What is so eye-opening about this document is that it presents an actual outline of the proposal to significantly increase the political control by the Kremlin’s Presidential Administration. In explaining the objectives and tasks of these expanded presidential offices, the document refers both to the “open” or public role of the revitalized Presidential Administration and the “not publicized” functions. It is worth quoting in full all its edicts and instructions:
1. The formation of a controlled mass public platform for all politicians and public-political organizations of the Russian Federation, supporting the President of the R.F.
2. The continuing removal from the Russian political arena of the State Duma of the R.F. as a “political platform” for the forces in opposition to the President of the R.F., and affixing with it an exclusively lawmaking activity.
3. The establishment of an informational-political barrier between the President of the R.F and the entire spectrum of oppositional forces in the Russian Federation.
4. Introducing active agitation and propaganda throughout the entire territory of the Russian Federation in support of the President of the R.F., the Government of the R.F., and their policies.
5. Introducing constant information-analytical and political work in all means of mass media.
6. Introducing direct political counter-propaganda aimed at discrediting the opposition to the President, R.F.’s political leaders, and political public organizations.
7. Holding public gatherings (pickets, rallies, conferences, marches, and etc.) in support of the President of the R.F.
8. The organization and management of active political activity in all the regions of the Russian Federation in order to prevent attempts of governors, heads of krais, republics, and oblasts to conduct any activities aimed at dismembering Russia or weakening the powers of the center.
9. The creation and maintenance of our own sources of mass media.78
The very idea that there would be open discussion in a document of removing the legislature as a political actor, “discrediting political leaders,” and “conducting active agitation” in support of the president is startling. And this was only 2000. The document also clearly reveals what the Kremlin actually meant by promising to rely on the work of “professionals.” It explicitly states that the “FSB, FAPSIXIII and other security forces should be in charge of providing professionals to staff the offices of the Administration,”79 and further that “all of the special and secret activities of the Directorate relating to counteracting the forces of opposition to the President of the R.F. . . . will be entirely in the hands and under the control of the special services [spets. sluzhb].”80 These professionals would function on both an open and a closed basis but would have specific tasks in dealing with the press, the opposition, elections, and the regions.
The Presidential Administration should not only be repackaging information in the mass media in a light more favorable to the president but should also be “taking control of different mass media outlets, using gathered special information, including that of a compromising character.” Persistent opposition outlets should be driven to a “financial crisis.”81
In relations with the opposition, the “open” function of the Presidential Administration is to “lock in constitutional norms” and “prevent the development in society of extremism,” while the “closed” function is a “massive cascade of political actions against the opposition. . . . It is necessary always to ruin coordinated plans of all opposition in general and each oppositionist personally.”82 As an example, the document proposes that “If there were a scandal with G. Seleznyov—beginning out of the publications in a St. Petersburg newspaper about his distant connection to the assassination of G. Starovoytova—developed and promoted by the ‘Independent Commission for Public Enquiry into the Assassination of G. Starovoytova,’ created with the help of the Administration, . . . sooner or later . . . he will begin looking for contacts within the Administration . . . and would be more ‘compliant’ in solving political questions than he is now.” This is part of a whole section on the political uses of “independent public commissions” against the opposition. It explicitly states that such a commission on Starovoytova “will gradually reveal the ‘communist trail’ in the murder of Ms. Starovoytova, which will continue to use it as the beginning of a large-scale campaign of struggle against the Communist Party.”83
On elections, the role of the Presidential Administration is to ensure the election at all levels of “loyal to the ‘Kremlin’ (controlled) deputies [loyalnyye ‘Kremlyu’ (upravlyayemykh) deputatov].”84 The maximum result for pro-Kremlin candidates at all levels is to be achieved; in particular the document promotes the targeting of anyone in favor of reducing the role of the “Center” in all aspects of life in the regions. As part of this effort, the document states that the Presidential Administration should take active measures to “disorient” the “protest electorate.” As to what these measures might be, the document makes clear that the task at hand is to “start and to conduct a permanently increasing ‘offensive’ against the opposition.”85
In the regions, it had long been known that Putin was concerned about the fissiparous tendencies in Russia, often expressing concern during the election that firm measures had to be taken to stop Russia’s collapse. The document shows the awareness by Kremlin officials of the need to urgently deal with regional opposition to Putin’s desire for central control: “Also, beginning in September 2000 electoral campaigns will be held in more than 40 regions of the Russian Federation, and for the new President of the R.F. strengthening his positions in regions of the Russian Federation and influencing these elections is a strategic necessity.”86 Efforts are to be made to obstruct the election of any leader whose actions might diminish the reassertion of the power of the Center on all aspects of life and governance in the regions, with details on the exact measures to be taken in controlling the regions contained in another classified document.
