The New Tsar (83 page)

Boris Nemtsov, who managed to get himself elected to the regional assembly in Yaroslavl, also continued to campaign against Putin, relying on the legal immunity that his legislative seat provided as some measure of protection. He fulminated against the war in postings on Facebook
and Twitter, describing Putin as a ghoul who needed blood to survive. And yet he too acknowledged that Putin seemed resistant to the growing body of evidence that Russians were fighting and dying in Ukraine. He complained that the international sanctions and diplomatic isolation remained half-hearted. He wanted stronger international efforts to end Putin’s regime, not to negotiate with it. “He’s not in isolation,” Nemtsov said. “He talks to Merkel. He talks to everyone.” Nemtsov carried on undaunted, compiling evidence for another of his pamphlets, like those on Gazprom, on corruption, on Sochi. This time he would document the Russian involvement in the fighting in eastern Ukraine—on Putin’s orders—and try to awaken the political conscience of the Russian people to the crimes being committed. He would call this one simply, “Putin. War.” He would not finish it, though.
²⁵
One night in February 2015, he was shot to death as he walked along the bridge leading from Red Square. He died within sight of the Kremlin, his death, like Politkovskaya’s in 2006, a casualty of a larger war. It was no random act of violence, but a highly organized assassination carried out in the middle of one of the most heavily policed places on the planet. His murder was linked to assassins from Chechnya, some allegedly close to Ramzan Kadyrov, the man Putin had relied on to reestablish control over a region that once threatened to spin free of Russia but whose brutal rule now operated without constraints. Putin’s indefatigable spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, let it be known that Putin was shocked by the tragedy but also that Nemtsov’s influence had not been great. As with Politkovskaya’s murder—or Aleksandr Litvinenko’s or Sergei Magnitsky’s—Putin may not have been personally involved or aware, as his supporters insisted. By then, however, it was difficult to argue that his epoch was not washed by the blood of his harshest critics.

—

O
n July 31, 2014, some of Russia’s richest men gathered in Moscow at the headquarters of the Russian soccer federation to deal with an unexpected consequence of Putin’s annexation of Crimea. They included the federation’s officials, as well as the owners of its most prominent professional teams: Sergei Galitsky, the owner of a supermarket chain and the Krasnodar Football Club; Suleiman Kerimov, the tycoon who owned Anzhi Makhachkala in Dagestan; and Vladimir Yakunin, whose Russian Railways sponsored Lokomotiv Moskva. On the agenda was a vote by the foundation’s executive committee to absorb Crimea’s three clubs into the Russian league, and those gathered there harbored reservations about
the risk of sanctions that could extend to them and their clubs. They could be barred from traveling to the West, expelled from competitions in Europe. “I don’t have any doubts that we’re all going to fall under sanctions,” Galitsky complained, according to a transcript of their testy exchange, which was surreptitiously recorded and leaked to the newspaper
Novaya Gazata
.
²⁶
He expressed frustration that everything he had built over the last quarter century—a chain of stores called Magnit that employed 250,000 people and was worth $30 billion—could be lost. Others in the committee’s conference room shared his concern—as well as his fear of displeasing the “chief executive.” Galitsky and the others clearly hoped to avoid having to vote, circuitously debating whether they needed to and whether a statement by the sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, could be as good as the word of Putin himself. None wanted to be put on the record with a vote, as the head of the union was insisting; nor did they want to risk disobeying Putin by not voting.

“It’s obvious I’m ready to suffer,” he said, but he would do so only if “the chief executive” made his choice on the matter clear. “Only after that would I be ready to ruin what I built over twenty-five years,” Galitski declared.

When the president and co-owner of CSKA Moscow, Yevgeny Giner, echoed his reluctance, the head of the union and Yakunin turned on him sharply, calling his views “indecent.” “Our country is under sanction,” Yakunin told him. “Our president is standing alone on the parapet. And you’re talking about screwing the country to the point they impose additional sanctions? They’ll do it. No matter what you do, even if you crawl before them on your stomach—they’ll do it! Understand? So either bug out of this country or behave appropriately, like a citizen of this country.”

