Winter is Coming (16 page)

Putin’s sudden ascent to acting president eliminated any remaining doubts about the result of the election. Not only would he have three months as the most visible and powerful person in Russia, with the full apparatus of the state to promote him, but the election would come three months earlier than the competition had expected. Putin appeared on television constantly in the months before the March 26 vote, with one exception. Continuing a Yeltsin tradition, he declined to participate in any debates with other candidates.

Putin won with 53.4 percent, nearly doubling Zyuganov’s tally and avoiding the runoff that would have been triggered had he failed to reach a majority. On election night I was watching the returns come in on television with several American guests curious to see the beginning of the post-Yeltsin era. One was Chris Cox, the congressman from California who had become a great advocate of Russian democracy and bilateral affairs, and a personal friend. Other guests that evening included James Woolsey, the former CIA director under Bill Clinton, and Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of state. I remember watching Putin’s numbers carefully that night. He was holding steady at around 47 percent when in less than an hour they jumped up to 53 percent and then never fluctuated again. It would have been embarrassing for Putin to have to undergo a second round. He was the chosen one and the time for uncertainty was over.

This is not to suggest Putin would not have won a completely fair election at the time. He would have. People were nervous and craving stability and strength, which is what Putin promised them. The various liberal reform groups, most notably the Yabloko (“Apple”) party of Grigory Yavlinsky, who received my vote, were relegated to bystanders. The idea that greater centralized power could lead to a loss of civil liberties was far from most Russians’ minds. We still had a mostly free media, with programs that openly criticized our politicians and their ideas. The brilliant satirical puppet show
Kukly
had raked Yeltsin over the coals for years on NTV. The government was not the sacred cow it would soon become.

Terrorism and physical security were not the only voter priorities. The 1998 financial collapse was still on everyone’s mind. Although it was relatively short-lived, and the economy would rebound in 2000 to achieve its highest ever GDP growth of over 10 percent, there were serious concerns about how much we could trust the banks and other financial institutions, especially because of who owned them.

The oligarchs who had gotten unimaginably rich in the 1990s while allying with Yeltsin were the public faces of the corruption that infuriated the average Russian. We saw them on TV and in the papers, saw their ostentatious wealth while their gangsters and bodyguards fought battles in the streets of Moscow. A “law and order” campaign is one of the oldest clichés in the history of elections, but it had real resonance in Russia in 2000.

Another element in the mood on the street in Russia then was Soviet nostalgia. Not for Communism, but the vague sense that something had been lost. It’s difficult to explain, but the 1990s failed to provide a new sense of purpose to fill that feeling of loss and failed to provide enough prosperity to distract Russians from thinking about the past. Putin and his air of regret over the collapse of the USSR were therefore appealing along these lines. It’s a subtle but important distinction. People did not really want to return to the Soviet days; they just didn’t want to feel bad about thinking about it.

Putin arrived mostly untainted by the corruption and financial ruin associated with the Yeltsin administration. The 1998 financial crisis had forced Yeltsin to clean house, and he swept out the good with the bad. The economic team led by Anatoly Chubais was demonized, fairly and unfairly. The purge also caught a young Yeltsinite on Chubais’s team, Boris Nemtsov. Once treated by Yeltsin as a potential successor, Nemtsov would go on to become one of the strongest voices in opposition to Putin’s rollback of democracy in Russia. Boris and I worked closely together for years in the anti-Putin opposition movement and I was horrified, but not surprised, by his assassination in Moscow on February 27, 2015.

Boris Yeltsin’s needs were far more personal. Corruption accusations were rising around him and members of his family, and not just “the Family,” as his closest circle of oligarchs and advisors were known, but his actual relatives. The 1998 government shake-up left Yeltsin rattled and aware of his vulnerability. Impeachment forces in the Duma were rising before he conceded and dropped Chernomyrdin for Primakov as prime minister. Yeltsin needed a presidential successor who would be grateful and loyal to him, without his own constituency, and who would be strong enough to stand up to Yeltsin’s enemies if they came after him.

Yeltsin’s younger daughter, Tatyana, was also his close advisor and was a major power behind the throne in the later years of his administration. She has been credited with influencing her father’s choice of Putin. There is a historical twist here going back to 1933, when ailing German president Paul von Hindenburg was convinced by his son Oskar to name Adolf Hitler chancellor. Hitler seized all state powers for himself within hours of von Hindenburg’s death in 1934. Ironically, in her blog in 2010, Tatyana Yumasheva (her married name) briefly and cautiously attempted to defend her father and his legacy against the Putin regime’s attempts to rewrite the history of the 1990s.

The nonaggression pact between Putin and the Family has otherwise held up very well. In fact, I think Putin was cautious about completely demolishing Russian democracy up until Yeltsin’s death. Despite his faults and fall from grace while in office, Yeltsin was a true freedom fighter. Had he felt obliged to speak out about Putin’s dictatorial maneuvers it could have had real repercussions going into the 2008 election season. But after he died on April 23, 2007, Putin clearly felt no constraints.

Yeltsin deserves to be remembered for more than his drinking and for sitting atop a tank during the August coup attempt. In December 1991, the Western world watched with grave suspicion as Mikhail Gorbachev was forced to resign from office. Yeltsin got little credit for leading the revolution that finally swept away Communist institutions and broke up the Soviet empire. It was Yeltsin, not Gorbachev, who brought Russia out of the looking glass into the sunlight. During the painful transition period, Russians lost their illusions about a shining future just around the corner. Corruption, poverty, crime, and war in the North Caucasus made daily life in Russia quite ugly, and Yeltsin received most of the blame.

