The New Tsar (58 page)

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Z
ubkov’s nomination, swiftly rubber-stamped by the Duma two days later, did little to calm the behind-the-scenes power struggle that had been unfolding all through Putin’s year of uncertainty. This struggle, which had become known as the “war of the clans,” erupted unexpectedly on October 2 when a special detachment of the FSB ostentatiously arrested a senior official of the country’s anti-narcotics agency, Lieutenant General Aleksandr Bulbov, as he arrived at Domodedevo Airport. Because Bulbov traveled with his own security detail, the arrest very nearly erupted into a shootout in the terminal. Bulbov, a decorated veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, was a senior deputy to Viktor Cherkesov, one of the KGB men Putin had known since the 1970s. On Putin’s orders, Bulbov had been assigned to the long-stalled investigation of smuggling at the furniture store Tri Kita, as well as at a second one called Grand. The case had begun in 2000 when customs officials confiscated a shipment of furniture from China and discovered that the owners of Tri Kita had evaded duties and taxes with the complicity of senior officials in the FSB. Vladimir Ustinov, as prosecutor general, had suspended the investigation, but the controversy lingered, seemingly leaving a trail of victims, including Yuri Shchekochikhin, the parliamentary deputy who had written about the case for
Novaya Gazeta
. After dismissing Ustinov, Putin had ordered a more vigorous prosecution, but now the man heading it was under arrest by the FSB, accused of authorizing a series of wiretaps of businessmen, journalists, and, it seemed, Cherkesov’s rivals inside Putin’s court: the
siloviki
allied with Igor Sechin.

From the beginning, Putin’s courtiers had pursued shifting alliances and ambitions, but Putin had enforced at least the public appearance of unity. Now with the end of the presidential term in sight, the tensions threatened to become open conflict. The foundation of Putin’s power,
the men he had installed throughout the ranks of government, no longer seemed as solid as it had. The arrest of a deputy and four other officers from his agency compelled Cherkesov to speak out, perhaps because he could no longer reach the president, access to whom was controlled by a rival allied with Sechin. A devoted, even romantic operative who was unapologetic about his KGB past, Cherkesov wrote an extraordinary open letter that appeared on the front page of
Kommersant
, detailing what had until then been the subject of only speculation and rumor about the inner workings of Putin’s Kremlin. He wrote that a war had broken out in the ranks of the special services that had been the salvation of the nation but that now cynically pursued commerce and profit. He all but accused the FSB of arresting his deputy to cover up its complicity in the Tri Kita schemes. “Do not try to be a merchant and a warrior at the same time,” he wrote, seeming to address all the former and current intelligence officers in Putin’s court. “It cannot happen. It’s either-or.”
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The struggle within Putin’s ranks could not be won, he went on; it was a war that would end in the complete dissolution of what Putin had built. Curiously, though, he did not call it the state. He called it the corporation.

The internecine fighting continued through the fall, and neither Putin nor Zubkov seemed able to control it. In November, the long-forgotten—or possibly suppressed—report on Putin’s malfeasance in the export scandal in Petersburg sixteen years before resurfaced. The “clan war” now seemed aimed at discrediting Putin, who soon faced the first public accusations that he had amassed a fortune himself by using as fronts his closest friends from Petersburg, Yuri Kovalchuk and Gennady Timchenko. Rumors of a coup d’état rumbled through Moscow, just as they had in the last summer of Yeltsin’s presidency, though in this case it was never clear whether the intent was to overthrow Putin or overthrow the Constitution and keep him in office. An appeal for calm appeared in the nationalist newspaper
Zavtra
in the form of a letter by five former directors or regional directors of the Soviet KGB, including Vladimir Kryuchov, the man who had led the abortive putsch in 1991. “Trust our experience,” they wrote. “A great disaster could happen.”
¹³

Putin said little about the struggle, seeking to maintain an equilibrium between the competing factions, though some suspected him of orchestrating it to preserve his ultimate authority as arbiter.
¹⁴
He chastised Cherkesov for airing “these kinds of problems” but went on to expand the authority of the drug-enforcement agency Cherkesov oversaw.
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He also kept his ultimate plans for the succession to himself, waiting for the outcome of the parliamentary elections in early December.

