ON THE MORNING OF December 31, 1999, a day when your newspapers were full of ridiculous articles about the Y2K bug, the software glitch that would supposedly make computers go haywire and planes drop from the sky, Putin called me into his office. “Tell me, Vadim, did they teach you to skydive at the Academy of Theater Arts?”
The question struck me as uncalled for, and I said nothing.
“But they’d at least have taught you how to pretend, no?”
A familiar gleam sparkled ironically in the tsar’s eyes. Standing next to him, Sechin was enjoying the scene with all the relish of a Doberman that has finally gotten to eat the cat in the neighbor’s yard. As I still said nothing, Putin added curtly: “In any case, get ready. We leave this afternoon.”
As announced, we made our way to the military airport a few hours later, where a plane was waiting to take us to the capital of Dagestan. From there we loaded onto three helicopters, heading for Gudermes, in Chechnya. We immediately started to breathe in the air of excitement and madness that surrounds a war, when just staying alive is itself an adrenaline rush. It was all new to me. My last remnants of inherited privilege had allowed me to avoid military service at eighteen. Now, while I listened distractedly to Putin’s exchange of pleasantries with the officers and had my first whiff of the fumes of war, I started to understand why some men might prefer them to any other stimulant. Unlike the civilian helicopters I’d ridden until then, this one had no opening to the world outside. We were inside an armored cabin, suspended over the Caucasus in the dark of night, and that simple fact turned us within minutes from being strangers to brothers, united not so much by fear as by the imperative not to let the least trace of fear show. Despite the deafening noise of the helicopter’s blades, we all felt the need to make conversation. We started by trading New Year’s memories from our childhoods. Some had grown up in tiny villages, in Kazan or Novosibirsk, but none of us, as we quickly realized, had ever imagined spending New Year’s Eve in a helicopter with the tsar. Putin, sitting in the front row, constantly turned back to us, and we could see from his expression that his wonder and amazement were even greater than ours. Against all odds, he was now tsar.
At a certain point, someone realized that it was almost the stroke of midnight. Sechin, who hadn’t yet developed his acquaintance with the French grands crus, produced a bottle of Moldavian champagne. We toasted to the health of the Russian people, and to the troops that we were going to visit, but just then the pilot informed us that he would be unable to land. He needed visibility of one hundred and fifty meters, and he had only a hundred meters, or something of the kind. The atmosphere changed immediately. The tsar insisted that we had to land, but when he understood that it wasn’t going to happen, he walled himself in silence. The helicopters turned around. Everyone thought the mission had been aborted. Actually, someone remarked in chiseled tones, there were plenty of troops for us to review in Dagestan. We could always go to Gudermes another day.
I made a point of saying nothing at all. Advising a ruler to abdicate is never a good idea, even in the most trivial matters. In fact, the helicopters had barely landed back where they’d started when we realized that, if Chechnya was where the tsar wanted to celebrate New Year’s, then Chechnya was where we’d be going, even at the risk of setting off a landmine or plunging into a crevasse. At one o’clock in the morning, we loaded onto jeeps and headed for the pass in the mountains. For an eternity, immersed in total darkness, we drove along the Caucasus’s ravines. Unable to see, we sensed in the shadows around us a cold, black, wind-battered landscape and the indomitable will of the man who led us. It took nearly four hours, but we arrived in Gudermes a little before dawn. The soldiers were sleepy and surprised. They couldn’t believe the tsar had taken so much trouble to visit them. Most were just kids in military fatigues, rubbing their eyes as though it might be a fairy tale.
After briefly passing the troops in review, we found ourselves in a tent with thirty or so officers. There, you could feel the situation stripped to its bare essentials, as in the Iron Age. The visit from the government authorities was impressive, no doubt, but we were in a place where authority was earned on the battlefield. The nearness of death simplified things a great deal. Polite formulas had no place here. The men looked at Putin with that mix of deference and irony that characterizes Russian attitudes toward power. They seemed to be waiting for something. A photographer who’d traveled with us took pictures of the event. It was hard not to act the part of tourists. To celebrate the New Year, the unit commander had set out champagne for a toast. All eyes turned to the tsar. But Putin, a glass of champagne already in hand, paused the proceedings.
“Let’s stop for a moment,” he said, his hard gaze traveling over the assembled men, “I would like to drink to the health of the wounded and extend New Year wishes to everyone here. But we face many obstacles on the road ahead. Many hard tasks confront us. You know this. And you know what the enemy has planned for you. We know it too. We know the strikes they are preparing, and where they will occur. We can’t allow ourselves an instant of weakness. Not one second. If we lower our guard, the dead will have died in vain. So I propose to you that we put our glasses back on the table. We will drink together, but at a later time.”
