That the political group around Putin could have masterminded the apartment bombings is horrifying. It is virtually impossible to find such examples in modern history. Certainly many leaders have started wars abroad and killed “others” in their own quest for political power at home. Leaders like Hafez Assad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq brutally killed many of their citizens who dared to challenge their rule. But to blow up your own innocent and sleeping people in your capital city is an action almost unthinkable. Yet the evidence that the FSB was at least involved in planting a bomb in Ryazan is incontrovertible. This is not something that happens every day in a civilized or even an uncivilized country, and it strikes at the heart of the legitimacy of the Putin regime from its inception.
The claim to the regime’s legitimacy was based, however, on the idea that the Russian state in the 1990s, under Yel’tsin, had ceased to be respected. Putin’s objective, and the objective of those who came to power with him and helped to bring him to power, was to restore the idea of Russia as a Great Power (derzhava) and a state worthy of and demanding respect in international affairs. The evidence clearly lends support to the conclusion that Putin was not waiting passively throughout the 1990s. He was a player, and eventually a central player in the drama that did indeed bring to power an elite that was nontransparent, unrepresentative, and highly corrupt from its very inception.
Yet undoubtedly this group’s desire to reestablish a strong Russian state, with themselves at its helm, responded to the desire of the general population to stop the disintegration of the country and its further slide into collapse. The events that produced a rallying around Putin over his perceived strong hand in handling crises, even if they were shaped by a hidden Kremlin hand, played to the population’s longing for an energetic and steadfast leader. In his December 1999 Millennial Address, issued only two days before he would become acting president, Putin called for the country to rally around a unified state to prevent Russia from becoming a “third tier country: Everything now depends entirely on our own ability to recognize the level of danger, to unify and rally ourselves and get ourselves ready for prolonged and difficult labor.”273 It is impossible to avoid the conclusion, however, based on the available evidence, that this level of danger was significantly increased by actions of the Kremlin itself, in promoting renewed conflict in Chechnya so that Putin could benefit from a “small and successful war” and then callously and cynically putting its own innocent population in harm’s way as FSB operatives sowed panic in Ryazan. It is not plausible that Putin, as prime minister and former chief of the FSB, would not have been aware of these actions, particularly since he was their main beneficiary. By the end of September 1999, polls showed 45 percent of Russians supported introducing a state of emergency to thwart further terrorist acts;274 by the end of October, Putin was the most favored presidential candidate.275
* * *
I. Chubays was the linchpin in a circle of liberal economists from St. Petersburg who had formed discussion clubs during the perestroika period, establishing the intellectual agenda for privatization. The group included Aleksey Kudrin, Andrey Illarionov, Alfred Kokh, Sergey Vasil’yev, Dmitriy Vasil’yev, Mikhayl Dmitriev, Vladimir Kogan, and Mikhayl Manevich (who was murdered in 1997). All rose to prominent positions in business and government around Chubays. They were not in the same circle as the staff around Sobchak, which included more personnel from the former Communist Party apparatus and the security services.11
II. Turover came from a Republican Spanish family who fled Spain to the USSR after Franco’s victory. He returned to Spain after Franco’s death and then in the late 1980s began working for the Swiss Banca del Gottardo, where he handled accounts of the Swiss construction firm Mabetex and provided advice to members of the Yel’tsin government about managing debts with Western creditor banks. For more on Turover’s life after he was “outed” by Del Ponte, see his interview (Elsässer 2002).
III. When subsequently interviewed by the Moscow English-language newspaper The eXile, Turover insisted that Lur’ye had not interviewed him, but then conceded that the interview had in fact taken place. However, he denied that he had said anything about Putin.35 Novaya gazeta did not retract the story.
