Strongman

by Roxburgh, Angus

  For those who took the leap – ‘collectives’ of shop-workers who got together to buy and run their own stores, for example – it really worked. As proprietors, desperate to attract customers, they set about transforming their businesses with a zeal that soon swept away the drab Soviet shopping experience. But for those on the other side of the counter, whose savings and pensions were obliterated by hyper-inflation, it was a very different story. Life-expectancy plummeted, alcoholism rose and thousands of quack doctors, psychics and ‘white witches’ stepped in to take advantage of the general mood of desolation.

  And then there was the Chechen war. Yeltsin had encouraged Russia’s regions to assert their own powers, but Chechnya, a small Muslim republic in the northern Caucasus, went so far as to declare itself independent. To accept this might have created a precedent which could lead to the break-up of the Russian Federation, so in December 1994 Yeltsin ordered an invasion of the republic. It was an all-round disaster. Thousands of poorly trained Russian troops died, and hundreds of thousands of Chechens were either killed or displaced to neighbouring republics. The capital, Grozny, was reduced to rubble. The Chechens became radicalised and embittered, rekindled their Islamic faith, which had been dormant in the Soviet period, and thousands of men joined the separatist militias – who eventually forced the Russian army out of their country. It was an ignominious defeat, which led to Chechnya’s de facto independence by the end of 1996. The rebels also took to staging terrorist attacks inside Russia itself: in the summer of 1995 they seized more than a thousand hostages in a hospital in the southern town of Budyonnovsk. The authorities tried to storm the hospital (leading to the deaths of at least 130 people) but then allowed the hostage-takers to escape.

  By early 1996 Boris Yeltsin’s popularity had slumped to a barely measurable level. Not only were his reforms unpopular and the war in Chechnya a disaster, but the president himself had become an embarrassment on account of his frequent drunken appearances. There is little doubt that the communist leader Gennady Zyuganov could have been elected president in that summer’s election if it had been fair. Instead, the country’s new oligarchs – billionaire businessmen who feared losing their new-found wealth if the communists came back – banded together to ensure a Yeltsin miracle. These were men who in a ‘loans for shares’ scheme initiated in 1995 acquired Russia’s largest state industries, including most of its oil and gas reserves, for a fraction of their worth, in exchange for bailing out the penniless government. Now they bankrolled Yeltsin’s campaign and used the national television stations they owned to skew election coverage entirely in his favour. Yeltsin swept back to power – and the West sighed with relief. For Clinton and other Western leaders, ‘democracy’ and the ‘free market’ had been saved in Russia. And that was all that mattered.

  What most Western leaders failed to appreciate was the psychological trauma that Russians, as individuals and as a nation, were going through. Vladimir Putin was far more in tune with it.

  As the American scholar Stephen F. Cohen wrote, the received wisdom in the US was that ‘since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has been a nation ready, willing, and able to be transformed into some replica of America’.4 Leave aside the immense cultural and historical differences that make Russia unlikely ever to become a ‘replica’ of America. The fact is that Russians were thrown in at the deep end, with no time even to adjust to freedom.

  The celebrated Soviet-era poet and singer Vladimir Vysotsky predicted the disorientation way back in 1965, at a time when he could only dream of what it might be like to be released from the communist straitjacket:

  They gave me my freedom yesterday,

  What on earth am I going to do with it?

  The West assumed that Russians would simply know how to use their liberty, as if it was something totally natural – as if Russians were just Americans who had been lumbered with communism for a few years: take away the constraints, give them a free market and everything will be fine. Toby Gati, Clinton’s Russia adviser who prepared the first aid package to Russia, admits: ‘Perhaps we in the US had a very narrow view of Soviet society and we overestimated the Russians’ desire to live by our rules. We started with the assumption that the transformation would be quick and the chaos, which, incidentally, was not seen as chaos but as a transitional period, would soon be replaced by normal life.’5

  But in the 1990s many Russians found themselves drowning in the tide of capitalism rather than riding it. Moreover there was a deep resentment at the sense of being instructed by outsiders in how to be ‘civilised’. It is true that communist ideology was paper-thin, and most Russians jettisoned it easily. But they did not lose certain ways of thinking that predate the communist era and lie deep in the Russian psyche. It was common, and still is, to hear Russians regret the loss of the ‘togetherness’ they felt under communism. The ‘collective’ was not a Soviet invention, but had roots in Russian history. But it rubbed against the grain of the individualist Western mores being forced upon them now.

