The New Tsar (36 page)

Many later viewed Putin’s response as cynical, but in the hours after the attacks he acted with alacrity and purpose to help a country he viewed with lingering suspicion. He tried to telephone President George W. Bush but could not reach him as Air Force One hopscotched the United States. When Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, tried to call Ivanov, Putin immediately took the receiver. He assured her he would not increase Russia’s military alert in response to the American move to a war footing; in fact, he lowered the alert and canceled a military exercise in the Pacific Ocean that had begun the previous day—simulating a nuclear conflict with the United States. “Is there anything
else we can do?” he asked Rice. A thought flashed through her mind:
The Cold War really is over
.
²

Putin was the first world leader to call the White House, even before the extent of the attack was clear. He later telephoned Prime Minister Tony Blair in Britain and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in Germany, repeating that the world must unite against the scourge of terrorism. In contrast to his cautious silence after the
Kursk
disaster and other major events, Putin went on television and expressed his condolences to the victims of what he called “an unprecedented act of aggression.” “The event that occurred in the United States today goes beyond national borders. It is a brazen challenge to the whole of humanity, at least to civilized humanity,” he said. He made it clear that the tragedy was an opportunity to refashion international relations to fight “the plague of the 21st Century.” “Russia knows firsthand what terrorism is,” he said. “So we understand as well as anyone the feelings of the American people. Addressing the people of the United States on behalf of Russia, I would like to say that we are with you, we entirely and fully share and experience your pain.”
³

By the time Bush called back on September 12, Putin had decreed a moment of silence in solidarity, setting a tone from the top that for a time at least tempered the virulent anti-American sentiment that infused Russian politics. Only two years after the anti-American protests against the NATO war in Serbia, many Russians—though certainly not all—followed Putin’s lead. They piled flowers outside the American embassy, and the tone of state television, where the Kremlin’s mood increasingly manifested itself, shifted markedly. “Good will triumph over evil,” Putin told Bush. “I want you to know that in this struggle, we will stand together.”
⁴

—

P
utin’s response seemed to validate Bush’s initial impression of him, which no one had anticipated when the new administration began. During his campaign against Al Gore in 2000, Bush had denounced the war in Chechnya with as much vehemence as Clinton ever had, seeing it as a way of portraying the Democrats as having been soft on Russia. From Bush’s very first days in office, relations with Putin’s Russia appeared fraught. In January 2001, American border agents acting on an international warrant had arrested Pavel Borodin when he landed in New York. After taking office, Putin had quietly transferred Borodin out of his post overseeing Kremlin property and given him a largely
ceremonial assignment as an envoy to the Union State of Russia and Belarus, an entity formed in 1996 but never realized. Russia’s new prosecutor, Vladimir Ustinov, quietly closed the investigation of Borodin’s activities, but the Swiss had not closed its case. Carla Del Ponte had circulated the warrant that snared Borodin, accusing him of accepting kickbacks of approximately $30 million from the contracts he had issued to renovate the Grand Palace at the Kremlin and the Accounting Chamber. The scandal that had tarnished the Yeltsin presidency now cast such a shadow over relations with the new American president that it was the subject of Putin’s first phone call with Bush on January 31, 2001.

Within weeks relations seemed doomed to worsen. In February, the FBI finally uncovered a long-suspected mole within its ranks: Robert Hanssen, a senior counterintelligence supervisor, had spied for the Soviet Union and then Russia until the evening of his arrest. His exposure led to the expulsion of fifty Russian diplomats from the United States, followed by the tit-for-tat expulsion of fifty Americans from Moscow.

For a time the Cold War seemed to take on a new life, but when Bush and Putin met for the first time in June 2001 at Brdo Castle, a sixteenth-century villa outside Slovenia’s capital, Ljubljana, both men seemed eager to defuse the mounting tensions. And both turned to their intelligence briefings in hopes of breaking the ice. Putin greeted Bush by mentioning rugby, which Bush had played for a year in college. “I did play rugby,” Bush told him, knowingly. “
Very
good briefing.”
⁵
Then as Putin got down to business, reading through his agenda from a stack of note cards, Bush interrupted and asked about the cross Putin’s mother had given him to bless in Jerusalem. Bush saw the surprise in Putin’s face, though it quickly passed. Bush explained that he had read about the story, without mentioning that it was contained in his own briefing book, prepared by the CIA. Putin recounted the story of the fire at his dacha, re-creating for him the moment when a worker found the cross in the ashes and presented it to him “as if it was meant to be.” Bush, a believer, told him, “Vladimir, that is the story of the Cross.”
⁶

When the two emerged to meet the press after two hours of meetings, they had resolved few of their differences, especially over Russia’s opposition to missile defenses, which Bush pursued far more aggressively than his Democratic predecessor, but they exuded a personal warmth that was striking given recent events. Bush called him “a remarkable leader,” and, in contrast to what the Russians viewed as Clinton’s carping, he made only passing mention of Chechnya or freedom of speech in Russia.
When asked if Americans could trust Putin, given their differences over a plethora of issues, Bush said he would not have invited him to his ranch in Texas the following November if he did not think so. “I looked the man in the eye,” Bush said. “I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul: a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.”
⁷

Neither Bush nor Putin mentioned the story of the cross or the fact that Putin was not wearing it that day, as he had told his biographers he did every day. (He did bring it with him when he and Bush met again at the Group of Eight summit in Genoa the next month.) Not everyone was convinced by this fledging partnership. “I can understand the strategy on rapport, but it went too far,” Michael McFaul, an American academic who first met Putin in Petersburg before the collapse of the Soviet Union, told a newspaper. “I think there is plenty of good reason not to trust President Putin. This is a man who was trained to lie.”
⁸

