In fact Berezovsky did surrender his control of the station, selling his stake to fellow oligarch Roman Abramovich, who meekly transferred his voting rights to the state, thus completing the government’s takeover of the channel. But this did not stop the attacks against Berezovsky. On 1 November the state prosecutor accused him of defrauding Aeroflot of hundreds of millions of dollars. Berezovsky was abroad at the time and decided to stay there. From the safety of exile he claimed that the money he was alleged to have embezzled was partly used to finance Putin’s election campaigns.
Berezovsky has lived in London ever since, despite repeated Russian attempts to have him extradited, and was granted political asylum in September 2003. Putin personally intervened to try to persuade Britain to send him back, and in so doing betrayed his lack of understanding of Western systems. He asked Prime Minister Tony Blair to put pressure on the courts to extradite Berezovsky. According to a well-informed source, Blair explained that this was impossible in the UK: it was a magistrate’s decision, not the government’s. Putin, unable to fathom the independence of the courts, took offence.1 This was the KGB man speaking, the product of a Soviet upbringing unwittingly applying his own undemocratic standards to a Western country.
There is no reason to think that Putin was dissembling; rather, it seems clear that he actually believes that it is normal for Western politicians to influence the courts in the same way as Russian leaders can. His belief that governments control the media is similar: in 2005 he accused President Bush to his face of personally ordering the sacking of the veteran CBS news anchor Dan Rather. And on another occasion he told a journalist who questioned why Russian police routinely beat up peaceful protestors that in the West it was ‘normal’ for demonstrators who found themselves in the wrong place to be ‘beaten around the head with a baton’.
The vertical of power
The crackdown on the free media was not the only reason why the West’s admiration for President Putin’s first steps in foreign policy and economic reform, described in the first two chapters of this book, was tempered from the start by wariness about his understanding of democracy.
One of Putin’s earliest decisions as president was to start creating what he called the ‘vertical of power’ – the gathering-in of all political power to the centre, and effectively into his own hands. He believed that lack of central control lay at the heart of Russia’s woes, that Yeltsin’s weak leadership had allowed crime and corruption to flourish, oligarchs to amass power and the country’s regions to spin off into separate orbits. Yeltsin had encouraged the regions to ‘take as much sovereignty as you can swallow’, which had had the unwanted effect of allowing governors quietly to ignore or even sabotage edicts from the centre, threatening the disintegration of the federation. Many regions passed laws that contradicted the Russian constitution, withheld taxes from the centre and struck bilateral agreements with foreign countries. Some of them could have survived well as independent countries: the republic of Yakutia, for example, produces one-quarter of the world’s diamonds (and has a population of less than half a million); Khanty-Mansiisk (population 1.5 million) is the world’s second largest oil producer.
On 13 May – just six days after his inauguration – Putin announced that the country’s 89 regions would be placed under the control of seven ‘super-governors’ personally appointed by the president. Five of Putin’s seven enforcers turned out to be siloviki2 – men with careers in the security services and armed forces. They included Viktor Cherkesov, first deputy director of the FSB, whose work in the past had included the persecution of Soviet dissidents.
Six days later Putin initiated a reform of the upper chamber of parliament (the Federation Council or ‘senate’). Previously, elected regional governors and heads of regional legislative councils were ex officio senators; now the regional bosses were replaced by nominated representatives, allowing the Kremlin to fill the Federation Council with ‘friendly’ senators.
Putin then moved to centralise the collection and distribution of taxes, which had been about 50–50 between the centre and the regions, to 70–30 in favour of the central government.
The apex of the new vertical of power was not the federal government, however, but rather Putin himself – something he achieved by appointing trusted colleagues from the security services or from his home town, St Petersburg, to key positions. Many of them, moreover, were also given directorships in state companies, thereby enmeshing the country’s political and business structures in a vast spider web, at the centre of which sat Putin.
