Strongman (5 page)

Just 11 days after NATO’s enlargement, the organisation launched its air strikes against Serbia, with all the repercussions described earlier in this chapter. And in August the troubles in
Chechnya, which had been smouldering quietly for the past two and a half years, suddenly burst into flames – igniting a visceral fury in Putin that would inform his actions at home and abroad
for many years. Fighting terrorism became an obsession.

Since the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya at the end of 1996, the republic had enjoyed
de facto
autonomy and become increasingly lawless. Its relatively moderate elected
government was undermined by warlords such as Salman Raduyev and Shamil Basayev, the man who had been behind the hostage-taking in Budyonnovsk. Kidnapping became commonplace. After the murders of
six Red Cross workers and four kidnapped telecoms workers, foreigners scarcely dared set foot in the republic. Islamic fundamentalism took hold, and some of the warlords developed links with Middle
Eastern extremist groups, including al-Qaeda.

On 7 August 1999 Basayev and a Saudi-born Islamist, Ibn Al-Khattab, launched a well-planned invasion of some 1,500 men into Chechnya’s neighbouring republic, Dagestan. Their aim was to
establish an Islamic state there – a first step towards the creation of an Islamic superstate throughout Russia’s northern Caucasus region. The attack also catapulted Putin to the
highest office. The next day Yeltsin appointed his steely security chief as prime minister to tackle the problem.

Putin’s sudden emergence from nowhere as the country’s future leader was astonishing. He was still virtually unknown in the country, and indeed to most of the political elite. But in
the months that followed he became the new face of Russia – tough, energetic and ruthless in responding to ever more audacious Chechen terrorist attacks.

In the space of two weeks in September four bomb explosions destroyed apartment blocks in the cities of Buynaksk, Moscow (twice) and Volgodonsk. Almost 300 people were killed. The attacks were
blamed on Chechens and, together with the invasion of Dagestan, provided Putin with the excuse, if he needed one, to launch the second Chechen war. At a meeting with Bill Clinton on 12 September an
agitated Putin drew a map of Chechnya and described his plan to annihilate the separatists. ‘These people are not human,’ he snarled to the press afterwards. ‘You can’t even
call them animals – or if they’re animals, they’re rabid animals ...’

The apartment bombings were so convenient in providing Putin with the pretext to go to war, and thereby to improve his ratings, that some Russians believe they were carried out by the FSB.
Conspiracy theories are so rife – and so outlandish – in Russia that you would have to rewrite history if you believed them all. But real suspicions were raised by a fifth incident, in
the city of Ryazan, where police acting on a tip-off foiled an apparent plot after discovering three sacks of white powder, which they identified as explosive, together with detonators, in the
basement of a block of flats. Thousands of local residents were evacuated while the sacks were removed and made safe. Putin himself praised the vigilance of the people who had spotted the sacks
being carried into the building. When men suspected of planting the bombs were arrested, however, they turned out to be FSB agents. The FSB chief then claimed it had all been an
‘exercise’ to test responses after the earlier explosions and that the bags only contained sugar. The local FSB in Ryazan knew nothing about such an exercise, however, and issued a
statement expressing surprise.

Several other mysterious circumstances surround the apartment bombings. For example, the speaker of the State Duma announced to parliament that he had just received a report of the apartment
bombing in Volgodonsk on 13 September – the day of one of the
Moscow
bombings, but three days
before
the Volgodonsk explosion. Had someone who knew in advance about all the
planned attacks got the dates mixed up? But attempts to have the incidents properly investigated in Russia have been thwarted, and the Kremlin reacts with fury to questions on the subject.
Moreover, two members of an independent commission that tried to establish the facts were murdered and a third was killed in a car accident, while the commission’s investigating lawyer was
arrested and jailed for alleged illegal arms possession. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, both of whom investigated the bombings, were murdered in
2006.

The second Chechen war was intended to avenge the humiliation suffered by Russia in the first, and to put a halt to what Putin apparently regarded as an Islamist threat to the entire country.
One of his closest advisers told me on condition of anonymity that Putin feared his tenure as prime minister might last only a few months (like that of his predecessors) and he wanted to use the
time to prevent Russia from falling apart. ‘The Chechen invasion into Dagestan was a signal from the bandits that they could go further, along the Volga river into some of our Muslim
republics – Bashkortostan and Tatarstan.’

