Strongman (18 page)

Five days later Saakashvili moved troops to the South Ossetian border to launch a massive ‘anti-smuggling’ operation. Ostensibly, the aim was to close down a huge market at the
village of Ergneti, through which vast quantities of goods passed illegally between Russia, South Ossetia and Georgia. The Georgian attack caused the worst fighting in the region since 1992.
Perhaps the real aim was to trigger the collapse of the South Ossetian government, but it had the opposite effect. Kokoity’s position was strengthened, and anti-Georgian attitudes hardened
among ordinary South Ossetians, for whom the Ergneti market had provided their only source of income.

With the Russian ministry of foreign affairs issuing a warning that ‘provocative steps’ might lead to ‘extremely negative consequences’, Saakashvili headed to Washington
for help. But there too, his actions were seen as impulsive and dangerous. The secretary of state, Colin Powell, recalled: ‘I think the president over-reached too early. I had to make clear
to him that, “You might think this is in your vital national interest – we’re not so sure it is. But it isn’t in our vital national interest. So don’t get yourself
into a situation that may overwhelm you and think we are going to race in to rescue you from any difficulties you get into. So be careful.” ’

Saakashvili took note, and in August Georgian troops were withdrawn.

Election night

Throughout history, Moscow has been afflicted by fires. The original wooden structures of the Kremlin – the fortress at the heart of the capital – burned down time
after time. In the sixteenth century Tatar invaders torched the city. In 1812, as Napoleon’s Grande Armée entered Moscow, a great conflagration destroyed almost everything, leading to
the city being rebuilt virtually from scratch.

On the evening of Sunday 14 March 2004, the Manezh exhibition hall, the former tsarist riding school which stands right next to the Kremlin, caught fire in unexplained circumstances and blazed
for hours into the dark night sky.
¹¹
Vladimir Putin climbed to a vantage point inside the Kremlin’s dark red walls and observed the scene.
Television pictures showed him staring out at the inferno, then turning and walking away, with a look of apprehension in his eyes. Perhaps he saw it as some of kind of omen. It was election day.
Polling stations had closed just a few hours earlier, and he had been chosen as Russia’s president for a second four-year term, with 71 per cent of the vote. Napoleon had seen his prize burn
down before his eyes. Would Putin’s vision also be destroyed by foreigners, encroaching on Russia with their alien concepts of democracy?

I have no idea whether such thoughts really ran through the president’s mind at that moment. But events a few months later in the south of Russia would show that Vladimir Putin, the
strongman, was haunted by almost paranoid illusions of weakness and external danger. Another bloody terrorist attack, which ended with the deaths of hundreds of children in a school, apparently
served as proof for Putin that his grip on the country was too feeble, and that Russia was an emasculated rump state surrounded by enemies. Cornered, he would lash out to prove his strength. Putin
Mark II would be an angry phoenix, born in fire.

Beslan and the ‘constitutional coup’

The tragedy began on 1 September, the day Russian children traditionally return to school after the summer holidays. In Beslan, a small town of 36,000 people, just north of the
Caucasus mountains and less than an hour’s drive west of Chechnya, children turned up at school No. 1 in cheerful mood and fresh uniforms. Just after 9 o’clock, as they held a ceremony
with their parents in the schoolyard, a group of armed fighters screeched up to the school in an army truck, firing their guns into the air, and herded more than 1,100 people – children,
parents and teachers – into the school building. It was a repeat of the Moscow theatre tragedy – except that the terrorists had learned lessons that made it even harder for the
authorities to deal with the crisis. The hostage-takers had planned the attack meticulously and knew every inch of the school. A dozen hostages were shot within the first hours, and over the next
three days the country watched horrific events unfold, as the gunmen laid trip-wires and explosives around the school and refused to allow food, water or medicine to be brought into the building.
Once again, President Putin faced the most awful dilemma – how to free hostages and save lives without giving in to the terrorists’ demands, which as usual included outright
independence for Chechnya. Negotiations with a doctor who had helped during the theatre siege and with a local government leader got nowhere. Packed into the school gymnasium, in sweltering heat,
the children were traumatised and parched. On the third day, special forces stormed the school following two unexplained explosions. The rebels fought back. Twenty-eight terrorists were killed, but
so were 334 hostages, mostly children.

