Television showed the handover: a low-key, gauche little ceremony, in which the old king – already in his gabardine mac and in a hurry to leave the stage – waved the young pretender into his new office, muttering ‘This is your desk.’ Under the watchful eye of the patriarch of the Russian Church, the nuclear briefcase was handed over and Boris Yeltsin shuffled out to his car, struggling with his fur hat and subsiding into the back seat.
In his New Year message to the nation, Putin asked all Russians to raise their glasses to a ‘new era’ for their country. ‘There will be no power1 vacuum,’ he said, ‘and anyone who tries to act outside the constitution will be crushed … the important thing is for the Russian state to be great and independent …’ The tone was new, harsh where Yeltsin had been avuncular; Russians already understood their acting president was a hard man.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in Leningrad in 1952. His grandfather had been Stalin’s cook, his father was decorated for bravery during the Great Patriotic War, and his mother had terrible memories of suffering during the German blockade of Leningrad. Putin says he was raised in a cramped communal apartment where he had to fight off the rats. After a youthful dalliance with delinquency (‘I was a hooligan2, not a Pioneer’) he decided he would devote his life to the defence of the motherland. At the age of 16, he walked into the Leningrad KGB headquarters and announced he was ready for service. In a brief autobiography that was distributed during the 2000 presidential elections, Putin claimed his decision was based on his passion for martial arts, which had taught him the need for discipline and hard work, and on his love of a popular TV drama series, The Sword and the Shield, in which brave KGB men risked their lives to protect the Soviet Union against the Nazis. Unfortunately for Putin, the KGB told him he was too young; he should go to university and wait for their call. He completed his law studies and the KGB took him on in 1975, but his career was far from stellar. His only foreign posting was to the less than glamorous KGB station in Dresden, East Germany. He was there when the Berlin wall fell in 1989, burning sensitive documents until the incinerator broke. The humiliation soured his view of Soviet Communism and convinced him that Russia must be made strong again. He left the KGB in 1991, but the values he had learned remained with him. ‘A KGB officer never3 resigns,’ he would say later. ‘You can join but you can never leave.’
In the economic and political uncertainty of the 1990s, Putin worked for the mayor of St Petersburg, gaining a reputation as someone who could get things done. It persuaded Yeltsin to appoint him head of the FSB in 1998, and prime minister in 1999. Most of the previous incumbents had not lasted more than a few months, and Putin was determined to make an impression. A series of bombings in September 1999 that killed hundreds of people in apartment blocks in Moscow and southern Russia gave him his chance.
The Kremlin immediately attributed the apartment bombings to Chechen terrorists. Yeltsin’s war in Chechnya between 1994 and 1996 had not crushed the republic’s drive for independence; nor had it stamped out the region’s endemic lawlessness. Money promised for the rebuilding of Grozny had been siphoned off by corrupt officials and organised crime groups; thousands of kidnappings had made Chechnya a centre of extortion and murder. Russians regarded it as the source of violent criminality.
On 17 September4, Putin convened an emergency session of the Federation Council. He proposed decisive action to ‘protect Russia’, including a defensive cordon along the Chechen border and aerial bombardments of Chechen territory. He appeared on television to announce that ‘action of the most uncompromising character’ would be taken to deal with ‘bandit bases’ in Chechnya. ‘The bandits must be exterminated,’ he said. ‘No other action is possible here.’ No suspects had been arrested for the apartment bombs, and the Chechen guerrilla groups, who usually claimed responsibility for their actions, remained silent. But Putin’s certainty that the Chechens were to blame impressed the electorate: his poll ratings, which had been languishing at 2 per cent, rose in step with the harshness of his rhetoric. In carefully rehearsed remarks that sounded like a parody of Winston Churchill’s ‘fight them on the beaches’ speech of 1940, Putin pledged to ‘pursue the terrorists5 wherever they go; if they are at the airports, we will strike them there; and if – pardon my language – we catch up with them when they are sitting on the toilet, we will wipe them out in the lavatories. That’s all there is to it; the problem is over.’
On 4 October 1999, the Russian army launched its second invasion of Chechnya. By December, Grozny was besieged, the separatists were on the defensive and there had been no more apartment bombs. Putin’s ratings soared to6 over 60 per cent, and when presidential elections were held in March 2000 he won a handsome victory. Voters saw him as the antithesis of the shambling, alcoholic Yeltsin, a young, tough teetotaller and a firm hand to restore order after the chaos of Russia’s failed liberal experiment.
Putin’s trump card had been the vigorous prosecution of the Chechen War. But some in the Russian media were asking if the apartment bombings that sparked the renewed conflict had been just a little too convenient. When a journalist from the7 investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta tackled Putin directly, asking if the apartments were deliberately blown up to justify the invasion, his response was emphatic: ‘What! You’re saying we blew up our own apartment blocks?’ Putin shot back. ‘Nonsense! Total rubbish! There’s no one in the secret services who would commit such a crime. The suggestion is offensive; it’s a slur against us.’
