BY THE STANDARDS OF POLITICAL BOMBSHELLS, this one was nuclear. On midday on New Year’s Eve, 1999, Boris Yeltsin appeared on Russian television to announce to a stunned public that he was stepping down from the presidency. His second and final term was not due to expire for another six months, but it was time to bow out and make way for a new generation.
‘I have made a decision. I have contemplated this long and hard. Today, on the last day of the outgoing century, I am retiring,’ Yeltsin told viewers. ‘Many times I have heard it said: “Yeltsin will try to hold onto power by any means, he won’t hand it over to anyone.” That is all lies. Russia must enter the new millennium with new politicians, new faces, new, intelligent, strong and energetic people. As for those of us who have been in power for many years, we must go.’1
Rubbing his eye, Yeltsin finished with a personal appeal inspired by the difficult transition from communism that Russia had undergone in the years since he had come to power.
‘I want to ask you for forgiveness, because many of our hopes have not come true, because what we thought would be easy turned out to be painfully difficult,’ he said. ‘I ask you to forgive me for not fulfilling some hopes of those people who believed that we would be able to jump from the grey, stagnating, totalitarian past into a bright, rich and civilised future in one go . . . I myself believed in this. But it could not be done in one fell swoop. In some respects I was too naive.’
Yeltsin said he would hand power over to Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer who had been a virtual unknown until his appointment as prime minister that August. The next presidential election, scheduled for June 2000, would be brought forward to March.
For a man whose time at the helm of Russia had been marked by turbulence and uncertainty, it was a characteristic piece of theatre. It was also a demonstration of Yeltsin’s determination to control his own destiny. No Kremlin leader before him had voluntarily given up power; all had succumbed either to death or to a palace coup. The memory of Mikhail Gorbachev, driven from office almost exactly eight years earlier when his country was taken away from beneath him, will have been fresh in his mind.
It is not clear precisely when Yeltsin had taken the decision to step down. He nevertheless kept his intentions to himself until the very end, even going ahead with the recording of his annual presidential New Year’s Eve address on 28 December, only to scrap it afterwards, telling the crew they needed to have another attempt later because he was not happy with the text or with his croaky delivery.
It was time to tell the ‘family’, who had effectively been running Russia since securing his re-election in 1996. The first to know were Aleksandr Voloshin, his chief of staff, and Valentin Yumashev, a close aide who in 2001 was to marry Yeltsin’s younger daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko. That evening Yeltsin summoned the two men to his official residence at Gorky 9, a heavily guarded complex on the Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Road on the western outskirts of Moscow. They were both stunned. Yeltsin then told Dyachenko. Yeltsin’s long-suffering wife, Naina, only learnt the news on the morning of New Year’s Eve.
After recording a new speech, this time announcing his resignation, Yeltsin had a final meeting with Patriarch Alexy, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and handed over the nuclear suitcase to Putin. While his bombshell was being broadcast to the nation, he was sitting down for a boozy farewell lunch with leading members of the so-called ‘power ministries’ responsible for defence and security. Then at 1:00 P.M., now an ex-president, Yeltsin left his office in the Kremlin for the last time and his driver took him home. Dozens of people called wanting to speak to him, among them Bill Clinton. They were all told to call back later. Yeltsin was now a free man and wanted to have a nap.
That evening it was Putin, now acting president, who made the traditional New Year’s Eve address in Yeltsin’s place. It was short, to the point and intended to assuage the traditional Russian fear of instability.
‘I assure you that there will be no vacuum of power, not for a minute,’ Putin declared. ‘I promise you that any attempts to act contrary to the Russian law and constitution will be cut short.’ The state, he said, would stand firm to protect freedom of speech, of conscience and of the mass media and ownership rights – ‘these fundamental elements of a civilised society’.
Putin ended with a few words of gratitude to his predecessor, which today sound tinged with irony. ‘We will be able to see the true importance of what Boris Yeltsin has done for Russia only after some time has passed,’ he said. ‘However, it is clear already now that it was thanks to the president that Russia has opted for democracy and reform and is moving towards these goals, and has become a strong and independent state.’
The world’s airwaves began filling with tributes to Yeltsin soon after. One of the most effusive was from Clinton, who had managed to have a twenty-minute conversation with him after he woke from his nap. Clinton praised the outgoing Russian leader for ‘dismantling the communist system’ and ‘building new political institutions under democratically elected leaders within a constitutional framework’. He largely glossed over the serious problems that had begun to emerge in relations between America and Russia in the late 1990s over NATO enlargement, Kosovo and corruption, which had now been joined by concerns over the brutality of the second war in Chechnya.
Asked by reporters why he admired Yeltsin, Clinton struck a more personal note. ‘I liked him because he was always very forthright with me,’ he said. ‘He always did exactly what he said he would do. And he was willing to take chances to try to improve our relationship, to try to improve democracy in Russia.’2 Writing later in his memoirs of the Russian leader’s departure, Clinton said: ‘It was both a wise and a shrewd move, but I was going to miss Yeltsin . . . For all his physical problems and occasional unpredictability, he had been a courageous and visionary leader . . . I could tell he was comfortable with his decision. He left office and lived as he had governed, in his own unique way.’3
But what of Putin? Yeltsin had assured Clinton that the man he had selected as his successor would remain committed to democracy, open markets and arms control. But what would Putin’s elevation mean for US–Russia relations? And how did he see America: as an ally and partner, or a rival and maybe a foe? Clinton knew better than anyone how personalised power could be, especially in Russia.
IF WASHINGTON INITIALLY STRUGGLED TO GET the measure of Putin, it was understandable. His path to the Kremlin had been extraordinary both for its speed and its unexpectedness. At the end of 1991, as the Soviet Union broke up, Putin had been in his native St Petersburg, where he held a relatively minor post in the mayor’s office as head of the committee for external relations. It was not until June 1996 that he had come to Moscow to become a deputy chief of the presidential property management department. Yet by July 1998 he was head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), one of the successor services of the KGB. In August 1999 he was named prime minister.
