COMFORTABLY SETTLED in the presidential office for the next four years at least, Putin realised that he now had a multitude of problems to deal with. Some were serious, others merely irksome. The latter category included members of his wife’s family who sought to jump on the bandwagon – particularly a cousin who openly sought to exploit the relationship and had to be ‘dumped’, which caused Lyudmila some distress and created domestic friction when Putin least needed it.
‘This is the point at which he discovered he had two kinds of friends,’ says a helpful VVP Man. ‘There were those who wanted to use him – they didn’t last long – and those of us who genuinely wanted to help.’ And that’s when a group of unappointed Putin supporters was formed; an all-male circle Putin believed he could trust to watch his back as much as to offer guidance on the road ahead.
‘At our very first meeting, we congratulated him and asked him how it felt to be President,’ continues the VVP Man. ‘His reply was: “Well, it beats selling bananas”. Chechnya was his first priority. It was all about pain, corruption, assassinations, corrupt prime ministers and ministers. And then of course there was [Ahmed] Zakayev, the Chechen warlord who was one of Boris Berezovsky’s cohorts... the man who managed to win the support of the British actress Vanessa Redgrave, even though he had been linked to the murders of hundreds of people in 1995/6.’
On a swelteringly hot day in July 2000, the President-elect summoned all 30 oligarchs – both major and minor players – to a meeting at the Kremlin. All but one, that is. A little bewildered about the purpose of the meeting, they were for the first time required to leave their airconditioned limousines at the Spassky Gate and go on foot to the grandest of the Kremlin’s gilded halls to face their President. All wore sunglasses, adding to the impression of a Mafia gathering ordered by Don Corleone, yet this was a meeting of ultra-rich men summoned by the undisputed leader of the Russian Federation.
They were punctual; Putin, as was his custom, was not. He had even been late for his reception in London by the Queen, so he was not averse to keeping these men waiting. Indeed, it gave them time to speculate on the possible reasons for the summons. They had been seated around the highly polished boardroom-style table for more than half an hour when the President finally made his entrance.
Cool and calm, he looked down the table and began to speak. ‘You built the state yourselves to a great degree through the political and semipolitical structures under your control,’ he began. ‘So there is no point in blaming the reflection in the mirror.’ Confused, the wealthiest men in Russia looked at each other. Was he blaming them? For what? The explanation was swift to follow: Putin’s message was that their days of meddling in politics were over. They could keep their lot on three conditions: they must pay their taxes, they must enter into no more sweetheart deals with corrupt ministers or officials, and they must not interfere in politics. The oligarchs were left in no doubt that if they broke these new rules they would be in trouble.
This, then, was a diktat they would ignore at their peril. Furthermore, they were aware that the tide of public opinion was turning against them. The average Russian had a pretty good idea of how their vast wealth was acquired. Mikhail Fridman later recalled: ‘We had to admit we were not popular. One of our number suggested we hire an image consultancy company. I said we had to go further than that. Ordinary people who could not afford to visit their families in Russia saw us going to St Tropez and [for tax purposes] calling it a business trip. We had to be seen as personally irreproachable.’
This is ironic, for it was Fridman who, when he received his summons to the Kremlin summit, had telephoned a fellow oligarch to say that big business had become far too important for the President to fall out with those who controlled it. The now-humbled Fridman was the one who had suggested the oligarchs hire a powerful PR firm, more to damage the President’s image than to improve their own.
Putin was in no doubt that his ‘guests’ that morning had more than vast riches with which to wage war on him; several of them had used parts of their fortunes to buy virtual control of the Russian media with its entrée into the hearts and minds of its people. But the new President had a trump card: he controlled the jails and, by way of a warning shot, had already had one of those present, Vladimir Gusinsky, arrested and briefly imprisoned the previous month on charges of embezzling tens of millions of dollars from Gazprom, which he did not intend to return. The charges were only dropped when the tycoon agreed to sign his powerful Media Most conglomerate (which included NTV, the Segodnya newspaper and Itogi magazine) over to the government-dominated Gazprom energy conglomerate – leaving him with just a small stake in the popular Echo of Moscow radio station, which is still broadcasting today – in return for a one-off payment of $300 million. Gusinsky had arrived at Putin’s doom-laden conference still complaining that, as the agreement was reached while he was in jail, it was made under duress and therefore not legally binding; the oligarchs were not used to giving back what they had taken from the state.
As they left the Kremlin building that fateful day, the oligarchs broke off into groups. Some were protesting, a few were planning rebellions – rebellions that would see one of their number jailed for longer than Putin could expect to be in power and others dispatched to uneasy exiles. Without exception, however, they all had one question on their lips: where was Roman Abramovich?
ONCE A PENNILESS ORPHAN, Abramovich, still three months short of his 34th birthday, had not only joined the ranks of Russia’s oligarchs, but become one of the most successful of all; yet when Vladimir Putin called them together on that summer day in 2000, Abramovich was conspicuous by his absence. Like the others, Boris Berezovsky had not dared to refuse the presidential summons. As he looked around the table, he could see that every seat had been filled, confirming that Abramovich’s presence was surplus to the President’s requirements.
PUTIN TRAVELLED to the Vatican City for this meeting with Pope Benedict XVI in the library of the Apostolic Palace, the Pope’s official residence.
