In Moscow's Shadows 253: The Fall Of Antikvar
6/20/202636 min
A 74-year-old port magnate known in the underworld as Antikvar is arrested by an FSB team, hauled into Moscow’s Basmanny Court, and suddenly the ghosts of St Petersburg’s wild 1990s feel very alive. Ilya Traber's career took him from from antiques monopolies to oil terminals, in the murky interface between “authoritative business” and outright organised crime. And much of it thanks to his relationship with Putin in and since the 1990s.
Traber's name has run through the bloody annals of 'Banditsky Peterbug,' so why act now? My theory: he overstepped the bounds of the new rules, at a time when serious figures within the FSB, including First Deputy Director Korolev, had reason to go after him.
But this would have come to nothing had Traber's old partner Putin not given the green light. When the decision is made at the top, even yesterday’s “untouchables” can become expendable.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsMark Galeotti· Host0:00
The high-profile arrest of an alleged criminal businessman in St. Petersburg, Пяндицкий Петербург, is a useful reminder that the sins of the wild 90s can't be forgotten until everyone who remembers them is behind bars or in the ground. [dramatic music] Hello, I'm Mark Galliotti, and welcome to My View of Russia in Moscow Shadows. This podcast of varying length, frequency, and format, yet always reassuringly low production values, is supported by generous and perspicacious patrons like you, and also by the crisis exercise software company, Conductor. Okay, so I'm recording this and will be releasing this a day earlier than usual on Saturday the 20th of June, in part because, quite frankly, this is a story that excites me to my, my dark soul with its particular problematic interest in, in Russia's gangsters, and also because there's a lot of nonsense being talked about this case, and it'd be nice to put some of the, of the myths to bed. But anyway, let me just start with a parallel.