It would be broadcast just before midnight. But first he had a few formalities to see to. At two o’clock he was given the ‘nuclear briefcase’ containing the codes needed to launch a nuclear strike. Then he held a five-minute meeting of his cabinet, followed by a longer session of his Security Council. At six he signed his first presidential decree, granting Yeltsin and the members of his family immunity from prosecution. Then he held a series of quick one-on-one meetings with key ministers. And finally, cancelling a planned trip to St Petersburg, he swept out of the Kremlin in the presidential motorcade and headed for Vnukovo airport. He had plans to bring in the New Year somewhere special.
While billions of people around the globe ushered in the new millennium with parties and fireworks, Russia’s new acting president was onboard a military helicopter trying to fly into the rebel republic of Chechnya in hazardous weather conditions that eventually forced the chopper to return to base in neighbouring Dagestan. This was the Putin the world would come to know and fear – the tough guy, the action man, obsessed with combating terrorists and separatists, determined to restore the pride of a country that under Yeltsin had come to look shambolic and sick.
As his helicopter battled with the elements over Chechnya, Russian television aired his pre-recorded address to the nation. It was brief and matter-of-fact, declaring there would be no vacuum of power and paying tribute to his predecessor. It contained only one policy pledge, which in retrospect looks quite remarkable. He said: ‘The state will stand firm to protect freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the mass media, and property rights, those fundamental elements of a civilised society.’
The freedoms and rights he praised were precisely those that had been obliterated in the communist USSR and then restored under Yeltsin. And yet within a few years Putin would stand accused of flouting them himself, creating a new kind of post-communist authoritarian model, trampling on the free press, and persecuting business tycoons – or indeed anyone – who dared to challenge him.
Why did that happen? The key, or at least one of the keys, to understanding Putin’s journey is to look at the Russia he inherited from Yeltsin – a Russia not just economically and militarily weak, but also patronised by the West.
Yeltsin and Clinton
Bill Clinton made his last visit to Russia as American president in June 2000, just two months after Putin’s inauguration. Clinton had met Boris Yeltsin some 20 times and built up a close, bantering relationship that came to be described as the ‘Bill ’n’ Boris Show’. He had also met Putin a couple of times, but like most Western leaders still knew little about him other than his prowess at judo and his past career as a KGB agent – and that was enough to make him wary. Now he found Putin a tough negotiator, who, irritatingly, already regarded Clinton as a lame-duck president with little more than half a year left in office.
Standing a good six inches shorter than the imposing American president, Putin made up for his lack of stature as any judo player does – with agility and skill. He doggedly resisted American plans to abandon (or even amend) the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty so as to allow the US to develop a national missile defence programme – the ‘Star Wars’ system first promoted by Ronald Reagan. The ABM treaty banned both Russia and the United States from deploying defences against nuclear missiles, and for Putin it was a cornerstone of nuclear deterrence: if one side was allowed to develop systems that could shoot down the other’s long-range missiles then the delicate balance of power would be destroyed and the side with the shield might be tempted to launch a pre-emptive strike.
Putin dismissed Clinton’s criticisms of the brutal new campaign he was waging in Chechnya and his crackdown against NTV, Russia’s leading independent television station. And he revealed his enduring resentment of NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999 – an event that would inform Putin’s foreign-policy thinking throughout the next ten years.
The campaign against Serbia, which was designed to put an end to President Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, was a pivotal moment in Russia’s relations with the West. Throughout the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, Moscow supported Milosevic, at least partly because of traditional Russian affinity with the Serbs, who, like Russians, are Orthodox Christian Slavs.
The ‘brotherly ties’ between Russians and Serbs may be exaggerated, but the Kremlin certainly saw parallels between Milosevic’s attempts to subdue ‘terrorism’ and separatism in Kosovo and Yeltsin’s fight against the same problems in Chechnya. Just as Yeltsin branded the Chechen rebels ‘bandits’, so Milosevic (and indeed at one point the US government) regarded the Kosovo Liberation Army as a terrorist group. Having launched a bloody war against Chechnya, causing tens of thousands of deaths and a mass exodus of refugees, it was entirely consistent for the Russians to support Milosevic in his efforts to maintain the integrity of what remained of Yugoslavia.
