Spiders in a Jar: How the War Turned Russia's Elite Into Cannibals

In the autumn, the same Putin personally ordered Traber released and the case closed. Only weeks separated the two decisions, and he made both with his own hand, never once suspecting that the arrest and the release had been prompted to him by the very same people, pulling the very same strings. This has not happened before. Putin has always been capable of being slow, of dragging his feet, of keeping a man who fell out of favour dangling for years. But to overturn his own high-profile verdict in plain view of everyone - to admit, in effect, that he himself had erred in ordering the arrest - that is new. And it is the single most interesting thing to have taken place in the Russian upper reaches in a long while. More interesting than any arrest. Because the jailing of a powerful man is, in the end, the routine business of the system. But when an all-powerful ruler swings a hundred and eighty degrees twice in two months, and both times is certain he is acting of his own free will, it means the button is still pressed by him - while the hand resting on that button now belongs to someone else. And the most gripping part of this story is working out whose.

Let us take it in order, because the plot is tangled enough that the thread is easily lost.

Let us begin with why the arrest of Traber became possible at all - and for that we need to understand the pit into which his patron, Arkady Rotenberg, had by then fallen. This, let me stress, is no ordinary rich man but one of the most load-bearing figures of Putin's Russia: a childhood friend of the president, a judo partner, a man through whose companies gigantic state contracts have flowed for decades, from Gazprom construction to the Crimean Bridge. Such people are by definition untouchable, because to strike at them is to strike at Putin himself, who raised them. But over the past year or so everything began to crumble for Rotenberg. Debts piled up, the stream of budget money on which he was used to feeding dried out, and from above came a displeasure that was muffled but distinct. When a childhood friend stops delivering benefits and starts delivering problems, the untouchability melts away - and predators willing to gnaw on the weakened animal materialise at once.

The willing predator turned out to be the FSB's Economic Security Service - the so-called Fourth Service, or SEB, the most lucrative and rapacious division of Russian state security, under its then all-powerful chief Sergei Alpatov. It was the SEB that set about dismantling Rotenberg's empire piece by piece. First came the arrests of his top managers, one after another sent behind bars. Among them was Konstantin Makhov, who ran assets that Alexei Miller's gas monopoly, Gazprom, had once "gifted" to the oligarch brothers - he was taken in a case concerning embezzlement in the building of a runway at Moscow's Domodedovo airport. Then came the turn of the innermost circle: Ilya Traber landed in a pre-trial cell - the same Antiquarian, a figure from the St Petersburg underworld of the nineties whom polite company prefers not to mention. Traber was charged with organising the murder of Alexander Petrov, the so-called "boss of Vyborg," with more bloody charges in preparation. And none of this, of course, was done freelance - it was done with Putin's direct sanction. Against people of this calibre, nobody in Russia moves without a nod from the very top.

And then - a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. Practically overnight.

The Hostage Method: How Russia Governs Through the Cell

To understand what actually happened here, one first has to explain the rules this system lives by. Because the arrests of Makhov and Traber are not a fight against crime, and not even a fight against corruption. They are a management technology. And it works like this.

Take any senior Russian official - a minister, a deputy prime minister, a governor. There is a very good chance that someone from his innermost circle is, right now, sitting in a cell or under investigation. Not a distant subordinate, not a chance acquaintance, but someone close: a deputy, a family friend, a business partner, sometimes a relative. And the official himself stays in his post, goes to his meetings, delivers his reports, smiles for the cameras. Prime Minister Mishustin, the powerful Kremlin administrator Sergei Kiriyenko, the industry chief Denis Manturov - the list runs on without end, and you would struggle to find a governor without a jailed deputy or an arrested businessman friend to his name.

The point of the arrangement is that the official now works not out of fear and not out of conscience, but for the sake of a living human being. Putin is displeased with the results, the reported "successes" turn out to be hollow - and someone from the inner circle promptly heads to a cell. From then on: atone for your guilt, prove your loyalty, accomplish the impossible, dazzle, ingratiate yourself. You want your friend out - deliver results. The classic case is Veniamin Kondratyev, governor of the Kuban region: half his circle was jailed, even his in-law did a stint in detention, his own home was searched - and then came the promises that all the beaches would open and the harvest would be record-breaking. Make it happen however you can, even if half the sea is slicked with oil. The arrangement instils in the elite precisely the feeling on which the whole vertical of power rests - a constant fear that never lets go for a second.

