factory, in Tatarstan, soon launched a new model, called the Kremlin Watch for the Left-handed, and shipped the first watch in the series to Moscow as a gift for Putin. He was never seen in public wearing the inexpensive, domestically manufactured watch, although he was photographed wearing several different timepieces over the next few years, most often a $60,000 white-gold Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar.
There were fifteen hundred invited guests at the inauguration ceremony, an inordinate number of them in uniform. One guest deserved particular note: Vladimir Kryuchkov, the former head of the KGB and an organizer of the 1991 coup. A reporter at the scene described him as “an old man of short stature who had difficulty standing and rose only once, when the national anthem was played.” Kryuchkov was easy to spot because he sat apart from the rest of the guests: he was not exactly a member of the contemporary Russian political elite. Yet no one dared object publicly to the presence of a man who had attempted to use arms to quash Russian democracy. He had spent seventeen months in jail and was pardoned by the parliament in 1994. Most newspaper reports of the inauguration ignored his presence altogether.
Just a few months earlier, on December 18, 1999—two weeks before becoming acting president—Putin had spoken at a banquet celebrating the day the Soviet secret police was founded, an obscure professional holiday that was destined to gain prominence in the coming years, with congratulatory banners adorning the streets, and television reports of the celebrations. “I would like to report,” Putin said at the banquet, “that the group of FSB officers dispatched to work undercover in the federal government has been successful in fulfilling the first set of assignments.” The roomful of secret police brass roared with laughter. Putin later tried to downplay it as a joke, but on the same day he had restored a memorial board on the FSB building, reminding the world that Yuri Andropov, the only secret police chief to have become general secretary of the Communist Party, had worked there.
Since the campaign to elect Putin and the man himself had seemed to exist parallel to each other, Putin had taken few other public actions between December and the inauguration. He had chosen his prime minister, a man whose imposing stature, booming bass voice, and Hollywood-actor good looks and white-toothed smile belied his lack of political ambition. Mikhail Kasyanov seemed to have bureaucracy in his bones: he had come up through the ranks of Soviet ministries, made a smooth transition to working for ministers in a series of Yeltsin’s cabinets, and recently become finance minister.
“He called me in on January 2,” just three days after Yeltsin had tendered his resignation, Kasyanov told me. “He laid out his conditions for my appointment. He said, ‘As long as you don’t butt in on my turf, we’ll be fine.’” Kasyanov, entirely unaccustomed to street language, was struck by Putin’s wording much more than by the substance of what he was saying. The constitution gave the prime minister extensive authority over the uniformed services; Putin was telling him he would have to forfeit these powers if he wanted to be prime minister. Kasyanov assented easily, asking in return that Putin allow him to press forward with planned economic reforms. Putin agreed and appointed him his first deputy prime minister, promising to make him the premier right after the inauguration.
Kasyanov essentially took over running the government. Putin set about preparing what he had called his “turf.” His first decree as acting president granted immunity from prosecution to Boris Yeltsin. His second established a new Russian military doctrine, abandoning the old no-first-strike policy regarding nuclear weapons and emphasizing a right to use them against aggressors “if other means of conflict resolution have been exhausted or deemed ineffective.” Soon another decree reestablished mandatory training exercises for reservists (all Russian able-bodied men were considered reservists)—something that had been abolished, to the relief of Russian wives and mothers, after the country withdrew from Afghanistan. Two of the decree’s six paragraphs were classified as secret, suggesting they might shed light on whether reservists should expect to be sent to Chechnya. A few days later, Putin issued an order granting forty government ministers and other officials the right to classify information as secret, in direct violation of the constitution. He also reestablished mandatory military training in secondary schools, both public and private: this subject, which for boys involved taking apart, cleaning, and putting back together a Kalashnikov, had been abolished during perestroika. In all, six of the eleven decrees Putin issued in his first two months as acting president concerned the military. On January 27, Kasyanov announced that defense spending would be increased by 50 percent—this in a country that was still failing to meet its international debt obligations and was seeing most of its population sink further and further into poverty.
If anyone in Russia or outside had cared to pay attention, all the clues to the nature of the new regime were there within weeks of Putin’s ascent to his temporary throne. But the country was busy electing an imaginary president, and the rest of the Western world would not begin to doubt its choice for years to come.
WHEN PUTIN WAS INAUGURATED, I was in Chechnya again: in the face of what now passed for politics and political journalism, I badly needed to feel I was doing something meaningful. With the country’s political system crumbling before my eyes, I felt particularly lucky to be able to research and publish the stories I felt were important. This time I had been traveling with military officers and self-organized volunteers who were looking for Russian soldiers missing in action in Chechnya; they numbered about a thousand at the time, half of them missing since the last war.
I returned from Chechnya the weekend of the inauguration. My second day back in the office, which also happened to be Vladimir Putin’s second day officially in the office of the president, police special forces descended on the corporate headquarters of Vladimir Gusinsky’s Media-Most, the company to which my magazine belonged. Scores of men in camouflage, wearing black knit masks with slits for their eyes and armed with short-barrel automatic rifles, pushed their way into offices of the newly renovated building in the very center of Moscow, about a mile from the Kremlin, roughed up some of the staff, and threw piles of paper into cardboard boxes that they then loaded onto small trucks. The prosecutor’s office, the presidential administration, and the tax police later made confused and confusing public statements explaining the raid: they said they suspected tax irregularities; they said they suspected misconduct on the part of Media-Most’s internal security service; they even said they suspected the media company was spying on its own journalists. The nature of the raid was in fact familiar to anyone who had been involved in business or had even observed business in Russia in the 1990s: the raid was a threat. These kinds of raids were usually staged by organized-crime groups to show who was boss—and who had greater influence with the police. This raid was unusual, though, in several respects: its scale (scores of officers, several truckloads full of documents); its location (central Moscow); its timing (broad daylight); and its target (one of the country’s seven most influential entrepreneurs). It was also unusual in its alleged initiator, whom Media-Most’s outlets identified as Vladimir Putin. He himself claimed no knowledge of the event; during the raid he was in the Kremlin, meeting with Ted Turner, reminiscing about the Goodwill Games held in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, and discussing the future of media.
The months that followed the raid on the Media-Most headquarters are the sort of period that is always difficult to recall and describe: the time between the diagnosis and the inevitable outcome, between the day when you learn how the story will end and the day it actually ends. I think it is fair to say that the roughly seventy people who worked at my magazine and the hundreds of people who worked at Gusinsky’s daily newspaper and his television channel, NTV—the same channel that had aired the investigative piece on the apartment-block explosions—all knew on the day of the raid that this was the beginning of the end of Russia’s largest private media company. Yet we continued to work almost as though nothing had happened, as though the story of the company’s troubles were yet another story to cover.
I do not remember learning of Vladimir Gusinsky’s arrest on June 13. I may have heard about it on the car radio, though this seems unlikely: the summer of 2000 was my second summer of bicycling in Moscow, which was then a novel form of transport in the city; I was even working on a story on city biking that June. I may have heard about the arrest from a colleague. I may have gotten a phone call from a friend telling me about it. However I got the news, the most important thing I heard was not even that one of the country’s most influential men, who happened to pay my salary, had been arrested, but that he was arrested on charges stemming from the privatization of a company called Russkoye Video. This was my story to write.
RUSSKOYE VIDEO was a television production company that had belonged to Dmitry Rozhdestvensky, the St. Petersburg man who had been in prison for two years by now. His was a story I had followed for some time without understanding it, starting back when I went to St. Petersburg to write about Galina Starovoitova’s murder.
