Strongman (2 page)

There was one piquant moment in my biography that made the offer even more tempting. Back in 1989, when Putin was a KGB spy in Dresden, his bosses deported me from Moscow in retaliation for
Margaret Thatcher’s expulsion of Soviet spies from London. I was then the
Sunday Times
correspondent and was one of three journalists and eight diplomats who were kicked out in the
last big spy scandal of the Cold War. How ironic, I thought, to return to Moscow as Putin’s adviser! I accepted, and became a Kremlin media consultant, based in Brussels but travelling
regularly to Moscow. I was part of a team of some 20–30 people worldwide, but the only full-time consultant. I came to know Peskov and his team very well, and although they always kept up
their guard, I was as close as any foreigner in those years to the corridors of power. My personal observations form the basis for much of what I describe during the years 2006–2009.

Our main task as media advisers to the Kremlin was to persuade them to open up to the press, on the rather obvious premise that the more you speak the more your views will be heard. The Russian
political class proved remarkably resistant to this idea, and remained so long after I left the PR world and returned to journalism – as I discovered while working on the BBC television
series. Persuading senior Russian politicians to give interviews was immensely difficult, and several key figures refused altogether. Others agreed, but only after many months of obstruction by
their subordinates who seemed unwilling or afraid even to pass on our request. President Medvedev’s spokeswoman, Natalia Timakova, refused point-blank even to speak to us. Ironically it was
easier to gain top-level access to the Kremlin in the final years of communism, when I worked on the BBC series
The Second Russian Revolution
, than it is now. Our task became even harder as
political uncertainty crept in during the year prior to the 2012 presidential elections. The entire administration was in limbo, as Putin and his president, Dmitry Medvedev, refused to reveal which
of them would run for re-election. Suddenly we found that interviews that had been promised were declined. It became clear that canny politicians and functionaries did not dare to stick their necks
out in such a time of flux.

Nonetheless we did interview more than a hundred people (either on or off the record) for the TV series and this book. They include heads of government, foreign ministers and senior advisers in
eight countries. In Russia we spoke to Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Anatoly Antonov, Stanislav Belkovsky, Vladimir Chizhov, Boris Chochiev, Arkady Dvorkovich, Viktor Gerashchenko, German Gref, Alexei
Gromov, Sergei Guriev, Andrei Illarionov, Igor Ivanov, Sergei Ivanov, Grigory Karasin, Mikhail Kasyanov, Viktor Khristenko, Yevgeny Kiselyov, Eduard Kokoity, Andrei Kolesnikov, Konstantin Kosachev,
Alexander Kramarenko, Alexei Kudrin, General Marat Kulakhmetov, Sergei Kupriyanov, Sergei Lavrov, Fyodor Lukyanov, Mikhail Margelov, Sergei Markov, Vladimir Milov, Oleg Mitvol, Dmitry Muratov, Gleb
Pavlovsky, Dmitry Peskov, Sergei Prikhodko, Yevgeny Primakov, Dmitry Rogozin, Sergei Ryabkov, Vladimir Ryzhkov, Viktor Shenderovich, Dmitry Trenin, Yuri Ushakov, Alexander Voloshin and Igor
Yurgens.

In the USA we interviewed Matthew Bryza, Bill Burns, Nicholas Burns, Eric Edelman, Daniel Fata, Daniel Fried, Philip Gordon, Rose Gottemoeller, Thomas Graham, Stephen Hadley, Lt-Col Robert
Hamilton, John Herbst, Fiona Hill, General James Jones, David Kramer, Michael McFaul, General Trey Obering, Stephen Pifer, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Sestanovich, Dean Wilkening and
Damon Wilson.

In Georgia we spoke to Irakli Alasania, David Bakradze, Giga Bokeria, Nino Burjanadze, Vladimer Chachibaia, Raphael Gluckmann, Natalia Kinchela, Erosi Kitsmarishvili, Daniel Kunin, Batu Kutelia,
Alexander Lomaia, Vano Merabishvili, Mikheil Saakashvili, Eka Tkeshelashvili, Grigol Vashadze, Temur Yakobashvili and Eka Zguladze.

In the UK we spoke to Tony Brenton, John Browne, Nick Butler, Jonathan Cohen, Michael Davenport, Martha Freeman, David Miliband, Craig Oliphant, Jonathan Powell, George Robertson and Alexander
Temerko.