IV. This is presumably a reference to Boris Fedorov, who was minister of finance in the early Yel’tsin period.
V. Mikhayl Poltoranin, who became head of the Federal Information Center, was accused by Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Shokhin and former procurator general Valentin Stepankov of an attempt to sell army property to a German firm. All charges were dropped in October 1993.36
VI. Boldyrev, who was one of the founders of the liberal Yabloko Party from St. Petersburg, had moved on to the Federation Council and had become a member of the Federal Audit Chamber. Within months of Putin’s becoming president, Boldyrev lost his position in the Chamber and denounced it as “Putin’s tool.”54
VII. At Naberezhnaya Reki Moyki, 31 in St. Petersburg. Sobchak’s occupation of this apartment is confirmed by the memorial to his living at that address placed directly outside.
VIII. “O kvartirakh (ili kassirakh?)”
IX. Ego nado prosto zatknut’.
X. Zdes’ uzhe, izvinite, ya deystvuyu kak gangster.
XI. Eto uzhe stanovitsya prosto neprilichnym
XII. Nado deystvovat’ ochen’ zhestko.
XIII. Shutov was elected to the St. Petersburg Legislature in December 1998. At the time, he alleged that Putin had used kompromat against Sobchak in 1990 to obtain a position in the mayor’s office.66 In February 1999 Shutov was stripped of his parliamentary immunity and arrested for involvement in the murder of Mikhayl Manevich and Galina Starovoytova. In November he was freed in the courtroom, and within minutes an OMON (Otryad Mobilniy Osobogo Naznacheniya) detachment of the Ministry of the Interior paramilitary riot police from Moscow descended on the courtroom, beat him up, and detained him once again, this time charging him with other murders. In 2002 he was elected again to the city parliament, and the Russian Supreme Court ruled his detention illegal. Only in 2006 was he finally convicted of a murder, previous murder charges having not been proved. He spent seven years in pretrial detention, which was the subject of a complaint by his lawyers to the European Court of Human Rights in Shutov (III) v. Russia, Application No. 20922/08.67 He was never convicted of the murder of either Manevich or Starovoytova. In 2006 Anatoliy Chubays hinted that Shutov had been behind Manevich’s murder, saying after Shutov had received a life sentence, but without mentioning Shutov’s name, “I have carried out everything I promised word for word: All the organizers of this murder are sitting in prison for life, and not one of them will ever come out.”68 For more on the Shutov case and the chronicle of criminal activities in St. Petersburg during the 1990s, see Mikhaylov (2005).
XIV. The annual polls conducted by the Levada Center going back to the 1990s show that the period following the August 1998 banking crisis produced the single greatest increase in popular pessimism, fear about the future, and distrust of authorities: 82 percent reported that 1998 had been harder than the previous year; in 1999, of people’s feelings about the past year, the greatest percentage reported tiredness, fear, confusion, and bitterness. In response to the question of where Russian political life was going, 62 percent chose “escalating chaos and anarchy.” Consequently general indices of confidence in public institutions showed an unprecedented decline in confidence in the president; his numbers in 1998 and 1999 dipped for the first time below the already low numbers for the government, the Duma, and regional officials as a group.112
XV. Anichin went on to become deputy minister of internal affairs and head of its Investigative Committee. He was accused of involvement in the Magnitskiy case and calls were made in the West to place him on a visa ban list. Magnitskiy was a Russian citizen who represented the U.S.-based investment firm Hermitage Capital, which alleged that Russian companies were engaged in corrupt and fraudulent practices and was itself raided by
the police and charged with tax evasion. Magnitskiy was employed to investigate the case but was arrested and held for eleven months in pretrial detention, where he died after being beaten and tortured and denied medical treatment. One of the commissioners of the Moscow Public Oversight Commission who released a study of the death described it as a “premeditated murder.”153 According to Lyudmila Alekseyeva, a human rights activist in Moscow and head of Russia’s Helsinki Group, Magnitskiy had been subjected not only to “willful torture” but also to false claims by Anichin that he was guilty of committing the alleged crimes despite the fact that he was never put on trial.154 She made these claims in a formal letter to Aleksandr Bastrykin, who had replaced Anichin as head of the Investigative Committee at the same time that the committee ceased to report to the procurator general and started reporting directly to the president in January 2011. International reaction led in December 2012 to the passage of a law in the United States that subjected those who were directly involved in Magnitskiy’s detention to denial of visas and seizure of foreign assets.155 Medvedev subsequently “released” Anichin from his position on June 11, 2011.156