The gold standard of that fear is Sergei Shoigu, the former defence minister. Putin will never jail him, but punishes him almost daily. He failed to win the war - so his entire entourage went to jail. Picture it: standing at the Victory Day parade, smiling, knowing that the man beside you sent every single person you worked with for decades, celebrated holidays with, whose families you knew, behind bars. Stop smiling, and Ruslan Tsalikov - Shoigu's oldest and most loyal friend, whom Shoigu literally begged to have moved to house arrest - goes straight back to the cell. Shoigu's own family is still untouched; that is the one red line Putin has not yet crossed. But everyone else watching this spectacle feels a chill down the spine, which is exactly the intended effect.

Someone will say: but this is just the usual infighting among the security agencies, Putin simply refuses to make personnel decisions under pressure, and he will dismiss the offender in due course. But "in due course" almost never arrives. This is not weakness and it is not chaos. It is a strategy, and everything happens strictly on his personal say-so. There is nothing new in it, by the way - Comrade Stalin worked the very same way.

Hold this mechanism in your mind. Because it is against exactly this backdrop that the whole story of Rotenberg, Traber and the fall of Alpatov unfolds.

The Reversal: Putin Overrules Putin

So: in the summer, the system was running as intended. Rotenberg's empire was being methodically dismantled, his people were being jailed, Traber was sitting in his cell. And then the position of the man at the top swung a hundred and eighty degrees - not gradually, but all at once.

The trigger was the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. There, for the first time in years, Arkady Rotenberg stepped demonstratively into the light. In previous years he had, at most, shown his face at the judo tournaments he himself organised on the sidelines; he took no part in the plenary sessions and never appeared before the cameras, not thinking it worth his while. This time he suddenly sat in the front rows, beside Gazprom chief Alexei Miller, during Putin's address. Gazprom, the same gas monopoly that had been one of the largest sources of money for the Rotenberg structures and had "shared" a string of assets with them. The oligarch's PR people immediately set about pushing exclusive footage across various channels with captions reading: look, he is no longer out of favour.

And almost immediately after the forum, the releases began. The first signal was Konstantin Makhov - the very Rotenberg manager who had been sitting in jail on the Domodedovo case. The Moscow City Court switched his measure of restraint to house arrest. In itself, easing the terms for a single detainee is a trifle no one would have noticed at another time. But by the rules of this system, where a jailed close associate is a form of punishment for his patron, a release works in exactly the opposite direction: if the hostage is let out, it means his patron - here, Rotenberg - has been given to understand that he is on the road to forgiveness. Next came Ilya Traber's release - and the Petrov murder case was closed altogether, the charges dropped, and this was done by Putin's personal decision, the same Putin who had personally approved the arrest earlier. Fittingly, the Antiquarian's pardon fell right on the eve of the Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God - a day of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Behind Traber, his entire combat infrastructure tumbled out too. His "right hand," the many-times-convicted gangland figure Vladimir Danilenko, walked free - the prosecution against him dropped. And this only days after a remarkable document had surfaced: how this same Danilenko paid the crime boss Abakar Darbishev the second half of a one-million-dollar fee for eliminating Petrov, the sum dressed up as a loan agreement - interest-free, with a repayment date set all the way out to 2046 - so that it could be laundered and invested into a business belonging to Yuri Iliadi, a friend of Traber's who had once helped the Antiquarian acquire a Greek passport. The decision to remove Petrov ripened in Traber at the height of the pandemic, and the faithful Danilenko drove a minibus to Moscow to see Darbishev. Also released was the enforcer Alisultan Nadirbegov - the man who organised the surveillance of Petrov, brought the shooter to St Petersburg, and ran the whole operation. Nadirbegov's biography is telling: he once handled muscle work for the crime lord Vyacheslav Ivankov, known as "Yaponchik," and when a sniper shot Ivankov dead, he moved into Darbishev's crew. Petrov, incidentally, was also killed by a sniper. A signature.

All of these people - the organisers and executors of a contract killing - found themselves free in a single stroke. Because the question being decided was not theirs, but of an entirely different order.

