Vladimir Putin had seemed to begin his presidency as a reluctant leader. When he was catapulted to power he’d told Boris Yeltsin he hadn’t been ready to take the job on, and described himself to members of the Yeltsin Family as the hired manager, suggesting he would serve only a few years. When disaster struck, such as the sinking of the Kursk submarine, he had a habit of withdrawing, paralysed into inaction, sometimes as white as a sheet. But now that he’d ordered the arrest of Russia’s richest man, there was no going back. Even if he’d wanted to, he didn’t feel he could. His inner circle in particular, the siloviki he’d brought with him from St Petersburg, pressed him to stay on. ‘They would frighten him,’ said Pugachev. ‘They told him, “No one will forgive you for Yukos, for the takeover of NTV. If you go to the West, they will arrest you at once.”’[1] Now that they’d tasted power, the KGB men were not about to step aside. They were preparing a further takeover of the country; following Putin’s re-election in 2004 they would be freed from some of the agreements he had made with the Yeltsin Family when he took over from them.[2]
Putin had eliminated the media tycoons Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky. Early reforms launched by his administration had drastically reduced the power of regional governors through the creation of ‘super-regions’ ruled over by Kremlin-appointed plenipotentiary leaders. Such measures – led by Dmitry Kozak, a former military-intelligence officer and prosecutor from St Petersburg – had reversed the policies of the Yeltsin years, when the president had commanded his governors to ‘grab as much freedom as you can’. Liberals and the former media tycoons warned darkly of the revanche of the KGB, of the Kremlin’s increasingly authoritarian grip. The arrest of Khodorkovsky and the seizure of his stake in YukosSibneft had sent tremors through the stock market and the business community. But Putin and the Kremlin sought to portray it as an isolated case, punishment for one rogue oligarch who had gone too far. The rest of the country was revelling in the benefits of a surge in oil prices, which had climbed from $12 to $28 per barrel since Putin came to power. Reflecting public approval of the end of the chaos of the nineties, and of his efforts to put the oligarchs in their place, Putin’s ratings throughout his first term were consistently at around 70 per cent.
All the signs were good for him to sail into a second term. But the takeover of NTV and the arrest of Khodorkovsky were not the only events that had scarred his first term with controversy – and according to one inside account, never before revealed, some leading members of the siloviki were seeking to leave nothing to chance. On the evening of Wednesday, October 23 2002, at least forty armed Chechen fighters filed into the Dubrovka musical theatre in a Moscow suburb south of the Kremlin, firing assault rifles into the air just as tapdancers trouped across the stage for the opening of the second act of a popular new Russian musical, Nord-Ost.[3] The theatre was packed with a nearly nine-hundred-strong audience, members of a middle class that was beginning to thrive in Putin’s Russia, there to see a show that paid homage to the bravery of the Soviets during the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War. The Chechens proceeded to wire the building with explosives, while some of the hostage-takers, women known as ‘Black Widows’ dressed in black hijabs, who appeared to have belts of explosives strapped to their bodies, stationed themselves among the terrified audience as the fighters sealed off the auditorium.
The siege that played out over the next three days appeared to be Putin’s worst nightmare. The Chechen fighters, led by Movsar Barayev, the nephew of one of Chechnya’s most renowned rebels, were demanding an end to Russia’s war in the republic, which had been going on ever since the 1999 apartment bombings that spurred Putin’s rise to power. They gave Russia seven days to withdraw its troops or they would blow the building up.[4] The evening the news of the siege broke, opposition politicians and security officials alike gathered outside the theatre in the dark and the cold rain, shocked that this could have happened a mere three and a half miles from the Kremlin. How had so many rebels, armed to the teeth with explosives, been able to enter the theatre, apparently in plain sight?
For the next three days, Putin did not stir from his office on a top floor of the Kremlin, seized by panic at the events spiralling out of control in the world below. As he cast about for a way out of the crisis, he cancelled a planned trip to Mexico, where he’d been due to meet world leaders including US president George W. Bush. The hostage-takers had allowed some prominent individuals into the theatre to negotiate, including member of parliament and well-known singer Iosif Kobzon, liberal opposition politicians, and a journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, renowned for her fearless reporting on the war in Chechnya. Although they secured the release of a number of hostages, including some of the children and foreign citizens, the attackers refused to back down on their demand for an end to the war.
On the third evening of the siege, a crew from NTV was allowed in to record an interview with Barayev. ‘Our goal – which we have declared more than once – is to stop the war and get the troops out,’ he said.[5] A female hostage-taker apparently wearing an explosive belt told the reporter: ‘We are following Allah’s path. If we die here, that won’t be the end of it.’
Again, Putin was paralysed by fear. The attackers had made it clear that they would kill the hostages and blow up the building if the security forces sought to intervene,[6] and already there’d been deaths: two civilians and one FSB colonel seeking to enter the theatre had been shot dead.[7]
The Russian security services finally acted just before dawn broke on Saturday, October 26. In order to avoid the hostage-takers setting off the explosives, a gas was released into the auditorium through the theatre’s ventilation system. But although it knocked out the hostages and some of the Chechen fighters, it also left many of the hostages dead, while the emergency services were ill-equipped and unprepared to deal with those still alive, who were laid on the roadside, some vomiting, some unconscious, others choking on their tongues.[8] Ninety minutes passed before they were taken to hospital for treatment.[9] Expecting to find a bloodbath from explosions and gunfire, 80 per cent of the ambulances that arrived on the scene were equipped only to deal with trauma wounds, not the effects of gas.[10] By the end of the following day, the death toll among the hostages was at least 115. Only two had been killed by gunfire. The rest had died from the gas.[11]
For a time, Putin faced an outcry over the handling of the siege. How had it happened in the first place? Why weren’t the emergency services adequately informed of the nature of the gas? According to several witnesses who survived the attack, the gas had seeped into the auditorium from under the stage, knocking out the captors nearest to it but filtering into the hall slowly enough for some of them to notice a caustic smell and a green-looking gas.[12] Facing mounting pressure to identify the gas, Russia’s health minister eventually claimed it was an aerosol derivative of the anaesthetic fentanyl, a potent opioid widely used as a painkiller, which he said ‘cannot in itself be called lethal’.[13] The reason the hostages died, he claimed, was that they’d been weakened by three days of severe stress, dehydration and hunger. In the final report by Moscow prosecutors, which eventually emerged a year later, the gas was labelled only as an ‘unidentified chemical substance’.[14]
What took place in the Kremlin on the night the theatre was stormed has been locked ever since behind a wall of secrecy. But now, one insider who said he was involved in the Kremlin discussions back then has begun to open a window. He claimed that what happened was the deadly unravelling of a plot that had not gone according to plan. In his account, the attack on the theatre was planned by Nikolai Patrushev, the gnarled FSB chief, to further cement Putin as president. It was intended as no more than a fake exercise that would boost Putin’s authority when he successfully brought it to an end, and increase support for the war in Chechnya, which was beginning to flag. Patrushev, this person says, told Putin that the terrorists-for-hire were not armed with real bombs, and that when the siege was over they would be flown to Turkey under FSB protection, while Putin would emerge as a hero, as the one world leader who’d ended a hostage crisis without any civilian deaths – and then he could tighten control in Chechnya.
