The face that the Kremlin shows to Russia and the world wears a mask. The Putin cult is a case in point. Putin’s denials that he was ever personally ambitious are unconvincing at best, and if he genuinely hesitated about accepting the premiership and acting presidency from Yeltsin, as he likes to maintain, this is unlikely to have been because of worries about his family’s security.1 But it is entirely credible that he would have thought hard about Yeltsin’s enthusiasm for sacking his prime ministers, although he perhaps overdoes the trauma he experienced on first arriving in the capital: ‘When I moved to Moscow from St Petersburg, I was shocked and astounded how many crooks there were gathered here, and their behaviour was so astonishing for me that I couldn’t get accustomed to it for a long time.’2 The idea that St Petersburg was entirely without corruption is laughable. Putin was not a political innocent. Yeltsin promoted him because he showed the toughness and loyalty that Yeltsin needed and he coped tenaciously with conditions in Moscow.
Yeltsin’s chaotic mode of rule as his health deteriorated and his alcoholism took a grip was a source of disdain among the ruling elite. There had been an increasing trend for Yeltsin to appoint ex-KGB officials to high office to reduce the disorder around and below him – few of his advisers were averse to his taking a chance on Putin.3 But the self-aggrandizement of leading businessmen – the ‘oligarchs’ – who profiteered from the country’s natural resources was another matter. Some of these entrepreneurs had pushed their way into posts of political authority and proceeded to exploit their elevation, causing widespread resentment. Among them was the flamboyant billionaire Boris Berezovski, who had served as the Security Council deputy secretary and regularly boasted of the influence he wielded over Yeltsin, deaf to the rancour that this provoked.
The president’s position grew ever more perilous. Two politicians, ex-prime minister Yevgeni Primakov and Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, allegedly advised him to step down from office. The alternative, they allegedly warned, would be a worsening situation in the country that could end with him suffering the same fate as Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu, who was summarily executed in 1989.4 The account has never been verified, but when Primakov was prime minister – from September 1998 to May 1999 – he certainly upset Yeltsin with a series of independent moves. Among them was Primakov’s overture to parties in the Duma, including the communists, for an accord to halt the ongoing pressure to impeach Yeltsin for ‘treason’. Yeltsin was the butt of multiple charges. He was blamed for shattering the Soviet Union in 1991, using lethal force to disperse the Russian parliament in 1993 and failing to defend the national interest against NATO. Primakov called for a respite from endless polemics and for compromise on economic policy. Yeltsin suspected that Primakov had his own designs on the presidency.5 Tensions mounted to the point that Yeltsin sacked him in favour of first deputy prime minister and Internal Affairs Minister Sergei Stepashin, but in August 1999, when Stepashin purportedly refused to guarantee that there would be no judicial proceedings against the Yeltsin family after he retired, Yeltsin replaced him with the FSB’s Putin.
Yet the appointment was a surprise, and not only in Russia. Putin was an unknown quantity for the average Russian, but then so were several of his predecessors. What also took many people aback was the fact that someone from the FSB was being appointed to the second highest office in the land. But Putin’s elevation was in keeping with how Yeltsin operated. Yevgeni Primakov became prime minister some years after spending half a decade as director of the Foreign Intelligence Service; Sergei Stepashin, who maintained friendly links with the KGB in the Gorbachëv period,6 took the premiership after heading the Federal Counter-Intelligence Service and then the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
One important fact that has escaped attention is that the FSB was being courted by those who wanted to succeed Yeltsin. Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov and St Petersburg Governor Vladimir Yakovlev, two of the leaders of the new All-Russia-Fatherland Party, placed articles in the agency’s in-house magazine Security Service (Sluzhba bezopasnosti).7 The country needed to be run in a more orderly fashion and a consensus was forming about how this should be done. Stepashin, when he was Minister of Internal Affairs, had written to Primakov, then prime minister, to rant about the thievery that was bringing Russia to the brink of ‘catastrophe’.8 All of them talked about the need for a renewal of honesty in public affairs. Whether they were sincere in this is doubtful, but they certainly aimed to shore up the foundations of central institutions and stamp on the current disorders. Stepashin and Primakov were not alone. All-Russia-Fatherland was formed by a merger of the two main ‘patriotic’ parties. Its aim was to challenge the liberals as well as the communists and the political far right at the December 1999 Duma election. It was a party that drew on support from regional leaders with a guiding belief that liberalism, insofar as it had been tried in Russia, had served to enable massive economic fraud. It also alleged that communism had proved its total bankruptcy as a method of rule.
