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And a terrifying one. Abramovich’s suit named Belton personally, meaning that her own home and savings would be at stake. The case was projected to cost ten million pounds if it went to trial, and under English law those who lose a suit can be ordered to pay their adversary’s legal costs. That’s part of why the rich like to take detractors to court in London. (Indeed, last fall, the Kazakh mining giant E.N.R.C. sued Tom Burgis over claims he made in “Kleptopia”; the case was dismissed on March 2nd.) Libel tourism is another chronic English problem that everyone bemoans but nobody does anything about.
This has meant terrific business for the oligarchs’ morally flexible attorneys; according to the British trade publication The Lawyer, some law firms charge a “Russian premium” for their services, of up to fifteen hundred pounds an hour. The attorneys who represent oligarchs have managed to remain largely unsullied by their unsavory doings. One lawyer involved in the HarperCollins suit is Geraldine Proudler, who previously sued the anti-corruption activist Bill Browder on behalf of a Russian official who was accused of involvement in the torture and murder of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009. (Browder prevailed in that case.) Remarkably, Proudler has served as a trustee of English pen, which advocates free speech and human rights.
In assessing this dire legal situation, it’s important to consider not just the cases that are brought against books and articles but also the books and articles that are never published in England to begin with. In 2014, the American political scientist Karen Dawisha submitted her book “Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?” to her longtime publisher, Cambridge University Press. After reviewing the manuscript, Dawisha’s editor, John Haslam, wrote to her praising the book but saying that Cambridge could not publish it. “The risk is high that those implicated in the premise of the book—that Putin has a close circle of criminal oligarchs at his disposal and has spent his career cultivating this circle—would be motivated to sue,” he explained. Even if the press ultimately prevailed, the expense of the proceedings could be ruinous, Haslam said. In a controlled fury, Dawisha wrote back that the U.K. had apparently become a “no-fly zone” when it came to publishing “the truth about this group.” The oligarchs “feel free to buy Belgravia, kill dissidents in Piccadilly with Polonium 210, fight each other in the High Court, and hide their children in British boarding schools. And as a result of their growing knowledge about and influence in the UK, even the most significant institutions . . . cower and engage in pre-emptive book-burnings.” (The book was ultimately published by Simon & Schuster in the United States.)
A major difficulty for would-be chroniclers of the kleptocrats is that, in England, a person bringing a libel suit does not have to prove that an assertion is untrue, so long as there’s evidence of “serious harm”; instead, the author must prove that it is true. This is a fiendishly burdensome standard when it comes to, say, establishing the true ownership of a super-yacht, or the subtle dynamics of an influence campaign orchestrated by ex-K.G.B. spies. In “Kleptopia,” Tom Burgis remarks that in the former Soviet Union the “skill prized above all others” was the ability to obfuscate the origins of stolen money. (On paper, Putin’s real-estate portfolio consists chiefly of one conspicuously modest apartment. He has denied that the palace on the Black Sea belongs to him.) Here, the professional facilitators of London’s butler class come in handy. There is a booming industry in financial dissimulation: the creation of shell companies, tax shelters, offshore trusts.
Haslam, in his letter to Dawisha, had objected that “Putin has never been convicted” for the crimes described in the book. But, by making it perilous to publish allegations, however well documented, that haven’t yet resulted in a criminal conviction, the legal system can grant well-financed malefactors a free pass from scrutiny. According to an investigation by BuzzFeed News, U.S. intelligence believes that at least fourteen people have been assassinated on British soil by Russian mafia groups or secret services, which sometimes collaborate, but British authorities tend not to name suspects or bring charges. (Instead, they have concluded with an unsettling frequency that such deaths are suicides.) In an interview with NPR in late February, Bill Browder was asked whether he would name Russian oligarchs who had not yet been sanctioned but should be. “I live in London,” he said. “So it’s very unwise to name names.”
Catherine Belton named names. But she, too, is bedevilled by the challenge of producing absolute proof in a world of shadowy deniability. There is the official record—property deeds, legal convictions—and then there is what everyone knows. “It’s not just his money,” a onetime associate of Abramovich’s told her. “He is Putin’s representative.” As the oligarch Oleg Deripaska once explained, “If the state says we need to give it up, we’ll give it up. I don’t separate myself from the state. I have no other interests.” (He later claimed to have been joking.) Time and again in “Putin’s People,” Belton tells the official version of a story, and then shares what she understands to be the real story—the word on the street. She describes “an emerging KGB capitalism in which nothing was quite as it seemed.” This is what it looks like when a national economy is designed by ex-spies.