But everything unravelled on the very first day of the siege, when one of the Chechens shot dead a civilian trying to enter the theatre. Putin plunged into panic, the insider said: ‘Everything spiralled out of control. No one knew who or what to trust.’[15] By the time the security forces prepared to storm the building, the hostage-taking was being treated as if it were a real act of terror. Igor Sechin, Putin’s closest KGB colleague from St Petersburg, was brought in to help deal with the situation, and knowing of Sechin’s tendency for overzealousness, Patrushev encouraged him, the former official familiar with the discussions said. ‘He told him, “Here, Igor you have military experience. Help us take care of this.”’ It was Sechin’s idea to use the gas, according to this account. He had spoken with a former commander of Russia’s chemical-warfare troops who’d told him the gas was old, and there was a chance it would not be effective. ‘Sechin told me he’d therefore ordered them to use ten times the usual dose,’ said the former official, who claims that, horrified at how events had played out, Putin had signed a resignation letter. But by then he was too deeply involved, and was told he had to stay. Patrushev, it seemed, had left the planning of the attack, and the security forces’ response to it, deliberately ambiguous. Bloodshed and loss of life would also tie Putin to the presidency. ‘It was organised so Putin would have to stay for a second term.’ If anything went wrong, he would have to be dragged in deeper still. ‘If Putin was replaced then it would have been the end for Kolya [Patrushev]. So he arranged this to cover him in blood.’[16]
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, dismissed the insider’s account as ‘total rubbish’, saying this person ‘doesn’t know anything’. It may be impossible ever to fully verify it. Only a very small circle at the top of power know how these events unfolded, but the former official who gave me this version of events was close enough to know. Were it not for a little-noticed Moscow prosecutors’ report that appeared a year after the siege, his account could easily be dismissed as just another of the wild conspiracy theories that typically emerged about closed-door Kremlin decision-making, especially after the murk of the apartment bombings. But when the prosecutors finally completed their investigation, they found that the two main bombs placed inside the auditorium were essentially fakes. At least one part of the insider’s story was ringing true. ‘The bombs had not been prepared for use: the detonators had nothing to fuel them,’ said the report. ‘There were no batteries … The bombs turned out to be safe blanks.’[17] The same went for the suicide belts worn by some of the women, as well as other explosive devices. Many of the women who wore the belts had been with the hostages in the auditorium, but rather than setting off the devices as they’d threatened, they passed out from the gas. Then, instead of taking them in for questioning to get to the bottom of the terrorist plot, the Russian security services shot each and every one of them dead.[18]
Even though it had taken five to ten minutes for the gas to take effect, the prosecutors found, the terrorists hadn’t detonated any of the bombs. Could it really have been the case that they had never intended to blow anything up at all, and the use of the gas had led to a needless loss of life? Unnamed sources in the FSB and the interior ministry told Kommersant, seemingly the sole Russian newspaper that reported on the prosecutors’ findings, that the terrorists themselves had ordered the detonators to be removed, because they feared accidental explosions.[19] But the liberal politician Irina Khakamada, who’d entered the building for negotiations, also voiced doubts about the siege: ‘I came to believe that it had not been in the plans of the terrorists to blow up the theatre centre, and that the authorities were not interested in the release of all hostages. But the head of the presidential administration ordered me in a menacing tone not to mess with this story.’[20]
Questions also arose about some of the terrorists involved. Their apparent leader, Movsar Barayev, had reportedly been arrested by the authorities just two months before.[21] How did he get from jail to taking part in the attack? The same went for one of the supposed female suicide bombers, whose mother identified her from television footage of the siege.[22] Could the authorities have been involved in moving them from jail to the theatre?
It was not the first time a terrorist attack in Russia had left lingering questions about security service involvement, the most notable previous examples being the apartment bombings that helped spur Putin’s rise to power. But in this case, the attack caused far less controversy. Most questions revolved around the use of the gas, and the prosecutors’ findings about the bombs being dummies were buried at the end of the Kommersant report, which led on the round-up of an alleged terrorist group preparing other attacks.[23]
In the aftermath of the siege, questions over how it unfolded were largely brushed aside, and most of the population simply breathed a sigh of relief that the death toll had not been higher. Putin was praised by international leaders and local politicians alike for his handling of the situation.[24] His ratings surged to their highest since he was elected.[25] Instead of facing a shake-up for allowing a group of armed terrorists into the centre of Moscow, Russia’s security services were rewarded with an increase in funding.[26] And the attack enabled Putin’s men to ramp up their military action in Chechnya, cancelling plans to reduce troop numbers.[27] Countless Chechens began disappearing from their homes in night raids and the pressure that had been rising on the Kremlin to begin peace talks with the Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov fell away overnight. Once again there was public backing for the war, and Maskhadov had been totally discredited. The Russian authorities accused him of being behind the attack,[28] but they never presented any evidence, apart from an old videotape of threats of a new offensive, and Maskhadov himself denied any involvement.
The siege also presented the Kremlin with an opportunity to paint its war in Chechnya as akin to the West’s war on terror. An effort to establish links between the Chechen rebels and Islamic militants from abroad had already begun in the months before the attack,[29] and the siege further heightened that perception: Al Jazeera broadcast video of people it claimed were accomplices of the Chechens in front of banners proclaiming ‘God is great’ in Arabic, while Putin called the attack a ‘monstrous manifestation of terrorism’ planned by ‘foreign terrorist centres’.[30] In the months that followed, the US began to change its view of the Chechen rebel forces, naming three groups it said were involved in the siege as terrorist organisations linked to Al Qaeda,[31] while Maskhadov was no longer seen as a moderate. ‘Our policy on Chechnya has moved closer to Russia,’ a senior US diplomat said soon after the attack. ‘This attack has substantially damaged [the Chechen] cause.’[32]
*
If Putin’s KGB men sought to tie him to the presidency, the truth was that, barring terrible events like the Dubrovka attack, he was in any case becoming accustomed to the role. ‘He’d begun to like it – all the ceremony, the G8, the recognition,’ said Pugachev.[33] He was lauded by his inner circle as the saviour of Russia. He’d saved the country from certain collapse, they said, from the thrall of the oligarchs and the destructive power of the West. Even those who’d once served above him in the KGB now bowed down before him. On one occasion, early on in his first term, when Putin gathered a small circle of friends for his birthday, one of his former bosses in Dresden, Sergei Chemezov, toasted his rise to power. ‘This was a very close person who in a previous life, before Putin had become president, was older and more senior in rank than him, and who Putin respects,’ said Pugachev. ‘He told him, “Vladimir Vladimirovich, I want to raise my glass. You know a lot of time has passed since I first heard that you were the president, but the feeling that I had then remains with me still. I thought it was like the sun rising over Russia … now I understand that 100 per cent of the population share that feeling with me.”’ For Pugachev, the speech was cringeworthy. He’d interrupted, wanting to get on with discussing the political situation, all the monumental tasks ahead. But Putin, he said, glared at him and told him to let his friend finish his speech. ‘He looked straight into his eyes and he told him he was a gift from God. He told him God had given the country a ruler who is ending the great suffering of the Russian people. This was a guy who knew him for fifteen years, and used to be his boss … I saw this for the first time … this was how it was from the very beginning, almost from the very first day. He’s an extremely vain person.’ In order to ask Putin a question, it became customary to flatter him at length first. ‘Sechin knew how to do this very well. He would tell him with a deep bow, “Vladimir Vladimirovich, I remember how you did this and you transformed the world.” When I first heard all of this I thought I was in the mental hospital. They would say to him things like “You have shaken the essence of humanity. You are a stunning person.”’[34]