Had he already satisfied Putin that he would abide by the three conditions imposed that day? Or was the man from the KGB demonstrating a divide-and-rule tactic by demonstrating that one of their number had already changed sides? The answer was yes to both questions. The President and the entrepreneur – an unlikely twosome – had already forged a pragmatic relationship; it was an uneasy alliance with one of those responsible for bringing the country to its knees by participating in Boris Yeltsin’s fire sale of Russia’s natural assets.
Although a man of seemingly unbending principle, Putin was also a realist. He knew better than most that Yeltsin had had little choice when, four years earlier, he bought his victory in the 1996 presidential election by scraping together the funds to pay pensions and public sector wages, saving his homeland from a return to Communism in the process; even if it had meant selling off Russia’s family silver for a fraction of its worth to a group of men who, in some cases, would become multi-billionaires from their acquisitions. Clawing back the national treasure could wait until another day.
ABRAMOVICH HAD FIRST encountered Putin at the Kremlin, when he was required to dance attendance as the business face of government. At that time Berezovsky had been happy to see his apprentice accepted into Yeltsin’s inner court; he had failed to realise that the blossoming relationship between him, Abramovich and Putin would lead to his own expulsion from the Kremlin. After all, when Yeltsin decided to appoint Putin prime minister, hadn’t he sent Berezovsky to sound him out?
Berezovsky and his fellow oligarchs expected the new man at the head of government to be their man, that Putin would be malleable. From the moment he was installed in office, however, the new leader wasted no time in demonstrating the fallacy of that belief and pointedly ignored Berezovsky’s attempts to impose himself on his premiership. Berezovsky’s Achilles’ heel was that he could never bring himself to compromise. ‘He must always win and be seen to win,’ says Robert Cottrell. ‘But in politics and high finance the inability to give ground is dangerous.’
In his first State of the Nation address, Putin warned: ‘We are facing the serious threat of turning into a decaying nation.’ He was referring to the grim demographic prospects Russia faced: after the Soviet Union collapsed the population shrank by five million overnight. His experts told him they expected the population to shrink by more than 30 per cent to just over 100 million before the new century was half over. Such a low population for a country as vast as Russia presents a potentially catastrophic situation, especially considering the far greater numbers who live in neighbouring China and Japan and threaten to encroach on Russia’s sovereign territory.
When Putin took office as President, Russia’s annual death rate exceeded the birth rate by 70 per cent and two thirds of the population lived below the poverty line. The consumption of drugs, alcohol and tobacco all contributed to the highest mortality rate in Europe and the lowest birth rate.
German Gref, the young liberal reformer, was appointed trade minister by Putin and put in charge of the Centre for Strategic Studies, which produced a 10-year development strategy paper. Gref and Putin knew each other well from their St Petersburg days. Putin’s choice of men he had long trusted strengthened his position and such was his level of influence that they in turn changed to adapt themselves to his behaviour: not just Gref but Kudrin, Chubais and even Vitaly Ignatenko, the longstanding director of the ITAR-TASS news agency. Reports to the President from his kitchen cabinet were not kind about Gref, however. ‘We recommended the incentive scheme for parents,’ said my VVP man. ‘We re-introduced the old scheme whereby parents get more, or better, accommodation in return for producing more children, plus there’s a monetary incentive. Gref lives in a dream world. He wanted to encourage people to go and settle in the outback, where no one wants to live. The parts of Russia he was talking about are virtually uninhabitable, plus they have no infrastructure. There are no roads to these places, no airports and no likelihood of getting them in the foreseeable future. It was a potty plan.’
One month later, five months after Putin was elected President, Berezovsky saw his chance to strike back. Just before 11.30 a.m. on Saturday 12 August, the Kursk, a state-of-the-art, guided missile submarine, sank in the Arctic Barents Sea. The length of two jumbo jets laid end-to-end, the Kursk had once been the pride of Russia’s Northern Fleet and, having been designed to defend its waters against aircraft carriers and their battle groups, it was not merely a submarine, but a symbol of state power. It had gone down with all hands after two explosions, the result of unsuccessful tests on torpedos. The mighty vessel’s loss was to shake the fledgling presidency.
At the very moment the accident occurred, Putin’s motorcade was sweeping out of the Kremlin, escorting Vladimir and Lyudmila on the first leg of their journey to the Black Sea resort of Sochi, where he was to spend his summer holidays. He was not informed of the sinking of the Kursk until early the following morning, and at that stage the fate of its 118 crew was undetermined. A more experienced head of state might have realised he was being let down gently when the elderly defence minister, Marshal Igor Sergeyev, called him at 7 a.m. to tell him that the ship ‘was not communicating’. The naval authorities had delayed giving him the news in the hope that the problem would be resolved. Sergeyev reassured him that everything was under control and there was no reason to interrupt his holiday. The torpedos the submarine was testing had been brought out from stores somewhere in Dagestan. A similar problem had led to the destruction of a British submarine 50 years earlier, but the reports of that incident had been classified.
As a result of the procrastination, while the cream of the Russian navy was suffocating to death at the bottom of the sea, Putin, still unaware of the extent of the tragedy, spent the day jet-skiing, sunbathing and writing a birthday card to a 70-year-old actress he admired. The families of the Kursk’s crew, meanwhile, tried in vain to get more information about their loved ones, while the navy refused all offers of help from the West to mount a rescue operation.
