Strongman

by Roxburgh, Angus

  It was only after the elections to the State Duma on 2 December that Putin finally revealed his choice – not that the result, which unsurprisingly gave his party, United Russia, 64 per cent of the votes, affected his decision. It was neither Zubkov nor the former KGB man Sergei Ivanov, on whom the dice fell, but the man who it seemed had been pipped at the post, Dmitry Medvedev.

  Again, it was a staged event, a pretence at democracy. The leaders of four parties, just elected to the Duma, came to Putin and put forward Medvedev’s name. Putin feigned surprise, and turned to Medvedev, who happened to be present: ‘Dmitry Anatolievich, have they discussed this with you?’

  ‘Yes, we had some preliminary discussions,’ replied the candidate.

  ‘Well,’ Putin had to agree, ‘if four parties representing different strata of Russian society have made this proposal … I have known Dmitry Anatolievich Medvedev for more than 17 years, and we have worked closely together all these years, and I fully and completely support this choice.’

  The following day, Medvedev declared that if he were elected he would nominate Putin for the post of prime minister. After months of confusion and manoeuvring, the way forward was suddenly clear. Putin would ensure his political longevity by transforming the post of prime minister (without so much as touching the constitution) from the quiet back-office occupied by Fradkov and Zubkov into the country’s real power-base.

  Though born in the same city as Putin, and a graduate from the same law faculty, Medvedev was 13 years younger and had a very different background. Born in 1965, into an intellectual family, he graduated in 1987, at the height of Gorbachev’s efforts to democratise the communist system. The zeitgeist of the time was all about debunking the KGB that Putin had chosen for his career. Medvedev helped run the campaign of the liberal reformer Anatoly Sobchak (one of his law professors) in the first genuine elections of the late 1980s. Sobchak later became mayor of St Petersburg and hired both Medvedev and Putin to work in his external relations office – this was when the two men met. Medvedev later followed Putin to Moscow, becoming his deputy chief of staff in 1999 and running his election campaign in 2000. As president, Putin appointed Medvedev as chairman of Gazprom, and later as his chief of staff.

  There were several reasons why Putin may have decided Medvedev was preferable to his main rival, Ivanov: he was less charismatic, had no power-base of his own, was less of a threat than a fellow silovik (who might be tempted to ease Putin out of the way) and – not unimportant for a small man – was even shorter than Putin. All in all, he was much less imposing and threatening than Ivanov, the tall cavalier who had once swept Condoleezza Rice off her feet. And there was the added benefit that with his liberal reputation, Medvedev would go down well in the West, perhaps acting as a lightning rod and removing the strain from Putin for a while. The task for the next four years would be to keep Medvedev on a tight leash, and at least leave the door open for Putin’s own return to the presidency.

  We in the Kremlin’s hapless PR team saw another opportunity to impress the West evaporate. An election between two establishment candidates with different views on how to run the economy would have been the same as in most Western democracies. But the Russian people were not to be asked for their opinion. Putin’s choice was the only one that mattered, and as the head of the Central Election Commission, Vladimir Churov – a friend of Putin’s appointed less than a year earlier – stated, ‘Churov’s First Law is that Putin is always right.’

  State television gave Putin’s choice blanket coverage, and Medvedev was duly elected on 2 March 2008 with 70 per cent of the vote. The Communist Party leader, Gennady Zyuganov, won almost 18 per cent, and the nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky 9.5 per cent. The former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, the candidate for the ‘democratic’ opposition, was registered as a candidate but later disqualified on the grounds that too many of the signatures gathered in his support had allegedly been forged.

  When the result was announced Putin and Medvedev walked out together on to Red Square in leather jackets and jeans, Medvedev trying to ape Putin’s macho gait. Interrupting a rock concert in front of St Basil’s Cathedral, Medvedev made a short speech affirming that the course of the last eight years would be continued. When Putin took the microphone to praise his protégé, the crowd of supporters drowned him out, chanting, ‘Putin, Putin, Putin …’ Nobody chanted ‘Medvedev!’