All in all, the document is a stunning foretaste of what the Kremlin in fact ended up doing. At the time there were still many who felt that Putin would decide not to take these measures, or that the opposition would succeed in obliging him to forgo them. In any case, the document appeared after Putin was already elected, although not inaugurated. A deputy press spokesperson was sent out to protest that this may have been one of dozens of proposals for reform circulating.87 The journalist who followed the story, Nikolay Vardul’, continued to stand by its authenticity and insisted he obtained the blueprint from a source inside the Presidential Administration: “Today they deny the plans, but tomorrow they will return to them. I’m interested in the fact they are proposing to bring the secret services into the administration. That needs to be written about and it’s definitely going to happen.”88 Looking back a decade and a half later, it indeed happened—the plan was implemented to its last letter, and then some.
Putin’s First Decisions as Acting President Target an Independent Media
Putin would start with the media. The independent media had known for months that, given their own harsh treatment of him, Putin would turn his attention on them the moment he was elected. On January 28, 2000, the radio station Ekho Moskvy conducted a lengthy interview with Marina Sal’ye. She was the former St. Petersburg parliamentarian who led the investigation into Putin’s corrupt business dealings, producing a city parliamentary resolution in 1992 that he be dismissed. She now charged that he was the head of a “corrupt oligarchy” who had worked in St. Petersburg with and through his “ ‘partners’ of the shadow economy, criminal and mafia structures, and front companies,”89 and she once again brought up the untidy details of Putin’s involvement in the food scandal.90 Sal’ye’s reaction to Putin’s coming to power was symptomatic of the view of the liberal intelligentsia, who were largely in shock about the prospects of a KGB revanche.
A preeminent Russian journalist, Andrey Babitskiy, who had worked for Radio Liberty since 1989, had been relentl
essly attacking Russian military actions endangering Chechen civilians. Russian troops captured him in Chechnya, charged him with being a Chechen agent, and ultimately exchanged him like a foreign spy for Russian soldiers held by the Chechens. This unprecedented treatment of an accredited journalist, and a Russian citizen, put the rest of the journalistic community on notice, particularly when Putin unabashedly declared, “What Babitskiy did is much more dangerous than firing a machine gun.”91 Putin’s own detailed knowledge of the operation and involvement in the exchange became evident to Natalya Gevorkyan when she was interviewing Putin for First Person. As Masha Gessen subsequently reported, Gevorkyan wondered after the interview whether Babitskiy was even traded, or whether the whole exercise had actually been a special operation to demonstrate to journalists that they would be treated as foreign agents if necessary. Gevorkyan, who decided early on in Putin’s tenure to move to France despite her very senior status in Russia, told Gessen, “The Babitskiy story made my life easier. . . . I realized that this was how [Putin] was going to rule. That this is how his fucking brain works. So I had no illusions. I knew this was how he understood the word patriotism—just the way he had been taught in all those KGB schools: the country is as great as the fear it inspires, and the media should be loyal.”92
Alarmed by the growing atmosphere of intolerance from the Kremlin, thirty media organizations signed an open letter in the weekly Obshchaya gazeta on February 16, 2000, stating, “The threat to the freedom of speech in Russia has for the first time in the last several years transformed into its open and regular suppression.” On the front page, the special edition of the newspaper posed a direct question to Putin: “Do you think that what is happening today and to freedom of speech is a worthy continuation of your course?” It continued, “It seems that the consolidation of ever more power in the hands of the president is not intended to implement some policy, since no policy unconnected with the consolidation of power itself has yet been announced, but has become an aim in itself.” The paper printed and distributed free of charge over 500,000 copies of the special edition.93
At a funeral for Russian soldiers killed in Chechnya, Putin did not back down, stating even more broadly a recurring theme of his presidency: that whenever Russia is weak, “riff-raff” appear to destroy it. But “common Russian people” arise to sweep the “riff-raff away.” And where do these elements get their money? An article in Moscow’s New Times noted the strangely coincidental timing between Putin’s speech and a financial report that just happened to be released by the FSB the same week, claiming that the “West” had injected “$1.5 billion” into certain Russian commercial banks “as a payment for the services of the journalists fighting against their own army on the side of the ‘Chechen bandits.’ ” The author of the New Times article, the legendary Valeriya Novodvorskaya, who was herself forcibly committed to a Soviet psychiatric hospital for protesting the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, lamented:
The daily allegations about money being paid to journalists for their work for the “Chechen bandits” and about Western special services hiring our mass media outlets and journalists in pursuit of their vile objectives involuntarily bring to mind the articles written by A. M. YakovlevXIV in Literaturnaya Gazeta, in the seventies, in which he urged invoking not Article 70 (for anti-Soviet activities) but Article 64 (for high treason), which carried the death penalty, in judging dissidents who supposedly worked for the West. All Lubyankas across the world repose upon foundations of lies. Therefore, above all, they seek to “rub out” the truth. And the press which dares to tell it.95
Dmitriy Medvedev, at that time the head of Putin’s campaign, announced, “Wars, including information wars, are not the best way of settling relations. Quite honestly, Putin cares more for the mood of the voter than for attacks by his opponents.”96 On March 4, in a harbinger of his entire presidency, Putin’s campaign issued an even stronger statement: “The press service of the election headquarters will continue to closely watch all facts or lies in respect of the candidate for the post of Russian President V. V. Putin, and reserves the right to use all means available in its arsenal for—as it has been stated more than once—an ‘asymmetrical’ answer to the provocations.”97 Arsenals? Asymmetrical responses? What did they have in mind by using this language of war?
