The New Tsar (29 page)

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O
n September 29, Putin expressed a willingness to negotiate with Aslan Maskhadov, Chechnya’s president, but only on the condition that he condemn all terrorism, expel the armed militias in the republic, and arrest and extradite the most wanted criminals, with Basayev, Khattab, and other commanders presumably at the top of the list. It was an ultimatum, not an offer. Maskhadov had denounced the incursion into Dagestan and the bombings in Russia, but his authority as president was too weak to exert control over Basayev or Khattab, let alone arrest them and turn them over to the Russians. “I cannot simply have Basayev arrested,” he told a journalist two days before Putin’s ultimatum. “People here would not understand that. After all, we fought together for our country’s independence.”
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On the day of Putin’s offer, Maskhadov had planned to travel to Dagestan to meet with its president to explore the possibility of talks with Moscow, but he had to cancel, because protesters in Dagestan blocked the road.
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It was too late anyway.

The next day the Russian army and Ministry of the Interior soldiers poured into Chechnya. Despite Putin’s disavowals, a full invasion had
begun. About 40,000 troops had taken part in the first war in Chechnya, many of them unseasoned conscripts, but now Putin ordered in more than 93,000, roughly the size of the Soviet force that invaded Afghanistan, a country nearly forty times as large.
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On October 1, he declared that Russia would no longer recognize Maskhadov’s government; instead he recognized a regional parliament that had been elected in 1996 during Russia’s military occupation. Its members were now mostly in Moscow or elsewhere, having fled when the Russians withdrew after the first war. The declaration ended whatever slim chances existed for a negotiated settlement. Putin did not really want one anyway. Maskhadov joined Basayev and the other more radical commanders in a bloody defense of the Chechen homeland. By October 5, Russian troops occupied the northern third of Chechnya, up to the Terek River, as the secret planning that began in the spring had intended. A week later they crossed the river and moved toward Grozny.

Putin vowed not to repeat the mistakes of the first war, which many took to mean he would not launch an all-out ground offensive to seize control of the entire republic. But that is exactly what he aimed to do—only this time he deployed the full force of Russian air power to minimize the loss of life to the Russian troops, irrespective of the toll inside Chechnya. “The difference is that this time we will not thoughtlessly send our boys to absorb hostile fire,” he told the newspaper
Vremya
. “We will act with the help of modern forces and means and destroy the terrorists from a distance. We will destroy the infrastructure. And special troops will be used only to clean up territories. There will be no frontal assaults any more. We will be protecting our men. Of course, this will require time and patience. Availing myself of this opportunity, I urge your readers and others to understand this and to realize that either, as in the past, we rush into the attack with screams of ‘Communists, forward!’ heedless of our losses, or we patiently and methodically destroy them from the air.” And if the air strikes failed? “We will succeed,” he told the interviewer. “There will be no ‘if.’ ”
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On October 20, as the fighting raged, Putin traveled in secret from Moscow to Chechnya on a journey that included a short flight on a Sukhoi-25 jet. As he had in Dagestan, Putin again handed out medals to pilots at an airbase, and he met with village elders in Znamenskoye, a village just inside Chechnya’s border, now liberated by the Russians. He lamented the Chechen government’s failure to pay salaries and pensions and its failure to keep clinics and schools open, despite budget
funds from Moscow that had never stopped flowing. Russia’s goal was to restore order, he said, by ridding the territory “of those bandits who are not only up to their elbows but up to their shoulders in blood.” “One of the aims of my visit here today is to show you that we and you are a single whole, so that anti-Chechen and anti-Caucasian feeling is not whipped up in Russia, so that the whole country knows and can see that there is nothing so bloodthirsty here.”
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The next day a Russian rocket landed in Grozny’s central market, killing scores of people, mostly women and children shopping for dwindling supplies of food.

Despite the furor over the apartment bombings, and an eruption of anti-Chechen sentiment in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia, the war until then did not have universal political support, especially among the politicians jockeying for power in the coming post-Yeltsin era. The memory of the first war remained raw. By the middle of September more than two hundred Russian soldiers had died in the fighting along Chechnya’s borders; the toll inside Chechnya was far higher, probably in the thousands. Yevgeny Primakov, who with Luzhkov was a front-runner to replace Yeltsin, expressed support for “pinpoint” strikes against terrorist camps, but not a new invasion. “I am strongly against large-scale operations that can develop into events we have seen in the past,” he said. “We shouldn’t be going back to that.”
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Luzhkov responded to the attacks with thinly veiled racism and the reinstitution of Soviet-era residency requirements. His proposal to resolve the conflict was to build a Berlin Wall along Chechnya’s border, not to reconquer the territory. Several of Yeltsin’s liberal supporters publicly raised doubts about the efficacy and morality of a military campaign that was killing civilians who were, for now at least, citizens of Russia. By the end of September more than a hundred thousand Chechens—mostly the elderly, women, and children—had fled for safety into neighboring Ingushetia, creating a refugee crisis that Russia was ill-prepared to handle.

The country was again awash in rumors that Yeltsin would resign, that he would dismiss Putin and his new cabinet, that the parliamentary elections scheduled for December would be canceled. Putin was forced to deny them all. Among Russia’s political elite, Putin was widely assumed to be committing political suicide by launching a new ground war in Chechnya. “Putin behaved like a political kamikaze, throwing his entire stock of political capital into the war, burning it to the ground,” wrote Boris Yeltsin, the man who could never bring himself to throw the full might of the Russian military into the first war.
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Putin acted as if
he were indifferent to the politics of the war, perhaps because he had no experience with the first war in Chechnya, perhaps because he simply did not doubt his “historic mission.” He was not responding to popular opinion or political expedience; as Yeltsin noted, he “didn’t expect his career to last beyond the Chechen events.” His actions seemed defiantly apolitical, even deeply personal, as if the incursion into Dagestan was an affront that he had to avenge.