But who could have found an easy way out at the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union had collapsed and the mere survival of the Russian state and its people was the only relevant issue? Yeltsin’s battering-ram power was sufficient to destroy the prison of the past, but he lacked the preparation and creativity to design the palace of the future.

Despite the challenges, by 2000 Russians lived in the same dimension as the rest of the civilized world, and we measured success and failure in our lives by the same standards. As did many of my compatriots, I always supported and voted for Yeltsin— with great expectations from 1989 to 1993, with hard feelings from 1994 to 1996, when his only great virtue was that he was an obstacle to Communist revanchism.

The growing disappointment of his last two years in office was due to Yeltsin’s inability to carry forward necessary reforms and root out corruption from Russia’s political and economic life. But, frankly speaking, we didn’t have any real alternative. In judging the pros and cons of Yeltsin’s rule, one may argue that he failed to root out the Communist and KGB seeds from Russian soil but at least he stopped them from sprouting on his watch.

Lenin still lies in Red Square, and the two bans (in 1991 and 1993) on the Communist Party marching under the banners of Lenin and Stalin were only temporary. As a dedicated anticommunist, I’m the last one to excuse such softness on what’s left of the criminal Soviet state. Yet I understand Yeltsin’s unease about dealing the final blow to the regime that propelled him to the top of the nomenclatura.

Perhaps the most important thing Yeltsin did was something he did not do when he took power. After the blackest pages of post-Communist Russian history had been turned in October 1993, and after several bloody days in Moscow, Yeltsin declined to do what his opponents almost surely would have done: wipe out the other side. For the first time in all of Russian history the new ruler did not eliminate the losers to consolidate control. What’s more, eventually they were integrated into the political process. Yeltsin called for immediate elections and accepted an independent parliament.

Out of nowhere, the career bureaucrat literally leapt to the front lines armed with an instinct for breaking down barriers and opening doors long closed. And yet Yeltsin’s inconsistency was boundless. He allowed regional leaders to have more power but then dived into the tragic war in Chechnya. He waged battle against special privileges for the elites but later opened the floodgates for the oligarchs to loot the country. He promoted free and fair elections, but in the end he couldn’t accept that popular will could decide supreme power.

It was clear Yeltsin couldn’t stay in power with fair elections and the abuses quickly mounted. From that point on the Putin police state was all but predestined. Putin had only to follow his own instincts and carry through what was already in motion. Yeltsin failed the final and most important test. The fragile democratic structures he allowed to form could not survive his own need for power and security. He failed to create lasting institutions. The structure relied on his leadership, and the freedoms that existed were there only because he allowed them. There was no way such a system could withstand the exit of the ruler who created it.

Worst of all, his collapse poisoned the minds of the Russian people against what they saw, incorrectly, as uncontrolled capitalism and democracy. The oligarchs who took power prevailed over the good of the people. Russians saw no benefits from the supposed blessings of elections and the free market. A new ruling elite was formed out of the old bureaucrats and the new technocrats, united in their indifference to the values of liberal democracy. The fights among them at the end of the 1990s to find Yeltsin’s successor could have gone differently, but democracy was sure to be the loser. They quickly recognized that elections and a free media could only threaten their grip on power. It was no coincidence that Yeltsin’s hand-picked successor came from the KGB.

Missed opportunities were inevitable considering the magnitude of the changes and problems that confronted Yeltsin. It’s still early to analyze what he could have done better, but it is relatively simple to compare how things have gone since Putin took over in 2000. There was chaos, but Yeltsin never attacked individual freedoms. Putin has built his entire presidency to be the opposite of the Yeltsin years, with a great deal of success. The entire government has been brought under the direct control of the president. The parliament attempted to impeach Yeltsin twice; now it is a puppet show. The corruption of the oligarchs has been moved inside the Kremlin walls where it has expanded to staggering levels. The media, which was free to criticize Yeltsin, is entirely at the service of the Putin administration. The economy is where we see the biggest difference, although most of the credit must go to the simple fact that during Putin’s tenure the price of oil went from $10 a barrel to over $100. And even with those untold energy riches the average Russian is seeing little improvement in his standard of living.

Boris Yeltsin had more than his share of faults, but he was a real person. He had virtues and vices in his flesh and blood. We exchanged him for a shadow of a man who wants only to keep us all in perpetual darkness. The long lines of Russians who waited to view Yeltsin’s coffin and pay their respects at a Moscow cathedral demonstrated that despite his many failures people sensed the possibility for good in what he attempted. This is a stark contrast to what we got in his successor.

Fifteen years into his rule in Russia, there is still an impressively large industry of pundits discussing Vladimir Putin’s true nature. Some guesswork is to be expected considering the lack of documentation about most of his early life and the conflicting reports and biographical portraits about him and about his career. Even his own autobiographical statements and interviews seem designed to obscure and mislead, which of course they are.

Putin’s early life story is not the subject of my interest or this book. Investigating the hardships of his Leningrad childhood and trying to sort fact from fiction in his biography has been done elsewhere by those who find such things more rewarding than I do. I expect there is much to learn that will never be learned until Putin is out of power, if ever. So I will cite a few authors whose opinions and analysis I respect and move ahead to Putin’s time in power. Russian journalist Masha Gessen knows as much as anyone can likely know about Putin and writes with her usual acuity on his character in her excellent 2012 biography,
The Man Without a Face: