Winter is Coming (15 page)

When I am asked if Putin was inevitable, this is why I say you have to start ten years before anyone knew his name. By the time Yeltsin made Putin the heir apparent, Russians were demanding stability and looking for a tough guy to stand up to the criminals and to the Western influences they’d been told were damaging the country and their pensions. To prevent Putin, or
a
Putin, from coming to power, the 1990s would have required a very different script with less appeasement of Yeltsin and his entourage and stronger support for democratic institutions.

As the election approached, my own view was that a faceless technocrat like Putin might just be what Russia needed at the time. I believed that the Russian government had to project strength and self-confidence and only then would it gain the popular support needed to follow through with painful economic reforms. After years of looting and capital flight it was getting harder and harder to scapegoat the West for how badly things were going. Yeltsin’s approval rating was dismal once again, another reason he and his oligarch backers were eager to find a fresh face to show to the frustrated Russian people.

The apartment bombings that terrorized Russia in September convinced even those who thought Russia should have let Chechnya go its own way in 1991 that the Chechens deserved everything they got. Laying siege to a hospital, bombing the families of soldiers: these were inhuman acts, so the gloves were off. The public cheered Putin as their new gladiator and enjoyed the rough, even profane language he occasionally used when talking about what he would do to those who would threaten Russia. “We will find the terrorists anywhere,” he once said, “and if we find them in their shithouses, we’ll wipe them out in their shithouses.”

This was a real transformation for a boring back-room bureaucrat, aided by the hasty publication of a campaign-ready biography that emphasized his deprived and difficult childhood and tough-guy credentials over anything that might prepare him for being a political reformer. This was no accident. The advantage of being faceless was that Yeltsin’s chief backer and master conspirator, Boris Berezovsky, could apply whatever face was needed.

We were forced to contemplate just how far Yeltsin, Putin, and their backers might go to guarantee Putin’s election on the night of September 22, when local police in the city of Ryazan interrupted what would have been the fifth apartment bombing of the month. Alerted by a resident, the police were too late to catch the perpetrators, but they found three fifty-kilogram sugar bags filled with white powder in the basement, connected to a detonator.

Chemical analysis on the scene the next morning detected the same military-grade hexogen explosive used in all of the previous bombings.

The next evening, the twenty-third, Putin made a televised statement praising local law enforcement and the alert citizens who had called them for averting a catastrophe. He also spoke briefly on the ongoing air strikes against Grozny. There was nothing to contradict the day’s dramatic news that a terrorist attack had been foiled in Ryazan. The next day, something incredible happened. FSB director Nikolai Patrushev issued a statement saying that the planting of a bomb in the Ryazan basement had been a “training exercise” to test the vigilance of the local security forces and residents! He said that there had been no explosives at all and that the sugar bags had actually been full of sugar, not hexogen.

This fantastical story was required because law enforcement and the local FSB office in Ryazan had already detected and exposed extensive FSB involvement in the attempted bombing. Suspicious phone intercepts on the night of the bombing were traced back to FSB headquarters in Moscow. Two men arrested in Ryazan had been carrying FSB identity cards and were released into the custody of a senior official from Moscow. Patrushev was obviously trying to cover his agency’s tracks, but there were far too many giant holes in his story.

Just to invoke the most obvious contradiction available at the time, if the bags were full of sugar why did the substance test as hexogen on the scene and why did the FSB rapidly take the bags away to Moscow for further testing if they knew it was sugar? More and more evidence and inconsistencies accumulated, enough to turn a nightmarish conspiracy theory about agents within the Russian government mass-murdering people for political purposes into a case that is very hard to refute on the facts. It was revealed, for example, that some soldiers had earlier stumbled onto sugar bags full of a “strange substance” on a nearby base, which turned out to be hexogen.

A deep investigation and analysis of the case were turned into a devastating book by former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko,
Blowing Up Russia.
The same Litvinenko, who had become a fierce Putin critic, was assassinated in London in 2006 with the rare radioactive substance polonium-210. An independent FSB investigator of the case, Mikhail Trepashkin, was arrested a week before hearings began and jailed for four years. In 2000, the Duma twice rejected calls for a parliamentary investigation of what happened in Ryazan. All evidence and internal documents related to Ryazan were then sealed on the grounds of secrecy for seventy-five years. While I admit to possessing the healthy paranoia developed by most people born in totalitarian states, this all seems like an overreaction over three bags of sugar.

Of course any suggestion that the bombings had been a self-inflicted “false flag” operation to stoke outrage and fear was condemned by the government. The theory didn’t make it into the mainstream inside Russia at the time; it was just too horrible to contemplate. The idea that a government would massacre its own people was too shocking in 2000. But by 2002, 40 percent of Russians believed the security forces were involved in the apartment bombings. By then we had more information about Ryazan and, more importantly, we had much more information about Vladimir Putin. The suspicion that the Putin regime had no allergy to Russian blood was confirmed by revelations about the scope of devastation in Chechnya, and then by the brutal government interventions in the Nord-Ost and Beslan hostage situations in 2002 and 2004.

