BORIS YELTSIN WAS AN OBSCURE COMMUNIST PARTY FUNCTIONARY in the tough, mafia-ridden industrial region of Sverdlovsk when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 summoned him to Moscow. There, Yeltsin became Gorbachev’s political protégé and demonstrated an energy seldom seen among Soviet leaders. His mentor rewarded him with promotions, enabling Yeltsin to rise rapidly through the ranks of party leadership. But the two began to butt heads when Yeltsin pushed the president to enact political reform faster than Gorbachev was willing. Yeltsin quit the Communist Party and soon became a political force in his own right. He captured the imagination of many Soviets with such populist gestures as rushing into a Moscow shop and demanding that their goods be stocked on open shelves, not pilfered by the proprietors. Everything about him seemed larger than life, including his distinctive shock of white hair.
Yeltsin showed he was willing even to put his life on the line, famously standing atop a tank in August 1991 to rebuff an attempted coup against Gorbachev by Communist hard-liners. Although he was no longer a supporter of the president, he would not allow a return to the worst traditions of Soviet rule, Yeltsin declared. Four months later, Gorbachev resigned from the presidency and the Soviet Union collapsed.
Now Yeltsin was president of independent Russia. He set out to improve the lives of Russian people by appointing a team of economic specialists led by a brilliant mathematician named Yegor Gaidar. The team’s assignment was simple: to provide Russians the economic lift from democracy that had been promised but not delivered during the last five years of Gorbachev’s rule. Gaidar’s strategy, dubbed “shock therapy,” was driven not only by economics but also politics. It was designed to wrest control of the nation’s means of production from Soviet-era bosses in order to create a middle class of stakeholders that would become the foundation of a new, freer Russia. And so the Yeltsin government ended state ownership of Russia’s biggest moneymaking enterprises, including nickel, oil, aluminum, and media companies. These giant industries were sold off, at a relative pittance, to a half-dozen well-connected Russian businessmen—“the oligarchs.” But the Russian economy ended up being the loser. Like the Communist bosses before them, the oligarchs mainly used their freshly won enterprises as a means to generate cash for themselves. Workers often went without pay, and the promised modernization of old and inefficient Soviet-era factories never happened.
In 1998, conditions worsened. The world price of oil, a critical source of revenue for Russia, plummeted below $10 a barrel. Already, an economic contagion had spread from Asia to Russia; for the second time in five years, the Kremlin impoverished ordinary Russians by devaluing the ruble and making their hard-earned savings nearly worthless.
Yeltsin took a pummeling. His popularity rating wallowed in the single digits. Despite his well-known personal frailties, such as alcohol-binging and depression, he had always been perceived as a giant of a man. Now he seemed physically and politically weak. John Lloyd of the Financial Times, perhaps the most able foreign correspondent in Russia at the time, wrote that Yeltsin had become a virtual tool of the oligarchs, “a mixture between an invalid and a puppet, his strings jerked by masters behind his throne.”
The story of Vladimir Putin’s ascent in the ruling circles of Russian government begins with the five heart attacks that Yeltsin suffered during his presidency. Yeltsin was routinely incapacitated for months. His staff ran the country, and it became plain to them in 1999 that the succession process—selecting who would follow Yeltsin, whose term was ending the next year—had to be accelerated. They had two aims: to preserve the political gains that their leader had achieved, and to ensure that the Yeltsin family would not be prosecuted once he vacated the ramparts of the Kremlin. In recent months, allegations had surfaced in Switzerland of Yeltsin and his daughters running up tens of thousands of dollars on credit cards provided by a Swiss man who had received millions of dollars in Russian government contracts. There was also the Russian tradition of political leaders persecuting their predecessors for retribution and political gain. The Yeltsins wished at all costs to avoid such an unfortunate retirement.
