The New Tsar (44 page)

At a concert at the Kremlin on February 23, Kasyanov himself sensed Putin’s coolness. He noticed him during an intermission, whispering in a corner with FSB head Nikolai Patrushev and otherwise avoiding him.
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The next day, Putin summoned Kasyanov to his Kremlin office alone and fired him. Not only did he not explain why to the public; he refused to tell Kasyanov, who was so stunned by the news that he did not initially understand that Putin meant immediately, not after his reelection in March, when a new prime minister might have been expected.
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It was Putin’s most significant shakeup of his government, whose continuity had been held up as a measure of political stability, and like Yeltsin before him, he used surprise to maximize the impact and keep the media’s attention on him. Not even other senior officials knew the move was coming. Putin said only that the voters deserved to know the composition of the new government before the election, which only underscored how predictable he knew the result would be. Putin did not immediately announce Kasyanov’s replacement, though, and the delay touched off rampant speculation—not about the election in three weeks, but about the one in 2008 that would elect Putin’s successor after he completed his second presidential term. Most politicians and analysts assumed Kasyanov’s replacement would be Putin’s choice as political heir, as Putin had ultimately become Yeltsin’s, but they misunderstood Putin’s intentions: he did not want to name an heir apparent who might emerge as a political figure in his own right. Doing so would create the idea of a Russia without Putin, and it was far too early to contemplate that.

Putin waited a week to let the mystery and suspense deepen. Speculation focused on the camps in Putin’s Kremlin: the liberals and the
siloviki
,
led respectively by Aleksei Kudrin and Sergei Ivanov, who had their own aspirations to ride Putin’s coattails to power. Instead he announced a nominee that no one predicted, not even those within the rival factions. “The political elite were stirred,” the journalist Anna Politkovskaya wrote. “The guessing game about whom Putin would appoint took over the television channels. The political pundits were given something to discuss, and the press finally got something it could write about the election campaign.”
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Less than two weeks before election day, meeting with parliamentary leaders to create the appearance of consultation, as nominally required by the Constitution, Putin proclaimed that the new prime minister would be Mikhail Fradkov. “There was a silence,” one of the meeting participants told the newspaper
Vedomosti
, “because some of us could not remember who Fradkov was.”
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Fradkov, a balding, jowly bureaucrat, had a long, obscure career that began in the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Economic Affairs; he had no patron, no political constituency, no policy proposals that anyone could discern. He seemed as bland a choice for prime minister as Putin had been in 1999. Even Fradkov seemed stunned. Putin had first called him over the weekend, and he was still in Brussels, where he served as Russia’s envoy to the European Union, when Putin made the announcement. When he arrived back in Moscow the next day, he admitted he had little qualification or vision for the post. He did not have to.

If Putin really meant the appointment to clarify the next government’s course, it signaled nothing except that a cabinet of ministers under Fradkov’s command would be as pliant as the Duma and the Federation Council had become. Fradkov had no personal ambition, but rather belonged to the cadre of former intelligence officers Putin assembled in Moscow during his presidency. Fradkov’s scientific education at the Moscow Machine and Tool Design Institute, a mysterious gap in his résumé, his fluency in English and Spanish, and an assignment in the 1970s as an economic adviser in the Soviet Union’s embassy in India strongly suggested ties to the KGB. The fact that he never acknowledged or denied it suggested only that he operated undercover, as many Soviet trade officials did.
²²
In his announcement, Putin merely said that Fradkov was a good administrator who had experience in the security services. Throughout his first term Putin had favored the security men in his appointments, by some estimates filling as many as 70 percent of senior government positions with former military, police, or intelligence
officers, many of whom had the same background in the KGB. Fradkov fit the pattern. What few realized was that Putin had known Fradkov, this bland unprepossessing apparatchik, for years. He had served as the Petersburg representative of the Foreign Trade Ministry in the early 1990s and with his boss, Pyotr Avon, now one of Russia’s richest bankers, had approved the barter contracts Putin had signed in the scandalous scheme to provide the city with food in the first winter of the new Russia.
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Kasyanov and, before him, Voloshin had represented a legacy of the Yeltsin years. Officials with their own ambitions, interests, and constituencies, they were now gone. There were still rivalries and divisions inside the Kremlin, but with Fradkov’s appointment, Putin consolidated his political supremacy by elevating a complete network of underlings that would above all remain loyal to him. A mere five days after the appointment, the Duma confirmed Fradkov’s nomination after a perfunctory debate that included only nine questions. Fradkov offered only the vaguest platitudes about his policies. He was there to do Putin’s bidding, and everyone understood it. The vote was 352 to 58, with 24 abstentions.

