Strongman (11 page)

The second war, unleashed by Putin in 1999, was by all accounts even more brutal. But fewer Western journalists covered it, because it was simply too dangerous. At least in the earlier war the
Chechens had been generally well disposed to journalists; since then the republic had turned into a lawless quagmire, where the risk of kidnapping and murder were just too great. The rebel fighters
themselves were now as barbarous as the Russians had been. It was left mainly to courageous journalists like Anna Politkovskaya of
Novaya gazeta
to bring the truth to the world this time.
(And even so no Western leader has called for any Russian commander or politician to be tried for war crimes.)

In the first war it was relatively easy for journalists to move around in Chechnya. It was this that led to the highly critical coverage – not only in the West but in Russia too,
especially on NTV. The authorities learned their lesson, and the second time around tried to restrict access to the war zone. One Russian journalist, Andrei Babitsky, who worked for Radio Liberty,
was even kidnapped by federal forces in early 2000 because of his critical reporting. They then handed him over to Chechen fighters in exchange for Russian prisoners of war, as though he himself
were a combatant – a fallacy apparently supported by Putin, who indicated that he saw nothing wrong with the swap because Babitsky – a
journalist
, let’s not forget –
was a traitor: ‘This was his own decision,’ Putin told the newspaper
Komsomolskaya Pravda
. ‘He went to the people whose interests he effectively served.’
²

If Putin believed that critical reporting was tantamount to serving the enemy, then there could be no doubt about what he must have thought of Politkovskaya. After the taming of NTV she became
the most important chronicler of Russian barbarity in Chechnya, a patient listener to the cries of pain that the Kremlin wished to stifle.

The authorities maintained that the campaign in Chechnya was a ‘security operation’, aimed solely at eliminating terrorists. Politkovskaya spoke to eyewitnesses of Russian
‘security sweeps’, men like 45-year-old Sultan Shuaipov, a refugee from the Grozny suburb of Novaya Katayama. He told Politkovskaya how he had personally gathered up 51 bodies from his
street and buried them. Here is just part of his story.

Despite all the documented cases of brutality, only one senior officer has ever been brought to justice. Colonel Yuri Budanov was accused of kidnapping, raping and murdering an 18-year-old
Chechen woman, Kheda Kungayeva, in a drunken rampage. She was dragged from her home by soldiers and abducted in an armoured personnel carrier, allegedly because they thought she was a sniper. The
rape charge was eventually dropped, and in court Budanov admitted strangling the woman, though he claimed to have been temporarily insane at the time, enraged while interrogating her. At first he
was found not guilty, but then, after a retrial, was sentenced to ten years in prison. He was released in January 2009, 15 months early, and then murdered in a Moscow street in June 2011.

The payback for the Russian campaign was a decade of Chechen terrorist attacks across Russia – in aeroplanes, underground trains, schools and streets. On 18 April 2002, in his annual
state-of-the-nation speech, President Putin declared the war over. But six months later terror struck right at the heart of the Russian capital. In October 2002, up to 50 armed Chechens, many of
them women, strode into the Dubrovka Theatre during a performance of a musical called
Nord-Ost
, and took the players and the 850-strong audience hostage. They were armed with guns and
explosives and the women put on suicide belts. They demanded the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya – within one week, otherwise they would start shooting
hostages.

For the next three days Putin was locked in almost constant crisis meetings with his security chiefs. At the first session the
siloviki
proposed storming the building, while the prime
minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, sharply disagreed, calling for talks with the terrorists in order to avoid casualties. According to Kasyanov, the security chiefs argued there was no point in making
concessions because casualties would be unavoidable in any case. Putin was scheduled to travel to Mexico for a summit of Asian and Pacific leaders, but sent Kasyanov in his place. Some have
suggested the decision was taken in order to remove from the process the only man opposed to using force to free the hostages, but even Kasyanov concedes that there was no way Putin himself could
have left the country at that point (especially in the light of the criticism he earned over his response to the
Kursk
disaster).
⁴
President Yeltsin
had gone to a G7 meeting in Halifax, Canada, in the middle of the Budyonnovsk hostage crisis in 1995, leaving his prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, to negotiate with the captors and allow them
to escape. Putin certainly was not going to repeat that mistake.

A number of politicians and journalists (including Anna Politkovskaya) did try to reason with the hostage-takers, but to no avail. In the end the
siloviki
did it their way. Special forces
pumped an anaesthetic gas into the theatre to sedate the terrorists (and the hostages), and then commandoes stormed in. There was a gun-fight, in which all of the terrorists were killed, including
those who had already been knocked out by the gas. But 130 hostages also died – mostly from the effects of the toxic chemical and the failure to provide them with immediate medical care when
they were brought out of the building. There was much criticism of the action, including the fact that the chemical composition of the gas used was so secret that even medics attending the scene
were not told what it was or what antidote could be used, almost certainly worsening the death toll.

