This is a man who has shown a complete disregard for human life, cynicism and hypocrisy, and a willingness to use war and the deaths of thousands of Russian soldiers and innocent civilians as a PR instrument in his election campaign. This is a man who raised a toast on the anniversary of Stalin’s birth, had the plaque commemorating former KGB head Yury Andropov restored to its place on the wall of the Lubyanka—Federal Security Service headquarters—and dreams of seeing the statue of butcher Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, stand once again in the center of Moscow.
Piontkovsky then referred to the plight of journalist Andrei Babitsky, who had been abducted by Russian military forces in Chechnya and who was later personally accused by Putin of treason for reports he felt were too sympathetic to the Chechen militants. Andrei concluded his article:
This game is also full of political significance. It is not only Babitsky who is being tortured in filtration camps. We are all being held in one huge filtration camp outside the gates to the Brave New Putin-Stasi World. They are testing our fitness for this world that awaits. How much can we swallow in silence? How quick and how easy is it to break us? Those who don’t make the grade will be ruthlessly cast off as rejects.
Don’t ask me who Putin is. And don’t ask me for whom Putin tolls. He tolls for thee.
In 2005, a bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky was returned to its old place in a courtyard behind the Moscow Police Building at Petrovka 38. The towering statue of him in Lubyanka Square that was pulled down in 1991 still awaits its return.
Putin was inaugurated on May 7, 2000, faced with an array of outside influences, not to mention a shaky economy and an ongoing war in Chechnya. With impressive focus, Putin began work immediately to tame or eliminate everything and everyone that could limit his power. His first decree had been to provide protection to Yeltsin, as had no doubt been promised. Those that followed in quick succession over the next few days were dedicated either to strengthening the military or dismantling Russia’s democratic institutions.
Oligarchs who had been on the wrong side of the power struggles quickly found out what it meant to lose to Putin. Vladimir Gusinsky, the media baron whose NTV had been the first independent channel in Russia, was considered too close to Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, whose presidential ambitions Gusinsky had funded. Gusinsky was deemed untrustworthy and potentially dangerous by Putin and the consequences were swift. Within days of Putin’s taking office, Gusinsky’s media company was raided by police. In June he was arrested on a bizarre charge and spent three days in jail. After being released on bail he left for Spain, where later in the year he was briefly arrested due to an Interpol warrant filed by the Russian government. (An early example of this tactic, abusing international institutions for political persecution.) Gusinsky’s media assets were eventually consumed by the state, a punitive form of renationalization that would also become a familiar pattern.
Berezovsky himself didn’t last much longer. Now also a member of the Duma, he published a letter protesting Putin’s proposed legislation that would demote regional governors and subject them to the authority of the central government, saying it was a threat to Russian democracy, which of course was the entire point. Six weeks later, on July 17, Berezovsky resigned from parliament, supposedly in protest over Putin’s onslaught of anti-democratic legislation. After the two exchanged criticism and threats in the media, an old fraud investigation against Berezovsky was revived by federal investigators in October. That was the only hint he needed to stay out of the country, which he did, eventually settling in London. As with Gusinsky, Berezovsky’s remaining Russian assets were stripped or he was forced to sell to oligarchs with higher loyalty ratings.
Putin may have simply deemed Berezovsky too powerful and too knowledgeable to keep around. The oligarch knew where lots of bodies were buried because he had buried many of them himself. He also controlled several very high-value targets, the oil company Sibneft and the TV channel ORT, later known as Channel One. Putin quickly realized that it was more effective to control the media completely than to censor it, so he cut out the middlemen.
Media outlets were taken over by forces friendly to Putin and his closest associates. This “takeover censorship” was accompanied by the more conventional kind, with its lists of non grata names and verboten topics. Media power was centralized in the same fashion as political power, and with the same purpose: looting the country without causing a popular revolt. The corruption of the Yeltsin era is burned into Russia’s collective memory only because we learned about it in the press at the time. In the 1990s, the competing oligarchs waged war against one another in their media outlets. It was not a fight fought fairly or decently, but a preponderance of facts came to light and thousands of honest journalists worked to bring the truth to the Russian public.
Putin’s obsession with the media boiled over after the accident that sank the Kursk nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea in August. One hundred eighteen sailors died, twenty-three of them after escaping the initial explosions and surviving for hours, maybe longer, in an isolated compartment awaiting a rescue that only arrived days later. The Kursk was the pride of the Russian fleet, launched in 1994 and deemed, like the Titanic, “unsinkable.” Due to budgetary cutbacks the sub had seen very little activity and not much maintenance, just like the rest of the military at that point in time. Poor training and corroded equipment led to disaster when an old practice torpedo exploded on board, sinking the submarine in one hundred meters of freezing water.
Putin was on vacation in Sochi at the time and decided to stay there during the crisis. There was likely nothing he could have done to save the trapped men on the Kursk; there is no way he could have known that at the time. He accepted the navy’s statement that a rescue was in motion with no debate. He admitted later that it looked very bad for him to be seen relaxing on the Black Sea while the disaster unfolded. For nearly a week no one was sure if there were survivors. The television reports switched back and forth between images of distraught families at the Vidyayevo Naval Base and the president’s barbecues in Sochi. The Russian Navy rejected offers of help that came immediately from the United States, France, Germany, Norway, and others.
Only five days and many failed Russian rescue attempts after the disaster did Putin accept international aid. A Norwegian ship arrived on the nineteenth, a full week after the Kursk had sunk. It took two more days to penetrate the submarine and confirm that there were no survivors. The navy, including several of its highest officers, had begun to spin stories about the cause of the disaster almost immediately. Their favorite was that it was the result of a collision with a NATO submarine, a conspiracy theory for which there was not a shred of evidence. Officials continued to suggest the collision theory even after evidence of two internal explosions was confirmed beyond any doubt. (Russian state-controlled media sources still mention it as a valid theory today even though the 2002 official report verified that the explosion of a faulty torpedo was the cause.)
Russian media, especially Boris Berezovsky’s television station, heavily criticized the response of the government as callous and bumbling, which was nothing more than the truth. Video of Putin and other unsympathetic officials being berated by grieving family members made Putin realize what a threat the media could be to his early popularity. Revealing that his totalitarian instincts were far stronger than any he had for reform, instead of reorganizing the military that had caused the horrible accident and botched the rescue, or publicly punishing the incompetent officers, Putin went after the media that reported on it.