The New Tsar (35 page)

That someone finds this

Here is a list—of those in the compartments who are here on the 9th and will try to get out

Hello to everyone, do not despair
.
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The wrecked submarine was already at the bottom of the sea when Putin was told only that it was missing. He carried on with his seaside vacation, jet-skiing on Sunday afternoon in the calm, warm water of the Black Sea. No one outside of the military chain of command knew anything was amiss since the navy did not publicly acknowledge the
Kursk
’s fate until Monday, after which officials obfuscated and then lied day after day.

After finally acknowledging that an explosion had crippled the
Kursk
, officials falsely insisted that the cause had been a collision with a foreign submarine—almost certainly from the United States or NATO. Russia’s military leaders reverted to a Soviet instinct for secrecy, and so did the Kremlin. The press office curtly noted on August 14 that the navy commander had briefed Putin on the rescue operation, but Putin himself said nothing until August 16 when he left Sochi—not to return to Moscow, but to attend a meeting of former Soviet states in Crimea.

On the sixth day of the crisis
Komsomolskaya Pravda
published a list of the 118 sailors and officers aboard, having paid a bribe worth $600 to obtain it. For relatives, the newspaper’s report was the first confirmation that their sons and husbands were aboard—and by now almost certainly dead. Another headline in the newspaper directly challenged Putin: “The sailors on the
Kursk
fell silent yesterday. Why has the president been silent?” Putin found himself excoriated in the media. Another newspaper published a sequence of photographs showing a tanned Putin, along with Marshall Sergeyev playing billiards and the navy commander, Vladimir Korayedov. The caption read, “They don’t sink.”
⁴⁷

Putin’s decisiveness in Chechnya, his bold promises to restore stability to the nation—these failed him in this new crisis. He seemed unable to control the military or an increasingly anguished and angry population, incited by television and newspaper coverage that displayed the sympathy and heartbreak that neither Putin nor his military commanders could seem to muster. Boris Berezovsky, who still harbored illusions of influence despite public disputes with Putin over his initial actions as president, telephoned Putin in Sochi on August 16 from his villa in Cap d’Antibes.

“Volodya, why are you in Sochi?” he said. “You should interrupt your
holiday and go to that submarine base, or at least to Moscow.” He warned him that he was doing damage to his presidency.

“And why are you in France?” Putin asked sarcastically.

Berezovsky pointed out that he was not the nation’s leader. “No one gives a shit where I am,” he said.
⁴⁸

Russia initially refused offers of international assistance from Norway, Sweden, Britain, and the United States. Putin only agreed after President Clinton called him in Sochi and pressed the offer. By agreeing to assistance, Putin had to overrule Sergeyev and the admirals whose highest concern was not the crew but the possibility that Russia’s enemies would learn the secrets of its nuclear submarine fleet. When British and Norwegian divers—but not American—finally arrived with a rescue vehicle on August 21, they succeeded in opening the
Kursk
’s outer escape hatch in six hours, something the Russians had not managed in nine days. By then all aboard were dead. The waiting families, still clinging to hope, erupted in outrage that filled the newscasts not only of Gusinsky’s NTV, but also of the channel Berezovsky controlled.

Putin had returned to Moscow quietly on the morning of August 19, but continued to say little about the crisis, leaving the media to declare the country leaderless in its time of tragedy. That morning Berezovsky discovered the consequences of critical coverage. Putin’s chief of staff, Aleksandr Voloshin, told him flatly that the channel was “working against the president.” Voloshin, who had once been a business partner of Berezovsky’s, now told him he should give up control of the network or go the way of Gusinsky. Berezovsky insisted on a meeting with Putin in person, and when they met in the Kremlin on August 20, along with Voloshin, Putin’s fury erupted. He claimed he had a report asserting that Berezovsky’s reporters had hired prostitutes to appear in news reports claiming to be the wives or sisters of the sailors. “They are not whores, they are real wives and sisters,” Berezovsky insisted. “Your KGB idiots are feeding you baloney.”
⁴⁹

With that, Berezovsky’s fate was sealed. Putin had come prepared. He opened a file and began reading about the mismanagement of finances at the state television channel.
⁵⁰
Berezovsky sputtered in protest, but could do nothing. Putin was cutting him off from whatever influence he hoped to have in the Kremlin. It would be the last meeting between the two, one who portrayed himself as a modern Rasputin, and the other happy to be rid of an odious oligarch wielding the power of television.

On August 22, ten days after the
Kursk
exploded, Putin flew to Vidyayevo,
a closed military city above the Arctic Circle; the
Kursk
’s home port was in this dilapidated garrison town, weathered by the unforgiving climate. There the fathers, mothers, wives, and children of the submarine’s crew had come from all over the country to wait as the tragedy unfolded, veering between hope and anguish, grief and fury. One of Putin’s deputy prime ministers, Ilya Klebanov, had tried to placate the families four days earlier, only to encounter uninhibited wrath inside the city’s officers’ club. Klebanov, who oversaw the country’s faltering military industries, looked shaken when one mother, Nadezhda Tylik, leapt from her seat, shouting, “Swines!” A nurse approached her from behind and plunged a needle through her coat sleeve to sedate her.
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Now, the relatives gathered once again at the club at five o’clock, this time to see the president himself. And they waited four hours until Putin arrived at last. Dressed in a black suit over a black shirt with no tie, Putin now faced the reality of suffering—not the “prostitutes” hired by unscrupulous journalists, as he had been told, but people genuinely bereaved. What he found was an angry mob. He had not finished his first sentence when he was interrupted by shouts. When he offered his condolences for the “appalling tragedy,” a woman loudly shouted that he should cancel the day of mourning that he had announced the day before. Putin seemed unsure of himself. He acknowledged the sorry state of Russia’s military, but sounded defensive. “There have always been tragedies,” he said. “You surely know that our country is in a difficult position and that our armed forces are as well, but I too never imagined that they were in such bad shape.”
⁵²
When a man demanded to know why the Northern Fleet did not have a rescue submersible, Putin blurted out, “There’s not a damned thing left in this country!”

