The New Tsar (32 page)

Putin’s response was not to shift tactics but to make sure that most Russians would not know the truth of what was happening. As the fighting ground on, the Kremlin strictly limited the access of journalists in the field, forcing Russian newspapers and television networks to cover the “counterterrorist operation” almost exclusively from the perspective of the Russian side. Romanticized coverage of the Chechen fighters in the first war had bolstered their cause and sapped morale in Russia, and Putin was not going to let that happen again.

News of the ferocious fighting, the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, and the growing evidence of war crimes by Russian troops continued to trickle out, especially in opposition newspapers and foreign news reports, but the Kremlin’s control of state television kept the most dismal news off the air. Reporters who dared to report the Chechen perspective on the conflict—or without official accreditation from the Russian military—faced arrest, or worse. When Andrei Babitsky, a reporter for the American-funded Radio Liberty, was captured by Russian forces in January, the military did not simply charge him with violating the rules on reporting from Chechnya and expel him from the area. It turned him over to masked Chechen rebels in exchange for five Russian prisoners of war, as if he were himself an enemy combatant. Babitsky’s fate caused
an outcry at home and abroad, prompting sharply critical stories about Putin and his KGB background.

Putin never sounded defensive; he sounded defiant, blindly so in some cases. He brushed aside any criticism of the war as an attack on Russia itself. “What Babitsky did is much more dangerous than firing a machine gun,” he said when the reporters in
First Person
protested that journalists in a war zone were not combatants.
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Pressed on the point, he simply replied, “We interpret freedom of expression in different ways.”

The American secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, raised Babitsky’s case when she visited Moscow and met Putin in February, but after a three-hour meeting, she nevertheless emerged sounding charmed by Russia’s new leader. It was not the last time Putin’s foreign counterparts would come away with a view they would later regret. “I found him a very well-informed person, a good interlocutor, obviously a Russian patriot who seeks a normal position with the West,” Albright said.
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Privately, she warned Putin that he was “riding a tiger” in Chechnya and again urged him to seek a negotiated settlement, something he never had any interest in pursuing. “I do not think we are any closer to a political solution in Chechnya,” she declared. She was right then, but he would be proved right in the end.

By late January, Chechnya’s rebel commanders, battered by the aerial assaults on their redoubts in Grozny, abandoned the city and began a treacherous withdrawal into a trap. A Russian counterintelligence officer who had previously arranged the exchange of prisoners accepted a $100,000 bribe to aid the escape of a large group of fighters through a settlement near Alkhan-Kala. On the night of February 1, the main force found the assigned route heavily mined. As they struggled through with devastating losses, Russian shells rained down on them. Hundreds of Chechens were killed. Among those badly injured was Shamil Basayev, who after the incursion into Dagestan was now Russia’s most vilified foe. A mine shredded his right foot during the escape. The Chechens released a gruesome videotape of a surgeon amputating the foot, apparently to demonstrate to the rebels and others that, although injured, Basayev remained alive.
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On February 6, Russian forces captured Grozny—at least what was left of it. No building remained undamaged; most were destroyed and uninhabitable. Russian military commanders raised a Russian flag above the city’s administrative office, but amid the devastation, they could not find a building sufficiently sound to serve as a military headquarters. The
Russian authorities airlifted food and medical supplies for residents who had spent the winter in their basements. “The people should understand that they are not a defeated people,” Putin declared. “They are a liberated people.”
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The war was not over by any means however. Thousands of Chechen fighters retreated into the mountains to join others, as many as seven thousand altogether. Maskhadov still remained at large, as did other commanders. Basayev vowed to continue to wage war “on the whole of Russian territory,” and he would keep his promise.

