The New Tsar (89 page)

47 
. The publication of the book in Germany was widely covered in the media at the time. See
St. Petersburg Times
, Feb. 23, 2001. And it was later published in Russia with the title translated as “Pikantnaya Friendship,” as in “spicy” or “racy,” reflecting its gossipy view of the Putin marriage.

48 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 206.

49 
. Ibid., p. 189.

50 
. Yeltsin, p. 14.

51 
. Ibid., p. 366.

52 
. Gevorkyan et al., pp. 144–45.

CHAPTER 11: BECOMING PORTUGAL

1 
. Sakwa,
Putin: Russia’s Choice
, p. 43.

2 
. Sakwa,
Putin: Russia’s Choice
, includes a translation, pp. 251–62.

3 
. Ibid., p. 44.

4 
.
New York Times
, Feb. 5, 2000.

5 
. Colton and McFaul, pp. 176–77. Vasily Starodubtsev, the governor of Tula, was quoted in
The New York Times
, Jan. 6, 2000.

6 
. Interview with Natalya Timakova, one of the three who conducted the interviews, in March 2013. A former journalist, she began working for Putin’s press office when he became prime minister in 1999. She continues to serve as spokeswoman for the current prime minister.

7 
. See Richard Torrence’s essay in Lasky, Ruble, and Brumfield,
St. Petersburg, 1992–2003
.

8 
. Aleksandr Oslon,
Putinskoye Bolshinstvo Kak Socialni Fact
[The Putin Majority as a Social Fact], March 2001, Fund Obshchestvennoye Mneniye, the Public Opinion Fund.

9 
. The letter, available at the Kremlin’s website,
http://archive.kremlin.ru/eng
, appeared in the newspapers
Izvestiya, Kommersant
, and
Komsomolskaya Pravda
.

10 
. Even now, the estimates of total Russian casualties in the war are disputed. The losses among Chechens—rebels and civilians—will never be known.

11 
. Michael Gordon, “The Grunts of Grozny,”
New York Times Magazine
, Feb. 27, 2000.

12 
. In a television interview at the time of Babitsky’s captivity, Putin pledged to support freedom of the press, but he also described Russia’s media as beholden to special interests, rather than to the state. Early on, Putin understood the importance of controlling public opinion through the control of information. He considered it a primary lesson of his career in the KGB. “The intelligence service is basically an information service. It is first and foremost information work.” Interviewed by ORT, Feb. 7, 2000, accessible at the Kremlin’s archive.

13 
.
New York Times
, Feb. 3, 2000.

14 
.
New York Times
, Feb. 8, 2000.

15 
. BBC interview, March 5, 2000.

16 
. Ben Judah,
Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), chapter 2.

17 
.
Moscow Times
, Sept. 9, 2000.

18 
. Medvedev, p. 360.

19 
. Satter in
Darkness at Dawn
identifies him as Aleksei Pinyaev, p. 30. Pinyaev later denied on state television that he had told the newspaper the story.

20 
.
Novaya Gazeta
, March 10, 2000.

21 
.
Moscow Times
, March 17, 2000.

22 
. Gevorkyan et al., pp. 143–44.

23 
.
Moskovskaya Pravda
, July 22, 1999.

24 
.
New York Review of Books
, April 13, 2000. Soros said he “could not quite believe” that the explosions were carried out to justify the war. “It was just too diabolical,” he wrote, though he added that he could not entirely rule it out either. “From Berezovsky’s point of view, the bombing makes perfect sense. Not only would such attacks help to elect a president who would provide immunity to Yeltsin and his family, but it would also give him, Berezovsky, a hold over Putin. So far, no evidence has surfaced which would contradict this theory.”

25 
. Colton and McFaul, p. 191.

26 
. Author interview with Mikhail Kasyanov, March 2013.

27 
. Felshtinsky and Pribylovsky, in
The Corporation
, state, with no evidence, that he might not have been alone when he died. And they suggest that he had been poisoned by his own aide, Vladimir Putin: pp. 461–63. This seems preposterous, but Putin’s critics by 2000 had begun to find patterns in untimely deaths.

28 
.
New York Times
, Aug. 10, 1996.

29 
. Yeltsin, p. 383.

30 
. Ibid., p. 384.

31 
. Gevorkyan et al., pp. 153–61.

32 
. Sergei Pugachev, a banker and businessman once close to the Putins and by 2010 in self-exile, said in an interview with the author in London in December 2014 that Lyudmila remained actively involved in business throughout her husband’s presidency, though always discretely. This was also asserted by a former American intelligence official who spoke only on condition of anonymity, though no evidence of any investments or assets ever surfaced publicly.

33 
.
Novaya Gazeta
, Jan. 28, 2009.

34 
. Author interview with Vladimir Yakunin, January 2014.

35 
. Dawisha, p. 96.

36 
. Kremlin website, interview with ORT, Feb. 7, 2000.

37 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 159.

38 
. Daniel Treisman,
The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev
(New York: Free Press, 2011), p. 232.

39 
. Hoffman, p. 479.

