The New Tsar (56 page)

Putin dismissed Ustinov on June 2. The decision surprised the Federation Council, which still had the final authority to install or remove a prosecutor general, though no longer the independence it had under Yeltsin to debate doing so. In an indication of how much the balance of power had shifted in the seven years since the scandal over Yeltin’s removal of Yuri Skuratov, the council voted the same day to affirm Putin’s decision. There was no debate, and the vote was virtually unanimous,
with only two abstentions. Sergei Ivanov hinted that there were “good reasons” for Ustinov’s departure, but Putin offered no public explanation. No one understood then that the dismissal was the first ripple from the political turmoil beneath the surface. The murders of Politkovskaya and Litvinenko soon followed. The hidden battle over Putin’s heir would not explode into public, however, until the following year over an investigation into the furniture store Tri Kita, or Three Whales. It was the case Yuri Shchekochikhin had been circling around in his reporting when he died mysteriously.

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t the height of the furor over the Litvinenko investigation, Putin dispatched Medvedev to the annual meeting of the world’s business and political elite at Davos, Switzerland, in January 2007. A little awkward, with a thick mat of brown hair and a musical taste for early American and British heavy metal, Medvedev projected a gentler image of a Russian politician than Putin had of late. Then only forty-one, he was a child of the intelligentsia with no known background in the security services. He came of age as perestroika took root, representing a new generation less hardened by Communism and the Cold War. He even spoke a smattering of English, picked up from his abiding passion for the music of Deep Purple. In his keynote speech, he reassured the audience that Gazprom was no bully—only weeks after it had suspended supplies to Belarus. He claimed that Russia had every intention of being a reliable partner in trade and investment—despite the Kremlin’s role in squeezing investors like Royal Dutch Shell. He even took issue with the slogan Putin’s political strategist Vladislav Surkov had popularized: “sovereign democracy.” Democracy, Medvedev said, needed no adjectives, and he was confident that Russia’s version was genuine enough. “We are not trying to push anyone to love Russia, but we won’t allow anyone to hurt Russia,” he said. “We will strive to win respect both for the citizens of Russia and for the country as a whole. Moreover, this shall be achieved not by using force but rather by our behavior and by our achievements.” Medvedev’s prominence at an international forum—Davos being a rite of passage for aspiring political leaders everywhere—was by and large well received, and it seemed to confirm his emergence as Putin’s heir apparent.

Medvedev’s defense of Russia did not diverge substantively from Putin’s, but the tone lulled the Davos attendees into believing him to be a different kind of leader. Less than two weeks later, however, Putin
made it clear at another international forum that he was taking a much harder line against his detractors in the West, and above all in the United States. The furor over the Politkovskaya and Litvinenko murders stoked Putin’s anger, but the precipitating impulse for the speech he was about to deliver was President Bush’s decision to negotiate the establishment of bases for the American missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. In his mind, they were all of a piece. Putin had fiercely opposed Bush’s decision to abandon the Cold War treaty prohibiting the deployment of national missile defenses, but he had acquiesced somewhat, reassured by the pledges to forge a new, more constructive friendship between the two countries. Instead they had drifted further apart. Now the United States wanted to put radar stations and interceptor missiles on Russia’s flank. In the view of Putin and his military commanders, the deployment challenged the core of the country’s nuclear deterrent, the one thing that had survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and preserved Russia’s great power status. “I’ve had enough,” he snapped at his aides.
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To express his vexation, Putin chose a forum often called the Davos of the national security world: the annual Munich Security Conference. At the February 2007 gathering, following an opening address by German chancellor Angela Merkel, Putin strode to the podium and began with a warning of what was to come. “This conference’s structure allows me to avoid excessive politeness and the need to speak in roundabout, pleasant, but empty diplomatic terms. This conference’s format will allow me to say what I really think about international security problems. And if my comments seem unduly polemical, pointed, or inexact to our colleagues, then I would ask you not to get angry with me. After all, this is only a conference.”
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He jokingly hoped the conference’s moderator would not turn on the red light warning him his time was up. A smattering of uncomfortable laughs followed. Merkel, sitting in the front row, forced a smile.

The end of the Cold War, Putin went on, left the world “with live ammunition, figuratively speaking.” He meant “ideological stereotypes, double standards, and other typical aspects of Cold War bloc thinking.” The collapse of the Soviet Union ended the geopolitical division of the world, but the resulting “unipolar” power was creating new divisions, new threats, and sowing chaos around the world. “It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign,” he went on. Instead of easing the world’s tensions, “unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions” have resulted
in more war and more deaths than in the divided world. “Significantly more,” he repeated. “Significantly more.”

“Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force—military force—in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts. As a result we do not have sufficient strength to find a comprehensive solution to any one of these conflicts. Finding a political settlement also becomes impossible. We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly close to one state’s legal system.” If anyone missed the point, he then singled out the United States, which had “overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural, and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this?”

Merkel watched with a stony face, as did the American delegation sitting in the front to her left, including President Bush’s new secretary of defense, Robert Gates, and two senators who were regular fixtures at the gathering, John McCain and Joe Lieberman.
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Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine, whose election he so vigorously fought, was to Merkel’s right. Putin’s speech went on for thirty-two minutes, a public dressing-down of the West over a catalogue of grievances from arms control treaties to the expansion of NATO, the development of missile defenses to that of weapons in space—all, in his mind, caused by the unchecked hubris of a superpower bent on dominating the world on its own terms. Other international organizations had to bend to its demands. Negotiations to admit Russia to the World Trade Organization became entangled with unrelated demands for greater freedom of speech. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which had criticized elections under Putin, had become “a vulgar instrument” to interfere in the internal affairs of others. The reaction in the hotel ranged from stunned to furious. The American response came the next day. Gates defended American actions and, as a former intelligence officer himself and director of the CIA who said he had evolved in the decades since 1989, offered a gentle rebuke to the man who seemingly had not. “One Cold War was enough,” he said.

