Hexogen is at the heart of this story: this is the explosive found in the basement in Ryazan. Researchers have claimed that it was only found in Russia at the time in tightly guarded FSB installations. But is this evidence that the FSB itself planted a ‘false-flag’ or that it could no longer secure its own stockpiles?55
The key people investigating the explosions have died in suspicious circumstances. These deaths have been gruesome. Several members of the investigative commission died in apparent assassinations, others in hit-and-run incidents, one from a tropical disease that caused his skin to peel off. Under any of the likely scenarios a ‘cover-up’ would have been carried out by the security services. They have as much need to avoid embarrassment as not being exposed in a conspiracy
These questions remain unanswered, but the consequences were clear. A new era had begun, blurred in the uncertainties between incompetence and amorality that defined it. The only beneficiary of the apartment bombings was the Kremlin’s chosen successor. Russia reinvaded Chechnya; Putin acted the part of a macho-saviour in front of the cameras and his popularity exploded. ‘We will waste them in their outhouses,’ he snarled at the perpetrators in salty criminal slang. As he said it, his popularity rating was soaring up to 79 per cent in December 1999 and the pro-Kremlin faction Unity which had been cobbled together to support him came second to the Communist Party in the race for parliament.56
In the 2000 presidential elections Putin was swept into the Kremlin atop a shaky wave of nationalist fear, the crescendo of the double disaster that made the new Russian state. The bombings seemed to change everything, even the language of politics itself. Now liberal TV anchors were the ones calling for the ‘carpet bombing’ of Chechnya and for the army to use ‘napalm’.57 This wave was the exact inverse of the tsunami of liberal euphoria that had crowned Yeltsin in 1991. Fear of terrorism was so intense in Russia – greater than the hysteria in the USA after 9/11 – that Putin took control of the government with ease.
His performance of calm fury throughout these atrocities meant that Putin now had an approval rating of almost 80 per cent and Yeltsin resigned early on 31 December 1999. Shuddering, he asked Russia to forgive him: ‘For many of our dreams did not come to pass.’ That night, Berezovsky had every reason to uncork imported champagne. He had found a man who was all things to all people: he was loyal but he was brave, he was KGB but a Yeltsin–Sobchak democrat, and he was essentially martial but economically liberal. He was grey – you could project your dreams onto him. But as it would turn out, this is exactly what Berezovsky himself was doing…
Putin was not a break from Yeltsin but the culmination of his choices and mistakes. But was there still an escape from entrenched authoritarianism? Had the man Russian democrats so feverishly supported doomed them to Putinism? One advisor in the current government’s closest circle, who asked to remain anonymous, only sighs:
‘Yes, I think there still was a chance to avoid a return to full authoritarianism. Putin inherited this half-built system. It was up to him, he would determine its shape – just imagine Putin had been a good man, not corrupt and not wanted to rule forever. There was still a way out. It all depended on who Putin really was.’
That was the question that nobody – not even Berezovsky – really knew the answer to. Not that they cared on the night of 31 December 1999 as he assumed his post as acting president. The inner circle were too busy creating a TV Putin. In the first telepopulist stunt, Putin was flown to a Russian front-line position in Chechnya to celebrate the millennium with the troops. All the way there, he drank champagne from the bottle. The spin doctors had been planning the shot carefully for weeks, working out how Putin would raise a plastic cup of vodka with the troops, to show that he was fearless, one of the people, but then suggest they not finish the vodka shot until the job was done – showing he was not Yeltsin, he was not a drunk and he would not tolerate failure. It went straight to the head of a vulnerable and scarred nation, desperate to be saved.
In the same way as the PR ‘political technologists’ attempt to cast Yeltsin’s chosen heir as a ‘break with the past’ was the opposite of the truth, so the national mood could not have been further away from Putin’s tele-populist posturing. Inside, Russians had far more in common with the characters of their pre-eminent, reclusive writer Victor Pelevin than with their new president. Pelevin is a writer in search of a metaphor. He is looking for the metaphor for Russia. In his early novels the USSR is a locked train speeding nowhere, or a rocket where cosmonauts must release each stage by hand, then burn up on re-entry with them, if it is to reach the moon at all and keep pace with the Americans, who have the luck of possessing automatic release buttons. In 1999, Pelevin’s metaphor for the unstable, shape-shifting and beliefless country was The Lives of Insects. At the edge of a Russian forest, these fragile, parasitical little creatures, whose wings are easily torn, are trying to do a business deal with an American insect. The proud Soviet Russia that frightened the West had woken up as a wounded and pathetic fly.
CHAPTER TWO
THE VIDEOCRACY
AS PUTIN’S rule was about to begin, on 29 December 1999 his team posted a manifesto outlining his goals for Russia. The dense essay announced to the people that Putinism was a project. ‘Russia was and will remain a great power,’ it asserted.1 ‘This is preconditioned by the inseparable characteristics of its geopolitical, economic and cultural existence. They have determined the mentality of the Russian people and the policy of the government throughout the history of Russia and they cannot but do so at present.’2 But in the closing paragraph it raised the spectre of this identity, this Russia, being extinguished for good. ‘Russia is in the middle of one of the most difficult periods in its history. For the first time in the past 200–300 years, it is facing a real threat of sliding to the second, possibly even the third, echelon of states. We are running out of time left to remove this threat.’3
Putin did not just inherit the Kremlin and the crisis. He inherited Yeltsin’s people, the Yeltsin agenda and Yeltsin’s war in Chechnya. Putin’s first term, between 2000 and 2004, was not fully Putin’s own – but was shaped by the Yeltsin legacy. Putin’s challenge looked Sisyphean – but Yeltsin had actually left behind one immense advantage. It was Putin’s luck to take over just as an economic boom took off. The year he began as prime minister growth hit 10 per cent thanks to a 75 per cent lower exchange rate following the default. Russian exports were competitive again and the state was no longer burdened by crippling debt. The country had rebounded from rock bottom. This legacy defined ‘early Putinism’. From his appointment as prime minister to the beginning of 2003, Putin’s politics were set on a road not entirely of his own choosing.
The man whom the Russian public associate with this period is Mikhail Kasyanov, a fallen political star. Dismissed from his post in 2004 and now pushed from the power elite, Putin’s first prime minister has not let go of the manners of a minister. Or – as the framed antique map of the empire above his desk hints – ambitions to return as one. Today, the entrance to Kasyanov’s office has an illuminated wall-size photo of him at an opposition march, standing behind a banner that heckles ‘Russia without Putin!’ His respectful, hushed staff give his office – or ‘party headquarters’, as they refer to it – the airs and graces of a government in exile. He likes to call himself an ‘opposition leader’ but I have not met one person who is ‘led’ by him.