Who Actually Pulled the String

And now, the heart of the matter. What made Putin turn around?

The reversal came after a long conversation between the man at the top and one member of the so-called clan of bodyguards - probably Alexei Dyumin. What was said, only two people know. But from the way events then unfolded, the picture is not hard to reconstruct.

Putin was told that a conspiracy was being prepared against him. And that the arrest of Traber and the assault on Rotenberg were part of it. The logic here was subtle, and all the more convincing for it. The thing is that Traber, Rotenberg and this whole St Petersburg circle of the nineties came out of the same milieu as Putin himself; their roots are shared, right down to old unsolved killings such as the 1999 assassination of Pavel Kapysh, general director of the Baltic Financial-Industrial Group. Dig seriously into any of these cases, and the investigation will inevitably reach toward the highest levels of today's power, because in that Petersburg everyone was tied to everyone else. Which means that every move in the Antiquarian's cases or those of Rotenberg's team ricochets into the president's own reputation: the moment investigators take up an episode, the name Putin surfaces right alongside. Wherever you poke, the ears of the man at the top are sticking out. And the seasoned Alpatov, so the story went, had let himself be deceived and, without meaning to, had deceived the president in turn. What exactly the messenger used to back this up is unknown. But the reaction was instant. Traber and Rotenberg's key people walked free; Alpatov was removed in a single day. The all-powerful head of the SEB, one of the top-ranked security chiefs, was sent on a holiday from which he will not return to the FSB. His protégés are under the axe too: Nikolai Babakov, head of the FSB's Directorate T, only recently appointed - the very directorate that was investigating the embezzlement in the construction of a runway at Moscow's Domodedovo airport, the case that had put Makhov in a cell. Sergei Demyanishnikov, head of the St Petersburg FSB. And a whole row of other senior FSB officers appointed under Alpatov. The full list of dismissals is promised for October - when a large shake-up of the FSB is expected in general.

And here is where the real news is buried. This is not the first time the clan of bodyguards has pulled this trick on Putin. In the spring a trial balloon was floated: representatives of the clan reported to the president a plot supposedly being prepared against his life - remember all those mythical gunmen and machine-gunners on the Kremlin walls and atop the mausoleum? - and brilliantly "foiled" a threat that never existed. That was when the clan grasped the true scale of its influence. The Traber affair was the second attempt, this one more ambitious: not merely to impress, but to win back one of their own and, at the same stroke, sweep inconvenient security men off the board.

So the mechanism is this. There is a group of people who control what the man at the top sees and hears. And this group has learned to govern his decisions by governing his picture of the world. Not by persuading him, not by intriguing in the open, but by feeding him the reality it needs him to have: there is a conspiracy against you, you were lied to, your loyal Alpatov set you up. Putin believes it - and turns around. Once, on an invented assassination plot. A second time, on an invented conspiracy. And he cancels his own decrees: first the July decree dismissing from the Prosecutor General's Office Sergei Bochkarev, the state's chief specialist in seizing assets for the treasury; now the arrest of Traber. This kind of volatility was never seen in the man at the top before. Now it is. And it is deeply interesting which centre of influence is working these miracles.

The Clan of Bodyguards: A New Era

The answer to the question of "which centre" is the resolution of the whole story.

For long years, the personnel reshuffles in the security bloc, the ministries, the state corporations were the work of familiar names - members of the "Ozero" dacha cooperative, shareholders in Bank Rossiya. The St Petersburg circle, the old guard, men with assets and with history. Well: that era is ending. In its place comes the clan of bodyguards - and it has been coming for a long time, doggedly, step by step.

The core of the clan is made up of men who share one line in their biographies. Alexei Dyumin, secretary of the State Council - a former bodyguard to Putin. Dmitry Mironov, adviser to the president - also a former bodyguard to Putin. Dmitry Stepanenko, deputy head of the state property agency - yet another former bodyguard to Putin. Dmitry Konchev, head of the Federal Protective Service, the FSO. Men who have neither "Ozero" nor Bank Rossiya nor the oil fortunes of the nineties behind them. But who possess the one thing nobody else has: physical closeness to the body. For years they stood by the door, drove the car, guarded him, were beside him in the moments when there was no one else beside him at all. And now it turns out that closeness to the body converts into closeness to the ear. And whoever owns the ear owns the decisions.

