The New Tsar (43 page)

Sensing the gravity of the attacks, Putin returned to Moscow and ordered the creation of a task force to investigate, but by the weekend he had returned to Sochi and said nothing more until he appeared with Chirac and Schröder. He blamed the bombings—the worst terrorist act in the skies over Russia—on Al-Qaeda, which grossly misstated the facts. Only a few hours after he spoke, a woman blew herself up at the entrance to the Rizhskaya metro station in Moscow, only three miles north of the Kremlin. That attack killed the bomber and nine others, and injured more than fifty. The officials who rushed to the scene included Moscow’s mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, underscoring the panic that was unfolding, not unlike that which had followed the apartment bombings in 1999. The police in Moscow announced that the bomber was Rosa Nagayeva, though that later proved false.
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Her sister, Amanat, was suspected of destroying one of the two airliners; their roommate, Satsita Dzhbirkhanova, destroyed the other. The three shared a grim apartment in Grozny’s shattered ruins with another woman, Maryam Taburova. They lived steps away from the city’s muddied, fetid central market, where they sold clothing they shuttled in from Azerbaijan.
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On August 22, two days before the attack on the airliners, the four had all left Grozny and taken a bus to Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku. They were now involved in a new wave of terror. The authorities quickly pieced together their trail, but they did not know where Taburova—and, as it turned out, Rosa Nagayeva—had gone.
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P
utin had begun 2004 seemingly at the peak of political power. The parliamentary elections had cemented his control of the legislature, and while the arrest of Khodorkovsky had rattled the stock market, it had not dented his popularity ratings, which hovered above 70 percent. Even wary investors seemed relieved that the attack on Yukos seemed to be a personal and political fight, not the result of a drive to renationalize industry. “People will forget in six months that Khodorkovsky is still sitting in jail,” declared William Browder, the director of Hermitage Capital, one of the funds that rode the Putin boom.
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The effects of an improving economy seemed to proliferate day by day in new stores and restaurants and apartment buildings, especially in Moscow and other cities. Oil prices had more than tripled since the fiscal crisis of 1998, and a new tax regime Putin imposed on the oil companies—based, ironically, on proposals drafted by Yukos—poured money into the state’s coffers. The share of oil profits the government received had nearly doubled, and
revenues had surged from less than $6 billion when Putin became prime minister to more than $80 billion.
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The Russians now talked about becoming the world’s largest oil producer, surpassing Saudi Arabia. The boom was not Putin’s success alone, and his critics derided him as lucky, but as the undisputed leader of the country, he reaped the political benefits.