A flurry of biographies has been written about Putin, starting with his poor upbringing in Leningrad, as his home city was then known. The only child of a stern father, who was the Communist Party representative in a factory making railway carriages, he grew up in a run-down communal apartment in a once-elegant nineteenth-century apartment building in the centre of town. Amusement came from chasing rats around the courtyard. Accounts of his childhood have undoubtedly been coloured by his later career, yet he seems to have been an unremarkable boy and young man, who briefly went off the rails before finding redemption in martial arts. A film, The Shield and the Sword, about the exploits of a Soviet spy in Nazi Germany, which was released in 1968 when he was sixteen, appears to have inspired him to join the KGB.
After studying law at Leningrad State University, Putin was accepted into the KGB and posted to East Germany – although he would never become the secret agent of his childhood dreams. He was sent instead to Dresden, a backwater that lay in what was known mockingly as the Tal der Ahnungslosen (‘Valley of the Clueless’) because it was out of the range of television broadcasts from West Germany. Just a handful of officers worked there – an enormous contrast with the KGB’s operation in East Berlin, the largest in the world. It was nevertheless certainly a step up, both in terms of career and lifestyle, from his life in Russia.
The German Democratic Republic (GDR), a communist state created out of what had been the Soviet-occupied zone of post-Nazi Germany, was on the front line with the West. It was also one of the most affluent parts of the Soviet empire, with living standards substantially higher than in the Soviet Union itself. ‘We had come from a Russia where there were lines and shortages, and in the GDR there was always plenty of everything,’4 recalled Putin. It was one of the most repressive too: between 1950 and 1989, some 274,000 people worked for the Stasi, the ministry for state security. Many ordinary people regularly reported their friends, family and neighbours to the authorities. Erich Honecker, who had led the country from 1971, refused to follow Gorbachev and liberalise East Germany, rightly seeing in such a move the seeds of destruction of his artificial state, whose only reason for existence was its communist political system.
Home for Putin and his wife, Lyudmila, a former air stewardess, was a serviced apartment block shared with KGB and Stasi families. Everything down to the dishes was provided for them. All they had to buy was food. Salary was paid partly in dollars and partly in East German marks. They also had use of a Lada for weekend excursions, which was a step up from the two-stroke Trabant that was the height of most East Germans’ motoring dreams. Work was a five-minute walk away. They and their German counterparts would socialise with each other in the evenings and at weekends. Vladimir Usoltsev, a former KGB colleague, recalled how Putin spent hours leafing through Western mail-order catalogues in an attempt to keep up with fashions and trends.5
Putin developed a taste for the local beer, Radeberger, and had a three-litre keg of it sent every week, with predictable consequences for his waistline. Lyudmila, who became pregnant with their second daughter shortly after they arrived, was struck by the contrast with Russia: how the streets were clean, the windows of their apartment block washed every week and how her German counterparts would hang out their laundry in neat lines behind the block every morning. She was jealous, too, of the fact that their counterparts in the Stasi were better paid than they were.
It was here in Dresden, far from home, that Putin lived through the collapse of the political system in which he and other Russians of his generation had grown up. Much has been made in his biographies of the fact that, by spending the second half of the 1980s in Honecker’s East Germany rather than in the Soviet Union, he failed to be caught up in the spirit of intellectual excitement as glasnost challenged old taboos and revealed the truth about the communist past. Instead he experienced the negative effects of Gorbachev’s actions on the Soviet empire. As a young patriotic KGB officer, there seems little doubt that it made a deep impression on him.
Most telling were the events of 5 December 1989, a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall. As a process of score-settling against the discredited East German communist regime gathered pace, a crowd stormed the headquarters of the Stasi, who seemed helpless to resist. A small group then crossed the road to the large house where Putin and his KGB colleagues worked.
‘The guard on the gate immediately rushed back into the house,’ recalled one of the group, Siegfried Dannath. But shortly afterwards Putin emerged. He was ‘quite small, agitated’.
‘He said to our group, “Don’t try to force your way into this property”,’ Dannath added. ‘“My comrades are armed, and they’re authorised to use their weapons in an emergency”.’6
Aware of how dangerous the situation could become, Putin called the headquarters of a nearby Soviet army tank unit to ask for protection. He was shocked by the answer he received. ‘We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow,’ the voice at the other end replied. ‘And Moscow is silent.’
As Putin put it: ‘Nobody lifted a finger to protect us.’ Worried that details of their intelligence work would fall into enemy hands, he and his KGB colleagues began frantically to destroy their files. ‘I personally burned a huge amount of material,’ he recalled in his autobiography, First Person. ‘We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst.’
The feared storming never took place, but those who have studied Putin claim the incident – and his experience of the collapse of East Germany – nevertheless taught him important lessons that would inform his later attitudes: in particular, the frailty of political elites and the ease with which they can be toppled by ‘people power’. Two weeks later Helmut Kohl, the West German chancellor, visited Dresden and was greeted by jubilant crowds demanding the reunification of the two Germanys. ‘That’s it. It’s in the bag,’ Kohl told Rudolf Seiters, one of his ministers.7 Soon afterwards, the Soviets began to pull out.
Putin was recalled to the Soviet Union in early 1990, ending up back in his home town, which the following year reverted to its old name of St Petersburg. The KGB gave him a post at the university, his alma mater, as assistant to the rector for international affairs, which gave him responsibility for watching students and visitors. It was not much of a job for an ambitious thirty-seven-year-old lieutenant general. The country was in chaos: the euphoria of the early glasnost years had given way to disorder and economic collapse. Lyudmila was appalled to see that the queues for food were even longer than they had been before they left. The Soviet Union was rapidly going the same way as East Germany.
