Strongman (29 page)

Gates and Rice batted ideas back and forth and eventually came up with an idea that might do the trick. In October they headed out to Moscow for what were dubbed ‘two plus two’ talks
– between the foreign and defence ministers on each side: Rice and Gates, plus Lavrov and Serdyukov.

On the morning of Friday 12 October they drove out to the president’s Novo-Ogaryovo residence, travelling the same road Rice had taken a year earlier for the surprise birthday party that
had ended so testily. Putin wanted to see them before the 2+2 talks got going – and he was in much the same mood as a year before. Again he kept the Americans waiting for half an hour, though
he had no other meetings. Then, when he assembled the two delegations around the table, with the television cameras running, he launched into a fresh tirade against the American plans: ‘The
one point I would like to make is that we hope that you will not push ahead with your prior agreements with Eastern European countries while this complex negotiating process continues. You know, we
could decide together to put a missile defence system on the moon some day, but in the meantime, because of your plans, we could lose the chance to achieve something together.’

According to Gates, Putin questioned whether the Americans really needed a system to defend them from an Iranian attack. ‘He passed me this piece of paper that showed the range arcs of
Iranian missiles, and he was basically saying that their Russian intelligence was that the Iranians couldn’t have a missile that could hit Europe for years and years and years. That’s
when I said, “You need to get a new intelligence service.” ’
¹⁴

News reports at the time quoted Putin’s sarcastic comment about missiles on the moon, and concluded that the talks had failed. But behind the scenes, Gates and Rice made an offer that the
Russians liked. It was intended to bridge the divide over whether or not the Iranians posed a threat. Lavrov remembers: ‘They suggested that the US would not activate their missile defence
system until we, together with them, established that there was a real threat.’
¹⁵

According to Rice, ‘Bob [Gates] said: suppose we dig the holes, but we’ll do a joint threat assessment on Iran, and won’t actually start deploying interceptors until there is
some shared understanding of where the Iranians are going.’

‘It was going to take some period of years anyway to get these sites operational,’ said Gates, ‘so we could wait for the installation of the interceptors until the Iranians had
flight-tested a missile that could hit Europe.’

The suggestion went down well because it at least delayed things, but it did little to disabuse the Russians of their conviction that they, not Iran, were the Americans’ real target. At
this point Gates came up with a proposal which he now admits, with a wry smile, was certainly not agreed with the hawks back home. ‘I thought that there were a lot of things we could offer in
the way of transparency, in terms of giving them access. We could even have a more or less permanent Russian presence there, like arms inspectors.’

Within minutes the idea evolved into an offer to the Russians to have a permanent military presence, 24/7, at the US installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. The Russians were astonished.
Their chief negotiator, Anatoly Antonov, recalls: ‘We didn’t actually discuss the technicalities of where they would live and who would pay for them … but it was an interesting
idea.’
¹⁶

Gates recalls rather ruefully: ‘All these measures that I talked about, I was just making up on the spot. If Condi and I agreed then why not see if we could make some headway with
Putin?’

Lavrov asked the Americans to put it on paper. But when Gates and Rice returned to Washington with their ad hoc proposals, there was, in Gates’ words, ‘consternation’. The
ideas had to be assessed by all the relevant administration departments – defence, state, national security – in the so-called ‘interagency process’. It soon became clear
that the neo-cons had not the slightest intention of giving the Russians 24/7 access to their most state-of-the-art facilities. They also belatedly consulted the Czechs and Poles, and were given
short shrift. As Gates recalls, with smiling understatement: ‘There were several areas in which the interagency process here sanded off some of the sharp edges of the offers and made them
less attractive.’

The offer was put in writing, as requested, but in place of ‘permanent Russian presence’, it suggested that embassy attachés could occasionally visit the Czech and Polish
sites. The Russians shook their heads with derision. Lavrov recalled in an interview: ‘We got the paper in November and not one of the proposals was in it.’

A second 2+2 session was held in March 2008, but it was bad-tempered and unproductive. By now it was clear to the Russians that the Bush administration would not be deflected from their plans.
Within a few months Washington signed the agreements it needed with Prague and Warsaw (despite the opposition of public opinion in both countries). Once again, Putin had attempted to force
Washington to take Russia’s views into consideration, and failed.