But the charges would not go away. It emerged that three FSB men had been intercepted planting explosives in another apartment block, this time in Ryazan, southeast of Moscow. The neighbourhood had8 been evacuated and 30,000 people spent the night in the open air. After being confronted with the Ryazan discovery, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev stated that the bomb was a dummy, part of a ‘test’ by the security forces, and he congratulated the residents on their vigilance in exposing the ‘exercise’. But the Kremlin’s claims were ridiculed by its political opponents, including a former security agent, Alexander Litvinenko. ‘The FSB intended to blow up residential buildings in Ryazan, Tula, Pskov and Samara,’ Litvinenko alleged. ‘It was important for the FSB to drag Russia into a war in Chechnya as quickly as possible so that the presidential elections could be held against the background of a major armed conflict. It was a conspiracy with the goal of allowing the former KGB to seize power … and the FSB succeeded in getting its own candidate elected president. Putin is perfectly described by the definition of a “tyrant” given by The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia: “a ruler whose power is founded on arbitrary decision and violence”.’ Litvinenko was the most strident of the conspiracy theorists and his accusations earned him the new president’s undying hatred.
Putin boasted that he had grown up with a picture of Felix Dzerzhinsky on his bedroom wall and that he never forgot his roots in the KGB. At a gathering of FSB9 officers to celebrate his rise to power, he joked that ‘the agent group charged with taking the government under its control has achieved the first step of its assignment’.
A vision of what Putin believed that ‘assignment’ to be came in a document he wrote in 2000. ‘Russia at the Turn of the Millennium’ made clear that he believed liberal democracy had failed in Russia and that the country needed strong state rule to prosper. ‘Russia cannot become a version10 of, say, the US or Britain,’ he wrote, ‘where liberal values have deep historic traditions. Our state and its institutions and structures have always played an exceptionally important role in the life of the country and its people. For Russians, a strong state is not an anomaly to be got rid of. Quite the contrary, it is the source of order …’
The message was clear: the Yeltsin years had been an unwelcome aberration and the experiment with Western-style government, like all those before it, was proof of Russia’s unsuitability to such a system; Russia needed a powerful state to impose order on a nation that had shown how unruly it could be when the restraints of autocracy were lifted. Putin’s words could have been those of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, or the early Slavs appealing to Rurik the Viking to rule over them. But he added an important caveat, that ‘modern Russia does not identify11 a strong and effective state with a totalitarian state’. Russia might be returning to its underlying tradition of autocratic rule, but it did not need to return to the horrors of the past.
Putin’s immediate aims were to rescue the nation from the economic meltdown of the Yeltsin years; to restore order in society, halt the violence and crime on the streets and return Russia to her former standing as a world power. (Where Boris Yeltsin viewed the end of the Soviet Empire as his life’s great achievement, Putin described the demise of the USSR as ‘the biggest geo-political12 tragedy of the century’.) He would achieve all those goals and win the gratitude of the vast majority of Russian people. But Putin’s critics complained that his successes came at the expense of democracy. During his time in office, the powers of parliament would be weakened and those of the president enhanced; the leaders of Russia’s 89 federal regions would no longer be elected, but appointed by the Kremlin. National elections to the Duma and for the presidency would still be held, but opposition parties would suffer discrimination, harassment and exclusion from the media; political rallies would be broken up and protestors jailed. Freedom of the press would be restricted. Television news would be controlled by the Kremlin.
The description Putin adopted for his style of government was ‘managed democracy’. Critics like Lilia Shevtsova of the Moscow Carnegie Institute had a different description: ‘Our country is building an13 imitation democracy,’ she wrote.
The external wrappings of democracy are present: elections, parliament and so on, but the essence is absolutely different. In the Russian case, we are dealing with … the deliberate use of democratic institutions as Potemkin villages [see here] in order to conceal traditional power arrangements … The political regime that has consolidated itself resembles the ‘bureaucratic authoritarianism’ of Latin American regimes in the 1960s and 1970s. It has all the characteristics: personalised power, bureaucratisation of society, political exclusion of the populace … and an active role for the secret services (in Latin America it was the military).
Putin himself was ambivalent about such descriptions. He continued to describe himself as a democrat, but made no secret of his belief that only a strong state could return Russia to its lost greatness. If some civil liberties were lost in the process, that was a price to be paid. ‘Russia is in the midst of14 one of the most difficult periods in its history,’ he wrote.
For the first time in the past two or three hundred years, it is facing the real danger of sliding to the second, if not third, echelon of world states. We are running out of time to avoid this. We must strain all intellectual, physical and moral forces of the nation. We need coordinated, creative work. Nobody will do it for us. Everything depends on us and us alone – on our ability to see the size of the threat, to consolidate all our forces, and to set our minds to prolonged and difficult work.
