The New Tsar (79 page)

In defiance of the Olympic charter’s promotion of freedom of expression, the police from Petersburg to the Caucasus arrested scores of people who had tried to protest for one reason or another on the day of the opening ceremony. In the middle of the games, a court in Krasnodar sentenced an activist with Environmental Watch on the North Caucasus to three years in prison, while other members of the group were detained to keep them from presenting a report they had compiled on the ecological damage wrought by the construction in Sochi. The women of Pussy Riot reunited in Sochi with a new protest song, “Putin Will Teach You to Love the Motherland,” and were immediately set upon by horsewhip-wielding Cossacks and then detained by the police, who claimed they were investigating a theft from their hotel. A documentary,
The Biochemistry of Betrayal
, appeared on Rossiya at the height of the games on February 18, equating the opposition in Russia to the Soviet commander Lieutenant General Andrei Vlasov, who collaborated with the Nazis after being captured in 1942. When the trial of eight arrested at the Bolotnaya protest in 2012 ended with convictions as the games climaxed, 212 people
were arrested in the streets outside the courthouse; when their sentences were announced three days later, there were more protests and 232 more arrests, including, once again, Aleksei Navalny and the women of Pussy Riot.

Putin had invested so much in the Olympics that any criticism of it—any protest that might question its benefit—was treated as blasphemous, an act of treason against a resurgent state. In a column on the website of
Yezhednevny Zhurnal
, the satirist Viktor Shenderovich, whose portrayal of Putin had knocked his puppet show
Kukli
off the air in 2000, mused about the pride he felt in Russia during the Olympics, worrying that impulses like his would only enhance and even embolden Putin’s power. He wondered whether a critic like himself could cheer guiltlessly for the Russian team, whose first gold medal in team figure skating came after a dazzling performance (and questionable voting by the judges) by a fifteen-year-old competitor, Yulia Lipnitskaya. Shenderovich’s column explained that he, too, had enjoyed “the girl on skates,” but he reminded readers of Germany’s enthusiasm for Hans Wölke, a star in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin: “A smiling guy, a handsome man, symbolizing the youth of the new Germany! Something, however, prevents us from enjoying his victory today.”
²⁵

He did not explain Wölke’s fate explicitly, but he mentioned Dachau and the bombing of Coventry, the siege of Leningrad, and a lesser-known massacre at Khatyn, near Minsk, the capital of what is now Belarus. The entire village was brutally executed in 1943 in retaliation for a partisan attack on a convoy of the Nazis’ 118th Auxiliary Police Battalion. Wölke, one of the battalion’s officers, was killed in the attack. The Nazi massacre was a notorious war crime that the Soviet Union publicized and that Shenderovich’s readers would certainly remember. “Not the fault of Hans, of course,” he wrote, “but it turned out that he contributed.” Shenderovich meant to be provocative—excessively so, perhaps—but his allusion to the Nazis provoked a furious backlash at a time when Russia was portraying the street protests in Ukraine as nothing less than an uprising of neo-Nazis. The reaction was swift and savage. Shenderovich was denounced in print and on air; the day after his column appeared the Rossiya channel broadcast snips of a video of him masturbating in bed with a woman who was not his wife.
²⁶
A few weeks later, the journal’s website was shut down, along with the opposition portals
Grani.ru
and
Kasparov.ru
. The Kremlin, having once largely ignored the permissive ethos of the Internet, had come to understand the threat it posed; it had
tightened the screws with regulations against promoting “extremism,” and now evoked them more vigorously than at any time in Putin’s era. The crackdown against dissent—the campaign of denunciations so fulsome that it could only have been orchestrated by the Kremlin’s media handlers—felt as if the country was being mobilized for war once again.

CHAPTER 25

Our Russia

P
utin did not expect the crisis that exploded before the Olympics in Sochi ended. Even though he might have anticipated it six years before when he warned President George Bush that NATO should not consider Ukraine’s membership, even though he had ordered a reorganization of Russia’s conventional forces to address the shortcomings exposed by the war in Georgia in 2008, and even though he and his advisers had warily monitored the political convulsions in Kyiv caused by its refusal to embrace the European Union, Putin had not planned to take his country to war. Nor had he prepared the country for it. He did not consult with the country’s diplomats or its military commanders, certainly not with its elected legislators, who no longer had any influence over how he governed.

