This article was originally published in 2018.

“I have been told that when I am nervous or I am tense, my lips begin to twitch” says Vladimir Yakunin. “I have started to make some effort to eliminate these movements. In my life, it is not useful to show your weakness in this way”.

This is a peculiarly Russian kind of understatement. Vladimir Yakunin has lived several lives, often at the same time — the KGB intelligence officer at the height of the Cold War; the Soviet diplomat on a covert mission to the USA; the contemporary and advisor to President Vladimir Putin; the CEO of Russia’s biggest company. And each life has required him to dismiss and suppress weakness at every twist and turn.

But half an hour later, as our photographer leans in for a close-quarters portrait, Yakunin’s bottom lip begins almost imperceptibly to ripple and fidget. “I find it an odd thing having my photo taken” he says. “Forgive me.”

This is the remarkable candour of the man who has broken rank with the established omerta of the Putin regime to tell his story in an astonishing new memoir. It’s a story that has been pegged neatly to the fortunes of modern Russia over the past half century — the childhood in Leningrad (now St Petersburg); the technical, pragmatic education at the city’s Mechanical Institute; the years of compulsory service in the Soviet Army; the recruitment by the KGB and the induction into the inner circles of the Russian high command; the wealth, power and access after the national service; the second act and second life in the West.

It is deeply unusual for those that have walked the corridors of the Kremlin to open up in this manner (to say nothing of revealing their lip-quivering micro-tells); much less when their contemporaries remain at the very height of their far-reaching power. In fact, Yakunin is the first from Putin’s inner circle to break rank in this way. There is very little to gain and everything to lose. Why, I ask, him, has he decided to commit this world to paper?

“There is so much misunderstanding between Russia and the West.” Yakunin tells me “Perhaps if I could tell my own personal observations from an autobiographical point of view I might clarify some of this misinformation.” Again, a levelled understatement. On the eve of World War Two, Winston Churchill described Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”.

“There is so much misunderstanding between Russia and the West...”

Today, as Vladimir Putin seeks a historic 5th term as President in this month’s pivotal general election, the country is better described as a confusion, trapped behind a firewall, cloaked in a conspiracy theory. Putin’s administration is pockmarked by supposed connivance, and question marks hang over every aspect of the modern regime: the Kremlin’s alleged interference with Western elections; the Russian intelligence agencies’ manipulation of social media; the violent annexation of Crimea; the hateful treatment of minorities; the state of the wider Russian economy; the mysterious deaths of political opponents in the West like Boris Beresovksy and Alexander Litvinenko; the creeping influence of jettisoned oligarchs in Fleet Street, Mayfair and Westminster.

All these, Yakunin believes, could be illuminated, even fleetingly, by a clearer discourse and his own candid reflections. The businessman has even set up a think tank and forum in Berlin named the Dialogue of Civilizations that hopes to bridge the yawning chasm between Western and Russian beliefs. But, within just a few pages of the memoir and a few minutes of our meeting, I detect another faint reason for this sudden openness — a kind of personal therapy.

“For many years I carried a double or maybe triple burden compared to others, because I had to fulfil many jobs at the same time” he tells me, describing his life in New York as a Soviet Intelligence agent with the KGB. “I had my obligations, which also consumed a lot of efforts, a lot of time, a lot of constant pressure. You were always looking behind your back — not only figuratively speaking, but literally speaking.”

When I ask him to describe the day-to-day life of a Cold War intelligence agent he tells me that this is a confidence he cannot breach. “This is not my story to tell. Everything which I was doing as an intelligence officer belongs to the state. It does not belong to me. Though many years have passed, that is my ruling.” The book maintains that general rule, but is peppered with incredible details of the more mundane — and humane — aspects of the job. “When one arrives as a secret services agent in the country, one quickly enters into an unspoken arrangement with the other side — a prickly kind of modus vivendi” he writes, before going on to describe how some agents and counter-agents saw so much of each other that a respect bordering on friendship often materialised between them.

“If you noticed a couple of men on the other side on your tail, you did not make any effort to lose them. We behaved in such a way that we never unnecessarily humiliated them.” Sometimes, agents would throw birthday cards into the windows of counter-agents that they had been stalking; at others, Russian servicemen would be approached in a restaurant and told that they could relax for an hour as the CIA man was off to lunch with his wife. “Listen, of course this is not ballet. This is risky business.” Yakunin tells me. “But you have to remember that the other man, he is not just an officer. He is a human being also.”

For all this unexpected humanity, something hardened inside Yakunin in those years of duplicity and subterfuge. “We had been stuffed full of ideology, like geese being fattened for foie gras, and for a long time I swallowed it whole” he says. By his early forties, the acute stress and pressure meant he had the health of a man in his sixties.

The book is punctuated with unexpected, almost throwaway asides that reveal this heart of darkness in the Russian character at large. “In the dark years in which their country was demolished… almost everybody in Russia had done something that one could judge as immoral” explains Yakunin.

This is the fundamental lesson of the memoir: that you cannot understand the Russian character unless you understand the institutions and landscapes that shaped it. The KGB, he believes, is fundamental to comprehending the generation of men who grew up in the final days of the USSR and the wild hinterlands of the nation’s perestroika, its chaotic restructuring towards capitalism.

“We had been stuffed full of ideology, like geese being fattened for foie gras, and for a long time I swallowed it whole..."

