the whole operation,” Vitaly says. “They needed a man who’d do that.”
Yeltsin boasted it was he who’d selected Putin but Vitaly makes it clear in his view it was Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatyana, who was key to the transfer of power. As Yeltsin’s health deteriorated, she’d become her father’s gatekeeper.
“Her role was so vast and so important it can’t be described in words,” Vitaly says. “But she never created the schemes; she just carried the information to her father. Of course, in delivering the information she could choose who to present to him.
“The first person Yeltsin spoke to on the phone, and thanked, after he knew Putin had won,” Vitaly points out, “was Valentin Yumashev [his former chief of staff]. Within a year Yumashev had become Tatyana’s husband.”
In June this year Putin’s press spokesman revealed Yumashev had been a secret adviser to Putin for 18 years, since he was first elected president. Deepening the familial connections, Yumashev’s daughter, Polina, is married to the aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska.
Deripaska, who was Russia’s richest man in the early Noughties with a fortune estimated at $28 billion (then about R182 billion), has remained extremely close to Putin, who bailed him out of financial trouble after the 2007 crash when other oligarchs were destroyed.
I ask about Boris Berezovsky, the exiled oligarch whose death at his home in Berkshire, England, in 2013 is still unexplained. Berezovsky always claimed Putin was his protégé.
“He wasn’t involved in this operation,” Vitaly says. “He was used, as the owner of TV stations and newspapers. But he wasn’t the master of the marionettes.” Was there a master of the marionettes? “There was a master of the marionettes,” he replies, before a long pause. “But, unfortunately, I wouldn’t dare to utter his name because I have no idea about the consequences. It’s better to remain silent on this issue.”
HE OFFERS a chilling reminder of what happens to those Putin no longer has use for. “The people who promoted Putin to power weren’t the same as those who came with him,” Vitaly explains. “He moved very quickly to take control. The first thing he did was kill the independent media. Then he destroyed the private businesses, the oligarchs.”
On election night, as one of Vitaly’s cameras pans round the secret headquarters where Putin’s campaign was run – Putin publicly claimed he had no campaign – we see a parade of once powerful insiders who are now in opposition, in exile, discredited, dead – or, in the case of Putin’s ex-wife, Lyudmila, divorced.
They include Mikhail Kasyanov, who was Putin’s first prime minister. Kasyanov was accused of corruption by the state media in the mid-Noughties and has faced numerous death threats. His friend and fellow opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was murdered near the Kremlin in 2015. Also shown is Mikhail Lesin, until 2004 the minister of press and broadcasting, who died in suspicious circumstances in a Washington hotel room in 2015.
Many people remain puzzled by the brazenness of the murder on British soil of Alexander Litvinenko, the former intelligence officer who was poisoned with polonium in 2006, and the novichok attack this year on the double agent and former FSB officer Sergei Skripal.
“Very simple,” he says. “In the KGB and the FSB there’s one certain principle: the traitor must die.”
But why were they attacked with poisons so easily traced to Russia? “It’s a signature and a signal,” Vitaly says. Many people believe Litvinenko was murdered because of his continuing public insistence Putin was responsible for the series of horrific apartment bombings that hit Russia in late 1999. Four bombings in two weeks in September 1999 killed nearly 300 people and shook the country to its foundations. The Russian government blamed Chechen rebels.
For Vitaly the beginning of Putin’s electioneering has a fixed moment – just after midnight on 9 September 1999 when an apartment building in Moscow was destroyed by a massive 400kg bomb that killed 94 people and injured 249, bringing terror to the heart of Russia’s capital.
“The country was stricken with fear,” Vitaly recalls in Putin’s Witnesses.
Putin, who’d just become prime minister, won immediate popular support with his retaliatory bombing of Chechen capital Grozny. Russians loved Putin’s profane threat about what he’d do to Chechen terrorists: “If we catch them in the toilet, we’ll rub them out in the outhouse.”
After a brutal ground campaign Grozny was razed, captured by the Russian army in February 2000. Thousands of civilians died. At Vitaly’s suggestion Putin made a secret night-time visit to the Moscow apartment site. As they’re standing on the street there’s an astonishing moment when he asks Putin, “Do you think the end justifies the means?”
Putin appears surprised, groping for words that don’t come, evidently thinking he’s being asked whether he was responsible for the bombings and can justify that. He has to ask Vitaly to repeat the question, which Vitaly explains was about whether the terrorists can justify the bombings.
“I’m convinced Putin isn’t connected to the bombings,” Vitaly tells me. “Because if he were connected then life has no meaning. It’s such a quintessential evil that it’s not possible. One more time: Putin isn’t connected.”
But there can be no doubt the bombings helped Putin.
“When Putin was made prime minister his poll ratings were zero. Two weeks later the bombs go off and his ratings immediately rise. In a couple of months they’re over 50%. These are just facts.
“Putin’s a very powerful person, the most powerful in the politics of the 21st century. That’s not a compliment. He conquered Russia by playing ping-pong with its laws. He’s forcing seemingly strong world leaders to accept his rules of the game. He outplays them all.”
I ask Vitaly, having spent so much time with Putin, what we don’t know about him that we should. “The most important thing is that we know nothing about him,” he says. “We know nothing about who he loves. We know nothing about his daughters. His children have changed their surnames. It’s a state secret who they are.
“This is a person who can’t share with the world and his own people anything intimate. This is his most important characteristic. Through this characteristic you may understand much about him.”
As Putin has got rid of many of the people from his past, Vitaly says the people closest to him are his security guards.
“They grew up in similar circumstances to him, which is very important. He does sports with them all the time, judo. He showed me the tatami mat where he does judo in his residence. When he came home from the Kremlin at the end of the day, he’d take his security people to this tatami to train together. You’re holding another man around the shoulders; you’re all sweaty. It’s very close. People become very intimate.”
Vitaly is startled by the physical transformation Putin has undergone in the past two decades. In Putin’s Witnesses he looks like a normal person, with bags under his eyes.
“I think Putin’s drastically Botoxed face is disgusting,” Vitaly says. “And this operation to widen the cheeks. But he understood what he was doing. Actually, it’s quite right for a politician like Putin to have such a face. He corresponds to the face he now has.”
Vitaly doesn’t believe Putin will ever willingly relinquish power. “Maybe he’ll end up in a wheelchair like [ former Chilean dictator Augusto] Pinochet, going to the high court. Maybe he’ll be hiding like [ former Iraqi leader] Saddam Hussein. Maybe he’ll be an absolute vegetable like [ former Portuguese dictator António] Salazar. But he won’t have any other possibility. For anybody who’s in power for more than 25 years the best choice is death from bad health. The best was Stalin’s: 24 hours in your own urine. That’s the best death Putin can have.”
‘He conquered Russia by playing ping-pong with its laws’