by John McCain
An early and profitable Putin move to consolidate power was the understanding he reached in 2000 with the oligarchs who had made their vast fortunes from the control of privatized state assets. They were allowed to continue operating without too much government interference as long as they publicly supported the regime, and privately shared their wealth with the ruling elite. Putin began making new oligarchs as well, whose loyalty to him was unquestioned. Most of the established oligarchs went along, except for three, Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, of whom Khodorkovsky was the most prominent and the richest. The head of Yukos, an oil conglomerate that owned valuable Siberian oil leases, he was reputed to be Russia’s wealthiest man. He was also a generous supporter of NGOs working to build the institutions of civil society in Russia, and he established a foundation in London for that purpose, Open Russia. He was outspoken in his concerns about the growing authoritarianism and corruption of Putin’s government. Khodorkovsky opened a Washington office of Open Russia in 2002, and became a familiar figure on Capitol Hill. He had business interests to represent here, of course, and lawyers and lobbyists to advocate for him. I met with him a few times, but our meetings were focused on his fears about Putin. He described how Putin was cracking down on those he perceived as a threat to his authority, opposition parties, independent media, disobedient billionaires. He warned that Putin would never be a reliable partner to the West, that his long-term goal was to reestablish the Soviet empire. Khodorkovsky had an openness about him. He seemed almost earnest and uncalculating, which didn’t strike me as a typical personality profile for a Russian oligarch. To be sure, he had his own interests to protect. But I believed his support of democratic values was sincere, as was his fear of Putin’s ambitions.
Khodorkovsky was arrested on trumped-up fraud charges in July 2003. His real crime was criticizing the regime and supporting opposition parties. He was given a ten-month trial in 2004, at which few defense witnesses were allowed to testify, convicted on all counts, and sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment. Two years were added to his sentence in a subsequent trial. The state seized Yukos on bogus tax evasion accusations, declared it bankrupt, and transferred most of its assets to the state-owned oil company Rosneft. Khodorkovsky was sent to a labor camp, where he was threatened, locked in solitary confinement, and physically assaulted. Putin finally let him go in 2013, and Khodorkovsky left Russia for Switzerland, where he relaunched Open Russia the next year.
Khodorkovsky’s arrest and imprisonment was one of Putin’s more daring moves to date, and seemed to surprise many Western observers, who regarded Khodorkovsky as a modern, fairly transparent, and honest international businessman. They had been less alarmed by Moscow’s war in Chechnya, the assaults on opposition parties and the media, the Russian army occupation of breakaway regions in Georgia and Moldova, and threats to the rest of the “near abroad” in its pursuit of an empire of submissive neighbors. The body count for victims of political assassinations was starting to mount, too. It was early days yet for the latest Kremlin chapter of Murder Inc., but the lives of Russians who dared investigate the darkest deeds of the regime were in grave peril. Two Duma deputies who had begun investigating the Moscow apartment bombing had died in mysterious circumstances. Journalists were beaten for asking the wrong questions, and several were killed. All the murders were unsolved.
The West might have been appalled to see a well-regarded Russian businessman shackled and forced to endure an obvious show trial, recalling images of Soviet-style justice in the bad old days. But many Western governments continued to view Putin as a man they could do business with, literally and figuratively. Europeans relied on Russian natural gas supplies, and the U.S. and its allies continued to seek Russia’s cooperation with various global and regional security challenges.
After their first summit meeting in Slovenia in 2001, President Bush said he had looked Putin in the eyes and was able to “get a sense of his soul.” Two years later, I quipped that I saw the letters KGB in Putin’s eyes, as I criticized Putin’s escalating authoritarianism, which I described as a “creeping coup,” and Russia’s intimidation of its neighbors. In reaction to the regime’s crackdown on the opposition, assaults on the press, endemic corruption, and attempts to subjugate its former republics, Joe Lieberman and I introduced a resolution calling for Russia’s participation in G-8 summits to be suspended. The U.S. was scheduled to host the next summit of the world’s leading industrial democracies in June 2004, and Russia, I argued, was anything but a democracy. In my statement introducing the resolution, I noted that:
The dramatic deterioration of democracy in Russia calls into question the fundamental premises of our Russia policy since 1991. American leaders must adapt U.S. policy to the realities of a Russian government that may be trending towards neo-imperialism abroad and authoritarian control at home. It is time to face unpleasant facts about Russia.
I understood the impulse for wishful thinking. The sudden end of the Cold War had left a lot of Americans, including me, giddy with optimism for what the future might hold for relations between the former superpower enemies. But at this point it was just wishful thinking to believe Putin would ever be our democratic partner. All that was in Putin’s soul, I worried, “is the continuity of four hundred years of Russian oppression.”
