Some would like to tear from us a ‘juicy piece of pie’. Others help them. They help reasoning that Russia still remains one of the world’s largest nuclear powers, and as much still represents a threat to them. And so they reason that this threat needs to be removed. Terrorism is just an instrument to achieve these aims.
He sounded like a hysteric but was in fact being sensible. Putin was trying to distract Russia from the obvious: the FSB was failing. This inability to stamp out the threat opened the way for the Putin elite to be challenged by the opposition – hence the need to take preventative measures.
‘Putin was frightened after Beslan of real competition,’ says Kasyanov, ‘which is why he launched a raft of anti-constitutional reforms – to eliminate any risk of losing power.’ First, Putin abolished regional governors’ elections. Instead they would now be appointed by him and rubber-stamped by local legislatures. Being elected to the Duma as an independent MP was rendered impossible by new laws insisting that all had to be elected on party lists.
Simultaneously the rules for registering parties were tightened. It was now necessary to get over 40,000 signatures, which could be thrown out easily by the authorities on ‘authenticity’ grounds. The threshold to enter the Duma was also raised from 5 per cent to 7 per cent. These laws meant that the Duma had ceased to be a place for either fist fights or real debates. Boris Gryzlov, the speaker, summed up perfectly what had happened when he said: ‘the State Duma is not the arena where you have to carry out political battles’.57
Putin had a slogan – ‘the dictatorship of law’. This is what he promised. This is why he said Khodorkovsky had gone to Siberia. Yet anyone in the know knew that this was PR. In 2006 every major position still had a price tag on it. The going rate for a minister’s post was $10 million, or that of a governor $8 million. Seats in the Duma cost roughly $2 million with a seat in the Federation Council between $1.5 and $5 million.58 The only difference was that with Khodorkovsky in jail, there was no overtly rival patronage system to the Kremlin’s with its sinews inside the political system. Out on the streets it was still lawless: the average annual murder rate under Yeltsin’s rule and Putin’s first presidency is virtually identical at 26 and 27 deaths per 100,000 people respectively.59
‘We have proved ourselves to be weak,’ Putin growled after the Beslan massacre, ‘and the weak get beaten.’ After each humiliation Putin blamed the bureaucracy and lack of central control, even foreigners. He was left feeling that the facts had been hidden from him, or that his officials were deliberately deceiving him. The chronic incapacity to deal with corruption and crime convinced him that more control and greater state capacity was needed. The greatest threat Khodorkovsky posed to Putin was not some fictitious oligarchic plot – but that the richest and one of the most respected men in Russia was saying that this regime was incompetent, that Putin was not a strongman but an incompetent ‘chinovnik’ – a mere bureaucrat out of his depth.
The Collapse of Managed Democracy Next Door
‘Russia has and will always be a great power’: these are the words with which Putin began his presidency. But what kind of ‘great power’ cannot get what it wants – in Ukraine? This country, for Russians, is not really a country. Going there is not really going abroad; being from there is not really being foreign. Russians are as intermarried with Ukrainians as the English are with the Scots; they feel like the Germans would towards a sovereign Bavaria – that it is something abhorrent, and surely temporary. There are as many born Ukrainians in the Kremlin as there are native Scots in Westminster. Here in Kiev, in the beginning, was the baptism of the Rus – the common forefathers of both Russians and Ukrainians.
Nobody is really nostalgic for the days when Russian tanks ruled in Budapest. ‘But Ukraine…’ says Alexander Verkhovsky, the leading voice on Russian nationalism: ‘It was not like Tbilisi or Yerevan. Those places were always different. But Ukraine… In the Soviet Union it was practically the same place! There was real shock that a border was put up and even today if you ask your average Russian where a border town is, in which country is – say Belgorod – most people will have no idea if it is in Russia or Ukraine. The mental map of the borders is blurred.’
Power in Ukraine is considered so important in Moscow that the last twist of the great turn that began with the Khodorkovsky affair took place not in Russia but in Ukraine. Powerful Kremlin officials were sent to win the election for the pro-Russian candidate using all the tools of managed democracy. They botched it so badly, in a country that Russians do not really consider to be ‘abroad’, that it was worse than a disaster: it was the foreign policy equivalent of what the 1998 default was for economics – rock bottom.
They threw at it the best ‘political technology’ that rubles can buy. Their candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, was given a makeover and Putin quality TV advertising, whilst a travelling circus blocked main squares across the country to obstruct the opposition from holding rallies. Their hopeful – Viktor Yushchenko – was mysteriously poisoned with a gigantic dose of dioxin. Later, a mysterious tape surfaced connected to the poisoning, which appeared to implicate Kremlin officials. With the campaign in full swing even Putin himself visited. On the night, massive fraud called the victory for Putin’s man in an 11 per cent defiance of the exit poll.
The opposition denounced the election as stolen and protests broke out across Kiev, given backbone and direction by Western-funded NGOs. Before long the city was paralyzed. Putin was shocked and hinted to the outgoing Ukrainian leader that he thought he should send in the tanks. When it came to the point of round-table talks between the two sides Putin even suggested sending Boris Yeltsin out of retirement as his representative.
The protesters won as a million people flooded onto the streets. As Putin’s men fled humiliated, the Bush administration and those that dreamt of a European Union that can dominate over Moscow in former ‘fraternal republics’, which in Brussels had begun to be called ‘the shared neighbourhood’, were delighted. The Arabs were vomiting up the neo-conservative ‘Freedom Agenda’ but in Eastern Europe something that looked like the good old days of 1989 was under way. For a moment Ukraine forgot that it is as overshadowed by Russia as Mexico is by the USA and fantasized about being in NATO. London, Brussels and Washington indulged them.
Moscow was aghast. Into this, the deepest of Russia’s historical wounds, the Americans were keen to push the NATO alliance. Ukrainians see this as their right as an independent country, but real horror gripped the Kremlin. ‘This was our 9/11,’ says Pavlovsky – or a moment Moscow realized its defences simply weren’t there. Rewinding back to 1991, when the intelligentsia clapped as Yeltsin cut loose the other SSRs, as the country as a whole shrugged off the independence of the Ukraine – because nobody wanted to pay to keep these people – there was an overriding conviction that it didn’t matter if they became independent. People thought, ‘They will just stay where they are.’ The foreign policy establishment thought an expensive empire would be converted into a cost-effective sphere of influence, not truly independent. Had Russians thought at the time that Ukrainians could join a NATO alliance led by George W. Bush they would have gone to war to stop it exiting the USSR.
Not only did Putin’s foreign policy machine look completely kaput, but key figures in the establishment, the same men who were supposed to be keeping his regime afloat, failed as well. The outcome in Kiev was considered so vital that the Kremlin assigned its most experienced agents to the task. None other than Dmitry Medvedev (then almost unrecognizably pudgier), the Kremlin chief of staff, ran the case. He had dispatched the spin doctors who had manufactured Putin’s own election victory – Gleb Pavlovsky and his sidekick Sergey Markov – off to Kiev.