The New Tsar (65 page)

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T
he United States under President Obama, in particular, vested inordinate hope in Dmitri Medvedev’s presidency. Seeing his election as an evolutional shift in Russia’s political development, Obama promised
a “reset” in relations after the disastrous end to the Bush years. Although realistic about Putin’s continued political dominance, Obama and his aides went out of their way to court Medvedev directly, according to protocol, and hoped that he would over time build his own foundations of political power. Putin had “one foot in the old way of doing business,” Obama said undiplomatically only weeks before he was to meet the new leader and the paramount one, but with Medvedev he hoped to move into a new era. No one in the White House or the State Department had any illusions that Medvedev could act without Putin’s consent on important matters of state, but the initial embrace appeared to produce results. In 2009, the two leaders negotiated a treaty, New START, to replace the agreement Putin had negotiated with George Bush in 2002 and to further reduce the two nations’ nuclear arsenals. Medvedev, as Putin had once done, helped the United States in Afghanistan, allowing the Americans to begin withdrawing thousands of matériel (though not weapons) by railroad through Russian territory.
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When presented with evidence that Iran had developed a secret uranium enrichment program, Russia joined the United States at the United Nations Security Council and voted to impose new sanctions on the Iranian economy.

Making his own concession on one of Russia’s bêtes noires, Obama abandoned plans to deploy missile defenses in the Czech Republic and Poland—the very deployments that had provoked Putin’s ire before his Munich speech in 2007. The Obama administration even played down the American efforts to support democratic change in Ukraine and Georgia, which in neither place had succeeded very well anyway. Georgia remained a close American ally, but a fractured one after the war in 2008. Viktor Yanukovych, whose fraudulent victory in Ukraine in 2004 had been overturned, managed to exploit the infighting of his rivals and defeat Yulia Tymoshenko in an honest election in February 2010, after which she was tried and sent to jail, ironically, for having negotiated a deal with Putin to end a second shutoff of natural gas in the winter of 2009. The “reset” seemed to be working, but the warming of relations did not extend to Putin himself. And soon other events chilled the warming trend.

Only two months after Medvedev and Obama signed New START in April 2010, the FBI uncovered the existence of eleven sleeper agents who had lived covertly in the United States throughout Putin’s rise to power. They were, in the parlance of espionage, “illegals,” posing as ordinary suburban Americans, working and raising children near Boston,
New York, and Washington without the protection of diplomatic immunity. As recently as 2009, Russia’s FSB reminded these agents, in an encrypted message intercepted by the FBI “to search and develop ties in policymaking circles and sent intels to C.”
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The initial referred to the Center, where they sent reports, as well as pleas for reimbursements for the education and housing the agents felt they needed to live the American Dream. The FBI informed President Obama on the eve of Medvedev’s second official visit to the United States, during which he visited Silicon Valley and promoted foreign investment and trade, but they did not move to make arrests until after Medvedev’s meetings at the White House and a chummy lunch with Obama at a popular hamburger restaurant in Arlington, Virginia. Assisted by amused media coverage of what seemed to be a network of ineffective spies enjoying the perquisites of American life, Obama’s aides dismissed the espionage as harmless efforts to glean information easily accessible from public sources, but the scope of the effort testified to the intensity of Russia’s lingering distrust of American intentions.

Ten of the agents pleaded guilty in July. The eleventh had fled to Cyprus and apparently escaped back to Russia. The others were traded with Cold War—like drama at the airport in Vienna, exchanged for four Russians who had been imprisoned at home for spying for the West, though in at least one case, the man insisted he had never been a spy. Upon the sleepers’ return, Putin met secretly with them, honoring those who had experienced the secret life he had once imagined for himself as a boy.