A decade later, Putin reflected on the tumultuous events he had witnessed in Dresden. ‘Actually I thought the whole thing was inevitable,’ he said of the collapse of East Germany. ‘To be honest, I only really regretted that the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe, although intellectually I understood that a position built on walls and dividers cannot last. But I wanted something different to rise in its place. And nothing different was proposed. That’s what hurt. They just dropped everything and went away . . . We would have avoided a lot of problems if the Soviets had not made such a hasty exit from Eastern Europe.’8
YELTSIN’S ILL HEALTH IN THE LATE 1990S had made it unlikely that he would attempt to serve for a third term. But Western powers had little idea who might replace him. In the United States, such a question is answered through a succession of primaries in which candidates fight it out in the public eye; in European democracies leaders are generally selected by their party. Russia is different. Yeltsin understood that his position as president effectively gave him the chance to choose a successor, someone who would not just continue his political legacy but also protect his own interests and those of his extended political family.
Yeltsin had initially plumped for Boris Nemtsov, one of the most charismatic of the young reformers, who served from 1991 to 1997 as governor of the Nizhni Novgorod region, which included Russia’s eponymous third-largest city, before moving to Moscow and becoming first deputy prime minister. Yeltsin even introduced him to Clinton as his successor. Opinion polls in the summer of 1997 put likely support for Nemtsov at well over fifty per cent.
Yet their relationship began to sour. Yeltsin thought Nemtsov ‘a bit of a guerrilla’ who had a habit of forcing through decisions on policy without first discussing them with him. And so he changed his mind: ‘I took a good look at him and realised he was not ready to be the country’s president,’ Yeltsin recalled.9 In any case, Nemtsov’s chances of being considered for the top job were ended by the Russian financial crisis of 1998, during which Yeltsin dissolved the government in which Nemtsov was serving. Also spoken of as a potential successor was Sergei Stepashin, who became prime minister in May 1999 after Yeltsin fired Primakov. Stepashin’s chances faded almost as quickly as they had begun, however. Yeltsin quickly saw that his appointee was not up to the job of prime minister, let alone president, and in August, he too was fired.
And then along came Putin. In his memoirs, Yeltsin writes that by late 1998 he had been sensing the Russian public’s need for a new quality in the state, for a steel backbone that would strengthen the whole government. ‘We needed a person who was intellectual, democratic and who could think anew but who was firm in the military manner.’10 Yeltsin claimed in one interview to have been keeping an eye on Putin for some time – and not just from his personnel dossier. ‘I had a pretty good understanding of his performance in St Petersburg under Sobchak,’ Yeltsin said. ‘And when he moved to Moscow, I started watching him especially closely. I could see that he was not just an intelligent and well-educated person but also decent and self-controlled.’11
Yeltsin did not reveal who had drawn Putin to his attention, but the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who served briefly as deputy chief of the National Security Council after Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996, claimed the credit. He and his fellow oligarchs knew that Yeltsin’s days were numbered and they were on the lookout for a potential replacement whom they could bend to their will. Putin had reportedly helped Berezovsky years earlier when he was setting up a car dealership. Courteous and respectful of their interests, he seemed like their man. What especially appealed to the ‘family’ was Putin’s reputation for loyalty – which he had demonstrated in 1997 when he reportedly helped to spirit Sobchak out of Russia and into exile in Paris to escape a corruption investigation after he lost the mayoral election the previous year.
On 9 August Yeltsin announced that he was nominating Putin as prime minister – his fifth in less than eighteen months. In the Russian system, the prime minister has largely administrative functions, nominating members of the cabinet and implementing domestic policy. The president appoints him – subject to approval by the Duma – and can fire him at will. Under Yeltsin it had become something of a scapegoat position: when things went wrong, he was quick to pin the blame on his prime minister.
This appointment seemed different. Yeltsin made it clear that he wanted Putin as his successor and saw the post of prime minister as a springboard for the top job. ‘Next time, for the first time in the country’s history, the first president of Russia will hand over power to a newly elected president,’ Yeltsin announced, reading from a prepared statement. ‘I have decided to name a man who, in my opinion, is able to consolidate society. Relying on the broadest of political forces, he will ensure the continuation of reforms in Russia.’12
Yeltsin’s appointment of a virtual unknown not just as prime minister but also as his choice of future president was greeted with surprise both in Russia and abroad. Putin would have the advantage of incumbency, but how would a relative unknown be able to beat one of the ‘big beasts’ of Russian politics such as Yevgeny Primakov, the former prime minister, or Yury Luzhkov, the powerful mayor of Moscow? Putin’s approval rating, according to Aleksandr Oslon, the pollster, was just three per cent. Oslon told Yumashev that it did not look as if the plan was going to work. ‘Podozhdite, podozhdite [Wait, wait],’ Yeltsin’s aide replied. ‘Maybe we will succeed.’13
In Washington, Yeltsin’s choice of Putin was greeted with incredulity. For Talbott, it was further proof that Yeltsin had ‘lost his grip on reality’. It was not just a matter of Putin’s lack of relevant experience and connections; he did not even look the part. Most of Russia’s leading political figures, such as Yeltsin, were bearlike, bulky men with booming voices. Putin, by contrast, ‘was slightly built and had the manner of a disciplined, efficient, self-effacing executive assistant’.14
Putin’s chances were transformed by events more than a thousand miles away in the North Caucasus. Following the end of the first Chechen war in 1996, an uneasy peace had descended on the region. The next year Yeltsin had signed a peace treaty with Aslan Maskhadov, the Chechen president, who predicted it would eliminate ‘any basis to create ill feelings between Moscow and Grozny’.