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P
utin’s reelection followed the script that Surkov’s political team had written for it. He won more than 71 percent of the vote. The little-known Communist candidate, Nikolai Kharitonov, came in a distant second with 13 percent. There was ample evidence of ballot stuffing and suspicious tallying, but the Kremlin blocked investigation of the accusations. In several regions the turnout and Putin’s total were incredible. In war-ravaged Chechnya, 92 percent voted for Putin. “I guess only Maskhadov and Basayev did not go to the polls,” Kharitonov quipped, complaining bitterly about electoral irregularities, including instances of votes cast for him being counted for Putin.
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All across the Northern Caucasus, the regions conquered by imperial Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, similar results were delivered to Moscow like tributes to a tsar. In Dagestan, 94 percent voted for Putin; in Kabardino-Balkaria, 96; in Ingushetia, 98. In some districts across the country, the turnout and the votes for Putin exceeded 99.9 percent, and yet no one in the Kremlin—or beyond—seemed particularly embarrassed about it.

The only drama of the night had nothing to do with the election. Only minutes after the polls closed in Moscow, a fire started in the Manezh, a neoclassical landmark across the Aleksandr Gardens from the
Kremlin. The fire spread quickly through the wooden rafters of the roof and soon consumed the entire building. The first images broadcast on television made it appear that the Kremlin itself was on fire, “not something the authorities would like Russians to see on the day of Vladimir Putin’s triumph,” as one newspaper wrote.
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Putin watched from the roof of the Senate, the presidential office building inside the Kremlin. He had to postpone his victory speech, and even so the state channels could not avoid showing the fire in the background during their live reports from the city’s center. When the building’s roof collapsed in an exploding heap, sending embers into the sky like an unwanted fireworks display, the crowd on the street inexplicably burst into cheers. Two firefighters died when the burning rafters fell in on them. Officials blamed faulty wiring or perhaps a welder’s spark, but since no one had been working there on a Sunday night, the suspicion of arson lingered and was never fully dispelled. In a deeply superstitious culture, the fire seemed a dark omen.

“I promise that the democratic accomplishments of our people will be unconditionally defended and guaranteed,” Putin said when he finally made a brief appearance at his campaign headquarters on election night, dressed in a black turtleneck sweater. There was no victory party or celebration. No one seemed particularly excited. On the morning after his reelection, Putin received congratulatory telephone calls from George Bush, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder, and Junichiro Koizumi, even as the international observers from the Organization for Security Co-operation in Europe gathered for the now-ritual postelection news conference and declared that the election “reflected the lack of a democratic culture, accountability, and responsibility.”

