There were two wars in Europe in 1999, both sequels to wars that had concluded just a few years earlier and both with considerable impact on the future of Russia. The second to begin was in Chechnya, and it played a key role in the rise to power of Vladimir Putin. The first I have already discussed: the Kosovo war in Yugoslavia where the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo was attempting to gain independence from the Serb-dominated central government still controlled by the unrepentant and unrestrained Slobodan Milošević. NATO bombing had finally forced him to agree to the Dayton Agreement in 1995, ending the war in Bosnia. But the Kosovo Albanians still struggled under repression and were out of patience waiting for their own independence.
The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) began attacking Serb security forces regularly in 1998 and they were met by the brutality and indiscriminate use of force that the Serbian forces had become well known for in Bosnia. By September, a quarter million Albanians had been displaced, many without shelter. The UN Security Council issued a resolution expressing that most famous phrase in the dictionary of diplomatic impotence: “grave concern.” In October, a NATO peacekeeping mission arrived but achieved little of lasting effect as both sides violated a cease-fire almost immediately.
As in Bosnia, it took a massacre of civilians to spur the great powers to act. Forty-five Kosovo Albanian farmers were rounded up and killed in the village of Račak in January 1999. This led directly to Clinton’s speech to the American people and nearly three months of NATO air strikes and cruise missile attacks against Yugoslav forces. (And, in one tragic incident, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three. NATO blamed the accident on an outdated map.)
By April, leaders of NATO nations were discussing an invasion of ground forces, which would have changed a great many things. Russia was openly advocating for the Yugoslav side in the conflict and the sight of NATO troops, especially American troops, on the ground as part of an offensive would have been very inflammatory in Russia. Russian weapons and supplies were also finding their way to the Yugoslav side. It was revealed in later reports that the main reason Milošević held out as long as he did was the hope that Yeltsin would intervene militarily on his side.
Milošević’s vicious calculations were based on the belief that conflict with the West would strengthen his position in Serbia and that desperate refugees would destabilize neighboring countries, including Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, and probably even Bosnia. The Balkans would be set on fire again and Western public opinion would prevent NATO from sending in ground troops. Then the Serbian military would play a decisive role in resolving the chaos, and of course reap the spoils.
Events, fortunately, did not turn out as he had hoped. The prestige of the free world was saved by the united actions of the major democratic powers. An impressive air campaign and the efficient organization of refugee camps sent a clear signal to every quarter in the world that the West was capable of supporting its moral claims with advanced logistics that totalitarian regimes simply lack.
Kosovo also demonstrated that the United Nations in its current form was, and is, irrelevant when it comes to solving such crises. It doesn’t take a Nostradamus to predict the fate the Kosovars would have met had it been left up to the United Nations, where Russia and China have a veto, to deal with Milošević.
This brings me back to the role of Russia in the events in the Balkans. It seemed obligatory in the Western capitals to give Boris Yeltsin and his special envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin credit for convincing Milošević to accept the terms dictated by NATO. (That the G7 had so quickly become the G8 made it clear some sort of payoff had gone on.)
In my view this public appraisal contained serious flaws. If Milošević had accepted the Rambouillet peace deal months earlier, he could have prevented the creation of over a million refugees, the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians, and the destruction of Serbia. President Milošević torpedoed this deal with the open support of Russia, which categorically objected to the presence of an international police force in Kosovo.
Later, after Serbian resistance was shattered by NATO airpower, Russia changed its view on foreign troops entering into Kosovo and decided to play the role of “impartial” broker. Imagine someone jumping onto the train just a few seconds before departure and then arguing with the conductor about the ticket price.
If one assumes that Russia did have serious influence over Belgrade’s decisions, then Yeltsin’s government should have been held partly responsible for Milošević’s stubbornness in conducting his murderous policy of ethnic cleansing. If Russia’s influence was being overestimated, what was the point of US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott’s overanxious shuttle diplomacy?