Together they sang songs, including the sentimental theme to
The Shield and the Sword
, the film that in 1968 propelled Putin into the KGB and even now seemed to serve as the foundation for his increasingly insulated and paranoid worldview. Putin still knew the words and had learned to play the music on the piano (which he would do at a charity auction a few months later). Whence does the Motherland begin, the song’s lyrics ask, and the answer seemed rooted in Putin’s own background:
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With good and trusted comrades

Living in the neighboring yard

Putin disclosed their meeting during an official visit in July to Sevastopol, the Crimea port that was the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet.
He was attending an international motorcycle rally, featuring the Night Wolves, Russia’s version of the Hell’s Angels, bikers who blended patriotism, Russian Orthodoxy, and reverence for Putin. He rode with them, though on a three-wheeled motorcycle especially kitted out for him, the sort of photo opportunity that was again becoming more common. The betrayal of the illegals deeply angered him, and he vowed that the source—who, he said, was already known—would suffer for it. “Traitors always meet a bad end,” he said. “As a rule, they die from either heavy drinking or drug abuse.” He then alluded to Sergei Tretyakov, a senior intelligence officer who had defected to the United States in 2000. He was known to his American handlers as Comrade J, and among his disclosures were details about Putin’s own chief of security, Viktor Zolotov. Tretyakov died only days before the spy ring was broken up, but his wife kept his death out of the news until the FBI could complete an autopsy, which showed no foul play. Having been head of intelligence activities at the United Nations before his defection, he might well have had a role in exposing the illegals, though his wife denied that.
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“Actually,” Putin said of Tretyakov anyway, “his life was such a waste.”

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T
he stylistic contrasts between Medvedev and Putin prompted endless speculation about actual rifts within their tandem. Given Putin’s expectation of loyalty, however, evidence of them rarely surfaced. Publicly at least, the two men and their aides portrayed their relationship as one united in a shared vision for Russia’s future. “There cannot be, by definition, any disagreements in the Medvedev-Putin tandem,” the speaker of the State Duma, Boris Gryzlov, declared in 2010.
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At the start of the presidency, the two men had in fact reached an agreement to which few others were privy, respecting the responsibilities of their respective offices, though Putin retained a greater say in military and intelligence matters than any prime minster before him.
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In the first half of his presidency, Medvedev never directly aired a word of criticism toward Putin himself or his policies, even as he struck a far more liberal tone in speeches that some read as implicit rebukes. Behind the scenes, though, rivalries hardened between the two offices and their cadres, the two centers of power. Medvedev had developed his own camp of advisers at the Kremlin who, like him, bristled at the obstacles that emerged to the president’s policies and his vision of a more progressive society and economy. As they learned that Medvedev’s authority extended only as far as Putin’s forbearance allowed, their resentments became more and
more pronounced. “There were disagreements—it is normal,” one of Medvedev’s closest advisers once said, though refusing to say even that much publicly.
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In fact, on the issues that mattered most to him, Putin not only retained the ultimate veto but dictated the details as well.

In the eyes of the public, Medvedev became the man of words—“Russia, Forward!”—while Putin was the man of action. When pernicious peat fires shrouded Moscow and other cities in choking smoke in the summer of 2010, it was Putin who came to the rescue, as he had in Pikalevo. The fires, fueled by a heat wave, burned uncontrolled for weeks, killing dozens of people and destroying entire villages. Medvedev was on vacation on the Black Sea and slow to return even as the disaster worsened. The government seemed helpless to control them, prompting unusually fierce criticism. A blogger’s profanity-laced diatribe, published on the website of Ekho Moskvy, was so incendiary that Putin had to respond.

“Where does our money go?” the blogger, who introduced himself as Aleksandr from a village near Tver, wrote. He complained that the village lost what meager equipment it had to fight the fires encroaching on residents’ homes. He then went on to single out one of Medvedev’s signature proposals: to create a Silicon Valley—like center for technological innovation in the Moscow suburb of Skolkovo. “Why do we every year slip farther and farther from even a primitive social system? What the fuck is your innovation center in Skolkovo to us, if we do not have basic fire trucks?”
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That the screed criticized a project closely associated with Medvedev’s presidency, and not Putin himself, might have been the only reason it received the attention it did. A diatribe like that against Putin personally would have been too toxic for any media to discuss so openly, but it resonated widely and Putin was sensitive to shifts in public opinion. Nine days later, he appeared on television piloting an amphibious aircraft to fight the fires personally. The plane landed in the Oka River to load water and later dumped it on a smoldering bog southeast of Moscow.