It took a telephone call from President Clinton that lasted more than half an hour to make Putin realise that the crew’s predicament had become an international preoccupation. Clinton argued that unless Putin accepted help with the rescue he would appear no more human than his Soviet predecessors. But Putin had to balance Clinton’s argument with strong objections from his own top brass, who believed the West was out to steal their military secrets. He eventually sided with Clinton (who had, after all, made such a fuss of him as Russia’s new Prime Minister when they first met in Auckland) but when a British mini-sub was offered by Tony Blair in response to the emergency, Putin’s admirals defied him, refusing at first to give permission for it to be used because of the highly secret status of the vessel. They remained convinced they could handle the situation, but while they prevaricated the crew perished and the media laid the tragedy at Putin’s door.
PUTIN PRIME MINISTER abandoned his limousine and cycled to President Medvedev’s Gorky residence on a fine summer day in 2011.
With all hope lost, the naval authorities continued to stonewall and it was not until Komsomolskaya Pravda, owned by oligarch Vladimir Potanin and normally a pro-Kremlin newspaper, paid a $600 bribe to an officer of the Northern Fleet to obtain a full list of the crew that relatives learned which of their men were aboard the vessel lying at the bottom of the sea. There followed extraordinary scenes. The Deputy Prime Minister, Ilya Klebanov, and Admiral Vladimir Kuroyed flew to the port of Vidyayevo to meet relatives. In the confusion, reports appeared that most of the relatives had been fed copious quantities of tranquilisers in a bid to control mass hysteria, but these turned out to be untrue. One woman, Nadezhda Tylik, whose son was among the dead sailors, was said to have been stabbed with a needle containing sedatives when she shouted at Klebanov and had to be carried from the meeting room, but she said later that it was ‘a lie’. She had been given an injection on her doctor’s recommendation and at the request of her husband and after ‘five minutes and a drink of hot tea’ returned to the meeting room.
A NATIONAL TRAGEDY had been turned into an international scandal. It was not until the early hours of Saturday 19 August, a full week after the Kursk sank, that Putin slipped back into Moscow to be briefed on the reasons for the tragedy. That night it was officially confirmed that all the crew were dead. The whole country was in deep mourning and Putin was facing one of the most severe trials of his life. Facing up to it boldly, and in full realisation of how great a tragedy had befallen his country, he set off for Vidyayevo on August 22 to meet the families of the victims – fully aware of the harsh reception they had already given to Klebanov.
Newly tanned from his holiday and dressed in a black suit and shirt buttoned to the neck but with no tie, he appeared at the Officers’ Club to face a hostile audience of 600, who grilled and barracked him for six agonising hours. Never before had a Russian leader had to endure such a hostile reception. Doing his best to change his normally dour expression, he told the assembly that the tragedy had ‘hurt his heart’ and promised to side with them in their struggle to obtain answers as to why it had been allowed to happen, but all this did little to placate the griefstricken relatives, who wanted to know why he had lost so much crucial time before accepting the help of international rescuers. Why had he continued sunbathing on the beach instead of going to sea to direct operations personally?
On his return to Moscow, Putin made it known that after being told of the accident, he had wanted to interrupt his holiday and fly at once to the scene: ‘But I refrained, and I think I acted correctly. The arrival in the disaster area of non-specialists and high-ranking officials does not help, but more often hinders. Everyone should be at his post.’ This was his response to media criticism of ‘inaction’ at a time when Clinton had interrupted his vacation to meet with firefighters battling blazes in the western United States, and Chancellor Schroeder had interrupted his holiday to attend memorial services for the Germans who had perished in the Paris Concorde crash.
SOME OF THE SAILORS’ relatives were placated by his offer to compensate widows with up to 10 years’ salary, though many thought they were being bought off and, unusually perhaps, were not afraid to say so.
Asked at one point why the navy’s rescue equipment was so inferior to that of the nations which had come to help, Putin lost his cool and, in a rarely raised voice, said: ‘I’m willing to take responsibility for my 100 days in power, but when it comes to the last 15 years I’m ready to sit on the bench with you and put the questions to them’.
Such was the strength of the Kursk’s loved ones’ anger that Putin was advised – advice he took – to cancel plans for a ceremony on the site of the sinking, during which he was to have lowered a wreath into the sea. He later explained that widows and mothers each received a package worth more than $30,000 plus a home in a city of their choice – a fortune to the families of sailors who, at the end of Yeltsin’s era, earned less than $50 a month (even the boat’s commander only received $2,400 a year). $130 million was subsequently paid to raise the 18,000-tonne wreck and give the dead a decent burial; four new naval rescue centres were also created. Cynics were to call it the most expensive face-saving operation in Russian history.
This tragic episode cost Putin dearly in terms of popularity: he slipped by a full eight per cent in the polls. The international press was united in attacking him and his government for their apparent disregard. In London, the Daily Telegraph described him as callous and irresponsible. But nowhere were the attacks on him more savage than in Moscow, led by Berezovsky’s ORT, NTV and Echo of Moscow radio – still owned by Gusinsky. Indeed, Berezovsky had just resigned as a member of the Duma, announcing that he was launching a ‘constructive opposition’ to Putin. All three media organisations alleged that the Kremlin had ‘tried to control coverage of the president’s meeting with angry relatives of the dead’.
This was exactly the kind of behaviour that Putin had warned the oligarchs he was no longer prepared to tolerate, and he was to respond with extraordinary cunning and ruthlessness. First, Berezovsky received an angry telephone call from the President complaining about ORT’s reference to Chernobyl. As a result the two men agreed to meet but, when Berezovsky went to the Kremlin he was greeted not by Putin, but by Chief of Staff Alexander Voloshin. ‘Either you give up ORT within two weeks or you will follow Gusinsky,’ said Voloshin. Berezovsky snapped: ‘You are forgetting something, I am not Gusinsky’. And with that he demanded a face-to-face meeting with the President.
Putin felt he could not ignore the demand and the meeting took place at 3 p.m. the following day. After a fruitless argument about ORT’s coverage of the tragedy, Putin produced a file and began to read from it. The gist of his lecture was that ORT was a corrupt organisation run by one man who took all the money – Boris Berezovsky. Putin had dredged up a report compiled by Berezovsky’s old enemy Yevgeny Primakov, who had ordered the raid on his business premises.
According to Berezovsky, when he asked Putin why he was bringing up this old complaint, Putin replied: ‘Because I want to run ORT. I am going to run it personally.’ Berezovsky says he replied: ‘Listen Vlad, this is, at the very least, ridiculous. And secondly it’s... Do you understand what you are saying? Effectively, you want to control all the mass media in Russia yourself.’ At this Putin got up and walked out. Berezovsky returned to his office and wrote him a letter in which he effectively excommunicated himself from the Kremlin. It was their last communication.
The President dealt with Gusinsky in a more subtle way, according to the broadcaster Alexei Venediktov. With the help of his loyal ally Abramovich, Putin set out to bankrupt his empire. Putin’s aim was indeed to starve all four of Media Most’s leading outlets of their lifeblood: advertising. It was a strategy that proved spectacularly effective: a more compliant team replaced the management of the television station, the newspaper became unprofitable and was taken over, and the editorin-chief of Itogi was sacked, his successor transforming the title into a harmless glossy. In Venediktov’s words, the group was ‘completely destroyed’, although his radio station survived and prospered as a commercial operation.
Abramovich was to buy the privatised half of ORT from Berezovsky and, by agreement with Putin, if not exactly on the President’s instructions, promptly turn it over to the state. As this backstage manoeuvring was going on, Putin went public with his attack on the oligarchs. Towards the end of a broadcast to the nation, during which he appeared to have had something of a personality transplant in admitting ‘a complete sense of responsibility and guilt for this [the Kursk] tragedy’, he launched into a vitriolic assault on the media in general and the oligarchs in particular, declaring: ‘They want to influence the masses and show the army and the political leadership of the country that we need them, that they have us hooked, that we should be afraid of them, that we should listen to them and let them plunder the country, the army, the fleet. That is their real aim. Unfortunately, we cannot order them to stop, although that would be the right thing to do.’
He included scathing references to those who had long advocated the destruction of the army and the navy and then given a million dollars to the Kursk victims’ families – a reference to a fund launched by Berezovsky’s Kommersant. ‘They would have been better to sell their villas on the Mediterranean coasts of France and Spain,’ he added, striking a particularly populist note. ‘Only then could they explain why the property was registered under false names and behind illegal firms. And we could probably ask the question: where did the money come from in the first place?’ The message was not lost on Berezovsky, who had a sumptuous villa at Cap d’Antibes, or Vladimir Gusinsky, who had a similarly well-appointed villa at Soto Grande in southern Spain.
THE GLOVES WERE OFF. Rubbished by the mass media at his time of greatest need, the President made it clear he was declaring all-out war on the oligarchs who owned them. Despite being one of those who had masterminded Putin’s election victory, Berezovsky found himself under investigation by government prosecutors and the tax police. Could it be that, for them at least, Putin’s Russia was turning into a much more dangerous place than Yeltsin’s? Berezovsky and Gusinsky had no intention of sticking around to find out. By that winter both had fled the country for good, the former to France and later Great Britain, and the latter to Spain and then Greece, before finally settling in Israel.
By selling his shares in ORT to Abramovich, Berezovsky had made his protégé Putin’s tool. Khodorkovsky was richer, but he lacked Abramovich’s grasp of the realities of life. As Berezovsky and Gusinsky went into exile, Abramovich was doing what he had been told to do – campaigning for the governorship of Chukotka. And he was already distancing himself from his troubled partner, stating: ‘We were close friends once, but Berezovsky didn’t help me, he helped himself ’.
Meanwhile, the Kursk tragedy gave Mikhail Gorbachev an opportunity to get his own back on Putin for supporting General Kryuchkov (if only by omission of any criticism) in the attempted coup back in 1991, and having declared since that Gorbachev had brought about the collapse of the once mighty USSR. ‘It seems to me that Putin didn’t get the facts at the start of the crisis,’ Gorbachev stated in an interview with the BBC. ‘The problem was he needed to intervene and instead of doing that he stalled for time. That was clearly an error of judgment. There was a succession of events. Putin made a mistake when he saw that something serious had happened – he stayed put and took no action. Only later did he go to the scene of the accident, he met sailors’ relatives, he tried to make amends. But he’d already made a grave miscalculation. It’s been a lesson to him.’
And in a harsh reminder of more difficult times, Gorbachev put the boot in by saying that the false and contradictory information given out by Putin’s navy spokesman reminded him of the cover-ups of Soviet days – the days Putin had blamed him for ending. ‘I’ve been through all that. Why do you think I pushed through the policy of glasnost and gave people some freedom? I used to say we couldn’t have no-go areas for the public. That’s what bureaucracy thrives on – lack of information.’