European and American leaders once again proved eager to salve Russia’s “great power” ego and anxiety, and for what? It was a classic form of enabling an abuser, even if in Yeltsin’s day it was more petty crime than major felonies. Russia was in denial and acting in a self-destructive fashion that also had impact abroad. Had the Western powers been firm about Russia’s true status and used that as leverage to encourage transparency and reform, we would all be much better off today.
Instead, with their Serbian ally in ruins and Yeltsin exposed as a mass murderer, the Yeltsin administration and the Russian media were desperate to create some angle that would salvage their dignity. While Russians in the country’s far east and northern territories were gravely concerned about obtaining a regular supply of food and fuel that coming winter, the Russian government was actively working to equip ten thousand peacekeepers for Kosovo.
In my Wall Street Journal op-ed after Kosovo, I had rare words of praise for Western leaders for their decisive action. I ended with a reminder that Kosovo would not be the last such intervention needed unless they combined their power to create a more stable world order. The United Nations had been created in 1945 to cement a political order following the Allied victory. But quickly the organization became a body of compromises in which the superpowers could veto any resolution deemed against the interests of their clientele. With the collapse of the Soviet Union this system no longer served the purpose of international peace and stability.
UN-crafted compromises were no longer necessary, and often dangerous. Indeed, strict adherence to the UN’s resolutions by President Bush in 1991 ultimately spared Saddam—and prolonged the Gulf crisis indefinitely. Milošević tried to play a similar game by involving Russia as a mediator (ironically Yevgeny Primakov was the broker of choice there, as with Iraq) and demanding UN authorization for any Alliance action.
All of this made it clear that the world needed an international decision-making mechanism not hobbled by the ideological baggage of the Cold War. The UN’s goal of freezing the status quo between two nuclear superpowers was obsolete. Democracy was ascendant and it was time to formally recognize this and to press the advantage. The indictment of Slobodan Milošević by a war crimes court was an excellent first step toward such a new world order but, as we now know, precious few steps were taken afterward.
In his definitive book on the Yugoslav wars, American journalist David Halberstam wrote an insightful passage about what led Milošević to ruin and, eventually, to die in jail in 2006 while on trial for war crimes in The Hague.
Milošević had managed to retain the view of many a totalitarian figure before him. He believed that if democracies were slow to act, it was a sign of weakness; if they were affluent, then they were also decadent. In addition, because their politicians and their citizens feared paying the price of war, they could be bullied. He once told the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, “I can stand death—lots of it—but you can’t.”
He was proved wrong eventually, but only after hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions more wounded and traumatized. Sadly, we can add to Halberstam’s first sentence, “and like many a totalitarian figure after him.” Putin performed the same ruthless calculus in his dealings with the free world over his invasion of Georgia in 2008 and over Ukraine today. Terrorists of every kind use this reasoning. They believe that democracies—our slow, affluent, fearful democracies—cannot stand up to suicide bombers and bloody massacres. They also believe the values of the modern world are both its weakness and a threat to their survival, and they are correct on both counts. Our challenge is to overcome our weaknesses without losing the values the enemies of the free world fear so much.
The type of evil Milošević represented has always been difficult to understand. He was urbane, intelligent, and able to present himself to different people in ways that flattered them and made them trust him. The Bush 41 foreign policy team was reportedly baffled by how “their friend” Milošević transformed from a well-mannered banker and bureaucrat into a fire-breathing Serbian nationalist who championed ethnic cleansing campaigns against his own citizens. This prompts a key question for this book and for our current world order: Are monsters born or are they made?
I do not intend to open a “nature versus nurture” debate about the genetic makeup of psychopaths or the long-term impact of a difficult childhood on personality. I have spent far too much of my life asking and answering questions about the origins of my chess success, and the only conclusion I’m confident in is that I was lucky to find a game that suited my talents perfectly very early in life. I’m happy to leave those theories to the psychologists and geneticists.
