The New Tsar (31 page)

As Yeltsin prepared to leave the Kremlin, he paused in the hallway
outside his office—now Putin’s—and extracted from his pocket the pen he had used to sign his last decree. He gave it to Putin as they walked out to the door of the Kremlin, two men so different in temperament and physique. Their relationship, Putin said later, had not been “particularly close.” It was never warm in the way that he remembered his feelings for Sobchak. “I can say that only when he began to discuss the question of his resignation with me did I sense a certain warmth in him,” Putin recalled later.
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Now Yeltsin wanted to say “something important” about the burden he would now face. “Take care,” he told him, “take care of Russia.” A soft, gentle snowfall surrounded the Kremlin’s grounds as he twisted his large frail frame into the armored car that would take him home. Bill Clinton telephoned on the drive back to his dacha, but Yeltsin had an aide tell him to call back later. He went home and took a nap.
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That evening Putin signed his first decree. It was seven pages long, having been prepared by Yeltsin’s aides in the previous two days, though Yeltsin would claim he was not aware of it until it was completed.
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It granted Yeltsin an array of benefits and privileges as a former president, including a salary, a staff, and the use of the dacha where he had spent so much of his second term convalescing. It also made Yeltsin immune from prosecution, protecting his assets and papers from search or seizure. With a sweep of the pen Yeltsin passed to him, Putin ended the threat that Skuratov had exposed and that very nearly brought Yeltsin to ruin.

Putin then carried out his own New Year’s surprise. He and his successor at the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, along with their wives and a popular singer, secretly flew to Dagestan. The Putins told the girls that they would be gone that night but not where they were going. They had already given the girls their presents—their first computers—and left them in Moscow with Lyudmila’s sister and one of Masha’s friends. After arriving in Dagestan, Putin and the others boarded three military helicopters and flew toward Chechnya’s second-largest city, Gudermes, recently liberated from the Chechen rebels. The weather was so foul, with visibility so limited, that the helicopters had to turn back. When the New Year and the new millennium arrived, they were still airborne, but they opened two bottles of champagne and passed them around, drinking from the bottles since they had no glasses. When they landed in Dagestan’s capital, Makhachkala, they climbed into military vehicles under heavy escort and drove two and a half hours back into Chechnya. It was nearly dawn when Putin greeted the Russian troops there. “They looked tired and a little disoriented—as though they wanted to pinch
themselves,” Lyudmila recalled. “Were they dreaming?”
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It had been a quiet night in Gudermes, but only twenty-three miles away, Grozny endured one of the heaviest nights of bombing to date. Putin, dressed in a turtleneck, again handed out medals and ceremonial knives. “I want you to know that Russia highly appreciates what you’re doing,” Putin told the soldiers mustered there. “This is not just about restoring Russia’s honor and dignity. It’s about putting an end to the breakup of the Russian Federation.” The Yeltsin era was over. The Putin era had begun.

PART THREE

CHAPTER 11

Becoming Portugal

V
ladimir Putin, who had never before been elected to political office, barely campaigned before the election, which because of Yeltsin’s resignation was moved forward to March 26, 2000. As prime minister, he painted his vision for Russia only in the broadest strokes. His only real campaign platform or agenda appeared in a manifesto on the government’s website on December 28, the eve of Yeltsin’s surprise appointment. The document was prepared by the Center for Strategic Development, a think tank founded by German Gref, an economist who was another of Putin’s colleagues in Anatoly Sobchak’s administration.
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In this five-thousand-word manifesto, called “Russia at the Turn of the Millennium,” Putin frankly acknowledged the country’s diminished social and economic status in the world. The country’s gross national product had dropped by half in the 1990s, and was now a tenth that of the United States and a fifth that of China. It would take fifteen years of substantial economic growth just to reach the level of Portugal or Spain.