Similarly, although the huge discrepancies in the official story on Ryazan were reported in the West, nobody wanted to hear the truth. This is a typical pattern of convenient cowardice. If you acknowledge the horrible truth you would have to act, so it’s easier to ignore the facts and pretend it’s “disputed” and say you’re “concerned” about “the allegations.” This charade is particularly important when you feel obliged to pretend the perpetrator is an ally and is operating in good faith. For example, European nations still don’t want to admit Putin has declared war on Ukraine. Even when Russian forces apparently shot down a civilian airliner over occupied Eastern Ukraine, the EU representatives seemed as eager to deny Russian culpability as the Russians. Again, if they admitted the truth, they would have to act, and nobody wants to act.

And so Putin’s popularity continued to rise. By October 1999, he was already polling ahead of opposition hopeful Yevgeny Primakov, one of the most successful of Yeltsin’s many former prime ministers and backed by the Communist Party and the powerful mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov. The election was scheduled for June, but Putin wouldn’t have to wait that long to sit in the president’s chair.

The December parliamentary elections came first, however, and at the time they felt like the first time Russians had gone to the polls the way other democracies did: simply to vote for the candidates who best reflected their views. All previous elections had taken place in a crisis atmosphere, especially Yeltsin’s desperate battle for survival in 1996. The newly formed “Unity” bloc, assembled by the government only three months prior and endorsed by Putin, did quite well; well enough to prevent the Communists from controlling the Duma.

I felt optimism based on the relatively normal appearance of the elections. Efficient and expensive political campaigns, famous personalities, and sitting members of the Duma dominated the polls, and the public showed a healthy conservatism by staying with known devils. As I joked at the time, the appearance of aggressive TV ads and mudslinging showed that we Russians were quickly learning to live up to American campaign standards.

My concern was that the West still showed no sign of developing a long-term strategy for Russia. Was it going to treat the Russian people like adults capable of hearing the painful truth, or would Western leaders continue to speak over our heads? Aid and understanding over Chechnya were important, but not at the cost of appeasing anti-democratic practices and epic corruption.

Russia’s terrible problems were not going to disappear overnight. Like most observers inside and out of Russia, I was primarily worried about the usual perils of corruption, inefficiency, and red tape that made it difficult for any government to forge ahead. Despite my hopes that the darker, more ideological challenges had been left behind us, I hinted at my doubts in the
Wall Street Journal
a few days after the elections. I wrote, “There is no guarantee that nationalism can be mastered and will not rise to overshadow liberal reforms. Mr. Putin’s KGB roots and strong military backing could well turn out to be liabilities that are too heavy to overcome.”

I had each point half right, as it turned out. Putin discarded the liberal reforms first, right out of the gate. He only revived nationalism as a political tool later when it served his purposes to do so. The military was never again the factor in politics it had been for so long, and Putin’s KGB roots were what would define him and the future of Russia.

With the apartment bombings to fan the flames of vengeance, the assault in Chechnya gained force. By December the siege of Grozny had begun and would last for two months. When it was over, Grozny would be described by visiting journalists as looking worse than Berlin in 1945. Not a single building was undamaged, earning Grozny the dubious title of “the most destroyed city on Earth” by the United Nations in 2003.

The human destruction was no better. Refugees were scattered all over the region in abysmal conditions. Russian troops rounded up prisoners indiscriminately. Torture and murder of captives was routine. As described by the incredibly brave Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who visited Chechnya every month during the second war, what happened there was “a clear, obvious, unbelievable worldwide betrayal of humanitarian values. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a little more than a half a century old, has fallen in the second Chechen war.”

She was validated when the European Court of Human Rights began to issue rulings against the Russian government in favor of the families of some of the many thousands of Chechens who had been tortured or disappeared in military custody.

When Politkovskaya wasn’t in Chechnya documenting the personal stories of families torn apart by violence and war crimes by the Russian military, or writing her reports for
Novaya Gazeta,
she was traveling widely to rally support for international humanitarian intervention that never came. After dodging death in the mountains for years, and being harassed and threatened from every possible direction, Politkovskaya was gunned down in her Moscow apartment building on October 7, 2006, Vladimir Putin’s birthday.

The federal government of Chechnya was abolished in May 2000, when President Putin established direct rule. Fighting continued after Putin appointed Akhmad Kadyrov as the head of the local government and would continue as a guerilla conflict for many years to come. Terror attacks large and small by Chechen groups would continue around the country. And even when violence had been reduced to “tolerable” levels, the repercussions from what Russia had done in Chechnya continued to ripple around the world. Chechnya’s main export became well-trained, well-armed radicalized fighters and terrorists.

Yes, I said “President” Putin. He had been inaugurated on May 7, 2000, a month before the election had been scheduled to take place. Yeltsin had another surprise up his sleeve and had suddenly resigned on December 31, 1999, making Putin the acting president and requiring an election in three months’ time. Putin took care of the most important business immediately, ensuring the security and wealth of Boris Yeltsin and his family. A decree granting Yeltsin and all his relatives freedom from prosecution was signed the same day Putin took office, revealing the real reason Yeltsin had selected him for his successor: self-preservation.