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P
utin’s reelection demoralized the country’s democrats. The collapse of the liberal parties that had begun with the parliamentary elections prompted soul-searching over what went wrong. One of the few independent liberals elected to the Duma in 2003, Vladimir Ryzhkov, who represented Barnaul in Siberia, called it “the liberal debacle.” The country’s democrats, he argued, had been tarnished by the negative consequences of the Soviet collapse, the chaotic and criminal transition to pseudo-capitalism that left millions impoverished and pining for the stability of the Soviet state, if not its stifling ideological and economic stagnation. And Putin, who had worked for one of the country’s first democrats and was the heir to the man who led Russia in the
1990s, somehow received all the credit for the economic recovery and the personal freedoms that still remained. Ryzhkov went on to lament that most of the democratic supporters of the liberal parties, Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces, had voted not for their party leaders, but rather for Putin, whom the party leaders blamed for stripping the election—and the system itself—of any real democratic character. “In the eyes of the majority of Russians, the country’s number one democrat is none other than President Vladimir Putin himself.”
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The most striking remonstrance, however, came from an unexpected quarter: the cramped prison cell of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He had been incarcerated for five months already, meeting with his lawyers and poring through the hundreds of pages of documents the prosecutors had assembled for his coming trial. He had made only brief remarks at his intermittent court hearings, but he spent the hours in his cell contemplating the evolution of politics and business in Russia. He had invested his personal fortune bankrolling politicians who had now been routed in parliamentary and presidential elections by the man he had tried—audaciously, he now understood—to challenge. From notes cobbled together with his lawyers, he published a lengthy treatise in the newspaper
Vedomosti
after Putin’s reelection. It was part prescription and part confession, a biting analysis of the sins of Russia’s liberals, himself included.
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Big business had pursued profit above the social good; it had perverted politics by sidling up to political power and lying about it to the people; the liberal champions of democracy had paid attention to 10 percent of the population and neglected those who suffered. “Today we are witnessing the virtual capitulation of the liberals. And that capitulation, indeed, is not only the liberals’ fault, but also their problem. It is their fear in the face of a thousand-year history, mixed with the strong liking for household comforts they developed in the 1990s. It is their servility ingrained on the genetic level, their readiness to ignore the Constitution for the sake of another helping of sturgeon.” He atoned for his own role as a financial sponsor of Yeltsin’s reelection in 1996 and the “monstrous effect it took to make the Russian people ‘choose with their hearts.’ ”

Khodorkovsky’s letter sounded like a jailhouse act of contrition, a plea for leniency or clemency. It was also an acute analysis of Russia’s politics and society. Putin, he wrote, “is probably neither a liberal nor a democrat, but he is still more liberal and democratic than 70 percent of our country’s population.” The man who jailed him was the man who would preserve the country until society developed a greater sense of
unity, communality, and equality. Khodorkovsky singled out one opposition candidate, Irina Khakamada, for suggesting in a full-page newspaper advertisement that Putin had been responsible for the
Nord-Ost
siege. “We must give up the useless attempts to call the president’s legitimacy into question. Regardless of whether we like Vladimir Putin or not, it’s time to realize that the head of state is not just a private person. The president is an institution guaranteeing a nation’s stability and integrity. And God forbid that we live to see a day when this institution collapses—Russia will not survive another February 1917. The nation’s history tells us that a bad government is better than no government at all.”

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S
eptember 1 is, by tradition, the first day of school across Russia, a ceremonial occasion called the Day of Knowledge. Parents and grandparents join their children as they assemble at their schools, everyone wearing their best clothes and carrying flowers or other presents to their new teachers. In the waning days of the summer of 2004, the celebrations once again took place across the country, including at School No. 1 in Beslan, a small city in North Ossetia, a predominantly Orthodox region in the center of the Caucasus. More than twelve hundred people had gathered in the school’s courtyard at nine o’clock in the morning when a military truck appeared and uniformed men leapt from beneath a tarp that covered the cargo bed. They fired rifles in the air and shouted “Allahu Akbar.” The gunmen herded everyone first into a courtyard and then into the school’s gymnasium, which they wired with bombs they hung above their hostages.
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Among the camouflaged men were two women, the roommates from Grozny who had been linked to the earlier attacks on the airplanes and the metro in Moscow: Maryam Taburova and Rosa Nagayeva. They were now part of a terrorist attack as barbarous as the
Nord-Ost
siege nearly two years before.