The crowd angrily corrected him when he stated the salaries of sailors and officers, shouting over his answers and forcing him to plead with the audience to let him finish. He misstated the timing of the explosion and repeated the navy’s obfuscation of the cause. “It could have been a collision, or a mine, or possibly an explosion on board, though specialists think this very unlikely.” The meeting lasted nearly two hours and forty minutes, and it was never intended to become public. A television camera from one of the state channels—not Berezovsky’s—filmed from a balcony, but the Kremlin released only the video without the sound so viewers never heard his misstatements or the crowd’s angry protests. One journalist, however, managed to record the event unnoticed. He was Andrei Kolesnikov, one of the three journalists who had interviewed
the acting president for
First Person
. In his telling, Putin ultimately tamed the fury, especially with his promises of compensation for the relatives—ten years’ salary and apartments in Moscow and Petersburg—the details of which had occupied nearly an hour of the meeting. “Putin left it,” he wrote of the meeting, “as the president of people who had been ready to tear him to pieces a short time earlier.”
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It was a searing experience. Some in the crowd shouted that they did not want his money, they wanted their loved ones. Putin’s political honeymoon had ended. The aura of invincibility—the charmed rise of the political neophyte who would restore Russia’s greatness—was gone. Putin believed he knew why; it was not the neglected state of the military, or the Soviet-like obstinacy of the navy’s commanders, who continued to blame the Americans. He refused to accept Marshal Sergeyev’s offer to resign or to punish any of the commanders who had so clearly lied about the tragedy.
⁵⁴
No, the cause of Putin’s political misfortune was the media. “Television?” he erupted in the officers’ club when asked why they had initially refused foreign assistance in the rescue, as widely reported. “They’re lying! Lying! Lying! There are people in television who bawl more than anyone today and who, over the past ten years, have destroyed that same army and navy where people are dying today.”

In case anyone had any doubt whom he blamed, he appeared on state television in Moscow the next day to address the nation for the first time. After expressing “a total sense of responsibility and sense of guilt for this tragedy,” he angrily denounced those who would “take advantage of this calamity in an unscrupulous way.” Without using their names, he referred to Berezovsky’s pledge to raise $1 million for the relatives of the crew and mentioned the villas he and Gusinsky owned abroad. No one missed the allusions. “Let me put it more bluntly: attempts are being made to inflate the situation politically in order to make some kind of political capital or pursue certain interests of particular groups. And they are right who say that in the front ranks of the defenders of the sailors are people who for a long time were contributing to the collapse of the army, navy, and state. Some of them have even put together a million. A single thread from everyone, and there’s a shirt for a naked man. It would be better for them to sell their villas on the Mediterranean coast of France or Spain. Only then they would have to explain why all this property is registered in dummy names and in the name of juridical companies. We would then ask them where the money came from.”

Of course, Putin already knew. He had files already compiled. In the
shady world of Russian business, few oligarchs could withstand scrutiny over their dealings, their murky acquisition, their tax dodges, their secret accounts offshore. As head of the FSB, he had established a monopoly on financial information,
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and as prime minister and now president he knew where the skeletons could be found. This was, not incidentally, the method of the KGB once upon a time. The suspended investigation into Berezovsky’s holdings in Aeroflot suddenly resumed the next month. When he was called to testify in November, Berezovsky ignored the summons and fled the country. In February he sold his shares in the television channel to his former partner, Roman Abramovich, who turned them over to the state. Gusinsky, who had been released on bail following his arrest in June, fled to his villa in Spain. In April 2001, Gazprom, the energy behemoth, seized control of NTV in a boardroom coup after calling in a $281 million loan it had given Gusinsky to weather the 1998 financial crisis. The channel’s journalists occupied the studio in protest but gave up after eleven days, and new management took over. Many at home and abroad registered protest, to no avail. Putin from the start understood the importance of television to the Kremlin’s authority—of its ability to shape not only his image, but the reality of Russia itself. Sergei Pugachev, a banker and friend who worked closely with him in the Kremlin at the time, marveled at how Putin would obsessively follow television news reports, even calling the channels’ directors in the middle of a broadcast to challenge aspects of the reports. He considered the state networks a “natural resource” as precious as oil or gas. “He understands that the basis of power in Russia is not the army, not the police, it’s the television,” Pugachev said. “This is his deepest conviction.”
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Now, barely a year into his presidency, the three main television networks in Russia were firmly under the control of the Kremlin.

CHAPTER 12

Putin’s Soul

O
n the afternoon of September 11, 2001, Putin assembled forty-eight journalists in the Kremlin to bestow upon them the honors of the state, a tradition from Soviet times. In his brief remarks before the television cameras, he singled out the war correspondents who reported from Chechnya and who thus confronted the “well-organized and generously paid propaganda warfare” of the rebels. “The peace process is gaining momentum there largely through your achievements,” he told them. The man who had neutered the only private television network and the only state network that displayed independence then declared the media an important pillar of the new Russia. “Huge political and economic changes would be impossible in Russia without its free mass media,” he said. The ceremony had just ended when his security aides summoned him to a conference room where they watched television reports of the commercial airliners that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, an attack carried out by Al-Qaeda, the organization that the Russians had long argued provided assistance to Chechnya’s rebels. Putin turned to Sergei Ivanov, his old KGB colleague and friend. “What can we do to help them?” he asked.
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