EVEN THE MOST TOTALITARIAN GOVERNMENTS ARE PUBLIC RELATIONS conscious. Journalists can usually count on at least one reasonably informed—if not entirely believable—person to serve as the face of the country. Afghanistan’s brutal ruler Najibullah himself met routinely with reporters during the late 1980s and early 1990s; Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov delegated the task to an economic lieutenant; and Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir had Islamic radical Hassan al-Turabi speak to me, in the days before Bashir threw him in prison.
In Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin there was no such person. Putin’s usual spokesman was Dmitri Peskov, baby-faced and charming. But I did not want to hear from a mere spin doctor. I wanted access to an actual player, a participant in events, so that I could better understand the Kremlin’s view of why certain things happened as they did. I got nowhere.
As one of Peskov’s assistants explained, Putin’s men saw no benefit at the moment in candid conversation with someone writing for an essentially Western audience. Whatever they said would be misperceived, and in any event why should they care what the West thought about them?
I raise my experience not out of pique at being rebuffed, but to note the larger truth it illustrated about Putin’s Russia. Now on top of the world, it owed no one an explanation. It was up to the West to accept that Russia was back. Unlike in the 1990s, when the nation was, economically speaking, on its knees, it was now self-sustaining, on the move, and didn’t need Western help nor the West’s understanding.
A sharp rise in oil prices was behind the Kremlin’s huge confidence. Crude oil sold for about $20 a barrel when Putin succeeded Yeltsin. It was pushing $100 a barrel when he announced in late 2007 that, since term limits barred him from reelection as president, he would assume the mantle of prime minister, thereby assuring his continued hold on power. Next to the country itself, Putin was the greatest beneficiary of Russia’s new oil riches; its people credited him personally for the resulting improvement in their standard of living. Never in history did such a large percentage of the Russian population have so much money to spend.
The impact of this wealth was especially evident on my trips to the capital in 2007. Moscow had become one of Europe’s most grand and fashionable cities. Each time I visited, the number of exclusive boutiques had multiplied along Tverskaya Street, all the way to Red Square and the Kremlin. This slice of Moscow now boasted one of the world’s largest concentrations of billionaires. The swelling middle class spent its salaries with seeming abandon at new shops and malls that encircled the city. Wealthy Russians bought up lavish villas, mansions, and chateaux along Montenegro’s Adriatic coast, in southern France, and in central London.
Russia’s new muscular profile earned it global deference. It ran neck and neck with Saudi Arabia in the contest to be the world’s largest oil producer, paid off its foreign debt, banked some $200 billion in a rainy-day fund, and began to invest in international stocks and bonds. For the first time, the country burst out of its borders not at the point of a gun, but through the strength of its purse.
Europe was an important energy customer; in 2008, Russia provided a third of the continent’s oil and natural gas, and indications were that the percentage was not going to drop. Foreign oil companies assiduously courted Russia, one of the few petro-states willing to entertain their proposals. But the price of admission became steep, and giants such as Britain’s BP could no longer negotiate the advantageous terms they had when Russia was far weaker. Oilmen from the West not only had to pay cash up front but also give Russian energy companies a share of their prized energy possessions elsewhere. Gazprom accumulated an impressive list of shareholdings in gas storage, marketing, and pipeline companies across Europe—in Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, and so on—and pressed hard for more. Investment banks, too, courted Moscow and earned tens of millions of dollars in fees by enabling a wave of Russian public offerings, mergers and acquisitions, and other financing deals.
Meanwhile, Putin’s exercise of power was applauded by much of the country. After moving aggressively against Chechnya, he took on some of the best-known titans who had amassed their wealth during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. In 2000, Putin forced two of Russia’s seemingly invincible oligarchs—Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky—into exile and turned their broadcast empires into pro-Kremlin propaganda vehicles. Putin’s campaign against Mikhail Khodorkovsky began in 2003; by the time it was over, Russia’s richest man had been sentenced to eight years in prison and his Yukos oil company had become the property of the state.
After eight years of paralysis under Yeltsin’s rule, Putin’s display of testosterone—dutifully reported on state-controlled television—sent his popularity rating over 70 percent. From the outside, Russia might have appeared to be under the thumb of a rogue regime. But at home, Putin was seen as demonstrating that Russia was governable. He had taken a perilous gamble, to be sure. His modus vivendi with criminal elements required that he tolerate their routine crimes and even murders in exchange for their fealty. To bind Russians together, he encouraged a campaign of sometimes frightening nationalism and xenophobia against non-Russians in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere. Hate crimes soared. According to the SOVA Center, a Russian activist group, that kind of violence killed thirty-three people across Russia in the first three months of 2008, compared with seventy-two in all of the previous year. Racist attacks tripled in four years, SOVA reported. But that was the nation’s Faustian bargain—acquiescence to a much-compromised, all-powerful state in exchange for the freedom to emerge from their homes, sweep away the rubble from their streets, and send their children to school.