Russia’s elections by now had become desultory affairs so thoroughly controlled by the central authorities that they lacked genuine competition and therefore suspense. The party of power, United Russia, had all the advantages of the Kremlin’s resources, leaving the tolerated opposition—the Communists, the nationalist Liberal Democrats, and a new party headed by one of Putin’s political allies from Petersburg, Just Russia—little oxygen to breathe. Putin’s liberal and democratic critics, led now by Putin’s former prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, and the former world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, mounted determined but quixotic protests, but they and other potential candidates were simply disqualified from the ballot on bureaucratic pretexts. One who did not face administration hurdles was Andrei Lugovoi, who, basking in the limelight of his notoriety as a murder suspect, joined the candidate slate of the Liberal Democrats, assuring himself a seat in the Duma and thus immunity from prosecution (which hardly seemed necessary given Russia’s refusal to extradite him).

To Putin, the unruly leaders of the opposition represented a conspiracy against Russia itself. Kasparov, who had retired from chess in 2005 to devote himself to loosening Putin’s grip on power, proved to be a perfect foil. He was arrested for organizing protest rallies in Moscow, Petersburg, and other cities the weekend before the parliamentary vote, and sentenced to five days in detention. When Kasparov, a polyglot, shouted something in English as he was manhandled into a police bus, Putin, who had once admired the young champion’s brash victory in 1985, responded dismissively. “Why did Mr. Kasparov, when arrested, speak out in English rather than Russian?” he asked
Time
magazine, which despite his vilification in and of the West had just named him Person of the Year. “Just think about it. The whole thrust of this thing was directed toward other countries rather than the Russian people, and when a politician works the crowd of other nations rather than the Russian nation, it tells you something. If you aspire to be a leader of your own country, you must speak your own language, for God’s sake.”
¹⁶

Putin still had not joined the party of power, United Russia, but heading into the parliamentary election, he sat at the top of its candidates list, clearing the way for him to remain the party’s leader, should he choose to be. Some believed he would step down from the presidency but use the party leadership to remain the ultimate political authority.
He campaigned for the party no more than he had in his own elections, but merely presided over the state, portrayed on the nightly news as Russia’s savior. On the eve of the election, he delivered a nationally televised speech that sounded very much like a valedictory address. “We have done a lot of work together,” he said in his firm, clipped style. “The economy is growing steadily. Poverty is in retreat, albeit slowly. We are going to step up the fight against crime and corruption.” He made the rare acknowledgment that not everything had gone well, but moved on to the rationale of his presidency. “Let’s remember what we started with eight years ago, the kind of pit we had to drag the country out of.” Russia had a long way to go, yes, but it could not succumb to “those who have already tried unsuccessfully to govern the country.”

The phrasing was discordant. Whom did he mean? Yeltsin who had lifted him to the Kremlin? The Communists of the Soviet era? The Communists’ platform called for greater social justice for pensioners but not, significantly, a radical break from the economic boom over which Putin had presided. Putin’s enemy was the mysterious “other,” the frenzied barbarians at the gates about to storm the walls with the sole intent of destroying Russia. “Today such people would like to rehash the plans for Russia’s development, to change the course that the Russian people support and return to times of humiliation, dependence, and dissolution.”

When the votes were cast on December 2, United Russia officially won 64 percent of the vote, though few believed the validity of the tally or, as before, the suspiciously high turnout in some regions. And yet no one poured into the streets as they had in Ukraine to demand a recount or a revote. By now, as Kasparov had warned in his campaign, it was impossible to challenge the legal mechanisms that ensured a preordained victory. The other parties, led by the Communists, trailed badly, though the Liberal Democrats did well enough that Andrei Lugovoi won a seat. The day after the vote, Putin declared that the outcome signified the maturity of the country’s democracy.