FSB Director Putin shared this outlook. Unlike Primakov, though, he had tactical finesse and avoided upsetting Yeltsin. He also charmed Berezovski and other business moguls who might obstruct his advance, and Berezovski began to talk of him as a protégé: he did not appreciate that Putin was never going to do as he was told.
Yeltsin had his reasons for looking after the FSB leadership. Having come to power as an enemy of the Soviet KGB, he began to see that the remodelled security services could help him to strengthen his political authority. As his own popularity fell away, Yeltsin’s democratic commitment took second place to his efforts to cling on to power. He also found the security services a useful counterweight to the tycoons pushing for policies in their personal interest. By schooling and tradition, moreover, FSB personnel think of themselves as indispensable to the country’s well-being. Before the late 1980s they had played a subordinate role to the Soviet Communist Party in the USSR, but from 1991 they felt they had been left alone to save the Russian Federation from itself. Even many of those who resigned from security agencies for careers in the private sector kept in contact with them. Some helped to establish private guarding companies offering protection to businesses. Yeltsin in his fitful way realized that eliminating corruption from the heights of government was desirable, and it was this that was behind his increasing tendency to appoint former KGB officials to the new agencies that oversaw administrative affairs. The resurrected secret services were becoming a state with the state.9
Like others in the Kremlin elite, Putin sensed that time was running out for Yeltsin. Disquiet at the influence wielded over him by big business reached a peak. Private profiteering seemed to have supplanted governance in the national interest. The economy had been in deep recession since the late 1980s – as it happened, an abrupt recovery was about to ensue as the result of a rise in the world market price for oil and gas, but this was not yet clear to most members of the Russian leadership. In foreign policy, Bill Clinton pressed Yeltsin into accepting the bombing of Belgrade in 1999 after Serbian President Milošević carried out ethnic cleansing of Albanians from Serbia’s Kosovo enclave.10 Yeltsin complained to Clinton of the sleepless nights he endured as a result of the phone calls he had to take from Russian politicians expressing their outrage.11
Kosovo became a pinch point. The same had happened in July 1914 when Nicholas II declared war on Austria-Hungary in defence of Serbia. It was not that the tsar was notably solicitous about the plight of Serbians, but rather that he had given way to Austria-Hungary and Germany in earlier diplomatic tussles. Russian conservative and liberal opinion had had enough and brought their pressure to bear in the Duma and the press. But whereas Nicholas would have gone to war regardless of pressure – he too had had enough – Yeltsin was not going to fight Clinton over former Yugoslavia or anywhere else. Nevertheless, American military operations in the Balkans in defiance of Moscow’s wishes had agitated Russian communist, nationalist and conservative opinion for years. Though most Russians had not shown any particular sympathy with Serbia, the Kosovo question affronted Russia’s national dignity. Throughout the 1990s, Russians had watched as the Americans successfully pushed for the world to accede to their foreign-policy demands. Events in former Yugoslavia seemed to exemplify global politics since the disintegration of the USSR.
The indirect effect was to shine a bright light on what was felt to be wrong with Russia’s internal situation. The focus was on thieving businessmen, corrupt officialdom and a scorned president who was no longer fit for high office. The Russian people searched for an end to their woeful financial and employment conditions. The scene was set for political explosion and social disturbance. ‘Kosovo’ suddenly united public opinion and brought these troubles to centre stage.