It was the bleakest day yet in Russia’s failing battle against terrorism on its own soil. The ability of gunmen and suicide bombers to wreak havoc almost at will demonstrated the impotence
of the authorities and the nonsense of Putin’s claim to have ‘won’ the fight. The Beslan tragedy was the sixth major terrorist incident in 2004 alone.

In February 41 people were killed in a bomb attack on the Moscow underground.

In May the pro-Moscow president of Chechnya, Akhmat Kadyrov, was assassinated at a Victory Day parade in the capital, Grozny.

In June a group of terrorists from Chechnya attacked the capital of the neighbouring republic of Ingushetia. They killed 95 people and captured a large cache of weapons which were later used at
Beslan.

In August 90 people died when two aircraft were simultaneously blown up in mid-air by suicide bombers.

And at the end of the same month, just the day before Beslan, a woman blew herself up in a Moscow metro station, killing herself and ten passers-by.

Vladimir Putin finally addressed the nation on television on the evening of Saturday, 4 September, a day after the violent end to the school siege and a few hours after travelling to the scene
to meet some of the survivors. He looked deeply shaken, and spoke slowly and emotionally about the ‘terrible tragedy on our soil’. Like a priest addressing a funeral service, he asked
people ‘to remember those who perished at the hands of terrorists in recent days’, and dropped his head in sorrow. But then he quickly moved on from the immediate crisis to draw
far-reaching and startling conclusions that in many ways defined the rest of his presidency.

‘Russia has lived through many tragic events and terrible ordeals over the course of its history,’ he said. ‘Today, we live in a time that follows the collapse of a vast and
great state, a state that, unfortunately, proved unable to survive in a rapidly changing world. But despite all the difficulties, we were able to preserve the core of what was once the vast Soviet
Union, and we named this new country the Russian Federation.’

The style was odd – a history lesson delivered at the nation’s moment of grief, evoking the greatness of the USSR. In his next words Putin betrayed his nostalgia for the iron fist of
the communist police state, which had been replaced by laxity:

In an intimation of the crackdown that would soon follow, Putin went on: ‘We showed ourselves to be weak. And the weak get beaten.’

Putin was putting a whole new spin on the terrorist attack. There was no mention of his own forces’ brutality in Chechnya – the main factor that lay behind all the home-grown
terrorism. In fact, he did not mention the word ‘Chechnya’ at all. Instead he was blaming the West! He couched his accusation in strange, ambiguous terms:

The attack on Beslan, Putin seemed to be saying, was part of a Western conspiracy to dismember the Russian Federation. Foreign governments were using terrorists as an ‘instrument’ to
achieve that end. He addressed his people now in apocalyptic terms, like a leader on the brink of war:

Putin swore that as president he would not be blackmailed or succumb to panic. ‘What we are facing is direct intervention of international terror directed against Russia. This is a total,
cruel and full-scale war.’ He warned Russians they could no longer live in such a ‘carefree’ manner, and demanded tough action from the security services. He promised ‘a
series of measures aimed at strengthening our country’s unity’.

Those measures were announced over the coming days, and they shocked those who believed Russia was already far too authoritarian. Putin’s former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov (who had
been sacked half a year earlier) called it an ‘anti-constitutional coup’.

First, in the name of fighting international terrorism, Putin abolished the direct election of regional governors. From now on, he himself would nominate them, and their appointment would be
rubber-stamped by regional assemblies. (The implication, never properly explained, seemed to be that Beslan would not have happened if regional governors were not ‘out of control’.)
Second, it was made almost impossible for independent politicians or radical opposition parties to get into the State Duma. Until now, half of the 450-seat parliament had been elected from party
lists, while the other half were individual politicians directly elected by voters in 225 constituencies. From now on, all would be chosen from party lists; the single-member constituencies were
abolished. The threshold required for a party to enter parliament at all was raised from 5 to 7 per cent. The rules for setting up new political parties were also tightened.

