The New Tsar (30 page)

“I want to step down this year, Vladimir Vladimirovich,” Yeltsin said he told him. “This year. That’s very important. The new century must begin with a new political era, the era of Putin. Do you understand?”

Putin did not understand. His reaction made Yeltsin’s heart sink. There had been rumors throughout the autumn that Yeltsin might step down and, according to the Constitution, pass power to the sitting prime minister. As recently as September, Putin had ruled out the idea as preposterous. “If I am absolutely sure about anything, it is that the
president has no intention of going,” he said. “No resignation whatsoever.”
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And yet now Yeltsin explained to him that that was what he intended to do, playing the last “trick up his sleeve.”
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The new, untested Constitution gave Yeltsin considerable control over the timing of his departure. Were the president to resign, the prime minister would become acting president until elections could be held ninety days later. Although that left little time for an election campaign, it would give the “incumbent” enormous advantage over his rivals.

The two men sat in silence as the realization dawned slowly on Yeltsin that Putin felt unprepared for the presidency. “I’m not ready for that decision, Boris Nikolayevich,” Putin finally replied. “It’s a rather difficult destiny.”
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Yeltsin, trying to persuade him, explained that he had arrived in Moscow to work when he was already over fifty—older than Putin—but “an energetic, healthy person” nonetheless. Now, he realized, his political life was exhausted. “At one time, I, too, wanted to live my life in a completely different way,” he told Putin. “I didn’t know it was going to turn out this way.” Yeltsin claimed, improbably, that he would get back into construction or move back to Sverdlovsk, where he had begun his career. He looked out the window at the gray, snowy landscape, lost in thought. After an interlude, he returned to the matter at hand.

“You haven’t answered me,” he said to Putin, looking him in the eye.

Putin, at last, agreed. No one else knew of their conversation, according to Yeltsin, or the momentous decision they had made.

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W
hen the votes were counted on the night of December 19, after an election that was fiercely contested and considered more or less fair, Unity had achieved a stunning upset. The Communist Party had won a plurality of 24 percent, consolidating its base, but Unity came in second with 23 percent. The Luzhkov-Primakov alliance, which had seemed poised to coast to power only months before, lagged behind with only 13 percent of the vote, its leaders battered by negative television coverage—and badly beaten. Yabloko and a new liberal coalition that allied with Yeltsin, the Union of Right Forces, which Putin had also “endorsed” with a few polite words, together won nearly as much. Yeltsin drank champagne on election night in anticipation of a victory, but went to bed worrying as the unofficial results trickled in. When he woke, he felt his trust in Putin had been vindicated.
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Yeltsin boasted that he had maneuvered Putin “from obscurity into the presidency over fierce resistance”
from the political elite, inside and outside the Kremlin. “It really was very hard, getting Putin into the job—one of the hardest things we ever pulled off,” Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana later said.
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For Yeltsin, this would be his parting legacy, one that would reshape the country he had nurtured out of the ruins of the Soviet Union. For the first time in his turbulent presidency, Yeltsin could rely on a pro-government majority in the new Duma, ending the paralyzing political clashes over Russia’s transition. He could have cemented his policies and even introduced new ones in his remaining six months as president. Instead, he resigned.

On December 28, Yeltsin sat in front of a decorated tree in the Kremlin’s reception hall and taped the president’s traditional New Year’s address. When he finished he complained that his voice was hoarse and he did not like the remarks. He asked the television crew to come back in three days and, despite their protests, record a new address. It was a ruse, though apparently only he knew it then. He returned to his residence and that evening summoned his current and former chiefs of staff, two of his closest advisers. What he said stunned them; he planned to resign on New Year’s Eve. Yeltsin had one last grandiose, impetuous surprise to unleash on the country. He would end his presidency with the old millennium and let Vladimir Putin usher in the new one. The next morning he called Putin to the Kremlin and told him the timing of what they had discussed in the abstract fifteen days before. “I immediately had the impression that he was a different man,” Yeltsin thought when the prime minister arrived.
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The discussion that followed was practical, detailed, and unemotional. They discussed the decrees that Yeltsin and then Putin would issue, the rerecording of the New Year’s address, the notification of the military and security agencies, the transfer of the “suitcase” carrying the codes to launch Russia’s arsenal of nuclear weapons. When they finished, they emerged from Yeltsin’s office, constrained by the public setting. They said nothing, though Yeltsin felt the urge to say more. Instead they shook hands, then Yeltsin wrapped Putin in a bear hug and said good-bye. Their next meeting was on New Year’s Eve.
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On December 30, Putin filled in for Yeltsin at a reception in the Kremlin. The aging president’s absence was noted but, given his frequent bouts of ill health, assigned little significance. Despite the festive occasion, Putin focused his remarks on the war in Chechnya, which was turning into a gruesome bloodbath as Russian forces surrounded Grozny. The city was reduced to ruins the likes of which had not been
seen in Russia—or anywhere else—since the Great Patriotic War. Thousands of civilians remained trapped inside, cowering in basements with no electricity, heat, or running water. Chechnya’s rebels continued to hold much of Grozny, killing hundreds of the Russian soldiers trying to seize it. Aslan Maskhadov reiterated his calls for a negotiated ceasefire, even as he vowed to keep fighting. “Even if the war lasts 10 years, Russia will not manage to subjugate Chechnya and its people,” he declared.
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As the fighting worsened, Russia faced mounting criticism from Europe and the United States about the unfolding humanitarian crisis, including evidence that Russian soldiers were conducting summary executions in “cleansing” operations in liberated areas. “Soldiers in Russian-controlled areas of Chechnya apparently have carte blanche to loot and pillage; many people have returned briefly to their homes to find them stripped bare of household goods and other valuables,” Human Rights Watch wrote in a letter to the United Nations Security Council, calling for an international investigation into war crimes.
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At the Kremlin, Putin brushed aside misgivings about the brutality of the war, saying it was the country’s duty to crush the “brazen and impudent” rebels at all costs. “Unfortunately,” he told the assembled guests before lifting a toast to the New Year, “not everyone in Western nations understood this, but we will not tolerate any humiliation to the national pride of Russians or any threat to the integrity of the country.”
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Yeltsin woke early the next morning, and before he left for the Kremlin, he at last told his wife, Naina, of his decision to resign. “How wonderful!” she exclaimed. “Finally!” Still, only six people knew as he rode to the Kremlin for the last time as president, not even his presidential guard or his aides, who left his mail, his schedule, and his other documents on his desk. Voloshin, his chief of staff, arrived with the decree stating that the resignation would take effect at midnight. Yeltsin summoned Putin, who arrived on time at 9:30, and then read the decree aloud. He looked at Putin, who “gave a slightly embarrassed smile,” and then shook Yeltsin’s hand. Now Yeltsin taped a new address, and Yumashev accompanied the recording in an armored car to the Ostankino television tower with orders to broadcast it at noon. As the new millennium began in the Pacific and marched hour by hour across each time zone, Yeltsin addressed “my dear friends” one last time.

