IN FEBRUARY 2007 VLADIMIR PUTIN STOOD in front of the Munich Security Conference, the first Russian leader to do so since the event’s inception more than four decades earlier, at the height of the Cold War, as a forum for discussing foreign policy. There was a great sense of anticipation among the audience in the Bayerischer Hof hotel, which included the German chancellor Angela Merkel and Robert Gates, the newly appointed US defence secretary. Before beginning his speech, Putin said he would avoid ‘excessive politeness and the need to speak in roundabout, pleasant but empty diplomatic terms’, adding: ‘If my comments seen unduly polemical, pointed or inexact to our colleagues then I would ask you not to get angry with me.’ He hoped the moderator wouldn’t try to cut him off after two or three minutes.
Putin proved to be as good as his word, proceeding to launch a broadside against America and what he saw as its determination during the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union to create, and dominate, a ‘unipolar world’. ‘The United States has overstepped its borders in all spheres – economic, political and humanitarian – and has imposed itself on other states,’ Putin declared. Such a formula had led to disaster. ‘Local and regional wars did not get fewer, the number of people who died did not reduce but increased. We see no kind of restraint – a hyper-inflated use of force.’ Only the United Nations – not NATO nor the European Union – could authorise the use of military force around the world, Putin said, and even then it should be as a last resort.
For many of those in the audience it sounded remarkably like the declaration of a new Cold War. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the NATO secretary general, called Putin’s remarks ‘disappointing and not helpful’; John McCain, who was to announce his presidential run that April, accused him of making the ‘most aggressive remarks by a Russian leader since the end of the Cold War’ and insisted that it was autocratic Russia – rather than America – that needed to change its behaviour. In his response the next day, Gates, a former CIA director, tried to defuse the tension with humour, noting that ‘as an old Cold Warrior’, Putin’s speech ‘almost filled me with nostalgia for a less complex time’.
A decade later, Igor Ivanov, who at the time of the speech was a member of Putin’s Security Council, denies it was confrontational. ‘That speech was not, as some people wanted to present it, the intention of Russia to restore the Soviet Union or something,’ he says.1 ‘It was a cry from the soul of someone who could no longer accept and tolerate what [the West] was doing.’ It also very much represented the Kremlin leader’s own thoughts: various drafts of the speech had been prepared by the foreign ministry and the presidential administration, but the final version was all Putin’s. ‘What he said was a surprise for all of us because it was very personal,’ recalls Ivanov. ‘It was his own speech.’
PUTIN’S WORDS REFLECTED HIS GROWING ASSERTIVENESS since the Colour Revolutions. He consolidated political and economic power in his hands and marginalised his opponents. A pro-Kremlin youth group, Nashi, was created to organise demonstrations and take on opposition protesters. Fundamental elements of democracy such as the separation of powers, an independent judiciary, the rule of law and freedom of the press, which had been established during the Yeltsin era, were being eroded. Elections continued to be held, but the shifting multiparty system of the 1990s was giving way to one in which there was a single dominant governing party, United Russia, and a few smaller parties that could be presented as opposition but without challenging the Kremlin’s hold on power.
The new mood had been reflected in Putin’s State of the Union address in April 2005, in which he described the demise of the Soviet Union as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the last century’, adding: ‘As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory. The epidemic of collapse has spilled over to Russia itself.’2 Putin’s comments, apparently timed to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War the following month, provoked alarm and condemnation from some of the leaders of neighbouring countries. In the years since, they have been repeatedly quoted against him and offered as evidence of a master plan to re-create the USSR. In reality, his words were not so extraordinary: Putin was looking back, as many ordinary Russians did, and regretting the loss of territory and superpower status that his country had once enjoyed.
United Russia’s dominance looked certain to be enhanced by new electoral rules – due to come into force for the Duma election of December 2007 – that stipulated all candidates should be elected on the basis of party lists and increased the minimum share of the vote required for a party to enter parliament. Those who took to the streets to protest against the changes found themselves on the wrong side of the law. In the run-up to the July 2006 G8 summit, held on Russian soil for the first time in St Petersburg, more than a hundred people were intimidated, harassed or beaten by the police, or had their passports taken away for no legal reason. A large number were young activists linked to an alternative event, timed to coincide with the summit, entitled The Other Russia. Foreign delegates were told by a high-ranking Kremlin official that attendance at the event would be treated as an ‘unfriendly gesture’. Many ignored the warning and went anyway.3
The Kremlin even came up with a new term to define how Russia was run. It was no longer a matter, as it had been in the early 1990s, of attempting – albeit with only limited success – to rebuild the country’s political institutions along Western lines. Russia was instead to be a ‘sovereign democracy’. The term was coined by Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s deputy chief of staff and one of his most influential aides, in a speech to the United Russia Party in February 2006. According to Surkov’s opaque definition, it was ‘a society’s political life where the political powers, their authorities and decisions are decided and controlled by a diverse Russian nation for the purpose of reaching material welfare, freedom and fairness by all citizens, social groups and nationalities, by the people that formed it’.