Yet, to the surprise of Yeltsin and many others, Putin’s conduct of the war proved to be immensely popular. The first war had been unpopular, but given the public’s reaction to the second, that was because the prosecution of the first war had been halfhearted; because the Russian army, the remnant of the great Red Army, had been ill-prepared and ill-equipped; because the Russians had lost to a bunch of lawless Chechens from the mountains. This war, under this prime minister, seemed different. The political elite, looking ahead to the coming elections, feared the consequences of a war, but now it seemed that ordinary Russians wanted, as Putin, to “bang the hell out of the bandits.”

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V
ladimir Putin had been largely unknown to Russians when Yeltsin appointed him prime minister. Now, even though he had not yet had time to articulate any policies or programs, his actions in Chechnya began unexpectedly to lift his approval ratings in the polls. In August, when he was appointed, a mere 2 percent of those polled favored him as a possible presidential candidate; by October, 27 percent did, only one point behind Primakov. Yeltsin kept his promise to Putin about the coming parliamentary elections: he did not have to concern himself with them. Yeltsin’s political strategists created a new party, called Unity. Like Putin himself, the party had no discernable platform or ideology, but fashioned itself as a patriotic front, adopting the bear as its symbol, an idea that Boris Berezovsky claimed had come to him in a feverish dream while he was hospitalized with hepatitis.
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Unity seemed to have little chance to win. By the end of October it barely registered in the polls, far behind the liberals of Yabloko, the Communists, and the front-runners, the Fatherland—All Russia alliance between Luzhkov and Primakov. What Unity did have was the full resources of the Kremlin and the oligarchs who poured cash into the campaign. Even Berezovsky, who felt increasingly estranged from Yeltsin, used his television network to savage Luzhkov and Primakov whom
he loathed, and to glorify Putin’s role as de facto commander in chief. Berezovsky gave a prime-time television show to a flamboyant commentator, Sergei Dorenko, who week after week accused Luzhkov of corruption, hypocrisy, and even murder.
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The accusations were extreme to the point of libel, but they were extraordinarily effective.

Given Yeltsin’s paranoia about political challenges, Putin’s rising popularity provoked a new wave of rumors about his imminent sacking. Those rumors gained momentum in November, when Putin affirmed his intention to run for president in 2000. People assumed that Yeltsin would fire him, as he had fired Primakov, not knowing that the aging president had invested his hopes for his legacy—and personal security—in this young prime minister. By the end of 1999, Yeltsin’s physical and legal problems had left him weaker than ever. Yuri Skuratov, still fighting his suspension as prosecutor general in court, continued to dribble out accusations surrounding the investigations of Mabetex and its ties to Yeltsin’s “Family.” His efforts were aided by a decision in Switzerland to freeze fifty-nine bank accounts linked to Russian officials. In October the Federation Council refused for a third time to fire Skuratov, who was angling to retain his post as prosecutor general under a new parliament and the next president. “Of course the ‘family’ is afraid,” he said in an interview at his dacha outside Moscow. “Now they control the situation, but it may get out of hand.”
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Putin’s rising popularity also began to attract the attention of Yeltsin’s opponents. On November 20 Primakov and Luzhkov, Yeltsin’s bitter rivals, met him privately in hopes of negotiating a political accomodation. Both began to suggest publicly that their alliance might support his nomination for president, effectively abandoning their own ambitions. Putin’s rise was as astonishing as it was unexpected. He seemed to represent a new, independent political force. And it was not solely because of Chechnya. In the muck of Russia’s politics, he alone seemed untainted by the intrigues of politicians and oligarchs that had consumed Russia for the previous eight years. Although he owed his career to Yeltsin and the “Family,” the fact that he had mostly worked on the margins of public scrutiny since 1996 meant he was not associated with the Kremlin’s multiple failings and scandals. His blunt public statements, even the coarse ones, seemed refreshing after the confusion and obfuscation of Yeltsin’s administration. The newspaper
Nezivisamaya Gazeta
wrote in November that within a precious few weeks “a completely unknown,
fairly colorless functionary” had become a leader willing, “unlike his predecessors,” to tell people what he intended to do. It went on to call this “one of the rare cases in our political history.”
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B
y then, Putin’s approval rating exceeded 40 percent, and now he had the political clout to influence the parliamentary election in December. He had not joined the Kremlin’s new party, Unity, which despite the government’s resources, favorable coverage on state television, and donations from the oligarchs ranked so low in the polls that it risked not reaching the threshold to win any seats in the Duma at all.
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On November 24, his one hundredth day as prime minister, Putin rescued Unity from political oblivion with an endorsement—of a sort. “As the prime minister, I would not want to discuss my political sympathies,” he said, “but as an ordinary voter, I will vote for Unity.”
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Most political analysts concluded that Putin was risking not only his own political future but the party’s as well by linking it too closely with the Kremlin. What they misunderstood was the party’s essential appeal as a new force that eschewed the tired ideology of right or left and embraced the patriotism of unity, not division, especially at a time of war.

Yeltsin, hospitalized twice in the fall, still agonized over his fate. “Authority in Russia had always been transferred through natural death, conspiracy or revolution,” he wrote of his thoughts during the period. “The tsar ceased to rule only after his death or after a coup. It was exactly the same with the general secretary of the Communist Party. I suppose the Communist regime inherited the inability to transfer power painlessly.” He reflected on Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964 and lamented that his death in September 1971 had been announced “in a tiny, obscure notice in the newspaper.”
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On December 14, five days before the election, Yeltsin summoned Putin to his residence at Gorky-9 for a secret meeting. They met alone.