As Yeltsin began to despair of reversing the public mood, he took the drastic decision to make Putin his successor. This was patrimonial politics: as president, Yeltsin thought it his right to hand the job on to his latest protégé. When he told Clinton about his plan, he promised that Putin was well informed and intelligent, with a strong understanding of democratic principles and the necessary toughness to lead Russia.12 He also endorsed Putin’s war in Chechnya, warning Clinton about the dangerous spread of jihadism throughout Europe. Though Putin was in daily political charge of the military campaign, its planning predated his premiership and had Yeltsin’s approval. As early as March 1999 Putin as FSB director had conferred with Internal Affairs Minister Stepashin and Defence Minister Igor Sergeev about the military reoccupation of the Chechen territories. The pretext for the war was an explosion in apartment blocks in Moscow and three other cities in September 1999. Though Putin was later accused of engineering the outrage, there were reasons to think that it was instigated by Yeltsin’s close relatives and political advisers – known widely as The Family – who saw these machinations and a short, victorious war as crucial to the administration’s survival.13
Putin’s genial demeanour, moreover, was reassuring to the leaders of big business – Berezovski, for example, had faith in Putin, unlike his view of Primakov or Luzhkov. Primakov’s crusade against economic crime had induced Berezovski to take the precaution of staying abroad for several months. On his return, it was clear that he wanted a firm hand in the Kremlin when Yeltsin stepped down, and he became one of Putin’s supporters. It was in this atmosphere that, on New Year’s Eve 1999, Yeltsin suddenly announced his retirement, automatically making Putin the acting president.
Putin was then still an unknown in the eyes of the Russian public. When appearing on television in his new role, he was bright and brisk. His aim was to say nothing that might agitate people before the presidential election in March 2000. Although he talked modestly about himself in public, he was possessed of an intense personal ambition. He was determined to transform and dominate the way that Russia was ruled. Generally he kept quiet about his thinking on the subject, although in summer 2008 he let slip to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: ‘Russians have always been at their best when they have been ruled by great men. Peter the Great, Alexander II. Russia needs a strong hand.’14 Putin has governed in the same spirit. He had little democratic experience. Until he first stood for the presidency he had never – not once – offered himself as a candidate at an election at any political level. Not even in his time in St Petersburg politics in the early 1990s. It was to Yeltsin that he owed his ascent of the slippery ladder of public office in Moscow as he became first director of the FSB, then prime minister and finally the acting president. He was accustomed to working inside a political machine that insulates itself from public pressure. His career has been an authoritarian ruler’s dream.
In Putin’s first presidential term between 2000 and 2004 there was a soft aspect of Russian foreign policy that has long since disappeared. Tactical pliability, however, was accompanied by a cynical view of international relations that he took pains to disguise. Even today he remains reluctant to give a frank exposition of his beliefs about global politics, fearing that he might cause concern to the Russian electorate. As much as he can manipulate their votes, it makes no sense for him to alienate them unduly. In the margins of his speeches, however, he displays a belief that amoral motives underlie the actions of the world’s leaders as they compete for influence. Harshness and even brutality, he thinks, are integral elements of statesmanship. Although he is mostly courteous at joint press conferences with foreign presidents, he can also lose his temper. He assumes that rival powers have no interest in Russian security or prosperity and will do down Russia at the first opportunity. In politics, dog eats dog.
On coming to power, as we shall see in later chapters, he carried out important economic reforms to deepen the foundations of Russian capitalism.15 He also balanced accommodation to America and NATO with renewed national assertiveness. He spoke of Russia as a European country. He made no objection to the American request for airbase facilities in Uzbekistan before the invasion of Afghanistan. He continued Russia’s quest to join the World Trade Organization. Like Yeltsin, he suggested that the Kremlin might even apply for membership of NATO. But the velvet glove of conciliation concealed a steel fist. Whenever Western leaders spoke of human rights abuses in Russia, he cut them short. Criticism of the war in Chechnya made him fractious and he insisted that no foreign leader had the right to define the Russian national interest. The UK’s prime minister Tony Blair, who was the first foreigner to befriend him, was also the first to feel the lash of his tongue at a press conference. However much Putin on other occasions smiled at American and European leaders, he brooked no trespass onto his international agenda. They were given to understand that Russia would steer its own course.
When in September 2004 Chechen terrorists occupied School No. 1 in Beslan in North Ossetia and killed captive parents and children, he suggested that there was international connivance behind the massacre. By then his patience with America had been snapped by George W. Bush’s initiative in 2002 to introduce a new anti-missile defence system to eastern Europe and his support for the ‘colour revolutions’ in Georgia and Ukraine in 2003. America morphed into being Russia’s official enemy number one.
