The New Tsar (22 page)

Putin saw the fractured political system as a symptom of the country’s ongoing dissolution. Chechnya’s struggle for independence was only the most extreme example of Russia rotting from within. The
vertikal
, the chain of government authority, had been destroyed, he recalled, and “it had to be restored.”
⁹
He told journalists that his main task now was to ensure that Yeltsin’s decrees would be enacted at the regional level, but he emphasized that he did not intend “a tightening of the screws.”
¹⁰
He never had time to do it. He would remain in that job for only sixty-one days—long enough to install a KGB colleague from Petersburg, Lieutenant
General Nikolai Patrushev, in his old job at the Main Control Directorate, but not to accomplish much else.

—

T
wo days after Putin’s latest appointment, Russia’s stock market crashed. Shares had lost half their value from the beginning of the year, wiping out millions of dollars of wealth, though only among the elite who could afford to invest. The poor had nothing. Arrears in wages steadily mounted, and strikes soon spread. Foreign investors began to withdraw their capital, while wealthy Russians socked theirs offshore. The privatization of Rosneft, the last state-owned oil company, was canceled because no one would even bid for it. A $4 billion credit from the International Monetary Fund stabilized Russia’s meltdown but only briefly. Yeltsin’s government struggled to hold up the value of the ruble, but it was a losing battle. The government “resembled a major fire department that had to hastily deal with the outbreak of more and more new blazes.”
¹¹

One of the blazes that preoccupied Yeltsin involved the loyalty of the FSB. Even as the country’s economy imploded, Yeltsin fretted over the agency’s power. Yeltsin, who had done more than anyone else to break the iron grip of the Soviet Communist Party, could never bring himself to purge the intelligence agencies with the zeal that the Germans had after 1989. He relied too heavily on the intelligence officers and their commanders, hoping to restrain their influence in politics and society by pitting them against each other.
¹²
For KGB veterans, the changes that occurred in the 1990s were disorienting and humiliating. Many left the ranks to serve as heads of security companies that were soon mired in violent battles for assets; others crossed into criminality, exploiting the government’s weaknesses. Often it was difficult to tell which was which.

Shortly after his reelection in 1996, Yeltsin had appointed a KGB veteran, General Nikolai Kovalyov, as the director of the newly created FSB. He was the sixth head of the domestic security services since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin considered him a competent administrator, but in office he developed “an enormous personal antipathy to business and all its representatives.” “He simply despised people with large amounts of money,” Yeltsin wrote.
¹³
He was not alone among the security officers who retained their paltry government salaries and, like many working Russians, watched as inconceivable fortunes landed in the hands of a privileged (and in their minds undeserving) few. Given the intelligence service’s historic anti-Semitism, it is not surprising that much of their fury flowed toward the oligarchs who were Jewish. The
Jews “sold out Russia,” they believed, manipulating the president and creating the economic crisis then unfolding.
¹⁴
What alarmed Yeltsin most was that under Kovalyov, the FSB began searching for these new “enemies of the people,” collecting compromising material,
kompromat
, against the executives of banks and other companies, as its investigators had done against Sobchak. Now the FSB’s zeal threatened people within Yeltsin’s “family”—even Yeltsin himself. He decided he needed to rein in the agency. He needed his own man in the FSB.

—

B
oris Berezovsky, whose control of Aeroflot had attracted the prosecutor general’s menacing attention, lurched in and out of Yeltsin’s circle. He nurtured his access to the president’s advisers, though he met more and more rarely with the president himself. Valentin Yumashev, a close Yeltsin aide, told him that Yeltsin no longer trusted the FSB’s generals and their “tightly knit clan.” In early July, Yeltsin had announced plans to reorganize the FSB, including a sharp reduction in the number of officers at Lubyanka, but Kovalyov seemed less than eager to carry out the order. Yeltsin wanted to clean house, Yumashev explained, and asked if he had any thoughts about Vladimir Putin.

Berezovsky recalled a deal he had made in Petersburg years before. He wanted to open a car dealership and was surprised that Putin had refused even to consider a bribe, which presumably he was prepared to offer.
¹⁵
“He was the first bureaucrat who did not take bribes,” Berezovsky said. “Seriously, it made a huge impression on me.”
¹⁶
Whether or not Berezovsky’s recollection was a factor, Putin had earned a reputation as competent and disciplined to the point of abstemiousness, though others noted his capacity for discretion. Yeltsin first noticed him when he served in the Main Control Directorate. His reports, he found, were “a model of clarity.” In contrast to the endless chattering and scheming of his aides, Putin did not try to press any agenda on his boss—or even bother him with much small talk. In fact he tried to “remove any sort of personal contact” with Yeltsin. “And precisely because of that,” Yeltsin said, “I wanted to talk to him more.” He was wary of Putin’s “coolness” at first but came to understand that it was “ingrained in his nature.”
¹⁷

After meeting at Yeltsin’s presidential retreat in Karelia to make the final decision to fire Kovalyov, the youthful new prime minister, Sergei Kiriyenko, flew back to Moscow and summoned Putin to meet him at the airport when he landed. Neither he nor Yeltsin had consulted Putin about the job; he was then a mere pawn in the game of political chess
that the president imagined as he lurched toward the end of his presidency. As he drove to the airport, Putin expected bad news and, in a way, for him it was.

“Hi, Volodya,” Kiriyenko greeted him, familiarly. As young as Putin was, the prime minister was a decade his junior. “Congratulations!”

“What for?” he asked.