Putin was ratcheting up his own control, and strangling the opposition. The ‘vertical of power’ created in 2000 was now made rigid. Putin’s ‘ideologist’, Vladislav
Surkov, was wheeled out to dignify the crackdown with a pseudo-academic term. He called it ‘sovereign democracy’, or sometimes ‘managed democracy’. In fact, it was the end
of democracy. In an interview with the newspaper
Komsomolskaya Pravda
, he gave an Alice in Wonderland version of the latest reform package. Everything was the opposite of how it seemed: the
new election system would not weaken the opposition but ‘bring it back from political oblivion’; the reforms would strengthen not Putin but the state; the appointed governors would have
greater, not fewer rights. A further initiative announced by Putin – the creation of a new ‘Public Chamber’, an assembly of 126 appointed worthies who would discuss civic
initiatives and draft laws – had caused some bewilderment, since it was assumed that this was what the elected State Duma was supposed to do. Surkov explained that the trouble with
parliaments is that deputies are always thinking about re-election; in the West this is known as ‘being held to account by the electorate’, in Russia according to Surkov, it leads to
populism. The experts in the Public Chamber would be less dependent on the political climate and thus be more objective.
¹²
(A measure of Surkov’s
grasp on reality was given a few years later, when he said on television that ‘Putin is a person who was sent to Russia by fate and by the Lord at a difficult time for Russia. He was
preordained by fate to preserve our peoples.’
¹³
Clearly such a God-given leader could interpret democracy any way he liked.)

And what were people to make of the president’s talk of foreign powers trying to seize a ‘juicy piece of pie’? According to the experienced analyst Dmitry Trenin, Putin’s
foreign policy was entering a new stage. Until 2003, he wrote, ‘Russia had been mostly moving toward rapprochement with the West under the slogan of its “European choice” and with
a quest to become allied with the US.’ Henceforth, ‘Moscow pursued a policy of nonalignment, with an accentuated independence from the West, but combined with reluctance to confront
it.’
¹⁴

It was the beginning of a new isolationist stance. In Putin’s second term there would be no more sucking up. He believed Russia had dropped its guard and needed to defend itself against
twin evils – terrorism (now defined as part of a foreign conspiracy) and Western-style democracy, which was infiltrating the former Soviet space, first through Georgia, and soon ... through
Ukraine.

7

The Orange Revolution

The scenes in Kiev in late 2004 caused apoplexy in the Kremlin: a sea of orange clothes and banners, a million protesters braving sub-zero temperatures, day and night, to bring
the Ukrainian capital to a standstill. Bad enough that this was a repeat of the Tbilisi events a year earlier – protests against a rigged election, mass support for a pro-American,
nationalist candidate who offered an alternative to corrupt, authoritarian, pro-Russian rule. But this was happening in Ukraine, the most important for Russia of all the former Soviet republics.
With 47 million inhabitants, Ukraine was ten times the size of Georgia. One in six of the population was an ethnic Russian, and there were millions of mixed Russian-Ukrainian families. Putin (like
many Russians) saw it as a mere extension of Russia itself. He reportedly told President George W. Bush in 2008: ‘You don’t understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state. What is
Ukraine? Part of its territory is Eastern Europe, but the greater part is a gift from us.’ One part – the Crimean peninsula – really was a gift, transferred by decree from Russia
to Ukraine by the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Crimea was strategically vital to Russia, as the Black Sea Fleet was based there – and indeed the whole country stood like a great
boulder across many of the strategic links between Russia and Europe – the oil and gas pipelines, the electricity grid, the military highways – the last buffer between Russia and the
ever-expanding NATO. And yet the man who would be president there, Viktor Yushchenko, with his American wife, was talking of
joining
NATO!