Want to understand Trump’s US? Look at late ‘90s Russia

Oligarchs looting the state. A weak, divided opposition. A strongman consolidating power. The lessons of 1990s Russia feel alarmingly relevant today.

Donald Trump’s assault on US democracy has been so wide-ranging, and so swift, that sometimes it’s hard to process.

In less than two months he has pardoned those who attacked the U.S. Capitol to overturn his 2020 election loss, placed loyalists atop the FBI and military, and purged the Department of Justice, which dropped investigations against Trump allies.

Trump has declared control over independent agencies such as the Federal Election Commission, punished media outlets for coverage he dislikes and many suspect he will defy court orders.

A particularly chilling potential sign of things to come is the case of Mahmoud Khalil. A prominent voice in Gaza protests at Columbia University, Khalil faces deportation - even though he has a green card. Trump has called Khalil’s arrest “the first of many to come.”

This anti-democratic blitzkrieg has drawn lots of parallels with past autocrats and their regimes. Many people look back to Hitler’s Germany, inspired not least by Elon Musk.

Mussolini’s Italy might be a more fruitful comparison. Jay Griffiths’s chilling essay about the echoes of the Futurists in Trump’s first term is well worth a read.

But increasingly the historical moment I keep coming back is more recent: Russia in the late 1990s. This was a country that in a few short years had seen the fall of Communism and the rise of gangster capitalism.

Rapacious oligarchs were looting the state - hello Musk, et al - while a liberal opposition was clueless and out of touch. From this chaos emerged a strongman, Putin, who understood how to manipulate a debased political system and a media rife with misinformation.

I have been reading a lot about Russia in the late 1990s, trying to understand how oligarchy destroys democracy.

I recently wrote a review of two new books about Russia in this era, for the Times Literary Supplement. The Kremlin’s Noose by Amy Knight focuses on Boris Berezovsky, the ruthless oligarch who fatally underestimated Putin; Russia in Four Criminals by Federico Varese looks more widely at Russia’s recent criminal history.

They’re very different books but I think they both give valuable insights into how oligarchy turns into autocracy - and what we can learn from Russia in the late 1990s that might help us understand Trump’s US. They also tell us a lot about how Britain opened its arms to Russian money. (Berezovsky was a central figure in making London the world’s libel capital, as I’ve written about before.)

Here’s the full review.

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On March 23, 2013, the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky was found dead at his multi-million-pound mansion at Titness Park, near Ascot. He was discovered by his bodyguard, in a locked bathroom, with a ligature around his neck.

At the inquest a year later, a Home Office pathologist found Berezovsky’s injuries “consistent with hanging”. Another pathologist, a German expert introduced by Berezovsky’s daughter, disagreed, citing wounds on the back of the head and a fractured rib.

In recording an open verdict, the coroner said: “I am not saying Mr Berezovsky took his own life, I am not saying Mr Berezovsky was unlawfully killed. What I am saying is that the burden of proof sets such a high standard that it is impossible for me to say”.

Berezovsky’s mysterious death – and the questions that still shroud it more than a decade later – provides the denouement for The Kremlin’s Noose, Amy Knight’s insightful, thorough account of the rise and fall of post-Soviet Russia’s most influential, and most notorious, oligarch.

Based on a combination of contemporaneous reporting and interviews with Berezovsky’s inner circle, Knight builds a refreshingly complex picture of Berezovsky, who has often been drawn in lurid, primary colours, along with the man whom he propelled to power, and who would become his arch nemesis, Vladimir Putin.

Born in 1946, Berezovsky later talked of enjoying “a perfectly happy Soviet childhood”. His father, Abram, a successful civil engineer, moved to Moscow from the Siberian city of Tomsk, and the young Borya grew up in relative affluence. The family owned a television and Abram earned enough that his wife, Anna, did not have to work. But they were also members of Moscow’s Jewish intelligentsia in a society marked by antisemitism.

When Anna, who was registered as ethnically Russian despite her mixed heritage, wanted to declare her baby Jewish on his birth certificate, the registrar implored the young mother: “Please don’t ruin the boy’s life. Register him as Russian”. Berezovsky became officially Russian but was seldom allowed to forget his Jewishness: decades later Putin’s then-wife, Lyudmila, said that for her Berezovsky was “enemy number one” because he was “born under the star of David”.

Following his graduation from Moscow State University, Berezovsky became a researcher at the prestigious Soviet Academy of Sciences. He wasn’t a gifted scientist, but he had an analytical mind and possessed an easy charm: through the 1970s and 80s, he played research politics well, building relationships between people and institutions, planning conferences and foreign trips.

He would likely have remained a successful, if frustrated, factotum but for the sweeping economic reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. In the late 1980s, with the Soviet system collapsing, Berezovsky later recalled, “I made an absolutely crucial decision: to discontinue doing science and start doing business, which was at the time called ‘speculation’.”

What Berezovsky called ‘speculation’, others might call deception, or even fraud. Mixing two of his hallmark traits, ingenuity and personability, the onetime researcher convinced the management of the Soviet Union’s largest domestic car manufacturer, AvtoVAZ, to go into business with him. AvtoVAZ was a state enterprise. Its cars came out the gate with artificially low, subsidized prices. Berezovsky’s company, LogoVAZ, would buy the cars, in bulk, at these rock-bottom prices and then sell them on the open market at a huge markup. The hidden trick was that Berezovsky would repay AvtoVAZ in roubles – at a time when inflation was running at 2,000 per cent.

