IN LATE JULY 1999 Boris Yeltsin summoned Sergei Stepashin to his dacha in Gorky-9 and sacked him. There in the corner of the room to witness the deed was the ubiquitous head of the Security Council (and still director of the FSB), Vladimir Putin. Putin was not comfortable about being asked to witness Stepashin’s dismissal and subsequently gave him a job as head of the Audit Chamber, placing him in the frontline of the war against the very oligarchs Yeltsin sought to protect.
Having sacked his fourth prime minister in less than a year and a half, Yeltsin had found a man he could trust, both to run the government and to ensure his own continued freedom and prosperity. He had arrived at Vladimir Putin by a none-too-subtle process of elimination – in the final analysis, Putin was the only one who measured up to his exacting specifications.
‘He invited me to his office and said that he was thinking about offering me the post of prime minister, but that he had to talk to Stepashin first,’ Putin says. ‘[Stepashin] knows I had nothing to do with his dismissal. Still, it was terribly awkward when I was telephoned on the eve of the event and asked to come to visit Yeltsin in The Hills the next morning. You can imagine the state I was in. It was all very unpleasant.’
As his health (and temper) vacillated during the late 1990s, Yeltsin had insisted that his aides find ‘a person who would continue democratic reforms in the country, who would not turn back to the totalitarian system, and who would ensure Russia’s movement forward, to a civilised community’. He made no mention of the allegation that his successor would have to grant him immunity from prosecution once he had left the Kremlin.
According to Lilia Shevtsova, ‘the political class was preoccupied with when Yeltsin would step down and who would rule Russia after him. How did Tsar Boris look today, was he compos mentis or not? Everything else was secondary.’ The only certainty about the President, whether he was in his office at the Kremlin, his sick-bed or the solarium at his dacha, was that he would change his mind (or Tatyana would change it for him). Yeltsin changed his mind like other men change their socks, so his quest for a successor had been an abject failure. Many were called but none chosen.
Indeed, nomination as Yeltsin’s successor was like drinking from a poisoned chalice. ‘If Yeltsin declares someone his successor,’ Gennady Seleznev, speaker of the Duma, moaned, ‘it’s the kiss of death for his political future. This has already happened many times.’
One of Yeltsin’s less endearing tactics was to prod a pretender to gauge his attitude towards the succession. Any willingness to assume the highest office in the land was deemed unacceptably ambitious. Having been permitted to hold the sacred ‘black box’, Prime Minister Chernomyrdin came to regard himself as the heir apparent and had been dumped for that very reason.
The next three prime ministers – Sergei Kiriyenko (March -August 1998), Yevgeny Primakov (September 1998-May 1999) and Sergei Stepashin (May-August 1999) – had all failed the ‘Tanya test’ or been discarded for other reasons. ‘Tanya, by her humble presence and occasional bit of advice, really did help me,’ he writes in Midnight Diaries, although according to Lilia Shevtsova, this ‘sweet young woman’ was at that time the virtual ruler of the country.
Casting his net wider, Yeltsin had considered a mixed bag, including Sergei Shakhrai, Vladimir Shumeiko, Oleg Sosko vets, Alexander Lebed, Boris Nemtsov, Nikolai Bordyuzhey and Nikolai Aksenenko. For a while he flirted with the idea of Nemtsov, governor of Nizhny Novgorod, a young, flamboyant liberal who would become one of the leaders of the Union of Right Forces (SPS), but that infatuation fizzled out after Nemtsov failed to gain any measurable public support. After that he closely observed Bordyuzhey, but – as we have seen – he also came to grief for being too pally with the unfortunate Primakov.
His next choice was to shock everyone. Vladimir Putin was a man who had never stood for election to any office and showed no political ambition. In fact it was Boris Berezovsky, whom he had met in St.Petersburg, who first recommended Putin to Yeltsin. According to Berezovsky’s own account, the President duly dispatched the oligarch to France, where Putin was on holiday with his family, to determine whether he would take the job. Berezovsky says the two men spent a day discussing the prospect in Putin’s rented condominium before Vladimir finally turned to Boris and said, ‘Okay, let’s try it. But you understand that Boris Nikolaevich has to ask me himself.’ Berezovsky says he nodded affirmatively: ‘Volodya, of course. I came here to make sure there would be no misunderstanding when he starts talking with you.’ Putin, he says, replied: ‘No problem, let’s do it’.