I’m referring to potential evil versus actualized evil and society’s role in preventing the former from becoming the latter. At what point do others have to accept some of the responsibility for the crimes of a murderer? Crimes they could have prevented? Not in the sense that a murderer is not responsible for his actions, of course. There is already far too much excuse making for criminals of every sort, as if the concept of personal responsibility can be suspended as long as a motive can be concocted. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is no more tolerable if you believe he felt threatened by NATO expansion than if you don’t believe he felt threatened. Telling Ukrainians they provoked Putin by rejecting him and moving toward Europe is like telling a harassed woman she should wear longer skirts. Do not lose sight of who is the offender and who is the victim! If we fail to maintain that moral balance and our perceptions of what is right and what is wrong, we are too vulnerable to propaganda.
The caveat is on the practical side of the matter. It is foolish to let down our defenses against an attack simply because we will be in the moral right should that attack come. Condemn, prosecute, and punish the violators, absolutely, but do not make it easy for them. Orson Welles’s modern fable of the scorpion and the frog is a memorable lesson. The frog carries the scorpion across a river on its back, convinced by the scorpion’s logic that it will not sting him because if it does, they will both die. In the middle of the river the scorpion stings the frog, who says, dying, “Logic? There is no logic in this!” The scorpion replies, “I know, I can’t help it. It is my character.”
The practical moral is not to trust a scorpion because logic and being in the right doesn’t help you very much when you’re dead. Another lesson is that not everyone acts in mutual best interest, or even in their own best interest, and that true nature can override logic and self-preservation. I think of this whenever I hear European diplomats talking about wanting to reach a “win-win” scenario with Putin over Ukraine.
This attitude is admirable in some ways, and it is the definition of diplomacy to at least say that is your goal. It would be wonderful if every crisis or conflict could be ended to mutual benefit, or at least to mutual satisfaction. But assuming that can happen with Putin or with ISIS ignores the true nature of the enemy. Putin’s only goal is to stay in power and he has moved beyond needing cooperation with the free world to do that. He needs conflict and hatred now, and how do you negotiate with that without betraying your ideals and your people? Al-Qaeda and ISIS want to cut off and destroy the modern world of rights and freedom. How does a pluralistic liberal society negotiate with that worldview to mutual benefit? It cannot.
When the logic of assumed mutual benefit keeps failing, it is time to try something else. We are not condemned to expose our backs to the world’s scorpions over and over in the hope that next time, for once, they won’t sting us.
Few humans are truly scorpions—complete psychopaths. Since the end of the ages of monarchy and empire, rising through political ranks to the highest stations requires at least some subtlety and intuition. (North Korea is one of the few modern exceptions and the result is obvious.) The crux of the “born or made” argument is potential meeting opportunity. Slobodan Milošević probably would have been just another party boss had the revolutions of 1989 not given him the chance to seek greater power through inciting hatred. Milošević was allowed to flourish in that role long enough to become responsible for the first genocide on European soil since the end of World War II. He should have been removed from power by force in 1995, but he was given another chance, which he naturally interpreted as weakness in his opponents, and he struck again a few years later.
As I said at the start of this chapter, there were two wars in Europe raging in 1999. Both were civil wars, both were fought largely along ethnic and religious lines, and both saw horrible war crimes and acts of terror against civilian populations. And in both Kosovo and Chechnya, the war was part of a fight for political power in a distant capital.
By the end of summer 1999, a new glow of Russia-facing optimism could be detected from Western policy and financial circles. The Clinton administration and international financial institutions had declared the government of Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin one they could “do business” with.
Not only did Russia appear to have averted the total economic implosion many feared during financial crisis, but the market had recovered to around its pre–August 1998 levels, and international creditors were returning. But the fourth firing of a government in less than eighteen months put the lie to such superficial indicators of health.
It also proved the fallacy of the West’s policy toward Russia. By mistaking superficial indicators for genuine progress, and placing unwarranted faith in the stale cast of political elites, Western leaders pursued a policy that rewarded nonreform, helped entrench a corrupt and undemocratic system of government, and, however unintentionally, punished the Russian people.
