WHOEVER LIVES IN THE Kremlin owns time. All around the fortress things are in constant flux, while on the inside life seems to have stopped, marked only by the solemn strokes of the Spasskaya Tower clock and the regular rounds of the presidential guard. As has been the case for centuries, a person crossing the threshold of the gigantic fossil that Ivan the Terrible placed in the center of Moscow feels the hand of limitless power resting on him, a power accustomed to grinding men’s fates to dust with the ease of caressing a newborn’s head. This force spreads outward in concentric circles through the city streets, giving Moscow that looming sense of menace that is a large part of its charm. The unsightly bulk of the Lubyanka, along with the seven towers that ring the central avenues, the skyscrapers of modern-day Moscow-City, and the rococo villas of Rublyovka are reflections of the dark energy flowing from the fortress’s heart.
But in the summer of 1999, that spell was broken. All that emanated from the great rooms of the presidential palace was the alcoholic breath of a fat and tired Siberian bear, surrounded by a small retinue of bejeweled courtiers who were growing increasingly alarmed at seeing the man to whom they owed their fortunes fall apart. Yeltsin had become a deadweight. Not only could he no longer protect them, but he was likely to drag them all into the abyss.
Outside, the animal city could feel that the jaws of authority had loosened their grip. Moscow was no longer the empire’s capital. It had become a metropolis where cell phones rang during performances of the Bolshoi Ballet and gangsters settled their scores with automatic rifles, enforcing the law of the jungle. The Kremlin no longer set the tone—money did that now. And the armored Mercedes of the oligarchs bulled through the streets of the city center just as in tsarist times the coachmen of the nobles had cleared a path through the crowds, cracking their whips to left and right. Meanwhile, when the docile working class of Moscow arrived home from work, they didn’t even have the money to turn on the heater.
In early August, the old bear picked a new prime minister whom most people had never heard of. Vladimir Putin’s nomination met with general skepticism. This was the fifth head of government Yeltsin had named in just over a year. “There’s no point ratifying the appointment,” the leader of the Duma had said. “There’ll be someone new to take his place in two months anyway.” Putin saw it differently. He knew he had only a few weeks to make his mark on public opinion, and he didn’t plan to waste any time.
Our offices were not in the Kremlin but in the old House of Soviets, also known as the White House—a gigantic block of naphthalene set down on the banks of the Moskva River, which nonetheless failed to protect the country from moths. Originally intended to host gatherings of the Supreme Soviet, the building now housed, more modestly, the government of the Russian Federation. After the old bear shelled the upper floors with mortar rounds during a moment of irritation, a Swiss firm had come in to rebuild, but the place hardly gave a sense of Alpine efficiency. The hallways were full of reassuring-looking types, old-fashioned characters in dark-gray and brown clothes. They seemed to exist outside the present moment, sculpted in wax, holdovers from a world where time was measured in great slabs, in contrast to the frenetic pace of the city, the frantic whirl of dollars and cameras I’d been a part of.
On the prime minister’s designated floor, twenty or so rooms had been emptied for the incoming staff. We moved in there: Putin, his administrators, the economic and military advisors, and the communications personnel. We worked day and night. The antiseptic walls could barely contain the violence of our ambitions. Meanwhile, only meters away, career government employees went about their lives, as placid as a lullaby sung by a nineteenth-century babushka. I’d subsequently learn that it’s always this way in a ministry. A small group of people works frenetically in one room, and everyone else slacks off. Interaction between the two groups is limited—an occasional respectful glance, tinged with irony, as the longtimers wait for this umpteenth invasion to move through like the rest, in the full knowledge that the grass will grow again where it’s now being trampled.
I don’t think they’d understood that we were it, that our gang was there to stay. How could they? We looked like everyone else. In our custom-tailored suits, carrying laptops, wearing the haughty expressions of people who have all the answers because they’re fluent in English. I struck them as being different, though. Sometimes one of these ministerial wraiths would stop me in the hallway. “Might I trouble you for a moment, Vadim Alexeievich?”
—Of course, I’m all ears.
—I just wanted to say I knew your father. A great man. Those were the days…They don’t make men of his stamp anymore!
Some undoubtedly said this to flatter me. More often, though, the specters who briefly interrupted me just wanted to make contact. Finding someone in our faction who’d known the old world reassured them. And do you know what? It reassured me too. Each time one of those people, seemingly escaped from the pages of a Gogol novel, spoke my father’s name, I felt a surge of warmth, and my childhood years came back to me, the fur coats and official cars, the piroshki and cutlets of Granovskovo Street. I would see the same nostalgia in their eyes. They remembered me as a child, or at least another like me, maybe their own son. They’d had plenty to be proud of at the time. They worked for the Supreme Soviet, for the Central Committee. They would arrive home and tell their children: “Today, I saw Comrade Gromyko, he was just back from Kabul, looking pleased about something. Things are clearly going better over there in Afghanistan.”
In fact, it was all over, and it had been for some time. But they still believed in the old order, or they could at least pretend to believe in it without anyone telling them they were misguided. Now they’d lost the right even to pretend. They could still take pride in their many years of service, however, their ability to look at new arrivals through a long lens. In their presence, I felt closer to my father, I understood for the first time what had happened to him. With some surprise, I discovered that I, too, had the gene that allows you to adapt to this kind of life—to live the way you might read through a stack of newspapers, wanting to be done with it.
True, I worked eighteen hours a day. Sitting beside the prime minister, I took part in a constant stream of meetings, and historic decisions were taken at every one of them. But the more deeply I entered into the process of governing, the more full of misunderstanding the world seemed, the more choked with useless explanations and missed opportunities. A vast exercise, never-ending, that consumed whole lives without leaving a trace. How could I have thought to leave a mark on the surface of the mute and indifferent sea?