In early January the Kremlin pressed its case against Yukos, announcing that the company owed $3.4 billion in back taxes for the year 2000 alone. Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov voiced the lone public protest. In an interview he gave to the newspaper
Vedomosti
, he argued that Khodorkovsky and his partners had not cheated on taxes, but simply used loopholes that were then available to everyone but were now retroactively being declared illegal.
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Putin took note of his prime minister’s defiance, however mild it seemed. Kasyanov was careful never to speak directly against his boss, but the following Saturday, at a regular meeting of his Security Council, Putin asked the members to stay on after the regular agenda had been completed. The council included the country’s most important officials, including the ministers of defense and foreign affairs and, of course, Kasyanov as the prime minister. Putin instructed the prosecutor general, Vladimir Ustinov, to read aloud the charges against Khodorkovsky, all of them, in the belief that the enunciation of Khodorkovsky’s “crimes” would dispel any doubts and refute Kasyanov’s dangerous line of questioning before anyone else took it up. Ustinov read the indictments monotonously, page after page, for more than an hour. “The Security Council members, not really understanding why this was being done, sat there with stone faces, not moving,” Kasyanov recalled. He could not help but smile at “all of the absurdities and obvious inventions.” Putin, at the head of the long oval table, scanned the faces of his aides, making note of the reactions: the blank, unaffected stares of most and Kasyanov’s grin. When Ustinov finished, no one asked a question or said a word in response, “and everyone walked out silently.”
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Putin’s political dominance was such that there seemed to be little point in challenging him. Not even in the presidential election, held that March, did he face meaningful opposition. The political titans of the Yeltsin era—Gennady Zyuganov and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, men who had once seemed within reach of ruling all of Russia—pulled out before the official campaign even started. Instead, they assigned party apparatchiks to run token campaigns; in Zhirinovsky’s case, his bodyguard, a former boxer named Oleg Malyshkin, carried the party’s banner.
Grigory Yavlinsky, so embittered by Yabloko’s defeat in December, refused entreaties from the Kremlin itself to mount a third campaign for the presidency, to create the semblance of a democratic choice. When they vacationed together that winter, Boris Nemtsov, another reformer who had served under Yeltsin, tried to persuade Kasyanov to run as the candidate representing the country’s economic liberals, but Kasyanov dared not seriously consider challenging his boss. In the weeks before the campaign, a poll found that 55 percent of respondents thought it would be better to cancel the election and save the money it would cost to hold it.
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Putin’s reelection, the affirmation of the course he had chosen for Russia, seemed on the verge of collapsing, but in a way he and his aides had not expected. The “managed democracy” that Surkov had orchestrated had succeeded so well that it threatened to undermine Putin’s own image as the democrat who had turned Russia around with the assent of the people. One of the first pieces of legislation in the new Duma called for amending the Constitution to extend the presidential term to seven years, allowing Putin to run for two new terms. It would have kept him in office until 2018, but he demurred, insisting that there should be no constitutional changes. He still sought a democratic imprimatur, though in a race in which he faced, by the Kremlin’s own design, no genuine competition. The Kremlin was left having to recruit its own candidates to oppose him, including Yavlinsky and a former legislator from Petersburg, Sergei Mironov, who accepted the nomination of a small party with an impassioned plea to vote for the incumbent. “When a leader who is trusted goes into battle,” he said of Putin, “he must not be left alone.”
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The liberals could not agree on a single candidate now any more than they had been able to unite as a bloc before the parliamentary elections. Irina Khakamada, a Russian of Japanese descent and one of the most prominent women in politics, ended up running a lonely challenge. Her own party, the Union of Right Forces, refused to endorse her.

From exile in London, Boris Berezovsky bankrolled another candidate, Ivan Rybkin, a former Duma speaker and Yeltsin ally. He ultimately dropped out, but not before injecting the most drama into the campaign by disappearing for four days in February, during which the authorities announced an investigation into his possible murder. When he resurfaced, he vowed to continue his campaign. He then promptly fled to London, where he met Berezovsky’s aides, including Aleksandr Litvinenko, the former FSB officer who had gone public with his accusations
against the agency. Litvinenko had fled Russia in October 2000 and settled in London with Berezovsky’s financial patronage. Rybkin now claimed that he had been kidnapped and drugged in Kyiv, where he had gone on an invitation to meet the head of Chechnya’s separatists, Aslan Maskhadov, the former president and now one of Russia’s most wanted criminals. The implausibility of Maskhadov risking travel to Ukraine, where Russia’s security services were deeply embedded, seemed not to have occurred to Rybkin.

Rybkin said he had fallen unconscious for four days after having sandwiches and tea in a Kyiv apartment. When he came to, two armed Russian men showed him a videotape that he declined to describe in detail except that it was made by “perverts” and was meant to humiliate him into silence.
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Litvinenko claimed the drug Rybkin had ingested was SP-117, a truth serum used by Russia’s foreign intelligence services. “Once you get SP-117, they can do whatever they want with you, drive you around, put you in bed with girls or boys, tape you, and so on,” he said. “Then you get one pill of antidote and you are normal again and don’t remember what happened.”
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No one took Rybkin’s accusations seriously, not even his wife, who said she felt “sorry for Russia if people like this want to govern it.”
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His political career never recovered. Berezovsky, though, never tired in his campaign to discredit Putin, denouncing him regularly with increasing vehemence and a diminishing regard for the truth. It would not be the last time he and Litvinenko became entangled in a sensational drama involving spies and poison.