One cannot debate the fact that by early spring both nationwide television channels had joined independent media in turning against Putin. Most notably, NTV carried a program only days before the March elections that directly blamed the FSB, and by implication Putin, for the summer 1999 apartment bombings in Russian cities.XV For its part, the Kremlin’s arsenal was unleashed in covert and illegal ways, including:
• Cyber attacks on Novaya gazeta for their investigation of the true culprits behind the attempted apartment bombings in Ryazan.99
• Personal pressure on NTV journalists, including attempts to blackmail them by threatening that if they did not work for the FSB, they or their families would face imprisonment on trumped-up charges. Such was the case with Eleonora Filina, who claimed in March 2000 that she was told if she did not act as a mole for the FSB inside NTV, a criminal case could be opened against her son.100
• Failure to launch robust investigations of suspicious deaths that fueled rumors of Kremlin involvement, including in the crash of a chartered plane carrying the investigative journalist Artyom Borovik (who was investigating the Ryazan apartment bombings, federal casualties in Chechnya, and claims that Putin’s publicized early childhood story was untrueXVI), which sent chills down the spine of independent media. Yevgeniy Primakov echoed the widespread belief that there had been foul play; at Borovik’s funeral, he stated, “I don’t understand how society and the government can possibly be indifferent to threats addressed against journalists. Why is there no reaction? Why are we so helpless? Why can’t we twist these scoundrels’ heads off?”101
• Mobilization of the mock intelligentsia to support the Kremlin. This feature, which became the Kremlin’s modus operandi, first appeared in the spring of 2000: leading members of the administration at St. Petersburg State University, including their rector Lyudmila Verbitskaya, wrote to demand that those responsible for the popular television show Kukly be investigated for possible criminal malfeasance.
If all of this, and more, happened when Putin was only acting president, what would happen after he was inaugurated?
The media’s desire to cover Chechnya in the same kind of open, robust, and critical way they had covered the First Chechen War brought them into conflict with a Kremlin determined not to have military operations constrained by media oversight—a sadly routine feature of Western media restrictions in war zones as well at this time. But in a much broader strategy, the Kremlin simply wanted to limit press scrutiny of all its actions. The real war against the press would start immediately after the inauguration, with independent television.
The political importance of nationwide television for cementing or loosening the public’s attachment to the Kremlin had never been overlooked by the political elite. The image of a young and vigorous president presiding over a victorious war against “bandits” vilified on TV only made Putin more popular. The nationwide state-owned ORT and RTR shaped their news coverage of Chechnya to maximize voter support for Putin. Gleb Pavlovskiy, the Kremlin’s major spinmeister, subsequently openly admitted that the purpose of his PR campaign for Putin at this time was to reawaken in the Russian people the “habit of adoration of national leaders [privychka k obozhaniyu],”102 which they had lost in the late Soviet and Yel’tsin eras.
But journalists and the independent media were having none of it. NTV, the only national independent television channel, owned by the oligarch Vladimir Gusinskiy, had openly challenged and mocked Putin (and Yel’tsin before him) in its popular show Kukly (Puppets). In one episode that Putin is reported to have been furious about, he is shown as an uncultured, foul-mouthed, whiney baby in the Kremlin Family whom bewitched villagers have been made to belie
ve is beautiful.103 Unlike Yel’tsin, who never interfered with the program despite its brutal portrayal of his faults, Putin and his team evidently had no intention of tolerating such insubordination. The creators of Kukly reported that they were instructed by the Kremlin to take Putin’s puppet off the show. In response, the next week, in a program called “The Ten Commandments,” Putin was depicted both as the burning bush and as a cloud calling down the Ten Commandments from atop Mount Sinai. The program’s creator, Viktor Shenderovich, subsequently described the episode: “The ten commandments were like ‘Don’t kill anyone except people of Caucasian nationality,’ ‘Don’t steal anything except federal property,’ ‘Don’t create idols except the president, Vladimir Putin.’ Technically we observed the conditions because we removed the Putin puppet. But that didn’t make us any more loved.”104 The creators freely admitted they were testing the limits of Kremlin tolerance.105
On March 24, 2000, less than forty-eight hours before polls opened for the presidential election, NTV aired a damning talk show, Independent Investigation, that openly suggested the FSB had been behind the apartment bombings in the city of Ryazan in 1999. Reconstruction of the events that cast doubt on the official FSB story and interviews with residents, many of whom had backgrounds in military and police affairs, showed the FSB was intending to blow up the apartment building for the purpose of boosting the case for an attack on Chechnya, an attack that would increase Putin’s electoral chances. NTV’s general manager subsequently reported that Media Minister Mikhayl Lesin had warned him that by airing the show, NTV producers had “crossed the line” and were now “outlaws” in the Kremlin’s eyes.106 These threats were to translate into vigorous assaults against freedom of the press once Putin became president.
Putin's Kleptocracy_Who Owns Russia? Page 31