Litvinenko had put himself in peril by turning his back on the Russian intelligence services and defecting from his native land. He had exhibited undeniable bravery before and after his exile by speaking his mind, sometimes recklessly so. He had died an agonizing death after twenty-three days of atomic war within his body. But I had difficulty viewing him as heroic or especially admirable, as a number of articles and documentaries rushed to describe him after his death. Litvinenko pursued his goals—first the reform of the FSB spy agency, then the downfall of Vladimir Putin—with much energy, but did not exhibit towering morality or intellect. In the end, he was a determined but ordinary man consumed by events far larger than him.
One thing was certain, though. Those who had scoffed at Litvinenko’s paranoia had been proven wrong—the devilish forces he said he was battling turned out to be all too real.
EPILOGUE
Exit Mr. Putin
As Vladimir Putin’s presidency was winding down, he sent two miniature submarines on a daring 2.5-mile dive under the Arctic ice. When they reached the seafloor, the three-person crew in one of the submersibles ejected a titanium capsule containing a Russian flag. This symbolic planting of the flag in August 2007 laid claim to the underwater region of the North Pole as Russian territory—a bold challenge to four other nations, the United States, Denmark, Norway, and Canada, that also asserted undersea rights there. But the unprecedented feat was no mere explorer’s vanity. According to the United States Geological Survey, some 25 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas underlies the Arctic. The Russian president was sending dual messages: Don’t underestimate Russian technology, nor Russia’s resolve to compete for global riches.
It was the type of gesture that Putin watchers had come to expect during his two terms in office. He regarded himself as a man of action, and, judging by opinion polls and election results, Russians as a whole did, too. As he made preparations to leave the presidency in 2008, Putin had become the closest thing to an all-powerful czar that Russia had known since the rule of Josef Stalin. He made no secret of his intention to remain at the pinnacle of power, and found a deceptively simple way to do so. Rather than run roughshod over the Russian constitution, which forbade a third term, he anointed himself as the next prime minister, enabling him to share power with his presidential successor. True, prime ministers after the collapse of the Soviet Union had served at the sufferance of the president; Boris Yeltsin and then Putin had fired them at will. But Putin decided that it would be different with him—Russia would have a government of equals and the new president would not, could not, arbitrarily fire him.
Achieving this arrangement required a critical mass of agreement among the Kremlin hierarchy, the military, and the security services that Putin was indeed essential. The ways of power in Russia have never been wholly visible, but this critical mass could bring down a government if it wished. Its leaders must have decided that it was in their mutual interest—professionally and probably financially as well—for Putin to remain a key player. Only one matter had to be resolved: With whom would Putin share power?
Eight years earlier, Yeltsin had set a precedent by declaring that Putin would be his successor, and had relied on the power of the Kremlin to make it happen. Now Putin set about doing the same. Many outsiders predicted that the next president would be Sergei Ivanov, a three-decade-long Putin intimate from his St. Petersburg days who had the added advantage of having served two decades in the foreign service of the KGB. Those who viewed Putin’s Russia as the “KGB State,” as Western publications and think tanks were prone to do, thought the fifty-four-year-old Ivanov was a shoo-in.
In December 2007, however, Putin announced that he would support another intimate for the job—a forty-two-year-old St. Petersburg lawyer named Dmitri Medvedev. In the post-Soviet custom, the election was rigged far in advance; Putin systematically disqualified any opponent he wanted to sideline, and state-controlled media accorded Medvedev the same worshipful coverage that Putin had enjoyed as presidential contender. Three months later, Medvedev won with about 70 percent of the vote, almost precisely Putin’s popularity rating in the country.
What explained Putin’s choice of Medvedev over Ivanov? By some measures, they were evenly matched. Both had served as first deputy prime ministers and neither was known for particularly strong leadership skills. But Ivanov, the KGB veteran, seemed far more likely to win the respect of the difficult-to-handle generals and spy chiefs. Medvedev, the son of university professors and the holder of a doctorate in law, had no experience in the military or Putin’s beloved intelligence agencies. Since Putin isn’t going to share his innermost thoughts, here is where only informed speculation is possible: Putin must have decided that Medvedev was more likely than Ivanov to tolerate, and perhaps even embrace, a subordinate relationship with the designated prime minister.
In a chat with the Financial Times, Medvedev seemed to give credence to this idea. “The incumbent president is an effective leader and he’s ready and able to continue to work to advance the development of our country, to make sure our development continues in the way set out eight years ago,” Medvedev said. “This is why this tandem, or this team of two, was formed between the presidential candidate and the Russian president as a possible future prime minister.”
Yet, one wonders if Putin was taking too much for granted. It is easy to call the undistinguished Medvedev colorless, but the same—and worse—was said of Putin himself when he took power eight years earlier. History is replete with mild-mannered understudies who became hubristic leaders once on the throne. In addition to Putin, there are the examples of Anwar el-Sadat and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt; Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan; and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Would Medvedev truly be content continuing his predecessor’s policies and receiving second billing? Or would he seek more? Putin would not have been blind to that peril, but he apparently saw little cause for concern.
He and Medvedev did their best to fend off doubts about their proposed power sharing. They remarked on their history of mutual trust and noted how long they had known each other. Medvedev had worked quietly as a subordinate to Putin for some eighteen years, starting in the early 1990s, when the scholarly lawyer was a legal consultant in the office of the St. Petersburg mayor. As the story goes, when Putin became prime minister in 1999, he had no one on whom he could truly depend. So he summoned Medvedev to Moscow to be his chief administrative deputy. Then, when Putin became president, he named Medvedev chairman of Gazprom.
The latter appointment was an important demonstration of confidence, since Gazprom is Russia’s strategically most important company, accounting for a quarter of all government revenue, according to 2006 tax figures. It also served as the main lever of Putin’s foreign policy. When he decided to seize oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky’s television station, it was Gazprom, with Medvedev at the helm, who actually took over NTV. When Putin ordered that the natural gas pipeline to Ukraine be shut down, incurring the wrath of European customers who depended on the same line for their supply, it was Medvedev’s Gazprom that actually carried out the order.
The same alliance went into action in 2007 when Putin moved to reassert Moscow’s power on the Caspian Sea, a longtime Russian preserve where the United States had been laboring for a decade to establish a strong Western presence.