That message wasn’t well received in Washington or the capitals of Europe. In truth, it was mostly ignored, as was our resolution, although Joe and I continued sounding the alarm about a revanchist Russia. Hardly a month passed when the Kremlin strongman didn’t supply us with more evidence to substantiate the charge. The Duma regularly passed laws altering election rules, laws restricting NGOs, laws suborning the media, laws controlling political parties, trade unions, and the judiciary, laws against “extremism,” all intended to serve one purpose above all others: to strengthen the authority and political security of the Kremlin and the man in charge.
In 2004, Putin ordered Russian security forces to storm a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, where Chechen terrorists were holding over a thousand hostages. Using tanks and rockets, the school was liberated at the cost of more than 330 innocent lives, 186 of them children. In a 2005 speech, Putin decried the dissolution of the Soviet Union as “the greatest political catastrophe of the 20th century.” On October 7, 2006, Putin’s birthday, courageous Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who had made her international reputation reporting from Chechnya during the second Chechen war and had been poisoned as she traveled to Beslan to help negotiate the hostages’ release, was shot several times at point-blank range in the elevator of her apartment building. The next month Alexander Litvinenko lay poisoned and wasting away in a London hospital.
In the same period, at a pace of one a year, color revolutions were overthrowing autocratic regimes in former Soviet republics, the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan in 2005. Putin reacted predictably with dark warnings about not letting the “post-Soviet space” succumb to “endless conflict,” and with export bans, gas cutoffs, and other punitive measures meant to bring the former vassal states to heel.
Two thousand seven saw the advent of the “dissenters’ protests,” organized by the Other Russia, a broad coalition of opposition parties, right, left, and center. Former chess world champion Garry Kasparov, whom I’ve gotten to know well and admire a great deal, was one of the protest’s most prominent leaders. He’s a smart, honest, and brave advocate for democratic governance and the rule of law, and an unflinching Putin opponent, which can be a dangerous occupation. A welcome benefit of my reputation as an early Putin critic and human rights advocate is that my office is a frequent stop for visiting dissidents, opposition leaders, civil society builders, freedom fighters, humanitarian workers, and other defenders of human dignity from every part of the world. I’m proud of that, and I’m grateful. I’ve gotten to know and associate myself with some of the most inspiring people in the world.
More than a few of them, like Garry Kasparov, were Russians.
Natan Sharansky, the stouthearted refusenik, gulag victim, legendary resister, and champion of the Rights of Man, has honored me with a couple visits. He is one of a few people on earth I’m content to let dominate our conversation. First, he is so fascinating and insightful and I’m smart enough to know I can learn a lot by listening to him. Second, it’s really hard to get a word in edgewise with him. He has a bigger personality than most people I know, probably bigger than anyone I know. He speaks quickly, forcefully, and demonstratively. It’s a riot of intelligent, passionately conveyed convictions and often brilliant analysis. We talk about Israel and the Middle East, of course. He’s an Israeli politician. But he’s come to see me because we are both democratic internationalists, and because we share the same view of Putin, although his is informed by personal experiences more relevant than mine. George W. Bush’s second term, which began with the introduction of his freedom agenda in his inaugural address, was an exciting time for democracy and human rights movements, and for guys like Sharansky and me, who were longtime democracy advocates and early skeptics of Putin. Regrettably, the Bush administration, for all its sincere commitment to helping support democratic movements, was much too slow to embrace that skepticism. When they finally did, it was too late. Sharansky was clear-eyed about what was happening in Russia, and about Putin’s goals, and he encouraged my similar views. And he urged me to continue speaking out on the subject, reminding me how Reagan’s speeches had sustained him when he was under duress. It was advice I was quite happy to follow.
The dissenters marched to protest rigged election rules in advance of the 2008 Russian presidential election. Thousands took to the streets in successive protests in Moscow and Saint Petersburg and three other cities, with marchers demanding new election laws and “Russia without Putin.” The police turned out in force. They beat many protesters, and arrested hundreds, including Kasparov, who had marched in Moscow.