This situation changed somewhat in January 2009 when Barack Obama entered the White House and announced his wish to ‘reset’ ties with Russia. There developed a second period of mutual accommodation, made easier by the fact that Medvedev rather than Putin was president for four years from May 2008. Much was quickly achieved. With American assistance, Russia secured membership of the World Trade Organization after years of applying in vain. A New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was signed, committing Russia and America to reducing their strategic nuclear warheads to 1,500 each. There was agreement also to establish a US–Russia Bilateral Commission, which would create working parties to seek an end to a range of chronic disputes between the two countries. In 2011 Obama reduced general military expenditure by 10–15 per cent by means of a bipartisan agreement in the US Congress.16
Putin was not alone in being irked by Medvedev’s conduct of public affairs. Those who cherished the old Soviet traditions were annoyed that Medvedev remained seated to greet the 9 May Victory parade on Red Square – the custom was for the head of state to stand and salute. Medvedev was sometimes impulsive in the way he issued his presidential decrees. Technological lobbies resented how he poured money into his pet programme at Skolkovo while starving the funding available for the reputable science institutions in Novosibirsk and Zelenograd. He boasted of turning Moscow into a world financial centre. The reality in 2013 was to be that Russia languished in 130th place as a banking market – below even Botswana – in the global rankings.17
Disquiet was also felt about Medvedev’s actions in foreign policy. With the onset of the ‘Arab Spring’, Libya collapsed in turmoil and its ruler Muammar Gaddafi violently suppressed the street demonstrations. Medvedev spoke of Gaddafi’s loss of legitimacy and accommodated Western powers in discussions as to how to end the bloodshed in Tripoli and Benghazi. France, followed by the United Kingdom, decided to impose a no-fly zone. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed Obama to support them. Obama, however, laid down a preference for approval by the United Nations, and he was lucky that it was Medvedev rather than Putin who was Russian president at the time. Medvedev told US Vice-President Joe Biden that Russia would not get in the way of air strikes. These were the days when Gaddafi looked likely to march on Benghazi and massacre every rebel in his path. In the vote at the UN Security Council on 17 March 2011, the Russian and Chinese ambassadors abstained, which left Western powers with a mandate to impose a no-fly zone over Libya to protect civilians from Gaddafi’s war planes.
Medvedev had never had much time for Gaddafi, about whom he talked with contempt in the presence of Americans.18 But as events unfolded, the French and British, with American intelligence support, started a bombing campaign that went beyond the framework of the UN Security Council mandate. Medvedev refrained from criticizing the Western powers. As the crisis intensified, he sacked the Russian ambassador in Tripoli for continuing to write disapproving reports on the military action.19
The measures on Libya angered the large part of Russia’s elite and electorate that wanted its president to flex his muscles in international affairs. The rift widened between president and prime minister. Putin made a public comparison of Obama’s Libyan action with Bush’s war in Iraq, ‘Where is the logic and the conscience? There’s nothing of either. There are already victims among the civilian population, on whose behalf the bombing strikes are supposedly being made.’20 This annoyed Medvedev, who spoke on television a few hours later in favour of the Security Council’s decision. Foreign policy was meant to lie on the Russian presidency’s exclusive table, and Medvedev objected to Putin picking up his cutlery. Western leaders showed a preference for Medvedev over Putin. Many leading Russians felt the same. Political advisers such as Vladislav Surkov and Gleb Pavlovski supported Medvedev in the hope of a more liberal pattern of governance than Putin would provide – Pavlovski warned that the leadership could not afford complacency about the possible shifts in public opinion.21
Medvedev felt inspirited to canvass for support in commercial circles for his plan to stand again at the presidential election of March 2012. As Medvedev probed the possibilities, Putin did the same on his own behalf. Patron and client got ready for the competition. The only question was whether they would contend against each other at the polls or seek a prior decision from the country’s ascendant elite as to which of the two should stand as its candidate.