Gradually, the constant kowtowing went to Putin’s head. Beginning to believe in his powers as the new tsar, he was emboldened to take tougher and more authoritarian decisions, including to take on Khodorkovsky and his men. ‘The entire oligarchy in essence was bowing down before him and offering him this and that and coming to him for permission for the slightest thing,’ said Pugachev. ‘And he really did like this. And somehow it entered his head. It was a creeping process. He’d always had these tendencies, but at some point he changed, and this grandiose belief in himself as the tsar took over.’[35]
If at first Putin had shared the machinery of state with the Yeltsin Family’s representatives, once Khodorkovsky had been arrested, the state apparatus really became his own. In shock at the turn of events and at being kept in the dark, Alexander Voloshin, the wily Yeltsin holdover who had served as Kremlin chief of staff since March 1999, stepped down. Voloshin had spoken several times with Putin about the legal onslaught against Khodorkovsky, but right up to the last he’d considered that it could be contained: ‘I honestly did not think they would put him in jail. I thought it was some kind of misunderstanding. It was clear that it was a campaign, and it was bad. I considered it was harmful for the development of the country.’[36] Putin replaced him with his own man, a colleague from St Petersburg: Dmitry Medvedev, a quietly spoken lawyer who’d worked on legal issues for Putin, including on containing the fallout of the oil-for-food scandal. He had a reputation for zealous precision, but also for timidity. Most importantly of all, he’d been virtually brought up by Putin when he entered the St Petersburg administration aged only twenty-five. ‘Putin reared Medvedev,’ said Valery Musin, who also acted as a legal adviser to Sobchak’s City Hall. ‘Medvedev always looked up to Putin as someone he could learn from.’[37]
The most influential holdover from the Yeltsin era had been replaced by a St Petersburg yes-man, with little more than three years’ experience in the Kremlin as deputy chief of staff. On the same day Medvedev’s appointment was announced, the St Petersburg siloviki signalled their intentions more loudly than ever before. Prosecutors announced that they had frozen $15 billion in Yukos shares, the 44 per cent Khodorkovsky held indirectly in the combined YukosSibneft, to prevent him from selling them.[38] Shell-shocked, the market perceived the move as a clear sign that the siloviki were intent not just on Khodorkovsky’s arrest, but on seizing Yukos itself. In addition, the move was seen as the end for the Yeltsin-era oligarchs, for the Family, whose interests had been carefully balanced against those of the siloviki for nearly four years. Just in case anyone was still wondering, Alexei Kudrin, Putin’s comparatively liberal-minded finance minister, made it even clearer, publicly hailing Voloshin’s departure as marking the end of the Yeltsin era. ‘Byzantium is over!’ he proclaimed. ‘With all due respect to Alexander Voloshin, I want to stress that his departure coincides with the end of the Yeltsin epoch … [The oligarchs] have been returned to a business environment in which you can only be successful if you play fair.’[39]
It was as if the machinery of the parallel government on which Sechin and others had been working quietly behind the scenes was slowly being rolled out, and a PR campaign was being launched. On the same day the Yukos shares were seized and Medvedev was appointed Kremlin chief of staff, Putin held an intimate meeting with the heads of some of the largest financial institutions in the world, including CitiGroup, Morgan Stanley and ABN Amro.[40] Helping to relay his intentions was the US-born head of local brokerage United Financial Group, Charlie Ryan, who’d worked with Putin since his days in St Petersburg in the early nineties. From the start, Ryan had been a vital conduit for Putin’s Kremlin’s messaging to the global finance community and the wider world. Putin told the investors that the Yukos campaign in no way presaged a broader onslaught against private business,[41] and the seizure of the shares was not a confiscation, but was only about covering liabilities. The campaign was no more than imposing the rule of law. To some degree, the global banks – some of which, including CitiBank, held billions of dollars in exposure to Yukos debt – were persuaded. They did not pull in the loans. If they had, Khodorkovsky’s direst predictions about the resulting collapse of the economy could have come true. Power had tilted in the Kremlin, and Putin’s men were already building a system of communication with global finance, the titans of which would one day be on bended knee for the hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of assets under Putin’s control.
If Voloshin’s departure signalled a transfer of power from the Yeltsin Family to Putin’s St Petersburg siloviki, the parliamentary elections just over a month later further cemented their political power. The pro-Western liberal parties had kept a vital foothold in parliament throughout the Yeltsin era, through Anatoly Chubais’ Union of Right Forces and Grigory Yavlinsky’s Yabloko. But they were routed in the election of December 2003.[42] The TV channels now monopolised by the state kicked them off the air, while the Kremlin threw its backing behind a party of the new Putin generation, the nationalist group Rodina, which was given extensive coverage on state TV. Its leaders, Sergei Glazyev and Dmitry Rogozin, pronounced a firmly statist course that chimed with the new mood in the Kremlin to take the oligarchs’ profits and hand them back to the state: ‘Return the wealth of the nation to the people!’ was one of the party’s slogans.[43] This fitted exactly with the mood of the moment, as the state TV channels endlessly replayed news of Khodorkovsky’s arrest. The liberal Union of Right Forces and Yabloko didn’t stand a chance. They failed to get past the 5 per cent barrier to holding seats in the Duma, while Rodina emerged from nowhere to take 9 per cent of the vote.[44] The pro-Kremlin party United Russia, which had been created just four years earlier as a vehicle that would help sweep Putin to power, secured an outright parliamentary majority, even though it had run on a campaign that was almost devoid of any content apart from loyalty to the president.[45] The Communists, in the meantime, the great foe of the Yeltsin era, ambled in with a mere 12.6 per cent of the vote.
It was clear that Putin’s hands were going to be freed to conduct whatever policies he wanted from then on. There would be no countering force from the liberals. Pro-Kremlin parties had a clear and resounding majority. Russia had entered the era of a rubber-stamp parliament. In such an environment, Putin’s election for a second term as president seemed almost a foregone conclusion. His ratings stood at over 70 per cent. But even then, he and his men did not leave anything to chance.
*
Ever since Khodorkovsky’s associate Platon Lebedev had been arrested in July, tension had been rising between Putin and Mikhail Kasyanov, the gregarious prime minister and the last remaining Yeltsin holdover in power. Kasyanov had been a Yeltsin-era Finance Minister, and his ties to the Family ran long and deep. When Putin came to power, Roman Abramovich had insisted on his appointment as prime minister, as their representative.[46] Kasyanov had had little appetite for taking on the role, which he considered dangerous. He’d become used to his comfortable position in the finance ministry, where he served as deputy minister in charge of foreign debt. To be thrust into the centre of what seemed like a precarious transition of power, answering to both the Family and to Putin, was not among his ambitions. But he was persuaded, and gradually he’d grown accustomed to his new role. ‘For three and a half years I considered that we were the right people in the right place doing the right thing,’ he said. ‘But when they threw Lebedev in jail and a number of other scandals began, I understood that was it.’[47]
Kasyanov’s government had led the liberal-seeming economic reforms of Putin’s first term – the income-tax cut to a flat rate of 13 per cent, and the ambitious land reforms to finally allow the privatisation of land. As prime minister he’d also spearheaded the talks with Exxon’s Lee Raymond over the potential sale of YukosSibneft to ExxonMobil. ‘In those days,’ he said, ‘we lived in friendship with the US. There were great relations with Bush and with [vice president] Cheney. I was speaking with Cheney all the time about energy assets. We had great cooperation after the tragedy of September 11, and over transit into Afghanistan we had a cooperation channel between the two governments … If there had been an exchange of assets between Yukos and ExxonMobil the entire energy sector would have been different. It would have been much more liberal.’