Paralysis in the Kremlin

Putin’s increasingly tough line abroad coincided with a time of growing uncertainty at home. Working with the Kremlin, I became aware of something close to paralysis in
the president’s team as he plotted his own future during 2007, the last year of his second term. Under the constitution, he could not run for a third consecutive term, and Putin repeatedly
stated that he would not change the constitution to serve his own personal ends. There were many in his entourage who urged him to do so – and public-opinion polls suggested it would have
been the most popular option – but Putin wanted to find another way to preserve his role.

It was the dilemma of an autocrat who was determined, at least formally, to abide by the rules. He had no intention of leaving the scene: his statements indicated that he was afraid the course
he had set Russia on could still be reversed, that he did not fully trust anyone else to defend that course as he himself would, and that he certainly did not trust ordinary people, through a
democratic election, to choose the ‘correct’ path – not even by offering them two ‘approved’ candidates to choose from. Somehow, he needed to manoeuvre a trusted
substitute into the driving seat – someone who would both continue his policies and not challenge his position as the ultimate ‘national leader’, running things behind the scenes.
The trouble was, Putin himself did not know how to achieve this. Nor did he know for many months who the right substitute might be.

Not the current prime minister, certainly. Whereas Boris Yeltsin had appointed Putin to that job in 1999 in order to position him to become president, Putin had appointed his most recent prime
minister, Mikhail Fradkov, for precisely the opposite reason – to have a grey yes-man with no ambitions at the head of the government.

There were two front-runners: Dmitry Medvedev had been first deputy prime minister since November 2005 and was seen as a ‘liberal’, with no obvious connections to the
siloviki
, while Sergei Ivanov, the former spy and defence minister, was promoted to the same rank – first deputy prime minister – on 15 February 2007, prompting speculation that
he was a serious rival for the future presidency. I could tell from my dealings with senior officials that no one knew which of them to side with. Both men began forming their own loyal teams,
including press secretaries, but the wisest functionaries kept aloof.

As a result, people at all the top levels of government became immobilised, afraid of taking long-term decisions and unsure which of the possible candidates to support. The hesitation was
palpable from the middle of 2007 through to the parliamentary election in December, and even beyond the presidential election on 2 March 2008. For a good year, the strongman’s dilemma left
the country weak and irresolute.

One thing was clear: no ordinary Russian – indeed no one below the top circle of power – would have the slightest say in who Russia’s next president would be. But it would take
Putin months to work out how to do it. I am pretty sure he did not have a plan in place at the beginning of the year. It emerged – and evolved – over the months. I often asked my
contacts in the Kremlin what was going on, and I am sure they were not dissembling when they told me they had no idea. Even Putin didn’t know.

The situation gave rise to the rebirth of Kremlinology, long dead since the days when people like me used to pore over photographs of Politburo line-ups on Red Square, or count how many words
Pravda
dedicated to various up and coming Soviet leaders. It did not escape attention that in January 2007 Medvedev received a warm welcome for a relatively liberal-sounding speech at the
World Economic Forum in Davos, nor that it was just five days after accompanying Putin to Munich in February that Sergei Ivanov was promoted to the same rank as Medvedev.

The new Kremlinologists, including those working in the Kremlin itself, fearful for their own futures, avidly debated the merits of the two contenders. Medvedev was seen as perhaps too liberal
or weak (though, on the other hand, that might be exactly what Putin was looking for, to project a softer image abroad). Ivanov was a
silovik
, surely closer to Putin, who had promoted so
many spies and military men in the past years … but then again, perhaps he was
too
strong, too much of his own man, too much of a threat. Might Putin even allow them to stand against
each other, representing different facets of the establishment? Or would Putin finally change the rules and run for a third term?

It was Ivanov who seemed to be being groomed for the top job, shown more often on television, travelling more often with Putin, haranguing the West in Putin-like tones. Opinion polls, to the
extent that they could be believed, put Medvedev marginally ahead of him until June, when the ex-spy pulled ahead by about four points.