The departure of Sergei Stepashin was hardly significant. Like its predecessors, the Stepashin government failed to tackle the structural problems that stopped growth and investment from taking off to the benefit of the country as a whole. Its only real claim to achievement was preventing a further decline in the value of the ruble.
Eight years of so-called reforms left a small group of elites fantastically wealthy, while a huge and potentially explosive segment of Russia’s population remained impoverished. Communism collapsed in the Soviet Union when an overwhelming majority of its citizens awakened to how terrible the system was for their well-being. There was real danger of a new awakening if hardship continued.
The demand for change that brought millions of Soviets to the streets in 1989–1991 was based on the belief that a more attractive alternative existed in the West. Western assistance to Russia was also considered by many of my compatriots as an imperative. That assistance, however, did not produce the great leap into modernity that Russians hoped for. The primary blame rests, of course, on the shoulders of Russia’s leaders: both the so-called reformers and those who openly maneuvered to create a new Russian elite with much the same power and privilege their Soviet predecessors enjoyed.
What the West failed to understand, however, is that the average Russian was more likely to point a finger at foreign financial institutions and governments for imposing what many Russians perceived as a corrupt and dysfunctional capitalist system. That it wasn’t really much of a capitalist system at all yet wasn’t understood. This resentment was compounded by how Yeltsin (and later Putin) and other top officials routinely deployed anti-Western rhetoric to pass off any blame from landing on their own shoulders. This all contributed to an anti-reform sentiment that made implementing a true market-based economic system all the more difficult.
The reformers and the Western nations involved in the reforms made a crucial mistake in responding to the criticism. Instead of confronting Yeltsin and the Russian public with the truth about the corruption and real reasons progress had stalled, they tried to pretend everything would be fine. Instead of transparency and the strong medicine Russia needed, we were fed placebos and told we were going to get well soon. It was a form of treatment we were quite familiar with from the days of the USSR. Once again the difference between the clarity of the Reagan administration and the timidity of his successors was on display. There was no need to compromise principles in the name of “doing business” with the Russian regime.
Instead of a comprehensive policy on how to act and speak to the Russian people, as existed during the Cold War, the West only dealt with our increasingly corrupt leadership long after it was clear they weren’t representing the people. The 1990s were a window of opportunity where Russians could access a wide variety of uncensored news media. We would have listened and become part of the debate. Instead, Yeltsin and Putin’s anti-Western rhetoric and litany of lies about why reforms weren’t working went unchallenged.
Western governments should have made it clear that credits and investments by commercial institutions in Russia would no longer receive taxpayer-backed guarantees. The loud and clear message from the West should have been that Russia’s rulers would not be told by Washington how they should spend public funds. Whatever Russia’s elites did with public money—steal it, transfer the funds to foreign bank accounts—at the end of the party they would have been held accountable by their disillusioned people. Instead, every string that the International Monetary Fund, United States, and European Union tied to their aid money was used as an excuse by Russian officials to scapegoat the West. Cutting those strings publicly would have reinforced the broken lines of communication between ordinary Russians and the free world.
There were smaller but nevertheless important ways the West could have communicated its interest in the Russian people. I had to deal with it more than most, but any Russian who endured the treatment of Moscow’s Western embassies in the process of obtaining an entry visa, or harassment at the hands of customs officials in Western airports, could have been forgiven for buying into the stories the Communists and nationalists spread about a worldwide anti-Russian conspiracy.
The collapse of the Soviet empire was brought about not by the West indulging Soviet leaders, but by a consistent and principled fight for liberal democratic values. Accommodating the demands of aging Soviet leaders never yielded positive results. The real contribution came from consistent efforts to reach Russians, such as the work of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America, which were considered by many Soviets to be the most reliable sources of information about our own country.
