The New Tsar (25 page)

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O
n the day the Federation Council finally took up the question of his resignation, March 17, Skuratov appeared to be in good health and now asked to keep his job—“if you extend your trust and support to me.”
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He explained to the lawmakers that he had resigned only under duress, and he blamed it on two former prime ministers and “well-known oligarchs.” He did not mention Berezovsky, but he did discuss the raids investigators had launched against Berezovsky’s companies. “These people were aware of my resignation no less than two weeks in advance,” he
said. He referred obliquely to people collecting information about his private life, but now seemed determined to hold on to his job.

It was then that the Kremlin sent the videotape of Skuratov and the women to members of the Federation Council who were preparing to vote on Skuratov’s fate. The tactic backfired badly: the council’s members were shocked and appalled, not by the videotape itself but by the use of such a crude trick to influence the outcome of its deliberations. They voted 142 to 6 to reject Skuratov’s resignation and leave him in office. The videotape promptly aired a few hours after the council’s vote. In the ensuing public uproar, it was impossible to say which was more morally compromising: the behavior on the bed or the decision to make it public.

The next morning Yeltsin summoned Skuratov to the hospital room where he was recovering, again, from a bleeding ulcer. By then, Yeltsin too had a copy, as well as still photographs. When Skuratov arrived, he found Primakov and Putin waiting in the room as well. He was not surprised by Putin’s presence. Putin had visited him while he was hospitalized, told him that the “Family” had been satisfied with his quiet departure in February, and offered to make him the ambassador to Finland—an “honorable exile.” Skuratov had refused.

“Then what would you like to be?” Putin asked.

Skuratov told him he wanted to continue “the very work I have performed.”
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After Skuratov’s release from the hospital in February, Putin tried new tactics to persuade him to resign. He called once and told the prosecutor he empathized with his quandary; he confided that “they say” there was a similar videotape of Putin himself! Perhaps it would be best to avoid scandal by stepping aside.
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Putin visited Skuratov again at his government house in Arkhangelskoye—they were neighbors—and as they strolled in the wooded grounds, he worked him like a source or a recruit, alternately confiding and threatening. “Yuri Ilyich,” he began, respectfully, “I am amazed that you managed to work three and a half years in this cesspool.” He said he could not imagine surviving in his job until the end of Yeltsin’s term. Then Putin’s tone shifted abruptly. He pulled out a sheaf of papers and said there were irregularities in the renovation of Skuratov’s apartment in Moscow. He insinuated that Skuratov was under fire now because of his investigation into Putin’s former boss, Pavel Borodin.
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Through it all, Skuratov thought, Putin had been unfailingly polite,
but the allusion to Borodin confirmed in his mind that his investigations had indeed struck close to Yeltsin and the “Family.” Borodin’s contracts with Mercata, the company that had renovated the Kremlin in 1994, and its sister company, Mabetex, had also come under the scrutiny of investigators abroad. There were suspicious transactions that suggested money laundering. In January, only weeks before the videotape appeared, investigators in Switzerland had raided Mabetex’s offices in Lugano and confiscated records that appeared to show that the company had not only paid bribes to Russian officials to win construction projects but also paid off the balances of credit cards belonging to Yeltsin’s daughters. Swizterland’s chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, had launched a prosecutorial campaign against the laundering of criminal profits in Switzerland, complaining the country was threatened “by dirty Russian money,”
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and the evidence against Mabetex surfaced as a result. Even as the Skuratov scandal was unfolding in March, she traveled to Moscow to pursue her investigation, offering to share the Swiss evidence in exchange for Russian cooperation. In two days of private meetings, she and Skuratov discussed the investigations, including, he claimed, details of bank accounts belonging to several Kremlin officials. Now that the Kremlin was trying to force him to resign, Skuratov had the leverage to fight back, confident that the Federation Council would side with him in the power struggle of Yeltsin’s political twilight.

