The New Tsar (57 page)

The spectacle heightened suspicion in Russia that Litvinenko’s murder, like Politkovskaya’s and the others, was part of an elaborate conspiracy to dictate the outcome of Russia’s political transition. The only questions that remained were whether the conspirators were inside Russia or outside, and whether they were conspiring to keep Putin in power or to force him from it. In June, two days after Britain expelled four Russian diplomats in retaliation for Russia’s refusal to extradite Lugovoi, the British police detained a mysterious Russian who had arrived in London on false papers. Suspecting him of intending to kill Berezovsky, they expelled him from the country.
³¹
In July, the Royal Air Force fighter jets had to scramble to intercept Russian TU-95 strategic bombers, testing British air defenses as the Soviet Union had done in the Cold War. It was as if the bear that was the Soviet Union had woken from two decades of hibernation.

CHAPTER 18

The 2008 Problem

I
n July 2007, Putin flew to tiny Guatemala on a personal mission that would assuage an international slight that dated to 1980, when the Soviet Union hosted the Summer Olympics in Moscow and much of the West boycotted to protest the invasion of Afghanistan. Bringing the games back to Russia became an obsessive quest that Putin had pursued from the time Sobchak made an improbable bid for Petersburg in the 1990s. As an avid sportsman and fitness obsessive, a judoka, a skier, and a swimmer, Putin loved the Olympics; as a leader, he saw hosting them as the means to affirm Russia’s return to its rightful place on the world stage. In 2001, not long after he assumed the presidency, he went on a skiing trip to St. Anton am Arlberg in Austria, accompanied by an oligarch of the Yeltsin era, Vladimir Potanin, and Boris Nemtsov, the liberal who had initially thrown his support behind Putin. Seeing the resorts nestled in the Alpine scenery, Putin lamented that the new Russia had none. “I want to get one European-style winter resort,” he told his companions.
¹

The oligarchs beholden to Putin, old and new, obliged. In January 2006, Yuri Kovalchuk’s Bank Rossiya opened a ski resort called Igora fifty-two miles north of Petersburg on the highway to the Ozero dacha Kovalchuk shared with Putin, with seven trails, though a vertical drop of less than four hundred feet. Potanin, whose holding company Interros controlled the metal giant Norilsk Nickel and kept him at the top of the list of Russian billionaires, drafted blueprints for a far more ambitious project on a ridge called Rosa Khutor in the mountains above the Black Sea resort of Sochi. Putin, who regularly vacationed at Sochi’s presidential retreat, visited the remote site above the forlorn mountain village of Krasnaya Polyana, and thus a legend was born. “He came to see
this road,” Anatoly Pakhomov, who would later become Sochi’s mayor, said, referring to the precarious, potholed route that wended beside the Mzymta River. And Putin said, “This beauty, these riches in Krasnaya Polyana, should belong to all the people.”
²

For Putin, the projects were not investments in the purest business sense. In fact, they were economically dubious. Rather, they were patriotic endeavors carried out for the greater public good, which he believed he best understood and which he alone decided. Soon Gazprom, firmly under Putin’s control, began a similar resort in an adjacent valley near Rosa Khutor. The two projects were the foundation for the new bid Putin was flying to Guatemala to present to the delegates of the International Olympic Committee.

Sochi’s bid was submitted by Russia’s Olympic Committee in 2005, but despite Pakhomov’s hagiographic recollection, the idea of staging the games there did not originate with Putin. He was carrying on an ambition that the country’s leaders had harbored for decades. In the wake of the Moscow Olympics, the geriatric Politburo in the Kremlin secretly debated a bid for the Winter Olympics, reviewing four possible locations across the Soviet Union. The dream had to be abandoned, as the leadership was overtaken by the rapid succession of general secretaries in the 1980s and finally by the promise and upheaval of perestroika.
³
Three of the cities they had reviewed—Almaty in Kazakhstan, Bakuriani in Georgia, and Tsaghkadzor in Armenia—were no longer part of Russia at all. Only Sochi still was. While it had been a favored seaside resort since Stalin’s days, it lacked any of the modern facilities required for the Olympics, beginning with a lack of functioning ski slopes. In 1995, during Yeltsin’s erratic presidency, the Russians had submitted a bid for Sochi for the 2002 Winter Olympics, but it failed even to make the short list. Putin tried again in 2005, bidding for the Summer Olympics. Moscow went up against New York, Madrid, Paris, and London for the 2012 Summer Games and finished last in the final balloting. The International Olympic Committee’s evaluations pointedly questioned whether Russia had the capacity to organize the games in its own capital. How could Russia two years later possibly make the case that Sochi, a decaying resort without a single Olympic-standard facility, would be ready for the Winter Olympics of 2014?