The Medvedev option collapsed with the first breath of wind. In July 2011, Medvedev called a meeting of twenty-seven leading businessmen and asked point-blank whether they would back him. A shuffling of feet occurred in the audience. The billionaires had not forgotten how Putin had dealt with business moguls Vladimir Gusinski, Boris Berezovski and Mikhail Khodorkovski. Gusinski had been forced to sell up most of his assets, including the NTV television station that had regularly criticized Putin, before fleeing the country in 2000. Berezovski had continued to put up a struggle, so Putin called him in for a discussion. When Berezovski said he was minded to move into ‘public opposition’, Putin faced him down, ‘Well, all right, that’s your business!’22 By the end of 2000, after recognizing that Putin held all the cards of power, Berezovski concluded that it was best for him to go into foreign exile. Khodorkovski stayed behind and maintained the challenge to Putin and in 2003 paid the price of being arrested. Two years later he was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment. The other business magnates learned the new rule book, and those of them who sat in Medvedev’s audience in 2011 were averse to risking their fortunes or freedom by entering the political fray. If Medvedev wished to contend for the presidency, he would have to go ahead without their blessing. They themselves would only spectate.23
Putin chafed with impatience while waiting to return to the highest office. Whenever he thought Russia’s purposes were being thwarted, he reacted like the KGB officer that he once had been. His truculence in international affairs came as a shock to those who had been impressed by his friendly overtures to the West during his first presidential term.
They should not have been surprised. He was only applying to foreign policy the same ruthlessness he had shown in internal politics. In Russia he had suppressed democratic aspirations whenever they threatened the requirements of the Russian ruling elite. He had accepted the formalities of democracy on sufferance while restricting its influence in practice. Kremlin leaders showed indifference when investigative journalists were assassinated in Russia. The Presidential Administration repeatedly rigged the laws governing national elections. Chechnya was subjected to armed occupation and then handed over to Akhmat and Ramzan Kadyrov, willing Chechens not known for their civilized manners. Whatever Putin’s foreign policy had been in the year 2000, he had already decided to impose severe political order, and the effects were bound to leach their toxicity into international affairs. The symptoms were obvious as early as 2004, when he reacted badly to Ukrainian elections that brought a leadership to power which sought friendship with NATO and the European Union and cooled relations with Russia. The prospect of an alternative model of governance on the Russian frontier was the last thing that Putin was going to tolerate, especially if the Ukrainians adopted democracy and the rule of law.
His patriotism, mistrust and mercilessness are the characteristic qualities of an intelligence officer. Russia’s secret services survived the collapse of the Soviet order better than any other institution, and Putin showed his resolve during his tenure as FSB director in 1998–9 to raise their level of morale and efficiency. When he addressed the State Duma in November 1998 and took questions from the floor, he was frank about what he thought the security institutions required and deserved. He only half-joked: ‘Nobody with the exception of State Duma deputies loves the Federal Security Service. That’s why everybody obstructs it.’ He tried to foster a changed attitude to the FSB and asked the Duma for support. He wanted a pay rise for his officers and demanded more of them be recruited. He advocated legislation to enable the FSB to conduct its investigations without hindrance. This was essential, Putin stressed, for the intelligence agencies’ capacity to keep the country safe.24
He boasted that his officers were engaged in a process of constant self-reform which had raised the level of their many services. He described an established pattern whereby they were assigned posts inside the Presidential Administration and ministries to facilitate their impact on current discussions.25 The FSB was integrated into the organs of daily governance and influenced every sector of public life. Russia in his estimation had not yet resolved its key problems. Privatization had been conducted in an ‘incorrect’ fashion with the result that in places such as the port of Novorossiisk, on the Black Sea coast, ‘there emerged an owner who began to take command of state property, created his own security service and subjugated and brought state institutions under his control’. Putin deliberately spoke only about a single city: he knew it would be a serious tactical error if he caused business leaders at the national level to tremble. Only later did they discover that he meant what he said far beyond the Novorossiisk quayside.26
Putin did tell the Duma, however, about what the FSB had done to prevent the illegal export of Russian natural resources. He disclosed that his officers had succeeded in getting hold of many wrongdoers abroad – he already endorsed the freedom of Russia’s security services to conduct extraterritorial operations (this activity was not framed in Russian law until 2006). He denounced the ‘criminalization’ of the regional elites throughout Russia, where organized crime groups had penetrated public life and were manipulating politicians. He complained about the extent to which Russia’s internal republics had insulated themselves from the fiscal system operated from Moscow. Putin called for measures to put a stop to the flight of Russian capital abroad. In his opinion, profits made at home should stay at home and not vanish into foreign bank accounts.27
He would say nothing yet about wresting back government control of those of the country’s natural resources that had been privatized, chiefly delivered by Yeltsin into the hands of a small group of business moguls known as the oligarchs in return for their support in the 1996 presidential election. But like millions of other Russians, Putin believed in the requirement for greater state regulation and this had been a key theme of the doctoral dissertation he submitted at the St Petersburg Mining Institute in 1997.28 (It is common for Russian politicians who are on the make to manufacture an academic status for themselves.) But he refrained from dealing with the topic when standing for the presidency, mindful not to put the ‘oligarchs’ on their guard.