  Even after the election, and for a month or so after Medvedev’s inauguration in May, the turmoil continued, as bureaucrats scrambled for what they thought would be the best seats. What I observed in the Kremlin press department was probably mirrored throughout the administration: officials were trying to work out where the real power would lie, in President Medvedev’s Kremlin or in Prime Minister Putin’s government, ten minutes away in the ‘White House’ on the Moskva river. In retrospect, the clever ones were those who moved to the White House, hoping to have a supervisory role over their counterparts in the Kremlin. Dmitry Peskov took us on a valedictory tour of the Kremlin in April, as Putin appointed him as his spokesman.

  ‘How will it feel to move away from here?’

  Peskov twisted his moustache: ‘Who knows? Who knows …?’

  Peskov’s move was part of a clever matrix of appointments designed to maintain Putin’s control over the new president. Peskov took with him to the White House his long-time deputy Alex Smirnov, who became head of the prime minister’s press service, an entity that had scarcely functioned under its predecessors. It was Peskov (rather than the president’s press secretary) who appointed a new, young team to the president’s press service, making it clear that they answered to him. Putin’s old spokesman and ally, Alexei Gromov, remained in the Kremlin, promoted to become President Medvedev’s deputy chief of staff, in a blatant attempt to maintain ‘ideological control’ over the president’s media operation. But there was a fly in the ointment. Medvedev retained Natalia Timakova, who had been his press adviser during the election campaign, as his spokeswoman. She was a rival rather than a protégé of Peskov’s, and soon began to co-opt the team Peskov had put in place in the presidential press service. She was fiercely devoted to the president, not the prime minister. Within a year, a clear split was developing: not surprisingly, Medvedev’s team soon felt they owed their allegiance to the president, not to the people who had appointed them. Over the next years I gained a strong impression that the two press offices grew rather far apart, to the extent that each no longer knew what the other was planning.

  I understand from well-connected sources that this situation was echoed in other departments too, so that by 2010–11 two competing bureaucracies existed, each knowing that their futures depended on their respective bosses, and each therefore dedicated to their own boss’s survival. This was not what Putin had intended.

  Putin took with him from the Kremlin to the White House his presidential chief of staff, Sergei Sobyanin, and also the influential economist Igor Shuvalov. But he left behind some of his trusted senior staff, to ensure ‘continuity’ under Medvedev. They included not only Alexei Gromov, in charge of the mass media, but also Vladislav Surkov, who became Medvedev’s first deputy chief of staff, Sergei Prikhodko, his foreign affairs adviser, and Arkady Dvorkovich, his economics adviser. The goal was to intertwine the two branches of the administration while ensuring that Putin’s appointees in the Kremlin held sway. Instead they became drawn into their separate teams, serving their new masters. Even the ‘ideologue’ Surkov changed his colours to support Medvedev’s new initiatives, some of which contradicted what he had earlier preached for Putin.

  Putin’s presidential legacy

  On 8 February 2008, in the middle of the election campaign, Putin gave his last major speech as president – effectively his own assessment of his achievements. In foreign policy, he insisted that ‘we have returned to the world arena as a state which is taken account of’. Yet the detail sounded more like a bitter admission of failure: ‘We drew down our bases in Cuba and in Vietnam. Wh
at did we get? New American bases in Romania, Bulgaria. A new third missile defence region in Poland.’ Russia had failed to prevent the United States from ‘unleashing a new arms race with its missile defence system’, obliging Russia to respond by producing ‘new types of arms, with the same or even superior specifications compared to those available to other nations’. And he protested, like a stuck gramophone needle, that ‘irresponsible demagogy, attempts to split society and to use foreign assistance and interference in the course of political struggle in Russia are not only immoral, but also illegal.’

