The New Tsar (26 page)

NATO’s air war, which began on March 24, 1999, lasted seventy-eight days, and each bomb or missile that fell on Serbia was perceived as an attack on Russia itself. Popular sentiment raged, with violent protests outside the American embassy and virulent denunciations in the Duma. The war stoked the nationalistic sentiment that Yeltsin had endlessly struggled to contain for his own political survival. He dispatched his former prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, to act as a mediator with the United States and NATO. He did so at the suggestion of Putin, who considered it his “own small contribution” to resolving the war.
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After weeks of relentless bombardment, Milošević had finally given in to NATO’s demands and agreed to withdraw Serbia’s forces from Kosovo to make way for an international peacekeeping force. Now Russia demanded to be part of the force but refused to be in any way under the command of NATO’s generals. Putin, newly appointed as the head of the Security Council, took part in negotiations to resolve the impasse over the peacekeeping mission. “I was struck by his ability to convey self-control and confidence in a low-key, soft-spoken manner,” Strobe Talbott, then the deputy secretary of state, wrote of his first meeting with Putin, on June 11, the day before NATO’s peacekeepers were to move into Kosovo from Albania and Macedonia. “He was physically the smaller of the men at the top—short, lean and fit, while all the others were taller and most of them were hefty and overfed.”
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Putin had prepared for his meeting with the American, referencing details of the poets Talbott had studied as a student, Fyodor Tyutchev and Vladimir Mayakovsky. He had clearly read Talbott’s intelligence profile.

During the meeting, the Americans received a note that Russia was threatening to send its peacekeepers into Kosovo without NATO coordination. Putin soothingly told Talbott that nothing had changed in the agreements they had reached and that “nothing improper” would happen. Something did anyway, and Talbott came to believe that Putin had known all along that it would.
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That evening a Russian paratroop unit stationed in Bosnia—part of an earlier, now seemingly naïve sign of post-Soviet cooperation with NATO—loaded up and drove from its base to the airport in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina. When British troops
arrived at the airport on the morning of June 12 in a heavy downpour, roughly two hundred Russians were already there in armored vehicles. As General Michael Jackson, the newly appointed British commander of the peacekeeping effort, landed there and prepared to announce the successful launch of the mission, one of the Russian vehicles rumbled through his impromptu tarmac news conference. A Russian squad commander stood halfway out of the turret, with a discernible smirk on his face.
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NATO’s supreme commander, General Wesley Clark, implored Jackson to somehow block the Russian deployment, but Jackson refused. “Sir,” Jackson told Clark, “I’m not starting World War III for you.”
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In Russia, the reaction to the deployment was ebullient, but the improvised intervention at the airport nonetheless showed the disarray of the country’s civilian and military commands. Putin, who a day before had said nothing would happen, acted as if nothing had when Talbott met him again the next day. He claimed total ignorance of the military’s preemptive rush into Pristina, but explained “slowly, calmly, in a voice that was sometimes inaudible” that the country’s “pre-election struggle” had pitted the hawks and doves against one another. Putin suggested it had been a mistake, but nonetheless the operation boosted the president at home. “No one in Russia,” Putin told Talbott, “should be able to call President Yeltsin a puppet of NATO.”
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P
utin’s remarks about the “pre-election struggle” underscored the extent to which the end of Yeltsin’s presidency had become an overriding obsession of Russia’s political elite. The country, after centuries of tsarist and then Communist rule, had never democratically transferred political power from one leader to another. The personification of power ran so deep in Russian culture that it seemed inconceivable. Even at this late stage, Yeltsin toyed with the idea of running for reelection. Though he had been elected twice already, the country’s new Constitution, which limited a president to two consecutive terms, had taken effect only in 1993. He could argue that legally his reelection in 1996 began his first term, allowing him to run again in 2000, but all that was fantastical. He was already sixty-eight, frail, and politically crippled. He had not yet resigned himself to leaving the Kremlin, but he knew it was inevitable. He thought hard about how to ensure a transition that would both preserve the political transition from Soviet rule and protect himself from the vengeful purges that had followed the removal of every leader since the Romanovs. Retirement had never been kind to the country’s leaders.