“Russia is in the midst of one of the most difficult periods in its history,” the document said. “For the first time in the past 200 [to] 300 years, it is facing the real threat of slipping down to the second and, possibly even third, rank of world states. We are running out of time to avoid this.”
²
The prescription was to restore national unity, patriotism, and a strong central government—not “the restoration of an official state ideology in Russia in any guise,” but a voluntary social pact that placed the authority of the state over the messy, divisive aspirations of its subjects. Its tone seemed almost religious, as if Putin were sharing a “personal revelation” of the middle road Russia would take between its authoritarian history and its democratic future.
³
“Russia needs strong state power and must have it. I am not calling for totalitarianism. History
proves all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government, are transient. Only democratic systems are lasting.”

With the duties of the presidency already his, Putin eschewed overtly political events during the short campaign. He held no rallies, gave no speeches, and refused to participate in debates with his challengers. Reflecting his dour character and disdain for retail politics, he was redefining the modern campaign in Russia in his own image and in ways that would stifle the democratic future the fall of the Soviet Union had seemed to usher in. Within days of becoming acting president on New Year’s Eve, Putin had co-opted his main potential rivals, tilting the playing field sharply in his favor. By the end of January 2000, the Unity bloc in the Duma had orchestrated an alliance not with the democrats or liberals, but rather with the Communists. Unity and the Communist Party divided up committee chairmanships among their members, while shutting out Yevgeny Primakov, as well as Sergei Kiriyenko, who had won a seat after his dismissal as prime minister, and Grigory Yavlinsky, the leading liberal in Russian politics. Their supporters promptly boycotted the Duma, and as a result a majority loyal to the Kremlin coalesced without regard to ideological differences. The country was learning that ideology mattered less to Putin than an orderly, pliant legislative majority.

A week later Luzhkov, who had been reelected as Moscow’s mayor in December, announced he would not compete against Putin for the presidency. Primakov, who had announced his candidacy on the eve of parliamentary elections, also gave up, pulling out of the presidential race two weeks later with bitter resignation. “I sense how far our society is from being a civil society and from a true democracy,” Primakov said.
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By early February, Putin’s most serious rivals—the ones who had terrified Yeltsin in the dying days of his presidency—had simply melted away before the official campaign began. One by one, regional governors then threw their support to Putin, even the man he had denounced as Judas four years before, Vladimir Yakovlev of Petersburg. The election, which had consumed Boris Yeltsin’s final months in office, turned out to be not much of a drama at all. It was not a democratic competition among candidates so much as a referendum on the man already holding the post. Only one governor, Vasily Starodubtsev, the Communist from Tula, declared support for one of Putin’s rivals, a fellow Communist, Gennady Zyuganov. “If there are no rivals, then there is no democracy, and if there is no democracy, then what was the point of demolishing the country?” he asked.
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Putin had told Yeltsin that he did not like election campaigns, and now he dismissed campaign promises as unachievable lies told by politicians and denigrated television advertisements as unseemly manipulation of gullible consumers. Visiting the textile city of Ivanovo, he announced that he would refuse the official television time allotted to all candidates to present their biographies and platforms. “These videos are advertising,” he said, belying his appreciation of the importance of television in shaping his public image. “I will not be trying to find out in the course of my election which is more important, Tampax or Snickers.” Behind the scenes, Putin’s aides nonetheless recruited a campaign staff, led by the young aide he had brought with him from Petersburg, Dmitri Medvedev. They conducted a sophisticated operation to shape Putin’s personal and political image, with all the tested techniques of modern politics but little passion for actual democracy. The result was an image not of a politician, but of a man above politics; Putin’s strategists succeeded beyond expectations. State television conducted a long biographical interview with him—which in his mind might not have amounted to a commercial, though that is what it was—and his campaign released a series of interviews conducted over six days by three journalists.

