the public: she simply trusted the people who had thought the whole thing up. “There were some articles coming out saying he was from the KGB,” she told me years later, “but the headquarters was staffed with liberals and we were convinced these were the people who would make up his inner circle.”
Nor did one have to be young and naive to believe that. In the late summer of 1999, I had a memorable dinner with Alexander Goldfarb, an old acquaintance who had been a dissident in the 1970s; he had played the role of Andrei Sakharov’s translator, become an emigre, spending the 1980s in New York, and turned into a highly effective social activist in the 1990s. He had served as billionaire philanthropist George Soros’s adviser on Russia; he had then launched a campaign to publicize and fight Russia’s epidemic of drug-resistant tuberculosis, bringing it to the world’s attention almost single-handedly. Now Alex and I were having dinner and talking about Putin. “He is the KGB’s flesh and blood,” I said to him, then still testing a theory more than making an argument. “But I hear from Chubais that he is smart, effective, and worldly,” Alex countered. Even a former dissident was nearly convinced that Putin was the modern young politician the Foundation for Effective Politics was inventing.
The more the military campaign in Chechnya escalated, the more the entire country seemed to be in thrall. Berezovsky, meanwhile, came up with the idea of a new political party, one that would be entirely devoid of ideology. “Nobody would hear the words if we said them,” he told me nine years later, still apparently convinced this had been a stellar invention. “I decided we would replace ideology with faces.” Berezovsky’s people cast about for faces and came up with a couple of celebrities and one cabinet minister. But the face that mattered most belonged to the man who had been faceless just weeks earlier: as Putin’s popularity soared, so did the new political party’s. In the parliamentary election on December 19, 1999, nearly a quarter of the voters chose the two-month- old bloc called Yedinstvo (Unity) or Medved (The Bear), making it the largest faction in the lower house of parliament.
To cement Putin’s lead, someone in the Family—no one seems able to recall who it was any longer— proposed a brilliant move: Yeltsin should resign early. As prime minister, Putin would, by law, become acting president, turning into an instant incumbent in the upcoming race. His opponents would be caught by surprise, and the lead time to the election would be shortened. In fact, Yeltsin should do it on December 31. It would be a very Yeltsin move: he would upstage the millennium, the Y2K bug, and any other news story that might occur almost anyplace in the world. It would also come on the eve of the traditional two-week New Year’s and Christmas hiatus, making the time available for Putin’s opponents to prepare for the vote that much shorter.
NEW YEAR’S, a secular holiday, had long since superseded all other occasions as Russia’s biggest family holiday. On this night, Russians everywhere would gather with friends and family; just before the end of the year they would assemble in front of their television sets to watch the clock on one of the Kremlin towers strike midnight—to raise their glasses of champagne and only then to sit down to a traditional meal. In the minutes leading up to midnight, the nation’s leader would give a speech; this had been a tradition in the Soviet Union, and it had been picked up by Boris Yeltsin on December 31, 1992 (on December 31, 1991, as the Soviet Union officially ended its existence, the nation was addressed by a comedian).
Yeltsin appeared on television twelve hours ahead of schedule. “My friends,” he said. “My dears. Today is the last time I am going to address you on New Year’s Eve. But that is not all. Today is the last time I address you as the president of Russia. I have made a decision. I spent a long and difficult time thinking about it. Today, on the last day of this century, I am going to resign…. I am leaving…. Russia should enter the new millennium with new politicians, new faces, new, smart, strong, energetic people…. Why should I hold on to my seat for six more months when the country has a strong person who deserves to become president and to whom virtually every Russian has linked his hopes for the future?”
Then Yeltsin apologized. “I am sorry,” he said, “that many of our dreams failed to come true. That things we thought would be easy turned out to be painfully hard. I am sorry that I did not live up to the hopes of people who believed that we could, with a single effort, a single strong push, jump out of our gray, stagnant, totalitarian past and into a bright, wealthy, civilized future. I used to believe that myself…. I have never said this before, but I want you to know. I felt the pain of each of you in my heart. I spent sleepless nights, painful periods thinking about what I could do to make life just a little bit better…. I am leaving. I have done all I could…. A new generation is coming; they can do more, and better.”
