The New Tsar (46 page)

Putin’s remarks sounded almost like an indictment of his first years in office, a recognition that
he
had failed to deliver on the promises he had made over and over. The reference to Russia’s “unprotected” borders revealed a blinkered understanding of the threat still emanating from Chechnya. He had long sought to link the war to the rise of Al-Qaeda globally, but despite a shared ideology of extremist Islam, the terrorism Russia faced was largely grown at home. Its roots reached back to the tsarist conquest of the Caucasus in the nineteenth century. Yet he believed that those who attacked the school had help from nations determined to punish Russia, to keep it weak and pliant. His tone was apocalyptic and defiant; he said the country had to unite to preserve its very existence. “Some want to tear off of us a juicy piece of pie,” he said. “Others help them to do it. They help because they think that Russia, as one of the greatest nuclear powers of the world, is still a threat, and this threat has to be eliminated. And terrorism is only an instrument to achieve these goals.”

Putin spoke as if he had experienced a great revelation, yet the war on terrorism was the one place where he had found common ground with world leaders. Despite occasional rebukes for the brutality of Russian tactics in Chechnya, no leader ever expressed sympathy for the terrorist tactics of Basayev and his followers. The only government that ever recognized Chechnya’s declaration of independence after the first war was the Taliban in Afghanistan, who the United States, with Russia’s blessing and assistance, had helped overthrow after the attacks of September 11, 2001. But now Putin blamed unseen enemies for abetting one of the most heinous terrorist acts in history. The country had grown lax and lazy in the face of this external threat, he said, and he vowed to take every possible measure to strengthen the state.

“We demonstrated weakness,” he said, “and the weak are beaten.”

—

T
he reforms that Putin promised in his national address after the Beslan tragedy were not long in coming. He did not shake up the intelligence services that had failed to anticipate the attack on a school. He did not fire the military or police commanders who had botched the attempted negotiations and the ultimate rescue. Instead, Putin announced that he would tighten the Kremlin’s political control by further dismantling the vestiges of democratic government.

On September 13, ten days after the horrifying end of the siege, Putin abolished the elections of governors, mayors, and presidents of Russia’s many regions and republics, who since the collapse of the Soviet Union had maintained their own constituencies and power bases outside of Moscow’s direct control. He would now appoint them and submit his candidates to the regional parliaments for ratification. If they rejected his candidates, he could then disband them. He also abolished the representative district elections for the parliament, which accounted for half of the Duma’s 450 seats. With opposition parties increasingly circumscribed, these elections provided the only independent and liberal members left in power after the 2003 elections.

The proposals shocked those who felt that for all of Putin’s authoritarian instincts, the country was nonetheless making steady, if halting, progress toward democracy.
Izvestiya
called it the “September Revolution,” while Putin’s critics denounced the moves as unconstitutional, even though they were resigned to the futility of any legal challenge. The most prominent criticism came from Boris Yeltsin. In an interview with
Moskovskiye Novosti
, he recalled his promise to remain out of the nation’s political debates in retirement, but said Beslan had been a watershed that had made Russia a “different country.” “We will not permit ourselves to renounce the letter and, most importantly, the spirit of the Constitution that the country adopted at a nationwide referendum in 1993—if only because strangling freedoms and curtailing democratic rights marks, among other things, the victory of terrorists.”
⁴⁵
Privately, Yeltsin despaired over the leader he had elevated to power, seeing Putin’s moves against the media, against opposition parties, and now against the governors as an erosion of his own legacy,
⁴⁶
but the interview was the only time Yeltsin had voiced his concerns so sharply in public. By now, though, Yeltsin’s moral and political authority had little force in Putin’s Russia. His time had passed, and his heir was taking the country on a new path. Indeed, the Yeltsin era—the erratic lurch through the chaos of
the 1990s—had become Putin’s recurring justification for his decisions. Step by step, Putin erased the legacy of his predecessor, as surely as Stalin had Lenin’s, as Khrushchev had Stalin’s, as Brezhnev had Khrushschev’s, as Yeltsin had Gorbachev’s.