On the night of February 18, the street protests in Kyiv, which had ebbed after Putin’s $15 billion bailout of Yanukovych’s flailing economy, erupted in an orgy of fire and violence as the riot police tried to clear the streets around Independence Square. By the end of the night, more than two dozen people had died, most of them protesters, but some of them police officers. By dawn the next day, there was open warfare in the center of the city, with police and protesters exchanging gunfire. The death toll soon climbed over a hundred, the worst violence in the city since the Great Patriotic War. The reports that filtered back to Putin in the Kremlin—and thus onto Russia’s television networks—portrayed the clashes as an armed insurrection, prodded by American and European diplomats who had not only encouraged the protesters but even passed out food and cookies.

What had begun as largely peaceful demonstrations in favor of the agreement with the European Union had evolved since November into a broader movement to oust Yanukovych’s corrupt regime. That there
were radical groups in the square—masked gunmen from two fiercely nationalistic groups, Svoboda and Pravy Sektor—convinced Putin that Yanukovych had lost control to the forces of anarchy and fascism. Putin never understood the core grievances that kept the majority of the protesters in the streets during those winter months, the yearning to break the corrupted grip of a rapacious leader, the radicalization that had inevitably arisen when even their most basic demands went unheeded. Putin had thought he could buy off the president and thus the people, as he had succeeded in doing in Russia for fourteen years, with economic largess, dispensed at critical moments. As the writer James Meek wrote when the protests in Kyiv descended into violence that day in February, “It is the ideal of a complete cynic, Vladimir Putin, the one ideal a complete cynic can have—that people have no ideals.”
¹

A troika of European diplomats—the foreign ministers of France, Germany, and Poland—rushed to Kyiv on February 20 to try to broker an end to the violence around Maidan. Still focused on the Olympics in Sochi, Putin said nothing at first, which left Russia’s response confused and contradictory. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, denounced the Europeans’ effort as an “uninvited mission,” even as Yanukovych himself sat down to host the ministers. As they hashed out a political compromise they hoped would end the shooting outside—by holding accelerated presidential elections in 2014, as well as granting amnesty for the protesters—Yanukovych interrupted the talks to telephone Putin, who was then back in Moscow. Despite all his efforts to feign independence, he could make no deal without Putin’s approval. He told Putin he would agree to step down for new elections and that he would order the withdrawal of the riot police from the burning barricades not far from the presidential office. In Putin’s mind, that amounted to a humiliating abdication, a dangerous sign of weakness in the face of the mob.

“You will have anarchy,” Putin claimed he told Yanukovych. “There will be chaos in the capital.”

Yanukovych accepted the Europeans’ compromise anyway, and it was announced at two o’clock on the afternoon of February 21. By that evening, Yanukovych’s political allies had begun to abandon him, and his authority over the police and interior troops dissipated amid credible reports that a cache of weapons looted from police stations in western Ukraine was on its way to the capital.
²
After issuing a statement congratulating the women’s biathlon relay team for winning the country’s first gold medal in Sochi, Yanukovych fled the capital. He flew first to eastern
Ukraine and then to Crimea before finally being secretly conveyed to refuge in southern Russia, in a special operation Putin ordered on February 23 after meeting all night with his advisers.
³
In Yanukovych’s wake, the agreement that had been reached to end the fighting unraveled before it could even go into effect. Ukraine’s parliament, with Yanukovych’s loyalists having broken with him, promptly voted to “impeach” Yanukovych in a legally dubious procedure. Deputies then elected a new parliamentary leadership and appointed an interim president until new elections could be held. One of the first acts of the newly reconfigured parliament was to make Ukrainian the official language, reversing an earlier law passed by Yanukovych’s government that had recognized Russian as well. The new acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, blocked the proposal but not before it inflamed the ethnic divide in Ukraine, one that had never entirely been bridged in nearly a quarter century of independence. In Moscow, the events in Kyiv confirmed Putin’s worst fears: what was happening was not a popular uprising against a weak, discredited leader, but a revolution hijacked by Ukrainian nationalists and radicals he compared to the Nazi storm trooper Ernst Röhm, and supported by the enemies of Russia, the Europeans and the Americans.
⁴