These asset-stripping tactics – repeated by many of the oligarchs who quickly emerged, with the West’s blessing, amid Boris Yeltsin’s chaotic privatization rush – made Berezovsky a multimillionaire almost overnight. With the blessing of Yeltsin and his kleptocratic cronies, Berezovsky used the cash that flowed through LogoVAZ to create a network of companies, siphoning money into Swiss bank accounts to buy other businesses, including banks and a television channel.

Few figures illustrated quite so clearly how the rhetoric of Russia’s shiny new democracy belied a system of power based on patronage and loyalty as Berezovsky, the garrulous bon viveur who hosted businessmen, journalists and foreign emissaries in his opulent LogoVAZ club, a restored pre-revolutionary mansion in Moscow.

As his fortune grew, Berezovsky increasingly saw himself as the power behind the Kremlin. He held shadow negotiations with Chechen separatists. He was a regular at Davos. His campaign contributions – and behind-the-scenes machinations – were instrumental in Yeltsin’s tainted presidential re-election in 1996. Three years later, Berezovsky was a prime mover in the elevation of Putin, an unremarkable former KGB intelligence officer, to the position of prime minister and Yeltsin’s anointed heir.

In March 2000, the journalist Ted Koppel invited viewers of ABC’s Nightline to imagine Berezovsky as “someone with the ego of a Donald Trump, the ambition of a Ross Perot, the instincts of Rupert Murdoch and the business reputation of John Gotti”. Within months, Berezovsky was gone, forced out of Russia, eventually settling in London.

What happened? Put simply, Berezovsky fatally misread Putin. He was not the only one. The oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky ended up in prison after challenging the Russian president about corruption during a televised meeting. But Berezovsky went further than any of the others. He publicly blamed the Kremlin for a litany of crimes, including a series of bombings in 1999, blamed on Chechen terrorists, that killed more than 300 people – and massively boosted Putin’s popularity.

From London, Berezovsky gave wild interviews in which he condemned Putin as a dictator and promised to overthrow him by force if necessary. His billions drained away in a series of legal battles, most damagingly a £100 million divorce settlement with his second wife, Galina, and a disastrous defeat in a £3.7 billion claim against Roman Abramovich over shares in Sibneft oil and Rusal aluminium.

Justice Elizabeth Gloster, who heard the Abramovich case, found Berezovsky to be “an unimpressive, and inherently unreliable, witness, who regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be moulded to suit his current purposes”. Federico Varese seems to agree. His short book Russia in Four Criminals paints a fascinating picture of the rule of law, and its absence, in contemporary Russia, through a quartet of lively pen portraits. Alongside Berezovsky, the oligarch who “made his fortune through scams and lies”, we meet the mob boss Vyacheslav Ivankov. A career criminal, Ivankov graduated from black marketeering and drug running to settling disputes between “more or less legitimate entrepreneurs”.

Killed in a hail of bullets in a Moscow restaurant in 2009, Ivankov epitomized the mafia violence that “played a fundamental role in the criminal governance of the economy in the late Soviet period and even more so in the 1990s”. The cybercriminal Nikita Kuzmin is an avowedly post-Soviet creature: the inventor of Gozi, one of the most powerful computer viruses ever conceived, he is part of an online ecosystem that is tolerated by the Kremlin “as long as the victims are not Russian citizens or institutions”.

Sergei Savelyev is the foursome’s most sympathetic character. A convict turned whistleblower, Savelyev leaked graphic footage of the torturing of prison inmates. Since 2015, Putin has systematically sought to destroy the “alternative power” of the “thieves in law” hierarchy in Russian prisons. As Varese wryly notes, there is no mafia in North Korea.

A scholar of organized crime, Varese draws in part on his own time in Russia in the mid-1990s, in the aftermath of the privatization shock therapy that tore through the country’s social fabric and made a handful of people very wealthy. The scale, and speed, of the privatization was staggering: in December 1992, only eighteen companies had been sold off; by the following April it was 582; by the end of June 1993, 2,418 firms were in private hands. The oligarchs were not just passive recipients of cronyist largesse: they enlisted the criminal underworld to secure their looted assets.

Varese traces the rise of Putin’s Russia directly to the chaos and mob wars that followed the fall of communism. The West, drunk on “the end of history”, failed – or didn’t want to see – the violent nature of the society that was emerging from the ashes of the Soviet Union. Varese sees Russia today as “caught in a vicious circle of liberalization, chaos, and repression”. The war in Ukraine has led to hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties, yet barely shaken Putin’s “managed democracy” (itself an exaggerated extension of the Yeltsin-era facade that Berezovsky and the oligarchs constructed but only later discovered they could not control.)

Neither Federico Varese nor Amy Knight dwells much on Britain’s role in the story of modern Russia, but it is worth reflecting on. Over the past thirty years, Britain, and particularly London, has opened its arms to Russian money. Prestigious museums and galleries have taken oligarchs' money. Despite post-Ukraine sanctions, London law firms and “reputation managers” still roll out the red carpet. Some less compliant émigrés have met untimely ends.

The dissident Federal Security Service agent Alexander Litvinenko died when two other former agents gave him tea laced with polonium at London’s Millennium Hotel in 2006. Nikolai Glushkov, the former director of Aeroflot, was found strangled in his New Malden home in 2018. But for those who heed Putin’s warnings to stay out of politics, London remains a home away from home.

This piece originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.