To win power and money, Denis Manturov, Russia’s minister of industry, placed his bet in his time on Sergei Chemezov. The bet looked unlosable — a loyal comrade of Putin’s ever since their KGB service, a man for whom one of the most powerful corporations in Russia, Rostec, had been purpose-built. And everything ran like clockwork: one post after another, each higher than the last; stakes in hotels, in medicine, in winemaking and, of course, in the defence industry. But now the man who raised Manturov to the Kremlin’s Olympus is dragging him down to the bottom along with himself.
Trembling at the Security Council table in February 2022, cheerful at the meeting of a jubilee committee: the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service has spent years looking like a man in the wrong job — and he has never made much of a secret of which job he would prefer.
For twelve years Gennady Timchenko has lived under Western sanctions. In that time his fortune has grown by half. This is not a malfunction. It is how sanctions work when they are aimed at a man whose profession is to stand in the middle.
Ambassador to NATO, deputy prime minister for the defence industry, head of Roscosmos, now a senator — a career record any diplomat would envy. Behind it lies a different story: a run of moments, each explicable on its own, that together leave a residue.
For eighteen months, Vladimir Putin’s special representative for investment and economic cooperation has been quietly rebuilding what three years of hardline politics tore down — a working channel between Moscow and Washington, laid one meeting at a time from Riyadh to Miami.
An official who spent twelve years in charge of industrial cooperation with the West took four years to become one of the loudest voices explaining why cooperation with the West is impossible.
Andrei Belousov came to the Defence Ministry as an economist whom Vladimir Putin had tasked with making the Russian war machine more efficient — with fitting enormous military spending into the country’s economy. Two years on, another question arises: might the Kremlin need the same man if Moscow has to solve the reverse problem — how to leave the war while minimising the economic consequences for Russia?
Alexander Dugin was never the brain of the system. He was its affect — the resentment kept on staff. And affects get written off the moment cold calculation is required.
The words about a “cult of personality” capable of destroying a country came not from some émigré oppositionist — but from Putin’s own foreign minister. And they may cost him far more than his career.