Putin later defended his actions, saying hundreds of lives had been saved. And in truth, no government in the world has ever worked out a perfect way to cope with such a situation. But had the
strongmen really taken enough care to protect the hostages’ lives? Or were they more intent on killing the terrorists? When the
Kursk
sank it is assumed that Putin turned down foreign
offers of help primarily because he did not want NATO rescuers poking around a top-secret Russian nuclear submarine. The chemical agent used to end the theatre siege was also a military secret, the
exact formula of which was never revealed.

The big issue that the Russian authorities refuse to face up to is what motivates the terrorists. Is it, as Putin always claims, part of an international Islamist movement, with its roots in
Pakistan and Afghanistan, or is it a vengeful response to Russia’s vicious attempts to subjugate Chechnya since 1994? The answer can be found in some of the gunmen’s answers to Anna
Politkovskaya during the theatre siege. She asked one of the captors to release the older children from the theatre (the younger ones had been released). ‘Children?’ came the response.
‘There are no children in there. In security sweeps you take ours from 12 years old. We will hold on to yours.’

‘In retaliation?’ Politkovskaya asked.

‘So that you know how it feels.’

Politkovskaya asked if she can at least bring food for the children.

‘Do you let ours eat in the security sweeps? Yours can do without too.’

Taming the oligarchs

In his first address to the nation, 12 hours after becoming acting president, Putin had pledged to respect freedom of speech, freedom of the mass media and property rights. On
28 July 2000 he had a showdown with the country’s top 20 businessmen and bankers to explain what he meant, and set out the new rules of the game.

These were men who had acquired vast fortunes during the Yeltsin years by exploiting every loophole, breaking and bending laws, bribery, thuggery, extortion, and, most simply of all, by helping
themselves to companies and resources offered to them in exchange for ensuring Yeltsin’s political survival. They owned the country’s major oil and gas companies, pipelines, aluminium
smelters, telecoms and advertising, automobile plants, iron and steel works, a brewery and the top banks. Mingling with them in a grand, columned Kremlin hall as they waited for the president to
arrive were the government’s young team of reformers – Kasyanov, Kudrin, Gref – who above all needed the tycoons to pay their taxes so they could get the country’s finances
in order. The oligarchs themselves had other concerns, having heard Putin threaten their existence ‘as a class’. They had just seen their colleague Gusinsky effectively stripped of his
wealth and hounded out of the country. His fellow media tycoon Boris Berezovsky was nowhere to be seen.

The oligarchs were seated democratically around a huge doughnut-shaped table. But when the president joined them in the circle there was no doubt about who was in charge. The meeting lasted two
and a half hours, but Putin’s offer was simple: there would be no reversal of the privatisation process, on two conditions – that the oligarchs started paying their taxes, and that they
kept out of politics. Putin was careful not to put it in the form of an ultimatum, but that is what it was.

In an interview, German Gref summed up what happened: ‘Putin sent a strong message that no nationalisation or expropriation of property was planned. He put it to them like this: “We
are making a gesture to you, we are sharply decreasing taxes, we are creating a favourable investment environment and defending property rights. But please, since we are lowering the taxes, you
should pay them. And secondly, if it’s business you’ve chosen, then do business.” ’
⁵

The businessmen emerged from the meeting almost singing with relief. Most of them had no desire to get into politics anyway, and paying taxes was a small price to pay for their fortunes.
Vladimir Potanin, president of the mining and metals conglomerate Interros, sounded almost repentant: ‘The oligarchs had set themselves up as an elite, but society doesn’t accept this
elite. We have to behave better.’

The initiative for this meeting had come from Boris Nemtsov, the former governor of Nizhny Novgorod who had helped to kick-start the privatisation process in the mid-1990s and now headed a
political party, the Union of Right Forces, to defend the interests of the nascent middle class. He described the event as a watershed – the point where (he put it, with irony, in Marxist
terms) ‘the ten-year history of the primitive accumulation of capital’ came to an end. In other words, this was the moment when Russia’s ‘robber barons’ were given the
chance to turn into respectable businessmen.

For the most part, the oligarchs went along with that. Gusinsky and Berezovsky went into exile – the former quietly, the latter continuing to wage battle against Putin from abroad. Roman
Abramovich, the owner of the oil giant Sibneft, did become a member of the Duma, and also governor of the remote region of Chukotka. But he did not use his political influence to challenge Putin.
He was far more interested in his British football club, Chelsea, which he bought in 2003.

Only one oligarch refused to toe the line – Mikhail Khodorkovsky. His intransigence would land him in a Siberian prison camp for many years and turn him into one of the greatest sources of
tension between Russia and the West.

The Khordorkovsky affair

Khodorkovsky had taken his earliest steps in business almost as soon as it was possible, back in the days of Mikhail Gorbachev’s tentative
perestroika
reforms. As
a communist youth functionary, he used his connections to set up a café, an import business and, eventually, one of Russia’s first commercial banks – Menatep. From then on his
rise was vertiginous. In 1995, in the ‘loans for shares’ scheme designed to bail out the bankrupt Yeltsin government, he acquired a major stake in Russia’s second-largest oil
company, Yukos. The following year he bought the shares – effectively from himself – and ended up with a majority stake in Yukos for just $309 million, a fraction of its real value.
Within months the company was worth $6 billion. None of this broke the law: the scheme was devised by the government itself.