But Yeltsin’s pleas not to attack Serbia went unheeded, leaving Moscow feeling that for all the bonhomie of the Bill ’n’ Boris Show, and for all the talk of welcoming post-communist Russia into the community of civilised nations, its word counted for nothing. On the eve of NATO’s air strikes on Belgrade, Yeltsin would explode with anger during telephone calls with Clinton and sometimes slam down the phone.1
Yeltsin’s prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, was flying to Washington on 23 March 1999. He had talks planned with President Clinton, Vice-President Al Gore and the International Monetary Fund. His mission was to secure multi-billion-dollar loans to help stabilise the Russian economy, still reeling from the financial collapse of August 1998. According to Primakov’s assistant, Konstantin Kosachev, the prime minister called Gore during a refuelling stop at Shannon in Ireland, and asked: ‘Are you going to bomb Yugoslavia?’ Gore replied: ‘I cannot tell you anything, no decision has been made.’2
The government plane took off for the flight across the Atlantic. In the back were Russian business tycoons and officials, drinking vodka and playing dominoes. Suddenly, after four or five hours, Primakov received a call on a crackly, encrypted phone line. It was Gore telling him that NATO air strikes were, in fact, about to begin. Primakov at once called Yeltsin, checked with the pilot whether they had enough fuel to return to Shannon, and then went through to the cabin to inform the businessmen that the trip was abandoned: doing business with the Americans at this moment would be inappropriate.
The reaction was telling. The tycoons, allowing their patriotism to outweigh their business acumen, broke into applause. ‘It was very emotional,’ says Kosachev. The decision to turn the plane around in mid-flight was meant to send a signal of Russia’s profound displeasure. Over the next days the same feelings spilled out onto the streets, as thousands of Russians protested outside the US embassy in Moscow.
On his final presidential visit to Moscow a year later Clinton found the wound was still festering. Putin presented himself as a man who would no longer allow Russia to be ignored or pushed around. For two days he hammered home his criticism of America’s plans for a unilateral missile defence shield. Then on the final morning, as they held a farewell meeting in the Kremlin, Putin issued a dark threat that if America went ahead with its plans, Russia’s response would be ‘appropriate’ and ‘maybe quite unexpected, probably asymmetrical’ – in other words, the Russians would not try to match the sophisticated and costly US system but would take means to render it ineffective. That could mean anything from building huge numbers of nuclear missiles to overwhelm the proposed shield, to destroying the American installations as soon as they were set up.
Clinton heard out Putin’s homily, then turned to his aide, Strobe Talbott, and murmured, ‘I guess that guy thought I didn’t get it the first time. Either he’s dense or thinks I am. Anyway, let’s get this thing over with so we can go see Ol’ Boris.’3
With relief, the Americans then drove out of the Kremlin to bid farewell to Clinton’s friend, ex-President Yeltsin, now living in retirement in his country dacha. There was a surprise waiting for him. By
the time he got there Putin had called Yeltsin and asked him to rub in the message even harder. Russia, he said, would not put up with any American policy that threatened Russian security. When the tirade was over, Clinton steered the conversation back to his own concerns about Russia’s future. His parting words, as related by his adviser Strobe Talbott, were quite remarkable – and revealing of the American view of Russia after the fall of communism.
‘Boris,’ he said, ‘you’ve got democracy in your heart, you’ve got the trust of the people in your bones, you’ve got the fire in your belly of a real democrat and a real reformer. I’m not sure Putin has that. You’ll have to keep an eye on him and use your influence to make sure that he stays on the right path. Putin needs you, Boris. Russia needs you ... You changed Russia. Russia was lucky to have you. The world was lucky you were where you were. I was lucky to have you. We did a lot of stuff together, you and I ... We did some good things. They’ll last. It took guts on your part. A lot of that stuff was harder for you than it was for me. I know that.’