In Ukraine we interviewed Leonid Kuchma, Hrihoriy Nemyria, Oleh Rybachuk and Viktor Yushchenko, and in Poland Alexander Kwa
ś
niewski and Radoslaw Sikorski.

In Germany we interviewed Rolf Nikel, Alexander Rahr, Gerhard Schröder and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and in France our sources were Jean-David Levitte and Maurice Gourdault-Montagne.

I would like to thank the producer of the Brook Lapping series, Norma Percy, and the executive producer, Brian Lapping, for giving me the opportunity to work on this long but rewarding project.
My thanks go to directors Wanda Koscia and David Alter for reading some of the chapters, and to assistant producer Tim Stirzaker for his indefatigable research and organisational help. Above all I
am indebted to the series director, Paul Mitchell, and the Moscow producer, Masha Slonim, for their stream of advice and insights. Neil Buckley and Fiona Hill kindly read the manuscript or parts of
it and made many sensible suggestions, for which I am very grateful. Lastly, warm thanks to my agent Bill Hamilton, and my excellent editor at I.B.Tauris, Joanna Godfrey.

1

A new millennium

The Putin era began at midday on the last day of the twentieth century. Taking the entire world by surprise, a wheezing, faltering President Boris Yeltsin appeared on
television to announce his resignation, six months ahead of schedule. In a voice breaking with emotion he asked Russians to forgive him for his mistakes and failings, and told his people that
Russia should enter the new millennium with ‘new politicians, new faces, new intelligent, strong and energetic people’.

Yeltsin had recorded the address in the Kremlin earlier that morning. The first people to know about it, apart from his daughter Tatiana and his closest advisers, were the television technicians
who loaded his script into the autocue machine. When he finished he turned away and wiped tears from his eyes, then opened a bottle of champagne, poured a glass for the camera crew and the few
presidential staff who were present, clinked glasses and downed his own one in a single go. Even as he did so, his designated successor, Vladimir Putin, was being made up behind a screen in the
same room to record his own New Year’s address to the people.

It would be broadcast just before midnight. But first he had a few formalities to see to. At two o’clock he was given the ‘nuclear briefcase’ containing the codes needed to
launch a nuclear strike. Then he held a five-minute meeting of his cabinet, followed by a longer session of his Security Council. At six he signed his first presidential decree, granting Yeltsin
and the members of his family immunity from prosecution. Then he held a series of quick one-on-one meetings with key ministers. And finally, cancelling a planned trip to St Petersburg, he swept out
of the Kremlin in the presidential motorcade and headed for Vnukovo airport. He had plans to bring in the New Year somewhere special.

While billions of people around the globe ushered in the new millennium with parties and fireworks, Russia’s new acting president was onboard a military helicopter trying to fly into the
rebel republic of Chechnya in hazardous weather conditions that eventually forced the chopper to return to base in neighbouring Dagestan. This was the Putin the world would come to know and fear
– the tough guy, the action man, obsessed with combating terrorists and separatists, determined to restore the pride of a country that under Yeltsin had come to look shambolic and sick.

As his helicopter battled with the elements over Chechnya, Russian television aired his pre-recorded address to the nation. It was brief and matter-of-fact, declaring there would be no vacuum of
power and paying tribute to his predecessor. It contained only one policy pledge, which in retrospect looks quite remarkable. He said: ‘The state will stand firm to protect freedom of speech,
freedom of conscience, freedom of the mass media, and property rights, those fundamental elements of a civilised society.’

The freedoms and rights he praised were precisely those that had been obliterated in the communist USSR and then restored under Yeltsin. And yet within a few years Putin would stand accused of
flouting them himself, creating a new kind of post-communist authoritarian model, trampling on the free press, and persecuting business tycoons – or indeed anyone – who dared to
challenge him.

Why did that happen? The key, or at least one of the keys, to understanding Putin’s journey is to look at the Russia he inherited from Yeltsin – a Russia not just economically and
militarily weak, but also patronised by the West.

Yeltsin and Clinton

Bill Clinton made his last visit to Russia as American president in June 2000, just two months after Putin’s inauguration. Clinton had met Boris Yeltsin some 20 times and
built up a close, bantering relationship that came to be described as the ‘Bill ’n’ Boris Show’. He had also met Putin a couple of times, but like most Western leaders still
knew little about him other than his prowess at judo and his past career as a KGB agent – and that was enough to make him wary. Now he found Putin a tough negotiator, who, irritatingly,
already regarded Clinton as a lame-duck president with little more than half a year left in office.