  But he delivered a glowing account of his own achievements at home. Russia, he said, was now one of the seven biggest economies in the world. ‘The main thing we have achieved is stability. We have established that life will continue to improve. [Under Yeltsin] wealthy Russia had turned into a country of impoverished people. In these conditions we started to implement our programme to take the country out of crisis. We consistently worked to create a robust political system. We were able to rid ourselves of the practice of taking state decisions under pressure from financial groups and media magnates.’

  Economic growth was at its highest in seven years. Russia’s foreign debt had been reduced to just 3 per cent of GDP. The last two years had seen a ‘real investment boom’ in Russia. The birth rate was rising.

  And there was a reason, he implied, for certain political restrictions. ‘Political parties,’ he said, ‘must realise their huge responsibility for the future of Russia, for the stability of society. It is never worth taking the country to the edge of chaos.’ This was a subtle reminder of the specious, unspoken deal Putin had offered, or rather imposed on, the country: that in exchange for growing prosperity and stability, political freedoms had to be curbed.

  Putin’s opponents decried both elements of his claim: there was no correlation between authoritarianism and economic growth, they said, and there was no real economic success anyway because the early liberal reforms had run their course.

  In a damning report published in February 2008, two of Putin’s major political opponents, Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov, conceded that some of the official statistics looked good: under Putin the country’s gross domestic product had grown by 70 per cent; incomes had more than doubled; poverty had been reduced, so that only 16 per cent lived below the poverty line (as opposed to 29 per cent in 2000); the budget was balanced, gold reserves stood at $480 billion, and the Stabilisation Fund had reached $157 billion.

  But … most of this had been achieved thanks to the soaring price of oil, which had gone from an average of $16.70 a barrel under Yeltsin to an average of $40 under Putin (and was now heading for $100). Instead of using the oil windfall to modernise the economy and carry out economic reforms, the authors argued, ‘our army, pension system, health care and primary education have all degraded under Putin’.17 Meanwhile corruption had attained ‘gigantic proportions, without analogy in Russian history’, and those oligarchs whom Putin had not driven into exile or put in prison were making themselves fabulously rich at the state’s expense. The recovery from the post-communist collapse had begun, they argued, not under Putin but earlier, in the final years of the Yeltsin presidency. Under Putin, instead of ‘authoritarian modernisation’ – which, had it worked, theoretically might have allowed one to forgive some of the anti-democratic tendencies of his rule – there was ‘authoritarianism without modernisation’. The brief period of progressive reforms had been replaced by ‘the greedy redistribution of property and the transformation of Russia into a police state’.

  Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine at exactly the same time, the American scholars Michael McFaul (later nominated by President Obama to become ambassador to Moscow) and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss came to similar conclusions. They wrote that although state resources had increased under Putin, allowing pensions and government salaries to be paid on time, and greater spending on roads and education, overall the state still performed poorly: ‘In terms of public safety, health, corruption, and the security of property rights, Russians are actually worse off today than they were a decade ago.’18 Security, ‘the most basic good a state can provide for its population’, had worsened: the frequency of terrorist attacks had increased under Putin; the number of military and civilian deaths in Chechnya was much higher than during the first war, and conflict in the North Caucasus region was spreading; the murder rate was rising; the death rate from fires was around 40 a day in Russia – roughly ten times the average rate in Western Europe. Health spending had gone down under Putin, the population was shrinking, alcohol consumption had soared and life expectancy had declined during the Putin years. ‘At the same time that Russian society has become less secure and less healthy under Putin,’ McFaul and Stoner-Weiss wrote, ‘Russia’s international rankings for economic competitiveness, business friendliness, and transparency and corruption all have fallen.’ Corruption, in particular, had skyrocketed. Property rights had been undermined: not only had the state engineered the sell-off of Yukos assets to Rosneft, but the oil company Shell had been compelled to sell a majority share in Sakhalin-2 to Gazprom.

  Such was the state of the Russia that Dmitry Medvedev took over after his inauguration on 7 May 2008. There were signs that he shared, or at least understood, the kind of criticisms levelled at his predecessor’s record. The main sound-bite to emerge from his only election campaign speech was ‘Freedom is better than non-freedom’, and in his inauguration address he promised that ‘we must achieve a true respect for the law and overcome legal nihilism’.