But by 2003, frequent clashes began to break out between Kasyanov and Putin’s KGB men. In the beginning, the conflicts had centred around Gazprom. Putin had installed his own man, Alexei Miller, at the helm of the state, gas giant, and was starting to use it as a way to flex the Kremlin’s muscles and exert control over the former Soviet states, which Russia liked to possessively call its ‘near abroad’. Under Putin’s orders, Gazprom was becoming much tougher about payment for its gas supplies to Belarus and Ukraine, as the Kremlin sought to force the former Soviet republics to toe the line.
Kasyanov, however, had been pursuing a reform of Gazprom that had been pushed for by liberals in government ever since the Yeltsin years: to liberalise the gas market and break Gazprom up into production and transportation units, splitting its gas production companies from its pipeline network. This had long been seen as a reform vital to boosting competition in the economy. But now that Putin’s men were cementing their grip, it was pushed off the agenda indefinitely – at the very moment Kasyanov had believed he was about to announce the momentous reform.[48] That September the press had gathered for a cabinet meeting, at which the gas reform was the first item on the agenda, when Kasyanov received a call from Putin. ‘He told me, “I insist you remove this item from the agenda,”’ Kasyanov recalled. ‘We’d been so close. We were even ahead of Europe on this. We were ready. But Putin called me just minutes before.’
Kasyanov’s position was becoming untenable. When Khodorkovsky was arrested a month later, Kasyanov was one of only two senior Russian officials who dared to speak out against it. But at a cabinet meeting, in front of everyone, Putin told him directly to ‘stop the hysterics’.[49] ‘It was a sort of warning to me,’ said Kasyanov.[50] Undaunted, however, he spoke out publicly again when, in January 2004, the tax ministry went public to confirm long-rumoured claims that it was charging Yukos retroactively with $3 billion in back taxes for 2000. Kasyanov told the Vedomosti newspaper that it was unfair for tax laws to be retroactively applied.[51] None of it looked good for the rule of law, he said.
Kasyanov was almost the sole voice in power speaking out against Putin’s grab for the energy sector. They were still on speaking terms, but Putin spoke to Kasyanov with ever greater coldness and suspicion, as if he could hardly bear to look at him. Then, in the middle of February, when temperatures stood at minus 24, Gazprom took its first ever step to cut off gas supplies to a neighbour, in this case, Belarus,[52] and the tension between the two men escalated to outright confrontation.[53] Gazprom had been locked in tough negotiations with Belarus over ending subsidised gas prices to the former Soviet republic and on taking a stake in its gas transportation network. The Russian gas giant had long been threatening to cut off supplies to strongarm the negotiations, but Kasyanov had stubbornly resisted the move. ‘I had forbidden Miller [the Gazprom CEO] to turn off gas to Belarus. In Minsk, it was minus 25. But in the morning in the middle of February I was called by the Prime Minister of Poland and the Prime Minister of Lithuania, and they said, “We have no gas.” Nobody had even told me. We had a public scandal.’ Miller told him he had acted on Putin’s orders. ‘We just shouted at each other, and at Putin. All the other ministers were ready to crawl under the table.’ Putin had had enough. Just over ten days later Kasyanov was fired.[54] ‘It had built up with him,’ said Kasyanov. ‘Khodorkovsky, Exxon, gas reform, Belarus and Ukraine. And I was starting this scandal. He couldn’t bear me any more.’[55]
It was just two weeks before the presidential elections, and it was expected that Putin would make changes to his cabinet after the vote. But he and his men were leaving nothing to chance. Now that they were making moves to cement their grip on power, they could not afford any accidents. According to the constitution, if something happened to Putin, the prime minister would take over the rule of the country.
In an election race that was barely a contest at all, Putin had removed the final element of risk, the last holdover from the Yeltsin years in power capable of challenging him. To replace Kasyanov, he appointed Mikhail Fradkov, a little-known technocrat who’d worked in the shadows of the security establishment for decades.[56] Before his appointment he’d been serving as Russia’s special representative to the EU, and few people had ever heard his name. But he’d proven himself a trusted ally to Putin’s KGB men, working since the early eighties as a key cog in strategic operations in foreign trade, including with the so-called friendly firms supporting the Soviet regime from abroad. During the time of the St Petersburg oil-for-food scheme, he’d been deputy minister of foreign economic relations. As Pyotr Aven’s man in St Petersburg, he’d approved the contracts Putin handed out to the small circle of allies and friendly firms that ultimately created a strategic black-cash store for Putin and the city’s security men.
Even after his unceremonious dismissal, Kasyanov still thought Putin’s path could be changed. It was difficult for him to comprehend that the entire course Russia had set out on since the Soviet collapse was being reversed. ‘Even after I left government, for another six months I believed Putin was mistaken, and that all this could be corrected, and that it would be corrected. It was only later – after the terrorist attack in Beslan – that I understood that all this was planned to change the entire political system.’[57]
*
The presidential elections that March barely registered on the public consciousness. Putin won with ease, with more than 71 per cent of the vote. The chief political adversaries of the Yeltsin era, Gennady Zyuganov, the head of the Communist Party, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, could not even muster the enthusiasm to stand. They appointed proxies to run in their place, and the Communist candidate, the little-known Nikolai Kharitonov, came a distant second with 13 per cent of the vote.[58] It was not even a contest. But even so, the Kremlin had left little to chance. State TV granted next to zero airtime to the opposition candidates: Kharitonov calculated that his meetings with voters had been broadcast for a mere four minutes and fifty seconds, compared to the blanket coverage Putin received. Putin’s KGB men soon filled all the most powerful posts in the cabinet. They were embarking on a second term in power without the checks and balances of the Yeltsin-era powerbrokers.
The only person who voiced any objection to Putin’s second term was his wife, Lyudmilla. She’d been raised in a rundown village in Kaliningrad. Her father had drunk heavily, and it had been hard for her to adjust to the scrutiny and the trappings of presidential life. ‘She wanted to leave him when he told her he was running for a second term,’ said Pugachev, who’d become close to her, often sitting in the kitchen of the presidential residence for hours on end as they waited for Putin’s return. ‘She said she had agreed to four years, no more than that. He had to persuade her to stay. It would be bad for the polling. He could not be running for president at the same time she was trying to divorce him. Always, she drank a lot.’[59]
It had been difficult for Lyudmilla to adjust to Putin’s constant absences. Throughout his career he’d spent long hours away at work, but now they stretched ever more endlessly. As if embarrassed by her, Putin kept his distance, taking her with him on official visits and trips less and less. When he did return home, often in the dead of night, he would sit in his slippers watching bland comedy shows on TV rather than spending time with his wife.
All the while, Pugachev had been watching the rising power of the KGB men with a faint sense of unease. Back in the eighties, he’d fought against the KGB in his hometown of Leningrad. Back then, he’d been a black-market currency trader whose sworn enemy was the KGB, which sought to cut him off and threatened him with jail. But he’d also learned how to buy KGB officials off. And now he hobnobbed with the new men in power, inviting them often to his home, on familiar laughing terms with Vitya (Ivanov) and Igor (Sechin). He’d become a senator in the Federation Council. But he was still considered a behind-the-scenes powerbroker. For a time he’d kept his office in the Kremlin, across the way from the chief of staff. And for a time, Putin remained a constant companion.
