Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? by Karen Dawisha (Unabridged Audiobook)
Narrated by Robert Petkoff
Length: 14 hours 29 minutes
Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko die. Gorbachev is not trusted. Yeltzin is called The Destroyer. The KGB already recognized in the early 1990s that the Soviet Union was falling apart and began mafia-like operations to export and hide billions to ensure their own survival after the collapse.
They began laying the groundwork for a new supranationalist Russia. These are the men who catapulted Putin, then a junior member of the cabal, to power. Once in power, he brings his criminal gang from St. Petersburg to Moscow.
Together they loot the nation's resources; suppress the opposition; jail, exile, or murder their enemies; acquire enormous private wealth; and divide up the nation's oil, gas, treasure. They blackmail and attack their neighbors, many parts of the old USSR, and threaten the West with economic reprisal. Hundreds of KGB (and FSB, its successor) banks are established to transfer assets abroad, many of them offshore. This is why USA Administration is targeting individuals and banks over Ukraine. The intention of Putin and these men is to restore the Russian empire.
Russian scholar Dawisha describes and exposes the origins of Putin's kleptocratic regime. She presents extensive hard evidence about his gang's use of public positions for personal gain even before he became president in 2000. She documents the establishment of Bank Rossiya, now sanctioned by the U.S.; the rise of the Ozero Cooperative, founded by Putin and other members now subject to visa bans and asset seizures; the links between Putin and Petromed, the company that diverted millions in state funds to build Putin's Palace near Sochi; the role of security officials from Putin's KGB days in Leningrad and Dresden, and their alliance with organized crime.
This book is the result of years of research into the KGB and the various and thriving crime syndicates. It documents how Putin rose to run them. Dawisha's sources include Stasi archives, Russian insiders, investigative journalists in the US, Britain, Germany, Finland, France and Italy, and Western officials who served in Moscow, including from the CIA. Russian journalists wrote part of this story when the Russian media was still free. Many of them died for this story, and their work has largely been scrubbed from the Internet, and even from Russian libraries she says. But some of that work remains..