Putin’s sudden emergence from nowhere as the country’s future leader was astonishing. He was still virtually unknown in the country, and indeed to most of the political elite. But in the months that followed he became the new face of Russia – tough, energetic and ruthless in responding to ever more audacious Chechen terrorist attacks.
In the space of two weeks in September four bomb explosions destroyed apartment blocks in the cities of Buynaksk, Moscow (twice) and Volgodonsk. Almost 300 people were killed. The attacks were blamed on Chechens and, together with the invasion of Dagestan, provided Putin with the excuse, if he needed one, to launch the second Chechen war. At a meeting with Bill Clinton on 12 September an agitated Putin drew a map of Chechnya and described his plan to annihilate the separatists. ‘These people are not human,’ he snarled to the press afterwards. ‘You can’t even call them animals – or if they’re animals, they’re rabid animals ...’
The apartment bombings were so convenient in providing Putin with the pretext to go to war, and thereby to improve his ratings, that some Russians believe they were carried out by the FSB. Conspiracy theories are so rife – and so outlandish – in Russia that you would have to rewrite history if you believed them all. But real suspicions were raised by a fifth incident, in the city of Ryazan, where police acting on a tip-off foiled an apparent plot after discovering three sacks of white powder, which they identified as explosive, together with detonators, in the basement of a block of flats. Thousands of local residents were evacuated while the sacks were removed and made safe. Putin himself praised the vigilance of the people who had spotted the sacks being carried into the building. When men suspected of planting the bombs were arrested, however, they turned out to be FSB agents. The FSB chief then claimed it had all been an ‘exercise’ to test responses after the earlier explosions and that the bags only contained sugar. The local FSB in Ryazan knew nothing about such an exercise, however, and issued a statement expressing surprise.
Several other mysterious circumstances surround the apartment bombings. For example, the speaker of the State Duma announced to parliament that he had just received a report of the apartment bombing in Volgodonsk on 13 September – the day of one of the Moscow bombings, but three days before the Volgodonsk explosion. Had someone who knew in advance about all the planned attacks got the dates mixed up? But attempts to have the incidents properly investigated in Russia have been thwarted, and the Kremlin reacts with fury to questions on the subject. Moreover, two members of an independent commission that tried to establish the facts were murdered and a third was killed in a car accident, while the commission’s investigating lawyer was arrested and jailed for alleged illegal arms possession. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, both of whom investigated the bombings, were murdered in 2006.
The second Chechen war was intended to avenge the humiliation suffered by Russia in the first, and to put a halt to what Putin apparently regarded as an Islamist threat to the entire country. One of his closest advisers told me on condition of anonymity that Putin feared his tenure as prime minister might last only a few months (like that of his predecessors) and he wanted to use the time to prevent Russia from falling apart. ‘The Chechen invasion into Dagestan was a signal from the bandits that they could go further, along the Volga river into some of our Muslim republics – Bashkortostan and Tatarstan.’
I have never heard Putin (or any other Russian leader) speak about the real grievances of the Chechen people – their mass deportation from their homeland to Central Asia under Stalin, the swamping of their culture and language by the Russians during the Soviet period. Nor is there much awareness of the fact that it was the brutal Russian invasion in 1994 that radicalised the Chechen fighters and encouraged Islamic fundamentalism – of which there was not a whiff when I visited the republic before the first war. It was the war, and the atrocities committed by Russian forces, that turned mere separatists into ideologically driven terrorists. Without that understanding, Putin’s new war was bound to make matters even worse.
He soon began to reveal the sharp tongue and earthy language that became his trademark. Asked about the ferocity of the Russian campaign, he replied, on 24 September: ‘We’ll pursue the terrorists wherever they are. If they’re in an airport we’ll get ’em there. If we catch ’em – excuse the expression – in the toilet ... we’ll wipe ’em out right there, in the outhouse. End of story.’
Putin’s campaign quickly raised him out of obscurity. But he was not yet the country’s most popular politician. One of his predecessors as prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, had publicly denounced the corruption in Yeltsin’s entourage and declared his intention of running for president. Together with the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, he created a political bloc, Fatherland–All Russia, which looked set to do well in parliamentary elections in December, giving him a springboard for the presidential election scheduled for June.
It was at this point that Boris Berezovsky stepped in to ensure the victory of the Family’s candidate, Putin. Berezovsky threw the entire weight of his ORT channel behind him, while mounting a sustained smear campaign against Primakov and Luzhkov. He hired a well-known presenter, Sergei Dorenko, who specialised in scandal, sensation and brazenly biased commentary. Berezovsky was delighted to let him take fire at Primakov, who as prime minister had had his companies raided and threatened to jail businessmen like him for economic crimes. Night after night, Russia’s main TV channel harped on about Primakov’s old age and infirmity and Luzhkov’s alleged corruption, while glorifying Putin’s heroics in Chechnya.