There is much conjecture about what happened next, chiefly that the FSB, the main successor to the KGB, decided to seize power. I looked to a longtime Kremlin insider for guidance, and he agreed to fill me in, but only anonymously so as to retain his access. I’ll call him Viktor. As he recalled, at that time Yeltsin named yet another new prime minister, his fourth in fourteen months. The rapid turnover resulted from Yeltsin’s opponents forcing on him candidates whom he did not favor, and Yeltsin in turn finding ways to install successors who were more to his liking. This time the lucky man was Sergei Stepashin, a former Interior Ministry officer from St. Petersburg. Although it was not made explicit, Yeltsin’s camp intended only to give Stepashin a tryout for the presidency, Viktor said. Stepashin almost immediately proved not up to the task. He lacked backbone, Viktor said. He wouldn’t take a stand. And that could only earn disrespect in a place where long knives were the norm. Yeltsin’s handlers and family were dismayed and looked about for a replacement.
Meanwhile, Putin had made his unobtrusive way onto the Kremlin’s radar screen as head of the FSB. By comparison with Yeltsin, he was wholly lacking in political charisma or presence, but he did have demonstrated decisiveness. In June 1999, Yeltsin announced to a visiting dignitary that in ten days he would appoint Putin as his new prime minister. Furthermore, he told his startled guest, he would soon name this up-to-now obscure functionary the next president of Russia.
Vladimir Putin was the archetypal man from nowhere—as in, how did this fellow get so far? He undoubtedly benefited from a convergence of probably unrepeatable circumstances. He had quietly gained recognition within the Kremlin, where the leadership was desperate for a competent successor to the erratic Yeltsin. The chief outside candidate seemed to be one of Yeltsin’s former prime ministers, Yevgeny Primakov. But he was an ally of political forces whom Yeltsin and his allies had alienated and hoped to keep at bay.
The most telling factor appeared to be that Putin was slavishly loyal. In the early 1990s, he had attracted attention in Yeltsin’s circles as the dutiful deputy to St. Petersburg’s mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, for whom he served after returning from KGB duty in East Germany. When Sobchak slipped into political decline and suddenly faced corruption charges, Putin worked to exonerate him, while arranging his secret flight out of the country.
This act of devotion was impressive. But then he outdid himself in the eyes of Yeltsin and the president’s advisers by helping to destroy the career of an official who had made a serious nuisance of himself with the Kremlin. Yuri Skuratov, a zealous prosecutor, had seemed bent on bringing criminal charges against the Yeltsin family. But at the height of Skuratov’s high-profile investigation, a video of him carousing in the nude with prostitutes suddenly appeared on Russian television. To head off claims that the video was a fake, Putin took pains to publicly state that it was authentic. The Kremlin was nearly teary-eyed with gratitude.
Putin gained a reputation as a bureaucrat who would shield his bosses and their families from prosecution and possible prison terms. What made his record all the more meaningful to the powerful men who observed him was that he didn’t appear to be self-serving; Putin had nothing to gain, for example, from aiding Sobchak, who was already out of power. Rather, Putin seemed to feel obligated by an almost quaint sense of honor and duty. As a former KGB boss, Oleg Kalugin, put it, he was “a man of Prussian-style obedience.” That quality, so rare in Russia, combined with a willingness to work hard and avoid the spotlight, swept him into the most powerful post in the country.
I don’t mean to discount his strong attachment to the state intelligence agencies. This outwardly emotionless man seemed to be moved almost solely by his feelings for the spy services and Mother Russia, both of which he believed had been scandalously maltreated by Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Yet Putin himself had a mediocre career in intelligence. To be a reasonably successful spy, one should land an assignment in the capital of an important enemy state, such as Washington or London, or in a zone of significant East–West conflict, such as the Middle East. By comparison, the apex of Putin’s career was a six-year posting to East Germany, a Soviet satellite with few secrets to learn and few foreigners worth converting to the Communist cause. Putin was not even assigned to Berlin, the capital, but instead to the singularly unremarkable outpost of Dresden. Upon returning home in 1990, he was not sent to the Soviet capital of Moscow—the center of intelligence work—but instead to St. Petersburg. In a collection of interviews conducted with him in 2000, called First Person, he claimed somewhat unconvincingly that St. Petersburg was his choice because he knew that the Soviet Union was teetering toward collapse. Whatever the case, his active intelligence career was over. He was thirty-eight.