Commentators devoted many column inches to pondering the nature of the system that Surkov was describing. Masha Lipman, of the Carnegie Moscow Center, put it more pithily in a commentary in the Washington Post: ‘“Sovereign democracy” is a Kremlin coinage that conveys two messages: first, that Russia’s regime is democratic and second, that this claim must be accepted, period. Any attempt at verification will be regarded as unfriendly and as meddling in Russia’s domestic affairs.’4
Russia was also flexing its muscles abroad. It blocked a strong United Nations Security Council move against Iran, and alarmed both America and Israel by inviting a delegation from Hamas to Moscow in March 2006 after the militant group won the Palestinian elections. Russia was also quick to re-establish its former strong ties with Uzbekistan after Washington fell out with its leader, Islam Karimov, over his bloody suppression of an Islamist uprising in Andizhan in the east of the country in May 2005. The United States demanded an international inquiry into the massacre. Karimov refused and in July, amid an escalating war of words, told America it was no longer welcome to use the military base it had set up there after the 9/11 attacks. Putin, by contrast, had no interest in scrutinising Karimov’s human rights record. That November, Russia and Uzbekistan signed a mutual cooperation agreement.
Russia was also making greater use of gas as a political weapon: friendly powers henceforth would be rewarded by investment in joint projects, while uncooperative neighbours would be punished with price hikes or even denial of supply – a fate suffered by Ukraine on New Year’s Day 2006, when a long-running dispute with Russia culminated in the cutting off of all gas running through its territory.
Underpinning its actions was a changed attitude to the West. Gorbachev and Yeltsin had been constrained by the weakness of the economy; the need to keep on good terms with Western creditors limited Russia’s ability to stand up to America over policies it did not like. Putin, by contrast, presided over a growing Russian economy, which had jumped in size by two-thirds since 1999. His arrival on the scene had, in itself, led to an improvement in confidence and with it the first signs of an upturn. Matters were helped by economic reforms carried out by Mikhail Kasyanov, the prime minister for his first four years. A rise in the global oil price did the rest: from an average $23 or so per barrel in 2001 and 2002, it jumped to $50 in 2005, just over $58 in 2006 and more than $64 in 2007. Oil production, meanwhile, had risen by a half during the course of the new millennium.5 This, in turn, allowed the Kremlin to put money into a domestic ‘stabilisation fund, which contained $100 billion by the time of the Munich speech. In 2006 the Kremlin paid off its entire $22 billion debt to the IMF ahead of schedule.
Russia and its wealthy elite did not want to be isolated from the rest of the world, but they also expected recognition of their country’s standing and respect for its economic and geopolitical interests. And they were no longer prepared to put up with being lectured about how far their country and its practices fell short of the American ideal.
Putin’s new-found assertiveness – coupled with Bush’s so-called ‘freedom agenda’ – prompted a rethink of America’s attitude towards Russia. Talk of Russia’s integration into the West and of a ‘strategic partnership’ between Moscow and Washington that had prevailed since the days of Gorbachev no longer seemed appropriate. The question now was how best to cope with a newly assertive Russia. As part of this, Western policymakers began to accept that Russia would not necessarily ever embrace democracy. For that reason, it should be considered as different from Central European countries such as Poland and Hungary and even some of the other former Soviet republics such as Ukraine. It should be placed instead in the same category as China, geopolitically important but essentially competitive.
Within the US administration there were growing calls from the beginning of 2006 for a ‘recalibration’ of policy towards Russia, with a split emerging in the White House between what one official described as ‘the Putin lovers’ and the ‘democracy lovers’.6 Minds were further concentrated by the G8 meeting that July in St Petersburg. In the run-up to the event, Putin’s critics warned that it risked granting legitimacy to an increasingly undemocratic administration. McCain urged Bush to boycott it completely.
‘The G8 summit in St Petersburg is becoming the focal point for everybody to reconsider where we are in terms of Russia,’ claimed Anders Åslund, a Russia specialist at the Institute for International Economics. ‘Is this really where we want to be? Should we change policy?’7
The new tougher line was championed by Dick Cheney, the US vice president, who advocated the pursuit of a ‘values-centred’ policy towards Russia,8 rather than a more pragmatic one based on national interest. That January, he had summoned Russia scholars – Åslund among them – to his office and tasked John Negroponte, the national intelligence director, with providing further information about Putin’s intentions.
