*
It was during the chaotic period that followed Gorbachev’s departure Sergei Tarasov first met Putin, then a middle level functionary in post-Soviet Leningrad, yet to become St Petersburg.
Putin worked for the then mayor of the city, he held a Phd in economics and had recently returned from what was then East Germany where he had served as a KGB colonel. He was a pure product of the USSR, born in 1952, and had grown up during Khrushchev-Brezhnev period, at the height of the Cold War. Order, hierarchy and organization, combined with a sense of duty and service to Mother Russia, were the values he had been taught to respect.
Tarasov remembered a conversation with Sergei Pugachev, another oligarch who had been close to Putin in his early years, but had since fallen out of favour. Putin had confided to Pugachev he had no ambition to stay in power and that his real goal was to get rich, however, as the end of his first term in office approached he began to fear what might happen if he left the Kremlin.
At the time Tarasov had put that down to idle court chatter, speculation. But a decade later Putin was rich beyond all imagination, a popular, unquestioned, all powerful, incumbent autocrat, who possessed Russia like the czars had before him.
Only a fool would step down. Like Stalin, Brezhnev or Mao he would remain in power until he died.
The question that remained was why had he, Sergei Tarasov, fallen from grace? It seemed to him it was not only his ideas, but his banking partnership with Fitzwilliams, which had not only provoked jealousy, but had also generated a powerful conduit out of Russia: a form of independence, which set him on a collision course with Putin, who apart from expecting nothing less than complete subservience, had lost control of the oligarch.
However, Putin was not alone in the Kremlin as Kalevi Kyyrönen had once explained to John Francis, with the enigmatic words: there are many towers in the Kremlin.
Since those early days in Petersburg, the ex-KGB man had radically changed. He had surrounded himself with his own confidants, old KGB pals, men like himself, and others whose vision looked to the past rather than the future.
As an individual, Putin inherited many of the traits of his Soviet predecessors and those who fell into his bad books were stripped of their privileges, banished, imprisoned or liquidated. His rule was intolerant, unforgiving, forgetting and vengeful.
Prior to the Ukraine crisis, Putin had the choice of liberalising his country, or advancing his personal dream of a Greater Russia, a vision that consisted of bringing the former members of the USSR together in an economic union, restoring the Kremlin to its former power vis-à-vis the West and its standing in the eyes of China and the developing world.
He chose the latter.
However, an unfortunate conjuncture of events derailed his ambitious plans. A collision of circumstances, starting with the Ukrainian crisis. As China’s long predictable slowdown unfolded, commodity and oil prices fell as a consequence of falling demand and oversupply, exacerbated by the sudden explosion of US shale oil production, all of which landed the Kremlin in a situation where it oil linked revenues could no longer accommodate its leader’s ambitions.
The outcomes of listening to his hard-line cronies came at the cost setting Putin on a collision course with the West.
A situation which disappointed Tarasov, who had tried to warn his political friends in London of the dangers. But Westminster persistently misread the man in the Kremlin, mistakenly believing concessions would lead to compromise. Putin, however, saw compromises as victories.
As he put it in Sotchi: ‘All states have always had and will continue to have their own diverse interests, while the course of world history has always been accompanied by competition between nations and their alliances. In my view this is absolutely natural.’
BLEAK HOUSE
The Stena ferry, Europe, docked in Rosslare at six thirty in the evening after a crossing of four hours. The Pijselman family checked into the Talbot Hotel, in Wexford, twenty kilometres from Rosslare Harbour. It was January, damp and cold, the peak of the low season. Fortunately the hotel, not a five star palace, was modern, well appointed and well heated. After an early diner the family retired to their two bedroom suite.
The next morning after a solid Irish breakfast they set out for Limerick, a drive of three hours across the rolling winter landscape of Kilkenny and Tipperary. Tarasov felt a huge weight fall from his shoulders taking in the villages and farms that rolled by as Kseniya cared for their two children in the back of the spacious Land Rover.
It was one in the afternoon when they arrived in Limerick City, the sky was overcast and the streets glistened after a brief shower. Tarasov called the housekeeper announcing their arrival and asked her to prepare lunch. Then after consulting a map he took the road for Foynes and a few miles further turned onto a small country road not far from Adare. Five minutes later they entered the gated driveway of a large late Georgian period country manor, which Howard had jokingly called Bleak House.
Bleak House – Limerick – Ireland
The fully renovated historic property was situated on high ground surrounded by a country estate composed of rolling woodlands and fields overlooking the Shannon River. The two hundred acre property had few neighbours, guaranteeing its occupants privacy and tranquillity.
The fourteen room house offered the Tarasovs genteel living far from the threats and dangers of Moscow, and prying British media, which would have mercilessly hounded him, as it had with certain of his less fortunate compatriots.
From the wintry Irish countryside the banker could now consider his future, how he would reorganise his life, which far from being triste was assured by the wealth he had put beyond the reach of the sinister claws of the Kremlin’s vultures, in a diversity of offshore accounts and holdings: if there was one thing Tarasov had learnt as a banker, it was to protect his own money.