I have never heard Putin (or any other Russian leader) speak about the real grievances of the Chechen people – their mass deportation from their homeland to Central Asia under Stalin, the
swamping of their culture and language by the Russians during the Soviet period. Nor is there much awareness of the fact that it was the brutal Russian invasion in 1994 that radicalised the Chechen
fighters and encouraged Islamic fundamentalism – of which there was not a whiff when I visited the republic before the first war. It was the war, and the atrocities committed by Russian
forces, that turned mere separatists into ideologically driven terrorists. Without that understanding, Putin’s new war was bound to make matters even worse.

He soon began to reveal the sharp tongue and earthy language that became his trademark. Asked about the ferocity of the Russian campaign, he replied, on 24 September: ‘We’ll pursue
the terrorists wherever they are. If they’re in an airport we’ll get ’em there. If we catch ’em – excuse the expression – in the toilet ... we’ll wipe
’em out right there, in the outhouse. End of story.’

Putin’s campaign quickly raised him out of obscurity. But he was not yet the country’s most popular politician. One of his predecessors as prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, had
publicly denounced the corruption in Yeltsin’s entourage and declared his intention of running for president. Together with the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, he created a political bloc,
Fatherland–All Russia, which looked set to do well in parliamentary elections in December, giving him a springboard for the presidential election scheduled for June.

It was at this point that Boris Berezovsky stepped in to ensure the victory of the Family’s candidate, Putin. Berezovsky threw the entire weight of his ORT channel behind him, while
mounting a sustained smear campaign against Primakov and Luzhkov. He hired a well-known presenter, Sergei Dorenko, who specialised in scandal, sensation and brazenly biased commentary. Berezovsky
was delighted to let him take fire at Primakov, who as prime minister had had his companies raided and threatened to jail businessmen like him for economic crimes. Night after night, Russia’s
main TV channel harped on about Primakov’s old age and infirmity and Luzhkov’s alleged corruption, while glorifying Putin’s heroics in Chechnya.

Meanwhile the inner circle – Berezovsky, Yumashev and Tatiana Dyachenko – met secretly at the dacha of Alexander Voloshin, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, to create a political force
to support Putin. In September, three months before the Duma election, a new party was born, called Yedinstvo (Unity). It had no roots, no philosophy, practically no policy other than its support
for Putin, but it did have the unabashed endorsement of Berezovsky’s ORT and several of his newspapers. On 19 December it won almost twice as many votes as Fatherland–All Russia. The
scene was now set for Yeltsin to resign on New Year’s Eve and hand over power to his prime minister and chosen successor.

The day after the Duma election was ‘Chekists Day’. Continuing a Soviet-era tradition, most professions in Russia have one day in the calendar in their honour, and this was the day
of homage to the country’s present and former secret police (originally known as the Cheka). In the morning Putin restored a plaque on the wall of the FSB headquarters, the Lubyanka, in
memory of Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief when Putin joined up. The plaque had been removed in the de-Sovietising Yeltsin years. At a gala ball in the evening the prime minister made a speech to his
former colleagues, and joked: ‘I want to report that a group of FSB operatives, sent to work undercover in the government, is successfully carrying out the first stage of its
mission.’

The second stage was about to begin. Ten days later, Yeltsin resigned and Putin assumed supreme power in Russia.

2

‘I want Russia to be part of Europe’

Russia’s relations with NATO had been frozen ever since the allied bombing of Yugoslavia in March 1999. ‘NATO’s representative in Moscow has been told to pack
his bags,’ announced Russia’s foreign minister, Igor Ivanov. ‘There will be no contact with NATO, including its secretary general, until the aggression against Yugoslavia
stops.’

But at the beginning of 2000, shortly after Vladimir Putin became acting president of Russia, the telephone rang in the secretary general’s office at NATO headquarters in Brussels. It was
none other than Igor Ivanov, and George Robertson, the new NATO chief, was taken aback. He had arrived in Brussels in October and had decided one of his first tasks should be to get Russia
‘back into the security fold’, but until now nothing had happened.

