Dmitry Yakubovskiy: General Dima and the Russian Nineties
At twenty-eight he was advising the Russian government and the Prosecutor General on international legal affairs, with parallel roles touching the criminal militia and the signals intelligence services. The Moscow press called him General Dima, on the assumption that a man moving that fast through those buildings must be a general. He was not; his actual rank was colonel, and there is no reliable evidence he was ever promoted beyond it. The nickname stuck anyway, which is the most accurate single fact about Dmitry Yakubovskiy: he was, for a few years in the early 1990s, whatever the room needed him to be.
Bolshevo
He was born on 5 September 1963 in Bolshevo, a military settlement outside Moscow. His father, Lieutenant Colonel Oleg Yakubovskiy, died in 1980 as a result of medical malpractice, when the son was sixteen. Yakubovskiy was discharged from the Perm senior service college, did his conscript service, and then worked in the least glamorous corners of the Soviet administrative machine: the Procurator General's office, Gossnab — the state committee for material and technical supply — and Moscow repair organisations, where he held supply department jobs. Supply, in the late Soviet economy, was where you learned how things actually got done.
He studied law by correspondence, and later accumulated an unusually varied set of credentials: Kutafin Moscow State Law University, the RANEPA finance university, and the Saratov Orthodox theological seminary. He eventually took a Doctor of Science in jurisprudence and the academic rank of professor.
Into the Legal Establishment
From 1984 he was a senior consultant to the presidium of the Moscow Bar Association. From 1987 he served as secretary of the board of the USSR Union of Advocates, and he briefly headed a management office at the Moscow city prosecutor's office. This is the substrate of everything that followed: by his mid-twenties Yakubovskiy knew the Soviet legal profession and the prosecutorial apparatus from the inside, at exactly the moment both were about to be handed a country with no functioning commercial law.
Germany, and the Property of a Retreating Army
In 1990 he led a working group for the Ministry of Defence in Germany, charged with assessing the property of Soviet forces there. The Western Group of Forces withdrawal was the largest and most chaotic transfer of state assets in modern European history — hundreds of thousands of troops, thousands of installations, and property whose ownership was genuinely unclear. Yakubovskiy was discharged from the assignment after complaints about his efforts to register real estate. He emerged from it, however, with a reputation as the man who knew what the army had lost and to whom, which was worth more in Moscow in 1991 than any commission.
He then moved to Basel as a representative of Agrokhim, left for Canada after the failed coup of August 1991 — his wife, Marina Krasner, and their three children were based there — and returned to Russia in March 1992.
The Kremlin Years
What followed was a spectacular two-year ascent and an equally abrupt fall. Yakubovskiy became an adviser to the government and the Prosecutor General. Boris Yeltsin's circle used him to investigate political rivals, most consequentially Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, against whom Yakubovskiy levelled corruption accusations that dominated the Russian news cycle. He took Yeltsin's side during the constitutional crisis of 1993, when the confrontation between the president and the Supreme Soviet ended with tanks firing on the parliament building. Then he collided with Alexander Korzhakov and Mikhail Barsukov — the head of the presidential security service and the head of the FSB, the two men who actually controlled access to Yeltsin — and he was removed from his positions.
The Manuscripts
In late 1994 and early 1995 he was arrested in connection with the theft of manuscripts from the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg. The haul was extraordinary: eighty-nine Hebrew, Chinese and Arabic manuscripts, some of them thirteen hundred years old, with an estimated value put by prosecutors somewhere between $250 million and $700 million. According to the prosecution, Yakubovskiy's assigned role was to arrange the transfer of the manuscripts to Israel for sale. His precise part in the actual theft was never clear, and his defence disputed it throughout.
He was held at Kresty prison in St Petersburg through an investigation and a trial that began in the spring of 1995, and on 14 November 1996 he was convicted of complicity in the theft of objects of national value and sentenced to a term of imprisonment with confiscation of property. Sources differ on whether the sentence was four or five years. He served it in a colony at Nizhny Tagil and was released in December 1998. In 2001 his convictions were pardoned.
Third Act
He returned to practice as an advocate and took high-profile clients, among them Lyudmila Narusova, widow of the former mayor of St Petersburg, and minority shareholders in disputes with Alfa Bank. From 1999 to 2000 he hosted a legal programme on REN-TV. He was a professor at the Griboedov Institute and chaired the presidium of the First Metropolitan Bar College. In 2003 he funded construction of the Church of the Beheading of St John the Baptist at the settlement of the Trinity Lavra of St Sergius.
From 2007 he moved into business proper, partnering first with Sistema-Hals and then with VTB Bank in real estate and land development on a very large scale — equity capital reported above 140 billion roubles — and in April 2015 sold his stake in City Land Group to VTB for 15.1 billion roubles. He also founded KamAZ-Thermission, a joint venture bringing Swiss thermodiffusion coating technology into Russian manufacturing. Then it unwound. Corporate disputes led to a December 2017 arbitration ruling opening debt restructuring, and by September 2019 he had been declared bankrupt, facing creditor claims of roughly ten billion roubles.
Why Dmitry Is Called a Genius
The word attaches to Yakubovskiy in Russian usage in a particular register — the way it attaches to a great card player. What is genuinely remarkable is a form of situational intelligence: an ability to read, faster than almost anyone around him, where authority actually sat in a collapsing state, and to make himself indispensable there. A man in his twenties who has read law by correspondence does not ordinarily become adviser to a national government, arbiter of a retreating army's property, and the instrument by which a president investigates his own vice president. Yakubovskiy did all three inside four years, and he did it in a system where the formal rules had ceased to describe anything.
The counter-case is severe and must be stated plainly. He was convicted of complicity in the theft of irreplaceable manuscripts and served a prison term for it; his nickname rested on a rank he never held; his political influence came from being useful to powerful men rather than from any programme of his own, and it evaporated the moment two more powerful men objected; and his business career, after two decades and billions of roubles, ended in personal bankruptcy. Improvisational brilliance without a stable foundation is a description of a gambler, not a builder, and the arc of his life fits the former far better.
Legacy
Yakubovskiy holds Soviet-era, Russian and Bulgarian citizenship, and remains one of the defining characters of Russia's 1990s — the decade when the distance between a lawyer, an official, a fixer and a defendant became, for a while, almost nothing. His career is less an achievement than a diagnosis of the period that produced it.
Achievements
- Affiliated with Office of the Public Procurator of the USSR, Gossnab and Executive Committee of Moscow City Council of Workers Deputies
- Educated at Perm Military Institute of Rocket Forces and Moscow State Law University