Yet around the time of Putin’s appointment, the conflict burst back into life when forces headed by Shamil Basayev, a Chechen warlord, crossed the border into neighbouring Dagestan, driving thousands of people from their homes and killing a number of Russian soldiers. When Basayev proclaimed a jihad to liberate nearby Muslim areas of the North Caucasus from the Kremlin’s rule, he transformed what had hitherto appeared to be a conflict in a faraway place into a potential threat to the Russian heartland. This fear was confirmed by a series of mysterious blasts in Moscow and in the provincial towns of Buynaksk and Volgodonsk in the course of less than two weeks in September 1999 that killed 307 people and injured more than 1,700.
These explosions have been the subject of many a conspiracy theory: Basayev, who had proudly claimed responsibility for previous terrorist attacks on Russian soil, denied they were anything to do with him, prompting some to assert – albeit without firm evidence – that they had been the work of the security services, presumably on the orders of Putin.
Such suspicions grew after the discovery of three bags marked ‘sugar’ and a detonator in the basement of an apartment block in Ryazan, 120 miles south-east of Moscow. The device appeared to have been set to go off at five thirty the next morning. The contents of the bags were identified by a local explosives expert as hexogen, a military explosive of the same type as that used in one of the Moscow bombings. Amid growing panic in the town, the local police mounted a massive operation involving 1,200 officers. Two men who answered the description of those who had been seen lurking outside the building were arrested, but the pair turned out to be members of the FSB. The next day, the FSB director, Nikolai Patrushev, a close associate of Putin since his Leningrad days, claimed it had been a training exercise – albeit one that had been carried out without the knowledge of his local officers.
The strange goings-on in Ryazan were seized upon during the election campaign by Putin’s opponents, who suspected foul play. Putin himself indignantly rejected such suggestions. ‘No one in the Russian special services would be capable of such a crime against his own people,’ he said. ‘The very supposition is immoral. It’s nothing but part of the information war against Russia.’15
Whatever the truth, there is no doubt as to the impact of the blasts on Russian public opinion. ‘These explosions [in Moscow] were a crucial moment in the unfolding of our current history,’ recalled Sergei Kovalev, a member of the Duma. ‘After the first shock passed, it turned out that we were living in an entirely different country . . . How, it was asked, can you negotiate with people who murder children at night in their beds? War and only war is the solution! What we want – so went the rhetoric of many politicians, including Vladimir Putin – is the merciless extermination of the “adversary” wherever he may be, whatever the casualties, no matter how many unarmed civilians must die in the process.’16
Putin’s actions lived up to his fighting words. The first Chechen war had been a national humiliation that merely postponed the question of the republic’s independence. By tying his own fate so closely to a second conflict, Putin was taking a considerable political gamble. Taking personal charge of the crisis, he unleashed a ferocious bombing campaign against Chechnya that killed thousands of civilians and added to a mass flow of refugees into neighbouring Ingushetia. Then, in early October, Russian forces began an all-out ground assault.
The extent and brutality of the response was enormous; Chechnya was, after all, part of Russia. It was as if the British government had launched air strikes against Belfast at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Putin pressed on, however, coupling the military response with high-profile media appearances designed to hone his macho image. Most striking were the comments he made the day after the mysterious explosives find in Ryazan, when he resorted to prison slang to underline his determination to strike hard at his Chechen foes. ‘We will pursue the terrorists everywhere. If it is in the airport, then in the airport,’ he declared. ‘You will forgive me, but if we catch them in the toilet, we will rub them out in the outhouse.’
A decade later, Putin claimed to have regretted his words, saying, ‘I should not have been wagging my tongue like that.’ Yet his earthy tone went down well with the Russian public, as did a trip he took the following month to Chechnya, the last stretch of which he spent aboard a Sukhoi-25 jet. During his brief visit he handed out medals to pilots at an airbase and met village elders in Znamenskoye, a Chechen village ‘liberated’ by the Russians. The aim of the military campaign, he said, was to rid Chechnya ‘of those bandits who are not only up to their elbows but up to their shoulders in blood’.17 Such words helped reinforce Putin’s image as a man of action. ‘After that appearance, people noticed him and it became clear that there was something to him,’ says Oslon.18
According to Oslon’s analysis, however, Putin’s real success came in dealing with another more prosaic issue: the state’s failure to pay pensions. Pensioners were one of the groups hardest hit by the collapse of the old communist system. Pensions were small and often not paid at all; the result was suffering not just for the elderly but often for their extended families, with whom they shared the money. Payment was handled by the increasingly independent-minded regional governors, many of whom had other priorities. That October, Putin ordered the governors to pay up. It was a sign of his growing influence that they did as they were told.
Observing the contest from the other side of the world, Talbott began to appreciate that Yeltsin’s judgement was not so flawed, after all. It was not just that the war in Chechnya was going in Putin’s favour. There was something more fundamental at work, namely the future president’s difference from the man he was to replace: while Yeltsin’s ill health made him seem older than his sixty-eight years, Putin was a forty-seven-year-old who made great play of his vigour and athletic prowess, whether playing judo or ice hockey. He also let it be known that, unlike Yeltsin, he drank little. While Yeltsin behaved like a Tsar, Putin seemed more like a manager who could make the system work.
Putin’s ratings, by then, had jumped to forty per cent. Oslon watched as his support – which had initially been largely confined to the poorest, the uneducated and rural voters – spread to the more affluent. By December, Moscow and the intelligentsia were swinging behind him as well. Yeltsin, hedging his bets to the last, was finally ready to take the plunge: rather than serve out the remaining few months of his term, he would step down early in favour of his protégé. On 14 December, he summoned Putin to Gorky 9 for a secret meeting.
According to Yeltsin’s own account, Putin was less than enthusiastic when Yeltsin told him of his plan. ‘I’m not ready for that decision, Boris Nikolayevich,’ he told him.19
Putin’s reaction made Yeltsin’s heart sink, but he persisted. ‘I want to step down this year, Vladimir Vladimirovich,’ he continued. ‘This year. That’s very important. The new century must begin with a new political era, the era of Putin.’
