army and the navy for ten years. They are talking now as though they are the biggest defenders of the military. All they really want to do is finish it off! They’ve stolen all this money and now they are buying everyone off and making whatever laws they want to make!” Putin ended with a high-pitched shout.
Dorenko, a charismatic, macho character with a deep baritone, spent nearly an hour dissecting Putin’s behavior, replaying some of the president’s least appropriate remarks, focusing on showing him still on vacation, tanned and relaxed in light-colored resort clothing, smiling and laughing with his holiday companions, most of them highly placed officials. Again and again, he showed Putin to have lied. The president claimed that the sea had been stormy for eight days, hampering rescue efforts. In fact, said Dorenko, the weather had been bad only during the first few days, but even that had no effect at the depth at which the
Dorenko cut to footage of a state television interview Putin had given the day after the Vidyayevo visit. Looking official and collected, the president said that it had barely been a hundred days since he accepted the burden of running the country. In fact, Dorenko pointed out, it had been 390 days since Putin was appointed prime minister and anointed Yeltsin’s successor, and prior to that he had run the FSB, “which is supposed to keep an eye on the admirals.”
“The regime does not respect us, and this is why it lies to us,” Dorenko concluded.
I think it was then, a year after the beginning of his miraculous ascent, a hundred days after becoming president, that Putin realized that he now bore responsibility for the entire crumbling edifice of a former superpower. He was no longer entitled to seethe at the people who had destroyed Soviet military might and imperial pride: by dint of becoming president, to a great number of his compatriots he had now become one of those people. His transformation was not unlike that of a longtime opposition politician who suddenly assumes power—except Putin had never been a politician at all, so his anger had been private but his humiliation was now public. He may have felt that he had been tricked: the people against whom he had ranted when he lost his temper in Vidyayevo—the ones who had disgraced the military on television and had passed “whatever laws they wanted”—had brought him to power to make him the fall guy. And then they used their television networks to humiliate him further.
Six days after the Dorenko show, Putin appeared on CNN’s
The world saw something entirely different, and Putin learned a key lesson. Television—the very same television that had created him, a president plucked out of thin air—could turn on him and destroy him just as fast and with the same evident ease.
So Putin summoned Berezovsky, the former kingmaker and the man still in charge of Channel One, and demanded that the oligarch hand over his shares in the television company. “I said no, in the presence of [chief of staff] Voloshin,” Berezovsky told me. “So Putin changed his tone of voice then and said, ‘See you later, then, Boris Abramovich,’ and got up to leave. And I said, ‘Volodya, this is good-bye.’ We ended on this note, full of pathos. When he left the room, I turned to Voloshin and said, ‘So, Sasha, what have we done? Have we brought the black colonels to power?’ Voloshin scratched his head and said, ‘I don’t think so.’” Testifying in a London court years later, Voloshin could not recall the meeting in detail, saying only that its purpose had been to inform Berezovsky that “the concert is over, the show is over.”
Berezovsky says he sat down and immediately wrote a letter to his old protege, then asked the chief of staff to pass it on. “I wrote about an American journalist who said once that every complicated problem always has one simple solution and that solution is always wrong. And I wrote that Russia is a colossally complex problem and it is his colossal mistake to think that he can use simple methods to solve it.” Berezovsky never received a response to this letter. Within days he had left for France, then moved on to Great Britain, joining his former rival Gusinsky in political exile. Soon enough, there was a warrant out for his arrest in Russia and he had surrendered his shares in Channel One.
Three months after the inauguration, two of the country’s wealthiest men had been stripped of their influence and effectively kicked out of the country. Less than a year after Putin came to power, all three federal television networks were controlled by the state.
“I’VE ALWAYS TOLD PEOPLE there is no point in going to jail voluntarily,” Andrei Sakharov’s widow, Yelena Bonner, told a small group of journalists in Moscow in November 2000. Berezovsky, she said, had called her in the summer to ask for advice and she had counseled him to stay out of the country. “Back in dissident times, I always advocated emigration for those under threat,” she explained. She had called us in for a press conference announcing Berezovsky’s grant to the Sakharov Museum and Human Rights Center in Moscow, which was on the verge of closing.
“What a shitty time we’ve lived to see,” said the museum’s director, former dissident Yuri Samodurov, “when we have to stand up in defense of people we don’t like at all, like Gusinsky and Berezovsky. We once lived in a totalitarian state that had two main features: totalizing terror and a totalizing lie. I hope that totalizing terror is no longer possible in our country, but we have now entered a new era of a totalizing lie.”
THE DISMANTLING OF DEMOCRACY
The political system changed so quickly that even political activists and political analysts needed time to get their bearings. In December 2000, I went to a roundtable discussion among political scientists, devoted to analyzing what had happened in the year since Putin was handed power in Russia.
“He has put Russia on ice,” said one of them, a man in his fifties with a beautifully chiseled face and tiny wire-rimmed glasses. “That’s not necessarily bad. It’s a kind of stabilizing effect. But what happens next?”
“It’s like the revolution has ended,” said another, a former dissident with disheveled salt-and-pepper hair and beard. He meant that the society had reverted to its pre–post-Soviet state. “Old cultural values, old habits are back. The whole country is trying to apply old habits to new reality.”
“I don’t think anyone really understands anything anymore,” said a third, a short man with a very big nose and a deep voice. I personally held him to be the smartest man in the room—and he certainly should have been the most knowledgeable, because he worked in the presidential administration.
“But all the changes in the last year have occurred in the area of public consciousness,” said another, a liberal political scientist who had come to prominence during perestroika. “The nation has come out of a psychological depression. This is going to be the toughest political era yet, because nationalist ideology is always the strongest.”
“But he has to live up to expectations,” objected a scholar from a younger generation, a large man with bushy black eyebrows.
The last speaker clearly had not shed the assumptions of the 1990s, when the media or the parliament could call the president to account, as they had many times: Yeltsin had last faced an impeachment attempt in 1999. The older man who had spoken before him, who had once been Mikhail Gorbachev’s leading ideological adviser, saw the 1990s for what they had been: a brief period of quasi-democracy, a fleeting vision, a fluke. “They’ve won, my dears,” Alexander Tsipko said to those present. “Russia is a large state floating in an unformed political space. And they try to fill this space with their national anthem, their two-headed eagle, and their tricolored flag. Such are the symbols of Soviet nationalism.”
Russia’s uncertain identity in the 1990s had manifested, among other things, in its inability to settle on state