But that was the business of the past. Putin had been in the post of President for only a few months and was just beginning to clean out the Augean stables that Yeltsin had left behind. And in this respect, as he said himself, he could not be responsible for what had gone on in the 15 years prior to his election.
IN OTHER MATTERS Putin was putting to use a skill that he had acquired in his experience with Tony Blair. The Russian President mounted a charm offensive on the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder. The two bonded closely and that can be partly credited to Putin’s knowledge of Germany and his fluency in its language, an unexpected bonus from his university studies and his time in Dresden. Indeed, Schroeder seemed to overlook the fact that he had been there as a Russian intelligence officer. Putin had more difficulty, however, when it came to the French. President Jacques Chirac did not want to know about cordial talks. Of all the ill-feeling in Europe about Chechnya, it was strongest in France. The French press covered the terrible war in greater depth and at greater length than anywhere else, and the French intelligentsia were constantly reminding their foreign minister that neither he nor Chirac should have anything to do with ‘the warmonger at the Kremlin’. When they did eventually meet amidst the splendour of Chirac’s Paris headquarters, their friendship initially seemed to owe more to a love of magnificent mirrored ballrooms than a mutual understanding of democratic freedom. However, French newspapers changed their tune when they saw that Chirac was falling under the spell of the young Russian President – due in no small measure to the influence he was having over Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, a Russian-speaking member of the French Academy, who had Chirac’s ear.
HE MAY be as fit as they are, but even Vladimir Putin could not bend this frying pan when he called on Russian athletes at their endurance sports club in 2011.
Putin toured extensively in his first year in office, repairing relationships that had lacked attention during the Yeltsin years. Showering goodwill as far and wide as he could, he visited India, China and Vietnam, but attached relatively little importance to a brief stay in America, where he was deliberately low-key, since he was biding his time until he could deal with the outgoing President’s successor. He did, however, spend an hour talking to Larry King on his CNN programme and that produced some dialogue clearly intended for White House ears.
In the interview the pair talked at length about the sinking of the Kursk, although King could not have been expecting much when Putin’s answer to his first question on the subject – ‘What happened with the submarine?’ – was met with the curt reply, ‘It sank’, leaving American viewers with the distinct impression that they were listening to the most cynical leader in the western world. Putin clearly realised that at this point he was expected to produce the usual sighs and expressions of mortification in order to endear himself to his audience. When King posed the difficult question of why he had not sought help from other countries right away, Putin fudged his response with technical information about the operation his own navy had mounted. But the American TV impresario persisted: in retrospect, was there nothing Putin would have done differently?
‘No,’ he responded flatly. The only thing he could have done differently as Head of State was to suspend the meetings he was conducting at his holiday base and return to Moscow. But that would have been a PR exercise, he quipped, since he had contact with the military (in this case the navy) wherever he happened to be.
He could, he supposed, have gone to the site of the tragedy. King disagreed: ‘I don’t think security would have let you do that’. Here the Russian leader became noticeably riled: ‘It wasn’t because of security [that I didn’t go], I would not ask permission from security. Security serves me, I don’t serve them... I am Commander-in-Chief…’ No, he reasoned, politicians should not be engaged in scoring points at a time when every moment counted for the would-be rescuers. He had turned the argument against him upside-down.
After that, the interview touched briefly on the imprisonment in Russia of the American businessman Edmund Pope on spying charges, but here again Putin put the interviewer in his place, pointing out that in a democratic state only the courts could decide a case. Then he said something surprising: ‘Even if the court confirms that Mr Pope has caused harm by his activities, I don’t think that intelligence can be that harmful’. Here was an ex-KGB man saying that the art of spying was past its sell-by date. When King persisted: ‘You were high up in the KGB – is spying among friendly nations still warranted?’ Putin demurred, replying that information-gathering via clandestine means could help ‘settle international problems’. Had he enjoyed his time in the KGB? King asked? ‘It was an interesting job. It allowed me to increase my vision, to get certain skills, skills of dealing with people, with information. It taught me to choose what the priority is and what is less important.’
After one of the frequent commercial breaks – for this was live TV – King finally got round to asking an important question: Why was Putin trying to stop the United States from building an anti-missile system which would protect the country from nuclear attack? Putin replied: ‘When our countries agreed on limiting ABM systems, that was not an accident. When we deploy ABM systems in our own territory we put together certain facilities that are hard to penetrate. If we... try to cover the entire territory this is mission impossible. But let’s imagine it could be possible. That could create on one side an impression, an illusion [that that side] could deal a blow, decide on an attack, without fear [of reprisal]. That would disrupt the balance of strategic interest, of forces, which in my mind is very dangerous. When discussing this matter with our American colleagues, I’m always tempted to remind them of how the nuclear arms race began. I always recall the fact that nuclear arms were created in the United States.
‘Subsequently, of course, some of the scientists who invented those arms transferred the secrets to the Soviet Union. “Why did they do that?” I always ask my American colleagues... [The scientists] were smarter than you and I. Voluntarily they transferred those secrets to the Soviet Union because they wanted to restore balance. And thanks to that balance mankind has survived without major conflict – large-scale wars – since 1945. If we disrupt that balance, then we’ll put the whole world in great danger, which doesn’t serve the interests of either country... That’s why we seek to retain the balance, why we object to the deployment of the national ABM system.’