Suddenly, on 12 September, Putin pulled off an excruciatingly bad piece of political theatre, in which the prime minister Mikhail Fradkov was shown on television walking into the
president’s office and falling – metaphorically and rather clumsily – on his sword. ‘In view of the political processes going on at the moment,’ Fradkov mumbled,
‘I want you to have complete freedom in your decisions and appointments. So I want to take the initiative and free up the position of prime minister so that you have a free hand in
configuring your cabinet as you see fit.’ That was code for: obviously I am not going to be the next president, so I will resign and let you appoint the person you want. (This was based on
the assumption that Putin, like Yeltsin, would appoint his chosen heir as prime minister.)

‘I completely agree with you,’ said President Putin, pretending to have had no say in the cabal, and immediately appointed a new prime minister. But it was neither Medvedev nor
Ivanov. Instead Putin nominated an old colleague from St Petersburg, Viktor Zubkov. He was as grey and uninspiring as Fradkov, but for most of the Putin presidency he had headed a powerful
anti-money-laundering unit, the Financial Monitoring Committee, which made him privy to the financial secrets of the elite. Few people had heard of him, yet within days the 66-year-old declared
that he might indeed run for president.

It wasn’t just outside observers that were shocked. I happened to be with the Valdai group in Moscow that day, and we had an appointment with Ivanov just two hours after he received the
news that he was not, after all, heir presumptive. He laughed it off as best he could, but it was clear from his demeanour that the news was as big a shock to him as to everyone else. His soaring
career had suddenly belly-flopped. He said Putin had not even discussed the move with him.

So was Zubkov the next president? Only if Yeltsin’s manoeuvring was seen as a precedent. But Putin was inventing new ways of doing things, and unlike Yeltsin he had no intention of
anointing a successor and then obligingly stepping out of politics. Two days later Putin opined that there were ‘at least five’ viable candidates. Kremlinologists assumed he meant
Zubkov, Ivanov, Medvedev, and … two others. I understood from a Kremlin source that this was not merely flak thrown up to disorientate the pundits: Putin himself had not yet decided.

It was only after the elections to the State Duma on 2 December that Putin finally revealed his choice – not that the result, which unsurprisingly gave his party, United Russia, 64 per
cent of the votes, affected his decision. It was neither Zubkov nor the former KGB man Sergei Ivanov, on whom the dice fell, but the man who it seemed had been pipped at the post, Dmitry
Medvedev.

Again, it was a staged event, a pretence at democracy. The leaders of four parties, just elected to the Duma, came to Putin and put forward Medvedev’s name. Putin feigned surprise, and
turned to Medvedev, who happened to be present: ‘Dmitry Anatolievich, have they discussed this with you?’

‘Yes, we had some preliminary discussions,’ replied the candidate.

‘Well,’ Putin had to agree, ‘if four parties representing different strata of Russian society have made this proposal … I have known Dmitry Anatolievich Medvedev for
more than 17 years, and we have worked closely together all these years, and I fully and completely support this choice.’

The following day, Medvedev declared that if he were elected he would nominate Putin for the post of prime minister. After months of confusion and manoeuvring, the way forward was suddenly
clear. Putin would ensure his political longevity by transforming the post of prime minister (without so much as touching the constitution) from the quiet back-office occupied by Fradkov and Zubkov
into the country’s real power-base.

Though born in the same city as Putin, and a graduate from the same law faculty, Medvedev was 13 years younger and had a very different background. Born in 1965, into an intellectual family, he
graduated in 1987, at the height of Gorbachev’s efforts to democratise the communist system. The zeitgeist of the time was all about debunking the KGB that Putin had chosen for his career.
Medvedev helped run the campaign of the liberal reformer Anatoly Sobchak (one of his law professors) in the first genuine elections of the late 1980s. Sobchak later became mayor of St Petersburg
and hired both Medvedev and Putin to work in his external relations office – this was when the two men met. Medvedev later followed Putin to Moscow, becoming his deputy chief of staff in 1999
and running his election campaign in 2000. As president, Putin appointed Medvedev as chairman of Gazprom, and later as his chief of staff.