  The picture I have described above is a bleak one, perhaps a little bleaker than the overall situation, because undoubtedly there were great joys and advances under Yeltsin too. But it is the darker side of life in the 1990s – so easily overlooked in the West – that provided the fertile soil into which Putin would plant his ideas.

  From kommunalka to Kremlin

  This is a book about Putin in power, not a biography, but a glance at his earlier years is revealing. His background and path to the highest office give clues to the contradictory behaviour he would exhibit as president: the democrat who doesn’t trust democracy; the Westerniser whose understanding of the West is flawed and limited; a man who believes in the free market but whose world view was formed in the communist past; a fiery believer in the Russian state, with the icy, ruthless attitude of the ex-KGB man towards its ‘enemies’.

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in 1952 in Leningrad, a city still being rebuilt from the rubble of the Second World War, when it was besieged and bombarded by the Germans for 900 days. His childhood was spent in a kommunalka, a communal flat, in which his family had one room and shared the kitchen and toilet with other families – an experience with bitter-sweet memories for many Russians. On the one hand the conditions were awful – there was no bathroom, no hot water, and rats in the stairwell; on the other hand, communal living and the shared experience of post-war reconstruction did much to reinforce the optimistic communist ideology of the day. The young Putin’s thinking would have been shaped entirely by crude Soviet propaganda. His was not a dissident or intellectual family which might have listened to foreign radio broadcasts or indulged in subversive discussions. At school he learned that the West was an evil world where capitalists exploited the workers and prepared for war against the USSR; life in his own country, he was told, was immeasurably happier, thanks to the wise leadership of the Communist Party. Even the brief ‘Thaw’ under Nikita Khrushchev, after Stalin’s death, was over by the time Putin was 12, so his secondary school years passed under the aegis of Leonid Brezhnev – a period marked by growing militarism, confrontation with the West, political repression and ideological rigidity. It was during these years that the young Putin showed an interest in joining the party’s enforcement machine, the KGB, an ambition he realised only after graduating from Leningrad’s law school in 1975.

  Putin says he did not even think about the mass terror inflicted by the KGB’s predecessor, the NKVD, under Stalin. Indeed, he probably knew next to nothing about it. ‘My ideas about the KGB were based on romantic stories about the work of intelligence agents,’ he says. ‘Without any exaggeration you could say I was the successful product of a Soviet patriotic upbringing.’6

  He would have known exactly what the KGB got up to, however, when he spent his first decade as an officer in Leningrad during the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was the period when it incarcerated dissidents in labour camps and mental asylums, confiscated foreign literature, jammed foreign b
roadcasts, controlled all contacts with foreign visitors, vetted the few Soviet citizens allowed to travel abroad and in every possible way helped the Communist Party to exercise total control over society. Abroad, its task was to subvert Western democracies, steal military and industrial secrets, spread communism to developing countries and help the secret services of the ‘fraternal socialist states’ of Eastern Europe to crack down on dissent. We do not know exactly what Putin did during those years, but one can infer from his work in counter-intelligence and in monitoring foreigners in Leningrad that he was totally committed to the Soviet cause and vigilant to the dangers of Western subversion. To this day he is crushing in his contempt for those who ‘betray the motherland’ and (as we saw in 2010 when he welcomed home ten Russian spies who were uncovered in the US) full of admiration for those who follow his own career path as a secret agent.

  Sergei Roldugin, a family friend, recalls that when he asked the young Putin at the time exactly what he did in the KGB in Leningrad, he replied enigmatically: ‘I am a specialist in mingling with people.’