WHEN he injured his shoulder on a tatami mat during a morning workout in August 2011, Putin went to the Smolensk Clinical Hospital for treatment by the celebrated traumatologist Viktor Petrachenkov.
It was an answer that would not have been lost on Bill Clinton (whom Putin had farewelled at a Kremlin dinner with a jazz concert featuring Clinton’s favourite living tenor saxophonist, Igor Butman).
After yet another break King raised the question of the hounding of media moguls Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, asking his nowconfident interviewee: ‘Are you looking to stop opposition?’ ‘Opposition?’ Putin began his reply. ‘On whose side? On the side of those who are interested in hanging on to their power which, I believe, is very detrimental and dangerous to Russia today... The cases you have mentioned have nothing to do with the freedom of the press. In the first case, we are talking about [an organisation called] Media Most, of which Mr Gusinsky is the 70 per cent owner.’ The company, Putin said, owed creditors more than $1 billion and that was why Gusinsky was in trouble. In the case of Berezovsky, Putin said that Russia’s leading television channel was owned 49 per cent by him and 51 per cent by the government, which in turn gave the government – by the terms of the channel’s charter – the right to decide on policy. Taxation policy was the same for commercial media enterprises as it was for government ones, so any talk of denial of freedom of expression was purely a matter of profit for the former owners.
NEXT KING TURNED to a matter of greater international interest: ‘Now, let us discuss Chechnya. Is this solvable? Will the troops stay? I know that you had great support when you started. The Russian people are now having their questions. What’s the situation today?’
This question did not go down well. Putin’s appointment as Prime Minister had coincided with the invasion of Dagestan by the Chechnyabased Islamic International Brigade (IIB), an Islamist militia. He had been prepared for it: the Security Council had briefed him the previous month about the likelihood of an invasion from the breakaway republic. It was a growing problem that had to be resolved without delay. The Chechens had been brutal and he knew he had to respond in kind. Captured Russian soldiers were being treated as slaves and foreign hostages held for ransoms of up to $1 million each – a bill which Berezovsky had footed personally on more than one occasion.
And as far as Russia’s President was concerned, it was not just his government that did not want the Islamic militants to take control of this corner of their territory: the people of Dagestan didn’t want it either. A large proportion of the ethnically mixed population found the prospect of coming under Islamic rule horrifying and this, Putin had reasoned at the time, would soften the blow to the international community when he launched his attack. He had expected America to support his actions when it was learned that the Chechens had received around £15 million to finance their battle.
He could not have been more wrong. In fact, the operation in Chechnya shocked the world, with international reports condemning Russia’s ruthless tactics. Many failed to add that during the conflict the 400,000-strong Russian population was wiped out. Huge numbers of civilians were brutally murdered, others kicked out of the country once their property had been ‘confiscated’. And now here was an American interviewer asking the President to justify his actions.
Speaking via a translator, Putin began his reply: ‘Today the situation is fundamentally different. If I may, I will probably give you a history of the situation, how it started, all those most recent events.’
Alas, he had to give way to a commercial break before completing his lesson: ‘I will allow myself to remind you of the very start of those most recent events last year. Since 1996, Russia completely and fully fled Chechnya. Russia did not recognise the independence of Chechnya, but de facto they got full state independence.
‘All the structures of governance of Russia were dismantled — the police, the military, public prosecutors’ offices, courts — all the offices of administration were destroyed and a President was elected who by law did not comply with the procedures of the Russian Federation.
‘What happened afterwards? You all know. They didn’t get any independence and de facto the territory was occupied by foreign mercenaries and religious fundamentalist [fanatics] from Afghanistan and other circles in the Arab East. This is a fact of life. They started firing squads working on the thoroughfares, beheading people, mass capture, hostage-taking in the adjacent territories of the Russian Federation and inside Chechnya. Over this period they took hostage over 200,000 people. That was a market of slave-driving in the contemporary world in Chechnya.
‘And Russia, finding itself in a similar situation like America found itself in the wake of the Vietnam War, did not respond to it at the time, and naturally that promoted, in a way, those international terrorists who swept – who had their cradle now in this area, their nest was set up there, and it resulted in the direct attack on Afghanistan, on Dagestan last year, armed-land direct attack, coupled with destruction of a shelter, property and death of people. And Russia had to react to protect its people and its territory.’
At this point King interjected: ‘And is still reacting…’
Putin’s assertive response surprised the interviewer: ‘No, the quality of this reaction has changed. When our armed forces entered Chechnya, our armed forces were met with a surprisingly good reception by the local populace. Over the years of Chechnya regime, we probably didn’t pay attention to certain new phenomena. It turned out the foreign mercenaries who captured, in fact, certain spheres of authority in the territory of Chechnya, they didn’t have unified governance, it was broken, with certain chieftains, those military commanders governing certain segments of society.
‘So it turned out that they also threw from outside into Chechnya a new ideological platform, religious platform for conception in Chechnya, coming from Middle East, and they tried to impose on the local population the Sunni trend of Islam. And our people in the Caucasus are mainly Shi’ites, therefore that caused a certain revolt on the part of the population there with respect to those mercenaries, and that caused tension between the two.
‘So when the federal forces stopped resistance of the organised troops there, subsequently increasingly actively, the political process was started with the local population, and today there are no large-scale military operations in progress, none.’