I hadn’t suggested it to him. I don’t think he’d planned his gesture beforehand. But it affected everyone present as if he’d dumped a bucket of ice water over their heads. In that instant, the tsar and the members of the military became one and the same, like a family in the midst of a conflagration, bound together by love and pride. After that, surrounded by officers, the tsar handed out medals and hunting knives to the soldiers: “You’re not here just to fight for our country’s honor and dignity,” he told them, “you’re here to put a stop to the disintegration of Russia.”
That night on the news, Russians saw their soldiers, tears welling in their eyes, showing a pride and determination not seen in years. Because once again they had a leader in charge.
That’s when I started to suspect that Putin belonged to what Stanislavski called the tribe of great actors. He believed that actors come in three kinds. The first has instinctive talent, and when he’s on his game he can transport an audience. But it’s different on his off days, when he becomes overemphatic and embarrassing. That’s the kind of actor who can ruin a production all on his own. Then there’s the methodical actor, the one who studies the part, does breathing exercises, devotes his evenings to rehearsing gestures and intonations. That one, by contrast, won’t lead you to great heights of emotion, but he also won’t disappoint you. He always does what needs doing, and you can count on his unvarying clichés in every circumstance. Putin is neither of these. Like all great politicians, he belongs to the third kind: the actor who puts his own self on stage, who doesn’t need to act because the role is so thoroughly a part of him that the plotline of the play has become his own story, it flows in his veins. When a director finds himself with a talent of this magnitude, he has practically nothing to do. He just needs to follow. Avoid introducing complications. Give his actor a little nudge from time to time. That’s how the election campaign went. In theory, I was its director, its strategist, to use a term of Boris’s, who thought he was the strategist. None of that was the case. Putin was already manning the controls. Alone.
While this was all happening, Berezovsky was still living in a dream world. He badgered the tsar with phone calls and meeting requests. He put himself forward as a mediator to deal with Chechnya, as an ambassador to Europe, as the Moscow campaign director. There’s nothing worse than the virus of politics. Especially when it infects someone without the antibodies to combat it. Boris was a very intelligent man. But intelligence doesn’t protect you from anything, not even stupidity.
I remember a meeting in the tsar’s office at the White House. Berezovsky hadn’t seen Putin in several weeks and was even more agitated than usual. “We’re becoming too negative, Volodya, too dark. There’s nothing wrong with war, and we all know that you’re a great general, that you’ll lead us to victory—I’ll even build you a triumphal arch if you like. But do you know what Julius Caesar did when he returned from Gaul? He went into debt up to his ears to give the Romans a three-week celebration. Panem et circenses, Volodya, does that mean anything to you? In your case, you don’t even have to go into debt, because I’ll pay for it. But let’s give these poor Russians something, otherwise they won’t go to the polls, they’ll be too busy jumping out of windows!”
In fact the person who wanted to jump out the window was Berezovsky himself, and the tsar knew it. Boris needed to feel indispensable, but he sensed that his usefulness was diminishing by the day. The noncampaign that I’d set up for Putin hadn’t cost a ruble, whereas Boris needed to build up credit with his candidate. He wanted us to use him, use his television stations, use his dark money to pay for television ads, posters, rallies. “They tell me you’ve even turned down the free advertising slots on TV? At that rate people will forget you’re a candidate, Volodya. They’ll think you’re bowing out in favor of Luzhkov or Primakov.”
“Don’t be absurd, Boris.” It was the first time I’d heard the tsar speak so sharply to Berezovsky. “We’re the government. The news is our campaign, the actions we’re taking, the history we’re writing. No one believes advertisements anymore. Facts are the only advertising that interests us.”
Berezovsky was jolted as if a scorpion had bitten him. For a tiny moment I thought he’d finally realized the depths of his misjudgment. But of course I was wrong. Boris had advanced too far down his own road. Years of making bets that had paid off handsomely and enjoying unlimited power had fattened him like a Christmas turkey. He’d lost his ability to gauge power relations accurately. Instead of analyzing the real dynamics of what was happening in front of him, he’d grown used to evaluating everything in terms of personal relationships. True, he had helped the tsar rise to power. And I might add that Putin is no ingrate. He doesn’t repay the people who’ve helped him by sending them to work in the salt mines. There, at least, Berezovsky had been right. The tsar genuinely felt gratitude and acted accordingly.
But he was a man destined for power. He was drawn to it, understood it, needed it. I don’t know how Boris could have imagined that after climbing to the throne, the tsar would agree to share the scepter with him. Or even consider letting one of his subjects stand on equal footing. You only had to look at him for a moment to realize this. But that was the problem: Berezovsky had never spent a moment looking carefully at Putin. He’d seen him as a silent enforcer and never once imagined that Putin’s impassive reserve hid anything but a plodding and obliging nature.
While all of us do some things better than others, I’ve rarely seen a person combine such keen intelligence with such abysmal stupidity as Berezovsky. He could engineer the most complicated deals and make a vast treasure appear out of nowhere, like a genie out of a bottle. But he completely missed things that would have been obvious to his lowest underling. In the final analysis, I think he was so intent on himself that he never had time to observe others, a failing that would cost him in the end.