By the time of his 2001 New Year message, he was able to point to the first successes of the new ‘statist’ policies. ‘There have been hard times15 and hard decisions,’ he said, ‘but something that seemed impossible just a year ago has happened: now there are signs of stability in our country, in politics and in the economy, and that is an invaluable thing. We have learned to respect the dignity and value of our country …’
Putin’s international swagger met with the approval of patriotic Russians, pleased to have a strong leader after a decade of economic and military weakness. He revived many of the trappings of the Soviet era, including the old Soviet national anthem (albeit with new words), and the military parades through Red Square, with convoys of missiles, tanks and marching regiments shouting ‘Ourah!’ to their president. Putin’s picture was hung in schoolrooms and public buildings; and he acquired a taste for pomp and ceremony, making regal entrances along red carpets with trumpets blaring. He reacted angrily to media criticism. When a popular TV satire show – the equivalent of the British Spitting Image – portrayed him as a rat, Putin banned it.
His personality cult did not attain the dimensions of Stalin’s, but he was happy to appear in military uniform at army and naval bases, co-piloting a fighter plane or standing beside a tank. An official photo shoot of the president naked from the waist up, fishing in a sunlit river and riding a horse across mountainous terrain, elicited a gasp of excitement from female voters and, perhaps unintentionally, from Russia’s gay websites. One newspaper, Komsomolskaya16 Pravda, splashed the photos on its front page under the headline ‘Be Like Putin!’ and a pop song titled ‘Putin Is a Man of Strength’ shot up the charts. A fanzine even called for Petersburg to be renamed Putinburg.
Putin’s image as a ‘strong tsar’ helped him survive public relations disasters that would have undermined other leaders. In the summer of 2000, he was on holiday in the southern resort of Sochi when the Kursk nuclear submarine sank in the Barents Sea with 118 sailors on board. The British and Norwegian navies offered to stage a rescue mission but were turned down, most probably because Moscow did not want Western countries to gain access to the submarine’s nuclear technology. For five days, Putin remained on holiday and made no public comment; when the vessel was finally lifted, all its crew were dead. The Russian media, privatised under Boris Yeltsin and enjoying a rare period of independence, criticised Putin for putting political interests before men’s lives. When the mother of a young sailor tried to speak out about her son’s death at a televised briefing, an official forcibly injected her with a hypodermic syringe, causing her to lose consciousness. Footage of the incident was shown around the world; Putin was accused of intolerance and repression.
The Kursk debacle prompted a crackdown on the Russian media. The most vocal critic of the Kremlin’s17 handling of the tragedy had been a television channel owned by the oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky. Putin had seen how adverse coverage of the First Chechen War had damaged Boris Yeltsin and was determined to stop it happening again. Gusinsky was put under pressure to hand over his media interests to the state, then arrested and held in jail until he signed on the dotted line. Shortly afterwards, he emigrated to Israel.
Putin’s willingness to take on the oligarchs also boosted his approval ratings. The tycoons who had gained control of Russia’s industry and were perceived to be exerting covert influence over the government were despised by the majority of Russians. So when Putin announced, in a deliberate echo of Stalin’s threat against the kulaks, that he intended to ‘liquidate the oligarchs as a class’18, he was widely applauded. At first he had had to move cautiously: the leading oligarchs had helped to fund his election campaign, and Boris Berezovsky had acted as the main sponsor of his political party, Yedinstvo (United Russia). Berezovsky expected to become Putin’s grey cardinal, the power behind the throne, just as he had been for Yeltsin; the others expected gratitude and respect for their support during the elections. Their expectations were to be dashed.
In July 2000, Putin called the leading oligarchs into the Kremlin to explain the rules of the game under which they would be expected to operate. He said he would not interfere with their business activities and would not reverse the privatisation process that had made them all rich, as long as they agreed to stay out of politics. They must not fund political parties; they must not seek personal political power; and, above all, they must not challenge or criticise the president.
The reaction of some of the oligarchs was scathing. Berezovsky felt personally insulted by the upstart Putin, whom he claimed to have brought to power, and pledged himself to enduring opposition. In 2001, he followed Gusinsky into exile and set up camp in London, from where he continued to rail at the master of the Kremlin. Roman Abramovich agreed to Putin’s terms, remaining persona grata in Moscow while buying respectability in the UK by running a middle-ranking football team. The biggest thorn in Putin’s side, however, the one man who thought he could take on the president and win, was Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
In the years after he acquired the Yukos Oil Company in Boris Yeltsin’s rigged privatisations of 1996, Khodorkovsky had built it into the most powerful player in the Russian oil sector and one of the biggest in the world. He deployed his fabulous wealth to finance several parties in the Russian parliament and spoke openly of using them to lever himself into the Kremlin. He angered Putin by inviting the Americans – now regarded as global rivals, even enemies – to buy into Yukos’s oil. And he began preparations to run for the Russian presidency. In a bitter showdown19 in Putin’s offices, the two men traded insults, angrily accusing each other of corruption.
Putin knew that crushing Khodorkovsky and confiscating Yukos would make him the bogeyman of liberals and the West; it would make him look a capricious tyrant and scare away investors. But he also knew that oil was the key to the country’s future. In October 2003, he dispatched machine gun-carrying troops to intercept Khodorkovsky’s plane on the runway of a Siberian airfield. The richest man in Russia was hauled back to Moscow in handcuffs and a black canvas hood over his head. The Kremlin used bogus tax charges to bankrupt Yukos and seize its assets for the state, and Khodorkovsky himself was sentenced to eight years in a labour camp. The aim was to keep him out of politics and out of Putin’s way.