But all the while, Pugachev says now, he was worried about the statist direction things were heading in, about the clampdown on freedom, about the events that had cemented Putin’s grip on power. Though he says he frequently raised these concerns, he chose not to do anything about them, saying he believed he could exert more influence from the inside than by objecting and stepping away. He thought that he could better act as a brake on the more authoritarian tendencies of Putin and his men if he remained close to them. But in fact he enjoyed his power and status as much as any of them. And in any case, he believed he didn’t have much of a choice: ‘It’s a story when you get in the car and the doors are closed and you can see the driver is on the edge of sanity,’ he said. ‘But the doors are closed and the car is already moving fast. And you have to decide whether to stay in or whether to jump is more dangerous. The moment when you can calmly get out of the car has passed.’[60]
A new ideology propounded by the KGB men to restore the greatness of the Russian state and bolster imperial ties with the former Soviet republics was emerging. One of Putin’s first acts as president – to the great dismay of Yeltsin holdovers such as Pugachev and Voloshin – had been to restore the Soviet anthem ‘The Unbreakable Union of Freeborn Republics’.[61] The powerful score of Alexander Alexandrov’s music was more than nostalgia, it was a call to revive the empire of the Soviet past, born as a hymn to Stalin and to the feats the country achieved as a global superpower – as well as to the great and terrible sacrifices it made along the way. Along with this call to the Soviet past, a new fervour for the Orthodox Church appeared to grip the ruling elite. Putin had broadcast his religious belief to the world in a book of interviews published just months before his first election as president, proudly telling how his mother and a neighbour in their communal Leningrad apartment had baptised him in secret, keeping it hidden from his father, who was a Party member and could not condone religious belief.[62] He’d told how in the early nineties, when he was due to visit Israel as the St Petersburg deputy mayor, his mother had given him his baptismal cross so he could have it blessed at Jesus’s Tomb. ‘I have never taken it off since,’ he said. Then, during his first meeting with George W. Bush in 2001, he’d charmed the US president with the story of how he’d saved his cross from the fire that destroyed his dacha in the mid-nineties. Bush said afterwards he got ‘a sense of his soul’.[63]
It seemed odd for a KGB officer who’d spent his career serving a state that outlawed the Orthodox Church to profess religious belief. But one by one, the KGB men who came to power with Putin, and who stood behind his rise, followed suit. From the beginning, they were searching for a new national identity. The tenets of the Orthodox Church provided a powerful unifying creed that stretched back beyond the Soviet era to the days of Russia’s imperialist past, and spoke to the great sacrifice, suffering and endurance of the Russian people, and a mystical belief that Russia was the Third Rome, the next ruling empire of the earth. It was ideal material with which to rebuild a nation out of hardship and loss. According to one oligarch who viewed the surge in religious belief with scepticism, it was conveniently designed to make serfs out of Russians again, and keep them in the Middle Ages, so that Putin the tsar could rule with absolute power: ‘The twentieth century in Russia – and now the twenty-first – has been a continuation of the sixteenth century: the tsar is above all else, and this is a sacred and heavenly role … This sacred power creates around itself an absolutely impenetrable cordon of guiltlessness. The authorities cannot be guilty of anything. They serve by absolute right.’[64]
According to Pugachev, who’d been a devout Orthodox believer since his teenage years, Putin understood little of the true Orthodox faith. Pugachev often blamed himself for the turn things took, because it was he who had introduced Putin to Father Tikhon Shevkunov, the priest who became known as Putin’s ‘confessor’. But the alliance, said Pugachev, had been one of convenience on both sides. For Shevkunov, it had allowed him to bring prominence to the Orthodox Church and its teachings, and riches and funding to his Sretensky monastery. For Putin, it was part of his appeal to the masses, and no more than that. ‘I would never have introduced Putin to the Church if I’d known how it would all end up,’ said Pugachev. On one occasion, when Putin and Pugachev attended a service together on Forgiveness Sunday, the last Sunday before Orthodox Lent, Pugachev told Putin he should prostrate himself in front of the priest, as was the custom, and ask for forgiveness. ‘He looked at me in astonishment. “Why should I?” he said. “I am the president of the Russian Federation. Why should I ask for forgiveness?”’[65]
In their search for a new idea to bind the nation together after a decade of collapse, it had long been clear to Putin and his supporters that Communism had failed. ‘Communism vividly demonstrated its inaptitude for sound self-development, dooming our country to steadily lag behind economically advanced countries. It was a road to a blind alley, far away from the mainstream of civilisation,’ Putin had said on the eve of his ascent to the presidency. And so, in the first years of his rule, when teachers and other experts were brought in to inculcate the new president in the history of the Russian state, they drew on Russia’s imperial Orthodox past. Putin was taught about the White Russian émigrés who had fled Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, and had spent their time in exile trying to craft a new ideology for the country’s revival should the Soviet Union ever collapse. There were, for instance, the writings of the religious philosopher Ivan Ilyin, who believed that Russia’s new national identity should be based on the Orthodox faith and patriotism, tenets that Putin would refer to in speeches in his second term. In addition, there were the writings of linguist Nikolai Trubetskoi and of Lev Gumilev, the Soviet historian and ethnologist who propounded Russia’s unique nature as a fusion of Slavic, European and Turkic cultures after centuries of invasion by Mongolian hordes. These thinkers stressed Russia’s unique Eurasian path, promoting the philosophy of Eurasianism as an alternative to the Atlanticism of the West. Putin referred to this philosophy again and again as he sought to create first a Eurasian common economic zone that would draw in Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and then a greater empire based on the alliances of the former Soviet states that, he hoped, would one day reach into Europe too.[66]
The aim was to forge an identity for the Putin regime that would fortify it against internal collapse and outside attack. Direct descendants of the White Russian émigrés, many of whom had become closely connected with the KGB, were brought into Putin’s inner circle to lead the effort to build a bridge with Russia’s imperial past. One of them described the philosophy of Putin’s rule as being ‘like a knot with three elements. The first is autocracy – strong government, a strong man, a papa, an uncle, a boss. It is an autocratic regime. The second element is territory, the fatherland, love of country and so on. The third element is the Church. It is the element to put everything together. It is the cement, if you like. It does not matter whether this is the Church or this is the Communist Party. It doesn’t make much difference. If you look at the history of Russia, you always had these elements put together. Putin is very careful in bringing the three elements together. It is the only way to keep the country whole. If you take away one of the elements, it collapses.’[67]
This philosophy was a direct copy of the state doctrine of ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality’ of Nicholas I, one of the most reactionary tsars, known for his brutal suppression of one of Russia’s first democratic uprisings. Now Putin’s KGB men were seeking to recycle his ideology to define their rule and justify their clampdown on any opposition.
But these were merely the germs of a transformation. It was only towards the end of 2004, when they were faced with a challenge to the Kremlin’s hold over the vital former Soviet republic of Ukraine, and when Russia was then struck by another horrific terrorist attack, that Putin and his allies doubled down. Only then did Putin, relying on the writings of Russia’s imperial Orthodox past, set a path that subverted what remained of the country’s democracy, and sought to unite the country by pitting it against the West.
The causes of the crisis in Ukraine were all too clear in the minds of Putin’s men: they believed the West was plotting to steer Kiev away from Moscow. But what was not clear were the causes of yet another horrific terrorist act – an act that left over three hundred hostages dead, galvanising Putin’s Kremlin to further tighten its grip.