Sochi was competing against Salzburg in Austria, and Pyeongchang, South Korea, the favorite going in to the final vote, having narrowly lost the previous bid. Few gave Sochi much chance.

—

T
he 119th session of the International Olympic Committee took place in the Westin Camino Real in the heart of Guatemala City. Putin had prepared intensely, rehearsing his speech in stilted, heavily accented, but nearly perfect English. Among the officials presenting the final bids, he spoke first in the morning. “The Olympic cluster in Sochi will be the first world-class mountain sports center in the new Russia,” he began, making it clear he had absorbed the Politburo’s review from the 1980s and the consequences of the Soviet dissolution. “Let me point out that after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia has lost all of its sports venues in the mountains. Would you believe it?” He sounded incredulous, even offended by the cruel historical turn. He highlighted the novelty of Sochi’s location on the Black Sea, abutting the peaks of the Caucasus. “On the seashore you can enjoy a fine spring day, but up in the mountains, it’s winter.” He pledged to spend $12 billion to erect the venues—a staggering sum that exceeded what Vancouver planned to spend in 2010. He promised “a safe, enjoyable, and memorable experience” and even joked that he would ease the city’s chronic traffic jams. He finished with a flourish of stilted French, thanking the committee for its consideration.

And then he left the hotel. He had staked so much of his prestige—and Russia’s—on the vote, but he refused to stay for it, as if he anticipated an unhappy outcome and feared the embarrassment of having to witness the delegations of Salzburg or Pyeongchang celebrating. Instead, he boarded his presidential jet and began the long flight back to Moscow.

By now, Putin was vilified in much of the West, and yet his remonstrations to the bullying Americans—and the fact that he was not wrong about the bloodshed in Iraq—won him grudging admiration in some quarters, and there were those who thought that played a role in the voting, which began while Putin was over the Atlantic.
⁴
Sochi came in second in the first round of votes, receiving thirty-four votes, compared to thirty-six for Pyeongchang; Salzburg won only twenty-five and was eliminated. When the second round finished, though, Sochi drew more of Salzburg’s votes, edging Pyeongchang by four votes. Russia had won; Putin had won. “He was nice,” Jean-Claude Killy, the French ski champion and a member of the International Olympic Committee, explained after the vote. “He spoke French—he never speaks French. He spoke English—he never speaks English. The Putin charisma can explain four votes.”
⁵

The deputy prime minister who remained in Guatemala, Aleksandr Zhukov, telephoned Putin on the presidential plane to inform him of the committee’s choice. Putin in turn called the chairman of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, and thanked him for what he called an “impartial decision.” At home, Putin’s popularity soared even higher. When he returned triumphantly to Moscow, he stepped out of his jet and met assembled reporters at the VIP hall of Vnukovo Airport. “It is, beyond any doubt, a judgment of our country,” he declared. Only in a country desperate for affirmation could the choice of an Olympics have loomed so disproportionately large. “Russia has risen from its knees!” German Gref declared in Guatemala City.

