But fidelity to Yeltsin did not in itself make his rise to supreme office inevitable. A broad public consensus behind Putin’s candidacy still had to be forged. It was the Second Chechen War that, in a matter of weeks, transformed Putin from mere cypher to president-in-waiting. In late August 1999, an incursion into Dagestan by Chechen Islamist warlord Shamil Basaev and his troops, followed by a series of bombings of apartment buildings elsewhere in Russia, provided the pretext for Russia to launch another invasion of the separatist republic in the North Caucasus. The First Chechen War, unleashed by Yeltsin in December 1994, had ended in August 1996 in an ignominious stalemate, seen at the time as definitive proof of the decline of Russia’s power. Its army had been fought to a standstill by bands of separatist fighters while images of senseless destruction streamed into living rooms across the country. Russian bombers had turned the Chechen capital, Grozny, into a sea of rubble and caused tens of thousands of civilian deaths.
Three years on, a key part of Putin’s popular appeal was his commitment to reversing the humiliation inflicted in the North Caucasus – famously summed up in his vow to ‘wipe out’ Chechen separatists ‘in the outhouse’. Warmly endorsed by the major Western powers, the assault on Chechnya – labelled an anti-terrorist operation – provided the springboard for Putin’s rise to the Kremlin, sending his approval rating from a mere 31 per cent in August 1999 to 80 per cent three months later.
The Chechen campaign was the stage on which Putin tested and developed his presidential persona. This took time to emerge fully. It is striking now to watch footage of his first address to the nation as acting president, on New Year’s Eve of 1999. Putin speaks haltingly, as if unprepared or lacking in conviction; but beneath the stilted delivery, there is a determination that would not have escaped viewers’ attention. His sobriety, too, is in stark contrast to the rambling, drunken incoherence of Yeltsin’s speech that same evening. Putin’s low-key style was well received by much of the Russian public, who had grown tired of the high-sounding but empty rhetoric of the 1990s’ politicians.
Putin also spoke clearly, and for the most part in the idiom of a well-educated person. In this he was unlike both Yeltsin and Gorbachev, who like many Communist-era Party bosses had accents that bespoke their proletarian or peasant origins. Putin’s language was more that of a bureaucrat or manager, replete with technical-sounding euphemisms (‘business structures’) and references to ‘solving problems’. His occasional swerves into street language – these became cruder and more frequent when he was under pressure – may have alarmed some in the liberal intelligentsia. But they were often excused or even admired by others, seen as glints of steel amid the clouds of phrase-mongering offered by other politicians.
The story of Putin’s ascent tells us a certain amount about the man who would come to dominate Russia after 2000. But for understanding how he would then rule, perhaps more important than his personal trajectory is the context in which his rise took place. The consensus that carried him to the presidency in March 2000 was to a large extent a negative one. Putin’s initial success was founded less on a positive evaluation of what he was than on approval of what he was not: he emerged as an apparent alternative to Yeltsin and the other leading politicians of the 1990s. His candidacy required him to do very little. In fact, the less he committed himself to particular positions, the more the public could project onto him their own assumptions and desires. This is why Putin’s rule, in its early stages, was marked by a kind of ideological weightlessness – and why, even as he took supreme office, Russians and foreigners alike still knew little about him. Putin was an empty centre around which all of Russia could be made to turn.
Both at the time and since, Putin has been widely perceived as marking a sharp break with what came before. Yet this overlooks the extent to which he represented a continuation of Yeltsin – a fact summed up symbolically in the guarantee of immunity he gave his predecessor on taking office, and in the quasi-monarchical succession through which he gained the presidency. Indeed, though a great deal changed in Russia after 2000, in crucial respects the political and economic arrangements that took shape during the 1990s were maintained and consolidated.
On the face of it, the Zero Years – as the 2000s are known in Russia – seemed markedly different from what had come before. Yeltsin’s erratic improvisation gave way to the cold calculation personified in Putin. After a decade in which the state apparatus had been hollowed out, Putin now began to reassert its authority. The tone was set early on by his frequent mentions of the ‘vertical of power’. The country’s parliament came increasingly to be dominated by the pro-Putin United Russia party, founded in 2001. In stark contrast to the constitutional free-for-all of the 1990s, when many of Russia’s territorial subunits laid claim to extensive powers, Putin established a clear chain of command, firmly subordinating Russia’s regions to Moscow by appointing plenipotentiaries to head seven new federal superdistricts, the okrugá. In the media, the boisterous, incoherent pluralism of the Yeltsin years was replaced after 2000 by a solid, at times deadening consensus, as the Kremlin gained control over the main TV networks and brought the more critical media outlets to heel.
Economically, the prolonged post-Soviet collapse was followed by recovery after the 1998 rouble crash, and then by an oil-fuelled boom in the new century. After reaching a nadir of $9 per barrel in mid-1998, the price of Urals crude oil more than doubled by 2002, and then rose past $50 by 2005, before rocketing to $138 in mid-2008.{11} This underwrote a period of impressive growth in Russia, with GDP increasing by an annual average of close to 7 per cent in Putin’s first presidential term, and almost 8 in his second. Taxes on hydrocarbon exports filled state coffers again, enabling the government to pay wage and pension arrears. Real incomes rose by an average of more than 10 per cent a year in the first half of the decade, poverty levels dropped from 30 per cent in 2000 to just under 18 per cent in 2004, and unemployment shrank from its 1998 peak of 13 per cent to 6 per cent by 2007.{12}
Yet despite these differences, there were deeper continuities between the Russia of Yeltsin and that of Putin. Politically, the system that prevailed in the 2000s was not a perversion of Yeltsinism but its maturation. Lauded in the West as the architect of democracy in Russia, Yeltsin showed little respect for its principles in practice. In October 1993, faced with a fractious legislature – the Congress of People’s Deputies elected in 1990 – he sent tanks to shell it into submission, and then rewrote the constitution, increasing the president’s powers exponentially; the changes were approved by a rigged referendum in December. Even before that, he had sidestepped democratic accountability by implementing much of the key legislation that shaped the post-Soviet economy through a series of decrees; some of them, notably on privatization, were drafted by Western advisers. In Chechnya, Yeltsin moved to crush local aspirations to sovereignty, unleashing total war against the civilian population in 1994.
On each of these fronts, Putin continued what Yeltsin had begun. Yeltsin had put the national legislature in its place in 1993, but in the wake of the 1998 rouble crisis the Duma had again showed signs of rebellion. Putin brought it firmly back under control, streamlining the party system so that by 2007 there were only three parties to manage besides the ruling United Russia. One of them, A Just Russia, was the Kremlin’s own confection, set up in 2006 to siphon votes from the Communist Party (KPRF). There was hardly any need, though, since the KPRF and the nationalist LDPR (the wildly misnamed Liberal Democratic Party of Russia) didn’t constitute much of an opposition: on most significant issues they rubber-stamped the government’s legislation. In December 2003, Boris Gryzlov, the Duma chairman, summed up the legislature’s negligible role by declaring, ‘Parliament is not a platform for political battles.’{13} Having reined in regional elites by appointing plenipotentiaries over their heads, in 2004 Putin further restricted their autonomy by abolishing elections for governors and mayors (though these were partially reintroduced in 2012).