Putin’s speech became a landmark in Russia’s relations with the West, interpreted by many as a defining moment as significant as Winston Churchill’s speech in 1946 that gave the world the phrase the “Iron Curtain.” Putin, as he had certainly intended to do, tapped into the global
anger and anxiety about the United States under George Bush: the prison on Guantánamo, the rendition of prisoners in secret detention centers, the torture of terrorist suspects, the war in Iraq. Putin might be criticized for his tightening grip at home, for Russia’s own atrocities in Chechnya and elsewhere, and even for the poisoning of Litvinenko, but many around the world—including some even in Europe and the United States—agreed with his assessment and openly cheered a country and a leader willing and able to provide a counter to unbridled American power. Russia was no Venezuela or Iran or some other enemy whose anti-Americanism could be easily brushed aside as the ravings of the weak and irrelevant. The German newspaper
Süddeutsche Zeitung
wrote after the speech that Putin’s was a warning worth minding: “The mother of all failures has been the paternalistic way in which the winner of the Cold War has treated the loser.”
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Putin had not closed the door on working with the Americans entirely—he would make one last bold gambit to co-opt Bush’s missile defenses—but in the seventh and last year of his presidency, Russia had regained its international swagger, emboldened by surging revenues from oil and gas. Medvedev had said as much in Davos, but in a soothing reassurance that now, only two weeks later, seemed weak. Putin was charting a new foreign policy that would be far more defiant, even hostile, toward the United States in particular but also, in the wake of the Litvinenko murder, to Britain too. He went from Munich to Saudi Arabia, once a vehement enemy of the Soviet Union, and then to Qatar, seeking to expand Russia’s energy power with an OPEC for natural gas. Joining him on the trip was Sergei Ivanov, whose hawkish views hewed far more closely to Putin’s rhetoric than Medvedev’s. Medvedev’s debut in Davos had been warmly received by the same international elite Putin had just dressed down. He had been seen as the front-runner in the unofficial primary race for the coming presidential election, but when Putin returned to Moscow a week later, it was Ivanov whom he promoted. There were now two first deputy prime ministers, and Ivanov was the one who seemed much more in tune with Putin’s mood.

Putin’s jeremiad in Munich also reverberated through the Russian military and security establishment, leading to an upsurge of threats and hostile acts not only against the United States but also against the Europeans. The commander of Russia’s strategic missile forces warned that he would retarget the country’s nuclear weapons at Poland and the Czech Republic if they went ahead with the deployment of American
military hardware. In April, Putin announced that Russia would suspend compliance with the treaty on conventional armed forces in Europe, a pact negotiated at the end of the Cold War to limit the number of armored vehicles, artillery batteries, and attack aircraft deployed across the continent. Putin’s deliberate turn in Munich was like a whistle to a nation that shared his feelings of betrayal and besiegement; it unleashed a suppressed fury toward foreigners, even diplomats. When Estonia relocated a Soviet war memorial from a park in its capital, Tallinn, in April 2007, the country’s computer network faced a crippling wave of cyberattacks that Estonian officials traced to computers in Russia, including one with an Internet Protocol address inside Putin’s presidential administration.
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It was described as a cyberwar, launched furtively by an increasingly bellicose Russia that no longer respected the sovereignty of its neighbors—exactly what Putin accused the United States of doing.

In Russia, Nashi, the militant youth group created and nurtured by the Kremlin, laid siege to Estonia’s embassy. Bodyguards for Estonia’s ambassador, Marina Kalijurand, had to use pepper spray to escape Nashists who rushed her as she departed a press conference trying to calm tensions over the monument. Her car was attacked as it left, as was the Swedish ambassador’s when he tried to visit the Estonian embassy. These breaches of diplomatic protocol were tolerated by the usually zealous Russian police. Nor did Putin let up on his public criticism of the American hegemon; at the annual Victory Day commemoration in Red Square on May 9, he compared the United States to the Third Reich with its “same contempt for human life” and its same desire to rule the world by diktat. The stability of international relations and the security architecture constructed after the Cold War—an era that augured a new peace for the continent—was unraveling in a convulsion of mutual reproach.

It was at this point that Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service brought to a head its investigation of the poisoning of Aleksandr Litvinenko. In May 2007, it announced that there were sufficient grounds to accuse Andrei Lugovoi of the murder. The prosecutors did not make their evidence public then, but the British had concluded that only the Kremlin could have authorized such a brazen and risky operation. Russia defiantly refused to consider Britain’s appeal for Lugovoi’s extradition. Russia cited its own constitutional prohibition on extraditing its citizens—and the hypocrisy of Britain’s repeated rebuffs of its own numerous appeals to bring Boris Berezovsky to justice in Russia. In April, Berezovsky had told
The Guardian
that he was actively financing an effort to foment a
new revolution in Russia among the political and business elite, who he believed were the only hope of change, not the coming election for Putin’s successor. “It isn’t possible to change this regime through democratic means,” he told the newspaper. “There can be no change without force, pressure.”
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The Kremlin declared Berezovsky’s threat a violation of the new law on extremism and renewed its demand for his extradition. Lugovoi held his own carnivalesque appearance before the press, mocking the indictment and accusing instead MI6 (the British foreign intelligence service, which had tried to recruit him), the Spanish branch of the Russian mafia (presumably in retaliation for Litvinenko’s meeting with the authorities there), and Berezovsky himself of the murder of the man he had once supported financially. He had himself been tainted with polonium-210, he said, “for the future use in a political scandal.”
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