Like many of those around Bush, Cheney never understood the president’s personal warmth towards Putin; he always saw him as the KGB officer he had once been. Cheney’s dim view of the Russian leader had been reinforced by an experience that January when he had led the US delegation to Poland to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. In his memoirs, he describes how Putin turned up late for his speech, bursting into the ornate nineteenth-century Juliusz Słowacki Theatre in Kraków’s Old Town when proceedings were already under way. As burly security guards cleared the way, the Russian leader strode up the aisle and, ignoring the fact that someone else was speaking, began to deliver his own speech. Cheney saw Putin’s action as a calculated snub to Kwaśniewski, his host, who had earned the Kremlin’s displeasure by championing the cause of Yushchenko in the Orange Revolution. ‘Watching his behaviour that day reminded me why Russia’s leaders are so disliked by their neighbours and why we were right to expand NATO and offer membership to former Soviet client states like Poland and Romania,’ Cheney recalled.9
Yet Rice, who responded to Cheney by summoning her own group of experts, remained sceptical. She feared that if America pushed the Kremlin too far on human rights, it risked complicating cooperation over other issues such as Iran’s nuclear programme, where America was trying to persuade the Kremlin to back tougher action against Tehran. There was also a reluctance to abandon Putin completely, especially in the light of his decision to allow US forces into Central Asia. Bush, too, was haunted by his earlier claim to have got a sense of his interlocutor’s soul. To shift from such backslapping bonhomie to open hostility would have made the president look like a poor judge of character.
Matters came to a head in May 2006, when Cheney met European leaders in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital. In a speech he combined praise for the political and economic progress made by many of the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe with his strongest rebuke to date of Russia’s record. ‘In Russia today, opponents of reform are seeking to reverse the gains of the last decade,’ Cheney declared.10 ‘In many areas of civil society – from religion and the news media, to advocacy groups and political parties – the government has unfairly and improperly restricted the rights of her people. Other actions by the Russian government have been counterproductive, and could begin to affect relations with other countries. No legitimate interest is served when oil and gas become tools of intimidation or blackmail, either by supply manipulation or attempts to monopolize transportation. And no one can justify actions that undermine the territorial integrity of a neighbour, or interfere with democratic movements.’
Russian anger at Cheney’s criticism was compounded by the very different approach that Washington adopted towards two other former Soviet republics, whose records on human rights and democracy were far poorer even than Russia’s. When Ilham Aliyev, the leader of oil-rich Azerbaijan, had visited Washington that February, he had been feted by Bush. In Washington’s eyes, the country’s strategic location between Russia and Iran and its willingness to provide logistical support for the war in Afghanistan and the broader fight against terror outweighed concerns about the manner in which Aliyev had succeeded his father as president in 2003.
America displayed similar tolerance towards Kazakhstan, which Cheney flew on to after Lithuania. Like Azerbaijan, it has considerable energy resources, and it is strategically located between Russia and China. Its leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has run the country since 1989, first as Communist Party leader and then since 1991 as president, won another seven-year term in December 2005 with more than ninety-one per cent of the vote – a suspiciously impressive performance even for a man beloved by his people.
Standing alongside Nazarbayev in the marble hall of the magnificent presidential palace in Astana, the capital, Cheney praised the country’s economic achievements and made no mention of the banning of opposition parties, shutting down of newspapers or intimidation of advocacy groups. When asked about the country’s human rights record, Cheney expressed ‘admiration for all that’s been accomplished here in Kazakhstan’, coupled with confidence that such ‘accomplishments’ would continue.11
Such inconsistency played into the hands of America’s critics. Bush’s freedom agenda, far from being prompted by genuine concern for human rights, was merely a stick with which to beat Russia, they claimed. Putin took a swipe at US policy in his State of the Union address a few days later. ‘As the saying goes, Comrade Wolf knows whom to eat, it eats without listening and it’s clearly not going to listen to anyone,’ he said, adding: ‘Where is all this pathos about protecting human rights and democracy when it comes to the need to pursue their own interests?’12 There was more of the same at the G8 in St Petersburg, where Putin used a joint press conference to compare the state of Russia’s democracy unfavourably with that in Iraq following the US invasion. ‘I’ll be honest with you: we, of course, would not want to have a democracy like in Iraq,’ Putin retorted, prompting laughter from the press corps.13
It was more than just verbal sparring. Something more fundamental was happening, according to Dmitry Trenin, a leading Russian analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center. His article, ‘Russia leaves the West’, which appeared in the July/August 2006 edition of Foreign Policy, foreshadowed the points Putin made in his Munich speech the following February. The Kremlin’s new approach to foreign policy, Trenin argued, assumed that Russia, as a big country, was essentially friendless: none of the great powers wanted it to be strong, since it would be a competitor, and many instead wanted it to be weak so that they could exploit and manipulate it. This meant Russia was left with a choice between accepting subservience and reasserting its status as a great power. It was clear which of the two Putin would choose.