Meanwhile the inner circle – Berezovsky, Yumashev and Tatiana Dyachenko – met secretly at the dacha of Alexander Voloshin, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, to create a political force to support Putin. In September, three months before the Duma election, a new party was born, called Yedinstvo (Unity). It had no roots, no philosophy, practically no policy other than its support for Putin, but it did have the unabashed endorsement of Berezovsky’s ORT and several of his newspapers. On 19 December it won almost twice as many votes as Fatherland–All Russia. The scene was now set for Yeltsin to resign on New Year’s Eve and hand over power to his prime minister and chosen successor.
The day after the Duma election was ‘Chekists Day’. Continuing a Soviet-era tradition, most professions in Russia have one day in the calendar in their honour, and this was the day of homage to the country’s present and former secret police (originally known as the Cheka). In the morning Putin restored a plaque on the wall of the FSB headquarters, the Lubyanka, in memory of Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief when Putin joined up. The plaque had been removed in the de-Sovietising Yeltsin years. At a gala ball in the evening the prime minister made a speech to his former colleagues, and joked: ‘I want to report that a group of FSB operatives, sent to work undercover in the government, is successfully carrying out the first stage of its mission.’
The second stage was about to begin. Ten days later, Yeltsin resigned and Putin assumed supreme power in Russia.
2
COURTING THE WEST
‘I want Russia to be part of Europe’
Russia’s relations with NATO had been frozen ever since the allied bombing of Yugoslavia in March 1999. ‘NATO’s representative in Moscow has been told to pack his bags,’ announced Russia’s foreign minister, Igor Ivanov. ‘There will be no contact with NATO, including its secretary general, until the aggression against Yugoslavia stops.’
But at the beginning of 2000, shortly after Vladimir Putin became acting president of Russia, the telephone rang in the secretary general’s office at NATO headquarters in Brussels. It was none other than Igor Ivanov, and George Robertson, the new NATO chief, was taken aback. He had arrived in Brussels in October and had decided one of his first tasks should be to get Russia ‘back into the security fold’, but until now nothing had happened.
‘If you were thinking of coming to Moscow,’ said Ivanov, coyly warming to his theme, ‘I want to say tha
t you might find that this would be welcomed.’1
And so it was that Robertson became the first major Western politician to meet the new Russian president. He flew into Moscow in February on a plane provided by the German air force.
Putin seemed to be tickled by the idea, and the sight of a Luftwaffe jet in Moscow helped to break the ice.
‘Why did you come on a German plane?’ he asked.
Robertson quickly realised that the word ‘Luftwaffe’, emblazoned across the side of his plane, evoked a certain sensitivity in Russia in view of the horrors its bombers had inflicted in the Second World War. He explained that NATO itself had no planes, so he had to borrow from the member states.
‘Hmm,’ said Putin, practising his English. ‘Maybe next time, secretary general, you should come in a British plane.’
Robertson had brought a gift for him – a book in English about the tsarist court, which he had found in an antiquarian bookshop. The Russian leader was delighted. It turned out that he was making a serious effort to learn English, now that his profession of ‘mingling with people’ would include a great many foreign leaders.
‘I like to read these English books out loud to practise,’ he told Robertson, and then added, ‘so now my dog is fluent in English.’
There was substance to the charm offensive as well as jokes. Robertson recalls Putin being quite blunt and to the point: ‘He was less confident than he was eventually to be. He was very new to the job. He wasn’t even in the job – he was still acting president.’
‘I want to sort our relationship out,’ said Putin. ‘It’s not constructive at the moment, and I want to resume relations with NATO. Step by step. It can’t happen overnight – and a lot of people disagree with me on this.’ Putin gestured at his defence minister, Marshal Sergeyev, and his foreign minister, Igor Ivanov. ‘But I know what I want, and I want Russia to be part of Europe. That’s where its destiny is. So let us work out how best we can do that.’
The British ambassador told Robertson he was impressed by such a bold, early foreign-policy decision. The relationship had been so fractious that for him to say ‘we are going to resume it’ was a big thing. Robertson sensed that Putin wanted to have ‘an uncluttered relationship’ – to sweep aside the inherited obstacles and talk about the big issues. ‘They wanted to be taken seriously as a major player in the world.’
One other world leader was keen to oblige. Prime Minister Tony Blair saw a chance to make Britain Russia’s ‘partner of choice’ in Europe and decided to ‘get in early’ with a trip to Russia in the first half of March – before Putin was even elected president (the election was due on 26 March). He was more willing at this stage to turn a blind eye to Putin’s ruthless campaign against Chechnya than either Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany or President Jacques Chirac of France. The Foreign Office, too, was wary of the ex-KGB man who was apparently presiding over what many considered to be atrocities in Chechnya. But Blair’s own advisers in Downing Street argued that he was a new type of leader, someone worth investing with early. ‘In my experience,’ said Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, ‘KGB officers were the more outward looking members of the old Russian nomenklatura. We decided to reach out to him actually during the election campaign rather than wait till after when there would be a long queue of people wishing to see him. It was risky, but we thought it was the right thing to do, and it did work.’2
Powell says Blair scarcely focused on the Chechnya problem until he was on the plane and started reading his briefs. ‘The brief produced by the Foreign Office got him increasingly irritated – because even at that stage Tony was concerned about Islamic terrorism, and he could see the danger of it and thought we were being a bit “double standards” in the way we were dealing with the Russian approach to it. So he decided on the plane to cut Putin some slack on Chechnya when we did the press conference.’