The years he spent inside the secret services have improved his ability to dissemble and sharpened his impatience with opposition. He hates being contradicted. Those who thwart him are poking their fingers into a wasps’ nest. This does not, however, mean that he never asks for expert advice, especially on how to handle the economy. Even so, the consultations can become fiery. The economist Andrei Illarionov frequently visited Putin at his dacha at Novo-Ogarëvo, but when Illarionov intruded his opinion that the 1999–2000 war in Chechnya constituted a crime, Putin angrily debated with him for half an hour. Neither convinced the other, and although Illarionov continued to work for Putin and economic reform, they never discussed Chechnya again.29
There were also fireworks at an encounter with selected journalists in 2008, when Ekho Moskvy columnist Arkadi Dubnov inquired about the fate of Mikhail Khodorkovski, the oil magnate who had been Russia’s richest man before his trial and incarceration. ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich,’ Dubnov asked, ‘tell us why you hate Khodorkovski so much.’ Such bluntness disconcerted his colleagues, who knew that the businessman had refused Putin’s demand for entrepreneurs to stay out of politics. Putin exclaimed, ‘Yes, but he was up to his elbows in blood!’ Without batting an eyelid, Dubnov came back at him, ‘How come? Vladimir Vladimirovich, what was it they condemned him for? Why did they condemn him for tax crimes?’ Putin growled, ‘Well, don’t you know about this? They drag themselves with bags of cash into the procurator’s offices and the courts!’ Dubnov made a final jibe, ‘So is this what we get as the result of your eight years in power?’ At this point a fellow reporter tugged at Dubnov’s jacket to stop the exchanges, ‘Arkadi, pack it in. What on earth are you up to?’30
As the others kept up the pressure with questions about Khodorkovski, Putin flew into a rage. Dubnov was now watching, rather than interrogating. Putin, he could see, ‘truly believed and had convinced himself that [Khodorkovski] was a murderer and that he was up to his elbows in blood’. Until then Dubnov had assumed Putin had been playing a role. But he was soon convinced that Putin was holding Khodorkovski in gaol because he genuinely held him guilty of complicity in murder.31
Dubnov may be right, but it is also possible that Putin was drawing upon his KGB training to use outrage as a tool when he was failing to get his way using the power of argument. Russian politics are a rough school that trains its practitioners in personal hardiness. Putin brags that he grew up in a tough environment. Speaking to foreign guests in October 2015, he confided, ‘You know, here’s something I’d like to say. Fifty years ago I learned one rule on the streets of Leningrad: if a fight is inevitable, be the first to attack.’32 In discussion he is practised at adopting an alarming tone. Perhaps as a result of his judo coaching, he aims to catch people off balance. But he has also learned when to be more moderate in talking to leaders from abroad, because he has discovered from experience that asperity wins him no prizes. Most foreigners who come into his presence have heard of his reputation and try to avoid annoying him. His fits of temper are notorious. But no sooner has he lost self-control over some disagreement in international affairs than he is speaking in a tranquil manner on another topic. One moment he is like a torrent and the next like standing water.33
If he grew up that way, it was also exactly how the KGB trained him. His fellow recruit in Leningrad and later political appointee Vladimir Yakunin has written about the schooling that promising young intelligence recruits received:
The ability to read body language, to read all of the signs that other people communicate unconsciously, has been a great advantage in my subsequent career. And, conversely, I can use my demeanour almost like an instrument to help me persuade and manipulate. We were taught how to subtly change the expression of our eyes, the tightness of our skin, the cast of our jaws: at times I can be all soft and full of laughter, at others I can be like a beast, but I never lose control of my emotions.34
Yakunin recalls that Dale Carnegie’s American bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People was on the KGB’s training curriculum. When in 2005 Putin made him head of the Russian railway network, he found this coaching in chameleon-like behaviour helpful when negotiating with foreigners. Putin, too, is able to adapt his mood and manner to suit each fresh environment.