It was at this point that the unexpected happened. On an autumn night a little after midnight, when the good people of Moscow had retired under the covers, leaving the city to the mobsters and the supermodels, a tremendous rumble echoed through the darkened capital. On Guryanova Street on the outskirts of Moscow, several hundred kilos of explosives had blown a nine-story apartment building apart. Dozens of peacefully sleeping families were swallowed up in the explosion. Four days later, a second explosion occurred at five in the morning. Another suburban building had been destroyed, leaving more than a hundred dead.
Afterwards, there were people who said the bombs had been set off by Putin’s allies, by agents of the security services. Frankly, I don’t know what’s true. If it’s a secret that has remained closely guarded, I’m glad to say no one has ever shared it with me. That said, it’s my experience that things are generally simpler than they appear. In politics, a cure is worth any amount of prevention. If you stop an attack from taking place, nobody is going to know, while if you react to one decisively and nail the guilty parties, then yes, you’ll derive political capital from it. But it’s a long way from that to saying that the bombs were set off by the FSB and not by Chechen terrorists.
In any event, those bombs were our 9/11 moment, two years early, and they completely transformed the landscape. Up to that point, the war in Chechnya had been a distant engagement that mattered only to the families whose sons were serving in the military over there. They formed a tiny minority. But when buildings in the suburbs of Moscow started to blow up in the middle of the night, carrying off hundreds of solid Russian citizens while they slept, the war came home to Russians for the first time.
Our people are valiant, and they are used to making sacrifices. But after those bombs exploded, there was a panic such as I’d never seen before. People were afraid to go home and sleep. They organized night watches around their houses, and if anyone wandered into the neighborhood who had even a trace of a beard, there was a good chance he’d be beaten to death.
Fortunately, the state was in the hands of a leader who was capable of responding. People tend, looking back, to attribute supernatural powers to the tsar, but the truth is that the only indispensable quality for a man of power is the ability to make use of circumstances. Not pretend to control them, but make decisive use of them.
Putin has never been fond of public speaking, but it was clear that the people needed to hear his voice. We were in Kazakhstan on a state visit. Just as well, because the Kremlin’s gilded panels would have distracted from the message. We needed a simpler location, the rough look of an improvised council of war. The press conference started with a few technical questions about the time it took emergency services to show up, the status of the investigation. The prime minister answered with his characteristic calm, precisely and without a trace of emotion—very much the ascetic government official that Russians were starting to recognize. Then a journalist asked him a slightly more polemical question: “Apparently, you responded to the attacks by ordering a bombing raid on the Grozny airport. You don’t think this kind of action might just aggravate the situation?”
What happened then is something I’m still not able to fully explain. Putin stayed silent for a moment. And when he resumed speaking, his expression hadn’t changed, but his presence had taken on a different consistency, as if his body had been dipped in liquid nitrogen. The ascetic official had suddenly transformed into the angel of death. It was the first time I’d seen a phenomenon of this kind. Never, even on the stages of the best theaters, had I witnessed a similar transfiguration.
“I’m tired of answering questions like this,” he snapped, not even looking at the journalist who’d asked it. “We’ll hit the terrorists wherever they’re hiding. If they’re in an airport, we’ll hit the airport, and if they go take a shit, pardon my language, we’ll get them in their outhouses.”
At this remove, it might not sound like much or might just strike you as vulgar, but you have no idea the impact these words had on the public. It was the voice of command and control. Russians hadn’t heard it in a long time, but they recognized it immediately, because it was the voice their fathers and grandfathers had grown up with. A great sigh of relief swept over Moscow’s avenues and fearful suburbs, over Siberia’s endless forests and plains. There was again someone at the top who could guarantee order.
That day, Putin stepped fully into his role of tsar. As for me, it reminded me of one of my grandfather’s sermons. “Do you know what the problem is?” he asked one day when we were walking through the woods near his isba. “The human eye was made to survive in the forest. That’s why it’s sensitive to movement. Whenever something moves, even on the extreme edge of our field of vision, our eye captures it and sends the information to our brain. But do you know what we don’t see?” I shook my head. “What stays motionless, Vadya. In the middle of all the changes, what we’re not trained to perceive are the things that stay the same. And it’s a big problem, because when you think about it, the things that don’t change are always the most important.”
It’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten. None of us has. It’s why, when the tsar talks politics, he never mentions numbers. His language speaks of life, of death, of honor, of country. Governing is not an activity that can be left to the feckless, to those who are too lazy to make money, too timid to become rock stars. Accountants looking for glory, little men who think that politics boils down to running a building council.
That’s not what it is at all. Politics has just one goal: to address men’s terrors. Consequently, when the state no longer manages to protect its citizens from fear, the very basis of its existence is called into question. When the battle over the Caucasus moved to Moscow in the fall of 1999 and nine-story buildings started to fritter away like sandcastles, the good Muscovite, already somewhat disoriented, saw the specter of civil war rising before him for the first time. Anarchy, dissolution, death. Primordial terror, which even the dismantling of the Soviet Union had failed to awaken, started seeping into people’s minds. What’s going to happen to me?
Vertical power offers the only satisfactory answer, the only one that can appease man’s anxiety when exposed to the world’s ferocity. After the bombs went off, reestablishing the vertical of power became the tsar’s top priority. Moving on from the Western logic of commodities and gadgets, of debates between bureaucrats mesmerized by statistical graphs, to build instead a system that would answer to man’s fundamental needs. That was the mission we then embarked on. Deep politics, night and day, uninterruptedly.