Putin was still not convinced, but Yeltsin’s mind was made up. Any remaining doubts he had would have been dispelled by the results of parliamentary elections held five days later on 19 December. In September the Kremlin had set up a new party, Unity, largely to counter the threat from Primakov and Luzhkov’s Fatherland–All Russia alliance. Despite blanket coverage from the state media and generous donations from oligarchs, the party got off to a poor start, barely registering in the polls. Then on 24 November, Putin’s one-hundredth day in office, he gave it his endorsement: it would be inappropriate for him as prime minister to back any party, he said, but as an ‘ordinary voter’ he would support Unity at the ballot box. It seemed a risky move, but it paid off: when the election results came in, Unity took twenty-three per cent of the votes, one point fewer than the communists, but way ahead of the Luzhkov–Primakov alliance, which won just thirteen per cent.
Yeltsin felt vindicated by the trust he had placed in his protégé. Putin, too, finally seemed to be relishing the prospect of his own new role, as Talbott noted when he called on the leader-in-waiting in his vast office in the White House, the seat of the Russian government, three days after the election. ‘There was an aura of power settling around him,’ Talbott recalled. ‘I could see it in the deference of the other Russians in the room, in the frenzied interest of the press and in the cockiness of the man himself.’20
Yeltsin, too, noticed the change in Putin when he summoned him back again a fortnight after their initial meeting to discuss the details of the handover of power. ‘I immediately had the impression that he was a different man,’ he recalled. ‘I suppose he seemed more decisive. I was satisfied. I liked his demeanour.’21
They worked through the various details of how everything was to unfold over the next few days, with Putin making various changes. Then it was all over. ‘There was a lot I wanted to tell him,’ Yeltsin recalled, ‘I think he had a lot to say to me, too. But we didn’t say anything. We shook each other’s hand. We hugged good-bye. Our next meeting was to be on December 31, 1999.’22
Putin did not betray the trust Yeltsin had placed in him. Hours after taking over on New Year’s Eve, he signed his first decree: seven pages long, and prepared by Yeltsin’s aides, it granted the former president a series of benefits and privileges, including a salary, staff and use of the dacha at Gorky 9. Most importantly, it gave Yeltsin a guarantee of immunity from prosecution over his involvement in any of the murky deeds, such as the loans for shares scheme, that had taken place during his time in office.
Yeltsin would later boast that he had manoeuvred Putin from obscurity into the presidency over fierce resistance. ‘It was really very hard, getting Putin into the job,’ his daughter Tatyana admitted. ‘One of the hardest things we ever pulled off.’23
PUTIN WAS STILL ONLY ACTING PRESIDENT; one of his first tasks was to win a popular mandate to perform the job that Yeltsin had gifted him. The election was set for 26 March 2000 and the result a foregone conclusion. By the end of December 1999, Putin’s approval rating had jumped to 47%; a month later, it had reached an astonishing 57%. Although it subsequently dropped back, Putin won 53.4% of the vote, sufficient to give him victory without even having to go to a run-off. Gennady Zyuganov, the communist leader whom Yeltsin had beaten in 1996, trailed on 29.5%.
Putin made it clear that his aim was to rebuild the machinery of state power and create an orderly society. The goal was the establishment of what the Russians call a ‘vertical of power’ that put the president firmly in charge of the federal government and the government in charge of everything else. It also meant reining in the competing sources of power that had got out of hand under Yeltsin: the regional leaders, the oligarchs and the independent media.
Yet the watchword of the first few years of Putin’s rule was also continuity. He was still surrounded by most of Yeltsin’s aides, including Aleksandr Voloshin as chief of staff, and he paid frequent visits to his predecessor at his dacha. ‘At that time, all of us – me, Voloshin and all the other people – believed he wanted to continue Yeltsin’s vision of building a Democratic Russia, a fair market economy and so on,’ said Mikhail Kasyanov, who was Putin’s first prime minister but later became one of his fiercest critics.24 ‘We all supported Putin at that time. And in fact Putin, to be fair, implemented his promises given to me in terms of supporting economic reform.’
First to feel the effects of Putin’s attempt to create his ‘vertical of power’ were the oligarchs, many of whom had backed him in the expectation that he would be their puppet. Instead, after winning the presidential election, Putin vowed to ‘rid Russia of the oligarchs as a class’. In a warning shot that June the media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky was thrown into jail for three days on corruption charges. The charges were dropped, but not before the heavily indebted oligarch agreed to transfer Media-Most, his media conglomerate, to Gazprom for $300 million. He later claimed to have done the deal only under duress.
Putin’s real coup de théâtre came on 28 July, however, when he summoned leading oligarchs to a gilded hall in the Kremlin and effectively offered them a bargain: they could keep the vast wealth that they had accumulated through the privatisations and other dubious deals of the 1990s, but only on condition that they stayed out of politics. They had little choice but to fall into line: the government had piles of kompromat (‘compromising material’) that it could use against them.
When it came to foreign policy, Putin saw it as his ‘mission’ to improve Russia’s ties with America. ‘Russia under Yeltsin had not formulated its interests and, in any case, in the 1990s we had so many domestic problems that we did not have time to think about issues such as NATO enlargement,’ recalled Voloshin.25 ‘Millions of people were unemployed, millions of people could not receive their pensions, people did not know how to get medical attention for their mothers or feed their children.
‘Putin believed relations with the West could and should be improved so that we could be partners. He considered the problem was that they did not understand us or the difficulties that we were facing: we needed to explain our situation, discuss it with them and they would help us and it would lead to a different relationship.’
The first prominent Western figure to meet Putin after he came to power was Lord Robertson, the former British defence secretary, who in October 1999 had taken over as secretary general of NATO. While attending the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) summit in Istanbul the following month, he received a message saying that Igor Ivanov, the Russian foreign minister, wanted to meet. ‘We chatted and talked, hoping we could get things moving, but that was about it,’ Robertson recalls.26 ‘Then in February 2000 I got a phone call from Igor Ivanov to say, “If you were to make a request to come to Moscow, you might get a favourable response”.’ Although surprised by the odd form of words, Robertson seized the opportunity, and the invitation duly appeared.