“Was that OK?” Putin asked, turning toward the pilot.

“A direct hit!” the pilot replied.

These images, no matter how transparently staged by the Kremlin’s media advisers and pliant television channels, proved remarkably effective. Putin was the ultimate celebrity of the Kremlin’s own reality, the indispensable leader, even a “glamorous, elite sexual icon” whose stunts seemed intended to elicit “passionate, even sexualized reactions” from
women.
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Medvedev never enjoyed the same adulation, spontaneous or contrived. Where Putin once demurred at displays that suggested a cult of personality, saying manifestations of reverence for the nation’s leader were inappropriately redolent of Stalinism, he now seemed to embrace them more than he ever had before.

The publicity stunts not only served Putin’s politics; they played into his vanity. And he appeared to take his vanity very seriously. Only weeks after his fifty-eighth birthday, Putin appeared in public with his face so heavily caked with makeup that journalists noticed. He was in Kyiv, this time for talks to merge Ukraine’s airline manufacturer with one of Russia’s newly rebuilt state enterprises, the United Aviation Corporation. Ties with Ukraine had improved measurably after the election of Yanukovych in 2010, but Putin seemed uneasy, even avoiding looking at the television cameras. Beneath the makeup there were visible bruises under his eyes. “It’s probably just the way the light fell,” his spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, insisted. “The prime minister is tired.” The bruises were undeniable, however, and they prompted speculation that Putin had begun a regime of cosmetic surgery.
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The speculation—always denied, though never unequivocally—swelled as changes in Putin’s appearance became evident in photographs and drew the attention of foreign officials who met him, at least one of whom spoke off the record of the cosmetic work as a matter of fact. The crow’s feet on his temples disappeared, as did the deep creases in his forehead and the noticeable bags under his eyes. His skin was taut, his cheeks fuller. With his thinning but carefully groomed hair, his face seemed rounder, his eyes narrower. A plastic surgeon in Chelyabinsk, Aleksandr Pukhov, even came forward to claim he knew the doctor who had carried out the procedures, which included blepharoplasty. He said so approvingly. “Would you really want to see the president old and flabby?”
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T
ensions within the tandem became more pronounced in the summer of 2010 when protests erupted over the construction of a new highway from Moscow to Petersburg. No one doubted the need for better roads, and the project, valued at $8 billion, was among the megaprojects Putin approved to stimulate economic growth, but a debate had raged for years over the route, and now, without public notice, the project suddenly moved forward. In July, bulldozers appeared and began clearing trees from Khimki Forest, a protected preserve on the edge of Moscow that many called the “lungs” of the city. The work prompted protests by
the forest’s neighbors, who were soon joined by local and foreign environmental activists. Wary after the public anger over the summer’s fires, Medvedev announced in August that he would suspend the construction while the government considered alternate routes.

The controversy became an unexpected test of Medvedev’s authority as president, and he failed. Moscow’s mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, criticized the suspension of the project in the government’s official newspaper,
Rossiskaya Gazeta
, a public rebuke he had never dared to make against Putin. Luzhkov, who had once opposed the highway for his own reasons, had shifted support to it. His reason was evidently that he knew the project had the support of Putin, who had awarded the contract for construction in 2008 and a year later waived the forest’s protected status to allow construction to begin. Whether Medvedev knew that was never clear, but he acted as if he had the power to intervene now. Luzhkov, who had presided over Moscow for eighteen years, defiantly called for a restoration of “the true meaning and authority” of the government.
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Many heard those words as a call for Putin to return to the presidency, a provocation that Medvedev could hardly ignore.