The abuse of the judicial system brought much criticism from the West and from Russia’s liberal opposition. But in purely pragmatic terms, Putin needed to reclaim Russia’s oil resources for the state. Rocketing energy prices did much to bolster his authority: Russia’s economy went from basket case to cash cow; Moscow could again punch its weight on the international stage and resume its seat at the world’s top table.
The Yukos confrontation had important political consequences. When Putin first came to power, he had inherited Boris Yeltsin’s team of ministers and officials. They were overwhelmingly reformers. Putin’s own first government, led by the pro-Western prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, had had the same liberal character. But soon Putin began to fill the Kremlin with his own people, allies who had worked with him in St Petersburg, and many of them were former KGB men. Headed by the presidential aides Viktor Ivanov and Igor Sechin and the new defence minister Sergei Ivanov, they formed a powerful clique known as the Siloviki or ‘strongmen’.fn1 They soon came into conflict with the Kremlin liberals.
The Siloviki were first and foremost ‘statists’ – they regarded the national interest as the main, perhaps the only, guiding principle for policy-making. They believed Yeltsin’s privatisation programme had been a disaster for Russia, and they had an inborn hatred for the oligarchs who had profited from his ‘sale of the century’. Putin put his friend Igor Sechin20 in charge of sorting out the oil barons. He was appointed to the board of the state oil company, Rosneft, with the brief of bringing the nation’s supplies back under state control.
The Kremlin liberals, led by Kasyanov, continued to fight for a free market and economic integration with the West; they argued that wealthy businessmen were a natural part of a properly functioning economy. But by 2003 their opponents had the upper hand. The decision to crush Khodorkovsky was taken by Sechin and Putin together, and it sealed the triumph of the Siloviki. From now on, strategic industries would be controlled by the government and used to challenge the West rather than cosy up to it. Putin’s mission to ‘make Russia great’ led to a new toughness in international relations: Moscow’s rhetoric became more strident and Russia’s neighbours were held to ransom by cutting off – or threatening to cut off – oil and gas supplies.
The public applauded the Yukos arrests; the remaining Kremlin liberals, including Kasyanov, resigned in protest. In the years following the Yukos affair, the Kremlin became noticeably tougher in its attitude towards domestic opposition – the fate of Mikhail Khodorkovsky deterred prominent individuals from entering the political arena, and ordinary citizens who tried to protest or organise found themselves on the wrong end of police batons.
Putin’s invasion of Chechnya in 1999 had drawn Russia into another long and brutal war. Russian missiles had again reduced Grozny to rubble, killing men, women and children. Hundreds of thousands of civilians fled to neighbouring Ingushetia; those who remained were deemed to be terrorists. Arkady Babchenko, a Russian soldier who served in both Chechen wars, told me in 2007 that Chechnya had turned him, and many young men like him, into inhuman agents of death; three years after he left the army, he still could not sleep. In his diaries, which would be published to equal measures of acclaim and abuse, he described the maelstrom of killing his unit discovered in the Chechen capital:
Fighting rages on in Grozny23. No one collects the bodies any more. They lie on the asphalt, on the pavements, between the smashed trees, as if they are part of the city. Armoured personnel carriers rumble over them at high speed; they get tossed around by explosions. Blackened bones are scattered around the burnt-out vehicles … Our whole generation died22 in Chechnya, a whole generation of Russians. Even those of us who stayed alive, can they really be those same laughing boys who once got sent off to the army? No, we died. We all died in that war.
The hellish conditions fostered despair and corruption. Drunkenness and suffering fostered cynicism. Torture, rape and looting24 were viewed as normal; few were brought to justice. When one colonel, Yuri Budanov, was charged with the rape and murder of a Chechen teenager, Elza Kungaeva, he claimed she was an enemy sniper. Unusually, his case went to trial, but the outcry from ex-servicemen and right-wing politicians made it a cause célèbre. Budanov’s lawyer complained that25 ‘we send our officers into Chechnya to clean a sewer; after they’ve cleaned it with their bare hands, people have no right to say they smell bad’. Budanov was released before the end of his sentence.
Kidnappings were common on both sides, with the victims being sold back to their families or, if no ransom was forthcoming, tortured and executed. One Russian officer estimated26 that 20 per cent of ‘disappearances’ were the work of Chechen guerrillas, 30 per cent criminals and 50 per cent Russian forces. Chechen males taken by the Russians rarely returned alive.
