CHAPTER 2
How Putin Got Elected
Boris Yeltsin Finds a Guarantor in a Man from Nowhere
BORIS YELTSIN WAS AN OBSCURE COMMUNIST PARTY FUNCTIONARY in the tough, mafia-ridden industrial region of Sverdlovsk when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 summoned him to Moscow. There, Yeltsin became Gorbachev’s political protégé and demonstrated an energy seldom seen among Soviet leaders. His mentor rewarded him with promotions, enabling Yeltsin to rise rapidly through the ranks of party leadership. But the two began to butt heads when Yeltsin pushed the president to enact political reform faster than Gorbachev was willing. Yeltsin quit the Communist Party and soon became a political force in his own right. He captured the imagination of many Soviets with such populist gestures as rushing into a Moscow shop and demanding that their goods be stocked on open shelves, not pilfered by the proprietors. Everything about him seemed larger than life, including his distinctive shock of white hair.
Yeltsin showed he was willing even to put his life on the line, famously standing atop a tank in August 1991 to rebuff an attempted coup against Gorbachev by Communist hard-liners. Although he was no longer a supporter of the president, he would not allow a return to the worst traditions of Soviet rule, Yeltsin declared. Four months later, Gorbachev resigned from the presidency and the Soviet Union collapsed.
Now Yeltsin was president of independent Russia. He set out to improve the lives of Russian people by appointing a team of economic specialists led by a brilliant mathematician named Yegor Gaidar. The team’s assignment was simple: to provide Russians the economic lift from democracy that had been promised but not delivered during the last five years of Gorbachev’s rule. Gaidar’s strategy, dubbed “shock therapy,” was driven not only by economics but also politics. It was designed to wrest control of the nation’s means of production from Soviet-era bosses in order to create a middle class of stakeholders that would become the foundation of a new, freer Russia. And so the Yeltsin government ended state ownership of Russia’s biggest moneymaking enterprises, including nickel, oil, aluminum, and media companies. These giant industries were sold off, at a relative pittance, to a half-dozen well-connected Russian businessmen—“the oligarchs.” But the Russian economy ended up being the loser. Like the Communist bosses before them, the oligarchs mainly used their freshly won enterprises as a means to generate cash for themselves. Workers often went without pay, and the promised modernization of old and inefficient Soviet-era factories never happened.
In 1998, conditions worsened. The world price of oil, a critical source of revenue for Russia, plummeted below $10 a barrel. Already, an economic contagion had spread from Asia to Russia; for the second time in five years, the Kremlin impoverished ordinary Russians by devaluing the ruble and making their hard-earned savings nearly worthless.
Yeltsin took a pummeling. His popularity rating wallowed in the single digits. Despite his well-known personal frailties, such as alcohol-binging and depression, he had always been perceived as a giant of a man. Now he seemed physically and politically weak. John Lloyd of the Financial Times, perhaps the most able foreign correspondent in Russia at the time, wrote that Yeltsin had become a virtual tool of the oligarchs, “a mixture between an invalid and a puppet, his strings jerked by masters behind his throne.”
The story of Vladimir Putin’s ascent in the ruling circles of Russian government begins with the five heart attacks that Yeltsin suffered during his presidency. Yeltsin was routinely incapacitated for months. His staff ran the country, and it became plain to them in 1999 that the succession process—selecting who would follow Yeltsin, whose term was ending the next year—had to be accelerated. They had two aims: to preserve the political gains that their leader had achieved, and to ensure that the Yeltsin family would not be prosecuted once he vacated the ramparts of the Kremlin. In recent months, allegations had surfaced in Switzerland of Yeltsin and his daughters running up tens of thousands of dollars on credit cards provided by a Swiss man who had received millions of dollars in Russian government contracts. There was also the Russian tradition of political leaders persecuting their predecessors for retribution and political gain. The Yeltsins wished at all costs to avoid such an unfortunate retirement.
There is much conjecture about what happened next, chiefly that the FSB, the main successor to the KGB, decided to seize power. I looked to a longtime Kremlin insider for guidance, and he agreed to fill me in, but only anonymously so as to retain his access. I’ll call him Viktor. As he recalled, at that time Yeltsin named yet another new prime minister, his fourth in fourteen months. The rapid turnover resulted from Yeltsin’s opponents forcing on him candidates whom he did not favor, and Yeltsin in turn finding ways to install successors who were more to his liking. This time the lucky man was Sergei Stepashin, a former Interior Ministry officer from St. Petersburg. Although it was not made explicit, Yeltsin’s camp intended only to give Stepashin a tryout for the presidency, Viktor said. Stepashin almost immediately proved not up to the task. He lacked backbone, Viktor said. He wouldn’t take a stand. And that could only earn disrespect in a place where long knives were the norm. Yeltsin’s handlers and family were dismayed and looked about for a replacement.
Meanwhile, Putin had made his unobtrusive way onto the Kremlin’s radar screen as head of the FSB. By comparison with Yeltsin, he was wholly lacking in political charisma or presence, but he did have demonstrated decisiveness. In June 1999, Yeltsin announced to a visiting dignitary that in ten days he would appoint Putin as his new prime minister. Furthermore, he told his startled guest, he would soon name this up-to-now obscure functionary the next president of Russia.
Vladimir Putin was the archetypal man from nowhere—as in, how did this fellow get so far? He undoubtedly benefited from a convergence of probably unrepeatable circumstances. He had quietly gained recognition within the Kremlin, where the leadership was desperate for a competent successor to the erratic Yeltsin. The chief outside candidate seemed to be one of Yeltsin’s former prime ministers, Yevgeny Primakov. But he was an ally of political forces whom Yeltsin and his allies had alienated and hoped to keep at bay.
The most telling factor appeared to be that Putin was slavishly loyal. In the early 1990s, he had attracted attention in Yeltsin’s circles as the dutiful deputy to St. Petersburg’s mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, for whom he served after returning from KGB duty in East Germany. When Sobchak slipped into political decline and suddenly faced corruption charges, Putin worked to exonerate him, while arranging his secret flight out of the country.
This act of devotion was impressive. But then he outdid himself in the eyes of Yeltsin and the president’s advisers by helping to destroy the career of an official who had made a serious nuisance of himself with the Kremlin. Yuri Skuratov, a zealous prosecutor, had seemed bent on bringing criminal charges against the Yeltsin family. But at the height of Skuratov’s high-profile investigation, a video of him carousing in the nude with prostitutes suddenly appeared on Russian television. To head off claims that the video was a fake, Putin took pains to publicly state that it was authentic. The Kremlin was nearly teary-eyed with gratitude.
Putin gained a reputation as a bureaucrat who would shield his bosses and their families from prosecution and possible prison terms. What made his record all the more meaningful to the powerful men who observed him was that he didn’t appear to be self-serving; Putin had nothing to gain, for example, from aiding Sobchak, who was already out of power. Rather, Putin seemed to feel obligated by an almost quaint sense of honor and duty. As a former KGB boss, Oleg Kalugin, put it, he was “a man of Prussian-style obedience.” That quality, so rare in Russia, combined with a willingness to work hard and avoid the spotlight, swept him into the most powerful post in the country.