The New Tsar (27 page)

Yeltsin claimed he had decided on his next course of action months before, though given his reactive and improvisational leadership, that seems doubtful. Even if he had thought of it earlier, no one else knew what he had decided to do, not even his closest advisers, until the announcement was imminent.
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It certainly seemed impetuous, not planned. On August 5 he summoned Putin to his dacha outside Moscow for a secret meeting.

“I’ve made a decision, Vladimir Vladimirovich,” Yeltsin told him, “and I would like to offer you the post of prime minister.”

Putin said nothing at first; he simply stared attentively at Yeltsin, digesting the news. Yeltsin explained “the state of affairs,” the brewing trouble in the Caucasus, the economy and inflation, and the thing that obsessed him most: the Kremlin’s need to manufacture a parliamentary majority in elections that were now just four short months away.
Putin, he believed, would act where Stepashin had dithered on the most existential issue facing the Kremlin: Yeltsin’s fate in the event Luzhkov or Primakov became the next president. Putin had already shown that he would act. As Luzhkov’s political momentum built in the spring, Putin had launched an investigation into the company controlled by his wife, Yelena Baturina. Her company, Inteko, had managed to win contract after contract, making her the first woman billionaire in Russia, a rags-to-riches tale that helped leave the millions of Russians impoverished by the collapse of the Soviet Union deeply embittered about this new capitalism and democracy—and not a little bit envious. Luzhkov bellowed in protest when investigators began poring through Baturina’s finances; he was no longer afraid to challenge Yeltsin and his senior security adviser. The FSB, Luzhkov protested, “unfortunately, works for the Kremlin today, not for the country.”
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Yeltsin was now asking Putin to take on a far more important role. He was asking him to build and lead a political party that could defeat those who had almost completely abandoned the president. When he finally spoke, Putin asked the obvious question: How can you build a parliamentary majority with no supporters in parliament?

“I don’t know,” Yeltsin replied.
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Putin reflected for an unusually long time in silence. His quiet demeanor had attracted Yeltsin, but now it seemed like hesitation.

“I don’t like election campaigns,” he finally said. “I really don’t. I don’t know how to run them, and I don’t like them.”

Yeltsin assured him that he would not have to run the campaign himself. Campaign tactics were the least of his worries. Experts could master political technologies. He must simply project what now eluded Yeltsin: confidence, authority, the military bearing he believed the country craved. In his desperation, the latter was very much on Yeltsin’s mind. Putin replied with “military terseness,” he recalled.

“I will work where you assign me.”

Yeltsin’s next remark nonetheless surprised him. “And in the highest post?”

For the first time, Yeltsin said, Putin seemed to comprehend the full intent of his plan. He was not being offered a sacrificial position, like the previous three prime ministers, who lasted only months in the office. Yeltsin was suggesting him as his heir as president, an endorsement that had eluded so many of Yeltsin’s senior aides.

A silence fell between the two men. Yeltsin felt the tick of the clock
in his office. He found himself contemplating Putin’s blue eyes. “They seem to speak more than his words,” he thought.
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He asked him to think about it, and then summoned Stepashin, who took the news of his dismissal as prime minister badly, pleading with Yeltsin to reconsider. Yeltsin, who preferred the quick execution of his decisions, uncharacteristically sympathized with his prime minister, who had been loyal to him throughout his presidency. Yeltsin agreed to think about it, a forbearance he immediately regretted. Anatoly Chubais, who had first worked with Putin in 1991, tried to talk Yeltsin out of his decision to appoint Putin as prime minister, appealing to the chief of staff, Aleksandr Voloshin, and to Yeltsin’s daughter. Chubais had always been cool to Putin, regarding him as a security man with little political savvy and, rightly, no political experience. Chubais had left Yeltsin’s administration for a final time and by then headed the state electricity monopoly, but he had masterminded Yeltsin’s comeback in 1996 and his political instincts were surer than Yeltsin’s at this point. There was little obvious advantage to replacing Stepashin with Putin. Neither had ever been elected to anything. They were the same age. Both came from Petersburg, and neither had any independent political base that would shore up Yeltsin. Chubais warned him that another reshuffling of his government would be seen as yet another act of madness that would bolster the Communists and the emerging alliance between Luzhkov and Primakov.

