Strongman (3 page)

Clinton heard out Putin’s homily, then turned to his aide, Strobe Talbott, and murmured, ‘I guess that guy thought I didn’t get it the first time. Either he’s dense or
thinks I am. Anyway, let’s get this thing over with so we can go see Ol’ Boris.’
³

With relief, the Americans then drove out of the Kremlin to bid farewell to Clinton’s friend, ex-President Yeltsin, now living in retirement in his country dacha. There was a surprise
waiting for him. By the time he got there Putin had called Yeltsin and asked him to rub in the message even harder. Russia, he said, would not put up with any American policy that threatened
Russian security. When the tirade was over, Clinton steered the conversation back to his own concerns about Russia’s future. His parting words, as related by his adviser Strobe Talbott, were
quite remarkable – and revealing of the American view of Russia after the fall of communism.

‘Boris,’ he said, ‘you’ve got democracy in your heart, you’ve got the trust of the people in your bones, you’ve got the fire in your belly of a real democrat
and a real reformer. I’m not sure Putin has that. You’ll have to keep an eye on him and use your influence to make sure that he stays on the right path. Putin needs you, Boris. Russia
needs you ... You changed Russia. Russia was lucky to have you. The world was lucky you were where you were.
I
was lucky to have you. We did a lot of stuff together, you and I ... We did
some good things. They’ll last. It took guts on your part. A lot of that stuff was harder for you than it was for me. I know that.’

As he left Yeltsin’s dacha, Clinton turned to Talbott: ‘That may be the last time I see Ol’ Boris. I think we’re going to miss him.’

Clinton’s mawkish words clearly suggest he thought that under Yeltsin things had gone very well in Russia and Russia was where America wanted it to be. In fact, things were not going well,
and Russia did not want just to go wherever America wanted it to be. In reality, what America was going to miss was a Russian leader who was compliant to the point of submissiveness. Putin would be
anything but that.

Yeltsin’s Russia

The West’s handling of post-Soviet Russia had been just about as insensitive as it could have been. With Western corporations salivating at the prospect of a huge new
market, Harvard economists hired by the Russian government urged it to introduce unrestrained capitalism at breakneck speed, with scant regard for the sensitivities of – and consequences for
– the Russian people. Their ideas were eagerly taken up by Yeltsin’s own reformers, led by the economist Yegor Gaidar, who had been inspired by the ‘shock therapy’ that had
transformed countries like Poland a couple of years earlier. Yeltsin had appointed him to ‘give the people economic freedom, and remove all barriers to the freedom of enterprises and
entrepreneurship’. Within a few years millions of Russians were reduced to extreme poverty, while a handful of go-getters and former communist officials turned themselves into billionaire
oligarchs, snapping up the country’s resources for a fraction of their value.

Undoubtedly, under Yeltsin Russians enjoyed Freedom, with a great neon-lit, capital F, such as they had never known in their nation’s thousand-year history. The 1990s were riotous years.
They saw an explosion of energies that had been pent up for 70 years of communism. Any Russian with a bit of cash and enterprise could set up a small business, if only a little stall selling
Snickers bars and vodka. Russians were free to travel abroad, to read whatever they wished, say what they liked and demonstrate against their leaders. There were competitive elections and political
parties. National television stations broadcast biting satire and no-holds-barred critiques of Kremlin policies. New private banks sponsored ballets and concerts. Shops quickly filled up with
consumer goods and foodstuffs that Soviet citizens had only glimpsed in foreign films. After the dark decades of totalitarian rule, people now felt unafraid. There was optimism and hope. Certainly
that’s how Russia looked to most Western observers. Evidently, it’s how Bill Clinton saw things.

And yet, when I look back at my notebooks and dispatches from the time, I am reminded that most Russians had a very different impression. My reports for the BBC chronicled a decade of shame and
humiliation.

Yeltsin’s Russia was a country that seemed to be run by thugs. You saw them barrelling down the highways in their cars with darkened windows, or ordering thousand-dollar bottles of wine in
the best restaurants and snarling contemptuously at the waitresses, or shopping in horrendously overpriced boutiques, and occasionally gunning each other down in broad daylight. Contract killings
were commonplace, as Russia’s mafia-style gangs carved up territories and businesses.