Around this time Putin had been flying to St Petersburg every weekend to see his father who was desperately ill. Vladimir Spiridonovich, a hero of the Siege of Leningrad, died on 2 August at the age of 88. Putin was grieving for the loss of his father when Yeltsin summoned him to the Kremlin and informed him that he had decided to appoint him prime minister. He also intimated that this was just a step up the ladder to ‘the very highest post’. Putin wore his most impenetrable mask throughout the interview, but his mind must have been racing. His first thought was that he would be plunged into the vortex of Russian politics at the forthcoming parliamentary elections. Thinking of his bitter experiences of electioneering for Chernomyrdin’s NDR party back in 1995 and Sobchak in 1996, he expressed his intense dislike of election campaigns. ‘I don’t know how to run them,’ he told Yeltsin, ‘and I don’t like them.’
Yeltsin waved this objection aside; it was a mere technicality. The conversation ended with Putin saying ‘I will work wherever you assign me.’ Yeltsin took that as a sign of acceptance and introduced Putin to the country on 9 August, referring to him as ‘a prime minister with a future’ and as ‘someone who can consolidate society, based on the widest possible political spectrum, and ensure the continuation of reforms in Russia’. Putin’s take on his appointment was characteristically pragmatic. ‘I thought, “Well, I’ll work for a year and that’s fine. If I can help save Russia from collapse, then I’ll have something to be proud of.” It was a stage in my life. And then I’ll move on to the next thing.’
DURING the Christmas service at the Church of St Procopius the Righteous in Veliky Ustyug, northern European Russia, 7 January 2008.
Yeltsin claimed that Putin had risen steadily in his estimation since he had appointed him head of the FSB in July 1998. ‘The more I knew Putin, the more convinced I was that he combined both an enormous dedication to democracy and market reforms and an unwavering patriotism,’ he writes in Midnight Diaries. ‘[He] did not allow himself to be manipulated in political games. He would not do anything that conflicted with his understanding of honour. He was always ready to part with his high post if his sense of integrity required it.’
Putin dismisses such rhetoric. ‘I did not have a particularly close relationship with Boris Nikolayevich, just a good working relationship,’ he says. ‘Only when he began to discuss the question of his resignation with me did I sense a certain warmth in him.’ On 16 August the Duma ratified Putin’s appointment by 233-84, with 17 abstentions. Many of the deputies assumed he would vanish like those before him. He was too shy, too inexperienced, too unremarkable, too unknown, to run a government that was rated among the most obstreperous in the world. None seemed to realise that this time Yeltsin had actually anointed his true heir.
Nothing was a greater challenge to Putin than being underestimated by supposedly superior men. The belief that his character could somehow be divined by looking into his eyes was as flawed as the assumption that he must have an inferiority complex because of his humble origins and relatively short stature. In fact, these were the very assets that had driven him since childhood to out-do his competitors, no matter what the personal cost.
‘How strange,’ Lyudmila ruminated. ‘I’m married to a man who yesterday was really just an unknown official in St Petersburg, and now he’s the prime minister.’ The seemingly nondescript chap she met on a blind date outside a Leningrad theatre and who had, on that occasion, so little to say for himself, was to run the government that ruled the biggest country on earth. How would he cope? Indeed, the new prime minister would need to draw on his inner strength more than ever before to survive the tumultuous months ahead.
THE PUTINS MOVED to a bigger dacha outside Moscow. For security reasons Masha and Katya were taken out of the Deutsche Schule Moskau, Moscow’s German School, and taught privately at home. It was a sensible move. There could be no greater kidnap target for the Chechen warlords than Putin’s daughters. The children also found that their father’s new status made life difficult at school. ‘People began to treat us with a lot more respect, it was really noticeable,’ Masha says. ‘Some of them would flatter us or try to get in our good books. And that really bothers me.’
Having lived according to a strict regime for years, Putin found it easy to stay in shape. Their new dacha came equipped with a 12-metre pool in which he would swim after his daily workout. He also took care with his diet: breakfast consisted of fruit and kefir, a type of yogurt; he skipped lunch but ate a meal in the evening. Sometimes he watched cartoons with his children, but couldn’t make time to see their latest favourite film, The Matrix, although promised to do so as soon as things quietened down.
Later that month Putin began his first day in the office as Prime Minister. As his motorcade of armed security men swept into the Kremlin’s 80-acre site in central Moscow, he had time to consider his programme for the day ahead. By the time his limousine had pulled up at the entrance to Administration Building No. 1, he had decided on the first name on his list of people to call. Jacket off, he wandered through the elegant suite of rooms, reflecting on his good fortune. The financial crisis of the previous year had ended; oil, gas and steel prices were rising and international borrowing rates were low.
