Winter is Coming (14 page)

European soil since the end of World War II. He should have been removed from power by force in 1995, but he was given another chance, which he naturally interpreted as weakness in his opponents, and he struck again a few years later.

As I said at the start of this chapter, there were two wars in Europe raging in 1999. Both were civil wars, both were fought largely along ethnic and religious lines, and both saw horrible war crimes and acts of terror against civilian populations. And in both Kosovo and Chechnya, the war was part of a fight for political power in a distant capital.

By the end of summer 1999, a new glow of Russia-facing optimism could be detected from Western policy and financial circles. The Clinton administration and international financial institutions had declared the government of Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin one they could “do business” with.

Not only did Russia appear to have averted the total economic implosion many feared during financial crisis, but the market had recovered to around its pre-August 1998 levels, and international creditors were returning. But the fourth firing of a government in less than eighteen months put the lie to such superficial indicators of health.

It also proved the fallacy of the West’s policy toward Russia. By mistaking superficial indicators for genuine progress, and placing unwarranted faith in the stale cast of political elites, Western leaders pursued a policy that rewarded nonreform, helped entrench a corrupt and undemocratic system of government, and, however unintentionally, punished the Russian people.

The departure of Sergei Stepashin was hardly significant. Like its predecessors, the Stepashin government failed to tackle the structural problems that stopped growth and investment from taking off to the benefit of the country as a whole. Its only real claim to achievement was preventing a further decline in the value of the ruble.

Eight years of so-called reforms left a small group of elites fantastically wealthy, while a huge and potentially explosive segment of Russia’s population remained impoverished. Communism collapsed in the Soviet Union when an overwhelming majority of its citizens awakened to how terrible the system was for their well-being. There was real danger of a new awakening if hardship continued.

The demand for change that brought millions of Soviets to the streets in 1989-1991 was based on the belief that a more attractive alternative existed in the West. Western assistance to Russia was also considered by many of my compatriots as an imperative. That assistance, however, did not produce the great leap into modernity that Russians hoped for. The primary blame rests, of course, on the shoulders of Russia’s leaders: both the so-called reformers and those who openly maneuvered to create a new Russian elite with much the same power and privilege their Soviet predecessors enjoyed.

What the West failed to understand, however, is that the average Russian was more likely to point a finger at foreign financial institutions and governments for imposing what many Russians perceived as a corrupt and dysfunctional capitalist system. That it wasn’t really much of a capitalist system at all yet wasn’t understood. This resentment was compounded by how Yeltsin (and later Putin) and other top officials routinely deployed anti-Western rhetoric to pass off any blame from landing on their own shoulders. This all contributed to an anti-reform sentiment that made implementing a true market-based economic system all the more difficult.

The reformers and the Western nations involved in the reforms made a crucial mistake in responding to the criticism. Instead of confronting Yeltsin and the Russian public with the truth about the corruption and real reasons progress had stalled, they tried to pretend everything would be fine. Instead of transparency and the strong medicine Russia needed, we were fed placebos and told we were going to get well soon. It was a form of treatment we were quite familiar with from the days of the USSR. Once again the difference between the clarity of the Reagan administration and the timidity of his successors was on display. There was no need to compromise principles in the name of “doing business” with the Russian regime.

Instead of a comprehensive policy on how to act and speak to the Russian people, as existed during the Cold War, the West only dealt with our increasingly corrupt leadership long after it was clear they weren’t representing the people. The 1990s were a window of opportunity where Russians could access a wide variety of uncensored news media. We would have listened and become part of the debate. Instead, Yeltsin and Putin’s anti-Western rhetoric and litany of lies about why reforms weren’t working went unchallenged.

Western governments should have made it clear that credits and investments by commercial institutions in Russia would no longer receive taxpayer-backed guarantees. The loud and clear message from the West should have been that Russia’s rulers would not be told by Washington how they should spend public funds. Whatever Russia’s elites did with public money-steal it, transfer the funds to foreign bank accounts—at the end of the party they would have been held accountable by their disillusioned people. Instead, every string that the International Monetary Fund, United States, and European Union tied to their aid money was used as an excuse by Russian officials to scapegoat the West. Cutting those strings publicly would have reinforced the broken lines of communication between ordinary Russians and the free world.

There were smaller but nevertheless important ways the West could have communicated its interest in the Russian people. I had to deal with it more than most, but any Russian who endured the treatment of Moscow’s Western embassies in the process of obtaining an entry visa, or harassment at the hands of customs officials in Western airports, could have been forgiven for buying into the stories the Communists and nationalists spread about a worldwide anti-Russian conspiracy.

The collapse of the Soviet empire was brought about not by the West indulging Soviet leaders, but by a consistent and principled fight for liberal democratic values. Accommodating the demands of aging Soviet leaders never yielded positive results. The real contribution came from consistent efforts to reach Russians, such as the work of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Voice of America, which were considered by many Soviets to be the most reliable sources of information about our own country.

In August 1991, when Boris Yeltsin’s administration took over, the majority of Russians were prepared for a partnership with the civilized world. This mood had all but disappeared by 1999, a casualty of the persistent nationalist campaigns of Russian political leaders. A good rapport was never going to be revived by ritualistic praising of whichever Russian leader was at the helm. The West had few avenues to influence the feudal fights of Russia’s ruling elite in the late 1990s. But it had a fighting chance to win back the trust of ordinary Russians, with whom the country’s future ultimately lay, and it missed that chance.