‘If you were thinking of coming to Moscow,’ said Ivanov, coyly warming to his theme, ‘I want to say that you might find that this would be welcomed.’
¹

And so it was that Robertson became the first major Western politician to meet the new Russian president. He flew into Moscow in February on a plane provided by the German air force.

Putin seemed to be tickled by the idea, and the sight of a Luftwaffe jet in Moscow helped to break the ice.

‘Why did you come on a German plane?’ he asked.

Robertson quickly realised that the word ‘Luftwaffe’, emblazoned across the side of his plane, evoked a certain sensitivity in Russia in view of the horrors its bombers had inflicted
in the Second World War. He explained that NATO itself had no planes, so he had to borrow from the member states.

‘Hmm,’ said Putin, practising his English. ‘Maybe next time, secretary general, you should come in a British plane.’

Robertson had brought a gift for him – a book in English about the tsarist court, which he had found in an antiquarian bookshop. The Russian leader was delighted. It turned out that he was
making a serious effort to learn English, now that his profession of ‘mingling with people’ would include a great many foreign leaders.

‘I like to read these English books out loud to practise,’ he told Robertson, and then added, ‘so now my dog is fluent in English.’

There was substance to the charm offensive as well as jokes. Robertson recalls Putin being quite blunt and to the point: ‘He was less confident than he was eventually to be. He was very
new to the job. He wasn’t even in the job – he was still acting president.’

‘I want to sort our relationship out,’ said Putin. ‘It’s not constructive at the moment, and I want to resume relations with NATO. Step by step. It can’t happen
overnight – and a lot of people disagree with me on this.’ Putin gestured at his defence minister, Marshal Sergeyev, and his foreign minister, Igor Ivanov. ‘But I know what I
want, and I want Russia to be part of Europe. That’s where its destiny is. So let us work out how best we can do that.’

The British ambassador told Robertson he was impressed by such a bold, early foreign-policy decision. The relationship had been so fractious that for him to say ‘we are going to resume
it’ was a big thing. Robertson sensed that Putin wanted to have ‘an uncluttered relationship’ – to sweep aside the inherited obstacles and talk about the big issues.
‘They wanted to be taken seriously as a major player in the world.’

One other world leader was keen to oblige. Prime Minister Tony Blair saw a chance to make Britain Russia’s ‘partner of choice’ in Europe and decided to ‘get in
early’ with a trip to Russia in the first half of March – before Putin was even elected president (the election was due on 26 March). He was more willing at this stage to turn a blind
eye to Putin’s ruthless campaign against Chechnya than either Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany or President Jacques Chirac of France. The Foreign Office, too, was wary of the
ex-KGB man who was apparently presiding over what many considered to be atrocities in Chechnya. But Blair’s own advisers in Downing Street argued that he was a new type of leader, someone
worth investing with early. ‘In my experience,’ said Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, ‘KGB officers were the more outward looking members of the old Russian
nomenklatura
. We decided to reach out to him actually during the election campaign rather than wait till after when there would be a long queue of people wishing to see him. It was risky,
but we thought it was the right thing to do, and it did work.’
²

Powell says Blair scarcely focused on the Chechnya problem until he was on the plane and started reading his briefs. ‘The brief produced by the Foreign Office got him increasingly
irritated – because even at that stage Tony was concerned about Islamic terrorism, and he could see the danger of it and thought we were being a bit “double standards” in the way
we were dealing with the Russian approach to it. So he decided on the plane to cut Putin some slack on Chechnya when we did the press conference.’

Putin was delighted, and laid on a full tour of his home town, St Petersburg, for the prime minister and his wife, Cherie: the Hermitage art gallery, talks at the tsar’s glittering summer
palace, Peterhof, and evening at Prokofiev’s opera
War and Peace
at the Mariinsky Theatre. The only sour moment came during the talks at Peterhof, when the British ambassador, Sir
Roderic Lyne, sat down heavily on a spindly-legged antique chair and shattered it.