Igor Sechin had the perfect pedigree: he had worked with Putin in St Petersburg, and by some accounts may also earlier have been a spy, working undercover as a translator in Portuguese-speaking African countries. He became Putin’s most trusted adviser, and followed his master from St Petersburg to Moscow in 1996. When Putin became acting president he retained Yeltsin’s chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, but immediately appointed Sechin as deputy chief of staff, controlling the flow of papers that crossed his desk, and in effect running the energy industry. In 2004 he also became chairman of the board of Rosneft, the state oil company.
Viktor Ivanov, from the Leningrad KGB, became Putin’s deputy chief of staff in charge of personnel matters – and also chairman of both the Almaz air defence corporation and Aeroflot. Sechin and Ivanov were considered the most powerful siloviki in Putin’s circle.
Dmitry Medvedev, another former colleague of Putin’s from St Petersburg, came to Moscow in 1999 to become a third deputy chief of staff, and also chairman of the state gas monopoly, Gazprom.
Putin brought his St Petersburg colleague Alexei Miller to Moscow to become deputy minister of energy and then CEO of Gazprom.
The two chief economic reformers, German Gref and Alexei Kudrin, also came from St Petersburg. Gref served on the board of Gazprom, and Kudrin became chairman of both VTB bank and the diamond producer Alrosa.
Sergei Naryshkin, another Leningrader and former colleague at KGB school, was promoted in Putin’s second term to government chief of staff, as well as chairman of the board of Channel One television and deputy chairman of Rosneft.
Another old Leningrad KGB colleague, Nikolai Patrushev, became chairman of the FSB, following Putin himself.
Rashid Nurgaliyev worked under Putin in the FSB and then became interior minister. Cherkesov, mentioned above, was another subordinate of Putin’s in the FSB.
Sergei Chemezov, a fellow spy with Putin in Dresden, was brought in to run Rosoboronexport, the country’s chief arms exporter. And another ‘Chekist’, Vladimir Yakunin, was brought in to the transport ministry and eventually became head of Russian Railways.
Yakunin has another link to Putin: they are both founding members of a so-called ‘dacha cooperative’ known as Ozero, which manages their adjacent country houses on Komsomolskoye lake near St Petersburg. All of Putin’s other friends from the Ozero group (as we shall see in Chapter 12) now hold top positions in government, banking and the media.
The Chechen war and the backlash
During Putin’s first years as president events in Chechnya cast a long shadow over his claims to be bringing Russia into the ‘European family’. I spent several months in Chechnya during the earlier war (1994–96) and saw for myself how the republic was ravaged by Russian forces. It seemed to me that there was more than sufficient evidence of serious war crimes and human rights violations, which I and scores of other journalists documented, but the international community – perhaps because it was preoccupied with the simultaneous wars in the Balkans – did nothing about them. The total devastation of the capital, Grozny, and the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, whose apartment blocks were literally pulverised by Russian air power and artillery, could not be justified by the alleged purpose of destroying ‘bandits’, as the rebel forces were known. I interviewed survivors of Russian ‘filtration camps’ – notorious prisons where Chechens were tortured to extract confessions, or just for fun. I visited huge open graves
, filled with hundreds of bodies, some with their hands tied behind their backs. I met dozens of grieving families, saw murdered women and children, hundreds of homes destroyed in villages all across Chechnya, streams of refugees fleeing from Russian troops, people cowering in basements from air attacks. I met defenceless, bedridden old people, all but freezing and starving to death in the rubble of their homes. But this was under Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, and the West, besotted with his alleged devotion to democracy, offered only limp condemnation, considering the conflict to be an ‘internal affair’.
The second war, unleashed by Putin in 1999, was by all accounts even more brutal. But fewer Western journalists covered it, because it was simply too dangerous. At least in the earlier war the Chechens had been generally well disposed to journalists; since then the republic had turned into a lawless quagmire, where the risk of kidnapping and murder were just too great. The rebel fighters themselves were now as barbarous as the Russians had been. It was left mainly to courageous journalists like Anna Politkovskaya of Novaya gazeta to bring the truth to the world this time. (And even so no Western leader has called for any Russian commander or politician to be tried for war crimes.)