Even as Chubais was pleading his case however, events in the Caucasus hardened Yeltsin’s resolve. On August 7, a large force of Chechen fighters crossed the republic’s border and encircled three towns in the neighboring republic of Dagestan. Russia’s military and interior police had prepared for months for an incursion, but the Chechen forces again acted with impunity in the rugged borderland. They were commanded by two fighters: Shamil Basayev, a ferocious rebel commander, and a shadowy figure with the nom de guerre Khattab. Khattab, a Saudi, was a veteran of Islamic insurgencies dating back to the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. He was a conduit for the foreign influence that Putin had warned about. Stepashin, whose handling of a similar intrusion in 1995 had led to his dismissal as the head of the FSB, flew to Dagestan the next day with the military’s chief of staff, General Anatoly Kvashnin, to oversee what turned into a full battle between the Chechen fighters and Russian troops. Stepashin declared that there would be no repetition of the mistakes of the Chechen war, and Russian artillery
and rockets began hammering the villages occupied by the Chechen forces. When Stepashin flew back to Moscow the next day, Yeltsin went ahead with his plans and fired him, nominating Putin as the next prime minister.

“I have now decided to name a person who in my opinion can bring society together,” Yeltsin said in a television speech on August 9. “Relying on the broadest political powers, he will ensure the continuation of reforms in Russia.” Yeltsin did not explicitly name Putin as his anointed heir, but he did mention the election scheduled for June 2000, expressing hope the voters would also find confidence in this diminutive, still relatively untested leader. “I think that he has enough time to show his worth.”

“This is the kiss of death,” a prominent Communist strategist, Leonid Dobrokhotov, declared at the time, referring to Yeltsin’s endorsement. “Given the universal loathing of him in the country, any recommendation by him of any politician, even the best, points the way to the grave.”
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The Duma’s speaker, Gennady Seleznyov, also declared that Yeltsin had ended Putin’s political career, saying that deputies should “not waste weeks” debating the nomination since “he could be fired in the next three months.” Even Putin himself doubted his future as a political leader, a future he had not considered for himself, as anyone who knew him well understood.

It had already been a difficult summer for Putin. His father’s health had deteriorated badly, and despite his ever increasing responsibilities at the FSB and security council, Putin traveled to Petersburg at least once a week to see him. His mother, Maria, had died the year before. Both had lived long enough to see him rise through the ranks of the city and federal governments that emerged out of the ruins of the Soviet Union. Putin’s relationship with his father had never been close, but the taciturn old veteran’s pride was palpable. On his deathbed, he exclaimed, “My son is like a tsar.”
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He died on August 2, and Putin had just returned from the funeral in Petersburg when Yeltsin offered him the post of prime minister.

Putin knew, despite what Yeltsin would later claim, that the president might discard him as quickly as he had discarded Stepashin, Primakov, and Kiriyenko. He calculated he had two, three, maybe four months before he too would be dismissed. Now, at the age of forty-six, he felt he had been given his “historical mission,” and only a short time to complete it. The violence on Chechnya’s border with Dagestan seemed
like a continuation of the dissolution that had begun in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. The war in Chechnya had been a humiliation. Russia’s leaders had reacted timidly to what was an existential threat to the nation. He felt the country was coming apart as Yugoslavia had and as East Germany had. “If we don’t put an immediate end to this, Russia will cease to exist,” he recalled thinking. The war in Chechnya had been profoundly unpopular, dragging down Yeltsin’s reputation and prompting a vote on his impeachment. He knew a new conflict would be risky too. “I realized I could only do this at the cost of my political career,” he said. “It was a minimal cost, and I was prepared to pay up.” He recalled being a tiny kid in the courtyard who the bullies were sure “was going get his butt kicked.” Not this time. In the Caucasus, he was going “to bang the hell out of those bandits.”
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CHAPTER 10

In the Outhouse

D
agestan is the southernmost part of Russia, an ethnically diverse land that borders the Caspian Sea and rises into the mountain peaks of the Eastern Caucasus at its border with Chechnya. Like Chechnya, it is predominantly Muslim, but it is also one of the most heterogeneous places in the world, with dozens of ethnicities and languages. It first came under Russian rule at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and had joined the other republics of the Caucasus to form a briefly independent state after the Bolshevik revolution. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, it did not join Chechnya in declaring its independence from Russia. Secession had little public support there among the various peoples, though the idea of unifying with Chechnya was debated for much of the 1990s.