In August 1991, when Boris Yeltsin’s administration took over, the majority of Russians were prepared for a partnership with the civilized world. This mood had all but disappeared by 1999, a casualty of the persistent nationalist campaigns of Russian political leaders. A good rapport was never going to be revived by ritualistic praising of whichever Russian leader was at the helm. The West had few avenues to influence the feudal fights of Russia’s ruling elite in the late 1990s. But it had a fighting chance to win back the trust of ordinary Russians, with whom the country’s future ultimately lay, and it missed that chance.
That sense of the tense and acrid atmosphere in Russia in August 1999 provides context for the traumatic events of September. Three years had gone by since the end of the first major war in Chechnya with Russian troops, but the chaos and violence in the region had never completely abated. By spring 1999, Chechnya was essentially in a state of internal warfare. Warlords controlled most of the region outside of the capital of Grozny and kidnapping for ransom had become a primary source of income. The 1998 kidnapping and murder of four foreign engineers, three British and one from New Zealand, made the news worldwide. The case would be a factor in removing any chance for international sympathy for the Chechen people during the horrors to come.
Russian politicians would occasionally bang the drums of war about the need to go “teach the Chechens a lesson,” and it was later revealed that an invasion plan had already been drawn up by Prime Minister Stepashin. But it wasn’t until the end of August that it all spilled over. Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev led a small army, including foreign fighters, into neighboring Dagestan. Then, over twelve days in September, four bombings of apartment buildings took place in different Russian cities, killing nearly three hundred people. While there had been smaller attacks before, these bombings were professional, nearly identical, and unlike any committed by the Chechens before or after.
As you can imagine, the public was terrified and furious. The Federal Security Service (FSB, the primary successor of the KGB) blamed the Chechens and Yeltsin demanded action. The man he turned to was not Stepashin, but his new replacement, Vladimir Putin. The new prime minister had been the head of the KGB for just a year before his sudden promotion to prime minister took place right before the bombings began. Before that, in reverse chronological order, Putin had been a fairly anonymous member of Yeltsin’s presidential staff, a deputy chief in the federal property management department, and a member of the mayor’s staff in St. Petersburg. Formerly, he had been a KGB intelligence officer in East Germany until the fall of the Berlin Wall.
On August 9, 1999, the largely unknown Putin was, to the great surprise of nearly everyone, put in charge of the Russian government. The surprises didn’t end there, however. At the same time, Yeltsin announced that he hoped Putin would succeed him in the presidency in 2000 and Putin publicly stated he would run. This made Putin stand out compared to the four other prime ministers Yeltsin had gone through in the previous eighteen months. Russia was facing many challenges at the time, but the top priority for the new government was promoting Putin as the undisputed president in waiting.
Things moved very quickly after that. As many a head of state is aware, winning a war, or even just waging one, can be an excellent way to win reelection. This was essentially the scenario for Putin, who was Yeltsin’s anointed successor and the head of government. He was still completely unknown to the Russian public, however, and becoming the public face of a new war in Chechnya and hunting down the terrorists behind the apartment bombings was the best way to fix that. Over the next few months, Yeltsin practically disappeared from sight (not that unusual considering his serious health problems) and Putin was suddenly everywhere.
Although the supposed targets of the Russian offensive in Chechnya were the militants who had gone into Dagestan in August, the bombing campaign was enormous and indiscriminate. Within weeks, hundreds of thousands of Chechens had been forced to flee. In October, Putin announced a ground offensive and tens of thousands of Russian troops advanced toward Grozny. Cluster bombs and heavy artillery caused thousands more civilian deaths and countless more refugees. What was ostensibly an anti-terror operation turned into a scorched-earth campaign.
The campaign in Chechnya had the predictable effect on the other campaign: the one for president. To deny this would be to deny the obvious. The war, for all its ugliness, was popular among Russians, and even reformers like Anatoly Chubais toed the patriotic line by supporting the war effort. For a very brief moment even my own attitude was quite sympathetic to the government’s actions.