Despite the brutality, there was little public opposition to the war. It seems that the few journalists who tried to report the suffering caused by the Russian military were silenced. Andrei Babitsky, who contradicted27 Moscow’s claim that only guerrillas were being killed in Grozny, was denounced by Putin as a ‘traitor to Russia’ and ‘no longer a Russian journalist’. Anna Politkovskaya, who famously exposed the corruption and violence in Chechnya in her articles for Novaya Gazeta, was murdered on Putin’s birthday in 2006.fn2
In response to the Russian occupation, Chechen extremists targeted Russian cities. In 2002, a group of 40 terrorists29, including a number of women, took hostage 850 people at the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow. After two days of fruitless negotiations, Russian Special Forces pumped toxic gas into the theatre and stormed the building. All the terrorists were killed, but 130 hostages also died from the effects of the gas.fn3
In 2003, Moscow installed Akhmad Kadyrov as its puppet ruler in the republic and gave him carte blanche to impose order. When he was assassinated a year later, his son took over. Ramzan Kadyrov became known for the ferocity with which he crushed opposition to his rule, with allegations of government death squads, torture and murder. According to Movladi Baisarov30, one of his former commanders, Kadyrov acted ‘like a medieval tyrant. He can do whatever he likes. He can take any woman and do with her as he pleases … He acts with total impunity. I know of many who were executed on his orders and I know where they are buried … If anyone tells the truth about his activities, it is like signing your own death warrant.’ In November 2006, Baisarov was assassinated in Moscow, less than a mile from the Kremlin.
Kadyrov continued to enjoy Putin’s backing. The brutality of his regime was accepted as a necessary evil to ensure Russian security. Kadyrov told a British journalist that his job was to ‘protect the whole of Russia so that people in Moscow and St Petersburg can live in peace’. ‘Putin is a beauty,’ he said. ‘He should be made president for life. What we need is strong rule. Democracy is just an American fantasy.’
But Kadyrov could not protect Russia for ever. In 2004, Chechen ‘black widows’, women whose husbands had been killed by Russian forces, detonated bombs on the Moscow metro, on a train and on two aeroplanes, killing several hundred people. Shortly afterwards, guerrillas seized a school in Beslan, a town in the north Caucasus region of Northern Ossetia. For three days, the terrorists held a thousand pupils and teachers in the school gymnasium, while anxious parents, some of them armed, waited with the Special Forces troops surrounding the building. On the afternoon of 3 September, the Russian army stormed the school, using tanks, rockets and heavy weapons. During the gun battle that ensued, the gymnasium was engulfed by fire. More than 300 hostages, the majority of them children, lost their lives.
Vladimir Putin blamed the local authorities for the Beslan tragedy and called for increased security measures. ‘We have shown weakness31,’ he said, ‘and the weak get beaten.’ He claimed that a number of the hostage-takers were Arabs, evidence – he said – that Russia was fighting the same war on international terror as the West. It allowed him to give short shrift to Western criticisms of Russian brutality in Chechnya. At a press conference in 200632, when George W. Bush urged Moscow to emulate ‘institutional change … like in Iraq, where there’s now a free press and free religion’, Putin replied dismissively, ‘We certainly would not want to have the same kind of democracy they have in Iraq, quite honestly.’
Chechnya, though, remained Putin’s biggest challenge. Attacks on Russian civilian targets, including more bombs on the Moscow metro, continued. But Putin ruled out negotiations on autonomy for the region. His efforts to convince the West that his campaign against Chechen ‘terrorists’ was the moral equivalent of US and British intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq were equally unsuccessful.
Perceived Western interference in the former Soviet republics and satellite states in Eastern Europe – Russia’s ‘near-abroad’ – added to Moscow’s grievances. NATO’s expansion into the Baltic states in 2004 was swiftly followed by the triumph of US-backed candidates in presidential elections in Ukraine and Georgia. Russia blamed Washington for meddling in its traditional ‘sphere of influence’. After a heated debate about the Pentagon’s plans to deploy US missile defence systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, Putin told an international security conference in Munich:
The United States has overstepped33 its national borders in every way. It imposes economic, political, cultural and educational policies on other nations. Who likes this? Who is happy about this? It is extremely dangerous. It means no one can feel safe. I want to emphasise this – no one feels safe! Because no one can feel that international law will protect them. Such a policy stimulates an arms race.
After the acquiescence of the Yeltsin years, Russia under Putin had regained its former self-confidence. When the pro-American government of Georgia asserted its control of the disputed territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the summer of 2008, the Kremlin sent in the army, pushing deep into Georgia itself and shelling the capital Tbilisi. It responded to Ukraine’s ‘defection’ (to NATO and the West) by ramping up the prices of Russian oil and gas supplies. Ukraine’s pro-Western president, Viktor Yushchenko, had been poisoned during the election campaign of 2004, leaving his health weakened and his face badly scarred. There were persistent, if unproven, allegations of Kremlin involvement in the affair, and a growing belief that Moscow was returning to the Soviet practice of eliminating its enemies abroad.