As he left Yeltsin’s dacha, Clinton turned to Talbott: ‘That may be the last time I see Ol’ Boris. I think we’re going to miss him.’
Clinton’s mawkish words clearly suggest he thought that under Yeltsin things had gone very well in Russia and Russia was where America wanted it to be. In fact, things were not going well, and Russia did not want just to go wherever America wanted it to be. In reality, what America was going to miss was a Russian leader who was compliant to the point of submissiveness. Putin would be anything but that.
Yeltsin’s Russia
The West’s handling of post-Soviet Russia had been just about as insensitive as it could have been. With Western corporations salivating at the prospect of a huge new market, Harvard economists hired by the Russian government urged it to introduce unrestrained capitalism at breakneck speed, with scant regard for the sensitivities of – and consequences for – the Russian people. Their ideas were eagerly taken up by Yeltsin’s own reformers, led by the economist Yegor Gaidar, who had been inspired by the ‘shock therapy’ that had transformed countries like Poland a couple of years earlier. Yeltsin had appointed him to ‘give the people economic freedom, and remove all barriers to the freedom of enterprises and entrepreneurship’. Within a few years millions of Russians were reduced to extreme poverty, while a handful of go-getters and former communist officials turned themselves into billionaire oligarchs, snapping up the country’s resources for a fraction of their value.
Undoubtedly, under Yeltsin Russians enjoyed Freedom, with a great neon-lit, capital F, such as they had never known in their nation’s thousand-year history. The 1990s were riotous years. They saw an explosion of energies that had been pent up for 70 years of communism. Any Russian with a bit of cash and enterprise could set up a small business, if only a little stall selling Snickers bars and vodka. Russians were free to travel abroad, to read whatever they wished, say what they liked and demonstrate against their leaders. There were competitive elections and political parties. National television stations broadcast biting satire and no-holds-barred critiques of Kremlin policies. New private banks sponsored ballets and concerts. Shops quickly filled up with consumer goods and foodstuffs that Soviet citizens had only glimpsed in foreign films. After the dark decades of totalitarian rule, people now felt unafraid. There was optimism and hope. Certainly that’s how Russia looked to most Western observers. Evidently, it’s how Bill Clinton saw things.
And yet, when I look back at my notebooks and dispatches from the time, I am reminded that most Russians had a very different impression. My reports for the BBC chronicled a decade of shame and humiliation.
Yeltsin’s Russia was a country that seemed to be run by thugs. You saw them barrelling down the highways in their cars with darkened windows, or ordering thousand-dollar bottles of wine in the best restaurants and snarling contemptuously at the waitresses, or shopping in horrendously overpriced boutiques, and occasionally gunning each other down in broad daylight. Contract killings were commonplace, as Russia’s mafia-style gangs carved up territories and businesses.
The BBC’s offices were located in a hotel and business centre part-owned by an American, Paul Tatum. After a dispute with his Chechen business partner, Tatum was riddled with bullets fired from a Kalashnikov rifle – at 5pm as he walked into a metro station near the hotel. His killer was never found. On another occasion I found myself in a traffic jam, and as I slowly edged forward noticed that a little hold-up was going on at the side of the road – again in broad daylight. Several men were pointing their guns at the head of some poor guy lying on the ground. On yet another ordinary day in Moscow a restaurant was raided, and we all threw ourselves to the floor while arrests were made. To get into my local supermarket, you had to walk past guards wearing fatigues and cradling AK-47s. All the early new capitalism was accompanied by violence and threats: whether you managed a five-star hotel or sold souvenirs from a trestle table on the Arbat, you paid protection money to one mafia gang or another.
On the outskirts of the major cities, especially Moscow, the so-called ‘New Russians’ built mansions with swimming pools, wine cellars and fashionable turrets, all hidden from view behind 15-foot fences. They represented a tiny proportion of the population. Millions meanwhile were impoverished by the economic reforms that started in 1992. The sudden liberalisation of prices led to soaring inflation. Ordinary Russians lined the pavements selling off their belongings. The very centre of Moscow became a huge flea-market. I vividly remember one man in particular – a middle-aged scientist with a PhD – selling old rusting padlocks and other bric-a-brac.
