The New Tsar (73 page)

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T
he infighting among the courtiers that preceded Putin’s return to the presidency intensified after Medvedev pressed ahead with plans to privatize the state’s shares in hundreds of companies, but found he had no more independent power to act than he did the previous four years. His rivals in Putin’s court remained Sergei Ivanov, who was now the Kremlin’s chief of staff, and Igor Sechin and the other
siloviki
, whose financial interests in the state enterprises had become even more pronounced. Medvedev had already declared that he would not rule out a
run for the presidency again in 2018, a position that was said to anger others in the Kremlin, many of whom held him responsible for the protests that marred Putin’s return. Only months into his term as prime minister, the film and the rollback of several of his initiatives eroded what little political standing Medvedev had. His prized project to build a Silicon Valley on the edge of Moscow suddenly faced criminal investigations on grounds that its executives had channeled money to the protest movement. Criticism of Medvedev’s work as prime minister began filtering even into the Kremlin-friendly media, while Putin himself harshly criticized the government’s budget and its slow pace at instituting the ambitious and exceedingly detailed—and, some said, largely symbolic—targets he decreed at the beginning of his new term to improve housing, early childhood education, scientific research, and life expectancy.

The denigration of Medvedev’s legacy extended to foreign affairs as well. Within days of his inauguration Putin signaled that the “reset” championed by the Obama administration had ended. He brusquely informed the White House that he would not attend the G8 summit that would be held near Washington later that month, a rebuff not just to the United States but also to the leaders of the other nations he had once courted. He sent Medvedev instead on the pretext that he would be too busy forming the new government. No one in the White House welcomed Putin’s return to the Kremlin, but Obama had sent his national security adviser, Thomas Donilon, to Moscow after his election in hopes of securing Russia’s support for continued reductions in nuclear weapons and for resolving the horrific civil war that had consumed Syria. In March, Obama, facing his own reelection campaign, had tried to reassure Medvedev that he and Putin could make progress overcoming Russia’s opposition to missile defenses in Europe, but he needed to wait till after the election. Their exchange, at a meeting of world leaders on nuclear security, was inadvertently picked up on an open microphone.

“On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved, but it’s important for him to give me space,” Obama told Medvedev.
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“Yeah, I understand,” Medvedev replied. “I understand your message about space. Space for you…”

“This is my last election,” Obama explained. “After my election I have more flexibility.”

“I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”

Obama’s gaffe prompted his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, to declare that Russia was “our No. 1 geopolitical foe”—worse than a nuclear-armed North Korea or an aspiring nuclear power in Iran because of the protection it provided to “the world’s worst actors” through its veto at the United Nations Security Council. Obama misunderstood that while he might have more flexibility after his reelection, Putin would now be more inflexible than ever. By June, when Obama met Putin on the Baja California coast for the G20 summit, neither made much effort to conceal his disdain for the other. Putin kept Obama waiting for more than half an hour, and when the two emerged from their meeting, they did not smile or even speak to each other; both stared at the floor as they answered journalists’ questions. They also made no progress on any of the difficult issues dividing them, especially the worsening conflict in Syria. Obama’s aides had drafted a plan to negotiate the exile of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, but it was based on the assumption that Assad would step down—and that Putin would persuade him to do so. Mindful of Medvedev’s “capitulation” on Libya at the United Nations in 2011, Putin made it clear that he would not allow the United States to lead another foreign intervention to topple a sovereign leader, no matter how many lives would be lost in an increasingly brutal conflict. Assad’s government remained one of Russia’s last allies in the Middle East, a major weapons purchaser and the host of a Russian naval base on the Mediterranean at Tartus, but Putin’s primary concern was to prevent the United States from in his view unleashing the forces of radicalism once again. Some officials in Washington and other capitals played down the anti-Americanism of Putin’s political campaign as a cynical appeal to patriotic resistance against Russia’s external enemies, but they misjudged how deeply it now shaped Putin’s thinking. The palpable international disappointment that greeted his return to the presidency, the consternation over the harsh crackdown on the protests, the denunciations of the trials of Pussy Riot and the Bolotnaya protesters—all served to harden Putin’s view that the West was inimically opposed to him and his interests, and therefore inimically opposed to Russia itself.