In November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London. After his accusations that Putin had staged the 1999 Moscow apartment bombs, Litvinenko had fled to the UK, where he was initially employed by the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Both men continued to denounce Putin in the most ferocious terms, and broadcast calls for a revolution on an independent Russian radio station. A British police inquiry established that Litvinenko had been killed by ingesting liquid polonium, and radioactive traces of the element were found in London locations visited by two former FSB agents, Andrei Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun. When Scotland Yard issued an extradition warrant for Lugovoy, Moscow refused. Putin declared that Britain was acting like a colonial power. ‘They tell us we should change our constitution34 [to allow extradition]. I view that as an insult to our country and our people. They are the ones who need to change their thinking, not tell us to change our constitution!’ Soon afterwards Lugovoy was elected as a pro-government member of the Russian parliament, giving him immunity from extradition.fn4
Commentators on Russian state television compared the Litvinenko murder to Stalin ordering the elimination of Trotsky. The remarks were intended to blacken those who oppose the Kremlin, but they also reflected a new willingness in the Putin years to rehabilitate the dictator’s memory. In December 1999, soon after becoming prime minister, Putin had celebrated his victory with a toast to Stalin; and in March 2003 he had allowed the fiftieth anniversary of the former leader’s death to be commemorated in Red Square. Thousands of people came to pay their respects. School history books no longer dwelled on the violence and suffering of the Stalin era, preferring instead to highlight its achievements.fn5
Western unease at Moscow’s hardening stance on human rights was tempered by Europe’s dependence on Russian energy supplies. Germany, Greece, Finland, Italy, Austria and France, as well as all the former East European states, consumed large amounts of Russian gas, so few were willing to be overtly critical. The rise in international energy prices, and Russia’s vast supplies, also strengthened Putin’s hand in dealing with the Americans. After the collapse of the 1990s, he presided over an economic revival that gave Russia real clout on the international stage. The crash of 1998 had sent GDP plummeting, but Putin had arrested the decline and returned living standards to the relatively high levels of 1990. Salaries rose and inflation remained within manageable limits. A low flat37 rate tax of 13 per cent encouraged people to pay up rather than operate in the black economy, and state revenues increased. Problems remained, however. Although average wealth levels were higher, the disparity between rich and poor continued to widen. The economy remained stubbornly dependent on the export of raw materials, and little effort was made to diversify or improve productivity in other sectors. Agriculture in particular continued to be chronically inefficient. By 2008, oil and gas accounted for half of Russia’s budget revenues, more than double the level of 1999.
Economic success maintained38 Putin’s impressive approval ratings, which habitually hovered around 80 per cent and never fell below 65 per cent. In the 2007 parliamentary elections, his party, Yedinstvo, won an impressive two-thirds of the vote. There were clear indications of electoral irregularities (including a 99 per cent win in Chechnya), but Putin was genuinely popular. Few would have been surprised if the constitution had been altered to allow him a third term as president. Instead he chose to name a crown prince, the relatively unknown Dmitry Medvedev. It was announced that should Medvedev win, Putin would become prime minister; a campaign poster depicting the two standing side by side proclaimed, ‘Together, we will triumph’. The succession was being deftly managed and it was no surprise when Medvedev won 70 per cent of the vote in the March 2008 election. He became the third president of the Russian Federation and, at 42, Russia’s youngest leader since Nicholas II.
Like Putin, Medvedev was a lawyer from St Petersburg, and he too had worked in the office of the city’s mayor before becoming Putin’s deputy prime minister in 2005. He was undoubtedly a Putin crony, and at 5 feet 2 inches he was gratifyingly shorter than his patron (5 feet 6). But he lacked Putin’s KGB background, and that seemed to influence the style, if not the substance, of his presidency. The newly installed Medvedev named among his most pressing policy objectives the establishment of the ‘rule of the law’. ‘I believe my most39 important aims will be to protect civil and economic freedoms,’ he announced. ‘We must fight for a true respect of the law and overcome legal nihilism, which seriously hampers modern development.’
It appeared on the face of it to be a return to the ‘civic society’ rhetoric of more liberal times. ‘Legal nihilism’ was a reference to the age-old tradition of courts doing the bidding of officials and politicians. The Kremlin had always had the final say in cases that affected the state or the national economy; the practice was known popularly as ‘telephone justice’ because judges waited by the phone to learn what verdict they should bring in. Now Medvedev appeared willing to cede some of the Kremlin’s autocratic power and allow a more independent judiciary.
A high-profile test of his sincerity came with the second trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2009. With presidential elections due in 2012, the Kremlin had little interest in seeing a potential political opponent released from jail. New charges were brought against Khodorkovsky – that he had physically stolen millions of tons of oil from his own company – and they carried a much longer sentence. The accusations were so far-fetched that even the Russian media seemed aware this was a political prosecution. If Medvedev were serious about judicial freedom and the judges permitted to make an unbiased decision, there would undoubtedly be a not guilty verdict. But the charges were upheld. The judge’s ruling quoted the prosecutors’ submissions verbatim, and the court granted the 14-year sentence – to run concurrently with the original eight-year term – that the prosecution had demanded. Medvedev had been unwilling or, perhaps, unable to change the old ways of doing things.