  In foreign affairs, Medvedev wanted to make a quick impression. He rushed to Berlin (just as Putin had done) shortly after becoming president to make what he hoped would be a ground-breaking speech, in which he grandly called for a new European Security treaty. This, apparently (though it was not made clear), would replace all existing treaties and alliances, making NATO and the OSCE redundant and, of course, giving Russia its rightful place at the top table of a new organisation. The initiative was largely ignored, and not just because it was half-baked and raised more questions than it answered. It was ignored mainly because it was divorced from reality: Russia was still acting in ways that reminded most people of the USSR, it played gas wars with its neighbours, appeared to condone the murders of Politkovskaya and Litvinenko, it bullied Georgia and Ukraine ... nobody wanted lectures about European security from a country like that. We in Ketchum sent memos explaining that foreign policy initiatives like this had to be part of a ‘package’, together with internal liberalisation, if they were be taken seriously. We pointed out why Mikhail Gorbachev had been so successful: he was a communist leader, but his arms-control gestures were taken seriously because he had also initiated glasnost and freed political prisoners. No one, we told the Kremlin, would take their security proposals seriously so long as they were rolling back democracy at home.

  Maybe – one liked to think – President Medvedev actually wanted to implement changes at home. But any hope of liberalisation was about to be dashed, as Russia for the first time since its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 went to war with one of its neighbours. The invasion of Georgia in August 2008 destroyed at a stroke all the efforts made by Putin, and then Medvedev, to present their country as a truly post-Soviet, European, democratised and trustworthy power. The events leading up to the ‘five day war’, and the question of who bore ultimate responsibility for it, were surrounded with controversy – and obfuscated by a fierce PR war in which the Georgians proved considerably more adept than the Russians. In the following chapter I will attempt to shed some light on what happened – without claiming to provide definitive answers.

  10

  THE DESCENT INTO WAR

  From Kosovo to Bucharest

  On Sunday 17 February 2008 Serbia’s breakaway Albanian-majority province of Kosovo declared itself independent. The next day the United States recognised it, and on Tuesday a reporter asked President Bush, ‘Isn’t this a poke in the eye to Vladimir Putin and others who say you’
re approving of secession movements everywhere implicitly?’

  Bush replied: ‘Actually we’ve been working very closely with the Russians ... You know, there’s a disagreement, but we believe, as do many other nations, that history will prove this to be a correct move to bring peace to the Balkans.’

  It was not the Balkans that Putin was worried about. Russia had good reasons to oppose the recognition of Kosovo – and its ‘brotherly ties’ with Serbia were the very least of them. Pandora’s box was open. However forcefully the Americans and their allies insisted that the Kosovo case for independence was sui generis – a unique set of circumstances, setting no precedent – there were a number of other secessionist nations around the world who were delighted. If the Kosovars could vote for independence and secede from Serbia, against the ‘parent state’s’ wishes, citing military attacks, ethnic cleansing and acts of brutality committed against them, then could not the Chechens say the same about their position within Russia, or the Abkhaz and South Ossetians about theirs within Georgia?

  Above all, Russia did not want to encourage Chechen separatism, but it was also wary of encouraging the South Ossetians and Abkhaz to secede – precisely because of the precedent it could set for other tiny nations within the former Soviet Union, not least the chain of restive Muslim republics in Russia’s northern Caucasus region. At a summit meeting of leaders from the Commonwealth of Independent States – the loose grouping of former Soviet republics – President Putin delivered an unambiguous warning of the consequences: ‘The Kosovo precedent is a terrifying one,’ he said, shifting nervously in his seat and almost spitting out the words. ‘It in essence is breaking open the entire system of international relations that have prevailed not just for decades but for centuries. And it will without a doubt bring on itself an entire chain of unforeseen consequences.’