Winter is Coming (28 page)

This was the new Kremlin strategy: to co-opt and quiet the West by recruiting prominent individuals. When everyone is guilty, no one is guilty, goes the logic. We already had seen the price paid for these see-no-evil policies on civil liberties and in Chechnya. With this new tactic, Western leaders had to resist the calls of their bank accounts, not only the calls of conscience. Everyone was engulfed in the same toxic cloud of oil, gas, politics, intimidation, and repression.

Those of us in the Russian opposition had been saying for a long time that while Putin was our problem, soon he would be the world’s problem. Our warnings went largely ignored. After years of rumbling warning signs, when the threats materialized in 2008 in the form of Russian tanks entering Georgia, the leaders of the free world were totally unprepared to deal with it. Engagement had failed but they didn’t know any other tricks to try. Expelling diplomats and limiting official visits was not going to have an impact. My suggestion then was the same as it is today: simultaneously curtail engagement and use the economic leverage of existing engagement to pressure its beneficiaries in Russia.

Ironically, Putin’s elites liked to keep their money where they could trust in the rule of law, and after the G8 lovefest in St. Petersburg, Putin and his wealthy supporters had every reason to believe their money was safe in the West. Limiting that access, or even threatening to do so, would have had a dramatic deterrent effect. Instead, it was business and appeasement as usual. The central myths of engagement are that it (1) liberalizes the unfree states and (2) provides leverage over them if they don’t liberalize. The first has proven false. The second has failed because the free world refuses to exploit its leverage the way dictatorships are so eager to do.

I have never called for a boycott of Russia, by the way. The free world also does big business with China, Saudi Arabia, and other autocracies without providing their leaders with democratic credentials the way they did with Putin. And it’s hard to imagine the elites who run another belligerent rogue state living in luxury in Western capitals. The minions and the oligarchs are loyal to Putin because he is the
capo di tutti capi
and he offers them protection. They can do as they like in Russia, and as long as they stay loyal they can get rich and take their money to America, to London, wherever. This is why I pushed for legislation to cut off that pipeline and damage Putin’s ability to protect his gang—and it’s why Russia fought so hard to prevent such legislation from gaining ground.

There was no reason to cease doing business with Russia. The delusion was that it could ever be more than that. The mafia takes and takes, and it only gives with many strings attached.

Boris Yeltsin died on April 23, 2007. I already eulogized him and his legacy in chapter 5, but I would like to focus on an overlooked aspect of his passing. As was likely required by both his health and his peace treaty with Putin, Yeltsin had kept a very low profile after leaving office on December 31, 1999. The only time I can recall his name in the news after that was when he and Mikhail Gorbachev publicly, if mildly, criticized Putin’s power-grabbing reforms after Beslan.

Putin also seemed to uphold his side of their bargain. No member of Yeltsin’s family, or his extended “Family” of allies and cronies, has ever been pursued by Putin’s government. Although Yeltsin stayed out of the limelight, I think his presence weighed on Putin’s mind. Putin may have become the Godfather, but Yeltsin was the founding father of Russian independence and democracy. Destroying Yeltsin’s legacy completely while the man was still alive might have been risky even for Putin. With Yeltsin gone, another of the thin restraints holding Putin back from totalitarianism was severed. Yeltsin had limited himself to two terms and surely would have expected his successor to leave power as well.

This mattered because in 2007 Putin was faced with the biggest decision of his life. His second term as president was coming to an end the next year, and according to the Russian constitution he couldn’t run again. The election would take place on March 2. First there was the matter of the Duma elections on December 2, 2007. It was a foregone conclusion that Putin’s United Russia Party would win overwhelmingly, but we did our best to track the “irregularities” that took place anyway. The art of rigging an election, you see, lies in making the election itself entirely meaningless. You don’t have to worry about who votes, or even who counts the votes, if you control the entire process and who appears on the ballot to begin with.

United Russia, with the sitting president at the top of its list, enjoyed every imaginable advantage, both legal and illegal. Opposition groups, including our own Other Russia coalition, were denied access to the ballot by meticulous new election laws designed for exactly that purpose. The alternatives left for voters on Sunday were mostly Putin supporters or parties that had made deals not to oppose Putin if they were allowed to stay in the parliament or on the ballot.

In the first category there was “A Just Russia,” whose first move after the election was to propose an extension of Putin’s presidency. Some opposition! In the second category were the Communists, who received, or you might prefer “were allowed,” 11.6 percent of the vote (around 20 percent according to an independent count), for 57 of 450 Duma seats. This low number angered Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, who rumors said had been promised at least 90 seats by the Kremlin for his loyalty. Zyuganov started making charges of election anomalies. As I joked in an article after the election: “I hate to say it, Gennady, but I told you so!” As the joke going around had it, the difference between democracy and the Putin system was like the difference between two chairs: one leather and one electric.

Not that it really mattered, but the most damning of all were the official statistics in places like Chechnya and Dagestan where there was little monitoring at the polls. With an outlandish 99.5 percent voter turnout, 99 percent of Chechen votes went to

United Russia. Do not forget this is a party led by Putin, the author of the second Chechen war that razed the Chechen capital Grozny to the ground. As usual, the truth is visible in the actions of lackeys who are too eager to please their Kremlin masters. My wife commented darkly that the only ones who didn’t vote in Chechnya were those who died on election day.

