Governors began to openly defy the federal state as provincial political and economic elites collaborated with gangs of bandits to enrich themselves on a grand scale. Government money was ruthlessly expropriated and those who had come to try and reclaim it were sent back to Yeltsin with their tails between their legs. Many regional legislatures adopted laws declaring sovereignty. They asserted ownership over natural resources, laid claim to the airspace above their territory and even began to start conducting foreign policies independent of Moscow.
The inevitable offensive launched in Chechnya in 1994 was as badly conceived and ill thought through as the policies that had preceded it and was soon attended by catastrophe. It seemed that even when Yeltsin tried to preserve the country’s fragile integrity, his every clumsy swipe only made it weaker. As the ’90s wore on, the idea that the collapse of the Soviet Union might be followed by the disintegration of Russia itself ceased to be only a nightmare and became instead a disturbingly plausible possibility.
Before long, the violence that had become such a feature of life on Russia’s periphery found its way to the country’s centre. Politicians were shot in the stairway of their homes, the blood spreading from their still-warm bodies just another stain on the dismal body politic. I still remember vividly the assassination in St Petersburg of the vice governor Mikhail Manevich, who was gunned down on his way to work in August 1997. As I stood at the memorial service alongside Mr Chubais and a number of the other men who figured in the city’s political life, such as Alexei Kudrin and Herman Gref (I would encounter many of them again when I moved to Moscow), as well as the massed ranks of the city’s officials, and people from every echelon of St Petersburg society, an air of disbelief – that this kind, gentle man had been given a gangster’s death – reigned. In the weeks that followed, there was a rapid expansion of the personal security market. Soon it was no longer unusual to see black-clad men wielding Kalashnikovs guarding the entrances to the city’s restaurants.[12]
The President’s reckless attempts over the years to fold the fledgling democracy into his personality – so that to many they were almost one and the same – meant that the government’s struggles were ascribed to his own failings. There had been a time when the sight of enemies circling would have been a source of energy, a sign that he was moving in the right direction. By 1999, however, he was increasingly trapped, wracked by thoughts about how he, his family and his circle might survive after his resignation. If it had been 1994, or even 1996, he might have been able to channel his populist gift and summon some kind of escape; a deal could have been struck and catastrophe averted. As it was, ‘the Family’ began to search frantically for a successor who they could trust to protect them. They knew their history, and did not need to be told how vulnerable those who have recently lost power quickly become. Soon, they settled upon the director of the FSB, a former KGB lieutenant colonel from St Petersburg called Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Putin was not born a president. At the time of his elevation he was still, despite his time as head of the FSB and the President’s Chief Control Directorate, someone with a reputation as a local politician. Though St Petersburg is Russia’s second city, few major politicians have emerged from it since the wild days of the 1917 revolution. It was very rare, during the Soviet era, that anyone from St Petersburg was brought into the highest echelons of power – the city’s proximity to the West, its democratic traditions, its assertive intelligentsia and persistent appetite for freedom, all served to make its residents suspect in the eyes of the Communist Party apparatus. But Putin had one significant feature that marked him out from almost all of his contemporaries: he kept his word. This, as much as anything, recommended him to ‘the Family’.
The Russian people were undoubtedly ready for a man like Putin – he looked a different type of leader from Yeltsin. But Putin’s presidency also depended on the kingmakers around Yeltsin. They had seen the loyalty he had shown to his boss Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St Petersburg; Putin had stood shoulder to shoulder with the guards protecting Sobchak’s office during the failed coup of 1991, and had remained loyal after he was deposed as mayor in 1996. They were confident they were bringing to power a man who never broke his promises – a quality without which Putin might not have become President, or at least not so soon.
There were other things about him they approved of too. His very obscurity, his ostensible lack of political ambition – he was, to begin with, incredibly reluctant to accept their proposal to lead the country, for he knew the price one pays, the life one loses, for taking on such a role – meant that he seemed to them a tabula rasa onto which they could inscribe their own agendas. Men like Berezovsky, who pushed hard for his appointment, were keenly excited by the prospect of installing another puppet in the government, the rest of ‘The Family’ looked forward to an untroubled future, and the only dissenting voice within the Yeltsin inner circle was the arch-moderniser Chubais, who would later admit he was wary of Putin’s past.
But if Chubais feared that the new president would be a revanchist who would interrupt the liberalising reforms that had been initiated, with mixed results, during Yeltsin’s reign, then his concerns would soon be assuaged.
Putin’s political education had come at the hands of men like the liberal Sobchak. If his first life might be said to have been lived in the KGB, his second was in the crucible of St Petersburg politics during the ’90s. He believed as strongly as his mentor in the urgent need to transform the fortunes of Russia’s sick economy – and once he became President he continued the economic policies that had been initiated by his predecessor’s government. (He had in fact agreed with the Family that he would not abandon the reforms they had begun.) If, for instance, you were to revisit his 2000 address to the Federal Assembly, you would see how much attention he devoted to fiscal issues. And given the strength of the neo-Communist faction in the Duma at the time, this was essential. Neither the people nor the country’s elite wanted the apparatchiks to regain their grip on power. What reforms had been achieved since 1991 still rested on fragile foundations, and turning the clock back would erode them entirely (however, even this attitude was occasionally bent out of shape by contradictions – for example, by the early 2000s, only a minority of the population opposed the renationalisation of state assets).
Putin’s faith in liberalism was complemented by experiences and qualities that set him apart from his contemporaries, whether at home or abroad. Perhaps the most notable difference is that he served for many years in the KGB, a fact that has been the source of endless specious speculation. (George H. W. Bush was another national leader in recent history with a secret-service background – he was briefly the director of the CIA – but I cannot help but note that nobody ascribes the same importance to this as they do to Putin’s time in the KGB.)
12
Despite its viciousness, perhaps