The fresh pride that Putin instilled in his people bore resemblance to the feel-good mood that Ronald Reagan inspired in many Americans with a famously successful political slogan. Vladimir Putin created what a clever Moscow ad man might have marketed as “It’s Morning Again in Russia.”
The more confident Putin became about Russia’s ascendancy, the more willing he seemed to rattle Europe occasionally and poke America in the eye with some frequency. He bluntly criticized the invasion of Iraq and complained about U.S. unilateralism. His assertiveness drew occasional scolding in America, which seemed to say, well, what can one expect of those impossible Russians?
But Putin’s increasingly disagreeable manner was not simply a Russian being difficult. It was at least in part a result of the West’s condescending attitude toward Russia when it was still deep in the throes of economic crisis. Russia’s sense that it had been humiliated when it could least defend itself helped set the stage for worsening relations as the years wore on.
Putin had begun his presidency ready to find a way to reconcile Russia’s profound differences with the West and develop friendly relations. As they did with Yeltsin, the policies of NATO would become an irritant for Putin. When the West, in the 1990s, began proceedings to absorb Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Baltic states into its military alliance, Russia objected. In nationalist circles, the NATO expansion was seen as a potential move to blackmail Moscow militarily should it mount any serious challenge to Western aims in the region. But Putin regarded the NATO dispute differently. He thought Washington simply didn’t understand the basis for Moscow’s opposition, according to Viktor, the Kremlin insider I consulted. If he was patient and made every effort to explain, Putin told his aides, “they’ll see we’re normal people, and we’ll have a different relationship,” Viktor recalled. So Putin sat for hours with major and minor Western visitors—a government minister, a vice minister, whoever was willing to hear his thoughts on Chechnya, NATO, and energy.
By the beginning of 2000, the NATO expansion was well under way. Putin met with President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and National Security Adviser Samuel Berger, and floated a question: What would be the West’s attitude toward Russia applying to join NATO? Putin was serious, according to Viktor. He saw dual benefits to NATO membership: Russia could integrate more tightly with the West, and, more important from Moscow’s point of view, have an opportunity to “reform” the Cold War–era organization from within. Like the other nineteen NATO members, Moscow would wield a veto. Among other things, it could stop the alliance from repeating acts Russia opposed, such as the bombing of Serbia.
As Viktor recalled the strained moment, Berger suddenly found a fly on the window to be extremely intriguing. Albright looked straight ahead. Clinton glanced at his advisers and finally responded with a diplomatically phrased brush-off. It was something on the order of, If it were up to me, I would welcome that.
Not dissuaded, Putin’s entourage raised the idea again with visiting congressmen. But they reacted similarly, getting “this tricky expression on their faces and saying, ‘Ah, you want to destroy NATO from within,’” Viktor recalled.
The congressmen had a point, of course. If Russia had been a NATO member in 1999, for example, Serbia would have simply overrun Kosovo as it and its surrogates had previously done with Bosnia and Herzegovina. It made sense to exclude Russia from NATO, notwithstanding the organization’s absorption of other members of the former Soviet bloc, I thought. But Viktor had been offended at the American suggestion that Russia’s motives were disingenuous. So too, apparently, had Putin. My mind wandered to Shakespeare’s admonition about protesting too much. Only minutes earlier, Viktor had openly stated that Putin wanted to join NATO in part to “reform” it. But I presume there was something irritating about Russia not being given the benefit of the doubt and instead being accused of deception.
A truly serious outrage came after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, Viktor said. Putin was among the first to reach President George W. Bush with condolences and an offer to provide any needed assistance. It wasn’t long before Bush requested that Russia acquiesce to the establishment of a U.S. military presence in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, from which an offensive would be mounted against the Taliban-ruled government in Afghanistan. The American president promised that the bases were temporary and only for the Afghan attack, said Viktor. He recalled Putin giving a positive response, saying, “We’ve got to help our friends.”
A year and a half later, the active phase of the Afghanistan campaign was concluded. The Kremlin asked when the United States intended to withdraw. Viktor paraphrased the American reply: “This is a zone of our strategic interests and we’re not leaving.”
Vyacheslav Nikonov, a dapper fifty-one-year-old historian and Kremlin insider, said America’s assertion that it intended to stay in Afghanistan pushed Putin beyond his threshold of patience. “I heard it from the Kremlin, ‘We’re fed up,’” Nikonov told me. Putin increasingly felt that Russia had made too many unrequited concessions since the Gorbachev years. “It’s, ‘You guys do what we Americans want or the relationship is terrible.’ This is what the relationship has been for the last fifteen years,” Nikonov said. “We did what the U.S. wanted, and it got us zero.”