One can only imagine what the United Russia bosses thought of Hugo Chavez losing a referendum by a measly 1 percent on the same day. What an amateur! Meanwhile, despite the absence of real alternatives on the ballot and with all the chicanery included, United Russia barely topped 50 percent in St. Petersburg and Moscow. It’s no coincidence that the residents of these cities had much greater access to news not provided by the Kremlin thanks to greater Internet penetration and Echo of Moscow, the one radio station where a variety of views was still heard.

It was a clear indication that Putin considered these elections important when he gave several frenzied speeches to get out the vote. The vicious language he used could barely be called coded as he warned against “enemies within” and “jackals” supported by the West. It was less Russian than what we might call Putinese, with a vintage Austrian-German accent.

Why bother making such an effort when the Kremlin’s control was apparently so absolute already? First we should recall that even Stalin held elections in 1937 during the Terror. The results on that Sunday weren’t in any doubt either, confirming our return to the rule of an all-powerful single-party state. But the elections were important to Putin’s regime for several reasons, starting, of course, with financial ones: Putin’s. Putin’s close relationship with Western leaders served as a guarantee to his ruling oligarchs that their money was safe. Had he discarded the last vestiges of democracy too blatantly at that stage this cozy situation might have ended, a risk Putin was not yet ready to take.

The first indications were bad. Nicolas Sarkozy had touted himself as a tough guy but seemed to have gone weak in the knees after a few drinks with Putin. The French president wasted no time in calling his counterpart to congratulate him on his big win. Putin always watched these signals from the West carefully, looking for signs of any real pressure. Most comments about the blatantly fraudulent elections weren’t favorable, especially in the media, but how much danger could there be if Sarkozy and Putin’s old buddy Tony Blair called him?

The other purpose of the Kremlin campaign was to provide the regime with pseudo democratic cover for whatever machinations they were going to come up with to keep their hold on power after the March 2 presidential elections. Putin couldn’t run again, or at least the constitution said he couldn’t and he had promised not to change it—if you wished to value the promise of a KGB lieutenant colonel.

After eight years blessed with record oil prices and a compromising West distracted by the “war on terror,” the Putin regime had reached its crisis. The Kremlin’s presidential candidate had to be named soon. Would it be a feeble puppet, leading, by “popular” demand or maybe a health emergency, to Putin’s return? Or could they find someone foolish enough to step in and risk taking the blame when the neglected Russian infrastructure and economy finally collapsed? Or would they change the system, eviscerating the constitution in some way so Putin could keep power in some new role?

After Putin’s friendly visit to Iran in October 2007 I wrote in an article that perhaps he was considering a new title for himself, one above the petty responsibilities of prime minister or even the old grandeur of the general secretary of the party. “Supreme Leader Ayatollah Putin” had a nice ring to it, I wrote, and I was sure he had always dreamed of running things from behind the scenes, without the petty annoyances and appearances of the presidency. My joke was closer to the mark than I could have imagined.

I was tempted to reproduce in this book a sort of protest that I employed in an article I wrote on the state of Russia in 2009 by not mentioning the name of Dmitry Medvedev even a single time. Ignoring him completely would be a fitting treatment of the man who held the presidency of Russia from 2008 until 2012, when he handed it back to Vladimir Putin like a dog bringing a stick back to its owner. There is no sense obscuring this story for the sake of personal protest, but I will keep my remarks on him brief.

Medvedev the human being was, and is, completely irrelevant. But the idea of
a
Medvedev, the idea of a young liberal president who might turn the country back toward the path of modernity, that was very, very useful. You can almost envision Putin and his inner circle in a laboratory, designing the ideal Medvedev. He had to be fresh-faced and bright-eyed and capable of spouting reformist jargon for the intelligentsia and keeping a straight face while politely acknowledging that things in Russia weren’t all great, but were definitely going to improve. The Medvedev also couldn’t have any mind, ambition, or power base of his own, just in case. Finally, he also needed to be shorter than Putin and with even less charisma, a very rare combination indeed. Fortunately for Putin, he happened to have one on hand right in his own cabinet.

On December 10, 2007, Putin made a big fanfare of endorsing his first deputy prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, to succeed him in the presidency. He was quickly nominated by United Russia and its puppet parties, and a week after receiving Putin’s blessing Medvedev was officially the candidate. His first priority was to announce that, should he be so lucky as to win the election, he would make Vladimir Putin his prime minister. Putin graciously accepted and that was that. (Medvedev also resigned as the chairman of Gazprom in order to run for president, leading to jokes about his being demoted to the presidency of Russia.)

One response from the Western leaders to the news will serve as an example of nearly all of them. The day after Putin’s endorsement of Medvedev, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice had a round-table discussion with the editorial board of the newspaper
USA Today.
They covered Iraq, Iran, and then moved to Rice’s former area of expertise, Russia. She made several solid remarks about how “democratic processes have taken a step backward in Russia” and “it’s not an environment in which you can talk about free and fair elections.” But then she went on to say that she knew Medvedev, and that he was “intelligent” and “of another generation,” as if any of that would matter, true or not.