Some of the members of his first cabinet had been selected for him by the presidential administration, which with enough practise had become adept at the game of musical chairs. The first Deputy Prime Minister would be Victor Aksenenko, a rascal who openly pursued his own business interests and those of the Family; while two of the ministries – energy and interior – would go to Family favourites Viktor Kalyuzhny and Vladimir Rushailo, respectively.
In a bizarre move, Putin then summoned none other than market trader-turned-billionaire tycoon, Roman Abramovich, and asked him to interview candidates for the remaining cabinet positions. The quiet tycoon seemed an unusual choice for this latest mission. But so it was, while the new Prime Minister proceeded with other matters, senior politicians stood in line outside a room on the floor above. One by one the men were trooped in for a short meeting with Abramovich, who nodded and listened while vetting each of the candidate’s suitability to run important state departments.
Alexei Venediktov, a political commentator and editor-in-chief of Echo of Moscow radio station, spotted the queue. He told me: ‘I talked to some of the candidates that I knew and I asked them what they were doing there, and they said “We’re having an interview”. I then asked them who they were having an interview with and they said that, as well as other people, they were having an interview with Roman Abramovich. “What does he look like?” I asked. And when they described him to me I realised he was the young man [I had previously seen] in one of the Kremlin corridors.’
The fact that one of Moscow’s best-informed pundits (later to become one of Abramovich’s closest friends) had not recognised a billionaire with the ear of the new Prime Minister may seem surprising, but at the time no photograph of Abramovich had ever appeared in print. Indeed, when news of the oligarch’s power and influence first spread, newspaper editors were obliged to use artists’ impressions of him until one publication ran a competition and a reader came up with a fuzzy picture of the publicity-shy oligarch.
It was equally puzzling that a man who had achieved billionaire status through the ‘loans for shares’ scheme under Yeltsin should have the ear of the new reformer. But Putin knew exactly what he was doing. Abramovich was the weak link in the oligarchs’ chain of command. The richest men in Russia had also become the most powerful and in order to break their stranglehold on the Kremlin, Putin had to get among them: Divide and rule. In the short time he had known Abramovich, Putin had surmised that, unlike the others, this man posed no threat to the administration, since he had no interest in politics; his interest lay only in making money.
Berezovsky was shocked when he learned of the task Putin had allocated to his former pupil. ‘I didn’t know anything about this,’ he said at his fortress of an office in Mayfair. The shock must have been all the greater considering that Berezovsky had approached Putin on his appointment to tell him who he wanted in the Cabinet. But at that stage he still regarded Putin as malleable. Separating Abramovich from the other oligarchs in the line of fire was part of the game Putin would play. His first priority, however, was the burning issue of Chechnya.
IN EARLY AUGUST 1999 Islamic militants had invaded Dagestan from Chechnya. Sergei Stepashin had worked out a credible plan to deal with the rebels and all Putin had to do initially was to follow it. The military move conceived by Stepashin involved dividing Chechnya by cutting off the separatists’ bastions in the mountainous south from the pro-Moscow north. The ex-premier reasoned that this would allow Russian forces to stop the warlords from seizing hostages and either holding them to ransom or murdering them. Yeltsin’s personal envoy, Major-General Gennady Shpigun, along with an Interior Ministry general, had been kidnapped at Grozny airport that spring and brutally slain. Captured Russian soldiers had been forced into slavery and others, including six foreign Red Cross workers and four Western telecom engineers, had been decapitated.
Putin concluded that the action proposed by Stepashin was not strong enough to deal with the threat. The hostage-taking and the killings were sapping Russia’s prestige as a strong nation; the invasion of Dagestan went even further: it pointed to the very break-up of the Russian Federation. Putin had to be seen to be stronger than the enemy. Shamil Basayev, who had led the invasion, made no secret of his ambition to form a trans-Caucasian Islamic republic. His ruthlessness had been proven four years earlier, when 150 people died in the Budyonnovsk hospital siege. As well as Basayev, there was a Saudi known as Khattab (real name Samir Saleh Abdullah Al-Suwailem) – a known cohort of Osama bin Laden – who had turned his attention to the Caucasus in 1995 after fighting in Afghanistan. Funded by bin Laden, Khattab set up headquarters in a border village for his 1,500-strong guerrilla army and shared Basayev’s dream of an Islamic state.
Putin made it clear that this was no time for half-measures. His only reservation was that the world – and perhaps his own people – would consider the action he contemplated too heavy-handed. Heavy-handed or not, his judgment proved to be accurate: thanks to the course he followed, the war in Chechnya eventually ended and terrorist attacks became fewer.