Later that month, Robertson flew to Moscow – courtesy of the German air force. He was surrounded by television cameras as he gave an impromptu late-night news conference at the airport in his fur hat. Visible behind him on the fuselage of the plane was the word ‘Luftwaffe’.
Robertson was received in the Kremlin. Flanked by Ivanov and Marshal Igor Sergeyev, the defence minister, Putin told him he wanted a step-by-step resumption of relations with NATO. ‘He said he believed that Russia should be part of Western Europe, that it was Russia’s destiny and he wanted to work towards that, even though not everyone agreed with him,’ says Robertson. ‘The legacy of Kosovo was still there but he thought it was a distraction. We would work together and cooperate. The atmosphere clearly changed.’
Robertson was also struck by his host’s manner. ‘The word “shy” is maybe not appropriate for a former KGB colonel but he was slightly unsure of himself,’ he recalls. ‘His head was down, but he was making it clear that he was the boss and that he knew what he wanted to do, and building relationships was part of that. I could see the EU was a mystery to him, but at the same time he recognised that Western Europe was stable and prosperous and maybe for once Russia had predictable and safe western boundaries.
‘At the end of the meeting, he joked that maybe I should come in a British plane the next time. He was smiling as he said it. There were flashes of humour.’
It was Tony Blair, Robertson’s former boss, who championed Putin’s entry onto the world stage. Blair had found Yelstin ‘very weird’ and ‘unpredictable’. In his memoirs he described a bear hug from the Russian leader that left him gasping for breath and in need of a stiff drink. Putin seemed refreshingly normal and modern in comparison. Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, and John Sawers, his foreign affairs advisor, suggested the prime minister steal a march on the rest of Europe by being the first to establish a relationship with him.
In March Blair set off to meet Putin in St Petersburg, even though the election in which he was to be confirmed as president was still two weeks away. Putin was delighted by the boost the visit gave his campaign. They held talks at Peterhof, the ‘Russian Versailles’ built by Peter the Great outside the city. On the way there, Putin pointed out to Blair the shabby block of flats where he grew up. He also gave him a personal tour of the Hermitage. That evening they and their wives saw Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace at the Mariinsky Theatre. The only sour moment came when Sir Roderic Lyne, the British ambassador, leant back too heavily on one of the antique eighteenth-century chairs in the Peterhof and broke its back. As Powell recalled, “Putin demanded compensation, only half jokingly”.28
Blair was an appropriate partner for Putin’s international debut: the two men were both young, dynamic lawyers. Putin seemed to consider him something of a role model. Their meeting also had a historical resonance: after all, it was Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1984 encounter with Margaret Thatcher – and her comment afterwards: ‘I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together’ – that had helped established the future Soviet leader’s reputation abroad.
The following month, Putin – now elected but still not yet inaugurated – travelled to Britain for his first foreign trip as president, which included tea with the Queen at Buckingham Palace. At a joint press conference, Blair praised Putin as a leader ‘ready to embrace a new relationship with the European Union and the United States, who wants a strong and modern Russia and a strong relationship with the West’. Challenged over Chechnya, Blair said he had discussed the issue, but made it clear he would not let it hinder relations. The two leaders were to meet five times over that year, including once in Moscow in November, when they went out for beers in a fake German Bierkeller and Blair said of his host: “He is someone who wants to do the right thing by himself and the world.”
Putin’s first months in the Kremlin also saw an improvement in relations with America. On 14 April, less than three weeks after his election as president, the Duma ratified the START II treaty, the most comprehensive arms control agreement to be concluded between the two states. Already ratified by the US Senate in 1996, it required both countries roughly to halve their respective nuclear arsenals by 2007, restricting each to no more than 3,500 nuclear warheads. A week later, the Duma ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
It was also announced that Clinton would meet Putin for what would be the two presidents’ first and last summit. It was set for Moscow in June. Clinton had already met Putin twice the previous year when he was still Yeltsin’s prime minister and nominated successor: first in September at the APEC summit in Auckland and then in November in Oslo at a tribute to Yitzhak Rabin, the late Israeli prime minister. Clinton was impressed by what he saw, contrasting Putin – measured and precise, compact and extremely fit from his years of practising martial arts – with the large, stocky and voluble Yeltsin.
‘Putin has enormous potential, I think,’ he told Blair in a telephone conversation. ‘He’s very smart and thoughtful. I think we can do a lot of good with him.’29
Clinton had only a few months left in the White House, but set off to Moscow with a number of goals: reaching agreement on allowing America to deploy a national missile defence system, bringing an end to Russian military assistance to Iran and attempting to coordinate Russian and Western diplomacy in the Balkans. He was also under pressure to draw attention to Russian backtracking on human rights.
Missile defence was probably the most contentious. It was almost two decades earlier, in March 1983, that President Ronald Reagan had unveiled his Strategic Defense Initiative, an ambitious network of ground-based and orbital anti-missile defences intended to protect the United States from a strategic nuclear strike. It quickly became nicknamed the ‘Star Wars’ project after George Lucas’ film franchise. What worked in the movies did not necessarily work in reality, however, and it soon became clear that it would need years, perhaps decades of more work to create such a global shield.
Reagan’s enthusiasm for the project had been prompted by his dislike of the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) which he likened to a stand-off in the Wild West with ‘two westerners standing in a saloon aiming their guns to each other’s head – permanently’.30 Reagan wanted America instead to develop a shield that such weapons would be unable to penetrate, thereby rendering them obsolete. He even, optimistically in hindsight, envisaged that such a system could be built in conjunction with the Russians.