40 
. Ibid., chapter 7, provides a biographical history.

41 
. Klebnikov, pp. 153–54. Berezovsky always denied that he had asked Korzhakov to organize the assassination.

42 
.
Los Angeles Times
, June 3, 2000; and
New York Times
, June 18, 2000.

43 
. See Putin’s interview with Radio Mayak, March 18, 2000.

44 
.
Talbott, p. 7. He offers an assessment of Putin’s early presidency: “I wasn’t sure whether he was hiding how many moves ahead he was thinking or how few. He seemed to have a knack for being in the right place at the right time with the right protector; he’d been promoted far beyond anything his experience or apparent abilities would have prepared him for. He was tactically adroit but, I suspected, strategically at sea. I still saw Putin as essentially a suave cop who had lucked into a very big job that would require a lot more than luck to pull off.”

45 
.
New York Times
, Aug. 29, 2000.

46 
. The Kolesnikov letters were not found until October when the first bodies were retrieved from the submarine. His notes, displaying his bravery and his love for his wife, renewed the anguish of the Russians and resonated deeply in the culture. In 2007, the rock band DDT and Yuri Shevchuk recorded a poignant song based on the letters, “Captian Kolesnikov Wrote Us a Letter.”

47 
.
Moscow Times
, Sept. 2, 2000.

48 
. Goldfarb and Litvinenko, p. 209.

49 
. Ibid., pp. 210–11.

50 
. Hoffman, p. 488. Hoffman’s source is Berezovsky, whose version of their final meeting varied in some details with each telling, but not in substance.

51 
. Peter Truscott,
Kursk: The Gripping True Story of Russia’s Worst Submarine Disaster
(London: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 85.

52 
.
The Moscow Times
published a translated transcript of the meeting on Sept. 12, 2000, available online at
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/face-the-nation-putin-and-the-kursk-families/258935.html
.

53 
.
Kommersant
, Aug. 24, 2000. The headline of the article was “How Putin Took Vidyayevo.”

54 
. See Robert Brannon,
Russian Civil-Military Relations
(Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), chapter 6.

55 
. Hill and Gaddy, p. 208.

56 
. Author interview with Sergei Pugachev, London, December 2014.

CHAPTER 12: PUTIN’S SOUL

1 
. Baker and Glasser, p. 122.

2 
. Condoleezza Rice,
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington
(New York: Crown, 2011), p. 75. Earlier in her memoirs, Rice recalls meeting Putin in 1992 when she visited St. Petersburg as a Stanford professor to discuss the creation of a European university with Anatoly Sobchak. Sobchak hosted a reception that to her seemed populated by people named Tolstoy or Pushkin—and “one man who looked quite out of place, dressed in a suit befitting a high-ranking Soviet bureaucrat,” that is, Putin (p. 61).

3 
. Kremlin archive, Sept. 11, 2001.

4 
. Bush, p. 196.

5 
.
Karen Hughes,
Ten Minutes from Normal
(New York: Viking, 2004), p. 218.

6 
. Bush, p. 196.

7 
. See
georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/06/20010618.html
.

8 
.
New York Times
, June 16, 2001.

9 
.
Breakfast with David Frost
, BBC, March 5, 2000.

10 
. Dale R. Herspring,
The Kremlin and the High Command: Presidential Impact on the Russian Military from Gorbachev to Putin
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), p. 180.

11 
. Dmitri Trenin, “Military Reform: Can It Get off the Ground Under Putin?”
Demokratizatsiya
, March 22, 2001.

12 
. From the Kremlin website, Feb. 9, 2000. Putin returned to the phrase again five years later in an interview with German television, May 5, 2005. “People in Russia say that those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart, and those that do regret it have no brain. We do not regret this. We simply state the fact and know that we need to look ahead, not backwards. We will not allow the past to drag us down and stop us from moving ahead.” General Alexander Lebed used an almost identical phrase in his memoir,
My Life and My Country
, published in 1997, making clear Putin did not coin the phrase.

13 
.
New York Times
, Feb. 3, 2003. Putin attended the 60th anniversary of the victory at Stalingrad but avoided the use of the name. By the 70th, the city had adapted the old name ceremonially for six days each year to mark important dates in the war, and the old name peppered his remarks. “Stalingrad, of course, will always remain a symbol of the invincibility of the Russian people,” he said, “the unity of the Russian people.”
Volga-Media
,
http://www.vlg-media.ru/society/vladimir-putin-pozdravil-volgogradcev-2222.html
.

14 
.
Izvestiya
, Dec. 5, 2000, accessed through Johnson’s Russia List,
http://russialist.org
.

15 
.
Komsomolskaya Pravda
, Dec. 7, 2000.

16 
.
Kommersant
, March 21, 2001.

17 
.
Izvestiya
, Nov. 9, 2000. In an interview with reporters, including the author, in December 2006, Ivanov said they met in 1977 but added, “I don’t want to go into the details.”

18 
. Thomas Gomart,
Russian Civil-Military Relations: Putin’s Legacy
(Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2008), p. 52.