So King asked: ‘No more suicide bombings? No? Do the Russian people support you?’ Putin had clearly prepared his prompt reply: ‘Yes, absolutely so, they do support me. But this phase is over, like I said, and now we’ve started to look for a political solution and, at the time of the Chechnya, now the former clergy, mufti, the clergy head was put – it started after 1996 first and the other thing, just two or three days ago, as the whole territory of Chechnya we held elections for the deputy of Chechnya to the parliament of Russia both the results and the figure of the population surprised me, over 69 percent of local population actively participated in this election campaign and elected their deputy to the Russian parliament’.
Putin arrived in Okinawa for the G8 conference. By this time, a number of the world’s leaders had already met Russia’s second presidentelect and, although some were irked by the fact that he had visited North Korea on the way to the summit, on the day in question he managed to charm them all and emerged, as it were, smelling of roses. Putin had, in diplomatic terms, scored his first major international victory since talking Tony Blair into an unofficial pre-election summit (that night at the opera).
There was a rude awakening for him around the corner, however. When George Bush finally succeeded Clinton, the message from Washington to Moscow was decidedly cool; in effect it was: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you”. This particularly galled Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov who was desperate (not least for the sake of his own career) to get to Washington and talk to Secretary of State Colin Powell, in order to prepare for early summit talks between the two presidents. Again and again Ivanov was told ‘Russia, yeah, remind us again where you are in the GDP league tables? Okay, we’ll get to you in due course’. The new masters of the White House clearly considered that the world had now become unipolar, and this seriously offended Moscow.
AFTER IVANOV WAS finally allowed into Washington, it was agreed that the two Presidents would meet in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in June 2001, during Bush’s first visit to Europe since his election. ‘The Americans picked it as a neutral spot. Nobody had ever heard of the place and ‘Bush could only remember that the country had a name beginning with “S” and ending in “A”,’ opines a Kremlin insider who attended the talks.
Nevertheless, what initially had all the makings of a disastrous encounter turned into a love-in as Putin applied his superb grasp of psychology (from his old judo days) to the sceptical Bush, who had arrived from a very sceptical Washington briefing on the talks. Bush had clearly agreed with his Republican colleagues that there was no future in continuing Clinton’s cosy relationship with Eastern Europe but, to the astonishment of diplomats the world over, he emerged after just two hours of talking to Vladimir Putin clearly having been successfully romanced by the man they had warned him about. Conjuring up a phrase Jimmy Carter would have been proud of, he was to declare: ‘I looked the man in the eye and got a sense of his soul’. (When he was asked some time later if he had seen Bush’s soul, Putin simply replied: ‘Well, he impressed me as a reliable person’).
BAFFI GETS special attention: Putin with his Karakachan shepherd. A present from the people of Bulgaria, the dog joined Connie, a black labrador, at the Putins’ home at Novo-Orgaryovo. Putin let a 5-year-old Moscow boy choose the name Baffi.
Just what, his aides asked, had Putin done to create this Damascene conversion in America’s leader? The simple truth is he that had taken a leaf out of Tony Blair’s book, suggesting they leave their retinue of officials behind and go for a stroll in the gardens of the 16th-century castle to which their meeting had been assigned. Once outside, Putin – ‘Call me Volodya, George’ – unbuttoned his shirt, showed the American president the humble aluminium cross he wore around his neck and told him how he had been christened with it and how it had ‘miraculously’ survived the fire that could have cost him his life. Not a man to talk much about his Christian faith and values, Putin was well aware of Bush’s deeply religious beliefs. According to Peggy Noonan in her book When Character was King, Bush told her that Putin was saying he believed in a higher power: ‘I think you judge a person on something other than politics. I think it’s important for me and you to look for the depth of a person’s soul and character.’ He told Putin: ‘I was touched by the fact your mother gave you a cross’. And in response Putin apparently explained he had taken to wearing the cross, which he had had blessed in Jerusalem and later feared he had lost in that house fire: ‘Putin said to me, “The thing I was most worried about was I’d lost the cross that my mother had given me”.’ Bush says Putin told him he instructed a workman to look for the cross, but the workman opened his fist and there it was: ‘It was as if something meant for me to have the cross,’ Putin told him.
THE RUSSIAN HAD played an ace and it won him an on-the-spot invitation to go and stay with George and Laura on their ranch in Texas: ‘I wouldn’t have asked him there if I didn’t trust him,’ Bush said later.
The friendship propelled Chirac into action. Never one to allow America to make all the running, the French President cornered Putin into forming the so-called Trilateral Alliance with himself and Schroeder. It wasn’t all about Iraq, Chirac insisted. But of course it was and for a while it strained the lovey-dovey relationship between Russia and America, although Bush never went so far as to say: ‘And you can forget about hoe-downs in Texas’.
Putin got his own back some time later when Chirac visited St Petersburg as the President’s guest. Putin insisted on inviting the French leader to a concert, knowing full well how much Chirac hated such events. Back through diplomatic channels came the message: ‘No concerts, the President doesn’t do concerts’. But the host was insistent and a clearly irritable Chirac went along. He duly sulked his way through most of the first half – and then fell asleep before finally leaving.
ONE OF PUTIN’S first deeds as Acting President had been to remove Pavel Borodin from the Kremlin by making him secretary of the Russia-Belarus union. There had long been more than a whiff of impending scandal around Borodin, and in any other circumstances Putin would have dumped him; but it has never been his style to discard people who have helped him along the way and, but for Borodin, he might never even have got to see the inside of the Kremlin.