‘Until recently, Russia saw itself as Pluto in the Western solar system, very far from the centre but still fundamentally a part of it,’ Trenin wrote. ‘Now it has left that orbit entirely: Russia’s leaders have given up on becoming part of the West and have started creating their own Moscow-centred system.
‘The United States and Europe can protest this change in Russia’s foreign policy all they want, but it will not make any difference. They must recognise that the terms of Western–Russian interaction, conceptualised at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse fifteen years ago and more or less unchanged since, have shifted fundamentally. The old paradigm is lost, and it is time to start looking for a new one.’
AT THE TIME OF PUTIN’S MUNICH SPEECH, he had just over a year to serve of his second and – under the terms of the Russian constitution – final term. Yet Putin was not yet ready to give up power, and he was not going to allow constitutional niceties to stand in his way. A solution had to be found: the simplest would be to engineer a change in the constitution to allow for a third or fourth term, a tactic followed by the leaders of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, whose presidents were still in power after almost two decades. However, this would hand further ammunition to his critics.
As the date of the presidential election, set for 2 March 2008, approached, other more inventive solutions presented themselves. Talks scheduled for December between Russia and Belarus to discuss a long-term merger of their countries prompted speculation that Putin might become president of what, in strict constitutional terms, would be a new nation, thereby resetting the electoral clock. Yet the talks proved fruitless – and even before they had started, Kremlin sources had dismissed the idea as mere speculation.
Putin had another solution: in October, during the conference of the United Russia Party, he announced that he might become prime minister the following year. Putin had often said he intended to remain involved in politics after his second term expired and that he might seek re-election after someone else took his place as president. With this statement, however, he made it clear that there would be no break in his influence. Implicit in this was a reinterpretation of the Russian constitution to turn the prime minister into a powerful figure in his own right, rather than merely a tool of the president, as had hitherto been the case.
But who would take Putin’s place in the Kremlin? For much of the year, speculation centred on three men: Dmitry Medvedev, the first deputy prime minister and chairman of Gazprom; Sergei Ivanov, a deputy prime minister and defence minister; and Vladimir Yakunin, head of the Russian railways. All were members of Putin’s St Petersburg circle. There was also some speculation about Viktor Zubkov, who was appointed prime minister that September. Another Putin associate from St Petersburg, he had been involved in the fight against money laundering and financial crime, initially in that city and then in Moscow. Soon after taking the job, Zubkov spoke publicly of the possibility of standing for president.
It was not to be: on 10 December 2007, Putin appeared on television alongside the leaders of the four political parties allied with the Kremlin to announce that he was formally endorsing Medvedev. ‘I’ve been very close to him for more than seventeen years,’ Putin declared. ‘I fully and completely support this candidate.’
Medvedev, with his background in the law rather than in the state security services, had virtually no independent power base in the Kremlin. Nor had he ever stood for popular election. Yet this weakness was, in a sense, his strength, as far as his suitability to Putin was concerned. Putin also knew that he could trust him; the two of them had worked together under Mayor Sobchak in St Petersburg, and Medvedev had gone on to be Putin’s legal adviser, as well as running his election campaign in 2000 and spending two years as his chief of staff.
In his first speech after being endorsed as candidate, Medvedev announced that, if elected, he would appoint Putin as his prime minister. Election posters underlined his promise to work closely with the outgoing president, portraying the two men side by side with the slogan: ‘Vmeste Pobedim’ (‘Together We Win’). This ‘Vote Medvedev – get Putin’ policy had the desired effect. Medvedev stormed home with seventy-one per cent of the vote, compared to just eighteen per cent for his nearest rival, Gennady Zyuganov, the veteran Communist Party leader, who had taken a break from the 2004 presidential contest but was back to try his hand again. The other perennial post-Soviet candidate, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, came a distant third.
Precisely as had happened in 2000, a man virtually unknown to the public a few months earlier had been catapulted into the leadership of one of the most powerful countries on earth. As Medvedev moved into the Kremlin and Putin went back to his old office in the White House, analysts were left to ponder the nature of the political tandem that would rule Russia for the next four years. Would Putin – in defiance of the spirit if not the letter of the constitution – continue to wield absolute power? Or would his young protégé, reputed to be more moderate and open to the West, take advantage of his new role to make his mark?