Putin was elevated to the top job in the FSB eight years later—in summer 1998—but not because of his intelligence skills. The Yeltsin camp effectively installed him there. Putin was seen as someone who could be relied upon to defend the first family and those around the president. Any notion that the FSB on its own would choose an arguably failed spy to be the intelligence agency’s champion seemed questionable to me. Indeed, Putin’s first act upon assuming the presidency of Russia, on December 31, 1999, seemed to validate the thinking of Yeltsin’s advisers. He signed a proclamation barring any prosecution of the outgoing president.
The state’s intelligence operatives nevertheless are extremely influential. It is disturbing, for example, to witness Putin’s benevolent attitude toward the remnants of the once all-powerful KGB. When the Soviet Union collapsed, thousands of siloviki, members of Russia’s military and security agencies, had gone from being the cream of Soviet society to the dregs of the Yeltsin era. Their complaints about their fate and their mourning for Russia’s past were largely ignored until Putin came along, tapped into their fury, and began methodically reappointing them to influential posts. By the end of 2006, they were in full control of both Russia’s political and corporate worlds, according to Olga Kryshtanovskaya, the scholar and leading expert on Russian elites. She examined the top one thousand officials in the Kremlin, parliament, the ministries, and business, and found that 78 percent had some link to the siloviki. This is not surprising when one considers the extent to which Putin and the siloviki—and a significant portion of ordinary Russians, for that matter—were troubled by the same questions: What had happened to this nation that in the not-so-distant past had struck fear into the hearts of the West? How had its once-venerated army fallen into such shameful disrepair?
But the evidence shows that Putin summoned the siloviki to help him right the ship, to restore the Russia that he and they remembered. I could find no reason to believe that there was any more to it than that. The theory that Putin’s ascendance was masterminded in FSB headquarters seemed vastly exaggerated.
As Putin assumed power over Russia, a kind of social contract was struck between the mafias and the state. The terms were unwritten but understood. The mafias did not disappear. But they were regularized and made to observe new rules of conduct—for starters, the wanton street shoot-outs that were a fixture of the Yeltsin era would no longer be tolerated. Among the chief beneficiaries of this contract were the hundreds of current and former agents of the FSB who had become part of Russia’s dark underbelly in the Yeltsin years, acting as muscle and brains for the mafias and gangs throughout Europe. Now they became the visible superstructure of Putin’s regime. Overnight, they were part of the new order, working in high-level security firms, assigned to jobs at every level in ministries, the Kremlin, and state-owned companies.
The Yeltsin period had been so rapacious that even some of the oligarchs recognized it as such. The most perceptive among them quickly understood that Putin would attempt to unwind their power. There is a belief that he offered the oligarchs a deal in the last half of 2000: Cease your political activity and most likely keep your fortunes. In fact, it appears that some of the oligarchs themselves sought this deal, to head off a Putin attack on all of them. One oligarch, Mikhail Fridman, told Lloyd, the Financial Times writer, that he and the other billionaires deserved Putin’s wrath. In an interview at the time, Fridman said they asked only that past wrongs be forgotten. “I think the best plan would be if Putin were to declare an amnesty on everything that happened in the past,” Fridman said.
Russia’s increasingly hostile stance toward the West under Putin also has a more nuanced history. The prevailing wisdom is that he was emboldened to challenge the West when soaring oil revenues suddenly made Russia a wealthy nation to be reckoned with. It is true that Russia and the West enjoyed a relatively warm relationship from the Gorbachev years through the middle to late 1990s. But antagonism actually began to surface during Boris Yeltsin’s latter years as president. It seemed to start as a pragmatic political response to a resurgence of Russian nationalism; Yeltsin’s government decided that it could strengthen its domestic support by adopting a harder-edged foreign policy. That turned to seriously belligerent talk in the lead-up to NATO’s 1999 decision to bomb Serbia in order to halt Belgrade’s advance on Kosovo. Yeltsin warned that the NATO strike could lead to military action by Russia and a possible world war. When he first took power, Putin sought to moderate Russia’s rhetoric, but that would soon change.
Domestic Russian politics and a series of terrorist attacks that shook the country in the latter half of 1999 were instrumental in creating the Putin we know today. Explosives shattered high-rise apartment buildings in the region of Dagestan, the city of Volgodonsk, and two districts of Moscow itself—a total of four bombings that killed more than three hundred and wounded scores more.