In the midst of the Kosovo conflict, Yeltsin had moved decisively to lay the groundwork for his life after the presidency. In May, he sacked his fourth prime minister. Primakov had proved a stabilizing force during his eight months in office, calming the panic of the August default in 1998 and navigating the parliamentary impeachment proceedings. He had been nothing but honest and decent and loyal, Yeltsin admitted. His greatest failure as prime minister had been to become more popular than Yeltsin. Now, a year before the 2000 presidential elections, Primakov and Moscow’s mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, were the presumed front-runners to take over the country, and that was something Yeltsin could not accept. He was concerned by Primakov’s remarks about freeing up prison space for “economic criminals” and by the fact that the Duma had completed five articles of impeachment and scheduled a debate for May. If any one article passed, Yeltsin would lose his authority to dissolve parliament for as long as the impeachment proceedings moved ahead; even if he could successfully delay or defeat impeachment, he would lose the leverage that had allowed him to push Kiriyenko through as prime minister the year before. Primakov could remain as prime minister and continue to amass political allies. Yeltsin, searching for an heir, thought Primakov did not have the temperament to be president. Russia needed “a person of a completely different mind-set, another generation, a new mentality.” Primakov, he believed, “had too much red in his political palette.”
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Without question the impeachment proceedings were politically motivated, pressed by the Communists and their allies in what was, arguably, the last great political battle over the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin’s crimes, according to the articles, began with the agreement that dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991. They went on to include the violent confrontation with the parliament in 1993, the war in Chechnya, the erosion of the military, and the “genocide of the Russian people” caused by the economic crises of the 1990s. As matters of constitutional law, they were dubious, but they resonated deeply with a frustrated public, for whom the end of the Soviet Union had brought little but suffering and shame. Yeltsin’s impeachment became a referendum on Russia’s transition to democracy. And each article had the support of a majority of lawmakers.

On May 12, the day before the impeachment debate began, Yeltsin dismissed Primakov and nominated Sergei Stepashin, a loyal if colorless police commander who had served in various ministries under Yeltsin since 1990, most recently as interior minister. He had been appointed a
deputy prime minister only two weeks before, the post being a prerequisite for anyone appointed acting prime minister, and during a government meeting Yeltsin made an embarrassing show of ordering Stepashin to move his chair closer to his own in order to, as he put it, “whip up the sense of expectation.”
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Yeltsin treated these shakeups as tactics in a game, and in truth they were all the power he had left to influence politics. “A sharp, unexpected, aggressive move always throws your opponent off balance and disarms him, especially if it is unpredictable and seems absolutely illogical,” Yeltsin wrote.
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He hoped that this latest reorganization could somehow derail the impeachment vote, but “absolutely illogical” is all it seemed to be.

The impeachment debate lasted two days, while Yeltsin’s aides frantically tried to count—and buy—votes. When the votes were held, 94 of the 450 deputies failed to show up, making it more difficult to reach the 300 votes required to adopt each article of impeachment. Even so, 283 of those present voted to impeach Yeltsin for the war in Chechnya, which liberals had opposed with almost as much passion as Yeltsin’s conservative opponents; 263 voted for the article pertaining to the events of October 1993. The other articles lagged, but all received an overwhelming majority of those present, and only narrowly failed to impeach him.

Yeltsin’s gambit with Stepashin had not affected the outcome of the debate as much as he thought it might, but when the dust settled, on May 19 the Duma voted, surprisingly and overwhelmingly, to accept Stepashin’s nomination as prime minister. The deputies calculated that he would be nothing more than a caretaker prime minister under a fatally wounded president until parliamentary elections were held in December. And if the prime minister’s job was a springboard to the presidency in 2000, they had little to fear from this meek, apolitical administrator. Yeltsin’s endorsement was a kiss of death anyway, and Yeltsin seemed to know that. He later claimed he had low expectations from Stepashin—and he had one last gambit to unveil. He wanted to wait until the time was right.