XVI. In July Putin’s situation was made a little more delicate by the return to Petersburg of his erstwhile mentor, Anatoliy Sobchak, whose plane touched down at Pulkovo Airport to great fanfare. Sobchak announced to the hundreds of waiting journalists that he was going to stand in the December 1999 Duma elections, which Putin presumably would have supported. In response to questions about the status of corruption charges against him, he defiantly declared, “If there are any complaints against me, I am ready to testify openly in court about the whole affair,” a statement that could hardly have been welcomed by Putin, who had worked to have the investigation suppressed. Sobchak immediately went to lay flowers on the graves of two political allies who had been murdered since he had fled to Paris, the federal parliamentarian, human rights campaigner, and possible presidential contender Galina Starovoytova, and the former Petersburg deputy governor Mikhayl Manevich, neither of whom was ever specifically linked to corruption scandals in Petersburg. Sobchak pointedly declared, “If today those working in our law enforcement bodies are unable or unwilling to solve these murders, sooner or later there will be people there who will.”161 When Sobchak’s efforts to win a Duma seat failed, he threw himself into campaigning for Putin’s presidential run. Putin was campaigning about the need for democracy while still keeping a hard line on Chechnya, and Sobchak declared that Putin was “a new Stalin, not as bloodthirsty but no less brutal and firm because that is the only way to get Russians to do any work.”162 This was hardly the message that Putin wanted to get out to the West. Sobchak also told a reporter from El País that he was independent of Putin and did not need his help, suggesting there had been a falling-out.163 While in Kaliningrad oblast’, Sobchak died in disputed circumstances. Officially he was said to have suffered a heart attack, but reports swirled that he had not been alone in the room when he became ill and that he had had two autopsies, one in Kaliningrad that suggested foul play and one in St. Petersburg that concluded he had had a heart attack. He was buried the next day, February 24, 2000.164 Arkadi Vaksberg, an investigative journalist with forensic experience who lived in Paris and was a friend of Sobchak, claimed that Sobchak’s bodyguards had also become ill, suggesting foul play. Vaksberg suggested that an old KGB technique had been revived: putting poison on the lightbulb of a bedside lamp that released deadly toxins when the lamp was turned on.165
XVII. CESID was the primary Spanish intelligence agency until 2002, when it was reorganized and renamed Centro Nacional de Inteligencia.
XVIII. In 2013 the Russian press reported that Zolotov was in line to head a new unified team for the personal protection of Putin that would combine the support systems provided for presidential security from the FSO, the MVD, and the FSB.212 But then Zolotov was moved instead in 2014 to become head of all Ministry of Interior troops.
XIX. Scientific-Investigative Institute (Nauchno-Issledovatel’skiy Institut, NII) for the Disposal and Conversion of Explosive Materials (Roskonversvzryvtsentr) under the Ministry of Education. The letter from Minister of Education Vladimir Filippov to Procurator General Vladimir Ustinov complaining about the lack of progress in the investigation of the Institute’s culpability in the transfer of RDX under Criminal Case No. 9271 was subsequently published.263
XX. For the originals, see the series of articles by Mandeville.266
Chapter Five
Putin Prepares to Take Over
From Prime Minister to Acting President, December 1999–May 2000
THE CRITICAL PHASE of Putin’s ascent to power occurred in December 1999, when he succeeded in destroying the chances of his main opponents to win elections. The fraud and abuse that were features of both the December Duma elections and the March 2000 presidential elections were a clear signal to rival politicians that those who provided early support would be rewarded and those who thought that elites could be ousted by democratic elections were both foolhardy and doomed. They would either be pushed from the scene or made into compliant Kremlin puppets, allowed to have their parties and their victories in return for playing the piper’s tune. This period before Putin was formally inaugurated in May 2000 is marked by two fraud-filled elections and the leaking of a document that purported to be the Kremlin’s strategy for reshaping the Presidential Administration’s structure and staff in accord with Putin’s plan to strengthen the presidency, undermine democracy, and fill the Kremlin’s ranks with KGB “professionals.” It is the contrast between Putin’s open statements supporting democracy and his covert promotion of an authoritarian blueprint that is the key to his presidency and provides the core reason it is possible to see the shape and direction of his entire rule from this early period.