Official corruption was not confined to the judicial system. The new ‘statist’ model of government in Russia had seen the Kremlin’s Silovik officials appointed to run the key sectors of the economy. Igor Sechin remained at the head of the oil giant Rosneft after it took over the assets of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Yukos; Sergei Ivanov ran the country’s biggest arms manufacturer; Dmitry Patrushev (son of the FSB director) headed up the state export bank; Vladimir Yakunin the railways; and Medvedev himself was a former chairman of the state gas monopoly, Gazprom. The finances of all these enterprises remained distinctly opaque, as billions of dollars went through their books every day. The opportunity for personal enrichment was ever present, and Russian commentators accused the Kremlin’s men of taking advantage. Vladimir Putin in particular was widely believed to have put aside more than adequate funds for his eventual retirement.fn6
The relationship between President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin was the subject of much speculation. Medvedev’s rhetoric suggested that he leaned towards the liberal values of democracy and free-market economics, while Putin remained a hardline statist. But there was little way of verifying such an assertion, and the broad direction of Kremlin policy did not change significantly after Medvedev’s arrival. It may have been that Medvedev’s ‘liberalism’ was exaggerated by political commentators, or it may have been that Putin retained the final say on key decisions. The fact that he addressed41 Medvedev using the familiar ‘ty’, while Medvedev responded with the more deferential ‘vy’, suggested Putin remained the senior partner. Nina Khrushchev, the granddaughter of Nikita, called Medvedev ‘the First Lady … just there to keep up appearances’.
The slogan Medvedev adopted to characterise his presidency was ‘modernisation’. He lamented Russia’s continued reliance on the export of oil and gas and called for greater diversification, especially into the new hightech industries. After travelling to California, he returned with Khrushchevlike enthusiasm and decreed that Russia must build its own version of Silicon Valley. At times, he suggested that economic modernisation would be accompanied by political liberalisation and democratic reform. ‘Instead of the primitive raw material42 economy, we must create a smart new economy generating unique knowledge, new useful things and technologies,’ he said in November 2009. ‘Instead of the archaic society, in which the leaders think and make decisions for everyone, we will become a country of intelligent, free and responsible people.’ The new rhetoric was welcomed in Washington: President Obama called for a ‘reset’ to improve relations with Moscow, and scrapped the much-resented US missile shield programme. But there were few perceptible improvements in Russia’s human rights record under Medvedev, and no lessening in the pressure exerted by the Kremlin against its domestic political opponents. ‘Legal nihilism’ retained its hold on Russian society, economic performance was slow to improve and the unrest in the north Caucasus continued to claim its victims, including the 35 Russians and foreigners who died in the suicide bombing of Moscow’s main international airport in January 2011.
A historian is not in the business of predicting the future. But these pages have traced underlying patterns in Russian history, and I think it is legitimate to ask if they will continue.
Russians have characterised the split in their national identity as a vacillation between the pull of Europe and the grip of Asia. Each enshrines a matrix of societal values – ‘Europe’ as participatory government, a civic society with personal and economic freedoms; ‘Asia’ as centralised, authoritarian rule, with a corresponding discount on individual liberty.
Why has ‘Asiatic tyranny’ proved so tenacious in Russia? Kievan Rus enjoyed the embryonic elements of participatory government, a startling glimpse of ‘European’ civic values. But it failed. Kiev fell because power devolved to the princes in the city states, and through them to the people, left no strong authority to secure national unity and national self-defence. The Mongols brought with them a different notion of statehood, one that recognised no rights other than the right of the state. And when the Mongols departed, Moscow prospered because it adopted a similar model. The eagerness with which Russians have embraced strong rulers stems from those years.
When autocracy became Russia’s default form of governance, the absence of a developed civic society prevented the initiation of change ‘from below’. Barring a revolution, the people did not have the means to make change happen. So nearly every attempt at reform has come ‘from above’ (from Russia’s rulers), and all have been motivated by the compelling reason that the autocracy was under threat.
When a real revolution ‘from below’ did happen, in February 1917, it promised to make colossal changes, to shift Russia’s historical paradigm to a liberal parliamentary system. But it was hijacked by another form of autocracy in the shape of the idealist despots of Leninist socialism. Lenin and Stalin revived the myth of Russia’s messianic mission; Moscow the Third Rome became Moscow the Third International, destined to redeem the world through the new religion of Communism.
Gorbachev’s reforms were also forced upon him. Just as Peter’s and Catherine’s changes were intended to shore up tsarist autocracy, Gorbachev’s aim was to maintain and reinvigorate that of the Communist Party. But something was different now. The Russian people were no longer content to follow directives from above; they had learned to have their own opinions. The long-held conviction that change from below was impossible had evaporated, and in August 1991 it was the people who demanded freedom and democracy. It was a tectonic shift that suggested things might be different in the future.
It was globalisation, the information revolution and Gorbachev’s recognition of it through glasnost that allowed change to happen. When I first worked in Moscow, I was not permitted to bring in a photocopier for my office lest unsavoury elements gain access to it to copy their anti-Soviet propaganda. I could listen to my own reports on the BBC World Service only if I leaned out of the window of my sixth-floor flat with a short-wave radio in my hand – otherwise Soviet jamming made Western broadcasts inaudible. The Kremlin kept its people in ignorance of the outside world so they would continue to believe the USSR was a paradise and the capitalist world a hellhole. But technology broke the party’s monopoly on information. Gorbachev was forced to allow the use of computers to prevent Russia sinking into economic backwardness. The walls were starting to come down. Soon Russians had access to satellite television and then the internet; they began to travel to the West, and the success of democracy and free markets could no longer be hidden. Russians saw the former Communist states of Eastern Europe looking westwards, increasing their levels of prosperity. In the 1990s Russia seemed to be taking the same route.