—

A
nd yet through the summer and fall, those inside the Kremlin’s walls were consumed by a fear that without Putin Russia might fall back down. Uncertainty gripped the political and business elite because, at the height of his political powers, the end of his presidency suddenly loomed. Putin’s repeated assertions that he would not amend the Constitution so he could serve a third term had finally sunk in. The elite had come to the unhappy realization that these were not simply coy deflections. Putin had created his own problem: he wanted to adhere to the strict letter of the law and assure a smooth transition to a new president, but he was determined that it be one that he alone controlled. His strategy was unquestionably authoritarian, but he sought the patina of legitimacy, fearing that a reprise of a color revolution—fomented by his enemies abroad—would destroy the system he had spent nearly eight years building.

Sergei Ivanov still seemed the presumptive front-runner in the undeclared campaign to replace Putin, trailed closely by Dmitri Medvedev, though periodically Putin would drop teasing hints that others might be considered: perhaps his old friend Vladimir Yakunin of the Russian Railways, or even, for diversity’s sake, the governor of Petersburg, Valentina Matviyenko. None dared declare an ambition for the post, which would usurp Putin’s prerogative. Ivanov had quietly assembled an advisory council to prepare policy positions,
⁶
though, while Medvedev’s work on the “national projects” assured him a conspicuous public role. Both gathered informal supporters, and opponents, in the deliberations that swirled through the government, but by the end of summer, Putin had not yet signaled a choice. He was in no hurry; a designated heir might steal attention from him, rendering him a lame duck, which seemed not
only inconceivable, but also unacceptable. As a result of his irresolution, the ranks of the bureaucracy became paralyzed, unwilling to make decisions that would last beyond the end of Putin’s presidency or affect their place in whatever administration was to come.
⁷
His irresolution also created dangerous tensions that spilled indecorously into the public.

Putin stoked the speculation further when on September 12 he revealed the latest act in the theater of managed democracy. Mikhail Fradkov, the loyal, functional prime minister since 2004, walked into Putin’s office in the Kremlin and, cameras rolling, unexpectedly resigned. “I understand the political processes taking place at the moment and I would like to see you have as free a hand as possible in making decisions,” Fradkov said. He did not sound like a man stepping down on selfless principle as much as an actor who had not rehearsed his lines enough. He looked forlorn and troubled. Putin at least made the effort to seem thoughtful and considerate. “Perhaps you are right,” he replied, thanking him for his service, though he went on to point out that some mistakes had been made. He said it was important to reflect on how the new nominee would affect the political situation before the parliamentary elections in December and the presidential election in March. A few hours later he announced an even more unexpected choice to replace Fradkov: Viktor Zubkov.

No one outside the Kremlin and few inside it understood Putin’s decision. Even Sergei Ivanov did not know it was coming.
⁸
If Putin was following Yeltsin’s model of designating his successor, tapping a new prime minister on the eve of the presidential campaign, he had opted for a man who by design had kept a low profile. Zubkov, born in the early months of the Great Patriotic War, was part of the cadre of men whose bonds with Putin had been forged in Petersburg in the 1990s. After the early barter-for-food deals created a scandal in the winter of 1991, Zubkov, a former collective-farm boss, had assisted Putin by using his influence among regional farmers to resume supplies of produce to the hungry city.
⁹
He became one of Putin’s most trusted associates, taking over the city’s taxation enforcement and later joining him and Igor Sechin in producing dissertations at the Mining Institute in the 1990s. He followed Putin to Moscow, where for seven years he had quietly headed the new Russian Financial Monitoring Agency, a department that gave him—and Putin—exclusive knowledge about the flow of money in and out of the country’s businesses, information that was invaluable in enforcing loyalty and thus maintaining some sort of equilibrium
among the rival financial empires being established, many of which had connections to the state itself. “Not once, I would like to emphasize, did Viktor Zubkov abuse this trust,” Putin later explained.
¹⁰
After his announcement, Putin then flew off to the regions of Chuvashia and Belgorod to see how Medvedev’s “national projects” were reviving the nation’s agriculture, leaving the political elite to ponder the meaning of his unforeseen gambit. Had Putin decided against Medvedev or Ivanov after all? He certainly wanted to signal that the decision was still an open one. On September 14, he said there were at least five serious candidates for the presidency, but he would not reveal them.
¹¹