In his memoirs Yeltsin suggests that Putin – who was to succeed him as President – had the necessary characteristics to face such challenging times: ‘Putin is ready for anything that life might dish out to him... He will answer everyone in the accustomed Russian way – with a wave of his hand.’ He added: ‘With steel teeth behind his smile’. Putin could cope with any task. Yet Yeltsin’s own hand in the Chechnya issue is dubious. When he signed the often overlooked Khasavyurt agreement with the Chechens, Yeltsin agreed that Chechnya could leave Russia at any time. There can be little doubt that if Yeltsin had remained in power the breakup of Russia would have been assured. He had already destroyed the Soviet Union, Russia was next in line.
ALTHOUGH THE bombing of apartment blocks in poor areas of Moscow, Volgodonsk and Buinaksk – which killed 300 civilians – was seen by some as just too convenient for Putin, it gave good reason for retaliation. Chechen rebels were blamed for the bombings. An FSB defector, Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Litvinenko, and his mentor, Boris Berezovsky, later came up with a speculation (matching popular 9/11 conspiracy theories) that the Kremlin contrived the bombings in order to win support for an all-out war in Chechnya. Few believed that Putin was capable of sanctioning the slaughter of Russians just to win a propaganda battle. Nevertheless, a strange incident demonstrated that the FSB – now commanded by his old friend and colleague from St Petersburg, Nicolai Patrushev – played superbly into the hands of the conspiracy theorists.
RALLY DRIVER Mika Hakkinen, Russian president Vladimir Putin and world pole vault record-holder Yelena Isimbayeva attend the 9th annual Laureus World Sports Awards ceremony in the concert hall of the Mariinsky Opera and Ballet Theater, 18 February 2008.
A particularly interesting event took place in Ryazan, not far from Moscow, which was widely – and freely – described in Russian newspapers. Novaya Gazeta returned to this extraordinary story in several editions. Police – in a high state of readiness for further bombings – were summoned to a block of flats on Novosyolov Street, Ryazan, where they found two men and a woman unloading bags into the basement of a building. The police inspector who was first on the scene had sufficient knowledge of bombs to recognise that the sugar sacks, along with an electronic device and a clock with wires attached, were components of a bomb. He called the bomb squad, who defused the device, establishing as they did so that it used hexogen – just like those which had killed 300 people in the earlier atrocities. The following day explosives engineers took a sample from the suspicious-looking sacks for testing.
Thanks to the speed of the caretaker who alerted police, the ‘bombers’ were caught red-handed. They tried flashing identity cards which showed that all three were members of the FSB, but the cards cut no ice with police, who took them into custody. However, when Patrushev intervened the following day, the trio were released without charge. Patrushev’s explanation was that the detonator and explosives had been planted by his agents as part of a training exercise to see if everyone was on their toes. Adding to the mystery, inspectors who carried out tests on the substances ‘planted’ said that they failed to explode.
SOME SAY THAT the bomb casualties already suffered were enough to give Putin public support for his military operation in Chechnya. Most Russians supported Putin when he sent in more than 80,000 troops to flatten Grozny, killing thousands of civilians in the process and making nearly half a million homeless. It was a brutal war that the West condemned, but Putin replied he was only doing what NATO had done in its air campaign in Kosovo, which had gone on for 70 days, and his supporters would later point to the invasion of Iraq, which cost more than 100,000 civilian lives.
The campaign was as effective as it was brutal, and Putin emerged the hero of the hour to his people. The Chechen onslaught had put him on course to win another victory – that December’s battle for the Duma, which had long been dominated by the Communists.
Putin would have preferred to be seen as non-political, above the fray – and his popularity was rising steadily, but Yeltsin needed to be propped up and his own prospects might be damaged by a coalition of the Communists and the Fatherland-All Russia Party. This party had been formed by an alliance between Yuri Luzhkov’s Fatherland movement, established in December 1998 in order to cam paign against the oligarchs, and the All Russia bloc, formed in April 1999 by a cabal of regional leaders, including Putin’s enemy Vladimir Yakovlev, the governor of St Petersburg. At the head of the new Fatherland-All Russia Party was Putin’s old nemesis Primakov, who made no secret of his presidential ambitions.