The Borodin scandal of 1999, however, was not over yet. He may have thought he had put it to bed by discrediting Prosecutor Skuratov, but it was to come back and haunt him after he sent Borodin to America to attend Bush’s presidential inauguration as his representative in January 2001. Borodin was astonished to find himself placed under arrest as he passed through John F. Kennedy airport in New York and subsequently extradited to Switzerland on a warrant issued through Interpol by one Bernard Bertossa, Geneva’s chief prosecutor. The allegation was that Borodin had demanded – and received – $25 million in kickbacks on contracts worth $492 million, which he had awarded to a Swiss-based company, Mercata Trading and Engineering. This was the company he had engaged to refurbish the Kremlin when he was head of Yeltsin’s General Affairs Department. Allegations published at the time stated that Borodin and Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana had transferred millions of dollars to their own accounts from Mabetex, a sister company of Mercata, which was in itself nothing more than a shell company, owned by a Russian businessman called Viktor Stolpovskikh. The Yeltsins were said to have millions of dollars frozen in Swiss accounts.
Borodin’s arrest was seen in Moscow as a deliberate act engineered by the new Bush administration to provoke the Kremlin. Many observers say it was Bush v. Putin. Borodin was Secretary of the Russian-Belarus Union and Bill Clinton had already made clear his fury at Belarus for having the temerity to resist the neo-liberal policies he would have had the country abide by: its government had refused to sign up to the ‘civil society’ groups run by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
Borodin had received his invitation on 13 January – just a week before the grand event was due to take place in Washington. The invitation came from an official member of the inauguration team – one Vincent Zenga, a wealthy lawyer from West Palm Beach, Florida, who had contributed sizeable sums to the Bush campaign.
Having not been abroad for a whole year, Borodin applied to the American embassy in Moscow for a visa to be stamped in his diplomatic passport, but the embassy decided to forward his request to the State Department in Washington seeking ‘guidance’. Not having time to hang around, he boarded a New York-bound Delta flight on 17 January, travelling on his personal passport in which he had a visa allowing him into the U.S. for ‘business or pleasure’.
The Swiss authorities had issued the international warrant for his arrest on 10 January and when the warrant was executed Borodin pleaded diplomatic immunity, but was reminded that he was not travelling on a diplomatic passport.
While he languished in a prison cell, Borodin says he received ‘more than one’ call from President Putin. Frenzied moves behind the scenes led to a diplomatic approach to the American authorities. It was proposed that Borodin should stay under house arrest at the home of the Russian consul-general in New York while the Russian ambassador to the United States, Yuri V. Ushakov, offered his personal guarantee that Borodin would turn up for his court appearances.
In a move that Putin is said to have taken as a personal slight to his representatives in the US, Federal Judge Viktor V. Pohorelsky turned down the request and, after a brief appearance in a Brooklyn courtroom, Borodin was ordered back to prison for a week without bail. His cries for recognition of his diplomatic status, his boasts that he was important enough in Russia to have been in charge of a $410 billion budget, as well as his insistence that he was a personal friend of Bill Clinton and had been on his way to Bush’s inauguration, where he was an invited guest, all fell on deaf ears. To the US authorities, Borodin was just a middleranking Siberian official who had become a Yeltsin crony and was wanted in another country for questioning about a multi-million dollar fraud.
Meanwhile, a red-faced Vincent Zenga was telling the world’s media that his invitation to Borodin – an offer which stated he would be provided with ‘a car plus driver, a hotel room, and tickets to a candlelight dinner to be graced by the new President (but bring your own tuxedo and it’s ball gowns for the ladies)’ – had been a mistake, despite the fact that it bore his signature. Zenga said he had ‘no idea’ how the invitation luring Borodin to American soil had been passed on by someone in the Moscow office of his company, StarCapital. Republican officials, however, did not find his argument convincing and told Zenga that he and his guests were no longer welcome at the inauguration festivities, and subsequently returned the $100,000 donation the lawyer had made to the organising committee.
Borodin spent almost three months in a US federal jail before being handed over to the Swiss authorities, who detained him in Zurich for another week before freeing him on $2.9 million bail and allowing him to return to Moscow. In Geneva, public prosecutor Bernard Bertossa vowed never to drop the money-laundering case against him, saying: ‘Justice in Moscow is today turning a blind eye... If the Russian people accept that their bureaucrats allow persons to run around free [and] put what comes into their hands into their own pockets, what can I do?’ No further attempt was made to prove the crimes Borodin had been accused of, and he has since been able to travel unchallenged freely around the world.
Putin’s loyalty to friends in trouble has long been a subject for raised eyebrows in political circles. It does not often sit comfortably with what many regard as his personal integrity, but as he has said himself: ‘I have a lot of friends [who have] never betrayed me and I haven’t betrayed them either. In my view that is what counts most. I don’t even know why you would betray your friends.’ Pavel Borodin is clearly a grateful, as well as loyal, friend. Camaraderie, rather than cronyism, is known to be a characteristic of Putin’s. He does not believe in letting his friends down, but subscribes to the notion of friendship best summed up by Gogol, one of his favourite writers, in Taras Bulba: ‘A Cossack has never abandoned or sold his comrade’.
PUTIN PUTIN surprised the audience at a charity concert in the St Petersburg Ice Palace just before Christmas 2010, when he took to the stage and accompanied himself at the piano while singing the old Fats Domino hit, Blueberry Hill.