The Yeltsin presidency was in its waning months; Putin, who had just been appointed prime minister, went on the air to angrily declare that he would not negotiate with those responsible for the apartment blasts, who he said were undoubtedly Chechens. In fact, he would not negotiate with terrorists under any circumstance—a seeming swipe at concessions made by Yeltsin to end the First Chechen War of 1994–96. Whereupon Putin launched the Second Chechen War, in which tens of thousands of Chechens and Russians would be killed during the worst years of the fighting.
These events in latter 1999—the apartment blasts and Putin’s retaliatory assault on breakaway Chechnya—“transformed the Russian political landscape,” wrote Paul Klebnikov, a Forbes magazine reporter. “Prime Minister Putin declared the nation besieged. Paranoia swept Russia’s cities….” The fearful populace craved a strong leader and six months later elected Putin president with 52.6 percent of the vote. The results were a stunning turnaround from his popularity rating of a mere 2 percent when, as a stranger to the population at large, he was first appointed prime minister.
While most of the country was galvanizing around Putin, some were troubled by an explosion that didn’t happen. On September 22, 1999, six days after the fourth blast, in Volgodonsk, nervous residents of an apartment building in the city of Ryazan became suspicious of strangers seen on the premises and called police, who found a bomb identical to the others and deactivated it.
Dogged local police work and reporting by Russian journalists turned up evidence that pointed away from Chechen involvement. One of the most tantalizing discoveries was a telephone call to FSB headquarters in Ryazan—tracked by a switchboard operator—that suggested contact between the security agency and someone involved in planting the bomb. Very quickly, the official story—that a terrorist attack had been thwarted—changed. Moscow now declared that the bomb was a dummy, placed in the apartment house as a civil defense exercise to test public vigilance. Local police, though, said it contained the working parts of a bomb, and tests indicated the presence of explosives.
In what became known as the Ryazan Incident, local and foreign reporters and opposition parliamentarians speculated that if the FSB itself wasn’t responsible for planting the bomb, then rogue agents or officers might have been. It wasn’t much of a leap to then suggest that similar elements in the FSB could have been behind the other apartment bombings.
It was a sensational scenario—that the deadly attacks had been staged by the FSB, acting on behalf of unidentified people with unknown motivations at senior levels of the government. Andrew Jack of the Financial Times bureau in Moscow took a skeptical view. He thought a likelier culprit was an affiliate of al-Qaeda in the neighboring region of Dagestan. But one of Jack’s predecessors, David Satter, was a chief proponent of the FSB theory. In Darkness at Dawn, Satter delivered a riveting analysis of the event in Ryazan, bolstered by witness testimony. Satter was convinced that “Ryazan was planned by the same people who perpetrated the earlier bombings.” He characterized the bombers as “those who needed another war capable of propelling Putin into the presidency in order to save their corruptly acquired wealth. These could only have been the leaders of the Yeltsin regime itself,” meaning the FSB.
Some who continued to question whether the government had played a role in the bombings were killed or imprisoned over the next several years. Opposition lawmaker Vladimir Golovlyov was shot dead while walking his dog. Gunshots killed Sergei Yushenkov, a leading liberal parliamentarian, near his home. Yuri Shchekochikhin, a Duma deputy and reporter for the opposition Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, died after a sixteen-day illness resembling poisoning. Lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin was jailed on a weapons charge just before he was to testify at a court hearing into the explosions. He maintained that the firearm in question had been planted, and upon his release a year later he renewed his accusations of government complicity in the explosions.
The mystery of the four apartment house explosions that preceded the Ryazan Incident attracted the attention of Russian billionaire oligarch Boris Berezovsky. He had played a crucial role in getting Putin elected president by lining up cash, political support, and, more important, unabashedly positive coverage on his television station, ORT. But the two had a falling-out soon after and the tycoon now lived in self-exile in the West.
One of his key advisers, Yuri Felshtinsky, believed that the FSB had been involved in the apartment blasts. He also suspected that Putin, who was chief of the agency up until a month before they happened, had taken part in the planning. Felshtinsky, a bearish Russian émigré, had spent years prowling Russian archives, specializing in cataloguing the diaries of Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky. He became bored with his historical pursuits, longed to move into contemporary political analysis, and signed on with Berezovsky.