Yeltsin and the oligarchs could not risk a powerful anti-Yeltsin coalition taking control of the Duma, so Berezovsky created the Unity Party with the cooperation of 39 regional leaders. His main official post had been running the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a pale shadow of the Soviet Union, and he had somehow found time to get himself elected to the Duma as deputy for the impoverished southern republic of Karachaevo-Cherkessia. Roman Abramovich was chosen by Berezovsky as paymaster and the driving force behind the new party. Leaving his energy empire for others to run, he began wooing more and more regional governors, enlisting their help in promoting Unity nationwide. This was particularly important because one of Putin’s principal opponents in a forthcoming presidential race was Luzhkov, who held enormous sway in Moscow as well as in other regions of the Federation.
While Abramovich worked on Unity, Berezovsky set about a campaign to destroy the chances of Luzhkov and Primakov and their Fatherland-All Russia Party. The most potent instrument at his disposal was the scurrilous news show host Sergei Dorenko, widely billed ‘the TV presenter politicians love to hate’. Berezovsky had met Dorenko following the car-bombing in which he was injured and his driver decapitated. He had flown to Switzerland for treatment for burns. From his hospital bed on his first night, he watched Dorenko’s show and heard the satirist make typically insensitive remarks about the attempt on his life. ‘Another moneybags was hit by a bomb today – too bad,’ was the thrust of Dorenko’s message. Instead of taking offence, Berezovsky decided he had discovered a potential star for his own network and told his secretary to track down Dorenko and arrange a meeting on his return to Moscow. When the presenter refused to see him, Berezovsky stalked him until he accepted an invitation to lunch, at which Berezovsky talked him into signing a contract with ORT.
Berezovsky – through the acid wit of Dorenko – began a merciless campaign to humiliate Putin’s rivals. Over a series of 15 shows, the mayor of Moscow was ridiculed remorselessly on primetime television. In the beginning the taunts were cruel, but not very serious. When Luzhkov’s ally Primakov had a hip operation, for example, Dorenko mocked it by showing gory details of surgeons operating on hips and thighs. Primakov was caricatured as a sick old man. And when Luzhkov took the credit for the rebuilding of a hospital destroyed by Chechens, Dorenko baited him: ‘Why don’t you just thank the donor?’
The Berezovsky-Dorenko smear campaign continued unabated for weeks and greatly amused Putin, who watched every show. It was hinted that Luzhkov was involved in ‘mysterious money transfers’ from Moscow to foreign banks. He was made to appear ridiculous with the back-to-back showing of video clips of him filmed two years apart, first praising Yeltsin during the 1996 presidential campaign and then attacking him for being too sick to fulfil his role. Even Putin was shocked when it was alleged that the mayor was to blame for the murder of businessman Paul Tatum, who was shot dead in the midst of a dispute over the ownership of a Moscow hotel – a crime for which no one had ever been charged.
Goaded beyond endurance, Luzhkov sued for libel and won $4,500 in damages, but the whole affair distracted him from matters of far greater importance. His dream of becoming president was dashed as his standing in the polls was eradicated. Meanwhile, the only real thorn in Putin’s side was Gusinsky’s NTV channel, which subjected him to a series of comparatively harmless personal attacks.
In September Putin travelled to Auckland, New Zealand, for a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) countries. ‘My political prospects were still unclear,’ he says. ‘I did not know myself what lay ahead.’ Among the delegates was Bill Clinton, who met the new Russian prime minister for the first time in that capacity on 9 September. ‘Putin presented a stark contrast to Yeltsin,’ he says in his memoirs, My Life. ‘Yeltsin was large and stocky; Putin was compact and extremely fit from years of martial arts practice. Yeltsin was voluble; the former KGB agent was measured and precise.’
Clinton came away from the meeting believing Yeltsin had picked a successor who had the skill and capacity to better manage Russia’s turbulent political and economic life.
At one of the APEC dinners, Clinton showed his appreciation by making a simple gesture to the Russian. ‘He came round this table at which all the APEC leaders were seated and whispered in my ear, “Volodya, I propose that you and I leave together”.’ Putin says: ‘This came as a complete surprise to me. We both got up and our colleagues all stepped back to form a sort of corridor and we walked along this corridor together to the applause of those present. I will never forget this and I am very grateful to him.’
Meanwhile, Putin’s support had rocketed from a mere two per cent in August 1999 to 15 per cent by the end of September, rising to 25 per cent in late October and 40 per cent by late November. His sense of humour on the campaign trail came as something of a surprise from someone so apparently strait-laced. When Putin visited Primorsky Region as Prime Minister in the autumn of 1999, the governor Yevgeny Nazdratenko heaped such lavish compliments on him that Putin replied: ‘Yevgeny Ivanovich, you praised me so much, I began to think that I must have died’.