The New Tsar (37 page)

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P
utin had been in office a year before he moved, abruptly and surgically, to bring the recalcitrant military command under his control. The minister of defense, Marshal Igor Sergeyev, had already passed retirement age, but he extended his term annually by appealing first to Yeltsin and then to Putin in 2000. Sergeyev, then sixty-three, assumed that his reappointment in early 2001 would again be a mere formality.
¹⁶
Like Yeltsin before him, Putin favored secrecy and surprise in the timing of his announcements. Only his trusted advisers knew of his plan, and Sergeyev was not among them, otherwise he would not have miscalculated the level of support he actually had in the Kremlin. On March 28, Putin assembled his national security team at the Kremlin and announced that Sergei Ivanov would take over as minister of defense. Ivanov was so close to Putin that he was sometimes described as an alter ego. Thin and pale, his hair parted sharply on the left, his face perpetually pinched, he had joined the KGB after studying English and Swedish at Leningrad State University. He and Putin met in 1977 at the Big House, where they worked together for two years before Ivanov’s career took off.
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He attended the Red Banner Institute outside Moscow and by 1981 had emerged as a foreign intelligence operative who served under diplomatic cover in Soviet embassies in Finland, Sweden, and Kenya, and maybe Britain. That his résumé remained so opaque underscored the sort of spy he was—and Putin was not. Unlike Putin he never resigned, rising through the ranks of the post-Soviet foreign intelligence service to become the youngest general in the new Russia. When Putin became director of the FSB, he appointed Ivanov as a deputy; Ivanov later followed him into the Kremlin, where he joined Putin’s inner circle of aides, attending the national security meetings held on Mondays, but also the less formal Saturday meetings and the purely social gatherings that occurred at Putin’s presidential residence whenever the mood struck, often late into the night.
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Ivanov was often portrayed as a hardliner, a
silovik
, who reflected Putin’s own experience and conservative views. He certainly shared Putin’s goal of remaking a bloated, inefficient military. Having retired from his military rank in the FSB, Ivanov became the first civilian to head the ministry in Soviet or Russian history. “As you can see, civilians are coming to take up key positions in military agencies,” Putin said when he announced the appointment. “This is also a deliberate step. It is a step towards the demilitarization of Russia’s social life.”
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Putin’s appointments signaled a break with Yeltsin, albeit a modest
one. He appointed the first woman to a senior position in the Ministry of Defense, Lyubov Kudelina, putting her in charge of overseeing the military budget. He replaced the interior minister with another Petersburger, Boris Gryzlov, who headed the pro-Putin bloc in the Duma, but he did not demote anyone except the minister for nuclear affairs, Yevgeny Adamov, who was later charged in an American court for embezzling $9 million in funds earmarked to bolster security at nuclear sites.
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The newspaper
Izvestia
declared that Putin’s “team now really has been brought together like a ‘fist.’ ”
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As defense minister, Ivanov watched the prospect of an American intervention on Russia’s periphery with alarm. Three days after the September 11 attacks, Ivanov ruled out “even the hypothetical possibility of NATO military operations on the territory of Central Asian nations.”
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Putin, though, felt that the United States now understood the threat of Islamic terrorism and was gratified. He traveled to Germany two weeks later and addressed the Bundestag, beginning his remarks in Russian and then shifting to “the language of Goethe, of Schiller and of Kant.” “Today we must state firmly and finally,” he said, “the Cold War is over!” The German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, reciprocated by declaring that the world should moderate its criticism of Russia’s military operations in Chechnya (even as he pressed Putin privately to intervene in the most prominent military trial involving war crimes by Russian soldiers).
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When Putin returned to Moscow on September 24, he went to the Ministry of Defense, a hulking white building on the Bulvar Ring in the city’s center, and ordered the commanders to work with the Americans. He overruled Ivanov, who quietly dropped his public opposition to the American operations in Central Asia.

