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For Putin the most vexing part of the whole episode was that when the angry crowd was threatening his offices, and he called the Soviet military chief in the Dresden district for help, he was told they could do nothing without a green light from Moscow. ‘But Moscow,’ says Putin, ‘was silent. I had the sense that the country didn’t exist any more. It was plain to see that the Soviet Union was sick. And the sickness was a deadly, incurable one called paralysis. The paralysis of power.’

Putin says he understood that Soviet control over half of Europe, based as it was on repression and barbed wire, could not go on for ever. But he admits he resented the loss of influence and regarded it as a national humiliation. ‘We just abandoned everything and left.’

It was at this point that Putin made an abrupt life-change that introduced him for the first time to outlooks and influences that would challenge everything he had believed in as a schoolboy, as a student and as a KGB agent. In January 1990 he returned from Germany to his home city, which would soon be renamed St Petersburg. While remaining at first on the KGB’s payroll, he found work in the foreign relations department of Leningrad University, and then as assistant to the chairman of Leningrad City Council, a former economics professor named Anatoly Sobchak. One of the leading free thinkers of the perestroika period, Sobchak was soon elected mayor of St Petersburg, and in June 1991 he put Putin in charge of the city’s foreign relations at a time when it had pretensions of becoming a major financial and investment centre. Sobchak later appointed Putin his deputy.

The former perfect ‘product of a Soviet patriotic upbringing’ thus became exposed not only to the democratic views of Sobchak but was also plunged into the alien world of Western trade and finance. When communist hardliners (including Putin’s KGB chief, General Kryuchkov) staged a coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, Putin says he was at Sobchak’s side, drumming up resistance in support of democracy. He said later he believed the plotters’ intention, of preventing the disintegration of the USSR, was ‘noble’, but they in fact achieved the exact opposite. By the end of the year the Communist Party had been swept from power and the Soviet Union broke up. It was a watershed for Putin: ‘All the ideals and goals I had when I joined the KGB collapsed.’

Putin’s tenure as deputy mayor was not without controversy. Deputies at the city council tried to have him dismissed for corruption following a scandal concerning food imports. He survived, but when Sobchak was voted out of office in 1996 Putin too found himself without a job.

Through a combination of luck and acquaintances, Putin soon found himself in Moscow, quickly working his way up through the ranks of the Kremlin bureaucracy.7 He became deputy chief of staff to President Yeltsin in March 1997, director of the KGB’s successor organisation, the FSB, in July 1998 and (simultaneously) head of the National Security Council in March 1999.

His patrons were the group of people known as the Family – President Yeltsin’s inner circle of advisers, which included his daughter Tatiana, his former chief of staff (and later Tatiana’s husband) Valentin Yumashev, Yeltsin’s current chief of staff Alexander Voloshin, and the influential business tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who owned 49 per cent of Russia’s main state television channel, ORT, and effectively controlled it.

Just as the Family had arranged Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996, so they would soon secure Putin’s appointment as prime minister – with the intention of moving him into the presidency as Yeltsin’s successor. They had been impressed by Putin’s loyalty. As head of the FSB he effectively stymied criminal investigations into large-scale corruption and money laundering, in which members of Yeltsin’s family and senior Kremlin officials were allegedly implicated. (One of the officials, Pavel Borodin, was accused of embezzling fabulous sums during the refurbishment of Kremlin buildings. He happened to be the man who had brought Putin from St Petersburg and given him his first job in the administration.) Putin also helped his former mentor Sobchak evade prosecution on corruption charges. Loyalty would later turn out to be a striking feature of Putin’s make-up. Just as he found his own loyalty to the Family repaid, so he as president would richly reward those most loyal to him – and punish those who opposed him. The Family were not let down: Putin’s first move on becoming acting president in 2000 would be to sign the decree granting Yeltsin and his family immunity from prosecution.

In the summer of 1999 Yeltsin’s coterie dispatched Berezovsky to talk with Putin, who was on holiday with his family in the French resort of Biarritz, and offer him the job of prime minister. Putin demurred, apparently unsure of his abilities, but when he returned to Moscow President Yeltsin would not take no for an answer.8

During this dizzy year of his career, Putin found himself dealing with events that would leave a deep impression on his thinking. In March 1999 three former members of the Soviet bloc, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, joined NATO. Whatever the truth about the alleged guarantees given to Gorbachev that NATO would not move eastwards (and American officials firmly deny that such a promise was made), this was the first stage of what Russia regarded as an unnecessary and threatening advance of a military alliance towards its own borders. The issue would dog the next decade of Putin’s rule.

Just 11 days after NATO’s enlargement, the organisation launched its air strikes against Serbia, with all the repercussions described earlier in this chapter. And in August the troubles in Chechnya, which had been smouldering quietly for the past two and a half years, suddenly burst into flames – igniting a visceral fury in Putin that would inform his actions at home and abroad for many years. Fighting terrorism became an obsession.

Since the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya at the end of 1996, the republic had enjoyed de facto autonomy and become increasingly lawless. Its relatively moderate elected government was undermined by warlords such as Salman Raduyev and Shamil Basayev, the man who had been behind the hostage-taking in Budyonnovsk. Kidnapping became commonplace. After the murders of six Red Cross workers and four kidnapped telecoms workers, foreigners scarcely dared set foot in the republic. Islamic fundamentalism took hold, and some of the warlords developed links with Middle Eastern extremist groups, including al-Qaeda.

On 7 August 1999 Basayev and a Saudi-born Islamist, Ibn Al-Khattab, launched a well-planned invasion of some 1,500 men into Chechnya’s neighbouring republic, Dagestan. Their aim was to establish an Islamic state there – a first step towards the creation of an Islamic superstate throughout Russia’s northern Caucasus region. The attack also catapulted Putin to the highest office. The next day Yeltsin appointed his steely security chief as prime minister to tackle the problem.

Putin’s sudden emergence from nowhere as the country’s future leader was astonishing. He was still virtually unknown in the country, and indeed to most of the political elite. But in the months that followed he became the new face of Russia – tough, energetic and ruthless in responding to ever more audacious Chechen terrorist attacks.

In the space of two weeks in September four bomb explosions destroyed apartment blocks in the cities of Buynaksk, Moscow (twice) and Volgodonsk. Almost 300 people were killed. The attacks were blamed on Chechens and, together with the invasion of Dagestan, provided Putin with the excuse, if he needed one, to launch the second Chechen war. At a meeting with Bill Clinton on 12 September an agitated Putin drew a map of Chechnya and described his plan to annihilate the separatists. ‘These people are not human,’ he snarled to the press afterwards. ‘You can’t even call them animals – or if they’re animals, they’re rabid animals…’