Putin’s language now echoed the worst periods of the Cold War, endorsed and amplified by the circle of strongmen who dominated his cabinet, pushing to the margins the more moderate voices who had gathered around Medvedev. The restoration of “foreign agents” as an appellation suggested that the Kremlin now viewed human rights advocacy or efforts like Navalny’s to enforce government accountability as a crime
against state sovereignty. Navalny, after all, had participated at a graduate leadership fellowship at Yale University. That alone was grounds for suspicion now.

In the summer of 2012, prosecutors had reopened a criminal investigation against Navalny, accusing him of “embezzling” $500,000 worth of timber in the Kirov region while acting as an unpaid consultant to the region’s government. It came a week after he had published evidence suggesting that the head of the investigative committee, Aleksandr Bastrykin, owned a business and apartment in the Czech Republic. Soon the investigations expanded to other deals in which Navalny was involved, forcing him to spend more of his time and energies defending himself in court.

The opposition to Putinism that had emerged in the winter of 2011–2012 slowly retreated from the streets, the rallies dwindling in size and fervor as the Kremlin pressed harder and harder against its critics. Putin’s many opponents—the hamsters and hipsters, the “creative classes” who had rallied behind Navalny—retreated instead back to the Internet, where they raged on, helplessly.

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I
n September, in still another sign of Russia’s deteriorating relations with the United States in particular, the Kremlin abruptly ended the work in Russia of the U.S. Agency for International Development. USAID had supported Golos and other civic organizations involved in politics but also many other politically benign programs, including ones to develop home mortgages and to fight AIDS. In October, a new law expanded the definition of treason to include passing “financial, material and technical, consultative or other assistance” to a foreign state or international organization. It was so broadly written that any critic of the government who now had contact with a foreign NGO could be charged as a traitor. Two prominent American organizations that supported election campaigns, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, were forced to leave the country, as were similar groups from Europe, lest their employees or contacts face charges that could result in twenty years in prison.

It became a tit-for-tat cycle, each action taken by one country replicated in the other. In 2012, the United States Congress, over the opposition of the White House, which still hoped to maintain a semblance of cooperation with Putin, adopted a new law named after Sergei Magnitsky
imposing travel bans and sanctions on Russian officials involved in his prosecution and death. American prosecutors ultimately traced some of the $230 million in illicit proceeds that Magnitsky had uncovered to four luxury condominiums and other commercial properties in Manhattan—and had a court seize them. They had been purchased by a real estate holding company in Cyprus, using money laundered through shell companies in the former Soviet republic of Moldova.
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The Magnitsky Act infuriated Putin, who, while improbably denying knowledge of the details of Magnitsky’s case, said that the United States would have sought to punish Russia regardless of the accountant’s death in prison. “If Magnitsky did not exist,” he said, “they would have found another pretext.”

The Russians initially retaliated by imposing sanctions on eighteen American officials involved in the detention and torture of prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay prison and elsewhere. Like the Soviet propagandists of the past, Putin had used these parallels—however misplaced at times—to deflect criticism of Russia, but now he went further. He proposed legislation that would place sanctions on American judges and officials involved in cases of abuse against adopted children from Russia, a subject of periodic tensions with the United States that seemed to have been resolved by a bilateral agreement to allow greater oversight of the process. Amid the furor over the Magnitsky sanctions, however, the Duma then went further still, passing legislation that would ban
all
adoptions of Russian children by Americans. The final vote was nearly unanimous, even though the legislation was so cynical and cruel that even members of Putin’s government objected. Russia’s orphanages were full of children in dire need of families—by some estimates as many as 800,000 in a country where adoption remained stigmatized and thus rare. Americans had adopted nearly 50,000 children since 1999; the ban would freeze some adoptions already in progress. Russia’s retaliation was not symmetrical, but asymmetrical and self-inflicted. The Americans had targeted corrupt bureaucrats for sanctions; Russia was now targeting its own orphans. The day before the Duma’s final vote on the bill, Putin faced unusually sharp questions during his annual press conference. He was asked eight times why he would harm the interests of children in a political dispute with the United States. Putin lost his composure under the unexpected hostility of the questions, retorting angrily at one point that it was the United States that had been indifferent to the abuse
of Russian adoptees. He claimed that American officials had rebuffed inquiries from Russian diplomats investigating instances where Russian children had been abused.