—

N
ine days later, Putin having made his wishes clear, the union’s executive committee accepted the three new teams into Russia’s professional league. Sergei Stepashin, Putin’s predecessor as prime minister and now a member of the union’s executive committee, had warned them. “Directives aren’t even needed. Crimea is a priori a territory of Russia!”

Crimea had become the new rallying cry around which the nation would unite behind Putin, the argument that ended all debate. The annexation drove his approval ratings above 85 percent, and the state of siege that followed—amplified by Orwellian agitprop on the state television—sustained Putin’s popular support at home for months to
come. After a quarter century of openness since the Soviet collapse, of economic and cultural exchange, most Russians again looked at the outside world as an enemy at the gates, to be feared and resisted. The siege mentality justified any sacrifice. “When a Russian feels any foreign pressure, he will never give up his leader,” said one of Putin’s deputy prime ministers, Igor Shuvalov, considered one of the liberals in his cabinet.
²⁷
“We will survive any hardship in the country—eat less food, use less electricity.”

Fear of censure, or worse, certainly silenced dissenting voices, but Putin had reasserted his place at the pinnacle of power, the indisputable leader of a country no longer a democracy except in periodic electoral simulation. After returning to power in 2012 with no clear purpose other than the exercise of power for its own sake, Putin now found the unifying factor for a large, diverse nation still in search of one. He found a millenarian purpose for the power that he held, one that shaped his country greater than any other leader had thus far in the twenty-first century. He had restored neither the Soviet Union nor the tsarist empire, but a new Russia with the characteristics and instincts of both, with himself as secretary general and sovereign, as indispensable as the country itself was exceptional.
No Putin, no Russia
. He had unified the country behind the only leader anyone could now imagine because he was, as in 2008 and 2012, unwilling to allow any alternative to emerge.

When he “disappeared” from public view for ten days in March 2015, the political elite seemed gripped by paralysis, the media filled with fevered speculation. Was Putin ill? Was there a coup? Was he grappling with an internal power struggle stemming from Nemtsov’s assassination, whose killers were traced to the Chechnya he had kept in Russia’s orbit under Ramzan Kadyrov? There were new rumors that he had fathered another child with Alina Kabayeva, who by then had resigned her seat in the Duma and joined the National Media Group, controlled by Bank Rossiya and Putin’s old friend, Yuri Kovalchuk. Others contended he simply underwent a new round of medical treatment for a bad back—or cosmetic surgery. Whatever the explanation, his brief and ultimately inconsequential absence from public view proved that he alone provided the stability that kept the unwieldy, kleptocratic system in place, the factions of Putin’s elite in stable equipoise.

Putin’s rule was no more permanent now than it had been inevitable. Yet it seemed inexorable. He faced no obvious challenge to his power before the presidential election scheduled for 2018. He could by law
serve six more years after that. When—if—he stepped down in 2024, he would not yet be seventy-two. Brezhnev had died in office at seventy-five; Stalin at seventy-four. He might then hand power to a new leader, Medvedev again perhaps or another member of the inner circle. It would ultimately be up to him. The fate of Russia was now entwined with his own, rushing forward as the troika in Gogol’s
Dead Souls
to an unknown destiny. Putin probably did not know himself whither—except forward, impetuous, unrepentant, undaunted. “The air rumbles, shattered to pieces, and turns to wind,” Gogol wrote of the troika.
²⁸
“Everything on earth flies by, and, looking askance, other nations and states step aside to make way.”

Acknowledgments

In the writing of this book, I am profoundly indebted to many, many people and two great institutions.