But instead of prosperity and freedom, Russia got economic meltdown, crime and ethnic strife. The result was a hasty return to the methods that had worked in the past. Russians wanted order, and they didn’t care if Putin suspended a few civil rights and undid Yeltsin’s laissez-faire economics to provide it. The silnaya ruka – the strong ruler – was back, and Russians were happy about it.
The ending of the liberal experiment of the 1990s posed new questions. On this occasion, the reassertion of autocracy was carried out with the approval of the people, not imposed on them. The governments of Putin and of Putin –Medvedev remained genuinely popular. No one in Russia was hurrying to return to the Yeltsin era; Russia’s liberal opposition enjoyed little influence or following. So did liberalism fail in the 1990s simply because it was introduced in an inept manner, because it was hamstrung by the old system and because the West failed to support it? Or was its failure the result of deeper factors? Could it be that centripetal Russia really can be ruled only by the silnaya ruka?
Western optimists say Russia’s reliance on US and European investment and technology will bind her into Western political and cultural values – if Russia wants our money, she will have to conform to our standards of legal and civil rights. It is a beguiling thought, but not supported by the facts.
When Vladimir Putin chose to seize the assets of the Yukos Oil Company and throw its owner in jail, there was criticism from London, Berlin and Washington. Commentators predicted that Western capital would flee a country where the rule of law is arbitrary and private businesses are confiscated with impunity. Even Dmitry Medvedev seemed to acknowledge the argument. Then Yukos was bankrupted and Khodorkovsky tried and convicted, not once but twice. It was a deliberate rebuff to ‘Western values’, but Western investors still came to Russia in search of a quick profit. BP signed a multibillion-dollar deal with Rosneft, the state oil company that was the main beneficiary of the sale of Yukos’s assets. International trade links seemed not to have persuaded Russia to act like a European country, but to have convinced her that she can act as she likes.
For nearly a millennium, Russia had been an expanding empire ruled first by autocratic monarchs, then by an autocratic party. Its size and power were a challenge and a warning to its neighbours. Its rulers demanded, and received, obedience from its people, who, in turn, took solace from the vastness of their land and the richness of their culture. Then the empire collapsed, Russia was left shrunken and broken, its leaders exposed as weak men unable to understand, let alone dominate events.
The popular revolution of 1991 did not lead to liberty. Latter-day economic boyars stole the country’s riches and used them to prop up a buffoon president. It was a new Time of Troubles, ended by a small but terrifying man. Vladimir Putin offered his country not the restoration of great power status, but the illusion of that restoration; not the restoration of peace and security at home, but the illusion of that security, periodically ripped apart by bombs and Islamic hit squads. The Kremlin was as powerful, as distant and as corrupt as under the Romanovs, and, knowing no other form of rule, Russians in the first decade of the twenty-first century bowed willingly to its command. George Bush’s suggestion at Christmas 1991 that Russia will now be ‘like us’ seemed misguided at the time and seems so today.
fn1 By 2002, former KGB21 and FSB agents were estimated to occupy more than half the positions in the higher echelons of the federal structure.
fn2 The fate of journalists like Politkovskaya became frighteningly common. The Committee to Protect28 Journalists says 25 reporters and correspondents were killed in Russia in the decade since Putin came to power. Half of them were nowhere near a war zone. Many more were beaten or threatened.
fn3 The casualties were partly the result of the Russian military’s refusal to tell doctors the nature of the gas they used – it was, they claimed, a military secret.
fn4 When I visited the Kremlin in February 2007, I asked Putin’s aide, Dmitry Peskov, if the Russian president had personally ordered Litvinenko’s murder. He ridiculed the suggestion35, but did not conceal that his boss had nursed a very personal hatred of the man. ‘The president was very upset [by Litvinenko’s allegations],’ he told me. ‘He was upset by these allegations made personally against him. He simply couldn’t believe that people were saying these things about him as a person … He never tried to camouflage or to hide the fact that he was far from fond of Mr Litvinenko.’
fn5 Organisations such as Memorial, which campaigns for human rights and to ensure that the atrocities of the Soviet era are not forgotten or repeated, faced growing harassment. In 2008, Memorial had its entire36 database, containing the names of all who suffered during Stalin’s purges, confiscated by the police.
fn6 The former Kremlin insider Stanislav40 Belkovsky, who had parted ways with his Siloviki friends, claimed that despite officially receiving only a modest salary, Putin’s bank account stood at $40 billion. ‘I have been dealing with this question for two and a half years,’ he told me in January 2008. ‘So it is not a new topic for me. I estimate the assets controlled effectively by Vladimir Putin at the level of at least $40 billion. That includes 37.5 per cent of Surgut-neftegaz oil company, 4.5 per cent of Gazprom and also the oil trader Gunvor, an offshore trader of oil and metals. It was unknown just nine years ago, and is connected with one of Putin’s closest friends and business partners, Gennady Timchenko. So I can imagine the assets under Putin’s control might be larger than I know, but they are at least $40 billion … There are hundreds of people inside the Russian elite who can confirm these figures …’