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O
n March 20, only six days before the presidential election, Putin visited Grozny for the first time. With Russian troops continuing to suffer losses in guerrilla attacks outside the capital, he braced the country’s voters for a longer war than anyone in the Kremlin had dared to acknowledge. The war had stalled the stunning rise in his popularity over the winter, but with coverage stifled, it had largely disappeared as a campaign issue. While Russian forces had destroyed the “majority of large illegal armed groups,” many threats remained, Putin said. “It is the reason why we should not pull out all troops from Chechnya but leave enough of our forces here to deal with current problems.” Most Russians never learned the dark side of Putin’s all-out war and did not seem to care if they did. Putin had arrived in Grozny aboard a two-seat attack fighter built in Soviet times. He emerged at the military airfield dressed like a character out of a war movie, swaggering in a pilot’s flight suit. Stunts like this would soon become a staple of Putin’s politics, the careful cultivation of the leader’s televised image that one author would christen a “videocracy.”
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The television coverage of his visit to Grozny was so fawning that many actually believed that Putin had piloted the jet himself.

By election day, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. The only suspense was about the turnout, since anything less than 50 percent would render the results invalid. Putin faced ten other candidates, but most were little-known regional leaders or politicians like Yuri Skuratov, who was still fighting his dismissal as prosecutor general without ever revealing all the incriminating information he claimed to have against Yeltsin’s inner circle. The most prominent challengers remained those who had opposed Yeltsin four years before: Gennady Zyuganov of the Communists and Grigory Yavlinsky of Yabloko. They were almost entirely ignored by the Kremlin and its state television networks until Yavlinsky
faced a late barrage of campaign ads and news reports attacking him as a candidate supported by Jews, gays, and foreigners. The attack, appealing to the lowest common denominator of Russian popular sentiment, reflected a fear that Yavlinsky would draw enough of the country’s liberals out of Putin’s column to force him into a runoff. Either the fear was misplaced or the tactic worked. Putin won 53 percent of the vote in the first round, crushing Zyuganov, who received only 29 percent, and Yavlinsky, who finished with less than 6 percent. There was evidence that Putin’s totals—and turnout—were aided by ballot stuffing,
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but no one really cared. Putin was indisputably the people’s choice in what would be the last election in Russia that could still arguably be called democratic.

Putin’s ascension to the pinnacle of power was so rapid, so unexpected, so astounding, that a prominent Russian historian described it in otherworldly terms, as the act of a higher power bestowed on a battered, grateful nation. Yeltsin, the historian Roy Medvedev wrote, had released his grip on power “without revolution or bloodshed, without a palace coup or plot of any kind. Russia entered the new century with a new leader, Acting President Putin, and almost all the population perceived this, not as a cause for alarm, but as a providential New Year’s gift.”
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O
nly days before the election the lingering puzzle of the apartment bombings and the events in Ryazan—colored now by the brutality of the fighting in Chechnya—began to gnaw at Putin’s opponents. They believed that there had to be a conspiracy at work, with this small, dull man merely a puppet of larger forces. The independent newspaper
Novaya Gazeta
published a series of articles that deepened the mystery about the “training exercise” in Ryazan. The articles quoted the police corporal who had first entered the apartment building and the officer who tested the sacks of “sugar” and defused the detonator. The newspaper also found a paratrooper from the 137th Regiment, which was stationed at a base near Ryazan, who had been ordered to guard a warehouse. Inside he and another soldier found dozens more sacks labeled sugar. “Tea made with this ‘sugar’ turned out to be foul, and not at all sweet,” the newspaper wrote. The soldier informed his platoon commander, who had an expert he knew test the substance. It was an explosive, hexogen. The paratrooper was identified only as Aleksei P.,
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and the evidence was purely circumstantial, but the newspaper suggested that the events in Ryazan and the bombings in Moscow and Volgadonsk
might not have been acts of terrorists against the state but rather terrorist acts by the state.

“Why was hexogen kept at a special-service base, and why was it packed into sugar bags?” the newspaper asked. “According to sappers, explosives in such quantities are not transported or stored like this because it’s too dangerous. Half a kilo is enough to blow up a small building.”
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Putin’s rise, the newspaper insinuated, might not have been a providential gift after all, but rather the result of an unspeakable sin. On March 16 a cyberattack destroyed the next day’s edition of the newspaper.