Other scientists emigrated in search of work that would give them a decent wage, many of them taking Russia’s strategic knowledge and secrets with them, leaving their country devoid of its best brains just when it needed them.
Railway stations filled with beggars and homeless people. The Kursky vokzal – Moscow’s main station for southern destinations – became a Dickensian dosshouse full of pickpockets and sick people. Amputees from the first Chechen war (1994– 96) began to clump around metro carriages asking for alms.
Business, of sorts, spread everywhere – most visibly in the shape of tiny kiosks selling suspicious-looking alcohols and foodstuffs. Meat, unfit for human consumption, was sold at marketplaces that sprang up spontaneously on pieces of waste ground, which became breeding grounds for rats and disease.
Desperate people sank their savings into pyramid schemes that invariably collapsed, leaving them penniless. In 1992 the government issued privatisation vouchers to every citizen. The idea was that these could be exchanged for shares in enterprises being privatised. In practice millions of people just sold them or gave them away and they ended up largely in the hands of a few shrewd entrepreneurs or state enterprise managers who thereby became Russia’s new capitalist owners.
Industry collapsed. Workers were not paid, or were paid several months in arrears, and often with goods – towels or soap or tampons – rather than money. Enterprises themselves traded with each other by barter. A once proud country received shipments of food aid – sugar and margarine from the European Union’s surplus stocks and US army rations left over from the Gulf War. A superpower was now holding out a begging bowl.
Flying to Vancouver in April 1993 to ask President Clinton for help, Yeltsin pointed out: ‘Remember that East Germany needed $100 billion to get rid of the communist monster.’ He returned with the promise of just $1.6 billion, much of it in the form of credits and food aid. Some wondered whether the West lacked imagination. Did Russia not need a ‘Marshall Plan’ to rebuild its decrepit Soviet-era infrastructure, which was in little better shape than Germany’s after the Second World War?
Western consultancies probably profited more from Western aid packages than the Russians did. I remember interviewing the manager of a small Moscow bakery who had been on a month-long management course, paid for by Western governments, with some consultancy in England. ‘All I really ne
eded,’ she told me, ‘was the money to buy some top-class bakery equipment. I know how to manage my company!’
Russian society was truly battered by the abrupt transition from communism. People had literally lost their own country: the Soviet Union, a land of 250 million people in 15 national republics, splintered. Twenty-five million Russians suddenly found themselves residents of foreign countries, stranded in what became known as the ‘near abroad’. Inhabitants of Siberia could no longer escape to holiday in the Crimea (now in Ukraine) or even in Moscow, because air fares were beyond their reach. I was astonished, on a trip to Siberia, to hear people calling European Russia the ‘mainland’, as though they were marooned on a remote island in the middle of an ocean.
There was little sign that the Kremlin’s Western advisers understood how to handle this dislocated society. Western governments didn’t seem to notice the chaos and squalor – or they didn’t care, so obsessed were they with the vision of building capitalism, regardless of its immediate impact. Western corporations only saw a massive new marketplace for their goods. A strange Russian phrase, Produkt kompanii Prokter end Gembl (produced by Proctor and Gamble), boomed out at the end of every other TV ad like some new political slogan. I think Russians must have been driven mad by those words. They seemed to replace ‘Long live the Communist Party’ seamlessly, but instead of promising a radiant future they promised Head & Shoulders and Pampers, which few Russians could yet afford.
American consultants in sharp suits swarmed around, cooing over Nizhny Novgorod’s privatisation projects and its pioneering young reformers. The city on the Volga, previously known as Gorky, was the first to sell off major chunks of the state’s assets to ordinary people. In many ways it really was inspiring. I remember watching go-ahead Russians, keen to set up their own private businesses, inspecting 195 state-owned trucks and vans, many of them in a dreadful condition, and then bidding for them at an auction. The problem for me, and I suspect for many Russians, was the sight of so many foreigners supervising the process. To all intents and purposes it looked as if America was selling off Russia.
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