Even those most affected by Putin’s new decree—the governors and mayors who owed their electoral legitimacy and authority to the ballot box, however compromised—stepped forward one by one to praise Putin’s proposal. The proposals had been debated before in his administration, but he used the Beslan tragedy as the pretext to implement them. Popular will, in Putin’s view, was the road to chaos. The people could not be entrusted with the power to choose their own leaders except in the most carefully controlled process. “The Russian people are backward,” he would later tell a group of foreign journalists and academics invited to a retreat that would become an annual affair known as the Valdai Club, after the resort where it was first held. “They cannot adapt to democracy as they have done in your countries. They need time.”
⁴⁷
His remarks reflected condescension that bordered on disdain, but few in Russia spoke up to challenge the authority he now took upon himself. Within weeks, the Duma and the Federation Council enacted all of his proposals, willingly handing more and more powers to the Kremlin. “The only thing left is absolute prostration,” Leonid Dobrokhotov, an adviser to the Communists, said in response.
⁴⁸
And most of Russia’s elite, either from loyalty or from fear, were happy to oblige.

CHAPTER 15

The Orange Contagion

O
n September 5, 2004, the night after Putin’s Beslan speech, Viktor Yushchenko drove surreptitiously to an exclusive, gated dacha outside Kyiv. He was running for president of Ukraine, and he was certain someone was trying to kill him. Accompanied by his campaign manager but not his bodyguards, he met General Ihor Smeshko, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine, or the SBU, the country’s own successor to the KGB. Smeshko had not wanted anyone else around. The host was Smeshko’s deputy, Volodymyr Satsyuk, whose cook prepared a midnight meal of boiled crawfish and salad, washed down with beer, followed later by a dessert of fruit with glasses of vodka and cognac.
¹
Nothing seemed amiss. Yushchenko posed for a photograph with the two security officials, and left at two o’clock in the morning. Later that day, he began to feel ill. His head hurt, and then so did his spine. His symptoms worsened in the days ahead and his handsome face was soon discolored and disfigured by an eruption of cysts. In pain, he traveled to Austria on September 10 for treatment, fearful of Ukrainian hospitals. After puzzling over his symptoms for weeks, the doctors there ultimately concluded that he had ingested, presumably at the late-night dinner, one of the highest doses ever recorded in a human of a highly toxic compound, known as 2,3,7, 8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, or TCDD.

Ukraine’s presidential election was scheduled for October 31, 2004. The winner would replace the president of the previous decade, Leonid Kuchma, an apparatchik who had been elected as a reformer in 1994, only to turn increasingly authoritarian and corrupt as Ukraine stumbled through its transition to democracy and capitalism. The country experienced the same chaos and corruption, poverty and criminality that Russia had, but there was a crucial difference. For many Ukrainians, the demise of the Soviet Union was not a catastrophe but a liberation—the
rebirth of independence from Moscow that it had experienced only very briefly, in the chaotic years that followed the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

With nearly forty-eight million people in 2004, Ukraine was the second largest and most important of the former Soviet republics, an agricultural and industrial heartland that had been devastated by the civil war; by the collectivization policies of Joseph Stalin, which produced a famine; and then by the Great Patriotic War, when it was occupied and ravaged by the Nazis and then retaken again by the liberating Soviet armies. Ukraine lost more than three million people during the war, more than a sixth of its population at the time, and the scars were deep. Ukraine’s nationhood—its national identity—remained tenuous. It was deeply divided geographically and ethnically between Ukrainians and Russians, among others; between those who embraced the liberation that came with the collapse of the Soviet Union and those who lamented its demise. Ukrainians were close to Russia, historically and culturally, but the nationalistic spirit that emerged in the country’s first years of independence resembled that of the former republics like Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, which had endured five decades of Soviet occupation and now were part of NATO and the European Union. They adopted Ukrinian symbols and Ukrainian names for cities, including the capital, which had been rendered in Russian as Kiev for centuries, but reverted in independence to the Ukrainian style, Kyiv.