—

P
utin traveled to eighteen countries in his first year in office, often with Lyudmila. He projected the image of a new Russia eager to engage the world and erase some of the vestiges of the Cold War. After his initial focus on policies at home, he overhauled Russia’s foreign policy in ways that Yeltsin never could, weakened as he had been by the Communists and nationalists still nostalgic for the lost superpower that was the Soviet Union. What Putin sought was nothing less than a rapprochement with the West—especially with Europe, but even with the “main adversary” he had been trained to fight as an intelligence officer. In 2001 he closed Soviet-era military outposts overseas, including a massive eavesdropping post in Lourdes, Cuba, and a naval and intelligence base in Vietnam, vowing that the new Russia should focus its resources instead on building up its military to counter the more pressing threat of Islamic extremism in the Northern Caucasus. After the attacks of September 11, Putin softened his public opposition to the enlargement of NATO, the next round of which would extend membership to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, the three Baltic republics that had been annexed by the Soviet Union and still included sizable Russian populations. (As a candidate in March 2000, Putin had even suggested that Russia might one day join NATO.)
⁹
As the United States went to war against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in October, Putin provided not only Russian intelligence but also money and weapons to the Northern Alliance, the
Afghans who had continued to resist the Taliban after it seized power in 1996 and before that had fought against the Soviet invasion. Putin also acquiesced in the establishment of American military bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, the first deployment of American soldiers to any part of the former Soviet Union since the Great Patriotic War.

Putin’s moves faced resistance from Russia’s military, a hidebound bureaucracy that more than most parts of society had not shed its Soviet heritage. It was now a decrepit force—vastly reduced from the 2.8 million personnel at the end of the Soviet era to barely 1 million—and, after the 1990s, a deeply corrupted one. The majority of soldiers were conscripts subject to a brutal form of hazing by older soldiers known as
dedovshchina
, from the word for “grandfather.” Conditions in the military were so bad that most Russian families did whatever they could, from bribes to faked illnesses to emigration, to keep their sons out of the draft. Crime and corruption infected the ranks from top to bottom, with commanders renting out conscripts as serfs and selling off their units’ fuel, spare parts, and even vehicles.
¹⁰
Although he favored warships and fighter jets as backdrops for his popular image, Putin was not a military man. In Soviet times, the soldiers and officers of the Red Army had disdained the elite agents of the KGB, and the feeling was often mutual. The military, though, lay at the heart of Putin’s mission to restore the nation, and he understood the sorry state it was in. Though eager to introduce a new military doctrine and turn the military into a leaner, more modern, and more disciplined professional force, Putin moved cautiously to impose his vision on the one institution that still had a measure of independence, despite its diminished standing.

Putin barely mentioned military policy in his first months in office, beyond the strategy for winning the war in Chechnya. Some military analysts in Russia pronounced Putin weak or aloof; others saw a Machiavellian strategy to allow rival commanders to batter themselves into such a weakened state that they would have to submit to Putin. “Putin prefers to deal with people who have been politically hamstrung, feel constrained and thus have to stay loyal to the president,” a prominent military analyst wrote.
¹¹
After the
Kursk
disaster, Putin resisted the expedient political move of dismissing the commanders whose incompetence and lies had dented his popularity. He proved far more calculating, building popular support and boosting morale by raising the salaries of soldiers and pledging more money for the military, even as he ordered a restructuring of the armed forces that would further reduce the number
of troops. Putin restored the Red Banner as the army’s standard, now with the tsarist double eagle, and the music of the Soviet national anthem, though with new words. (The anthem adopted after the collapse of the Soviet Union contained no lyrics, and athletes at the Summer Olympics in Sydney in 2000 had complained to Putin they could not sing along when they stood on the podium to receive their medals.)

Such moves proved deft. They appealed to the nostalgic patriotism of the military and large swaths of society, without restoring the Soviet ideology that many Russians were happy to put behind them. Putin might have been a political novice, but he found a balance between the conflicted past and the uncertain future—one that came naturally because it very much reflected his own views. He did not rail against the Soviet system the way Yeltsin had but instead co-opted the parts of its history that served his idea of the new Russia. During a call-in with voters in February 2000, he used an aphorism that has been widely attributed to him, but was not in fact his own. “Anyone who does not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union has no heart,” he said. “And anyone who wants to see it re-created in its former shape has no brain.”
¹²
Putin himself seemed suspended between his impulses. He kept Felix Dzerzhinsky’s statue on his desk at the FSB but opposed public appeals to restore the man’s bronze monument to the traffic circle where it stood in front of Lubyanka. He glorified the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War, but when asked to do so, he refused to restore the wartime name of Volgograd, the site of the terrible siege, far better known as Stalingrad.
¹³

Despite Putin’s criticism of the failures of the Soviet past, his embrace of some of its symbols raised alarms among intellectuals and liberals. A group of prominent artists and writers published an open letter to him, warning of the dangers of restoring the Soviet anthem. “The head of state must be clearly aware that millions of fellow citizens (including those who voted for him) will never come to respect an anthem that flouts their convictions and insults the memory of the victims of Soviet political repressions,” they wrote.
¹⁴
Boris Yeltsin, criticizing his successor for the first time since he left office, said the music was associated in his mind with Soviet bureaucrats attending Communist Party congresses. “The president of a country should not blindly follow the mood of the people,” Yeltsin told
Komsomolskaya Pravda
.
¹⁵
“On the contrary it is up to him to actively influence it.” Putin did influence the mood, sampling the past as if from a buffet, picking and choosing a history that he presented to a society deeply divided over what it represented.