*
On the morning of September 1 2004, children all over Russia were preparing for their first day of school. The girls were in their finest dresses, with enormous coloured bows in their hair. The boys had been armed with flowers for their teachers, and the parents were flocking around the school gates, clucking and proudly taking pictures of their young. But in Beslan, a small town in the North Caucasus about seventy miles from Chechnya, the traditional start-of-school ceremony was disturbed. Although Putin’s devastating war in Chechnya was officially over, Russian troops still occupied the republic, and the entire region was a tinderbox. Violent skirmishes with Russian troops continued on a near daily basis, and armed incursions into neighbouring republics were still taking place.[68]
At approximately 9.10 a.m., as the children of Beslan milled around the school gates for the start-of-school ceremony, dozens of armed terrorists drove up in a police truck, firing at the handful of policemen guarding the school. They seized the school, taking more than 1,100 parents, children and teachers hostage. Several of the hostages later described how the terrorists had retrieved stacks of munitions from under the floorboards of the school, which a senior police official said had been hidden there by a group of workers during renovations ahead of the school year.[69] The terrorists herded the hostages into the gym, and wired the entire school building with explosives. Bombs were hung on a line stretched between two basketball hoops at each end of the gym, while two others were attached to a pedal mechanism at the feet of two seated terrorists. Tripwires were placed around the school to deter rescue attempts. In order to avoid being taken out by gas as in the Dubrovka siege, the terrorists were equipped with gas masks, and knocked out all the windows of the gym. For the next two days, the hostages were refused food and water despite the terrible heat. Children begged to drink each other’s urine, and ate the flowers they’d brought in for their teachers.[70] From time to time gunfire broke out, and on the second day the terrorists fired grenades at two cars they thought had approached too near the school.[71] The terrorists were again demanding an immediate Russian troop withdrawal from Chechnya, recognition of Chechnya’s independence, and an end to armed activities in the republic.[72]
Negotiations soon began – the hostage-takers allowed Ruslan Aushev, the former president of the neighbouring republic Ingushetia, into the school on the second day, and he promptly secured the release of twenty-six mothers and babies.[73] The presidential adviser on Chechnya, Aslambek Aslakhanov, an ethnic Chechen, said he’d reached an agreement to enter the school at 3 p.m. the following day.[74] He was proposing that seven hundred well-known Russian volunteers go into the school as hostages in return for the release of the children, and he was flying from Moscow to Beslan in the hope that he could pull the plan off. It later emerged that the local authorities had even reached out to Aslan Maskhadov, who’d been Chechnya’s president in the mid-nineties, when it was a separatist state.[75] For the Kremlin he was still persona non grata, the arch foe they’d declared a terrorist and branded responsible for the Dubrovka siege. But the situation was so desperate that an aide to the deputy head of the local North Ossetian regional parliament had called Maskhadov’s closest associate in London, who said he’d agreed with Maskhadov that he would come to the school to negotiate with the hostage-takers. Maskhadov’s only condition was that he be granted safe passage there. At noon on the third day, this message was relayed directly to the North Ossetian president.
But just an hour after they spoke, an explosion suddenly rang out in the gymnasium. It was followed by a second, and then by a series of blasts.[76] Gunshots and rocket fire broke out as Russian special forces began launching rockets known as Shmel flamethrowers at the school.[77] Soon the roof was on fire. At about 2.30 p.m., according to eyewitness accounts, at least one Russian tank advanced and fired at the school’s walls.[78] As the fire spread, the terrorists ordered many of the hostages out of the burning gym to the cafeteria, where they were forced to stand at the windows as human shields.[79] An independent investigation later found that as many as 110 hostages had died there.[80] The fire was meanwhile still raging through the gymnasium, but firefighters arrived only two hours after it began.[81] By then the roof had collapsed. Many of the hostages, including children, were burned alive, while others who tried to run out of the school were shot in the crossfire. Only a few ambulances were in attendance to transport the wounded to hospital.[82] The gunfire continued into the night.
Aslambek Aslakhanov arrived in Beslan in time only to witness the deadliest ever end to a terrorist attack.[83] ‘When I was going there, I was in anticipation of this great joy over the fact that we would be setting the children free now,’ he said. ‘And when I got off the plane, I was simply at a loss. I thought to myself, how could this happen?’[84]
In all, 330 hostages died, more than half of them children. To this day, questions remain over how the deaths were caused, why the Russian special forces had begun attacking the building with rocket and gun fire, and most importantly, what had triggered the first explosion in the gymnasium. No one knew whether it had been deliberately set off by the terrorists, or accidentally by the Russian troops. Was the fire that caused so many deaths started by the explosion inside the school, or by the troops’ flamethrowers?
Putin reluctantly agreed to a parliamentary investigation, but it was led by a close ally, Alexander Torshin, a senator with long-standing ties to the FSB. It could scarcely be described as independent, and when its work was eventually done over two years later, it found that one of the terrorists had caused the destruction of the school by intentionally detonating one of the bombs.[85] He was ‘acting according to a plan developed earlier’, it was claimed, while the federal authorities had acted completely in line with the law.[86] ‘As the tragic events unfolded, all possible measures were taken to save the lives of people,’ said the report, which claimed that the tanks and flamethrowers had only been deployed once all the hostages were out of the building. This was completely inconsistent with eyewitness accounts,[87] while the conclusion that the first explosion had been intentionally set off by a terrorist jarred with the findings of other independent investigations. One such investigation was led by the deputy speaker of the North Ossetian parliament, Stanislav Kesayev, who’d been present at the siege. It cited testimony from a captured hostage-taker that the first blast was triggered when a sniper took out one of the terrorists whose foot had been on a detonator.[88]
It was relatively easy for Torshin’s commission to cast doubt on that claim, because the windows of the school were opaque, making it nearly impossible for a sniper to see inside.[89] But it was much harder to dismiss the findings of a third investigation led by a weapons and explosives expert, Yury Savelyev, an independent Duma deputy, who found that the initial explosions could only have been caused by rockets fired from outside the school.[90] His report concluded that the special forces had fired rocket-propelled grenades without warning, even as the negotiations were still going on.[91] In essence, he found, it was the Russian forces’ intervention that led to the string of explosions that caused so many needless deaths.
Savelyev was highly respected in his field. He’d initially served on Torshin’s panel, on which he’d been the only ballistics and weapons expert, but had stepped down when it became clear that the official findings were going to diverge widely from his own. His conclusions chimed with a video that was released nearly three years after the events at Beslan, apparently of army engineers talking to prosecutors when the siege was over.[92] The engineers were examining several of the home-made explosive devices rigged by the terrorists that lay undetonated on a table in the school. They were plastic bottles filled with shrapnel and ball bearings. ‘The holes inside [on the walls of the school] could not have been caused by these explosives,’ says one of the engineers. ‘As they keep saying, all of these [ball bearings] would have been scattered around, but there was no evidence of these sort of injuries on the children we brought out. And all around, too.’ ‘So there was no explosion inside the building?’ asks another of the engineers. ‘Inside the building there was no explosion,’ replies the first.
The extent of the carnage that broke out that day meant it was difficult to present the evidence as absolutely conclusive. But the claim that the first shots had been fired from outside the school was repeated by surviving hostages interviewed by the Los Angeles Times. One of them told of the shock on the hostage-takers’ faces when the explosions began: ‘They didn’t expect this explosion. And that phrase – I’ll never forget it – “Your own people blew you up.” One of the hostage-takers repeated this several times in this very deep voice. I’ll never forget it.’[93] Could it be, as one former Kremlin insider suggested, that the Russian authorities had ordered the firing that set off the attack on the school because they did not want to risk the arrival of Maskhadov, the former rebel leader and their sworn enemy, for talks?[94] The first explosions had rung out just one hour after his aide conveyed the message that he would come to negotiate. It was a rumour too terrible even to contemplate.
