It would be broadcast just before midnight. But first he had a few formalities to see to. At two o’clock he was given the ‘nuclear briefcase’ containing the codes needed to launch a nuclear strike. Then he held a five-minute meeting of his cabinet, followed by a longer session of his Security Council. At six he signed his first presidential decree, granting Yeltsin and the members of his family immunity from prosecution. Then he held a series of quick one-on-one meetings with key ministers. And finally, cancelling a planned trip to St Petersburg, he swept out of the Kremlin in the presidential motorcade and headed for Vnukovo airport. He had plans to bring in the New Year somewhere special.
While billions of people around the globe ushered in the new millennium with parties and fireworks, Russia’s new acting president was onboard a military helicopter trying to fly into the rebel republic of Chechnya in hazardous weather conditions that eventually forced the chopper to return to base in neighbouring Dagestan. This was the Putin the world would come to know and fear – the tough guy, the action man, obsessed with combating terrorists and separatists, determined to restore the pride of a country that under Yeltsin had come to look shambolic and sick.
As his helicopter battled with the elements over Chechnya, Russian television aired his pre-recorded address to the nation. It was brief and matter-of-fact, declaring there would be no vacuum of power and paying tribute to his predecessor. It contained only one policy pledge, which in retrospect looks quite remarkable. He said: ‘The state will stand firm to protect freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the mass media, and property rights, those fundamental elements of a civilised society.’
The freedoms and rights he praised were precisely those that had been obliterated in the communist USSR and then restored under Yeltsin. And yet within a few years Putin would stand accused of flouting them himself, creating a new kind of post-communist authoritarian model, trampling on the free press, and persecuting business tycoons – or indeed anyone – who dared to challenge him.
Why did that happen? The key, or at least one of the keys, to understanding Putin’s journey is to look at the Russia he inherited from Yeltsin – a Russia not just economically and militarily weak, but also patronised by the West.
Yeltsin and Clinton
Bill Clinton made his last visit to Russia as American president in June 2000, just two months after Putin’s inauguration. Clinton had met Boris Yeltsin some 20 times and built up a close, bantering relationship that came to be described as the ‘Bill ’n’ Boris Show’. He had also met Putin a couple of times, but like most Western leaders still knew little about him other than his prowess at judo and his past career as a KGB agent – and that was enough to make him wary. Now he found Putin a tough negotiator, who, irritatingly, already regarded Clinton as a lame-duck president with little more than half a year left in office.
Standing a good six inches shorter than the imposing American president, Putin made up for his lack of stature as any judo player does – with agility and skill. He doggedly resisted American plans to abandon (or even amend) the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty so as to allow the US to develop a national missile defence programme – the ‘Star Wars’ system first promoted by Ronald Reagan. The ABM treaty banned both Russia and the United States from deploying defences against nuclear missiles, and for Putin it was a cornerstone of nuclear deterrence: if one side was allowed to develop systems that could shoot down the other’s long-range missiles then the delicate balance of power would be destroyed and the side with the shield might be tempted to launch a pre-emptive strike.
Putin dismissed Clinton’s criticisms of the brutal new campaign he was waging in Chechnya and his crackdown against NTV, Russia’s leading independent television station. And he revealed his enduring resentment of NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999 – an event that would inform Putin’s foreign-policy thinking throughout the next ten years.
The campaign against Serbia, which was designed to put an end to President Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, was a pivotal moment in Russia’s relations with the West. Throughout the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, Moscow supported Milosevic, at least partly because of traditional Russian affinity with the Serbs, who, like Russians, are Orthodox Christian Slavs.
The ‘brotherly ties’ between Russians and Serbs may be exaggerated, but the Kremlin certainly saw parallels between Milosevic’s attempts to subdue ‘terrorism’ and separatism in Kosovo and Yeltsin’s fight against the same problems in Chechnya. Just as Yeltsin branded the Chechen rebels ‘bandits’, so Milosevic (and indeed at one point the US government) regarded the Kosovo Liberation Army as a terrorist group. Having launched a bloody war against Chechnya, causing tens of thousands of deaths and a mass exodus of refugees, it was entirely consistent for the Russians to support Milosevic in his efforts to maintain the integrity of what remained of Yugoslavia.
But Yeltsin’s pleas not to attack Serbia went unheeded, leaving Moscow feeling that for all the bonhomie of the Bill ’n’ Boris Show, and for all the talk of welcoming post-communist Russia into the community of civilised nations, its word counted for nothing. On the eve of NATO’s air strikes on Belgrade, Yeltsin would explode with anger during telephone calls with Clinton and sometimes slam down the phone.1
Yeltsin’s prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, was flying to Washington on 23 March 1999. He had talks planned with President Clinton, Vice-President Al Gore and the International Monetary Fund. His mission was to secure multi-billion-dollar loans to help stabilise the Russian economy, still reeling from the financial collapse of August 1998. According to Primakov’s assistant, Konstantin Kosachev, the prime minister called Gore during a refuelling stop at Shannon in Ireland, and asked: ‘Are you going to bomb Yugoslavia?’ Gore replied: ‘I cannot tell you anything, no decision has been made.’2
The government plane took off for the flight across the Atlantic. In the back were Russian business tycoons and officials, drinking vodka and playing dominoes. Suddenly, after four or five hours, Primakov received a call on a crackly, encrypted phone line. It was Gore telling him that NATO air strikes were, in fact, about to begin. Primakov at once called Yeltsin, checked with the pilot whether they had enough fuel to return to Shannon, and then went through to the cabin to inform the businessmen that the trip was abandoned: doing business with the Americans at this moment would be inappropriate.
The reaction was telling. The tycoons, allowing their patriotism to outweigh their business acumen, broke into applause. ‘It was very emotional,’ says Kosachev. The decision to turn the plane around in mid-flight was meant to send a signal of Russia’s profound displeasure. Over the next days the same feelings spilled out onto the streets, as thousands of Russians protested outside the US embassy in Moscow.
On his final presidential visit to Moscow a year later Clinton found the wound was still festering. Putin presented himself as a man who would no longer allow Russia to be ignored or pushed around. For two days he hammered home his criticism of America’s plans for a unilateral missile defence shield. Then on the final morning, as they held a farewell meeting in the Kremlin, Putin issued a dark threat that if America went ahead with its plans, Russia’s response would be ‘appropriate’ and ‘maybe quite unexpected, probably asymmetrical’ – in other words, the Russians would not try to match the sophisticated and costly US system but would take means to render it ineffective. That could mean anything from building huge numbers of nuclear missiles to overwhelm the proposed shield, to destroying the American installations as soon as they were set up.