This book simply would not exist without
The New York Times
, where I have had the privilege to work since 1989. I am grateful to the editors who dispatched me as a correspondent to Moscow in 2002, and again in 2013, and who granted me leave to write the book. They include executive editors Joe Lelyveld, Howell Raines, Bill Keller, Jill Abramson, and Dean Baquet, and foreign editors Roger Cohen, Susan Chira, and Joe Kahn. The bones of this book were formed by my reporting for the
Times
, but also by that of colleagues past and present in the Moscow Bureau: Steven Erlanger (who first interviewed Vladimir Putin for the newspaper in April 1992), Frank Clines, Serge Schmemann, Felicity Barranger, Celestine Bohlen, Michael Specter, Alessandra Stanley, Michael Gordon, Michael Wines, Sabrina Tavernise, Sonia Kishkovsky, Seth Mydans, Erin Arvedlund, Rachel Thorner, Chris Chivers, Andrew Kramer, Michael Schwirtz, Cliff Levy, Ellen Berry, Andrew Roth, David Herszenhorn, Patrick Reevell, and, finally, James Hill, whose photographs are among those included in the preceding pages. None of our work would have been possible without the bureau’s staff, particularly Natasha Bubenova, Oleg Shevchenko, Pavel Chervyakov, Alexandra Ordynova, and especially, the wonderful translators, fixers, traveling companions, and friends: Nikolay Khalip and Viktor Klimenko. I also thank Maria Goncharova for her assistance on a series of articles in 2014 on the economic pillars of Putin’s rule, written with my colleagues Jo Becker and Jim Yardley.

The other institution is the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., which provided me a place to study
and write within its Kennan Institute, where the atmosphere was serious, nonpartisan, and thoroughly convivial. I thank the center’s director, Jane Harman, as well as Blair Ruble, Robert Litwak, and Will Pomeranz; my research assistant there, Grace Kenneally; and the staff of the center’s library—Janet Spikes, Dagne Gizaw, and Michelle Kamalich—who guided me through not only the stacks of George Kennan’s collection, but also the Library of Congress, which extends the center’s scholars special access.

I relied on research by Almut Schoenfeld in Berlin and Dresden and Noah Sneider in Moscow. Bryon MacWilliams, my old friend, author, translator, and
banya
compatriot, also scoured obscure sources, while acting as an expert on the nuances of the Russian language and culture. Others read all or parts of the book and shared their insights, advice and encouragement, including Nina Khrushcheva, Geraldine Fagan, Frank Brown, Nathan Hodge, Max Trudolyubov, and Rory MacFarquhar. I also consulted many other experts on Russia, most of whom have published their own books on subjects covered here, including Anders Aslund, Harley Balzer, Karen Dawisha, Clifford Gaddy, Mark Galeotti, Thane Gustafson, Fiona Hill, Oleg Kalugin, David Kramer, Andrew Kuchins, Cliff Kupchan, Andrei Miroshnichenko, Robert Orttung, Peter Reddaway, Andrei Soldatov, and Dmitri Trenin.

There were several officials in Russia and the United States who provided information on condition that I not identify them; I appreciate their confidence. Another source over the years—and a character in this book—was Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated near the Kremlin in February 2015 just as I was finishing. He was a Russian patriot. May justice prevail.

I owe a singular debt to Larry Weissman, the literary agent who reached out more than a decade ago and planted the seed that grew into this book. I would also like to thank the people at Alfred A. Knopf who agreed to publish this book and who helped pull it together, especially a fine editor, Andrew Miller.

Many others have supported me in ways large and small. I hesitate to name them for fear of leaving someone out, but they include Boris Shekhtman, who first taught me Russian, and Sveta Prudnikova, whose irrepressible spirit never faltered as she tried to make my Russian better; and my colleagues from the
Times
and elsewhere: Catherine Belton, Alan Cowell, Alan Cullison, Peter Finn, Nicole Gaouette, Isabel Gorst, Nick
Kulish, Albina Kovalyova, Mark Mazzetti, Anna Nemtsova, Arkady Ostrovsky, and Sharon Weinberger. Finally, I thank my wife, Margaret Xavier Myers, and our daughters, Emma and Madeline, who tolerated the numerous inconveniences involved in this effort and to whom I have dedicated this book.

NOTES

EPIGRAPH

Fyodor Dostoevsky,
The Brothers Karamazov
,
translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), pp. 34–35.

CHAPTER 1: HOMO SOVIETICUS

1 
. The date of Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin’s injury and the detail of his unit were reported by the official Russian Information Agency, during a memorial visit to the battlefield by Putin in 2004. The agency was rebranded as Sputnik in 2014; see
http://sputniknews.com/onlinenews/20040127/39906137.html
.

2 
. Michael Jones,
Leningrad: State of Siege
(New York: Basic Books, 2008), p. 139.