Yeltsin spoke for ten minutes. He looked bloated, heavy, barely mobile. He also looked dejected, helpless, like a man who was burying himself alive in plain view of over a hundred million people. His facial expression barely changed throughout the speech, but his voice cracked with emotion as he signed off.
At midnight, it was Vladimir Putin who appeared on television. He looked noticeably nervous at first, and even stuttered at the beginning of his speech, but seemed more confident as he went on. He spoke for three and a half minutes. Remarkably, he did not seem to use the opportunity to give his first stump speech. He made no promises and said nothing that could be interpreted as being inspiring. He said instead that nothing would change in Russia and assured viewers that their rights were well protected. In closing, he proposed Russians raise a glass to “Russia’s new century”—though he had no glass of his own to raise.
Putin was now acting president, and the election campaign was officially under way. Putin, recalled Berezovsky, was disciplined and even docile: he did as he was told—and he was told not to do much. He was already so popular that this was, in essence, a non-campaign campaign, leading up to a non-election election. All Putin had to do was never seem too different from whatever it was voters wished to see in him.
On January 26, 2000, exactly two months before the election, the moderator of a Russia panel at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, asked, “Who is Mr. Putin?” Chubais—the man who had seven months earlier argued that Putin would make an ideal successor—was holding the microphone when the question sounded. He fidgeted and looked questioningly at a former Russian prime minister sitting to his right. The former minister, too, was clearly unwilling to respond. The panel’s four members started looking back and forth at each other anxiously. After half a minute of this, the room exploded in laughter. The world’s largest landmass, a land of oil, gas, and nuclear arms, had a new leader, and its business and political elites had no idea who he was. Very funny indeed.
One week later, Berezovsky commissioned three journalists from a newspaper he owned to write Putin’s life story. One of them was a young blonde who had spent a couple of years in the Kremlin pool but had managed to remain unnoticed next to more colorful colleagues. Another was a young reporter who had won acclaim for his humorous reports but had never written about politics. The third member of the team was a star, a veteran political reporter who had spent the early eighties covering wars all over the world, and the late eighties writing about politics and, especially, about the KGB for
“Berezovsky would keep calling me and asking, ‘Isn’t he fucking amazing?’” she told me years later. “I would say, ‘Borya, your problem is, you have never known a KGB colonel. He is not fucking amazing. He is perfectly ordinary.’”
“I was curious, of course, to know who this guy was who was now going to run the country,” she told me. “So I got the sense he liked to talk and he liked to talk about himself. I’ve certainly spoken to many people who were more interesting. I had spent five years writing about the KGB: he was no better or worse than the rest of them; he was smarter than some and more cunning than some.”
In addition to the forbidding task of putting together a book in a matter of days, Natalia Gevorkyan wanted to use her time with the acting president to help a friend. Andrei Babitsky, a reporter for the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, had disappeared in Chechnya in January. He had apparently been detained by Russian troops for violating their strict embedding policy: during the first war in Chechnya the media had been sharply and consistently critical of Moscow’s actions, so this time around, the military banned journalists from traveling in the war zone unaccompanied by uniformed personnel. This policy not only hindered access to combatants on both sides but exposed journalists to danger: it is almost always safer, in a war zone, not to have a uniform on you or near you. The more enterprising reporters tried to circumvent the policy—and few were better at this than Babitsky, who had for years been reporting specifically on the North Caucasus.
For two weeks following his detention, Babitsky’s family and friends heard nothing from him. Rumor soon spread in Moscow’s journalist circles, however, that Babitsky had been seen in the infamous Russian prison of Chernokozovo in Chechnya. On February 3, the day after Gevorkyan and her colleagues began interviewing Putin for his biography, Russian officials announced that Babitsky had been exchanged for three Russian soldiers who had