In a meeting at his suburban Boston home, Felshtinsky explained to me that one day while riding in a limousine with his employer he took the opportunity to advance his theory about the explosions. He told Berezovsky that the motives were obvious: power and wealth. As the Yeltsin era drew to a close, the future control of Russia was up for grabs. If the men of the FSB had to kill three hundred people to create a climate of fear that would enable them to claim the spoils, well, they would kill three hundred people. It followed that the leader of the intelligence agency would be rewarded with the presidency because he had taken the greatest risk. That’s a mafia tradition—the person risking the most gets the most, Felshtinsky argued.
At first, Berezovsky was skeptical of Felshtinsky’s suspicions. But later, he began to reflect on the run-up to Putin’s election. As the struggle to succeed Yeltsin had begun to take shape, most observers viewed the taciturn prime minister as a relative unknown who stood little chance of political survival. Yet Putin had seemed highly confident, Berezovsky now recalled. In fact, the man had seemed to know something that he was keeping to himself.
“I am so stupid,” Berezovsky finally blurted out, according to Felshtinsky. “I am so stupid.”
Felshtinsky’s scenario was entirely believable, Berezovsky decided. Putin’s confidence that he would assume power could be explained by his knowledge of, or participation in, a plot that was unfolding within the FSB.
The oligarch now directed his attention to the particulars of the apartment house explosions. Who would know how such a terrorist plot might have been carried out and how to identify the likely culprits? Felshtinsky immediately thought of another Berezovsky adviser, a fellow named Alexander Litvinenko, who had served as an intelligence officer with some of the darkest units of the FSB. Litvinenko, already a pointed critic of the spy agency, was still living in Russia but would soon defect to the West.
At Berezovsky’s request, Felshtinsky flew to Moscow to test his theory with Litvinenko. They drove out together to the latter’s dacha outside Moscow, and strolled in the woods after leaving behind their cell phones—a standard precaution against possible electronic surveillance. Felshtinsky outlined his suspicions and posed the question: Was such a sequence of events possible?
Felshtinsky not only sounded reasonable, Litvinenko replied, but had hit upon a pattern.
“Find everything you can about Max Lazovsky,” Litvinenko suggested.
“Who?”
Lazovsky was a former KGB officer and reputed criminal leader. As Litvinenko and Felshtinsky would later describe in Blowing Up Russia, a book they would write together, Lazovsky had helped bomb a Moscow bridge, an act coinciding with Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection campaign, and was later arrested. In August 1999—a month before the apartment bombings—the Russian Supreme Court freed Lazovsky. Now he was dead—murdered eight months after the apartment explosions—and Litvinenko saw his fingerprints all over them. “If you understand Lazovsky, how he operated, how his organization was built, you will understand everything,” Felshtinsky recalls Litvinenko saying.
It was hard to separate the Berezovsky team members from their inherent bias against Putin. These three intelligent people—Felshtinsky, Litvinenko, and Berezovsky—had looked at highly suspicious circumstances through a shared lens of anger, victimization, and vengefulness, and reached the most extreme possible conclusion: that Putin had conspired in the bombing of fellow citizens as part of a diabolical power grab by Russia’s intelligence services. The circumstantial evidence was certainly prejudicial against the FSB. Yet as far as I could see, it would be very difficult to validate the three men’s conclusions.
A contrarian attitude is healthy when it comes to conspiracies; though many are suggested, few turn out to be real. I myself learned that lesson on my first foreign posting, in the intrigue-filled Philippines, a place where there were no simple answers. The locals spun the most fantastic tales, into which it was easy to be drawn. The coup-prone counterintelligence officers of the Philippine Army were even more dangerous, skillfully persuading most of the foreign correspondents that President Corazon Aquino was destined to fall and that they—these handsome officers—would take her place. She didn’t fall, and those who succumbed to the disinformation were embarrassed. David Briscoe, my Manila boss at The Associated Press, possessed one of the wisest approaches to seemingly sinister events. “Sometimes the answer is right there on the surface,” Briscoe used to say of conspiracies, or the lack thereof.