Standing a good six inches shorter than the imposing American president, Putin made up for his lack of stature as any judo player does – with agility and skill. He doggedly resisted
American plans to abandon (or even amend) the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty so as to allow the US to develop a national missile defence programme – the ‘Star Wars’ system
first promoted by Ronald Reagan. The ABM treaty banned both Russia and the United States from deploying defences against nuclear missiles, and for Putin it was a cornerstone of nuclear deterrence:
if one side was allowed to develop systems that could shoot down the other’s long-range missiles then the delicate balance of power would be destroyed and the side with the shield might be
tempted to launch a pre-emptive strike.

Putin dismissed Clinton’s criticisms of the brutal new campaign he was waging in Chechnya and his crackdown against NTV, Russia’s leading independent television station. And he
revealed his enduring resentment of NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999 – an event that would inform Putin’s foreign-policy thinking throughout the next ten years.

The campaign against Serbia, which was designed to put an end to President Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, was a pivotal moment in Russia’s relations with the West.
Throughout the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, Moscow supported Milosevic, at least partly because of traditional Russian affinity with the Serbs, who, like Russians, are Orthodox Christian Slavs.

The ‘brotherly ties’ between Russians and Serbs may be exaggerated, but the Kremlin certainly saw parallels between Milosevic’s attempts to subdue ‘terrorism’ and
separatism in Kosovo and Yeltsin’s fight against the same problems in Chechnya. Just as Yeltsin branded the Chechen rebels ‘bandits’, so Milosevic (and indeed at one point the US
government) regarded the Kosovo Liberation Army as a terrorist group. Having launched a bloody war against Chechnya, causing tens of thousands of deaths and a mass exodus of refugees, it was
entirely consistent for the Russians to support Milosevic in his efforts to maintain the integrity of what remained of Yugoslavia.

But Yeltsin’s pleas not to attack Serbia went unheeded, leaving Moscow feeling that for all the bonhomie of the Bill ’n’ Boris Show, and for all the talk of welcoming
post-communist Russia into the community of civilised nations, its word counted for nothing. On the eve of NATO’s air strikes on Belgrade, Yeltsin would explode with anger during telephone
calls with Clinton and sometimes slam down the phone.
¹

Yeltsin’s prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, was flying to Washington on 23 March 1999. He had talks planned with President Clinton, Vice-President Al Gore and the International Monetary
Fund. His mission was to secure multi-billion-dollar loans to help stabilise the Russian economy, still reeling from the financial collapse of August 1998. According to Primakov’s assistant,
Konstantin Kosachev, the prime minister called Gore during a refuelling stop at Shannon in Ireland, and asked: ‘Are you going to bomb Yugoslavia?’ Gore replied: ‘I cannot tell you
anything, no decision has been made.’
²

The government plane took off for the flight across the Atlantic. In the back were Russian business tycoons and officials, drinking vodka and playing dominoes. Suddenly, after four or five
hours, Primakov received a call on a crackly, encrypted phone line. It was Gore telling him that NATO air strikes were, in fact, about to begin. Primakov at once called Yeltsin, checked with the
pilot whether they had enough fuel to return to Shannon, and then went through to the cabin to inform the businessmen that the trip was abandoned: doing business with the Americans at this moment
would be inappropriate.

The reaction was telling. The tycoons, allowing their patriotism to outweigh their business acumen, broke into applause. ‘It was very emotional,’ says Kosachev. The decision to turn
the plane around in mid-flight was meant to send a signal of Russia’s profound displeasure. Over the next days the same feelings spilled out onto the streets, as thousands of Russians
protested outside the US embassy in Moscow.

On his final presidential visit to Moscow a year later Clinton found the wound was still festering. Putin presented himself as a man who would no longer allow Russia to be ignored or pushed
around. For two days he hammered home his criticism of America’s plans for a unilateral missile defence shield. Then on the final morning, as they held a farewell meeting in the Kremlin,
Putin issued a dark threat that if America went ahead with its plans, Russia’s response would be ‘appropriate’ and ‘maybe quite unexpected, probably asymmetrical’
– in other words, the Russians would not try to match the sophisticated and costly US system but would take means to render it ineffective. That could mean anything from building huge numbers
of nuclear missiles to overwhelm the proposed shield, to destroying the American installations as soon as they were set up.