The commander who led the incursion from Chechnya on August 7, Shamil Basayev, declared his intention to create an Islamic state of Dagestan, hoping to expand his political and ideological campaign of violence and terror in order to bolster his own power in Chechnya. Along with the Saudi fighter Khattab, he led a force of two thousand fighters who seized the small villages along the mountainous border. The exact goal of the raid remained unclear, but thanks to the tensions that had been rising ever since General Shpigun’s kidnapping (his body would later be found), the Russian military was better prepared. As interior minister and, after May, as prime minister, Sergei Stepashin had drafted plans for a police and military operation that would restore federal order in Chechnya; Putin, as FSB chief and head of Yeltsin’s Security Council, was involved in shaping those plans. Stepashin would later claim that they had settled on the timing of the operation—August or September—long before Basayev’s incursion.
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Stepashin’s plan had limited military objectives: to seize the plains in the northern third of Chechnya, the lowlands
up to the Terek River, creating a cordon sanitaire that would contain the radicalism and criminality in the republic’s mountains.

In the wake of Basayev’s incursion into Dagestan, Putin now had something far more ambitious in mind. He asked Yeltsin for “absolute power” to coordinate all the security ministries and conduct military operations—authority that officially belonged to the president as commander in chief. Yeltsin agreed, the first time he had delegated so much of his presidential prerogative to a prime minister.
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The day after his appointment in August, Putin declared that Russia’s commanders would reestablish control in Dagestan, and he gave them a deadline of two weeks. His nomination had not even been confirmed yet. By August 13, Russian bombers and helicopter gunships bombarded the villages occupied by the Chechen fighters, and Putin threatened to carry the air war into Chechnya itself. The next day the Russians did exactly that, bombing villages that the incursion forces were using as bases.

On August 16, the Duma took up Putin’s nomination and by only a narrow margin confirmed him after a debate that focused more on the election campaign than on his qualifications for the post or the violence unfolding in the south. He received 233 votes, only 7 more than the minimum needed, and far less than Stepashin, Primakov, or Kiriyenko had.
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Putin seemed a transitional figure at best, soon to be swept aside. In his brief, clipped remarks before the parliament, Putin pledged to restore discipline in the government, and he reminded Russia’s generals of the deadline for repulsing the invaders in Dagestan. “They have one week left.”

And a week later Basayev’s fighters withdrew, having miscalculated the ferocity of the Russian reprisals and the dearth of local support in Dagestan for an Islamic uprising. Although Dagestan had adherents to a radical strain of Islam, the republic’s myriad ethnic groups remained far more loyal to the Russian state than the Chechens.
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Local police and paramilitary forces had joined the federal troops in resisting the invaders, and by August 26 they had raised Russia’s tricolor flag over the villages that had been occupied and then destroyed in two weeks of air strikes. The next day Putin flew to Dagestan, accompanied by newspaper and television journalists who were not told their destination until they landed at the regional capital, Makhachkala. With heavy security and complete secrecy, the entourage then boarded a helicopter and flew to Botlikh, a mountain village at the center of the invasion, only five miles from the Chechen border. Putin, dressed casually in slacks and a
jacket, addressed a group of Russian and Dagestani fighters and passed out fifty medals. He announced that three Hero of Russia medals, the nation’s highest military honor, would be awarded later in ceremonies at the Kremlin. A fourth would be granted posthumously. By the official count, nearly sixty Russian soldiers had died during the fighting—no one announced the rebel or civilian casualties—but Putin was there to proclaim their cause just, the losses worthy. He began to offer a toast to those who died but stopped in mid-sentence.