In the first war it was relatively easy for journalists to move around in Chechnya. It was this that led to the highly critical coverage – not only in the West but in Russia too, especially on NTV. The authorities learned their lesson, and the second time around tried to restrict access to the war zone. One Russian journalist, Andrei Babitsky, who worked for Radio Liberty, was even kidnapped by federal forces in early 2000 because of his critical reporting. They then handed him over to Chechen fighters in exchange for Russian prisoners of war, as though he himself were a combatant – a fallacy apparently supported by Putin, who indicated that he saw nothing wrong with the swap because Babitsky – a journalist, let’s not forget – was a traitor: ‘This was his own decision,’ Putin told the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. ‘He went to the people whose interests he effectively served.’2
If Putin believed that critical reporting was tantamount to serving the enemy, then there could be no doubt about what he must have thought of Politkovskaya. After the taming of NTV she became the most important chronicler of Russian barbarity in Chechnya, a patient listener to the cries of pain that the Kremlin wished to stifle.
The authorities maintained that the campaign in Chechnya was a ‘security operation’, aimed solely at eliminating terrorists. Politkovskaya spoke to eyewitnesses of Russian ‘security sweeps’, men like 45-year-old Sultan Shuaipov, a refugee from the Grozny suburb of Novaya Katayama. He told Politkovskaya how he had personally gathered up 51 bodies from his street and buried them. Here is just part of his story.
When 74-year-old Said Zubayev came out of No. 36 on Line [street] 5 he ran into the federals and the soldiers made him dance, firing their rifles at his feet to make him jump. When the old man got tired, they shot him. Thanks be to Allah! Said never knew what they did to his family.
At about nine at night, an infantry fighting vehicle broke into the Zubayevs’ courtyard, taking the gates off their hinges. Very efficiently and without wasting words the soldiers brought out of the house and lined up by the steps 64-year-old Zainab, the old man’s wife, their 45-year-old daughter, Malika (the wife of a colonel in the Russian militia); Malika’s little daughter, Amina, aged eight; Mariet, another daughter of Said and Zainab, 40 years old; their 44-year-old nephew, Said Saidakhmed Zubayev; 35-year-old Ruslan, the son of Said and Zainab; his pregnant wife Luiza; and their eight-year-old daughter Eliza. There were several bursts of machine-gun fire and they were all left dead in front of the family home. None of the Zubayevs survived except for Inessa, Ruslan’s 14-year-old daughter. She was very pretty, and before the massacre the soldiers carefully set her to one side, then dragged her off with them.
We looked desperately for Inessa but it was as if she had vanished into thin air [Sultan says]. We think they must have raped her and then buried her somewhere. Otherwise she would have come back to bury her dead. That same night Idris, the headmaster of School No. 55, was killed. First they battered him against a wall for a long time, and broke all his bones, then they shot him in the head. In another house we found, side by side, an 84-year-old Russian woman and her 35-year-old daughter, Larisa, a well-known lawyer in Grozny. They had both been raped and shot. The body of 42-year-old Adlan Akayev, a Professor of Physics at the Chechen State University, was sprawled in the courtyard of his house. He had been tortured. The beheaded body of 47-year-old Demilkhan Akhmadov had had its arms cut off too. It was one of the features of the operation in Novaya Katayama that they cut people’s heads off. I saw several bloodstained chopping blocks. On Shevskaya Street there was a block with an axe stuck in it, and a woman’s head in a red scarf on the block. Alongside, on the ground, also headless, was a man’s body. I found the body of a woman who had been beheaded and had her stomach ripped open. They had stuffed a head into it. Was it hers? Someone else’s?3
Despite all the documented cases of brutality, only one senior officer has ever been brought to justice. Colonel Yuri Budanov was accused of kidnapping, raping and murdering an 18-year-old Chechen woman, Kheda Kungayeva, in a drunken rampage. She was dragged from her home by soldiers and abducted in an armoured personnel carrier, allegedly because they thought she was a sniper. The rape charge was eventually dropped, and in court Budanov admitted strangling the woman, though he claimed to have been temporarily insane at the time, enraged while interrogating her. At first he was found not guilty, but then, after a retrial, was sentenced to ten years in prison. He was released in January 2009, 15 months early, and then murdered in a Moscow street in June 2011.