  In 1985, promoted to the rank of major, Putin was sent to mingle with the people of communist East Germany. He was based in Dresden, and says his job was ‘political intelligence’ – recruiting informants and gathering information about political figures and about the plans of ‘enemy number one’ – NATO. At this stage he must still have been ideologically driven, and still he had no first-hand experience of the West. Neither did he experience at first hand the remarkable awakening of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). While Moscow newspapers and theatres were tearing up the falsified images of the Soviet past and slowly dropping the clichés about Western villainy, Putin was based in one of the communist bloc’s most repressive states. The East German leader, Erich Honecker, resisted the winds of change blowing in from Moscow to the last. Putin would have witnessed the gathering unrest in East Germany, however, which culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989. Indeed, in the weeks leading up to the collapse of communist power, it was precisely in Dresden that the peaceful revolution began, with demonstrators taking to the streets to protest – right under Putin’s nose.

  So Russia’s future leader had an unusual vantage point from which to observe the collapse of communism. While missing the Gorbachev revolution at home, he saw at close quarters how East Europeans seized their destiny and wrested themselves free of the Soviet orbit. In his KGB role he was also scrutinising NATO’s response, and will have been keenly aware of the verbal promise allegedly given to Gorbachev by the US secretary of state, James Baker, during the German reunification process, that the alliance would not take advantage of the collapse of communism to expand into the former Soviet bloc.

  When the game was up for the East German communists – and for the Soviet Union’s hegemony over the country – Putin frantically incinerated all the most sensitive files in his Dresden office, and had to brandish a pistol to fend off a rioting crowd that was intent on ransacking the place, having already stormed the offices of the East German secret police, the Stasi. Later Putin claimed he could understand the crowd’s reaction to the Stasi: ‘They were tired of the Stasi’s absolute control. Society was totally intimidated. They saw the Stasi as a monster.’ (There is no indication that he recognises that Russians had the same view of the KGB.)

  For Putin the most vexing part of the whole episode was that when the angry crowd was threatening his offices, and he called the Soviet military chief in the Dresden district for help, he was told they could do nothing without a green light from Moscow. ‘But Moscow,’ says Putin, ‘was silent. I had the sense that the country didn’t exist any more. It was plain to see that the Soviet Union was sick. And the sickness was a deadly, incurable one called paralysis. The paralysis of power.’

  Putin says he understood that Soviet control over half of Europe, based as it was on repression and barbed wire, could not go on for ever. But he admits he resented the loss of influence and regarded it as a national humiliation. ‘We just abandoned everything and left.’

  It was at this point that Putin made an abrupt life-change that introduced him for the first time to outlooks and influences that would challenge everything he had believed in as a schoolboy, as a student and as a KGB agent. In January 1990 he returned from Germany to his home city, which would soon be renamed St Petersburg. While remaining at first on the KGB’s payroll, he found work in the foreign relations department of Leningrad University, and then as assistant to the chairman of Leningrad City Council, a former economics professor named Anatoly Sobchak. One of the leading free thinkers of the perestroika period, Sobchak was soon elected mayor of St Petersburg, and in June 1991 he put Putin in charge of the city’s foreign relations at a time when it had pretensions of becoming a major financial and investment centre. Sobchak later appointed Putin his deputy.

  The former perfect ‘product of a Soviet patriotic upbringing’ thus became exposed not only to the democratic views of Sobchak but was also plunged into the alien world of Western trade and finance. When communist hardliners (including Putin’s KGB chief, General Kryuchkov) staged a coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, Putin says he was at Sobchak’s side, drumming up resistance in support of democracy. He said later he believed the plotters’ intention, of preventing the disintegration of the USSR, was ‘noble’, but they in fact achieved the exact opposite. By the end of the year the Communist Party had been swept from power and the Soviet Union broke up. It was a watershed for Putin: ‘All the ideals and goals I had when I joined the KGB collapsed.’

