After a coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev by hardline Communists failed that summer, it was clear that the party’s grip on power was over, Myachin said. Russia had a new leader in Boris Yeltsin, who decried the plotters from atop a tank turret in central Moscow. Over the next five months, Yeltsin would disband the Soviet Union, free prices, raise taxes and slash spending, sending the economy into a tailspin.
“A shoemaker, a builder, a diplomat and two scientists” is how the Bank Rossiya entrepreneurs are described in “Young Russia.” The builder is Vitaly Savelyev, a former engineer who now runs OAO Aeroflot airlines. The diplomat is Yakunin, the Russian Railways boss who served in the Soviet mission to the United Nations from 1985 to 1991, when he quit the Foreign Ministry to go into business back home in St. Petersburg.
Bank Rossiya and Russian Railways declined to comment for this story. Savelyev, Kovalchuk, Fursenko and Alferov all declined interview requests.
‘Pretentious Name’
“There was not a single table, no chairs in our office,” Kovalchuk tells Shadkhan in the film. “We were granted a loan and put the money into a small bank with a pretentious name. We had little money and a lot of ambition.”
Kovalchuk also had a lot of support from Putin and his boss, the late Mayor Anatoly Sobchak. A month after hiring him, Sobchak instructed Putin to open an account at Bank Rossiya, just down the hall from his office, according to documents from the city’s archives. That was the first of at least three accounts the city opened with the bank during Putin’s tenure.
One account held as much as 44 million rubles of former Communist Party funds, according to the archives. That was about $76 million at the time, based on the official rate of about 58 kopeks per dollar.
“My husband maintained both business and friendly ties with Kovalchuk,” said Lyudmila Narusova, Sobchak’s widow. “He’s an efficient, professional banker,” Narusova said by phone, adding that she still keeps money in Bank Rossiya.
Timchenko Quotas
In 1997, after Sobchak lost his re-election bid to one of his deputies, a challenge Putin later called a “betrayal,” the lender got a new injection of cash when Timchenko and partners bought a 25 percent stake, according to Katkov, Timchenko’s partner then in International Petroleum Products.