The payback for the Russian campaign was a decade of Chechen terrorist attacks across Russia – in aeroplanes, underground trains, schools and streets. On 18 April 2002, in his annual state-of-the-nation speech, President Putin declared the war over. But six months later terror struck right at the heart of the Russian capital. In October 2002, up to 50 armed Chechens, many of them women, strode into the Dubrovka Theatre during a performance of a musical called Nord-Ost, and took the players and the 850-strong audience hostage. They were armed with guns and explosives and the women put on suicide belts. They demanded the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya – within one week, otherwise they would start shooting hostages.
For the next three days Putin was locked in almost constant crisis meetings with his security chiefs. At the first session the siloviki proposed storming the building, while the prime minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, sharply disagreed, calling for talks with the terrorists in order to avoid casualties. According to Kasyanov, the security chiefs argued there was no point in making concessions because casualties would be unavoidable in any case. Putin was scheduled to travel to Mexico for a summit of Asian and Pacific leaders, but sent Kasyanov in his place. Some have suggested the decision was taken in order to remove from the process the only man opposed to using force to free the hostages, but even Kasyanov concedes that there was no way Putin himself could have left the country at that point (especially in the light of the criticism he earned over his response to the Kursk disaster).4 President Yeltsin had gone to a G7 meeting in Halifax, Canada, in the middle of the Budyonnovsk hostage crisis in 1995, leaving his prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, to negotiate with the captors and allow them to escape. Putin certainly was not going to repeat that mistake.
A number of politicians and journalists (including Anna Politkovskaya) did try to reason with the hostage-takers, but to no avail. In the end the siloviki did it their way. Special forces pumped an anaesthetic gas into the theatre to sedate the terrorists (and the hostages), and then commandoes stormed in. There was a gun-fight, in which all of the terrorists were killed, including those who had already been knocked out by the gas. But 130 hostages also died – mostly from the effects of the toxic chemical and the failure to provide them with immediate medical care when they were brought out of the building.
There was much criticism of the action, including the fact that the chemical composition of the gas used was so secret that even medics attending the scene were not told what it was or what antidote could be used, almost certainly worsening the death toll.
Putin later defended his actions, saying hundreds of lives had been saved. And in truth, no government in the world has ever worked out a perfect way to cope with such a situation. But had the strongmen really taken enough care to protect the hostages’ lives? Or were they more intent on killing the terrorists? When the Kursk sank it is assumed that Putin turned down foreign offers of help primarily because he did not want NATO rescuers poking around a top-secret Russian nuclear submarine. The chemical agent used to end the theatre siege was also a military secret, the exact formula of which was never revealed.
The big issue that the Russian authorities refuse to face up to is what motivates the terrorists. Is it, as Putin always claims, part of an international Islamist movement, with its roots in Pakistan and Afghanistan, or is it a vengeful response to Russia’s vicious attempts to subjugate Chechnya since 1994? The answer can be found in some of the gunmen’s answers to Anna Politkovskaya during the theatre siege. She asked one of the captors to release the older children from the theatre (the younger ones had been released). ‘Children?’ came the response. ‘There are no children in there. In security sweeps you take ours from 12 years old. We will hold on to yours.’
‘In retaliation?’ Politkovskaya asked.
‘So that you know how it feels.’
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