True, innocent people were suffering, and the suspicion at the time that Russia was using excessive force and committing war crimes was later confirmed. The Russian press was largely controlled by Yeltsin’s oligarch supporters who had also endorsed Putin, or you might say had created Putin, and gave a very rose-colored picture of unfolding events. The Russian public also bought the official story that Chechens were behind the terrorist attacks in Moscow and Volgodonsk in September, even though there was hardly any proof. (More on that in a moment.)
But even knowing what we know now, I admit that the support Russians gave their soldiers in Chechnya was not the result of brainwashing. Many of the Chechen rebels were bandits who plied their trade on Russian territory and whose methods could only be described as medieval. Nor were their activities constrained to the Caucasus and the occasional terror attack outside. Chechen criminal gangs were active all over the country, although it was clear that they would never have become as powerful and dangerous as they were without their reliable “business partners” in Moscow. For the majority of Russians the military crackdown in Chechnya was part of their desire to end the plague of corruption and criminality in cities where they lived.
Every day struggling Russians read about the new billionaires being created by cozy deals with the government. You didn’t have to understand how things like privatization vouchers, loans-for-shares, and rigged auctions worked to realize there was a huge scam going on. Worried that reforms might be rolled back by conservatives, Yeltsin’s reform team, led by Yegor Gaidar and Chubais, started selling things off at a frantic pace at absurdly low valuations. Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky, already two of the wealthiest and most influential oligarchs, acquired their huge energy firms, Yukos and Sibneft, for less than 10 percent of their real value.
Such sanctioned looting continued under Putin, of course, and continues today. The difference was that in the 1990s Russians could find out about it. The various political and business factions had warring media outlets, and while the press could be more than a little yellow, at least it represented many different sides so the truth could be found somewhere in the middle.
When I am asked if Putin was inevitable, this is why I say you have to start ten years before anyone knew his name. By the time Yeltsin made Putin the heir apparent, Russians were demanding stability and looking for a tough guy to stand up to the criminals and to the Western influences they’d been told were damaging the country and their pensions. To prevent Putin, or a Putin, from coming to power, the 1990s would have required a very different script with less appeasement of Yeltsin and his entourage and stronger support for democratic institutions.
As the election approached, my own view was that a faceless technocrat like Putin might just be what Russia needed at the time. I believed that the Russian government had to project strength and self-confidence and only then would it gain the popular support needed to follow through with painful economic reforms. After years of looting and capital flight it was getting harder and harder to scapegoat the West for how badly things were going. Yeltsin’s approval rating was dismal once again, another reason he and his oligarch backers were eager to find a fresh face to show to the frustrated Russian people.
The apartment bombings that terrorized Russia in September convinced even those who thought Russia should have let Chechnya go its own way in 1991 that the Chechens deserved everything they got. Laying siege to a hospital, bombing the families of soldiers: these were inhuman acts, so the gloves were off. The public cheered Putin as their new gladiator and enjoyed the rough, even profane language he occasionally used when talking about what he would do to those who would threaten Russia. “We will find the terrorists anywhere,” he once said, “and if we find them in their shithouses, we’ll wipe them out in their shithouses.”
This was a real transformation for a boring back-room bureaucrat, aided by the hasty publication of a campaign-ready biography that emphasized his deprived and difficult childhood and tough-guy credentials over anything that might prepare him for being a political reformer. This was no accident. The advantage of being faceless was that Yeltsin’s chief backer and master conspirator, Boris Berezovsky, could apply whatever face was needed.
We were forced to contemplate just how far Yeltsin, Putin, and their backers might go to guarantee Putin’s election on the night of September 22, when local police in the city of Ryazan interrupted what would have been the fifth apartment bombing of the month. Alerted by a resident, the police were too late to catch the perpetrators, but they found three fifty-kilogram sugar bags filled with white powder in the basement, connected to a detonator. Chemical analysis on the scene the next morning detected the same military-grade hexogen explosive used in all of the previous bombings.
