a mission for al-Qaeda or the Chechens? Were other forces at work?
There did seem to have been a plot afoot to bomb the Ryazan building. But it did not seem possible for a journalist to solve the mystery of who organized it. As far as the allegation of a conspiracy at the top levels of government, the most that anyone could say with absolute certainty was that the Kremlin had been guilty of its customary indifference to the welfare of Russian citizens.
In the years to follow, Putin would preside over a revival of Russian prosperity at home and influence abroad, fueled by a great flood of wealth from the country’s tremendous store of oil and natural gas. Russia possessed 26 percent of the world’s natural gas—the largest reserves of any country—and the seventh-largest oil reserves, at 6.6 percent. Putin would trumpet the return of a Great Russia and tell his people to be proud of themselves and their past. He would glorify leaders and events regarded as odious by much of the outside world; Josef Stalin’s murderous 1930s purges, he would say, had been exaggerated by Russia’s enemies. (As prime minister, Putin had toasted Stalin on the dictator’s birthday. And he threw a lavish, nationally televised Kremlin party to honor Felix Dzerzhinsky, the brutal founder of Cheka, the early Bolshevik-era prototype of the KGB. It all smacked of a personal love affair. “This profession employs those who love our Motherland and who are selflessly devoted to their people,” Putin told a room of intelligence agents. “…Those who are ready to execute the most difficult and dangerous tasks at the first order work in the security services.”)
The Russian people would respond to Putin’s steady withdrawal of their individual liberties with obedience combined with defiant nationalism, a standard set four centuries earlier under Ivan IV. In the West, Ivan’s nickname, Grozny, was translated as “Terrible”—but to Russians, Ivan was “Fearsome” or “Awesome,” an image that Putin would successfully cultivate.
Putin maintained no torture or execution chambers. Yet his matter-of-fact responses to the domestic assassinations that occurred with some regularity invited the impression abroad that he was cold-blooded and at minimum a protector of murderers.
Consider the month of October 2006. A killer fired four shots into Anna Politkovskaya, killing the journalist in her apartment house. Three days later, gunmen killed banker Alexander Plokhin, the head of a Moscow branch of Vneshtorgbank. Days after that, the victim was Anatoly Voronin, business director of the ITAR-TASS news agency. Finally, a lone assailant used a Kalashnikov with a silencer to execute Dmitry Fotyanov, a mayoral candidate in the mining town of Dalnegorsk. None of the murders was solved.
Litvinenko was assassinated the following month in London. The United Kingdom concluded that a former Russian intelligence agent had done the killing, and sought his extradition from Russia. Putin could have acquitted himself and Russia as a whole by cooperating with Britain. Instead, he rejected the extradition request and looked on approvingly as the suspected assassin won election to the national parliament, thereby gaining immunity from prosecution within Russia while a wanted man in Europe. Opinion abroad hardened that Putin was, in one way or another, complicit in the murder. I could think of no similar behavior by the president of an industrialized country. Putin seemed to be deliberately putting himself in the same camp as the world’s most disreputable leaders.
It was altogether possible, of course, that Putin and his circle intended to convey precisely the menacing impression that foreigners had of them, sending a message that said, Don’t mess with Russia. But that seemed like overthinking. The greater likelihood was that Putin was simply being Putin.
CHAPTER 3
Getting to Know The Putin
EVEN THE MOST TOTALITARIAN GOVERNMENTS ARE PUBLIC RELATIONS conscious. Journalists can usually count on at least one reasonably informed—if not entirely believable—person to serve as the face of the country. Afghanistan’s brutal ruler Najibullah himself met routinely with reporters during the late 1980s and early 1990s; Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov delegated the task to an economic lieutenant; and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir had Islamic radical Hassan al-Turabi speak to me, in the days before Bashir threw him in prison.
In Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin there was no such person. Putin’s usual spokesman was Dmitri Peskov, baby- faced and charming. But I did not want to hear from a mere spin doctor. I wanted access to an actual player, a
As one of Peskov’s assistants explained, Putin’s men saw no benefit at the moment in candid conversation with someone writing for an essentially Western audience. Whatever they said would be misperceived, and in any event why should they care what the West thought about them?
I raise my experience not out of pique at being rebuffed, but to note the larger truth it illustrated about Putin’s Russia. Now on top of the world, it owed no one an explanation. It was up to the West to accept that Russia was back. Unlike in the 1990s, when the nation was, economically speaking, on its knees, it was now self- sustaining, on the move, and didn’t need Western help nor the West’s understanding.
A sharp rise in oil prices was behind the Kremlin’s huge confidence. Crude oil sold for about $20 a barrel when Putin succeeded Yeltsin. It was pushing $100 a barrel when he announced in late 2007 that, since term limits barred him from reelection as president, he would assume the mantle of prime minister, thereby assuring his continued hold on power. Next to the country itself, Putin was the greatest beneficiary of Russia’s new oil riches; its people credited him personally for the resulting improvement in their standard of living. Never in history did such a large percentage of the Russian population have so much money to spend.
The impact of this wealth was especially evident on my trips to the capital in 2007. Moscow had become one of Europe’s most grand and fashionable cities. Each time I visited, the number of exclusive boutiques had multiplied along Tverskaya Street, all the way to Red Square and the Kremlin. This slice of Moscow now boasted one of the world’s largest concentrations of billionaires. The swelling middle class spent its salaries with seeming abandon at new shops and malls that encircled the city. Wealthy Russians bought up lavish villas, mansions, and chateaux along Montenegro’s Adriatic coast, in southern France, and in central London.
Russia’s new muscular profile earned it global deference. It ran neck and neck with Saudi Arabia in the contest to be the world’s largest oil producer, paid off its foreign debt, banked some $200 billion in a rainy-day fund, and began to invest in international stocks and bonds. For the first time, the country burst out of its borders not at the point of a gun, but through the strength of its purse.
Europe was an important energy customer; in 2008, Russia provided a third of the continent’s oil and natural gas, and indications were that the percentage was not going to drop. Foreign oil companies assiduously courted Russia, one of the few petro-states willing to entertain their proposals. But the price of admission became steep, and giants such as Britain’s BP could no longer negotiate the advantageous terms they had when Russia was far weaker. Oilmen from the West not only had to pay cash up front but also give Russian energy companies a share of their prized energy possessions elsewhere. Gazprom accumulated an impressive list of shareholdings in gas storage, marketing, and pipeline companies across Europe—in Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, and so on—and pressed hard for more. Investment banks, too, courted Moscow and earned tens of millions of dollars in fees by enabling a wave of Russian public offerings, mergers and acquisitions, and other financing deals.
Meanwhile, Putin’s exercise of power was applauded by much of the country. After moving aggressively against Chechnya, he took on some of the best-known titans who had amassed their wealth during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. In 2000, Putin forced two of Russia’s seemingly invincible oligarchs—Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky—into exile and turned their broadcast empires into pro-Kremlin propaganda vehicles. Putin’s campaign against Mikhail Khodorkovsky began in 2003; by the time it was over, Russia’s richest man had been sentenced to eight years in prison and his Yukos oil company had become the property of the state.
After eight years of paralysis under Yeltsin’s rule, Putin’s display of testosterone—dutifully reported on state- controlled television—sent his popularity rating over 70 percent. From the outside, Russia might have appeared to be under the thumb of a rogue regime. But at home, Putin was seen as demonstrating that Russia was governable. He had taken a perilous gamble, to be sure. His modus vivendi with criminal elements required that he tolerate their