Throughout his presidency, Kuchma balanced Russia on one side and the European Union, and even NATO, on the other. His government retained close economic and diplomatic ties with Russia, but also dispatched Ukrainian troops to Iraq as part of the American-led coalition that was then struggling to reestablish order after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Like the country itself, he seemed conflicted. To his many critics, he simply lacked conviction; he was a kleptocrat motivated by greed and power, beholden to the country’s oligarchs. Yet he never had the will or the power to stifle politics the way Putin had, because the country’s divisions ensured competing power centers. The country’s oligarchs themselves had divided loyalties and ambitions and thus were never entirely subservient. Putin had tamed Russia’s oligarchs, while in Ukraine they still threw their support—and cash—behind different political factions, depending on their financial interests.

Democracy in Ukraine was immature, unruly, and, at times, vicious,
but no one man dominated the country’s politics. Kuchma’s opponents enjoyed the support of a television network, Channel 5, which had remained free of state control, permitting a diversity of news and opinion that in turn fostered political debate. When Kuchma was implicated in the murder of a prominent journalist, Georgy Gongadze, he could not easily suppress the anti-government protests that erupted, nor could he prevent opposition members of parliament from demanding an investigation. In 2000, Gongadze’s headless body was discovered in a forest outside of Kyiv only months after he founded an online investigative newspaper that infuriated Kuchma’s inner circle with its rollicking reports on corruption. Conversations secretly recorded in Kuchma’s office caught him railing against Gongadze’s reporting and urging aides to deal with him.
²
Kuchma denied ordering the murder, but his political career was in ruins. Many had feared that as his second term came to an end in 2004, he would try to revise the Constitution to extend his rule, but in the end Kuchma had no choice but to step aside. Unlike Russia’s listless parliamentary and presidential elections in 2003 and 2004, Ukraine’s remained passionately, fiercely contested, the outcomes uncertain.

Putin followed Ukraine’s politics closely and found them worrisome. Kuchma’s dwindling credibility raised the very real possibility that the opposition could win. Putin had already watched another former Soviet republic, Georgia, succumb to a popular, democratic uprising after a disputed election in 2003. It was a tiny country of five million people on Russia’s new southern frontier, the spine of the Caucasus. The country’s president, Eduard Shevardnadze, had been the former foreign minister of the Soviet Union, a close adviser of Mikhail Gorbachev, and a man many in Russia blamed for the collapse that followed perestroika. Shevardnadze returned to his native republic and stumbled into power following Georgia’s violent birth as an independent state, fractured by wars, abetted by Russian fighters, which established the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia inside the country’s internationally recognized borders.

After Georgia’s parliamentary election in November 2003 was rigged, thousands of people poured into the streets to protest. They had the training and financing of international organizations funded by George Soros and the United States Congress, among others. When Shevardnadze tried to install the new parliament on November 22, the protesters
stormed the building, led by the opposition leader, Mikheil Saakashvili. Shevardnadze had to appeal to the Kremlin for help. He telephoned Putin that night as the latter dined with his senior advisers in one of Moscow’s most famous Georgian restaurants.
³
Putin ordered his foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, to fly to Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, to mediate, though with clear instructions not to let a mob overthrow an elected head of state. In the end, Ivanov failed, and Shevardnadze, misunderstanding the level of support he had from Moscow, resigned. The “Rose Revolution,” as it came to be known, thrust Saakashvili into power. The parliamentary election was followed by his election as president in January 2004. Saakashvili considered himself Georgia’s Putin, a strong leader determined to restore stability to the country. In one of his first acts in office, he flew to Moscow to meet Putin, fawning over him as a political inspiration. Putin, however, was alarmed by Shevardnadze’s ouster and Saakashvili’s westernizing instincts. Putin responded to the fawning with a tirade about the former countries of the Warsaw Pact becoming “slaves to America.”
⁴
Georgia’s relations with Russia went downhill from there.