Part-gargoyle and part-charmer, he won the admiration of President George W. Bush, who in June 2001 announced that after staring into Putin’s eyes, ‘I was able to get a sense of his soul’. At first, Bush had found Putin heavy going because he had come with a stack of prepared talking points. To a man who valued Texan informality, this was uncongenial. But then they discovered that they shared an interest in the Bible.35 Bush was not to know that Putin had been advised by an American contact to advertise his Christian faith as a negotiating ploy.36 When Bush took a trip to St Petersburg, Putin took him out to his residence and showed him the private chapel that he had built in the grounds.37 Most importantly, in 2001, Putin had shown that he understood the enormity of the September 11 terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Center by being the first head of state to call Bush to express his condolence and offer active cooperation.
While Russia’s dealings with America were deteriorating in the mid-2000s, Putin remained courteous in meetings with Bush, and he and Obama called each other Vladimir and Barack.38 Yet foreign leaders know him as someone who listens intently to the opposite side’s argument. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel has acknowledged his willingness to hear her out when they disagree, and they keep up a dialogue even in times of international stress.
Despite this, Putin still has the reputation of a carnivore prowling among herds of unsuspecting ruminants. His friendly banter can swiftly give way to anger when he feels seriously baulked and he creates an alarming environment if he feels the need. On one of José Manuel Barroso’s many visits to Russia, the European Commission president was looking forward to having a relaxed evening at Putin’s presidential dacha. Barroso, who had flown to Moscow from Kazakhstan, expressed admiration for the dinner that his Russian hosts provided. Putin stormed back at him, pretending to be shocked at the disrespect he was showing to President Nursultan Nazarbaev. It was confected outrage. Putin wanted to discomfit Barroso so as to gain the upper hand in the negotiations that they were about to undertake.39 This was far from being the nastiest recorded case of how he probes points of weakness. In 2007 he brought Koni, his black Labrador, into a meeting with Angela Merkel at the Sochi presidential residence. It is widely known that she is nervous of dogs, having been bitten by one in her youth. Trying to shake her up and take advantage came naturally to Putin, judo master and ex-KGB officer. And in his male-chauvinist fashion, he assumed that a frightened woman would yield to his political requirements.
But Merkel gave him his comeuppance when she told reporters, ‘I understand why he has to do this – to prove he’s a man. He’s afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this.’ It was an outburst untypical of a German chancellor who values discretion. Putin had set out to humble her and she paid him back in language he would understand.40 Russian TV stations refrained from reporting what she said. Russians evidently were to be shielded from witnessing her scathing assessment of Russia’s achievements with Putin at the helm.
Publicity is certainly given, however, to meticulously preparing for meetings, making it a point of honour to master his daily brief. He himself has bragged that he typically reads entire policy documents rather than abstracts,41 and has surprised foreign interviewers with his command of Russian economic statistics or of Russia’s diplomatic considerations. Admittedly there have been those who have queried this, as when the reporters Konstantin Gaaze and Mikhail Fishman cited unnamed Kremlin officials who said that he spent only fifteen minutes a day on documents, being more interested in his exercise machines and the swimming pool.42 But most observers tell of a perfectionist who constantly tries to improve his political skills. He will never become a great orator. But this does not bother him so long as he can make an impact as a pugnacious if monotonous speaker. He once quipped that he was being coached in rhetorical technique, then had to deny this when people failed to understand that he was joking.43
He has always appreciated the importance of public image. When working in the St Petersburg administration in the early 1990s, he took the unusual step of commissioning a TV documentary about his work.44 Years later he told media editors, ‘It’s better not to be chewing in front of the cameras.’ He explained that broadcasters would exploit the slightest visual faux pas.45 On rising to the presidency, he worked at grooming himself in public relations. When in November 2000 he met Prime Minister Blair in Moscow, he asked about how to improve his image. Blair’s team included some of the world’s doyens in media manipulation, and Blair was famous for his ease with audiences and his actorly flair. Putin listened avidly to how the British did it. His zeal to learn from Western experience stretched to asking Blair to send over a team of consultants to Russia to advise on how to reform the Russian civil service.46
Putin recognized that he was capable of huge misjudgements. In August 2000 he had incurred widespread disapproval of the way that he handled news about the disaster in the cold waters of the Barents Sea when the entire crew of the Kursk nuclear submarine perished. Putin complacently refused to interrupt his summer holiday. He was by nature and instruction an enemy of sentimentality: KGB officers were meant to adopt an impassive demeanour. The Russian public saw things differently: Putin was president and it was his duty to help the country to deal with the pain. His popularity plummeted. It was ten days before he understood the damage done by his inactivity and went in person to the Vidyaevo naval base. There he met hundreds of bereaved family members, who lost their tempers with him in full view of the TV cameras. This was not so much an embarrassment as sheer humiliation. But rather than blame the naval high command for years of negligence, he castigated the Russian media for their investigations into the tragedy and hit out at media owners who were living safely in their plush Mediterranean villas.
