I don’t mean to discount his strong attachment to the state intelligence agencies. This outwardly emotionless man seemed to be moved almost solely by his feelings for the spy services and Mother Russia, both of which he believed had been scandalously maltreated by Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Yet Putin himself had a mediocre career in intelligence. To be a reasonably successful spy, one should land an assignment in the capital of an important enemy state, such as Washington or London, or in a zone of significant East–West conflict, such as the Middle East. By comparison, the apex of Putin’s career was a six-year posting to East Germany, a Soviet satellite with few secrets to learn and few foreigners worth converting to the Communist cause. Putin was not even assigned to Berlin, the capital, but instead to the singularly unremarkable outpost of Dresden. Upon returning home in 1990, he was not sent to the Soviet capital of Moscow—the center of intelligence work—but instead to St. Petersburg. In a collection of interviews conducted with him in 2000, called First Person, he claimed somewhat unconvincingly that St. Petersburg was his choice because he knew that the Soviet Union was teetering toward collapse. Whatever the case, his active intelligence career was over. He was thirty-eight.
Putin was elevated to the top job in the FSB eight years later—in summer 1998—but not because of his intelligence skills. The Yeltsin camp effectively installed him there. Putin was seen as someone who could be relied upon to defend the first family and those around the president. Any notion that the FSB on its own would choose an arguably failed spy to be the intelligence agency’s champion seemed questionable to me. Indeed, Putin’s first act upon assuming the presidency of Russia, on December 31, 1999, seemed to validate the thinking of Yeltsin’s advisers. He signed a proclamation barring any prosecution of the outgoing president.
The state’s intelligence operatives nevertheless are extremely influential. It is disturbing, for example, to witness Putin’s benevolent attitude toward the remnants of the once all-powerful KGB. When the Soviet Union collapsed, thousands of siloviki, members of Russia’s military and security agencies, had gone from being the cream of Soviet society to the dregs of the Yeltsin era. Their complaints about their fate and their mourning for Russia’s past were largely ignored until Putin came along, tapped into their fury, and began methodically reappointing them to influential posts. By the end of 2006, they were in full control of both Russia’s political and corporate worlds, according to Olga Kryshtanovskaya, the scholar and leading expert on Russian elites. She examined the top one thousand officials in the Kremlin, parliament, the ministries, and business, and found that 78 percent had some link to the siloviki. This is not surprising when one considers the extent to which Putin and the siloviki—and a significant portion of ordinary Russians, for that matter—were troubled by the same questions: What had happened to this nation that in the not-so-distant past had struck fear into the hearts of the West? How had its once-venerated army fallen into such shameful disrepair?
But the evidence shows that Putin summoned the siloviki to help him right the ship, to restore the Russia that he and they remembered. I could find no reason to believe that there was any more to it than that. The theory that Putin’s ascendance was masterminded in FSB headquarters seemed vastly exaggerated.
As Putin assumed power over Russia, a kind of social contract was struck between the mafias and the state. The terms were unwritten but understood. The mafias did not disappear. But they were regularized and made to observe new rules of conduct—for starters, the wanton street shoot-outs that were a fixture of the Yeltsin era would no longer be tolerated. Among the chief beneficiaries of this contract were the hundreds of current and former agents of the FSB who had become part of Russia’s dark underbelly in the Yeltsin years, acting as muscle and brains for the mafias and gangs throughout Europe. Now they became the visible superstructure of Putin’s regime. Overnight, they were part of the new order, working in high-level security firms, assigned to jobs at every level in ministries, the Kremlin, and state-owned companies.
The Yeltsin period had been so rapacious that even some of the oligarchs recognized it as such. The most perceptive among them quickly understood that Putin would attempt to unwind their power. There is a belief that he offered the oligarchs a deal in the last half of 2000: Cease your political activity and most likely keep your fortunes. In fact, it appears that some of the oligarchs themselves sought this deal, to head off a Putin attack on all of them. One oligarch, Mikhail Fridman, told Lloyd, the Financial Times writer, that he and the other billionaires deserved Putin’s wrath. In an interview at the time, Fridman said they asked only that past wrongs be forgotten. “I think the best plan would be if Putin were to declare an amnesty on everything that happened in the past,” Fridman said.
Russia’s increasingly hostile stance toward the West under Putin also has a more nuanced history. The prevailing wisdom is that he was emboldened to challenge the West when soaring oil revenues suddenly made Russia a wealthy nation to be reckoned with. It is true that Russia and the West enjoyed a relatively warm relationship from the Gorbachev years through the middle to late 1990s. But antagonism actually began to surface during Boris Yeltsin’s latter years as president. It seemed to start as a pragmatic political response to a resurgence of Russian nationalism; Yeltsin’s government decided that it could strengthen its domestic support by adopting a harder-edged foreign policy. That turned to seriously belligerent talk in the lead-up to NATO’s 1999 decision to bomb Serbia in order to halt Belgrade’s advance on Kosovo. Yeltsin warned that the NATO strike could lead to military action by Russia and a possible world war. When he first took power, Putin sought to moderate Russia’s rhetoric, but that would soon change.
Domestic Russian politics and a series of terrorist attacks that shook the country in the latter half of 1999 were instrumental in creating the Putin we know today. Explosives shattered high-rise apartment buildings in the region of Dagestan, the city of Volgodonsk, and two districts of Moscow itself—a total of four bombings that killed more than three hundred and wounded scores more.
The Yeltsin presidency was in its waning months; Putin, who had just been appointed prime minister, went on the air to angrily declare that he would not negotiate with those responsible for the apartment blasts, who he said were undoubtedly Chechens. In fact, he would not negotiate with terrorists under any circumstance—a seeming swipe at concessions made by Yeltsin to end the First Chechen War of 1994–96. Whereupon Putin launched the Second Chechen War, in which tens of thousands of Chechens and Russians would be killed during the worst years of the fighting.
These events in latter 1999—the apartment blasts and Putin’s retaliatory assault on breakaway Chechnya—“transformed the Russian political landscape,” wrote Paul Klebnikov, a Forbes magazine reporter. “Prime Minister Putin declared the nation besieged. Paranoia swept Russia’s cities….” The fearful populace craved a strong leader and six months later elected Putin president with 52.6 percent of the vote. The results were a stunning turnaround from his popularity rating of a mere 2 percent when, as a stranger to the population at large, he was first appointed prime minister.