The next evening, the twenty-third, Putin made a televised statement praising local law enforcement and the alert citizens who had called them for averting a catastrophe. He also spoke briefly on the ongoing air strikes against Grozny. There was nothing to contradict the day’s dramatic news that a terrorist attack had been foiled in Ryazan. The next day, something incredible happened. FSB director Nikolai Patrushev issued a statement saying that the planting of a bomb in the Ryazan basement had been a “training exercise” to test the vigilance of the local security forces and residents! He said that there had been no explosives at all and that the sugar bags had actually been full of sugar, not hexogen.
This fantastical story was required because law enforcement and the local FSB office in Ryazan had already detected and exposed extensive FSB involvement in the attempted bombing. Suspicious phone intercepts on the night of the bombing were traced back to FSB headquarters in Moscow. Two men arrested in Ryazan had been carrying FSB identity cards and were released into the custody of a senior official from Moscow. Patrushev was obviously trying to cover his agency’s tracks, but there were far too many giant holes in his story.
Just to invoke the most obvious contradiction available at the time, if the bags were full of sugar why did the substance test as hexogen on the scene and why did the FSB rapidly take the bags away to Moscow for further testing if they knew it was sugar? More and more evidence and inconsistencies accumulated, enough to turn a nightmarish conspiracy theory about agents within the Russian government mass-murdering people for political purposes into a case that is very hard to refute on the facts. It was revealed, for example, that some soldiers had earlier stumbled onto sugar bags full of a “strange substance” on a nearby base, which turned out to be hexogen.
A deep investigation and analysis of the case were turned into a devastating book by former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko, Blowing Up Russia. The same Litvinenko, who had become a fierce Putin critic, was assassinated in London in 2006 with the rare radioactive substance polonium-210. An independent FSB investigator of the case, Mikhail Trepashkin, was arrested a week before hearings began and jailed for four years. In 2000, the Duma twice rejected calls for a parliamentary investigation of what happened in Ryazan. All evidence and internal documents related to Ryazan were then sealed on the grounds of secrecy for seventy-five years. While I admit to possessing the healthy paranoia developed by most people born in totalitarian states, this all seems like an overreaction over three bags of sugar.
Of course any suggestion that the bombings had been a self-inflicted “false flag” operation to stoke outrage and fear was condemned by the government. The theory didn’t make it into the mainstream inside Russia at the time; it was just too horrible to contemplate. The idea that a government would massacre its own people was too shocking in 2000. But by 2002, 40 percent of Russians believed the security forces were involved in the apartment bombings. By then we had more information about Ryazan and, more importantly, we had much more information about Vladimir Putin. The suspicion that the Putin regime had no allergy to Russian blood was confirmed by revelations about the scope of devastation in Chechnya, and then by the brutal government interventions in the Nord-Ost and Beslan hostage situations in 2002 and 2004.
Similarly, although the huge discrepancies in the official story on Ryazan were reported in the West, nobody wanted to hear the truth. This is a typical pattern of convenient cowardice. If you acknowledge the horrible truth you would have to act, so it’s easier to ignore the facts and pretend it’s “disputed” and say you’re “concerned” about “the allegations.” This charade is particularly important when you feel obliged to pretend the perpetrator is an ally and is operating in good faith. For example, European nations still don’t want to admit Putin has declared war on Ukraine. Even when Russian forces apparently shot down a civilian airliner over occupied Eastern Ukraine, the EU representatives seemed as eager to deny Russian culpability as the Russians. Again, if they admitted the truth, they would have to act, and nobody wants to act.
And so Putin’s popularity continued to rise. By October 1999, he was already polling ahead of opposition hopeful Yevgeny Primakov, one of the most successful of Yeltsin’s many former prime ministers and backed by the Communist Party and the powerful mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov. The election was scheduled for June, but Putin wouldn’t have to wait that long to sit in the president’s chair.