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utin ignored not only his challengers; he ostensibly ignored his own campaign, as he had four years before. He did not have to campaign overtly because the Kremlin’s control of television meant his duties as president were dutifully and uncritically covered even more prominently on the evening news. Putin’s challengers, if they were mentioned at all, were infantilized or denounced. When the first debate among the presidential candidates was held on February 12—at eight in the morning, the early hour ensuring the fewest possible viewers—Putin refused to attend. His twenty-nine-minute speech that day officially opening his campaign, however, aired repeatedly through the afternoon and evening. He ran no campaign ads, held no rallies, and offered no clear proposals for a second term except to continue to be the living embodiment of Russia’s stability.

The paradox was that, four years into Putin’s presidency, Russia’s stability
still seemed precarious, a disaster away from the turmoil of the 1990s that Putin often invoked. On the eve of the race, a bomb exploded at the door of Yelena Tregubova, the journalist Putin had treated to sushi while he was director of the FSB. In 2003, she had published a book on her experiences in the Kremlin’s increasingly circumscribed press pool,
Tales of a Kremlin Digger
. It had been a best seller, describing in gossipy detail the Kremlin’s efforts to manage the pool’s reporting, including an incident where Putin scolded a boy who had been hit by a car. “From now on,” he told the boy, “you won’t be violating traffic regulations anymore.” Tregubova assumed the bombing was somehow linked to the coming election. She was not injured, but she was rattled enough that she fled Russia. “It is becoming uncomfortable to live in this city,” she said.
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Four days later, a suicide bomber blew himself up on a metro train in the center of Moscow, killing forty-one and wounding more than two hundred. One of those accused of organizing it was later involved in the attack at the Rizhskaya metro bombing six months later.
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On February 14, two days after the official start of campaigning, the roof of a popular new indoor water park in southern Moscow collapsed. Transvaal Park symbolized the amenities that Putin’s economic boom was bringing to the country’s emerging consumer class: an indoor tropical paradise in the frigid north. Twenty-eight people died in the disaster, which the building’s designers blamed on a terrorist attack but that was in fact caused by a construction flaw. It was impossible to blame Putin directly for any one of the events, but they were collectively as sure a measure of his rule as the economic successes he happily took credit for. Ivan Rybkin produced a lacerating American-style attack ad that showed the subway and water park disasters, along with the sorry state of education and health care, but the state’s television networks simply refused to broadcast it.
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Still, Surkov’s political team left nothing to chance. The Kremlin issued orders to outlying regions specifying Putin’s vote totals and voter turnout. The authorities in Khabarovsk in the Far East threatened to discharge hospital patients if they could not prove they had received absentee ballots to cast their votes. A housing official in St. Petersburg sent a letter to building superintendents ordering them to ensure 70 percent turnout.
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Anticipating the Kremlin’s wishes, local bureaucrats threw up obstacles to keep Putin’s rivals from mounting campaigns at all. The police interrupted one rally in Yekaterinburg on the premise there was a bomb threat; the electricity was cut off at another in Nizhny Novgorod two days later. The campaign was so stripped of any electoral
interest that the Kremlin’s biggest worry now was that voter turnout would fall below the 50 percent threshold required to make the election legal. Anything below that would force a new election. That would be embarrassment enough, but Putin’s closest advisers also began to see the seeds of a conspiracy to deprive him of power. By law, if a new election were required, the prime minister would step in to serve as acting president in the interim. That is, Mikhail Kasyanov. He had criticized the prosecution of Khodorkovsky, who, Putin was convinced, was trying to buy control of the state. He had vacationed with Boris Nemtsov, who had raised the possibility of his running for president, as Putin must surely have found out. The chances of Kasyanov maneuvering into power were infinitesimally remote, but Putin and his aides believed it, and they would not tolerate any risk.
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