It was a difficult position for Western leaders to be in. Putin spoke the language of reform and Russia’s post-Soviet difficulties very well and he had none of Yeltsin’s baggage or bluster. When they looked at his actions, however, the picture was very different. I recently asked my friend and US State Department veteran Steve Sestanovich what surprised or worried him most about Putin in the early days. His reply is an excellent introduction to how the West struggled to understand the new Russian leader and what this meant for Russia:
From the very beginning “Putinism” was an uneasy package that honestly we didn’t know how to handle. On one side there was the reformist talk of his campaign platform, and his blunt statements about how far Russia had fallen behind the West. All that seemed encouraging. But there was also the relentless shutting-down of independent media-and the scorched earth campaign in Chechnya. That was disturbing. Who was this guy?
I remember a conversation that Madeleine Albright had in her office in the spring of 2000 with a Russian visitor, one of the most influential figures of the Yeltsin era. She asked me to sit in. He said to us, “I want you to know that Russia now has the best successor to Boris Yeltsin we could have hoped for. We also have a president who is going to be rolling back some of our democratic achievements. He is going to attack press freedoms first. Here we who support him count on you to oppose him.” I came out of that meeting thinking, how are we ever going to get this right?
I could essay a few good guesses as to the identity of that Russian visitor to US Secretary of State Albright’s office that day, but there is no point. The guest was quite accurate in his assessment of what Putin was going to do and how the United States should react to what was coming. And you can easily see the dilemma Sestanovich and the entire administration could see forming in front of them, especially if you remember that Bill Clinton was still the president at the time.
Clinton’s last year in office was already a complicated one. He had just survived impeachment related to the Lewinsky sex scandal, which had cost him much of his remaining energy and credibility. The Internet bubble burst in February, taking with it much of the optimism around the US economy. It was also an election year and Vice President Al Gore was battling George W. Bush over Clinton’s legacy.
Foreign policy was also giving Clinton a headache. Every US president attempts to solve the Israel-Palestine problem in his last year in office and Clinton was no exception. After doing little since the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin had halted the Oslo Accords peace process, Clinton arranged the Camp David Summit between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat in July 2000. To the surprise of everyone who knew nothing about history, no agreement was reached. A few months later, the second intifada erupted after Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount. In a relative footnote at the time, al-Qaeda suicide bombers attacked the USS Cole in Yemen, killing seventeen.
In short, Clinton was in no condition to take any strong stands against a tough and complicated new Russian leader. The White House continued to pay lip service to healing the atrocities in Chechnya, always at great pains to emphasize that “Chechnya isn’t Kosovo,” in the infamous phrase of British prime minister Tony Blair. Russia was still pained by the way the United States and NATO had run roughshod over Russian interests with the Serbs in 1999, something Putin would refer back to time and time again.
In Clinton’s last visit to Moscow as president on June 3, 2000, the two leaders went through the usual US-Russia checklist of nuclear issues, trade, and American missile defenses, which would become one of Putin’s favorite subjects over the years. The Clinton administration deserves credit for at least mentioning civil liberties during the trip. Madeleine Albright visited Radio Liberty, whose unvarnished Chechnya coverage had gotten its journalist Andrei Babitsky abducted.
Clinton gave an hour long interview to Echo of Moscow radio, a member of the Media-MOST group then still owned by Vladimir Gusinsky, whose outlets had declined to endorse Putin. Clinton sounded surprised when he was asked if he had ever used police powers against critics or the media. “I have never done anything like that. It’s illegal!” Exactly one polite week after Clinton left Moscow, Gusinsky was arrested.
Most of Europe was also eager to paper over concerns about the bloody mess of Chechnya and embrace Putin with no conditions. Two key European leaders, Tony Blair in the UK and Gerhardt Schroder in Germany, were constitutionally averse to confrontation, especially when there were deals to be made and so much Russian money coming into the markets. (Silvio Berlusconi, who would become Putin’s most eager partner and staunchest defender, would return as Italian prime minister in 2001.) Some praise must go to Jacques Chirac in France, whose government strongly protested atrocities in Chechnya at the time, even receiving a representative of the Chechen president to the National Assembly. But this victory was excruciatingly brief, and by the time Putin visited Paris in October, Chirac was toasting Putin and his wife Lyudmila with, “It’s up to us to write a new page in Franco-Russian relations.” How do you say “press the reset button” in French?
By then Blair had set a high bar for pandering when he performed the bizarre maneuver of making a sudden private visit to Putin in St. Petersburg on the eve of the Russian presidential election in March 2000. Human rights organizations and the British press attacked Blair for essentially endorsing Putin while “mass executions of civilians, arbitrary detention of Chechen males, systematic beatings, torture and, on occasion, rape” were occurring under Putin’s command. Instead of discussing that, Blair and his wife visited the Hermitage Museum, the Tsarist Summer Palace, and “spent a night at the opera, attending with the Putins the premiere of Sergei Prokofiev’s War and Peace.” Blair declined to meet with any other candidates or opposition figures on his visit.
Two thousand wasn’t my best year either. I had a spent much of the latter half of 1999 launching a massive chess website, Kasparov Chess Online, which would arrive in the world just as the dot-com bubble was deflating. It was still an exciting time, and I’m proud of some of the projects we accomplished, but like so many other Internet ventures it flamed out after just a few years. In October, I had my first world championship title defense in five years, against my compatriot Vladimir Kramnik. I arrived in London in great shape, full of ideas and confidence. A month later I had been defeated in a title match for the first time, and without winning a single game. Kramnik had out prepared me and outplayed me and I was a victim of my own complacency after fifteen years at the top. It was a crushing experience and, at thirty-seven, I briefly considered retirement for the first time. But my desire to prove I was still the best player in the world was too strong and I would retain my number one ranking until I retired in 2005.
While licking my wounds and preparing for my comeback, I had plenty of time to survey the results of Putin’s first year in office. Many of the thoughts below on Putin’s first year were included in a January 4, 2001, Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “The Russian President Trades in Fear” which, to my dismay, still holds up very well today. I would much rather be able to admit to having been wrong in that one than in my optimistic article from a year earlier. Putin has the habit of making me into an accurate prophet, but a very disappointed Russian.
Boris Yeltsin’s sudden resignation on December 31, 1999, had caused me to spend New Year’s Eve writing about his role in Russian history. Since the outgoing president had named his successor (which in Russian politics meant guaranteed election), I had tried to predict the parameters of Vladimir Putin’s politics. Unfortunately, my forecast, based on the assumption that a young pragmatic Russian leader would strengthen democratic processes inside the country, fight corruption, and level the curves of Boris Yeltsin’s uneven foreign policy, turned out to have been wishful New Year’s thinking.