Putin faced a tidal wave of anger over the handling of the siege. Instead of the praise he’d won for the resolution of the Dubrovka theatre attack, questions mounted not only over the bloodbath that broke out when the Russian forces stormed the school, but over how the terrorists had managed to travel there in the first place – again armed to the teeth, and again in plain sight. Questions were being asked by the few remaining independent members of parliament in the Duma about whether he could ensure the security of the nation. One of the key planks of the social contract Putin had offered to the Russian people when he came to power had been an end to the terrorism that had brought the apartment bombings, through his war against Chechnya. But his security services had failed to learn the lessons of the Dubrovka siege, said the critics. The well-known political commentator Sergei Markov, seen as close to the Kremlin, called it ‘a colossal crisis’.[95] Even the Communists, long cowed and silent as an opposition force, began to claim that Putin’s clampdown on the political opposition had distracted his regime from tackling the bigger problem of terrorism. ‘They’ve built a vertical of power that’s proved useless in the face of these terrorist threats,’ said Ivan Melnikov, the Communist Party’s deputy leader.[96] Putin’s ratings had been steadily sinking ever since his re-election, as fatigue over the endless Chechen war set in, and after Beslan they sank to a four-year low of 66 per cent.[97]
But the answer that Putin emerged with, pale-faced and determined when it was clear that the death toll had reached catastrophic proportions, was that the attack had been staged by forces outside Russia, who wanted to undermine the country’s territorial integrity and bring about its collapse. In a direct address to the nation the day after the siege had ended, he called the tragic events ‘a challenge to all of Russia, to all our people. This is an attack against all of us.’ ‘We are dealing with the direct intervention of international terror against Russia, with total and full-scale war, which again and again is taking away the lives of our compatriots,’ he said. Instead of pointing the finger at terrorists in Chechnya, he claimed the attack was part of a broader plot that, it seemed he believed, emanated from the West: ‘Some would like to tear from us a “juicy piece of pie”. Others help them. They help, reasoning that Russia still remains one of the world’s major nuclear powers, and as such still represents a threat to them. And so, they reason this threat should be removed. Terrorism, of course, is just an instrument to achieve these aims.’[98]
The attack, he argued, followed on directly from the collapse of the Soviet Union – which he and his KGB men believed had been engineered by the West. Russia, the core of what had been a ‘vast and great state’, had been unable ‘to fully understand the complexity and the dangers of the processes at work in our own country and in the world. In any case, we proved unable to react adequately. We showed ourselves to be weak. And the weak get beaten. We simply cannot and should not live in as carefree a manner as previously. We must create a much more effective security system … Most important is to mobilise the entire nation in the face of this common danger.’ At an annual meeting with Western academics he took the claims further, drawing direct parallels between the Beslan attack and the Cold War standoff with the West: ‘It’s a replay of the mentality of the Cold War … There are certain people who want us to be focused on internal problems, and they pull strings here so we don’t raise our heads internationally.’[99]
Despite the fact that the subsequent investigations appeared to show that most of the deaths at Beslan had been caused by the Russian forces’ own intervention, what happened next was the start of a sea change in Putin’s Russia as his KGB men further sought to strengthen their grip. The response, he declared, would be the biggest constitutional change in the country’s post-Soviet history. Russia, he announced ten days after the Beslan attack, was abolishing elections for regional governors. This went much further than the attempts to control the regional governors’ powers already imposed by the Kremlin. Now, instead of being elected, they would be installed by Kremlin appointment, and confirmed by regional parliaments. The move would strengthen the system against external threats, Putin said: ‘The organisers, the perpetrators of the terror attack are aiming at the disintegration of the state, the break-up of Russia … The system of state power needs to not only adjust to the Beslan tragedy, but also prevent a repeat of such a crisis.’[100]
Independent political commentators like Nikolai Petrov, and independent Duma members, warned that this was a return to Soviet practices, tantamount to a return to a single-party system in which the Kremlin ruled supreme.[101] It was a complete reversal of one of the most important freedoms won in the Yeltsin years, and removed a system that had provided voters and regional elites alike with one of the most important lessons in local democracy. But the Kremlin argued that it was removing a system that had been corrupted, that had allowed elections for regional governors to be bought by those who could throw the most cash at them. Russia’s young democracy was too weak to afford the risk of direct elections. The external threat to its unity was too great. Putin’s men were building a fortress Russia, presenting the country as under siege from an external threat. But in reality they were intent only on preserving their own power. Putin’s foreign policy establishment had long lashed out at the West for harbouring some of those it believed backed Chechen terrorists – Akhmed Zakayev in the UK, and Ilyas Akhmadov in the US.[102] It had questioned whether the Chechen rebels had been using the Pankisi gorge, a narrow valley that ran between Georgia and the North Caucasus, as their route through which to launch terrorist attacks on Russian soil. But till that moment, Putin’s men had rarely publicly alluded to the idea that the West was intent on breaking Russia apart.
The evidence of Western involvement in the Beslan attack had, according to a Kremlin insider, been presented to Putin by Patrushev, and had of course been accepted unquestioningly: ‘Putin believed it because it suited him. The main thing was to create a myth, to blame it on the West. This is how they were able to cover it all up. It was only after it happened they decided it was a good excuse to cancel elections for governors too.’[103] In fact, the move had long been on the agenda. The security men had just been waiting for a moment to bring it into force.
Putin had made no similar assertions about Western involvement after the Dubrovka siege. What’s more, no evidence was ever presented that any Western forces had been involved in the Beslan attack. A report leaked by Russia’s security services claimed that three UK residents, one an attendee of a well-known radical mosque in London’s Finsbury Park, the other two Algerians living in London, took part in the siege.[104] But soon there was no more mention of this, and it was never confirmed.
What was happening at the same time, however, was a mounting threat to Russia’s influence over its most vital near neighbour. In Ukraine that autumn, presidential elections were approaching. The constitutional term of Leonid Kuchma, a former Communist Party boss who’d balanced the country between East and West since 1994, was coming to an end. The pro-Kremlin candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, the then prime minister and a former convict and industrial boss who hailed from the pro-Russian stronghold of Donetsk in east Ukraine, was facing a mounting challenge from a candidate who favoured much closer integration with the West. This was Viktor Yushchenko, who’d also served a spell as prime minister, and everything he stood for was anathema to Putin’s plans for Ukraine.
Of all the former Soviet republics, Moscow had always felt the loss of Ukraine following the Soviet collapse most keenly, as if it were a phantom limb of empire that Russia still believed was attached. Ukraine was the third-biggest former Soviet republic, after Russia itself and Kazakhstan. Nearly 30 per cent of its population spoke Russian as their native language, and its economy had been closely linked with Russia’s since Soviet times. The Politburo had invested heavily in the industrialisation of Ukraine, once an agricultural region, transforming it into a major defence manufacturer vital for supplying Russia. Its steel plants had been joined with Russia’s in the Soviet command economy, while its factories were still key suppliers of raw materials for Russia’s aluminium industry. Most importantly of all, Ukraine was a vital transit zone for Russia’s most strategic export. Eighty-five per cent of Russian gas exports to Europe were shipped through Ukraine’s pipeline network, arteries of empire built in Soviet times, while Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula on the Black Sea was still home to a strategically important Russian naval base.
