Catherine Belton

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