How Putin grew up in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and how he made a career KGB and rose to the heights of the state. But unlike the president, he did so in the shadow of the palace and for years moved the reins of power in Russia without making his name known to the masses. Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev is Putin’s most loyal hawk, the man the president wished to have by his side after his election as director of the FSB’s intelligence services, and the agent who mediates with the Americans in sensitive situations of the war in Ukraine. The only Russian to date who has maintained contact with Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national security adviser, despite American sanctions against him.
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Nikolay Patrushev, the man in Putin’s shadow
Born in 1951 in the same city where Putin is born a year later Leningrad, St. Petersburg Patrushev is the son of a Soviet naval officer. Immediately after graduating as a naval engineer in 1974, at the age of 24 he joined the KGB, the secret services of the Soviet Union, where he was educated at the Minsk Academy. Back in Leningrad, he takes on the role of head of the city’s antismuggling and anticorruption department and meets the young Putin there, who takes care of the city’s foreign economic relations for the mayor Anatolyj Sbciak. A friendship was formed and after the fall of the wall, the two found themselves together again at the head of the FSB between 1998 and 1999: Putin as director and Patrushev as deputy operational director. When the former enters the government, Patrushev becomes head of the FSB with the title of minister. In 2008 he left the post to become Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation (a constitutional body dealing with national security and strategic interests). In this role, his loyalty to the President stands out once again: he supports all his most aggressive policies, from the invasion of Georgia in 2008 to the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the attack on Ukraine.
The President’s Armed Wing
Since his first assignments in KGB, Patrushev earned the reputation of an inflexible and strict man. His name comes up in the British Secret Service investigation into poisoning with the polonium of the dissident Alexander Litvinenko (Putin’s enemy). And again, the former agent would have acted in the shadows to consolidate the president’s power. Immediately after Putin’s rise to the Kremlin, a number of attacks credited with provoking the Chechen terrorists 307 dead in Russia, in the cities of Moscow, Buinaksk, and Volgodon, and are used to justify the war in Chechnya, a rapidly won blitzkrieg that immediately inaugurates Putin to power and strengthens internal consensus. According to many, these attacks were real provoked by the intelligence services led by Patrushev.
The former agent will be decisive for the President also in “War against the oligarchs“Supporting the ouster of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oilmanoligarch accused of tax evasion and expelled from Russia. To further demonstrate the ties to the President and his power within the state apparatus, just look at the careers of the two sons Dmitri and Andrei: One has been Minister of Agriculture since 2018, the other a highranking Gazprom manager.