And that was the end of Putin as sometimes-friendly interlocutor. If Washington and the rest of the West were going to treat Russia as a second-class country, well, Putin had his own message to deliver. He told off Washington, saying it had “overstepped its national borders in every way.” When the United States said, in 2007, that it would install anti-missile devices in Poland and the Czech Republic, Putin’s commander of missile forces threatened to re-aim Moscow’s nuclear rockets at the installations. Then Putin struck the West’s true soft underbelly: energy. He forced both Royal Dutch Shell and France’s Total to sell controlling shares in their Russian oil properties to state-run companies at low prices, and warned that a similar fate might await Britain’s BP and the biggest company of all, ExxonMobil.
The West called Putin belligerent. But his disparaging remark about the extent to which America had extended its presence seemed altogether reasonable to me—the United States clearly had overreached around the world. America’s reaction to Putin’s complaint showed once again that it could be just as thin-skinned as the Russians, tending to vilify any outspoken critic abroad.
Viktor found it telling that Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin—two wholly different people—started out and ended up at the same point in their attitudes toward the United States: hopeful at first, quite disenchanted and antagonistic in the end. What Viktor might have added was that their separate journeys reflected Russia’s historic problem since Ivan the Terrible: Much of the world felt uncomfortable with Russian ways and kept the country at arm’s length. Russia’s modern ruling elite recognized the dissonance, yet thought that over time other nations might become more accepting. Putin in particular thought that Moscow’s willingness to shelve its misgivings and bow to the West in certain situations would motivate the West to reciprocate in other instances. When the West largely failed to do so, he was hotly resentful.
The story line put forth by Viktor and Nikonov presupposed that Russia and Putin wouldn’t have adopted their chin-out attitude if the West had behaved differently. While it must be recognized that the West does not have entirely clean hands in all of this, I am not as confident as my two Russian informants. There is no way to dial back, but my own experience in the former Soviet Union is that Russia is predisposed to some amount of bullying self-importance. Russia and the West quite likely would have ended up in the same spot no matter how much more accommodating the West had been. The West likely would never accept certain Russian demands, and vice versa. For instance, it is difficult to imagine Russia willingly acceding to the West’s Balkan policy, specifically the independence of the region of Kosovo. Likewise, it’s improbable that Washington will abandon its determination to see NATO expand all the way to Russia’s borders. No matter how many diplomatic courtesies might have been exchanged during the post-Soviet years, these two issues would have remained incendiary in Russia and resulted in continuing antagonism.
Part of Putin’s in-your-face defiance may be the lawyer in him. In a 2007 interview with Time magazine, for example, its correspondents questioned him about corruption within the Kremlin. Putin figuratively coiled into a fighter’s stance—if Time was making such allegations, he assumed the magazine was certain that it had the facts right; if that was the case, his team was prepared to examine whatever Time published and take unspecified action should it find error. In other words, prove it.
The Time interview coincided with its selection of Putin as Person of the Year for 2007, an exceptional honor, although Putin seemed only grudgingly to recognize that. In a video excerpt of the interview, what I saw was the president of Russia in so many words putting up his middle finger. The writer, Adi Ignatius, in his account of how Putin behaved during their three and a half hours together, confirmed my impression. Putin was king of the world. Ignatius and his colleagues were supplicants. Here was one of the West’s most prestigious publications declaring him a man of global importance. So what? He would act as he wished. Though the interview and a dinner were obviously strained, Putin was more or less indulgent through much of it. But each time he sensed that his interrogators were using events or Russian history to patronize or bludgeon his country, he would have none of it. When his tolerance had reached its limit—before the main dinner course arrived—Putin called it a night and summarily dismissed the journalists.
In a famous remark, Sergei Yastrzhembsky, Putin’s senior envoy to Europe, said, “Gentlemen, Russia has returned. It should be reckoned with.” That’s certainly how Put in felt, and his toughness was probably necessary to move Russia along the path toward renewed greatness. In the same way that Gorbachev opened Soviet society and made peace with the West, and Yeltsin stood down the Communist Party and forced it to yield, Putin brought a sense of order to the country and prepared it for prosperity. With chaos all around, the country’s economy in tatters, and the oligarchs dictating what they were going to make off with next, he said “Enough.” He pushed back, creating space for the state and reclaiming much of the property that arguably should never have been relinquished—certainly not at such bargain-basement prices—to profiteers who enriched themselves at the country’s expense. When oil prices went up, the system was poised to benefit and take off, and that’s what happened.