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W
ith the presidential election now only months away, Putin’s future remained unclear, even to those closest to him. He faced the defining choice of his political career. His greatest legacy—after the conquest of Chechnya, the economic boom, the winning of the bid for an Olympic Games—would be a transition of power. In Russia’s long history, only an enfeebled Boris Yeltsin had stepped down voluntarily, and now Putin stood at the same crossroads. With an obsequious constitutional
majority, he could easily, even at that late hour, ram through a revision of the Constitution and remain in office. There would have been few protests in Russia, where his popularity remained astonishingly high, and the rebuke that would surely come from the international community would only affirm his case that the country’s enemies refused to accept its destiny as a restored power. Or he could hand power to a new leader and retire, the unexpected mission he had been given by Yeltsin eight years before—“Take care of Russia”—having arguably been accomplished far beyond anyone’s expectation at the time.

It was eight days after the parliamentary vote, and barely three months before the presidential election, when Putin at last made his choice clear with one final bit of political theater before the prolonged winter holidays. On December 10, the leader of United Russia, Boris Gryzlov, joined the leaders of three other parties in Putin’s Kremlin office.
They
had deliberated over the possible candidates for the nation’s highest office, Gryzlov told Putin, and wanted to discuss with him in detail their recommendation. The meeting played as if it were a consultation, not a decision of Putin’s that had already been made. It was politics as performance art, with not very good actors. Gryzlov explained to Putin that he and the other party leaders were unanimous in their choice: not Ivanov or Zubkov or any of the other unnamed candidates who had been touted by Putin himself, but rather the one whose star had seemed to wane over the last year: Dmitri Medvedev, the diminutive protégé who had worked loyally at Putin’s side now for seventeen years.
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Medvedev just happened to be in attendance as the television cameras suddenly panned back to reveal Putin, turned to him in feigned ignorance.

“Dmitri Anatolyevich, have you been consulted on this?”

“Yes,” he replied, playing his role as dutifully as the others. “There were preliminary consultations and they were positive. We will continue these discussions today and tomorrow.”

Putin then complained that there were “a lot of political events crammed into a rather short period of time” before the New Year, “but life has to continue and the law requires that we begin the presidential campaign.” He sounded put out, as if the election were a chore that had to be tended to. Instead of explicitly announcing his heir as Yeltsin had, Putin wanted to create the impression that his own choice had been made for him, with the consent of a “broad spectrum of Russian society” represented by the party leaders in the room. Putin, with the reins of power in his hands, wanted to preserve the pretense of a pluralistic
choice, a “managed” democracy, not an authoritarian writ. For all his bluster and dark ridicule of the West, he still sought its validation, something a constitutional grab for power would have precluded. Putin, legalistically minded, sought a way to ensure his succession within the strict letter of the law, if not the spirit.

Among the Kremlin’s clans, Medvedev seemed the least divisive choice, acceptable to the various factions arrayed beneath Putin, with the exception perhaps of Sergei Ivanov and Igor Sechin.
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He was not viewed as a serious threat to any of them, least of all to Putin himself. Medvedev had his allies in government—the other “liberals” and reformers—but he had no power base of his own. Putin at the end of his presidency had orchestrated a barely plausible transfer of power in a resurgent superpower, but even then did not unveil his own fate. The final act in his political theater came a day later. Medvedev, addressing the nation as the presumptive president in waiting, declared that for the sake of stability, he would,
if elected
, nominate as his prime minister…Vladimir Putin. The arrangement would come to be known as the “tandem,” and it reassured those who had been most worried about Putin’s departure from the Kremlin. After eight years at the helm of state, Putin would not really be leaving after all.

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O
n April 11, 2008, a few weeks before Dmitri Medvedev’s inauguration as president, a relatively new tabloid newspaper,
Moskovsky Korrespondent
, printed a short article that dared to test the limits of the political era that many hoped the new president would usher in. The article, by a veteran reporter named Sergei Topol, was only 641 words long, and its tone was neither particularly salacious nor slanderous. Rather, it was sympathetic when it came to the delicate matter of Putin’s private life. It was not entirely true, but it lifted the veil of secrecy that had enveloped Putin’s family for eight years. “The Sarkozy Syndrome,” the headline declared, referring to the French president’s recent divorce and his marriage to his third wife, the model and pop singer Carla Bruni. Putin’s personal life, Topol wrote, was the inverse. He had remained married through his first two terms as president, but now that he was stepping down from the highest post, “there is little that binds the first couple.” The “demobilization,” as Topol put it, freed him now to “find time to resolve his personal matters.”