The December parliamentary elections came first, however, and at the time they felt like the first time Russians had gone to the polls the way other democracies did: simply to vote for the candidates who best reflected their views. All previous elections had taken place in a crisis atmosphere, especially Yeltsin’s desperate battle for survival in 1996. The newly formed “Unity” bloc, assembled by the government only three months prior and endorsed by Putin, did quite well; well enough to prevent the Communists from controlling the Duma.
I felt optimism based on the relatively normal appearance of the elections. Efficient and expensive political campaigns, famous personalities, and sitting members of the Duma dominated the polls, and the public showed a healthy conservatism by staying with known devils. As I joked at the time, the appearance of aggressive TV ads and mudslinging showed that we Russians were quickly learning to live up to American campaign standards.
My concern was that the West still showed no sign of developing a long-term strategy for Russia. Was it going to treat the Russian people like adults capable of hearing the painful truth, or would Western leaders continue to speak over our heads? Aid and understanding over Chechnya were important, but not at the cost of appeasing anti-democratic practices and epic corruption.
Russia’s terrible problems were not going to disappear overnight. Like most observers inside and out of Russia, I was primarily worried about the usual perils of corruption, inefficiency, and red tape that made it difficult for any government to forge ahead. Despite my hopes that the darker, more ideological challenges had been left behind us, I hinted at my doubts in the Wall Street Journal a few days after the elections. I wrote, “There is no guarantee that nationalism can be mastered and will not rise to overshadow liberal reforms. Mr. Putin’s KGB roots and strong military backing could well turn out to be liabilities that are too heavy to overcome.”
I had each point half right, as it turned out. Putin discarded the liberal reforms first, right out of the gate. He only revived nationalism as a political tool later when it served his purposes to do so. The military was never again the factor in politics it had been for so long, and Putin’s KGB roots were what would define him and the future of Russia.
With the apartment bombings to fan the flames of vengeance, the assault in Chechnya gained force. By December the siege of Grozny had begun and would last for two months. When it was over, Grozny would be described by visiting journalists as looking worse than Berlin in 1945. Not a single building was undamaged, earning Grozny the dubious title of “the most destroyed city on Earth” by the United Nations in 2003.
The human destruction was no better. Refugees were scattered all over the region in abysmal conditions. Russian troops rounded up prisoners indiscriminately. Torture and murder of captives was routine. As described by the incredibly brave Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who visited Chechnya every month during the second war, what happened there was “a clear, obvious, unbelievable worldwide betrayal of humanitarian values. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a little more than a half a century old, has fallen in the second Chechen war.”
She was validated when the European Court of Human Rights began to issue rulings against the Russian government in favor of the families of some of the many thousands of Chechens who had been tortured or disappeared in military custody.
When Politkovskaya wasn’t in Chechnya documenting the personal stories of families torn apart by violence and war crimes by the Russian military, or writing her reports for Novaya Gazeta, she was traveling widely to rally support for international humanitarian intervention that never came. After dodging death in the mountains for years, and being harassed and threatened from every possible direction, Politkovskaya was gunned down in her Moscow apartment building on October 7, 2006, Vladimir Putin’s birthday.
The federal government of Chechnya was abolished in May 2000, when President Putin established direct rule. Fighting continued after Putin appointed Akhmad Kadyrov as the head of the local government and would continue as a guerilla conflict for many years to come. Terror attacks large and small by Chechen groups would continue around the country. And even when violence had been reduced to “tolerable” levels, the repercussions from what Russia had done in Chechnya continued to ripple around the world. Chechnya’s main export became well-trained, well-armed radicalized fighters and terrorists.
Yes, I said “President” Putin. He had been inaugurated on May 7, 2000, a month before the election had been scheduled to take place. Yeltsin had another surprise up his sleeve and had suddenly resigned on December 31, 1999, making Putin the acting president and requiring an election in three months’ time. Putin took care of the most important business immediately, ensuring the security and wealth of Boris Yeltsin and his family. A decree granting Yeltsin and all his relatives freedom from prosecution was signed the same day Putin took office, revealing the real reason Yeltsin had selected him for his successor: self-preservation.