“I have heard people say more than once that Yeltsin would cling to power as long as possible, that he would never let go,” he said. “That is a lie.” He said that he wanted to create “a vital precedent of voluntary
transfer of power to a newly elected president” but that he would not wait until the presidential election scheduled for June. “Russia should enter the new millennium with new politicians, new faces, new people who are intelligent, strong and energetic, while we, those who have been in power for many years, must leave.”

Yeltsin rubbed a speck from his eye and finished with a strikingly personal appeal to the country he had led for eight years. “I want to ask your forgiveness—for the dreams that have not come true, and for the things that seemed easy [but] turned out to be so excruciatingly difficult. I am asking your forgiveness for failing to justify the hopes of those who believed me when I said that we would leap from the gray, stagnating totalitarian past into a bright, prosperous and civilized future. I believed in that dream. I believed that we would cover that distance in one leap. We didn’t.”
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L
yudmila had not watched Yeltsin’s address, but five minutes after it ended, a friend telephoned. “Lyuda, I congratulate you,” she said. “And I you,” Lyudmila replied, thinking they were exchanging best wishes for the New Year.
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Her friend had to explain that her husband had become the acting president of the country. Putin had not divulged Yeltsin’s secret after their first meeting on December 14, or the timing after the second on December 29. She heard it along with the rest of Russia. Her husband’s rise in Moscow had left her marveling at times that she was married to “a man who yesterday was really just an unknown deputy mayor of Petersburg.”
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As she had feared when he returned to the FSB, her family’s life became constrained. The girls, now fifteen and thirteen, had to stop going to the German school they had been attending since they arrived in Moscow; they were tutored at home. Security guards accompanied them on their rare excursions to the theater or cinema. When asked, Lyudmila said she had only three close friends. When Putin returned to the FSB, she had had to end a friendship she had developed with the wife of a German banker, Irene Pietsch, while they were in Petersburg. “She was not happy at all,” said Pietsch, who went on to write
Delicate Friendships
, a titillating book about the Putins that described a stormy marriage.
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In it Lyudmila complained that her husband would not let her use a credit card—no doubt worried about the scandal surrounding Yeltsin’s daughters—and joked that his lifestyle was like a vampire’s. “This isolation is dreadful,” Lyudmilla told Pietsch when she ended the friendship.
“No more traveling wherever we want to go. No longer able to say what we want. I had only just begun to live.” Her husband, too, could be cutting, and dismissive of her opinions. He once told Pietsch during a weeklong visit to their dacha in Arkhangelskoye that anyone who could spend three weeks with Lyudmila deserved a monument.
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Now, Lyudmila was about to become first lady, a modern, Western role that Russians viewed ambivalently. She cried when she learned of her husband’s new job, she said, because she “realized that our private life was over for at least three months, until the presidential elections, or perhaps for four years.”
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Putin, after Yeltsin’s announcement, presided over a meeting of the Security Council, which he had led until becoming prime minister only four months before. Its members included the leaders of the Duma and the Federation Council, as well as the ministers of defense and the interior and the intelligence chiefs. Those in the room had been in Moscow far longer than he had and had far more experience in government and politics. Now they listened as he outlined his priorities. He pledged no change in Russia’s foreign policy but signaled a new era in military affairs: Russia had to improve its weaponry and address the social problems of its conscripted ranks, an “aspect that has been neglected recently.” He noted the conspicuous absence of the prosecutor general, Yuri Skuratov, whose investigations had done as much as anything to propel him to his post, but then pointedly added that the acting prosecutor, Vladimir Ustinov, seemed “to be doing a good job.” His remarks were brief, almost perfunctory given the occasion. He urged vigilance for the New Year given the fear of potential Y2K computer glitches that around the world had been the biggest news of the day—until Yeltsin’s resignation.

Putin then recorded his own New Year’s address, the one that Yeltsin would normally have delivered, to be broadcast at midnight in Moscow. He began with his own embellishment, saying that he and his family had planned to gather around the television that night and listen to Yeltsin’s speech, “but things took a different turn.” He assured listeners that there would be no power vacuum—“not for a minute”—and vowed to continue his efforts to restore law and order. “I promise you that any attempts to act contrary to the Russian law and Constitution will be cut short.” He ended by offering his gratitude to the nation’s first president. “We will be able to see the true importance of what Boris Yeltsin has done for Russia,” he said, “only after some time has passed.”