In book form the interviews were called
Ot Pervovo Litsa
, literally “From the First Person,” a phrase that also in Russian suggests “The First,” that is, the leader or the boss. Boris Berezovsky, who still controlled the first state television channel, paid for the printing of the book, eager to ingratiate himself with Putin after his influence within the Kremlin had fallen dramatically. (He and Yeltsin had not met since 1998.) When the Election Commission banned the commercial sale of the book as a violation of campaign laws, Putin’s headquarters simply purchased the first run in bulk and distributed the copies to voters at no cost.
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Putin, along with Lyudmila and others who had known him for years, recounted his biography in a folksy, occasionally frank manner that shaped his image as an ordinary guy, but also as the undisputed, virtually unchallenged ruler of a vast, once-great nation emerging from its latest “time of troubles.” Putin managed at once to express pride in his Soviet upbringing and his KGB career while distancing himself from the failures of the Soviet Union. He offered everyone something to cling to, a cipher committed both to the past and to the new democracy, both a patriot and a religious believer. And no one knew for sure what he stood for, because he seemed to stand for everything. In his short months in
prominence, the question “who is Putin?” became the refrain of journalists, academics, investors, foreign governments, and their intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, which set its analysts hurriedly to work to compose a profile, interviewing those who had had occasion to meet Putin during his years as an obscure underling.
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T
he strategy of Medvedev’s campaign team was simply to let Putin carry on with his official duties as prime minister and acting president. It was no coincidence, of course, that those duties took him across the country for (televised) encounters that would appeal across the entire spectrum of Russian society. He visited Russia’s space center outside Moscow one day, an oil rig in Surgut the next. He presided over meetings of his security advisers and an official visit from Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair. He pledged to pay all wage arrears by the end of spring. He raised pensions first by 12 percent, and then again by 20 percent, actions that contributed to his rising approval ratings at least as much as the war in Chechnya.
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Putin would not deign to debate his challengers, but his remarks on the government’s work received far more airtime than anything they ever said. He was not
promising
anything; he was delivering.

Once the month-long campaign officially opened, he published a letter to voters in three major newspapers that amounted to a public break with Yeltsin’s Russia. “The state machine is coming apart,” he wrote. “Its engine—the executive branch—sputters and hiccoughs as soon as you try to get it started.”
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He vowed to combat crime and declared that the war in Chechnya was a fight against “the criminal world,” not against an independence movement with historical claims to self-determination. In a barely veiled reference to Primakov’s threat to clear the jails to make way for those accused of “economic crimes,” he made clear he did not intend to reverse the messy, inequitable privatizations of the previous decade, but rather to reinforce the state’s control over the market in order to end “a vicious circle” of corrupt businessmen paying bribes to government workers and sapping resources from the budget that were needed to lift the poor out of poverty. “Millions of people in the country can barely make ends meet; they are skimping on everything, even on food,” he wrote. “The elderly, who won the Great Patriotic War and made Russia a glorious world power, are eking out a meager existence or, worse, begging in the streets.” Putin coined a slogan for his vision of a new, rule-abiding Russia that was secure and prosperous. It embodied the internal contradictions of his ideology, of his background as a lawyer
and intelligence officer, and of his temperament. He felt it so deeply he used it twice in one letter. Russia, he declared, would be “a dictatorship of the law.”

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T
he biggest threat to Putin’s popularity before the election, ironically, seemed to be the war that had propelled him to the Kremlin’s highest post. The lightning push to the Terek River in the fall of 1999, cheered on by the public, now bogged down over the winter in gruesome street fighting for control of Chechnya’s capital, block by ruined block. By the end of January 2000, when Russian troops pushed into Grozny, the military had acknowledged the deaths of 1,173 soldiers, though many accused the government of underreporting combat casualties by not including Russians from outside the military and Interior Ministry, including the FSB, or those who died of wounds later.
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The Russian troops suffered shortages of equipment, uniforms, food, and ammunition—and could not trust that they would not be killed by their own bombs.
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The heady burst of patriotic fervor that greeted the initial attack now faced the reality of a conflict that would be longer and bloodier than most Russians had expected.