The apartment bombings were so convenient in providing Putin with the pretext to go to war, and thereby to improve his ratings, that some Russians believe they were carried out by the FSB. Conspiracy theories are so rife – and so outlandish – in Russia that you would have to rewrite history if you believed them all. But real suspicions were raised by a fifth incident, in the city of Ryazan, where police acting on a tip-off foiled an apparent plot after discovering three sacks of white powder, which they identified as explosive, together with detonators, in the basement of a block of flats. Thousands of local residents were evacuated while the sacks were removed and made safe. Putin himself praised the vigilance of the people who had spotted the sacks being carried into the building. When men suspected of planting the bombs were arrested, however, they turned out to be FSB agents. The FSB chief then claimed it had all been an ‘exercise’ to test responses after the earlier explosions and that the bags only contained sugar. The local FSB in Ryazan knew nothing about such an exercise, however, and issued a statement expressing surprise.
Several other mysterious circumstances surround the apartment bombings. For example, the speaker of the State Duma announced to parliament that he had just received a report of the apartment bombing in Volgodonsk on 13 September – the day of one of the Moscow bombings, but three days before the Volgodonsk explosion. Had someone who knew in advance about all the planned attacks got the dates mixed up? But attempts to have the incidents properly investigated in Russia have been thwarted, and the Kremlin reacts with fury to questions on the subject. Moreover, two members of an independent commission that tried to establish the facts were murdered and a third was killed in a car accident, while the commission’s investigating lawyer was arrested and jailed for alleged illegal arms possession. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, both of whom investigated the bombings, were murdered in 2006.
The second Chechen war was intended to avenge the humiliation suffered by Russia in the first, and to put a halt to what Putin apparently regarded as an Islamist threat to the entire country. One of his closest advisers told me on condition of anonymity that Putin feared his tenure as prime minister might last only a few months (like that of his predecessors) and he wanted to use the time to prevent Russia from falling apart. ‘The Chechen invasion into Dagestan was a signal from the bandits that they could go further, along the Volga river into some of our Muslim republics – Bashkortostan and Tatarstan.’
I have never heard Putin (or any other Russian leader) speak about the real grievances of the Chechen people – their mass deportation from their homeland to Central Asia under Stalin, the swamping of their culture and language by the Russians during the Soviet period. Nor is there much awareness of the fact that it was the brutal Russian invasion in 1994 that radicalised the Chechen fighters and encouraged Islamic fundamentalism – of which there was not a whiff when I visited the republic before the first war. It was the war, and the atrocities committed by Russian forces, that turned mere separatists into ideologically driven terrorists. Without that understanding, Putin’s new war was bound to make matters even worse.
He soon began to reveal the sharp tongue and earthy language that became his trademark. Asked about the ferocity of the Russian campaign, he replied, on 24 September: ‘We’ll pursue the terrorists wherever they are. If they’re in an airport we’ll get ’em there. If we catch ’em – excuse the expression – in the toilet… we’ll wipe ’em out right there, in the outhouse. End of story.’
Putin’s campaign quickly raised him out of obscurity. But he was not yet the country’s most popular politician. One of his predecessors as prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, had publicly denounced the corruption in Yeltsin’s entourage and declared his intention of running for president. Together with the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, he created a political bloc, Fatherland–All Russia, which looked set to do well in parliamentary elections in December, giving him a springboard for the presidential election scheduled for June.
It was at this point that Boris Berezovsky stepped in to ensure the victory of the Family’s candidate, Putin. Berezovsky threw the entire weight of his ORT channel behind him, while mounting a sustained smear campaign against Primakov and Luzhkov. He hired a well-known presenter, Sergei Dorenko, who specialised in scandal, sensation and brazenly biased commentary. Berezovsky was delighted to let him take fire at Primakov, who as prime minister had had his companies raided and threatened to jail businessmen like him for economic crimes. Night after night, Russia’s main TV channel harped on about Primakov’s old age and infirmity and Luzhkov’s alleged corruption, while glorifying Putin’s heroics in Chechnya.
Meanwhile the inner circle – Berezovsky, Yumashev and Tatiana Dyachenko – met secretly at the dacha of Alexander Voloshin, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, to create a political force to support Putin. In September, three months before the Duma election, a new party was born, called Yedinstvo (Unity). It had no roots, no philosophy, practically no policy other than its support for Putin, but it did have the unabashed endorsement of Berezovsky’s ORT and several of his newspapers. On 19 December it won almost twice as many votes as Fatherland–All Russia. The scene was now set for Yeltsin to resign on New Year’s Eve and hand over power to his prime minister and chosen successor.
The day after the Duma election was ‘Chekists Day’. Continuing a Soviet-era tradition, most professions in Russia have one day in the calendar in their honour, and this was the day of homage to the country’s present and former secret police (originally known as the Cheka). In the morning Putin restored a plaque on the wall of the FSB headquarters, the Lubyanka, in memory of Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief when Putin joined up. The plaque had been removed in the de-Sovietising Yeltsin years. At a gala ball in the evening the prime minister made a speech to his former colleagues, and joked: ‘I want to report that a group of FSB operatives, sent to work undercover in the government, is successfully carrying out the first stage of its mission.’
The second stage was about to begin. Ten days later, Yeltsin resigned and Putin assumed supreme power in Russia.
2
COURTING THE WEST
‘I want Russia to be part of Europe’
Russia’s relations with NATO had been frozen ever since the allied bombing of Yugoslavia in March 1999. ‘NATO’s representative in Moscow has been told to pack his bags,’ announced Russia’s foreign minister, Igor Ivanov. ‘There will be no contact with NATO, including its secretary general, until the aggression against Yugoslavia stops.’
But at the beginning of 2000, shortly after Vladimir Putin became acting president of Russia, the telephone rang in the secretary general’s office at NATO headquarters in Brussels. It was none other than Igor Ivanov, and George Robertson, the new NATO chief, was taken aback. He had arrived in Brussels in October and had decided one of his first tasks should be to get Russia ‘back into the security fold’, but until now nothing had happened.
‘If you were thinking of coming to Moscow,’ said Ivanov, coyly warming to his theme, ‘I want to say that you might find that this would be welcomed.’1
And so it was that Robertson became the first major Western politician to meet the new Russian president. He flew into Moscow in February on a plane provided by the German air force.
Putin seemed to be tickled by the idea, and the sight of a Luftwaffe jet in Moscow helped to break the ice.