The same day the FSB, which had remained largely silent about the bombings since the fall, held a press conference to announce that its investigation had established the vast network of insurgents who had been involved in the attacks, which, a spokesman insisted, had been organized inside Chechnya.
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The FSB also altered significant details in its new account, especially those involving the explosives. Instead of hexogen, which is produced and closely guarded by the military, the FSB said, the terrorists used a more common mixture of fertilizers that were widely available. The FSB’s confusing and shifting accounts challenged even those inclined to believe that terrorists were responsible. Putin, in the campaign interviews collected in the book
First Person
, dismissed the suspicions as madness. “No one in the Russian special services would be capable of such a crime against his own people,” he said. “The very supposition is amoral. It’s nothing but part of the information war against Russia.”
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Who exactly was waging this war? Putin did not explain.

Zyuganov and Yavlinsky raised the lingering questions on the campaign trail. NTV, the independent part of the Media-Most conglomerate owned by the oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky, also echoed the accusations. NTV held a town hall debate in which residents of Ryazan questioned an FSB spokesman and mocked his unconvincing answers. At one point the spokesman held up a sealed box that, he insisted, contained all the evidence, though of course he could not open it. It was a preposterous performance. Despite the official denials, the media and some in the opposition began to piece together odd incidents and reports into the shape of a conspiracy to propel Putin to office. Local and foreign newspaper articles in the summer
before
the bombings—largely ignored at the time—seemed now to have eerily predicted them, though the presumed motive at that time was to declare a state of emergency and cancel the parliamentary elections, not to start a new war in Chechnya or propel
Yeltsin’s security council director and FSB chief into the Kremlin. In July 1999, for example, a retired army colonel turned journalist, Aleksandr Zhilin, had published an article in
Moskovskaya Pravda
with the headline “Storm in Moscow,” predicting “terrorist attacks” against government buildings, the goal of which was allegedly to discredit Mayor Luzhkov.
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Berezovsky’s close contacts with Chechen and other rebels in the Caucasus—which he had cultivated during and after the first Chechen war—suggested to his many enemies that he might have been involved in the hopes of blocking the Luzhkov-Primakov alliance. Berezovsky, who ran for and won a parliamentary seat from the nearby Caucasian republic of Karachayevo-Cherkessia, acknowledged meeting Chechen fighters and making large payments to them, including Basayev, to free kidnapped hostages. A transcript purporting to be of Berezovsky’s telephone conversations with a Chechen leader, Movladi Udugov, suggested they had haggled over the incursion into Dagestan, presumably as a provocation to justify the invasion. Berezovsky said the tapes had been edited but did not dispute that the conversations had taken place. Berezovsky’s critics believed he had as much at stake in the post-Yeltsin transition as anyone else and would stop at nothing to retain his wealth and influence. “Berezovsky saw the world through the prism of his personal interests,” the financier George Soros wrote. Soros had worked closely with Berezovsky until they fell out over a telecommunications auction, and he viewed the man as a con, as did many of Berezovsky’s erstwhile business partners. “He has no difficulty in subordinating the fate of Russia to his own.”
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There were counterarguments that supported the FSB’s version of the bombings. It was not beyond the Chechen extremists—and their like-minded fighters in the other Muslim republics—to commit acts of terror, after all. The political logic of the conspiracy also ignored the fact that the political elite had deeply opposed a new war for the reasons that now seemed prophetic. Launching a war was in the summer of 1999 seen as a liability, not an asset. And now after the early military successes and all of Putin’s tough talk, the war had become a drag on Putin’s broader popularity, not the ballast it had been at the beginning. A survey of Russian voters found that the war in Chechnya was ranked as the worst decision of his first eight months in power. (Nearly as many ranked Putin’s moves to increase pensions and wages as his best.)
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Moreover, any conspiracy would have had to be set in motion before anyone,
even Putin himself, knew he would become prime minister, let alone Yeltsin’s anointed successor.