The BBC’s offices were located in a hotel and business centre part-owned by an American, Paul Tatum. After a dispute with his Chechen business partner, Tatum was riddled with bullets fired
from a Kalashnikov rifle – at 5pm as he walked into a metro station near the hotel. His killer was never found. On another occasion I found myself in a traffic jam, and as I slowly edged
forward noticed that a little hold-up was going on at the side of the road – again in broad daylight. Several men were pointing their guns at the head of some poor guy lying on the ground. On
yet another ordinary day in Moscow a restaurant was raided, and we all threw ourselves to the floor while arrests were made. To get into my local supermarket, you had to walk past guards wearing
fatigues and cradling AK-47s. All the early new capitalism was accompanied by violence and threats: whether you managed a five-star hotel or sold souvenirs from a trestle table on the Arbat, you
paid protection money to one mafia gang or another.

On the outskirts of the major cities, especially Moscow, the so-called ‘New Russians’ built mansions with swimming pools, wine cellars and fashionable turrets, all hidden from view
behind 15-foot fences. They represented a tiny proportion of the population. Millions meanwhile were impoverished by the economic reforms that started in 1992. The sudden liberalisation of prices
led to soaring inflation. Ordinary Russians lined the pavements selling off their belongings. The very centre of Moscow became a huge flea-market. I vividly remember one man in particular – a
middle-aged scientist with a PhD – selling old rusting padlocks and other bric-a-brac.

Other scientists emigrated in search of work that would give them a decent wage, many of them taking Russia’s strategic knowledge and secrets with them, leaving their country devoid of its
best brains just when it needed them.

Railway stations filled with beggars and homeless people. The
Kursky vokzal
– Moscow’s main station for southern destinations – became a Dickensian dosshouse full of
pickpockets and sick people. Amputees from the first Chechen war (1994– 96) began to clump around metro carriages asking for alms.

Business, of sorts, spread everywhere – most visibly in the shape of tiny kiosks selling suspicious-looking alcohols and foodstuffs. Meat, unfit for human consumption, was sold at
marketplaces that sprang up spontaneously on pieces of waste ground, which became breeding grounds for rats and disease.

Desperate people sank their savings into pyramid schemes that invariably collapsed, leaving them penniless. In 1992 the government issued privatisation vouchers to every citizen. The idea was
that these could be exchanged for shares in enterprises being privatised. In practice millions of people just sold them or gave them away and they ended up largely in the hands of a few shrewd
entrepreneurs or state enterprise managers who thereby became Russia’s new capitalist owners.

Industry collapsed. Workers were not paid, or were paid several months in arrears, and often with goods – towels or soap or tampons – rather than money. Enterprises themselves traded
with each other by barter. A once proud country received shipments of food aid – sugar and margarine from the European Union’s surplus stocks and US army rations left over from the Gulf
War. A superpower was now holding out a begging bowl.

Flying to Vancouver in April 1993 to ask President Clinton for help, Yeltsin pointed out: ‘Remember that East Germany needed $100 billion to get rid of the communist monster.’ He
returned with the promise of just $1.6 billion, much of it in the form of credits and food aid. Some wondered whether the West lacked imagination. Did Russia not need a ‘Marshall Plan’
to rebuild its decrepit Soviet-era infrastructure, which was in little better shape than Germany’s after the Second World War?

Western consultancies probably profited more from Western aid packages than the Russians did. I remember interviewing the manager of a small Moscow bakery who had been on a month-long management
course, paid for by Western governments, with some consultancy in England. ‘All I really needed,’ she told me, ‘was the money to buy some top-class bakery equipment. I know how to
manage my company!’

Russian society was truly battered by the abrupt transition from communism. People had literally lost their own country: the Soviet Union, a land of 250 million people in 15 national republics,
splintered. Twenty-five million Russians suddenly found themselves residents of foreign countries, stranded in what became known as the ‘near abroad’. Inhabitants of Siberia could no
longer escape to holiday in the Crimea (now in Ukraine) or even in Moscow, because air fares were beyond their reach. I was astonished, on a trip to Siberia, to hear people calling European Russia
the ‘mainland’, as though they were marooned on a remote island in the middle of an ocean.