The Duma Elections, December 19, 1999
The Duma elections unfolded against the backdrop of the beginning of the Second Chechen War, an operation that former prime minister Sergey Stepashin was to declare had been planned since March 1999.1 Putin’s toughness, his promise to bring stability to the country, the overwhelming support he received from the oligarch-friendly media, its concomitant vilification of the Communists and OVR, and ad hominem attacks on Yevgeniy Primakov and Yuriy Luzhkov2 ensured victory for Putin as Yel’tsin’s heir apparent and for the latest Kremlin “party of power,” Unity. Putin’s emergence as the resolute leader of the “party of war” during a major national crisis produced a stunning increase in his popularity going into the elections. Starting at less than 5 percent in September (compared to more than 20 and 25 percent for Primakov and Gennadiy Zyuganov, respectively), Putin’s approval rating rose to over 45 percent in late November (compared to less than 10 and 20 percent for Primakov and Zyuganov).3
The key to the Kremlin’s strategy was not only to ensure a good showing for Unity but, even more crucially, to destroy the reputations of those candidates who had the greatest chance of beating Putin in the forthcoming presidential race: Luzhkov and Primakov. Putin’s best chance of winning in the March elections was to limit the field of presidential candidates to those who were not positively perceived by the population as a whole: the head of the Communists, Gennadiy Zyuganov, and the head of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, Vladimir Zhirinovskiy. Luzhkov and Primakov’s Fatherland–All Russia Party (OVR) occupied a center-left platform and commanded the loyalty of a large number of regional elites, including Putin’s arch nemesis in St. Petersburg, Vladimir Yakovlev. And Primakov’s ratings, though declining as Putin’s grew, showed he was the real candidate to beat.
These regional leaders’ opposition to the Kremlin under Yel’tsin, to his government, now headed by Prime Minister Putin, and to Unity marked the only time (before or since) that a viable opposition party of economic liberals and political conservatives had arisen to oppose the Kremlin. This development threw the Kremlin into a panic, according to Boris Berezovskiy: “The situation was bordering on catastrophe. We had lost time, and we had
lost our positional advantage. Primakov and Luzhkov were organizing countrywide. Around fifty governors [out of eighty-nine] had already signed on to their political movement. And Primakov was a monster who wanted to reverse everything that had been accomplished in those years.”4 Primakov’s call while he was prime minister to clear ordinary criminals out of Russian jails to make way for corrupt officials underlined his seriousness as a threat to the oligarchs.5 And the presence in the election of so many OVR candidates for governor underlined the second main issue of this race: the choice between the continuation of a decentralized federal system or a reassertion of strong central control under a single unifying figure.
Alongside OVR, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), the liberals (with the exception of Grigoriy Yavlinskiy’s Yabloko Party) succeeded in uniting various splinter parties into the Union of Right Forces.I However, the CPRF stood at the head of all parties in public opinion polls going into the fall election season, and the Kremlin had every reason to believe that Yel’tsin’s unpopularity would only bolster the popularity of the other major non-Kremlin parties, all of whom vowed to continue the investigations of the Yel’tsin Family and the oligarchs around them. Yel’tsin’s approval ratings dropped to 2 percent, and those around Yel’tsin became increasingly aware that their wealth, their positions, and perhaps even their freedom and lives were hanging in the balance. The campaign showed clear and, according to independent Western election observers, unfair advantage for Unity. Military units received handouts about the Duma elections that mentioned only Unity, and the army’s chief deputy of the Main Administration of Educational Affairs publicly called on subordinates to promote Unity among the recruits. Similar reports emerged about special “Unity support committees” being formed within departments of the federal administration.6
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