When Yeltsin confronted Skuratov at the hospital the morning after the Federation Council’s first vote—the morning after the videotape aired—he tapped his fingers on a copy of the videocassette. “You know, Yuri Ilyich,” Yeltsin told him, leaning back in his chair and breathing deep. “I have never cheated on my wife…” Yeltsin then promised to stop showing it on television if Skuratov would write a second letter of resignation. This was “elementary blackmail,” Skuratov thought, but he also knew that it was pointless to debate its authenticity now. Skuratov protested that he had launched an investigation into Mabetex, which Yeltsin interpreted as a form of blackmail in return.
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“We’re talking about something else now, Yuri Ilyich,” Yeltsin told him. “After what’s happened to you, I don’t think you should remain in the post of prosecutor general. I won’t fight with you. I won’t try to persuade you. Just write your resignation letter. I will no longer work with you.”

Yeltsin pushed a pen and paper toward him. Skuratov turned to Primakov, expecting support from the prime minister who had pledged to fight corruption among the country’s oligarchs. He received none.
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Putin said nothing, though Skuratov sensed him observing him throughout. Skuratov signed the letter, resigning for the second time in less than seven weeks, though Yeltsin agreed to his request that the letter be postdated until April and the next scheduled meeting of the Federation Council. As Skuratov left the hospital and returned to his office, he contemplated his next move. He envisioned his fight with the Kremlin as a game of chess: his position was tenuous, but he had just avoided checkmate.
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Now he must counterattack. While driving, he called a television reporter and made the Mabetex investigation public.
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O
f all the political controversies surrounding Yeltsin’s presidency, the investigation that Skuratov and the Swiss had launched into Mercata and Mabetex posed the direst threat yet to the president and his “Family.” Yeltsin himself acknowledged that this was the one scandal that had “legs” and could even bring his presidency to a premature end. The day after his confrontation with Skuratov, Yeltsin checked out of the hospital and returned briefly to the Kremlin. He fired his chief of staff, Nikolai Bordyuzha, with no public explanation, though many later assumed it was because of his failure to remove Skuratov quietly. Bordyuzha, a former military officer, received an “honorable exile” like the one Putin had offered to Skuratov, becoming the ambassador to Denmark. Yeltsin replaced him with Aleksandr Voloshin, a former business partner of Boris Berezovsky. Ten days later he promoted Putin to secretary of the Security Council.

It was then that Putin intervened in a way that would deepen Yeltsin’s trust in him. Although Putin denied that his agency recorded Skuratov’s tryst, he did make it clear that the FSB had intimate knowledge of its provenance. On April 2, he announced that the videotape was in fact genuine—first to the Federation Council “with eyes downcast,” as Skuratov described it, and then again in remarks to waiting reporters. As embarrassing as that was, it was not enough by itself to force Skuratov, but Putin had found a legal technicality that trumped the council’s obstinacy. He went on to announce that there had been other “parties,” like the one in the video, and that they had been paid for by criminals trying to influence Skuratov’s investigations. If shown true, this would be a grave crime, and since any civil servant under criminal investigation had to step down pending the resolution of the charges, Putin’s announcement did what nothing else had so far. In the middle of the night, the Kremlin called in a deputy prosecutor in Moscow, presented him with the FSB’s evidence, and ordered him to open an investigation.
Now Skuratov had no choice but to step aside until this new case against him was resolved.

Yeltsin then announced that he had suspended Skuratov. He removed his personal security detail, cut his office phone lines, and ordered his office sealed. “Russia without a prosecutor general was the lesser of two evils,” Yeltsin would write.
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Putin’s maneuver was technically legal—assuming there was some basis to the accusations of influence buying—but it was also ruthless. A grateful Yeltsin once again took note. A week later, he announced that Putin would remain director of the FSB, even as he presided over the Security Council. He had demonstrated his loyalty to the president, impressing him with his quiet efficiency; others might promise, but Putin achieved results. After only two and a half years in Moscow, Putin now stood at the center of Yeltsin’s administration, no longer a mere deputy, but one of the most powerful officials in the Kremlin.