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P
utin expected something for his acquiescence to a post–Cold War order. He invested heavily in developing a personal relationship with Bush. Already the first Russian or Soviet leader since Lenin to speak a foreign language, he took lessons in English for an hour a day, learning the language of American diplomacy and commerce, and he used his rudimentary skill to speak privately with Bush and to break the ice. In Slovenia, walking in the garden, he remarked on the commonalities between them. “I see you named your daughters after your mother and your mother-in-law.” When Bush replied, “Aren’t I a good diplomat?” Putin laughed and said, “I did the same thing!”
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In private, he felt he could be candid with Bush about their differences, trying to make him
understand the difficulties that Russia—that he—faced in the transition from the Soviet ruins. He sought some kind of accommodation with the United States, even with NATO.

When he met Bush again on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shanghai in October, Putin proposed changes in the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that would allow some tests of the American missile defense system that Bush coveted but leave the treaty’s main provisions in place for another year or two. He considered the treaty critical to Russia’s strategic defense, and a delay would give its scientists time to develop new weapons that would counter the American system. He also pressed Bush to agree to lower the number of nuclear weapons each country had, an essential step for Putin in reducing the costs of sustaining Russia’s military. He considered his proposal a sensible compromise, and Bush promised to consider it, but his administration was feeling heady following the invasion of Afghanistan. The Pentagon dug in its heels, balking at Putin’s proposal that Russia be notified in advance of each and every test and be allowed to monitor the progress of a defense system that, ultimately, could negate Russia’s standing as a nuclear superpower. When Putin arrived in Washington in November for his first visit to the United States as president, he still imagined a grand bargain was possible, but any hope of one evaporated when he met Bush in the White House.

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“M
y God,” Putin blurted out when he entered the Oval Office on the morning of November 13, the light streaming through the south windows. “This is beautiful.” Bush, like his aides, never stopped being confounded by the seeming contradictions contained by “a former KGB agent from the atheist Soviet Union”
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and never seemed to imagine that perhaps an agent might use them to his advantage. Bush felt certain that they would overcome the differences of the past. The common cause they had forged over the attacks of September 11 bore fruit, in his mind, even as they met: the night before, the Taliban abandoned Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, and retreated in disarray. “This thing just might unravel like a cheap suit,” Bush told him. Condoleezza Rice, who speaks Russian, could not be sure of the exact translation but said Putin roared in approval.
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The next day the Putins flew to Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. The Bushes greeted them in a pouring rain, with Lyudmila handing Laura Bush a single yellow rose, a symbol of Texas lore. They stayed in
the ranch’s guesthouse next door to the Bushes, and arrived at dinner an hour early, forgetting the time change from Washington. When dinner finally began, they ate barbecue and listened to the pianist Van Cliburn and a country swing band playing songs like “Cotton-Eyed Joe.” Lyudmila wore a dress with red, white, and blue sequins, and when Putin offered a toast, he sounded personally moved. “I’ve never been to the home of another world leader,” he said, adding that the United States was “fortunate at such a critical time in its history to have a man of such character at its helm.”
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The down-home camaraderie continued when they met students at Crawford High School the next day, after which Putin flew to New York and visited the ruins of the World Trade Center, still smoldering two months after the attack.

Then, three weeks later, Bush telephoned Putin in Moscow and informed him he was withdrawing from the ABM treaty despite Putin’s objections. The only concession that Putin wrested from him after six months of talks—and four meetings between the two leaders—was the courtesy of a week’s advance notice before Bush announced the move publicly in the middle of December.