“The decree is signed,” Kiriyenko said. “You have been appointed director of the FSB.”
¹⁸

Putin claimed he was surprised, though the possibility of his appointment had been rumored in the media nearly a year before.
¹⁹
He had even discussed the possibility with Lyudmila three months before during an evening walk at the dacha in Arkhangelskoye, one of the increasingly rare moments when he spared time for her. He told her he did not want to return to the “closed life” of the intelligence world, which he thought he had left behind in 1991. “I had no desire to step in the same river twice,” he said.
²⁰

Lyudmila did not relish the prospect either. As the wife of a rising political appointee in Moscow, she lived a far more open and interesting life, traveling frequently to Germany and elsewhere, though often only with the girls, not together as a family. Basking in her new freedom, she remembered the oppressive strictures of the KGB spouse: “Don’t go there, don’t say that. Talk to that person, don’t talk to this person.”

Dutiful as ever, though, Putin did not refuse the appointment. He telephoned Lyudmila with the news while she was vacationing with their daughters on the Baltic coast.

“You be careful there,” he told her, “because I’ve been returned to the place where I began.”

Lyudmila was confused. She thought he had returned to Borodin’s office—that he had been demoted somehow in the turmoil then roiling the country.

“I’ve returned to the place where I began,” he repeated.

He had to say it a third time before she understood. She had to wait until she returned to Moscow to find out what exactly had happened to return him to the KGB’s successor. “They appointed me, and that’s it,” he told her, and she asked no more questions.
²¹

—

K
iriyenko introduced Putin to the FSB cadres at Lubyanka on the following Monday, July 27, 1998, and tried to placate Kovalyov, who
learned of his dismissal from the news reports on television. He had served admirably, Kiriyenko said, but “conditions are changing, people are changing.”
²²
At the announcement, Putin expressed his appreciation of the president’s confidence and vowed not only to carry out the restructuring Yeltsin had ordered, but also to focus on the government’s strategy for easing the economic crisis: prosecuting economic crimes and tax evasion. He said he had “come home.”

Kovalyov, although furious about his dismissal, handled the transition professionally. He showed his replacement around and opened the safe in his office. “Here’s my secret notebook,” he told him. “And here’s my ammunition.”
²³
Two days later Putin granted an interview to the newspaper
Kommersant
, in which he outlined his priorities and expanded the agency’s traditional domestic work to include the fight against political extremism and nationalism, against foreign spies, and against the newly arrived and slowly expanding World Wide Web. “Of course, the FSB is not going to take the Internet under its control,” he said, already expressing a wariness of the growing importance of the new medium, “but it understands that modern tools of telecommunications can be used to the detriment of the country’s security.”
²⁴
Putin’s appointment caused grumbling among the FSB’s veterans—also KGB veterans—who viewed him as an upstart and an outsider. He was from Petersburg and had served his entire intelligence career in provincial posts. He had never risen above the rank of lieutenant colonel. It was an extraordinary, unanticipated break for Putin—and an enormous advance in an unexpected rise. He had leapfrogged over far more experienced and qualified generals, who considered him a parvenu sent to impose the Kremlin’s control over the agency—which is exactly what he set out to do.

—

O
n August 1, after returning abruptly from his vacation in Karelia to deal with the looming economic crisis, Yeltsin summoned his new FSB director to his dacha in Gorky, outside Moscow, to discuss the post. Yeltsin wanted Putin to “make the service less politicized” and to restore its prestige and authority, something that would send chills down the spines of the dissidents for whom Lubyanka remained a source of fear. Yeltsin proposed that Putin return to active intelligence service, with a promotion to the rank of general. Putin refused, however, recalling his resignation during the August 1991 coup. He also revealed to Yeltsin that in the seven years since, he had remained in the reserves as the KGB
became the FSB. “I am a civilian,” Putin told Yeltsin. “It’s important that such a power ministry be headed by a civilian.”
²⁵
And so he became the first civilian to head the FSB—and the last.
²⁶

Putin moved into an ascetically decorated office on the third floor of Lubyanka. He did not move into the old executive office nearby that had been occupied by Soviet intelligence chiefs from Lavrenty Beria to Yuri Andropov. He turned that into a museum that some considered a shrine. On his desk he placed a bronze statue of “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky, who founded the Soviet secret police in 1917.
²⁷

As the loyal servant he had always been, Putin carried out Yeltsin’s instructions to reorganize the agency and reduce the central staff—a task that became even more urgent as the country’s economy and budget woes worsened. He ultimately reduced the number of officers at Lubyanka by a third, to four thousand from six thousand, at the cost of considerable discontent among those in the ranks who considered Putin’s reductions a purge motivated by Yeltsin’s politics. He also abolished departments he considered outdated and created new ones to address the most urgent security threats. They oversaw intelligence in the regions with a particular focus on seething Muslim areas, like Chechnya; computer security and telecommunications; and, ominously, the defense of the Constitution, a task that echoed that of the Fifth Chief Directorate, the KGB’s agency that hunted dissidents in Soviet times. As he had since he arrived in Moscow two years before, Putin turned to lieutenants he could trust, the men he had known since his KGB days in Petersburg. Aleskandr Grigoryev, Viktor Cherkesov, and Sergei Ivanov, all generals on active duty, took up positions in the FSB’s leadership. Yeltsin admired Putin’s steely determination. “He did not allow himself to be manipulated in political games,” he wrote. “In the insidious rumor mill of the government at that time, it was wise for even a seasoned person to avoid entanglements.”
²⁸

Putin immersed himself once again in the life of the intelligence agent, where everything is secret and everyone is suspect. “If you were an intelligence officer, you were always the object of a potential vetting,” he recalled. “They were always checking up on you. It might not happen very often, but it was not very pleasant.” Even as director, he felt the “constant state of tension.” He also shared the agency’s paranoia. They “couldn’t even go out to a restaurant!” he said of his cohorts. “They thought only prostitutes and black-marketeers went to restaurants.
What would a decent officer of the security agencies be doing in such company?”
²⁹