On August 9, 1999, the largely unknown Putin was, to the great surprise of nearly everyone, put in charge of the Russian government. The surprises didn’t end there, however. At the same time, Yeltsin announced that he hoped Putin would succeed him in the presidency in 2000 and Putin publicly stated he would run. This made Putin stand out compared to the four other prime ministers Yeltsin had gone through in the previous eighteen months. Russia was facing many challenges at the time, but the top priority for the new government was promoting Putin as the undisputed president in waiting.
Things moved very quickly after that. As many a head of state is aware, winning a war, or even just waging one, can be an excellent way to win reelection. This was essentially the scenario for Putin, who was Yeltsin’s anointed successor and the head of government. He was still completely unknown to the Russian public, however, and becoming the public face of a new war in Chechnya and hunting down the terrorists behind the apartment bombings was the best way to fix that. Over the next few months, Yeltsin practically disappeared from sight (not that unusual considering his serious health problems) and Putin was suddenly everywhere.
Although the supposed targets of the Russian offensive in Chechnya were the militants who had gone into Dagestan in August, the bombing campaign was enormous and indiscriminate. Within weeks, hundreds of thousands of Chechens had been forced to flee. In October, Putin announced a ground offensive and tens of thousands of Russian troops advanced toward Grozny. Cluster bombs and heavy artillery caused thousands more civilian deaths and countless more refugees. What was ostensibly an anti-terror operation turned into a scorched-earth campaign.
The campaign in Chechnya had the predictable effect on the other campaign: the one for president. To deny this would be to deny the obvious. The war, for all its ugliness, was popular among Russians, and even reformers like Anatoly Chubais toed the patriotic line by supporting the war effort. For a very brief moment even my own attitude was quite sympathetic to the government’s actions.
True, innocent people were suffering, and the suspicion at the time that Russia was using excessive force and committing war crimes was later confirmed. The Russian press was largely controlled by Yeltsin’s oligarch supporters who had also endorsed Putin, or you might say had created Putin, and gave a very rose-colored picture of unfolding events. The Russian public also bought the official story that Chechens were behind the terrorist attacks in Moscow and Volgodonsk in September, even though there was hardly any proof. (More on that in a moment.)
But even knowing what we know now, I admit that the support Russians gave their soldiers in Chechnya was not the result of brainwashing. Many of the Chechen rebels were bandits who plied their trade on Russian territory and whose methods could only be described as medieval. Nor were their activities constrained to the Caucasus and the occasional terror attack outside. Chechen criminal gangs were active all over the country, although it was clear that they would never have become as powerful and dangerous as they were without their reliable “business partners” in Moscow. For the majority of Russians the military crackdown in Chechnya was part of their desire to end the plague of corruption and criminality in cities where they lived.
Every day struggling Russians read about the new billionaires being created by cozy deals with the government. You didn’t have to understand how things like privatization vouchers, loans-for-shares, and rigged auctions worked to realize there was a huge scam going on. Worried that reforms might be rolled back by conservatives, Yeltsin’s reform team, led by Yegor Gaidar and Chubais, started selling things off at a frantic pace at absurdly low valuations. Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky, already two of the wealthiest and most influential oligarchs, acquired their huge energy firms, Yukos and Sibneft, for less than 10 percent of their real value.
Such sanctioned looting continued under Putin, of course, and continues today. The difference was that in the 1990s Russians could find out about it. The various political and business factions had warring media outlets, and while the press could be more than a little yellow, at least it represented many different sides so the truth could be found somewhere in the middle.
When I am asked if Putin was inevitable, this is why I say you have to start ten years before anyone knew his name. By the time Yeltsin made Putin the heir apparent, Russians were demanding stability and looking for a tough guy to stand up to the criminals and to the Western influences they’d been told were damaging the country and their pensions. To prevent Putin, or a Putin, from coming to power, the 1990s would have required a very different script with less appeasement of Yeltsin and his entourage and stronger support for democratic institutions.
As the election approached, my own view was that a faceless technocrat like Putin might just be what Russia needed at the time. I believed that the Russian government had to project strength and self-confidence and only then would it gain the popular support needed to follow through with painful economic reforms. After years of looting and capital flight it was getting harder and harder to scapegoat the West for how badly things were going. Yeltsin’s approval rating was dismal once again, another reason he and his oligarch backers were eager to find a fresh face to show to the frustrated Russian people.
The apartment bombings that terrorized Russia in September convinced even those who thought Russia should have let Chechnya go its own way in 1991 that the Chechens deserved everything they got. Laying siege to a hospital, bombing the families of soldiers: these were inhuman acts, so the gloves were off. The public cheered Putin as their new gladiator and enjoyed the rough, even profane language he occasionally used when talking about what he would do to those who would threaten Russia. “We will find the terrorists anywhere,” he once said, “and if we find them in their shithouses, we’ll wipe them out in their shithouses.”
This was a real transformation for a boring back-room bureaucrat, aided by the hasty publication of a campaign-ready biography that emphasized his deprived and difficult childhood and tough-guy credentials over anything that might prepare him for being a political reformer. This was no accident. The advantage of being faceless was that Yeltsin’s chief backer and master conspirator, Boris Berezovsky, could apply whatever face was needed.
We were forced to contemplate just how far Yeltsin, Putin, and their backers might go to guarantee Putin’s election on the night of September 22, when local police in the city of Ryazan interrupted what would have been the fifth apartment bombing of the month. Alerted by a resident, the police were too late to catch the perpetrators, but they found three fifty-kilogram sugar bags filled with white powder in the basement, connected to a detonator.
Chemical analysis on the scene the next morning detected the same military-grade hexogen explosive used in all of the previous bombings.
The next evening, the twenty-third, Putin made a televised statement praising local law enforcement and the alert citizens who had called them for averting a catastrophe. He also spoke briefly on the ongoing air strikes against Grozny. There was nothing to contradict the day’s dramatic news that a terrorist attack had been foiled in Ryazan. The next day, something incredible happened. FSB director Nikolai Patrushev issued a statement saying that the planting of a bomb in the Ryazan basement had been a “training exercise” to test the vigilance of the local security forces and residents! He said that there had been no explosives at all and that the sugar bags had actually been full of sugar, not hexogen.
This fantastical story was required because law enforcement and the local FSB office in Ryazan had already detected and exposed extensive FSB involvement in the attempted bombing. Suspicious phone intercepts on the night of the bombing were traced back to FSB headquarters in Moscow. Two men arrested in Ryazan had been carrying FSB identity cards and were released into the custody of a senior official from Moscow. Patrushev was obviously trying to cover his agency’s tracks, but there were far too many giant holes in his story.