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T
hroughout the debate over Afghanistan and missile defense, Putin managed to prevent any eruption of nationalist fervor over his quiet accommodation with Bush’s actions and policies. Yeltsin had railed against the United States and the West in part to protect his political flanks. Putin instead co-opted those in Russia most critical of America, cementing his dominance of the parliament in the same slow, stealthy, and methodical way that he had done with the military. One of Putin’s first legislative initiatives in 2000 had been a restructuring of the Federation Council, then comprising the governors of the country’s eighty-nine regions and their representatives who, as they showed in the Skuratov affair, operated independently of the Kremlin. The move, along with the creation of seven regional envoys, faced opposition at first but ultimately succeeded in reining regional leaders under Putin’s control. Over time, the upper house that had tormented Yeltsin became a rubber stamp filled with Putin loyalists. In Putin’s first years in office, the Kremlin also controlled an unwieldy majority in the Duma; some of his early reforms—especially an effort to allow the privatization of agricultural land—still faced opposition. Putin disdained party politics and legislative jockeying, as he had as Anatoly Sobchak’s deputy facing Petersburg’s
city council. To him, the political blocs of the legislative branch should be instruments of the Kremlin’s executive. He said he had no desire to re-create a single ruling party that would govern Russia as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had; he intended to create several parties, all effectively reliant on the Kremlin. In July 2001, Putin signed a new election law to reduce the number of parties by requiring memberships of more than fifty thousand, dispersed through at least half of the country. Ostensibly the idea was to create a two-party or three-party system like those in Europe, the only difference being that all the parties would be loyal or at least pliant. Although he professed his commitment to democracy, he had little patience for debates with uncertain outcomes. Unity already shared control of the parliament’s committees with the Communists, but to consolidate its power, Putin’s aides orchestrated a merger with the party of Primakov and Luzhkov, unveiling it in a new congress on December 1, 2001. The new party was to be called United Russia, an organization filled with the officials and bureaucrats of Putin’s “party of power.”

The mastermind of the Kremlin’s political strategy was Vladislav Surkov, a Chechen-born advertising genius with a background in military intelligence who in the 1990s had worked for the banks of three of Russia’s oligarchs, including Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He joined Aleksandr Voloshin’s staff while Yeltsin was still president, and more than anyone else he helped craft Putin’s public image and engineered his political strategies. He was youthful and deeply cynical, a fan of American rap music—he kept a picture of Tupac Shakur next to one of Putin—and Shakespeare, whose work he considered a font of political inspiration. As a Russian novelist and activist, Eduard Limonov, once said, Surkov had “turned Russia into a wonderful postmodernist theater, where he experiments with old and new political models.”
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In April 2002, Surkov overturned the Duma’s leadership in what became known as the “portfolio putsch.” The Kremlin’s allies ousted the Communists from the committee posts that Putin had offered them shortly after the elections in 1999, while the Communist speaker, Gennady Seleznyov, threw his support to the Kremlin and abandoned his party colleagues. Putin, as aloof as a tsar from the petty squabbles of the dukes and boyars, had effectively decapitated the Communist leadership. Gennady Zyuganov, the party’s chief, who had once seemed a serious threat to Yeltsin’s Kremlin, could only sputter in protest. “Even
when tipsy, Yeltsin had the courage to gather leaders of different factions in critical moments and look for a solution together, rather than starting a new war,” he said bitterly.
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The motive for Putin’s reshuffling of the legislative leadership became clear two weeks later when he delivered his annual address to the Federal Assembly, which comprised the upper and lower houses of parliament. In the Marble Hall of the Kremlin Presidium, Putin touted his accomplishments—a drop in unemployment, rising incomes, a balanced budget, Russia’s return to its position as the world’s second-largest oil producer—but he lamented the “large and clumsy” bureaucracy of the government, the unreformed ministries that still acted as “branches of a centralized economy.” He needed a parliamentary majority not to debate the issues but to pass the legislation the Kremlin needed to impose solutions. And for an hour, he listed a host of liberal reforms intended to transform the judiciary, to create a mortgage system to expand the housing market, to end the draft and introduce a professional volunteer military, and to write regulations that would hasten Russia’s membership in the World Trade Organization. It was an ambitious agenda, and he now had few obstacles to imposing it.