Yakunin’s accounts reveal an agency that rewarded blind adherence to the nation and unquestioning belief in the collective over the individual. “It was made clear to us that we were never supposed to ask what kind of salary we might receive for fulfilling a particular role” he says. (Later, we learn that he made less than “a garbage collector at the New York Department of Sanitation” when he was working in America; his sons slept on old gun boxes instead of beds.)

Indeed, Yakunin’s career as a KGB officer was nearly cut dramatically short when he inquired, almost in passing, whether there might be schools near his next posting where his children could study. “It was a calculated risk. But it almost ruined my career” he writes. For that single question, he was barred from travelling for the KGB and kept largely in the dark for four years. In this regime, anything but a manic and unquestioning devotion to orders was seen as the sign of a sinister and weak character.

It was this same mood of allegiance in which Vladimir Putin, Yakunin’s near contemporary, was raised. Both men grew up in Leningrad. Both men were excellent KGB officers who quickly impressed their superiors. Both came to maturity under the hopeful era of Michel Gorbachev; both were quickly disillusioned with the dismantling of the Soviet state and the incoherent mumblings of his successor, Boris Yeltsin.

To understand Yakunin, then, is to better understand Putin. In that striking regard, this is one of the most remarkable and important books of the many to be written about the President. With a general election less than a month away, I ask Yakunin what he thinks the world ought to know about the other Vladimir. What is he like as a man?

“I will tell you what distinguishes him from many of my friends. He is, internally, a very free person. He doesn’t care if a meeting is delayed for a couple of hours because he has to do something. Other people limit themselves. He does not.” The admission seems at odds with Putin’s steely, unflinching persona in both Russian and Western propaganda. “I hope if he reads it he will not be disturbed or angry,” Yakunin says. “But I suppose he is following the formula that a man should live like every day is his last, yet also like he has an eternity left.”

More surprising still is Yakunin’s estimation that Putin never had any real ambitions towards high office, and is not, in essence, a career politician. As Boris Yeltsin (Russia’s leader in the post-Soviet era from 1991 to 1999) began to flounder and stall, the cabal around the aging president looked for a new host for their ambitions.

They approached Putin, Yakunin tells me, as much for his obscurity as for his intelligence and KGB training. “I am positive for him to accept this proposal, it was a very difficult decision for him” Yakunin says. “He knew that it would be his last days to be a regular human being, in terms of free expression of his emotions, free expression of his opinions, enjoyment of life.”

Putin’s rapid rise to power coincided with Yakunin’s own massive success. In 2005, in the midst of Putin’s first term, Yakunin was made President of Russian Railways, the country’s biggest conglomerate. His supremacy was, he says, a “technocratic happenstance.” But he acknowledges the fog of conspiracy that hangs around the administration and his peers.

"He is, internally, a very free person. He doesn’t care if a meeting is delayed for a couple of hours because he has to do something. Other people limit themselves. He does not..."

“Most people assume that I was part of the cabal of former KGB operatives infiltrated into the Russian government by a President determined to fight the cold war all over again” he writes. “That at Ozero, the dacha cooperative in which I was once, long ago now, involved with Putin, we plotted how we could divide the country’s wealth among ourselves.”

“This is people’s own projections, their own insecurities.” He tells me. “They only want to hear accounts that confirm what they already think about Russia.” Why are people so fiercely attached to these theories, then, if there’s nothing in them at all? “Maybe this is due to the fact that people have a desire to simplify the system they cannot understand. They want to label, simplify, identify the system.’ Yakunin says. “This is the setback of modern political reporting and processes.”

Yakunin does admit, however, that this kind of inner-circle chumocracy was wildly prevalent in the years preceding Putin’s reign. He describes the nineties in Russia as a time of opportunism, banditry and pillaging; of “black clad men weilding Kalashnikov’s guarding the entrances” to Moscow’s finest restaurants; of personal armies and security services warring between the factions of the oligarchs that had sprung up in the death throes of the union.

“Between 1996 and 2000, the group of oligarchs known as the Semibankirschina (the seven bankers) possessed a significant proportion of Russian finances” he claims — “46 percent of the nation’s economy was concentrated into the hands of just eight families”, each of whom had come to prominence thanks to their close ties to Yeltsin’s paranoid band of advisors known as “the Family.” One of Putin’s first acts as President was to publicly expel this panel of puppeteers from the country. Many of them, such as Boris Beresovsky, settled in London. In this way, the story of modern Russia has become intertwined broodily with the story of our own capital.

Yakunin’s career, and the confidences it has afforded him, have earned him followers in high places — especially, he believes, in the West. “I accept now that everything I do on my phone is being listened to in some way.” he tells me. “It means I am careful, but I accept it as a fact of my life.”

The admission is accompanied again with a boyish laugh. At moments like this, Yakunin seems a world away from the tense, anxiety-etched figure that he describes in his memoir; a weight seems lifted from his shoulders; he seems unencumbered and playfully honest in his answers.

In this new mood of manic international distrust, one can only hope that Yakunin’s optimism is grounded in some sort of reality, and that Russia and the West need only a sense of shared experience to get along better. It seems a remote possibility at best. And the answer to that hope will only come, I suspect, during Putin’s next term (he is almost certain to win the coming election, with poll ratings, at the time of writing, hovering above 70 percent.)

After we finish our interview, I take Yakunin upstairs to where the photographer is waiting. Within moments, the former KGB agent has been consumed by schoolboy giggles as he poses for a headshot. He apologises as tears of laughter prickle his eyes. “I’m sorry” he says, a hand placed giddily on his chest. “But what fun!”

This article was taken from the Mar/Apr 2018 issue of Gentleman’s Journal. To join the club, 

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