So, what about the apartment blasts? Did the FSB and possibly Putin slaughter hundreds of Russians to achieve their aims? Putin himself called the Ryazan theory madness. “There are no people in the Russian secret services who would be capable of such a crime against their own people,” he said. “The very allegation is immoral.”
Yes, the possibility was intriguing, made so by the writings of Felshtinsky, ultra-smart Russian journalists such as Pavel Voloshin, who led the reporting on it at the time, and foreign correspondents such as David Satter. I was reluctant to dismiss them, even though my nonsense detector rejected their stated or implied judgments that a conspiracy was to blame. After all, the authorities had tried to sweep Ryazan under the carpet.
I reconsidered the competing theories—that it was al-Qaeda, Boris Berezovsky, Chechens, rogue FSB agents, or perhaps someone completely different. What if one group had blown up the first four buildings, but copycats had planted the Ryazan bomb? An FSB link of some sort seemed certain—former or current agents were basically caught in the act. But did that mean it was a plot approved at the top? Were they rogue operators hired to carry out a mission for al-Qaeda or the Chechens? Were other forces at work?
There did seem to have been a plot afoot to bomb the Ryazan building. But it did not seem possible for a journalist to solve the mystery of who organized it. As far as the allegation of a conspiracy at the top levels of government, the most that anyone could say with absolute certainty was that the Kremlin had been guilty of its customary indifference to the welfare of Russian citizens.
In the years to follow, Putin would preside over a revival of Russian prosperity at home and influence abroad, fueled by a great flood of wealth from the country’s tremendous store of oil and natural gas. Russia possessed 26 percent of the world’s natural gas—the largest reserves of any country—and the seventh-largest oil reserves, at 6.6 percent. Putin would trumpet the return of a Great Russia and tell his people to be proud of themselves and their past. He would glorify leaders and events regarded as odious by much of the outside world; Josef Stalin’s murderous 1930s purges, he would say, had been exaggerated by Russia’s enemies. (As prime minister, Putin had toasted Stalin on the dictator’s birthday. And he threw a lavish, nationally televised Kremlin party to honor Felix Dzerzhinsky, the brutal founder of Cheka, the early Bolshevik-era prototype of the KGB. It all smacked of a personal love affair. “This profession employs those who love our Motherland and who are selflessly devoted to their people,” Putin told a room of intelligence agents. “…Those who are ready to execute the most difficult and dangerous tasks at the first order work in the security services.”)
The Russian people would respond to Putin’s steady withdrawal of their individual liberties with obedience combined with defiant nationalism, a standard set four centuries earlier under Ivan IV. In the West, Ivan’s nickname, Grozny, was translated as “Terrible”—but to Russians, Ivan was “Fearsome” or “Awesome,” an image that Putin would successfully cultivate.
Putin maintained no torture or execution chambers. Yet his matter-of-fact responses to the domestic assassinations that occurred with some regularity invited the impression abroad that he was cold-blooded and at minimum a protector of murderers.
Consider the month of October 2006. A killer fired four shots into Anna Politkovskaya, killing the journalist in her apartment house. Three days later, gunmen killed banker Alexander Plokhin, the head of a Moscow branch of Vneshtorgbank. Days after that, the victim was Anatoly Voronin, business director of the ITAR-TASS news agency. Finally, a lone assailant used a Kalashnikov with a silencer to execute Dmitry Fotyanov, a mayoral candidate in the mining town of Dalnegorsk. None of the murders was solved.
Litvinenko was assassinated the following month in London. The United Kingdom concluded that a former Russian intelligence agent had done the killing, and sought his extradition from Russia. Putin could have acquitted himself and Russia as a whole by cooperating with Britain. Instead, he rejected the extradition request and looked on approvingly as the suspected assassin won election to the national parliament, thereby gaining immunity from prosecution within Russia while a wanted man in Europe. Opinion abroad hardened that Putin was, in one way or another, complicit in the murder. I could think of no similar behavior by the president of an industrialized country. Putin seemed to be deliberately putting himself in the same camp as the world’s most disreputable leaders.
It was altogether possible, of course, that Putin and his circle intended to convey precisely the menacing impression that foreigners had of them, sending a message that said, Don’t mess with Russia. But that seemed like overthinking. The greater likelihood was that Putin was simply being Putin.