The federal government of Chechnya was abolished in May 2000, when President Putin established direct rule. Fighting continued after Putin appointed Akhmad Kadyrov as the head of the local government and would continue as a guerilla conflict for many years to come. Terror attacks large and small by Chechen groups would continue around the country. And even when violence had been reduced to “tolerable” levels, the repercussions from what Russia had done in Chechnya continued to ripple around the world. Chechnya’s main export became well-trained, well-armed radicalized fighters and terrorists.
Yes, I said “President” Putin. He had been inaugurated on May 7, 2000, a month before the election had been scheduled to take place. Yeltsin had another surprise up his sleeve and had suddenly resigned on December 31, 1999, making Putin the acting president and requiring an election in three months’ time. Putin took care of the most important business immediately, ensuring the security and wealth of Boris Yeltsin and his family. A decree granting Yeltsin and all his relatives freedom from prosecution was signed the same day Putin took office, revealing the real reason Yeltsin had selected him for his successor: self-preservation.
PRESIDENT FOR LIFE
Putin’s sudden ascent to acting president eliminated any remaining doubts about the result of the election. Not only would he have three months as the most visible and powerful person in Russia, with the full apparatus of the state to promote him, but the election would come three months earlier than the competition had expected. Putin appeared on television constantly in the months before the March 26 vote, with one exception. Continuing a Yeltsin tradition, he declined to participate in any debates with other candidates.
Putin won with 53.4 percent, nearly doubling Zyuganov’s tally and avoiding the runoff that would have been triggered had he failed to reach a majority. On election night I was watching the returns come in on television with several American guests curious to see the beginning of the post-Yeltsin era. One was Chris Cox, the congressman from California who had become a great advocate of Russian democracy and bilateral affairs, and a personal friend. Other guests that evening included James Woolsey, the former CIA director under Bill Clinton, and Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of state. I remember watching Putin’s numbers carefully that night. He was holding steady at around 47 percent when in less than an hour they jumped up to 53 percent and then never fluctuated again. It would have been embarrassing for Putin to have to undergo a second round. He was the chosen one and the time for uncertainty was over.
This is not to suggest Putin would not have won a completely fair election at the time. He would have. People were nervous and craving stability and strength, which is what Putin promised them. The various liberal reform groups, most notably the Yabloko (“Apple”) party of Grigory Yavlinsky, who received my vote, were relegated to bystanders. The idea that greater centralized power could lead to a loss of civil liberties was far from most Russians’ minds. We still had a mostly free media, with programs that openly criticized our politicians and their ideas. The brilliant satirical puppet show Kukly had raked Yeltsin over the coals for years on NTV. The government was not the sacred cow it would soon become.
Terrorism and physical security were not the only voter priorities. The 1998 financial collapse was still on everyone’s mind. Although it was relatively short-lived, and the economy would rebound in 2000 to achieve its highest ever GDP growth of over 10 percent, there were serious concerns about how much we could trust the banks and other financial institutions, especially because of who owned them.
The oligarchs who had gotten unimaginably rich in the 1990s while allying with Yeltsin were the public faces of the corruption that infuriated the average Russian. We saw them on TV and in the papers, saw their ostentatious wealth while their gangsters and bodyguards fought battles in the streets of Moscow. A “law and order” campaign is one of the oldest clichés in the history of elections, but it had real resonance in Russia in 2000.
Another element in the mood on the street in Russia then was Soviet nostalgia. Not for Communism, but the vague sense that something had been lost. It’s difficult to explain, but the 1990s failed to provide a new sense of purpose to fill that feeling of loss and failed to provide enough prosperity to distract Russians from thinking about the past. Putin and his air of regret over the collapse of the USSR were therefore appealing along these lines. It’s a subtle but important distinction. People did not really want to return to the Soviet days; they just didn’t want to feel bad about thinking about it.
Putin arrived mostly untainted by the corruption and financial ruin associated with the Yeltsin administration. The 1998 financial crisis had forced Yeltsin to clean house, and he swept out the good with the bad. The economic team led by Anatoly Chubais was demonized, fairly and unfairly. The purge also caught a young Yeltsinite on Chubais’s team, Boris Nemtsov. Once treated by Yeltsin as a potential successor, Nemtsov would go on to become one of the strongest voices in opposition to Putin’s rollback of democracy in Russia. Boris and I worked closely together for years in the anti-Putin opposition movement and I was horrified, but not surprised, by his assassination in Moscow on February 27, 2015.
Boris Yeltsin’s needs were far more personal. Corruption accusations were rising around him and members of his family, and not just “the Family,” as his closest circle of oligarchs and advisors were known, but his actual relatives. The 1998 government shake-up left Yeltsin rattled and aware of his vulnerability. Impeachment forces in the Duma were rising before he conceded and dropped Chernomyrdin for Primakov as prime minister. Yeltsin needed a presidential successor who would be grateful and loyal to him, without his own constituency, and who would be strong enough to stand up to Yeltsin’s enemies if they came after him.
Yeltsin’s younger daughter, Tatyana, was also his close advisor and was a major power behind the throne in the later years of his administration. She has been credited with influencing her father’s choice of Putin. There is a historical twist here going back to 1933, when ailing German president Paul von Hindenburg was convinced by his son Oskar to name Adolf Hitler chancellor. Hitler seized all state powers for himself within hours of von Hindenburg’s death in 1934. Ironically, in her blog in 2010, Tatyana Yumasheva (her married name) briefly and cautiously attempted to defend her father and his legacy against the Putin regime’s attempts to rewrite the history of the 1990s.
The nonaggression pact between Putin and the Family has otherwise held up very well. In fact, I think Putin was cautious about completely demolishing Russian democracy up until Yeltsin’s death. Despite his faults and fall from grace while in office, Yeltsin was a true freedom fighter. Had he felt obliged to speak out about Putin’s dictatorial maneuvers it could have had real repercussions going into the 2008 election season. But after he died on April 23, 2007, Putin clearly felt no constraints.
Yeltsin deserves to be remembered for more than his drinking and for sitting atop a tank during the August coup attempt. In December 1991, the Western world watched with grave suspicion as Mikhail Gorbachev was forced to resign from office. Yeltsin got little credit for leading the revolution that finally swept away Communist institutions and broke up the Soviet empire. It was Yeltsin, not Gorbachev, who brought Russia out of the looking glass into the sunlight. During the painful transition period, Russians lost their illusions about a shining future just around the corner. Corruption, poverty, crime, and war in the North Caucasus made daily life in Russia quite ugly, and Yeltsin received most of the blame.