But he learned from this episode. After Kursk, he always visited scenes of outrage or spoke on television to condole with victims and threaten wrongdoers with punishment. When terrorist atrocities took place at Moscow’s Nord-Ost Theatre in 2002 and two years later at Beslan’s School No. 1 he was immediately shown supervising the security operations. Experience might have changed his practice, but his temperament and attitude remain the same.
In discussion, Putin is remarkably decisive and sticks fixedly to his decisions. He is comfortable when explaining them on TV to the Russian public. Years of power have lent him an aura of self-confidence. Once he has marked out and expounded his line of thought, he sits back holding the arms of his chair. His calmness somehow accentuates his inner energy. He is animation in human form and careful viewers can observe the frequent movement of his feet. He moves his head towards TV presenters or interviewers to make his points, often raising the right hand in a fist. His fingers move restlessly on the edge of his table. He is not a fidget but rather he aims to demonstrate that his policies alone can deal with the recurrent crises in world politics. He speaks rapidly, clearly, articulately. He rations levity to a minimum. He expects to be in charge and reacts to dissent with a cannonade of assertions. Impassivity gives way to anger. In an instant the gentle ruler shows himself an irascible autocrat.
Some have contended that the facade of competence conceals a degree of psychological insecurity. One of his former advisers, the so-called political technologist Gleb Pavlovski, whom he consulted about internal political strategy until April 2011, tells of having witnessed at least one crisis of self-confidence:
In the spring of 2010, Putin fell into a kind of depression, which was very noticeable. He even began to speak badly – he would read from pieces of paper. There was an uncertainty, a lack of confidence, when he appeared in front of people. He didn’t look into the camera, which is not like him. A doubt appeared in his mind about his own decisions, and about the people he was working with. He began to change. He decided that they were all doing something not quite right, everyone was making wrong decisions, including Dmitry Medvedev. And he had no influence over that. So a kind of a fear deepened in him.47
Pavlovski voiced regret that Putin dealt with his doubts by retreating further into himself and handling those around him with distrust.
Whatever the truth of this, Putin is unmistakably sensitive by temperament despite having the hide of a pachyderm about his policies. It has been suggested that, at five feet six, he has feelings of awkwardness about his height. When Tony Blair and Putin stood side by side at their first press conference, Blair towered over the Russian president. Putin did not make the same mistake twice. At subsequent sessions with the press he arranged for there to be a gap between him and any tall foreign leader, and it was rumoured that his team procured a concealed step for him to mount.48 It has also been asserted that special arrangements were made when Putin was filmed alongside Oliver Stone in their series of TV interviews. Allegedly Stone fixed the lighting so as to disguise his own much taller stature. In fact the two of them were recorded together without special effects. There was nevertheless a piquant scene when Putin, taking his American interviewer to an ice hockey game in which he was going to play, emerged from the changing room in full kit beaming with enthusiasm – and Stone exclaimed, ‘Mighty Mouse!’49
This was not a remark Putin’s people judged appropriate to include in the interview transcripts. The affable Stone had voiced a touch of condescension. What was published instead was the exchange between the two men after the game when Putin inquired whether Stone had had a good time. Stone said yes and asked whether Putin felt exhausted. Putin shrugged this off, ‘No, everything’s fine. I’ll try to get some sleep and restore my strength.’50 The edited volume presented Putin as a steely ruler. This was not a fiction: Russia had produced some rulers of steel in the previous century and Putin is the latest in the line, on and off the ice rink.