Yuri Andropov, the then Soviet leader, had been suspicious: he feared it would make it possible for America to carry out a first strike against Soviet missiles, confident that the shield would deal with retaliation from the remnants of Moscow’s forces. The Strategic Defense Initiative, they claimed, was also inconsistent with America’s obligations under the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which restricted both countries to two sites at which they could base a defensive system, one for the capital and one for intercontinental ballistic missile silos.
Clinton had arrived in office sceptical about missile defence, but, as the Republicans used the issue against him, he responded by bolstering spending on research. Since the end of the Cold War, the justification for the system had been changed: initially intended to protect America against a deliberate Soviet missile strike, it was now meant to stop missiles fired accidentally by Russia – or China – or intentionally by rogue states such as Iraq or North Korea. This did not make it any more palatable to the Kremlin.
At the summit, however, little progress was made on nuclear issues. He and Putin pledged to destroy another thirty-four metric tons each of weapons-grade plutonium, but they could not reach agreement on amending the ballistic missile treaty to allow American deployment of the missile shield. Clinton was not overly concerned; he doubted the system would actually work and feared that, even if it didn’t, it would encourage other countries to build more missiles to maintain their deterrent capacity. He also understood that, with a new US president about to be elected, Putin would prefer to wait before committing himself.
Also hanging over the summit was the matter of NATO enlargement. Despite the Alliance’s relentless march eastward, the Russians clung to the idea that the organisation could be transformed from a purely military one into something far more political in nature – one that might even include Russia as a member. In an interview with the BBC’s David Frost, screened on 5 March, a few weeks before his election, Putin reiterated Yeltsin’s concern about NATO’s eastern expansion but said he was prepared to discuss ‘more profound’ integration with the Alliance, provided Russia was regarded as an equal partner. Asked if Russia could ever join NATO, he replied: ‘I don’t see why not. I would not rule out such a possibility.’*
Indeed, Putin seemed to have warmed to the idea. According to Voloshin, there had been a number of discussions in the Kremlin about the possibility of NATO membership, though only provided it shifted away from its old Cold War focus to concentrate on terrorism, piracy and other contemporary issues. Putin suddenly brought up the idea at the summit during a meeting at which Clinton was joined by Sandy Berger, his national security adviser, and Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state. During what Voloshin described as a ‘semi-philosophical’ discussion, Putin asked: ‘How would you react if Russia joined NATO?’
‘Clinton was a bit surprised,’ recalled Voloshin. ‘He looked at Albright who was next to him and she pretended that she was looking at a fly on the wall. Then Clinton looked at Berger, who did not react at all. Clinton realised that his advisers would not help him so he answered: “As far as I am concerned, personally” – and he repeated “personally” three times – “then I would support it”.’31
At the summit, Clinton seemed to have missed the bonhomie that had characterised his many meetings with Yeltsin, though Putin tried to re-create the atmosphere, even trying out his English, in which he had been taking lessons. After the formal talks, the two men repaired to a wood-panelled theatre for a jazz tribute to Louis Armstrong conducted by Oleg Lundsrem, one of Russia’s best-known bandleaders. Although the meeting was cordial, it lacked the first-name familiarity of previous Clinton–Yeltsin summits.
The lack of progress was predictable given the disconnect between the American and Russian electoral calendars: Putin, fresh from his election triumph, was on the way up, and Clinton, well into the eighth and final year of his presidency, was on the way out. ‘Clinton felt patronised,’ wrote Talbott, who accompanied him. ‘Putin had given Clinton what was calculated to seem a respectful hearing, but Clinton knew a brush-off when he saw one . . . Putin had, in his own studied, cordial and oblique way, put US–Russian relations on hold until Clinton, like Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, had passed from the scene.’32
After the meeting, Clinton drove north-west out of Moscow through what Talbott described as ‘the capital’s high-rent exurbia, where modern redbrick cottages had sprouted amid leftovers of the old power structure – sprawling VIP dachas, rest homes and clinics behind stucco walls or high green wooden fences’.33 They slowed to travel down a narrow potholed road and arrived at Gorky 9.
Yeltsin, his wife, Naina, and their daughter, Tatyana, were waiting at the door of the dacha. Yeltsin embraced Clinton for a full minute, repeating in a low voice, ‘moi drug, moi drug [my friend, my friend]’, before leading him by the arm into the living room. The scene that followed, as Talbott described it, was a remarkable tribute to the closeness of the personal relationship that had – for better or for worse – set the tone of US–Russia relations for much of the previous decade.
As the two men sat in gilt oval-backed chairs next to a traditional Russian sky-blue stove, drinking tea and eating a rich, many-layered cake that Naina had been up half the night baking, Yeltsin eschewed the small talk Clinton had expected and instead delivered a message from Putin: his successor had just called him and asked him to make clear to Clinton that Russia would continue to pursue its interests as it saw them and resist pressure to acquiesce in any US policies it considered a threat to its security.
For Clinton, the sight of Yeltsin, his face stern, posture tense and fists clenched, was one familiar to him from the many meetings they had held over the previous eight years. As Talbott put it, Clinton ‘took the browbeating patiently, even good-naturedly’. He knew that ‘a session with Yeltsin almost always involved some roughing up before the two of them could get down to real business’.34 Yeltsin followed by singing Putin’s praises as ‘a young man and a strong man’, as if these were the essence both of what Russia needed and what he, by selecting Putin, had hoped to preserve as his own legacy.
When Yeltsin had finished, it was Clinton’s turn to speak his mind, albeit more gently: he wasn’t sure, he told Yeltsin, how ‘this new guy of yours’ defined strength, either for himself or for the country. Clinton also expressed doubts about Putin’s values, instincts and convictions. ‘You’ve got the fire in your belly of a real democrat and a real reformer. I’m not sure Putin has that,’ Clinton told him. ‘You’ll have to keep an eye on him and use your influence to make sure that he stays on the right path. Putin needs you . . . Russia needs you.’35
Clutching Clinton by the hand, Yeltsin leant into him, muttering: ‘Thank you, Bill. I understand.’