Putin was delighted, and laid on a full tour of his home town, St Petersburg, for the prime minister and his wife, Cherie: the Hermitage art gallery, talks at the tsar’s glittering summer palace, Peterhof, and evening at Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace at the Mariinsky Theatre. The only sour moment came during the talks at Peterhof, when the British ambassador, Sir Roderic Lyne, sat down heavily on a spindly-legged antique chair and shattered it.
‘You’ll be paying compensation for that, I hope,’ quipped Putin – ‘not entirely in jest’, according to one witness.
The visit achieved everything Blair wanted it to. Powell admits that Britain had felt excluded from the cosy relationship Yeltsin had had with the French and Germans (not to mention Bill Clinton), and now Blair had ‘inserted himself’. As soon as the presidential election was out of the way – a mere formality, which Putin won with 53 per cent of the votes – Blair followed up by bringing him to London. There was an uproar in the press as the ‘Butcher of Grozny’ was invited to meet the Queen at Windsor Castle.3
Blair did appear, for a time, to become Putin’s chief Western contact. In November, when the American presidential election hung in the balance as ballot papers were recounted in the state of Florida, Putin called Blair for advice about whether he should call George W. Bush to congratulate him. Powell recalls: ‘Tony suggested he hold off for the moment until things were clear, and he was very grateful and didn’t make the call. It was interesting. It illustrated a sort of relationship you wouldn’t normally have had with the Russian president, and it made us feel our investment had been worth it.’
Part of the calculation, of course, was that British business would benefit from closer political ties, so during his April visit to London Putin was taken to meet a group of leading industrialists. Lord John Browne, CEO of BP, was impressed: ‘He was a refreshing change.’ The businessmen listened to Putin promising laws that would be stuck to, and a crackdown on corruption – and his cold, impassive demeanour made them feel he meant it. Three years later, watched by Putin and Blair at a ceremony in London, BP and a major Russian oil company, TNK, signed a deal for a 50-50 partnership. At the time, BP’s $6.75 billion outlay represented the biggest ever foreign investment in Russia. Both sides were happy – though there would be a bumpy road ahead, as Putin began to have second thoughts about selling off his nation’s strategic assets to foreigners.
Seeing Putin’s soul
As for America, Putin had already decided to sit out the rest of the Clinton term, and started putting out feelers to George W. Bush’s team. The Russians had long expected a Bush victory. They even sent a team to the Republican Party Convention in Philadelphia at the end of July 2000. One of its members, Mikhail Margelov, a Russian senator and PR expert who had worked in Putin’s election team, said it was part of the new United Russia’s outreach to ‘conservative parties all over the world’, designed to create a right-of-centre ‘brand’ for Putin’s party. They met Condoleezza Rice and other members of the Bush team – not for long, but long enough to get invited back to the inauguration in January.4
On the day of the inauguration Rice sought out a Russian diplomat to convey a positive message on behalf of the new administration to Putin. Rice was a Russian-speaker and Soviet specialist, who would be central to Bush’s Russia policy over the coming years. Her message held out the prospect of good, friendly relations – but certainly not of a reprise of the Bill ’n’ Boris Show. Rice’s view was that Clinton’s cosy relationship with Yeltsin had become too personalised, and far too soft when it came to calling the Russians to book for their behaviour in Chechnya. In an article that appeared in The Chicago Tribune on 31 December 2000 she delivered a scathing denunciation of the Clinton policy:
The problem for US policy is that the Clinton administration’s ongoing embrace of Yeltsin and those who were thought to be reformers around him quite simply failed. Clearly the United States was obliged to deal with the head of state, and Yeltsin was Russia’s president.
But US support for democracy and economic reform became support for Yeltsin. His agenda became the American agenda.<
br />
America certified that reform was taking place in Russia where it was not, continuing to disburse money from the International Monetary Fund in the absence of any evidence of serious change.
Thus, some curious privatization methods were hailed as economic liberalization; the looting of the country’s assets by powerful people either went unnoticed or was ignored. The realities in Russia simply did not accord with the administration’s script about Russian economic reform.
On top of that, Rice knew there were tough times ahead because Bush was planning to press much harder than Clinton ever did to pursue the goal of building a missile defence shield. She recalled in an interview: ‘Bush had been very clear that a reorientation in the offence-defence relationship in arms control was going to be very important to him, and that the ABM treaty was an impediment to missile defence.’5
Still, for Putin the change of occupancy in the White House augured well, and the Russians looked forward to getting on with building a new relationship with George W. Bush after his inauguration in January 2001.
The Russians were in for a nasty shock. In March the Americans announced they were expelling 50 Russian diplomats who were working undercover as spies in Washington and New York. What the Russians did not realise – and to this day (judging from our interviews) apparently still do not realise – is that the expulsions also came as a nasty surprise to the incoming Bush administration! The Russians assumed Bush had decided to send a tough signal right from the start of his presidency. But in fact, he was merely clearing out a problem inherited from his predecessor.
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