  Putin’s tenure as deputy mayor was not without controversy. Deputies at the city council tried to have him dismissed for corruption following a scandal concerning food imports. He survived, but when Sobchak was voted out of office in 1996 Putin too found himself without a job.

  Through a combination of luck and acquaintances, Putin soon found himself in Moscow, quickly working his way up through the ranks of the Kremlin bureaucracy.7 He became deputy chief of staff to President Yeltsin in March 1997, director of the KGB’s successor organisation, the FSB, in July 1998 and (simultaneously) head of the National Security Council in March 1999.

  His patrons were the group of people known as the Family – President Yeltsin’s inner circle of advisers, which included his daughter Tatiana, his former chief of staff (and later Tatiana’s husband) Valentin Yumashev, Yeltsin’s current chief of staff Alexander Voloshin, and the influential business tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who owned 49 per cent of Russia’s main state television channel, ORT, and effectively controlled it.

  Just as the Family had arranged Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996, so they would soon secure Putin’s appointment as prime minister – with the intention of moving him into the presidency as Yeltsin’s successor. They had been impressed by Putin’s loyalty. As head of the FSB he effectively stymied criminal investigations into large-scale corruption and money laundering, in which members of Yeltsin’s family and senior Kremlin officials were allegedly implicated. (One of the officials, Pavel Borodin, was accused of embezzling fabulous sums during the refurbishment of Kremlin buildings. He happened to be the man who had brought Putin from St Petersburg and given him his first job in the administration.) Putin also helped his former mentor Sobchak evade prosecution on corruption charges. Loyalty would later turn out to be a striking feature of Putin’s make-up. Just as he found his own loyalty to the Family repaid, so he as president would richly reward those most loyal to him – and punish those who opposed him. The Family were not let down: Putin’s first move on becoming acting president in 2000 would be to sign the decree granting Yeltsin and his family immunity from prosecution.

  In the summer of 1999 Yeltsin’s coterie dispatched Berezovsky to talk with Putin, who was on holiday with his family in the French resort of Biarritz, and offer him the job of prime minister. Putin demurred, apparently unsure of his abilities, but when he returned to Moscow President Yeltsin wo
uld not take no for an answer.8

  During this dizzy year of his career, Putin found himself dealing with events that would leave a deep impression on his thinking. In March 1999 three former members of the Soviet bloc, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, joined NATO. Whatever the truth about the alleged guarantees given to Gorbachev that NATO would not move eastwards (and American officials firmly deny that such a promise was made), this was the first stage of what Russia regarded as an unnecessary and threatening advance of a military alliance towards its own borders. The issue would dog the next decade of Putin’s rule.

  Just 11 days after NATO’s enlargement, the organisation launched its air strikes against Serbia, with all the repercussions described earlier in this chapter. And in August the troubles in Chechnya, which had been smouldering quietly for the past two and a half years, suddenly burst into flames – igniting a visceral fury in Putin that would inform his actions at home and abroad for many years. Fighting terrorism became an obsession.

  Since the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya at the end of 1996, the republic had enjoyed de facto autonomy and become increasingly lawless. Its relatively moderate elected government was undermined by warlords such as Salman Raduyev and Shamil Basayev, the man who had been behind the hostage-taking in Budyonnovsk. Kidnapping became commonplace. After the murders of six Red Cross workers and four kidnapped telecoms workers, foreigners scarcely dared set foot in the republic. Islamic fundamentalism took hold, and some of the warlords developed links with Middle Eastern extremist groups, including al-Qaeda.

  On 7 August 1999 Basayev and a Saudi-born Islamist, Ibn Al-Khattab, launched a well-planned invasion of some 1,500 men into Chechnya’s neighbouring republic, Dagestan. Their aim was to establish an Islamic state there – a first step towards the creation of an Islamic superstate throughout Russia’s northern Caucasus region. The attack also catapulted Putin to the highest office. The next day Yeltsin appointed his steely security chief as prime minister to tackle the problem.