Vladimir Yakunin - The Treacherous Path - An Insider's Account of Modern Russia

Many of my countrymen were gripped by a feverish iconoclasm in the months after the end of the Soviet Union. It was as if they desperately needed to find some way of transmitting the inchoate feelings of bewilderment and rage this tectonic change had left them with. Across the country, statues commemorating the heroes of communism were hauled to the ground. Outside the Lubyanka [6] The popular name for the building that contained the headquarters of the KGB. in Moscow, a monument to the Cheka’s founder Felix Dzerzhinsky was toppled and not long after there was an attempt to do the same to another monument to him in Leningrad. But there was a difference between the two cities. When a group of civilians massed near the statue, ready to smash it to pieces, they were confronted by a handful of officers who braced themselves in front of the stone figure. They were not armed, but made it clear that anybody who tried to do any damage would receive a bloody nose for their efforts. If they wanted to tear a statue down, the officers suggested, it would be better for them to look elsewhere. As it turned out, very few if any of the socialist monuments in Leningrad met the same fate as their counterparts in Moscow – perhaps appropriate, in this traditionally revolutionary city.

We must be careful before we judge the actions of men and women from the past; it is too easy to condescend to history. And we must remember also that when we destroy the artefacts of the previous order, we are depriving future generations of their past: one cannot cut the cord of history in the middle without incurring a terrible loss. Though this is of course the aim of any ideology that wants to achieve complete control over the society in which it finds itself. For the ideology to take root, its adherents must demolish everything to do with the civilisation it has supplanted – and those items for which the population feel most affection are considered the most dangerous, for they represent a challenge to the new ideology’s hegemony over the people’s hearts and minds. Once already during the twentieth century Russia had seen its cultural and spiritual inheritance smashed, when the Bolsheviks destroyed countless old monuments and churches. In 1991, however, we hoped for stability, and that the values that had inspired the best aspects of the old regime would continue to underpin whatever new society emerged in its aftermath. So we could not accept this symbolic annihilation of everything that the Soviet Union had once represented, which was informed by a blind, vicious fury that wishes only to spit in the eye of the past.

A couple of months later, in the summer of 1991, I was sitting in my office when I got a telephone call, a strange communication that unsettled and reassured me in equal measure. The man on the other end of the line was the vice-director of the Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute, where I had spent some years as a researcher before leaving for New York. He was not a friend – a colleague at most – but nevertheless he said to me:

You used to work at the institute, I remember you. I know what is going on now; I know how witch hunts turn out – if you ever need protection, if you ever need a safe house for your family or yourself, this is my telephone number, just call me. I have a dacha near St Petersburg. You will always be welcome there.

His communication with me was a response to the uncomfortable sequence of events, which began in the summer of 1991, when a decree by Yeltsin suspended the activities of the Communist Party, another step that made me realise that I was vulnerable now in ways I had never considered possible. There had been violence in Estonia, Georgia, Azerbaijan. Even in Czechoslovakia, the site of the bloodless ‘Velvet Revolution’, the entire senior hierarchy of their secret service had been eliminated – each man gunned down without even the pretence of a trial.

And in Russia, the government had said that the new so-called democrats could enter the KGB premises and were to be given access to any document – cables, records, CVs – they asked for. It was supposed to herald a new openness in society, but instead it simply meant that the many thousands of people who over the past years had, in one form or another, cooperated with the state were suddenly at risk. The principle that we were responsible for our agents had always governed our operations; we could not abandon them now, no matter how much our country had changed. We spent days burning entire files, thrusting sheet after sheet into the furnaces in our office.

The fact that the institute’s director had felt compelled to contact me at all was a sign of the curious and dangerous times through which we were living, but his generosity of spirit was a welcome reminder that the best of my country’s values were still intact, embodied by men like him. I cherish the memory of that man’s goodness; it is as valuable to me as any medal I have ever received. I thank God too that I never had cause to use the number he gave me.

Even before I left the service in 1995, I realised I would have to strain every sinew to ensure that I could carve out a small corner that would allow me to support my family. During my time in the KGB, I had been trained for mimicry; I could be whatever, whoever. I felt as comfortable in black tie and tails as I did in the white laboratory coat of a scientist. Now was the time to see if I could succeed in a different world.

In 1991, along with Yuri Kovalchuk and Andrey and Sergey Fursenko, I had created an organisation called Temp, [7] Temp’s full name was TOO NTP TEMP. TOO is broadly equivalent to LLP (Limited Liability Partnership), and NTP stands for Scientific-Technical Enterprise. which we envisaged as a kind of umbrella company that would provide a home for all of the business projects we wanted to pursue – many of which we knew would be in the science and technology sphere – making the most of the contacts and knowledge our relationship with the Ioffe Institute and other similar research facilities had furnished us with. We were trying to do something sustainable, with a moral core, bringing foreign investment and expertise to St Petersburg that would end up being of benefit to the city.

Strange as it may seem to readers thirty years on, profit was not our main goal. We knew it was important if our business was to be a success, and yet we had been brought up to value other things more than money; our priorities were achieving respect and a certain position in society. We also thought it was essential to do something positive. We had received a good education and the people around us thought well of us. In addition to this, my time in the United States had furnished me with a good command of English and experience in dealing with Westerners. But while these were advantages that set us apart from our competitors, I am not sure that they were enough. When we set up our company it was inevitable we would draw heavily on the ideological precepts that we were used to. We did not understand until later on that there was a new reality and that society was already dashing off in a different direction. It could sometimes feel as if we were trying to perfect the design of the abacus at a time when everybody else was already using calculators.

In this respect, we were different to some of our younger competitors. The generation born in the ’60s was more cynical and ruthless, and less convinced that the state had anything to offer them. They did not think anything with public involvement could yield anything worth having. While I grew up in the aftermath of the Khrushchev thaw, in a time that fizzed with possibility, they came of age once its promise had given way to disillusion, and the system had already entered terminal decline. I had experience of a system that worked, but they only knew its flaws. They felt no obligation to provide anything in return.