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n the day of Stepashin’s appointment, Putin met with Yeltsin in the Kremlin and presented a plan to increase the FSB’s authority across the Northern Caucasus. The plan meant to improve “the coordination and means which are available to the federal organs of power”—in short, to prepare for war in a region that was careering out of control, not
only in Chechnya, where Moscow effectively had no authority, but also in the neighboring republics like Karachayevo-Cherkessia, where local elections in May threatened to provoke a bloodbath between rival ethnic groups. Putin had had no experience dealing with the Caucasus before he moved to Moscow and dealt with the region’s problems first as the inspector for the Main Control Directorate and then as the director of the FSB. Since Catherine the Great’s conquests, the mostly Muslim lands stretching from the Black Sea to the Caspian had been restive subjects of the Russian and later the Soviet empires. Stalin expelled entire Caucasian populations to Siberia during the Great Patriotic War, fearing they would embrace the Nazi invaders. The collapse of the Soviet Union unleashed old grievances, which culminated in Chechnya’s declaration of independence and the disastrous war from 1994 to 1996. In Putin’s mind, this amounted to the dismemberment of Russia itself, aided and abetted by nefarious foreign influences. Apparently, he meant the victors of the Cold War, principally the United States.
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The debacle of Kosovo, and the near clash at the airport, prompted Yeltsin to order the Security Council to meet weekly to better coordinate national security strategy. The meetings further raised Putin’s public profile. He began granting regular interviews to newspapers and television channels, answering the questions of the day—from a new nuclear doctrine to American complaints about Russian espionage, from a proposed reunification of Russia and Belarus to the coming political campaign. Yeltsin’s continued infirmity fueled rumors of unrest and even of a coup by hardliners. In an interview with
Komsomolskaya Pravda
, Putin deflected a question about the possibility of a coup by the security services with a sardonic aside: “Why should we stage a coup if we are in power as it is?” he asked.
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His comment sent chills through the country’s liberals and Yeltsin’s opponents, who did not take the threat so lightly.

By the end of July, Yeltsin cut short a vacation and returned to the Kremlin. He complained that a heat wave had made vacationing impossible, but he had a more pressing matter that for the time being only he knew. The precipitating cause was an election alliance revealed the day before between his banished prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, and Mayor Luzhkov of Moscow. No longer close to Yeltsin, Luzhkov was now unleashing virulent attacks on the president’s administration and his ties to the oligarchs. The media, including newspapers and a television station funded by Luzhkov’s government, published report after
report on Yeltsin’s “Family” and the corruption around it. Yeltsin complained that the most slanderous stories had been bought by or leaked to the same newspapers the KGB had used in Soviet times (even though his man Putin was in charge of its successor). NTV, which had once supported Yeltsin against the Communist threat, turned against him with a vengeance after his chief of staff, Aleksandr Voloshin, tried to stop government loans to its owner Media-Most, the holding company of Vladimir Gusinsky, one of the oligarchs who had bankrolled Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection effort.

Yeltsin convinced himself that the Primakov-Luzhkov juggernaut was a plot not simply to win the parliamentary elections, but to abolish the presidency itself. In several meetings over the summer, he pleaded with Stepashin to do something,
anything
, to stop governor after governor from pledging support to Luzhkov’s party, called the Fatherland, which was now allied with Primakov’s All Russia bloc. Yeltsin brooded, increasingly isolated from all but his inner circle, the “Family” that was now in as precarious a position as ever. “He was simply unable to understand what was going on in Russia,” a Russian historian, Roy Medvedev, wrote, “and was thinking not so much about holding onto power but guaranteeing his own personal security.”
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Eight years after his heroic resistance to the putsch, Yeltsin had lost the admiration of a nation that was breaking free after decades of Soviet ideology. His memoirs did nothing to hide the self-pitying state he had reached. He felt abandoned, distrustful, and almost certainly afraid. “I tortured myself with worries. Who would support me? Who was really backing me?”
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