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P
utin rose through the ranks as the Yeltsin era seemed to be in its death throes. The unfolding Skuratov scandal aided efforts by the Communists to impeach Yeltsin, a step that would have made Primakov acting president until new elections could be held. The president, ailing and fearful, no longer exerted much control over events, but instead reacted to them, often erratically.

On March 5, 1999, the Interior Ministry’s special envoy to Chechnya, General Gennady Shpigun, was kidnapped as he boarded a plane in the region’s capital, Grozny. Kidnappings had become the principal postwar industry in Chechnya, with hundreds of people held for ransom between 1996 and 1999, but the abduction of a senior envoy was too brazen for the Kremlin to ignore. The peace talks that ended the war in 1996 had given Chechnya a great deal of sovereignty, but nearly two years of fighting had devastated the region and left its economy in ruins. The war had killed as many as a hundred thousand Chechens, as well as nearly five thousand Russian soldiers, according to official records that some doubted were complete. Having survived the Russian counterassault, Chechnya after the war descended into chaos and criminality, undermining efforts by the region’s elected president, Aslan Maskhadov, to restore order and win international recognition for its secession from Russia. Soon the lawlessness was spilling over Chechnya’s borders. On March 19, the day after Skuratov’s second resignation, an enormous bomb exploded in a market in the southern city of Vladikavkaz, the
capital of North Ossetia, another of the republics along the Caucasus, not far from Grozny. The blast killed more than sixty people. Yeltsin ordered Putin and the interior minister, Sergei Stepashin, to Vladikavkaz to oversee the investigation.

Two days later, Maskhadov narrowly survived an assassination attempt. A former artillery officer from the Soviet era, Maskhadov was a committed nationalist and separatist, but he was one of the few Chechen leaders the Kremlin could negotiate with. For much of the year planning had been under way for Maskhadov to meet with Primakov or even Yeltsin himself to finalize Chechnya’s transition to independence, as allowed in the peace accords of 1996. Now Maskhadov suggested that “certain forces” in Moscow had conspired to kill him as a pretext for declaring a state of emergency and avoiding a resolution of Chechnya’s fate. Putin angrily denounced the accusation.
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The peace accords that had suspended the first war had been a humiliation to Russia. They now no longer offered much hope for resolving the republic’s ultimate drive for independence. The Kremlin’s security men, including Putin, began drafting plans for a new war instead.

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T
he renewed turmoil in Chechnya unfolded as Russia was facing a war waged by the Soviet Union’s archenemy, NATO, against the country’s Slavic brothers in Serbia. After the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Serbia turned its nativist fury on the once-autonomous Muslim region within its own borders, Kosovo. At the end of 1998, Serbia’s president, Slobodan Milošević, launched a campaign to crush separatist militias in the region; within months, the campaign looked more and more like the ethnic cleansing that had occurred in Bosnia only a few years before. Europe and the United States, shamed by their dithering over the earlier killing, responded aggressively.

The prospect of a NATO military intervention to protect Kosovo infuriated Russia in ways American and European leaders failed to appreciate. Serbia and Russia shared Slavic roots, religion, and culture, but Russia’s concerns went deeper. The conflict in Serbia inflamed Russia’s wounded pride over its deflated status since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The new Russia lacked the ability to shape world events, which made the American-led actions even harder to swallow. Yeltsin berated President Clinton, insisting that an intervention was forbidden by international law, only to be ignored. Russia resented the fact that the United States and its expanding NATO alliance were acting as if they could
impose their will on the new world order without regard to Russia’s interests. Even worse, the conflict in Kosovo had striking parallels to the one in Chechnya, and even Russians not prone to paranoia could imagine a NATO campaign on behalf of Chechnya’s independence movement.
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