“Do you think this is normal?” he fumed at one reporter. “How can it be normal when you are humiliated? Do you like it? Are you a masochist?”

A week later, despite the unusual outpouring of protest at home, Putin signed the adoption ban into law.

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P
utin’s sixtieth birthday on October 7, 2012, was celebrated across the nation in a manner befitting a cult of personality, something he always professed to find distasteful. No more, it seemed. In the days leading up to it, an exhibition of paintings was held in Moscow entitled, without irony,
Putin: The Most Kind-Hearted Man in the World
. A youth group affiliated with United Russia produced a four-minute, sexually charged video of beautiful women reenacting his most famous exploits: from riding a horse in the mountains to flying in a fighter jet to driving a yellow Lada in Siberia. There were poetry readings and essay contests for schoolchildren. The milestone had special political resonance in Soviet history, where the fate of the leader and the country seemed inexorably intertwined. Stalin’s sixtieth birthday in 1939 had been treated as a national holiday that overshadowed the Winter War with Finland. He was awarded the Order of Lenin medal. Adolf Hitler even sent a telegram with his best wishes “for the prosperous future of the peoples of the friendly Soviet Union.” Nikita Khrushchev received the same award on his sixtieth birthday in 1954, while Leonid Brezhnev was given the honor of Hero of the Soviet Union upon his.

Putin’s sixtieth came with no medals, and there was something hollow in the fanfare. Despite the official adulation, there was an intangible sense of trepidation, among both his supporters and his critics, a realization of his age and mortality, a feeling that he had become indispensible but that no one could be forever. In September he appeared at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vladivostok with a visible limp that the Kremlin seemed unwilling to explain clearly. (He had pulled a muscle in his back while playing ice hockey, which he had recently taken up, one senior aide later explained.) After a tumultuous year, Putin had survived the wave of marches that sullied his reelection, but the uncertainty involving his health revealed a disquiet coursing through the system. The leader seemed to be struggling to regain the
verve of his first presidency; it was as if he had returned to power with no clear goal, as if his election had been not a means to an end, but the end itself.

On his way to the summit he had flown on a motorized glider as part of a conservation program to return endangered Siberian cranes to the wild. Putin had charmed his supporters with various encounters with wild animals (some of them sedated), but his choreographed stunts no longer seemed convincing. He had stopped during the upheaval around his election, perhaps embarrassed by his “discovery” of the planted amphorae in the Black Sea, but now they had resumed, his strategists returning to the tactics that had worked for so long. Putin dressed in a willowy white jumpsuit and joined the glider’s pilot to lead cranes raised in captivity near the river Ob in western Siberia toward their winter resting ground to the south. The aircraft, equipped with cameras, had to make two attempts before the birds would follow. Putin had reportedly paid for the glider and spent hours training for the flight, but the event was ridiculed as a twenty-first-century form of Soviet hagiography. Gleb Pavlovsky, the strategist who had fallen out of favor, described Putin’s latest stunts as reflexive and unconvincing, as if the Kremlin had run out of new ideas. Pavlovsky had done as much as anyone to shape Putin’s political image through the television stunts that had made him the political leader he became, but having returned to office, Putin seemed to know no other way to lead. Rather than drawing attention to conservation issues, the cranes now were simply another prop for Putin’s vanity. “The leader went to the movies and never came back,” Pavlovsky said. He sounded contrite.
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