For some, the lesson was clear: Anyone who aimed to rule effectively in a rowdy neighborhood like Russia had to demonstrate muscle. It was a limited vision, to be sure. Where Gorbachev and Yeltsin suggested that the Russian people could be more than they had perhaps imagined, controlling their own lives in a democracy, Putin told the people through his actions that the state had first claim to greatness, ahead of individuals for the most part.
But many Russians were tired of high-minded ideas anyway. They wanted to be paid their long-overdue salaries and pensions, and to have some stability in their lives. Putin by and large delivered both, and began 2008 with enviable popularity, leaving the presidency after two consecutive terms with his 70 percent approval rating intact. His chosen successor, a former law professor named Dmitri Medvedev, campaigned in a rigged election and received 70 percent of the vote. As part of the bargain, he named Putin his prime minister, with the stated intention of maintaining the policies of the previous eight years. It was no surprise: Putin had chosen Medvedev with the presumption that he, Putin, would continue to exercise his power over matters of state, then manipulated the election to make it happen.
Vyacheslav Nikonov, the Kremlin adviser who helped me understand some of Putin’s disillusionment with the West, now explained the plan for the long-term future. Nikonov was a grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov—Stalin’s foreign minister and the namesake of the Molotov cocktail—and a former assistant chief of staff to Gorbachev. He also was a chief adviser to Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s domestic policy chief, and that interested me the most. The forty-three-year-old Surkov was the mastermind behind the making of what I call The Putin—the transformation of the president’s visage into a savior-of-Russia icon, gargantuan and granite-faced, gazing from billboards, television screens, and newspapers throughout Moscow.
Although neither of us used the term during our conversation, Nikonov was a firm believer in The Putin, both the idea and the man, and seemed to expect him to rule for some time to come. He thought he would run again for president. “Putin may be back in 2012 and 2016, then 2024 and 2028,” he said, naming the years of presidential elections, with a single break to satisfy Russia’s term limits.
In other words, Putin’s circle had settled in for a good two-or three-decade run. We journalists often joked about the creative ways that this or that dictator would devise to be president for life. I remember speculating that my five-year-old daughter, who has Kazakh grandparents, would be old enough to succeed the sixty-six-year-old president of Kazakhstan by the time he agreed to step down. Yet, faced with Nikonov’s on-the-record declaration of pretty much the same ambition, I was momentarily speechless. “This is not extremely visionary,” he assured me, “but pragmatic.”
What did this exceedingly articulate Russian, dressed in a blue blazer with gold buttons and Scottish knit tie, mean by “pragmatic”? In Nikonov’s own words, Putin had created a “rich, cynical, professional” group in their late thirties and early forties who “like their jobs. They are hand-managing the government. They’ll be there another thirty years.” Maybe that was pragmatism, Russian style. In any event, Nikonov was serious. And there was no reason to doubt that Putin felt the same way.
Putin has been unfairly criticized for playing a “double game,” the multilevel chess cherished by spies everywhere. In fact, his governing strategy was transparent from the outset. He surrounded himself with people whose discipline and loyalty he trusted—other intelligence agents, military officers, and lawyers and colleagues from his old St. Petersburg days. Writers called it “Russia Inc.” or “Kremlin Inc.” A more apt label might be the “Gazprom State,” since he rode Russia’s oil and natural gas riches to global influence for himself and Russia. As the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the age of the Soviet empire, Putin’s style signaled the emergence of a coolly pragmatic state (as Nikonov would put it) overseen largely by ultra-patriotic spies and former spies.
But critics warned of a downside to Putin’s approach. Boris Volodarsky, a former Russian military intelligence officer, told me of a messianic “KGB mentality” in which “everything is the state…. They will make a decision and carry it out, without limits.” By its very nature, Putin’s corps of intelligence agents will use whatever it deems necessary to achieve its goals, he said. Volodarsky was describing bespredel, anything goes.
In Soviet times, this single-mindedness among spies was suppressed by the Communist Party, according to Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB defector I met in the United Kingdom, where he lived in self-exile. He thought the dangerous thing about Putin was not that he was reverting to Soviet ways, but that he was failing to sufficiently reconstitute control over the spy services. As he put it, “The KGB without the Communist Party is a gang of gangsters.” It was a rich assertion—as if the Communist Party didn’t have its own gangster-like figures. Yet the central point remained valid—that the KGB’s successor, the FSB, now answered to no one.
Coincidentally, my contacts included another man who possessed intimate knowledge of the spy services in Soviet times. And so I headed to California for a visit with Nikolai Khokhlov, a former captain of the KGB, a defector to the West, and an intended victim of murder by radioactive poison. He knew something about bespredel.