There was little sign that the Kremlin’s Western advisers understood how to handle this dislocated society. Western governments didn’t seem to notice the chaos and squalor – or
they didn’t care, so obsessed were they with the vision of building capitalism, regardless of its immediate impact. Western corporations only saw a massive new marketplace for their goods. A
strange Russian phrase,
Produkt kompanii Prokter end Gembl
(produced by Proctor and Gamble), boomed out at the end of every other TV ad like some new political slogan. I think Russians must
have been driven mad by those words. They seemed to replace ‘Long live the Communist Party’ seamlessly, but instead of promising a radiant future they promised Head & Shoulders and
Pampers, which few Russians could yet afford.

American consultants in sharp suits swarmed around, cooing over Nizhny Novgorod’s privatisation projects and its pioneering young reformers. The city on the Volga, previously known as
Gorky, was the first to sell off major chunks of the state’s assets to ordinary people. In many ways it really was inspiring. I remember watching go-ahead Russians, keen to set up their own
private businesses, inspecting 195 state-owned trucks and vans, many of them in a dreadful condition, and then bidding for them at an auction. The problem for me, and I suspect for many Russians,
was the sight of so many foreigners supervising the process. To all intents and purposes it looked as if America was selling off Russia.

For those who took the leap – ‘collectives’ of shop-workers who got together to buy and run their own stores, for example – it really worked. As proprietors, desperate to
attract customers, they set about transforming their businesses with a zeal that soon swept away the drab Soviet shopping experience. But for those on the other side of the counter, whose savings
and pensions were obliterated by hyper-inflation, it was a very different story. Life-expectancy plummeted, alcoholism rose and thousands of quack doctors, psychics and ‘white witches’
stepped in to take advantage of the general mood of desolation.

And then there was the Chechen war. Yeltsin had encouraged Russia’s regions to assert their own powers, but Chechnya, a small Muslim republic in the northern Caucasus, went so far as to
declare itself independent. To accept this might have created a precedent which could lead to the break-up of the Russian Federation, so in December 1994 Yeltsin ordered an invasion of the
republic. It was an all-round disaster. Thousands of poorly trained Russian troops died, and hundreds of thousands of Chechens were either killed or displaced to neighbouring republics. The
capital, Grozny, was reduced to rubble. The Chechens became radicalised and embittered, rekindled their Islamic faith, which had been dormant in the Soviet period, and thousands of men joined the
separatist militias – who eventually forced the Russian army out of their country. It was an ignominious defeat, which led to Chechnya’s
de facto
independence by the end of 1996.
The rebels also took to staging terrorist attacks inside Russia itself: in the summer of 1995 they seized more than a thousand hostages in a hospital in the southern town of Budyonnovsk. The
authorities tried to storm the hospital (leading to the deaths of at least 130 people) but then allowed the hostage-takers to escape.

By early 1996 Boris Yeltsin’s popularity had slumped to a barely measurable level. Not only were his reforms unpopular and the war in Chechnya a disaster, but the president himself had
become an embarrassment on account of his frequent drunken appearances. There is little doubt that the communist leader Gennady Zyuganov could have been elected president in that summer’s
election if it had been fair. Instead, the country’s new oligarchs – billionaire businessmen who feared losing their new-found wealth if the communists came back – banded together
to ensure a Yeltsin miracle. These were men who in a ‘loans for shares’ scheme initiated in 1995 acquired Russia’s largest state industries, including most of its oil and gas
reserves, for a fraction of their worth, in exchange for bailing out the penniless government. Now they bankrolled Yeltsin’s campaign and used the national television stations they owned to
skew election coverage entirely in his favour. Yeltsin swept back to power – and the West sighed with relief. For Clinton and other Western leaders, ‘democracy’ and the
‘free market’ had been saved in Russia. And that was all that mattered.

What most Western leaders failed to appreciate was the psychological trauma that Russians, as individuals and as a nation, were going through. Vladimir Putin was far more in tune with it.