That sense of the tense and acrid atmosphere in Russia in August 1999 provides context for the traumatic events of September. Three years had gone by since the end of the first major war in Chechnya with Russian troops, but the chaos and violence in the region had never completely abated. By spring 1999, Chechnya was essentially in a state of internal warfare. Warlords controlled most of the region outside of the capital of Grozny and kidnapping for ransom had become a primary source of income. The 1998 kidnapping and murder of four foreign engineers, three British and one from New Zealand, made the news worldwide. The case would be a factor in removing any chance for international sympathy for the Chechen people during the horrors to come.

Russian politicians would occasionally bang the drums of war about the need to go “teach the Chechens a lesson,” and it was later revealed that an invasion plan had already been drawn up by Prime Minister Stepashin. But it wasn’t until the end of August that it all spilled over. Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev led a small army, including foreign fighters, into neighboring Dagestan. Then, over twelve days in September, four bombings of apartment buildings took place in different Russian cities, killing nearly three hundred people. While there had been smaller attacks before, these bombings were professional, nearly identical, and unlike any committed by the Chechens before or after.

As you can imagine, the public was terrified and furious. The Federal Security Service (FSB, the primary successor of the KGB) blamed the Chechens and Yeltsin demanded action. The man he turned to was not Stepashin, but his new replacement, Vladimir Putin. The new prime minister had been the head of the KGB for just a year before his sudden promotion to prime minister took place right before the bombings began. Before that, in reverse chronological order, Putin had been a fairly anonymous member of Yeltsin’s presidential staff, a deputy chief in the federal property management department, and a member of the mayor’s staff in St. Petersburg. Formerly, he had been a KGB intelligence officer in East Germany until the fall of the Berlin Wall.

On August 9, 1999, the largely unknown Putin was, to the great surprise of nearly everyone, put in charge of the Russian government. The surprises didn’t end there, however. At the same time, Yeltsin announced that he hoped Putin would succeed him in the presidency in 2000 and Putin publicly stated he would run. This made Putin stand out compared to the four other prime ministers Yeltsin had gone through in the previous eighteen months. Russia was facing many challenges at the time, but the top priority for the new government was promoting Putin as the undisputed president in waiting.

Things moved very quickly after that. As many a head of state is aware, winning a war, or even just waging one, can be an excellent way to win reelection. This was essentially the scenario for Putin, who was Yeltsin’s anointed successor and the head of government. He was still completely unknown to the Russian public, however, and becoming the public face of a new war in Chechnya and hunting down the terrorists behind the apartment bombings was the best way to fix that. Over the next few months, Yeltsin practically disappeared from sight (not that unusual considering his serious health problems) and Putin was suddenly everywhere.

Although the supposed targets of the Russian offensive in Chechnya were the militants who had gone into Dagestan in August, the bombing campaign was enormous and indiscriminate. Within weeks, hundreds of thousands of Chechens had been forced to flee. In October, Putin announced a ground offensive and tens of thousands of Russian troops advanced toward Grozny. Cluster bombs and heavy artillery caused thousands more civilian deaths and countless more refugees. What was ostensibly an anti-terror operation turned into a scorched-earth campaign.

The campaign in Chechnya had the predictable effect on the other campaign: the one for president. To deny this would be to deny the obvious. The war, for all its ugliness, was popular among Russians, and even reformers like Anatoly Chubais toed the patriotic line by supporting the war effort. For a very brief moment even my own attitude was quite sympathetic to the government’s actions.

True, innocent people were suffering, and the suspicion at the time that Russia was using excessive force and committing war crimes was later confirmed. The Russian press was largely controlled by Yeltsin’s oligarch supporters who had also endorsed Putin, or you might say had created Putin, and gave a very rose-colored picture of unfolding events. The Russian public also bought the official story that Chechens were behind the terrorist attacks in Moscow and Volgodonsk in September, even though there was hardly any proof. (More on that in a moment.)

But even knowing what we know now, I admit that the support Russians gave their soldiers in Chechnya was not the result of brainwashing. Many of the Chechen rebels were bandits who plied their trade on Russian territory and whose methods could only be described as medieval. Nor were their activities constrained to the Caucasus and the occasional terror attack outside. Chechen criminal gangs were active all over the country, although it was clear that they would never have become as powerful and dangerous as they were without their reliable “business partners” in Moscow. For the majority of Russians the military crackdown in Chechnya was part of their desire to end the plague of corruption and criminality in cities where they lived.

Every day struggling Russians read about the new billionaires being created by cozy deals with the government. You didn’t have to understand how things like privatization vouchers, loans-for-shares, and rigged auctions worked to realize there was a huge scam going on. Worried that reforms might be rolled back by conservatives, Yeltsin’s reform team, led by Yegor Gaidar and Chubais, started selling things off at a frantic pace at absurdly low valuations. Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky, already two of the wealthiest and most influential oligarchs, acquired their huge energy firms, Yukos and Sibneft, for less than 10 percent of their real value.

Such sanctioned looting continued under Putin, of course, and continues today. The difference was that in the 1990s Russians could find out about it. The various political and business factions had warring media outlets, and while the press could be more than a little yellow, at least it represented many different sides so the truth could be found somewhere in the middle.