—

P
utin presided over the closing ceremonies in Sochi on the night of February 23, after first laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers in Moscow in the morning. The Olympics not only defied the most dire predictions of disaster, they ended with Russia’s athletes winning the most gold medals—thirteen—and the most medals overall—thirty-three. Now, at Russia’s moment of glory, years in the making, the convulsions in Ukraine overshadowed everything. That a sixteen-day sporting event had taken on such symbolic and ideological importance for Putin and for Russia only made the upheaval in Ukraine seem even more humiliating; some of Putin’s supporters thought it really had been incited in order to sully the moment. Putin spent the hours before the closing ceremonies—another lavish ode to Russia, with even a knowing, self-deprecating wink to the snowflake gaffe in the opening ceremonies—complaining on the telephone to Angela Merkel that the Europeans had not enforced the agreement that Yanukovych had signed, as if they could have forced him to remain in Kyiv.

Putin said nothing publicly about Ukraine in Sochi that day, or the next, when he hosted a breakfast for the organizing committee, decorated Russia’s medalists, and planted thirty-three trees, one for each
medal. He would say nothing, in fact, for nine more days, even as he set in motion a secret operation that morning of February 23, one that not even his own ministers knew was coming. On February 25, he met with his national Security Council for the second time since the violence erupted in Kyiv. The council’s twelve members included Medvedev, the ministers of defense, foreign affairs, and the interior, the leaders of both houses of parliament, and the directors of foreign intelligence and the FSB. One of them, Valentina Matviyenko, the chairwoman of the Federation Council, emerged from the meeting and declared that it was impossible that Russia would intervene militarily in Ukraine to halt the chaos.

Neither she nor many of the others in the Kremlin knew then that Russia already had. Putin would punish Ukraine by dismembering it. The next day, he announced a snap military exercise that mobilized tens of thousands of troops in western Russia, as well as the headquarters of the air force and air defense commands. The exercise had been planned for months, but the timing allowed the Kremlin to disguise the sudden deployment of thousands of Russia’s elite special operations troops. Secrecy was essential, as was deniability. Putin could not be sure of the potential international response—from NATO, above all—and wanted to test the resolve of the world’s leaders before he acknowledged the extent of his plan.

Before dawn on the morning of February 27, commandos from Russia and troops from the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet and other bases in Crimea seized the Crimean regional parliament and other important buildings on the peninsula, as well as two airfields. The troops were well equipped and heavily armed, but their uniforms bore no insignia; the soldiers had been ordered to remove them. Within the next twenty-four hours, thousands more troops landed at the airfields and fanned out, securing the peninsula without significant violence, despite several tense confrontations with startled Ukrainian troops, who, amid the political havoc in Kyiv were under orders not to resist. The Russian commandos became known as “little green men,” or “polite people,” preserving Russia’s increasingly unconvincing denials of any involvement. A hastily organized session of the regional parliament, which was held behind closed doors, elected a new government and declared, in violation of Ukrainian law, that a referendum would be held on May 25 on the question of giving Crimea greater autonomy.

Even Putin’s supporters were surprised. Putin had acted after consultations
only with a small circle of aides that included the men he had always trusted, the men whom he had kept by his side since they all joined the KGB: Sergei Ivanov, Nikolai Patrushev, and Aleksandr Bortnikov. They shared his deepest thoughts, his suspicion of NATO’s ambitions, and his rage over the culpability of Western nations in rushing to embrace the new government that was taking shape after Yanukovych’s retreat. There were uncanny echoes of the decision in 1979 to invade Afghanistan, which was also made by a close, cloistered cadre of the Soviet leadership on false pretenses. The result of the secrecy was confusion among the country’s political establishment, underscoring how much decision making now rested solely in Putin’s hands.