As Putin sought to assert a Russian imperial revival, the last thing he needed was for Ukraine to turn to the West. But the country had long been divided, a crossroads between East and West since pre-Revolutionary times. Poland and Lithuania had controlled vast swathes of western Ukraine ever since 1686, when Russia and Poland divided the country between them after thirty years of war. Though Soviet rule put an end to any remnants of that, Western influence remained indelibly imprinted on the west of Ukraine, and the pro-European independence movement there was strong. During his rule, Kuchma had skilfully carried out a balancing act between the country’s pro-Western and pro-Russian forces. But now Yushchenko had emerged to challenge Putin’s plans for a tighter union through the creation of a Eurasian common economic zone. Both countries’ parliaments had ratified the common economic zone’s creation in April. But in Putin’s mind Yushchenko was being backed by governments in the West determined to foil Russia’s resurgence.
Yushchenko strongly supported Ukraine’s integration into the European Union and NATO – Kuchma had fired him as prime minister for his Westernising bent. His Ukrainian-American wife had been raised in Chicago, and had gone on to serve in the US State Department. They had first met when they were seated next to each other on a plane – which Putin regarded as suggesting that Yushchenko had been recruited by the CIA.
Putin and his men were horrified at what they perceived as a clear incursion on their turf, a direct threat to the closer Eurasian integration they had been plotting. Putin had already voiced his first warning about Ukraine to the West that summer, several months before the Beslan attack. At stake were Kremlin plans for the first step in the resurrection of Russian empire, the so-called Common Economic Space between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. ‘By getting closer we are increasing our competitiveness. And this is understood not only by us, but by serious people, our partners abroad,’ Putin had declared during a meeting with Kuchma in July.[105] ‘Their agents, both inside our countries and outside, are trying everything possible to compromise the integration between Russia and Ukraine.’ Putin chose the setting for this statement carefully: the meeting with Kuchma took place in the same historic Livadia Palace in Yalta where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had divided Europe into spheres of influence between East and West towards the end of the Second World War. Putin was laying claim to a renewed historic right, a Russian sphere of influence over its near abroad.
But his warning appeared to have no impact. Yushchenko’s popularity continued to rise by the day, despite a deployment of Kremlin spin doctors to Kiev to rally Yanukovych’s vote. By September 5, just one day after Putin claimed in his speech about Beslan that outside forces were trying to tear juicy chunks out of Russia, Yushchenko’s opponents went on the offensive. Yushchenko went for dinner at the dacha of the head of Ukraine’s security service, General Ihor Smeshko. The next day he felt ill, and terrible cysts broke out on his face in the days that followed. Doctors in Austria, where he flew for treatment, concluded that he’d been poisoned by a highly toxic dioxin. But still the juggernaut of his campaign went on. Although Yushchenko had been temporarily sidelined, Yulia Tymoshenko, a formidable political operator and Ukrainian nationalist, continued the campaign in his absence. Their campaign was catchy and slick. The slogan was no more than a simple Tak – Yes – and their orange banners and placards seemed to be everywhere. Putin’s attempts to intervene – even visiting Ukraine’s capital Kiev just days before the poll to call on people to vote for the pro-Kremlin candidate Yanukovych – only seemed to backfire.[106] The blanket backing by Russian state TV for the gruff Yanukovych, the Party boss and ex-convict from the Russian stronghold of east Ukraine, who at times seemed as if he could barely string a sentence together, grated on an electorate anxious for independence after decades of Soviet hegemony. Yanukovych paled in comparison to the erudite Yushchenko, who’d become a hero for surviving the poisoning attempt that had left him disfigured and might still threaten his life.
When the nation went to the polls late in November, Putin’s intervention again appeared to backfire. He congratulated Yanukovych on his victory even before the results had come in, although exit polls pointed towards the opposite result.[107] The official count was being overseen by a close Putin ally, and when it eventually tallied with Putin’s early call, the opposition claimed that the vote had been rigged. Tens of thousands of Yushchenko supporters took to the streets, including legions of young people, many of them united by the youth group Pora!, who built a tent city in Kiev’s main square, Maidan.[108] Despite the freezing cold the protests swelled, with up to a million people gathering on Maidan Square, and Kuchma was eventually forced to agree a new vote. This time the poll, held in December under the intense scrutiny of local and international observers, ended in victory for Yushchenko. The West’s candidate had won.
For Putin and his supporters it was a devastating defeat that many have not forgotten to this day. The fallout from what became known as the ‘Orange Revolution’ was so great, the blow to the Kremlin’s plans so devastating, that, according to two people who were close to him, Putin tried to resign.[109] But the fact was that no one in his inner circle wanted to take his place, no one was willing to take on the immense responsibility. This was the second pro-Western revolution in Russia’s backyard. Just a year earlier, the Columbia-educated, pro-Western Mikheil Saakashvili had swept to power in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. To Putin and his allies, the forces of the West seemed to be activating all around them, encroaching on Russia’s sphere of influence and threatening to reach into the country itself. It was the worst nightmare of Putin’s KGB men that, inspired by events in neighbouring countries, Russian oppositionists funded by the West would seek to topple Putin’s regime too. This was the dark paranoia that coloured and drove many of the actions they were to take from then on.
Again, the response of Putin and his inner circle was to double down, presenting Russia as a nation under siege. What had happened in Ukraine and Georgia would influence the actions of Putin’s Kremlin for many years to come. Seeing themselves as being engaged in both a battle for empire and a battle for self-preservation, they could not allow the emergence of any outside influence – a factor that had surely coloured their decision to abolish elections for regional governors.
In December, just days before the second vote in Ukraine, Putin used his annual press conference to rail against the West, which he claimed was trying to isolate Russia by fomenting revolution in its near abroad. Again he linked this to the turmoil in Chechnya: ‘If this is the case, then the West’s policy towards Chechnya becomes more understandable … as a policy aimed at establishing elements that would destabilise the Russian Federation.’ The revolutions in the former Soviet republics, he claimed, had been ‘planned in other places’, adding that the American billionaire George Soros was bankrolling the salaries of the new Georgian government.[110]
By the time Putin gave his annual state of the nation address the following April, the themes he had learned from the White Russian émigrés of the imperial past were clearly coming to the fore. Quoting liberally from Ivan Ilyin, the religious philosopher who’d fled the Bolshevik Revolution, and citing Sergei Witte, the reforming prime minister of Russia’s last tsar, Putin said that Russia was following a unique path, its own destiny. Its form of democracy would not follow the models of the West. The collapse of the Soviet Union, he told the nation for the first time, had been the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century. ‘Many thought or seemed to think at the time that our young democracy was not a continuation of Russian statehood, but its ultimate collapse, the prolonged agony of the Soviet system. But they were mistaken,’ he said. Now the country was reaching a new stage of development: ‘Our society was generating not only the energy of self-preservation, but also the will for a new and free life … We had to find our own path in order to build a democratic, free and just society and state.’[111]
Before then, Putin’s state of the nation addresses had focused almost entirely on the economy, on measures to double GDP, to create a ‘comfortable’ life for Russia’s citizens, and on the closer integration of the country into the global economy and Europe. ‘The expansion of the European Union should not just bring us closer geographically, but also economically and spiritually,’ he had said in his address just a year before.[112] But this year’s speech had a different twist: ‘Russia should continue its civilising mission on the Eurasian continent. We consider international support for the respect of the rights of Russians abroad of major importance, one that cannot be the subject of political and diplomatic bargaining.’[113]
Russia was marking out its sphere of influence, albeit belatedly, in the former Soviet republics. It was on a new trajectory – building a bridge to its imperial past.