The clan has already embedded itself deep into all of Arkady Rotenberg's assets, and its people hold strong influence over Herman Gref, head of Sberbank, Russia's largest bank. Right now the clan is squeezing assets out of Anatoly Yablonsky, keeper of the capital of FSB deputy director Yevgeny Lovyrev. And political ambitions this group always had - it simply used to lack the nerve to press them.

Now it has the nerve. And the operation to rescue Rotenberg was not, in fact, about rescuing Rotenberg at all. Or rather, not only about him. Yes, the clan's interests largely coincide with the oligarch's financial ones; yes, Traber was helped out. But at bottom this was a demonstration. The clan was showing - both Putin and the rest of the elite - what it is capable of. We can convince the man at the top of anything. We can jail and we can release. We can bring down the all-powerful head of the SEB in a single day. Watch, and remember.

And Rotenberg himself harbours no illusions. Yes, the attack was beaten back. But he will not recover his former standing. From master he has become a pawn in someone else's larger game, and he has fallen into total dependence on the clan. The bodyguards have long had their eye on a number of his assets - including those held jointly with Traber - in particular the PNT oil terminal in St Petersburg. He will plainly have to part with them. So much, then, for the price of rescue: you are hauled out of the pit not so you can be robbed on the run, but so you can be robbed calmly and at leisure, in a proprietary fashion. Rescue here is a form of absorption.

What the War Has to Do With It

And now, the main question. Why is all of this happening precisely now? Why does the man at the top jail and release people one episode at a time, cancel his own decrees, while a predatory clan that did not exist before forms around him?

Because the food has run out.

For twenty-five years this system lived off a growing pie. Oil, gas, budget contracts, the leftovers of privatisation, access to export flows - there was enough of all of it for everyone admitted to the table. You could divide, you could negotiate, you could keep a rival dangling for years without killing him. The pie was growing, so there was room enough. And the hostage mechanism worked gently: a close associate is jailed, the official mends his ways, gets him out, everyone is content, everyone stays in business.

The war stopped the pie from growing. The budget is empty, there is no financing, exports are under sanctions, and the cost of the front devours everything within reach. Putin, by accounts from the inside, is displeased with everyone and everything - because there is nothing left with which to please him. The successes are hollow, the war was not won, the money is gone. And the jailings, which used to come as needed, now come literally every day, interlaced with nationalisations. A system that cannot grow begins to eat itself. It has nothing left to divide - so it divides one another.

This is the jar of spiders. As long as feed was dropped into the jar, the spiders sat in their corners, eyeing one another, occasionally scrapping over territory, but on the whole coexisting. The moment the feed ran out, each spider became the only available meal for its neighbour. The security men devour the oligarchs - the SEB takes apart Rotenberg. The clans devour the security men - the bodyguards bring down the SEB. And even the "rescued" are not rescued, merely set aside for later, like Rotenberg with his PNT terminal. In a jar where the food is gone there are no allies - only those who have not yet been eaten, and the queue.

And the war, in this construction, is not merely the backdrop. It is the hand that sealed the jar with a lid and stopped dropping in the feed. It is the war that zeroed out the old model, in which there was enough for everyone, and pushed to the top a new tier - those who have no assets but do have access to the body. In the fat years the bodyguards would have stayed bodyguards. Hunger made them a clan. Because when there is nothing left to divide, the decisive asset is no longer a factory or an oil field, but control over what the leader sees and hears. Whoever feeds him his picture of the world is the master of the jar.

And here the whole story closes on itself. Vladimir Putin, who spent a quarter of a century building a system of total personal control, a system in which no one dares to act without his say-so, has ended up its hostage. He still presses the buttons. He jails and releases, appoints and removes; his signature still decides everything. But what exactly he signs is no longer decided by him - it is decided by those who ration out the reality that reaches him. He jailed Traber because the situation was shown to him one way. He released Traber because it was shown to him another. In both cases the hand was his. The head, no longer. And that, perhaps, is the truest portrait of what the war has made of Russian power: a leader still omnipotent, yet no longer knowing whose will his own hand is carrying out.