Running late, they all went outside for a group photograph, followed by some hurried goodbyes and a bear hug. As they got into the car, Clinton fell silent and stared at the birch trees lining the road. Talbott found his mood more sombre than it had been on the way out. ‘That may be the last time I see Ol’ Boris,’ Clinton said. ‘I think we’re going to miss him.’36
THE RUSSIANS, BY CONTRAST, WERE WARMING to their new leader. After the wild swings of the Yeltsin era, Putin brought political stability. The economy was also powering ahead, thanks to rising oil prices and the after-effects of the devaluation of the rouble. It was now growing at an annual rate of seven per cent, regaining ground lost in the previous decade. Consumer spending and investment were rising even faster. The government was also able to record post-Soviet Russia’s first budget surplus. This was largely due to factors beyond Putin’s control. Yet he also laid out an economic programme that won praise from Western governments and introduced a new flat tax of just 13 per cent. In pursuit of his ‘vertical of power’, he also began a major reorganisation of Russia’s unruly regions, dividing the country into seven large new administrative areas and putting his own allies in charge of them. Underlying his efforts was an attempt to create a new state structure that melded freedom and order. Liberal critics feared that Putin, with his KGB background, would err too far towards the latter, but most ordinary Russians appeared to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The new regime nevertheless suffered one major setback when the Kursk, a nuclear-powered Oscar-class submarine, sank in August 2000 during a naval exercise in the Barents Sea, after a torpedo on board malfunctioned and exploded. All 118 personnel on board perished. The Russian response was the same mixture of denial, misinformation and eventual acknowledgement that had characterised the Chernobyl disaster fourteen years earlier. Putin himself was on holiday on the Black Sea and made no immediate move to return; instead he was filmed enjoying himself, shirtsleeves rolled up, hosting a barbecue. Russian media were scathing about the approach taken by the authorities: had pride prevented them from seeking Western help to save the submariners? Some of the harshest criticism was reserved for Putin himself. Why could he not find time to comfort the families of those who had lost loved ones?
Yet, despite what was widely acknowledged as a public relations disaster for the new president, his ratings did not particularly suffer, according to Oslon. Putin appeared to draw a different lesson from the Kursk, moving in the months that followed to tighten his control over the media. Just as he had gone for Gusinsky, now he took on another oligarch, Boris Berezovsky. Despite having helped bring Putin to power, Berezovksy had begun publicly to criticise him, and his ORT network had been especially condemnatory of his handling of the Kursk disaster. Berezovsky fought hard to hold onto ORT, but the following February bowed to pressure. He and his long-standing partner, Badri Patarkatsishvili, sold their stakes to Roman Abramovich, who promptly ceded editorial control to the Kremlin. That April, the government also took control of NTV from Gusinsky.
As part of Putin’s reassertion of Russian statehood, he also made significant symbolic moves. That December, the Soviet-era national anthem, which had fallen into disuse, was revived, albeit with new words, in place of the little-loved piece by the composer Mikhail Glinka, which had been used by Russia during the 1990s. The Soviet red banner – without the hammer and sickle – was restored as the official flag of the armed forces. The white-blue-red flag and the double-headed eagle coat of arms, which had existed in a kind of limbo, were also given legal approval. Putin declared the restoration of the anthem to be part of a process of healing of Russia’s past and fusing the Soviet period with Russian history – but the move brought a rare intervention from Yeltsin, who joined liberal critics in labelling it a mistake.
Putin, meanwhile, was continuing his diplomatic offensive. Less than a fortnight after hosting Clinton in Moscow, he went to Berlin for a summit with Gerhard Schröder – who was to become a firm ally – and in July attended his first G8 summit as president, in Japan, where he was the star of the gathering. He made pre-summit visits to North Korea and China and returned to Japan in September for a meeting with Yoshiro Mori, the Japanese leader. In October he went to see President Chirac in Paris.
The West was still willing to give Putin the benefit of the doubt. Blair and Clinton discussed their impressions of the Russian leader in a phone call on 23 November after Blair went to Moscow for a working visit. ‘He feels that he is not understood about the problems he is facing there,’ said Blair. ‘He was very anxious to impress me. He wanted to see America as a partner, I think.’37 Clinton was also optimistic on the basis of his contacts with Putin: ‘I think he is a guy with a lot of ability and ambitions for the Russians. His intentions are generally honourable and straightforward, but he just hasn’t made up his mind yet,’ he said, before adding prophetically: ‘He could get squishy on democracy.’
Putin himself, when asked by the Russian media about foreign policy during a long interview that December intended to sum up his first year in office, declared that his country had to find a middle way between the ‘imperial ambitions’ of the Soviet era and the need to ‘understand clearly our own national interest[s] . . . to formulate them clearly and to fight for them’.38
Oslon, the pollster, asks Russians every December to look back on the year that is just ending, compare it with the previous one and with their expectations for the one that is to follow. For most years since the end of communism, their answers suggested that they saw things getting worse and worse. Asked the question in December 2000, however, a majority declared the year drawing to a close to have been better than 1999 and thought 2001 would be even better still. ‘A remarkable change had taken place by the end of 2000,’ said Oslon. ‘During the course of the year the population became convinced that a new epoch was beginning. The epoch of chaos – “the sick decade” – had ended. The period of recovery had begun.’39
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* The idea was not an entirely new one: in March 1954, twelve months after Stalin’s death, the Soviet Union sent a note to America, France and Britain saying it would be prepared to join NATO under certain conditions. ‘To put it very bluntly, the Soviet request to join NATO is like an unrepentant burglar requesting to join the police force,’ retorted Lord Ismay, the Alliance’s secretary general. His memo can be read at http://www.nato.int/