Two thousand seven also seemed to mark a turning point in the West’s sense of Putin. The Litvinenko and Politkovskaya murders had an impact on Western opinion, as had Putin’s reactions to the color revolutions and his crackdowns on the media and political opponents. Later that year, Russia launched a surprise expedition to the North Pole, to plant the Russian flag and claim disputed Arctic territory. And in November, Putin pulled Russia out of the treaty that limited conventional armed forces deployments in Europe. The Bush administration and most European governments now had a more realistic appreciation of the man in whom they had invested too much hope, and of the rapidly disappearing chances for a broadly cooperative relationship with him. But the evidence of his authoritarianism and corruption had been there all along. In an interview in 2006, I warned that “the glimmerings of democracy are very faint in Russia today,” citing Putin’s repression of dissent and the Russian press. We need “to be very harsh” in response, I urged.
I announced my presidential campaign in the spring of 2007, but I had been preparing to run for months, and, as I mentioned in an earlier chapter, I was widely viewed as the front-runner for the nomination. Among other effects, my higher profile widened the audience for my criticism of Russia. And Russia was starting to respond. I was an object of occasional but pointed criticism in various organs of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine. Sometimes the complaints were from Russian government officials, lamenting my “old”—an adjective that my foreign and domestic critics overused in 2008—“Cold War mentality.” Often the alarm about my hawkishness was given voice by random Russian citizens, chosen for their scrupulous honesty, no doubt, and the acuity of their political insights. A retired Red Army officer earned favorable press notice by claiming to have manned the surface-to-air missile in Hanoi that had destroyed my plane. He was a modest hero, a Russian newspaper tribute to him described, who had done his duty and earned the respect of his grateful nation.
In February 2007, Vladimir Putin attended the Munich Security Conference, a long-running annual gathering of government and military leaders. For most of its history, the conference was attended almost exclusively by officials and journalists from the West. It was a conference for committed Trans-Atlanticists. But in the post–Cold War era invitations were extended to officials of former and current adversaries of the West. Putin’s defense minister and deputy prime minister, and at one time his expected successor, Sergei Ivanov, was a regular attendee whom I had gotten to know and had exchanged ideas with, so to speak, a few times. He and Putin had been friends since they had served together as young spies in the bad old days. We sat next to each other a few times at conference dinners over the years. I complimented his English once. He explained he had served in the KGB’s London station. Putin had never attended the conference before, and his appearance in 2007 was eagerly anticipated.
I had been coming to the conference since the 1970s, when I was the Navy’s liaison to the Senate, and had helped staff the Senate delegation led by the late John Tower. For the last twenty years, I had led the delegation myself. I was a familiar face there, and had made many friendships over the years that I value despite having a reputation for being argumentative, and too blunt sometimes—my critics might call it confrontational—about what I perceived as threats to the West’s values and interests. Starting in the early years of the new century, my remarks at Munich usually identified Vladimir Putin’s regime as one of those threats.
Like everyone there, I had expected Putin to be gracious and magnanimous, to sketch out a vision of cooperation with the West, and offer his hand in friendship to former adversaries and new friends, or some such hogwash. And I was prepared to denounce it as such. But he surprised us.
Putin delivered an angry diatribe, an extraordinary tirade about NATO, and especially the United States. “Today, we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force,” he complained, meaning, of course, the United States. He warned that our efforts to dominate the world would destroy us. Our primacy was at an end. Our day was over. Russia and other great, proud nations of the world were asserting themselves again. He appeared angry that the U.S. hadn’t accepted the role he assigned us. High on his list of complaints were the Baltics’ admission into NATO, American support for democratic reform movements, the color revolutions in Russia’s “near abroad,” and U.S. plans to build a ballistic missile shield in Europe. He was, in essence, insisting that the world order again be based on spheres of influence, and there was nothing the U.S. should or could do to prevent it. I half expected him to start banging his shoe on the podium as Nikita Khrushchev is purported to have done at the U.N. For good measure, he threw in a threat to pull Russia out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Agreement signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988. The audience was stunned. And Putin kept it up in the question-and-answer session that followed his speech. He professed to be enjoying himself, which he emphasized with his usual bravado, demanding the interrogator ask him more questions. “This is fun. I love it,” he insisted.
The second most interesting aspect of the whole thing was that Putin glared at us almost the entire time he was delivering the speech, and I mean really glared. He would read a line or two from his prepared text, then look up, and fix a menacing stare at me, at Defense Secretary Bob Gates, at Joe Lieberman. I was sitting between Bob and Joe, at a table directly in front of Putin with Jon Kyl and California congresswoman Jane Harman. Lindsey, former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, and other members of our delegation were seated just behind us. German chancellor Angela Merkel was seated at the table to our right. We all saw it, and felt the animosity behind it, and remarked about it afterward. It was weird. I don’t know if it had been meant exclusively for me, as a U.S. presidential candidate with a record of being his detractor, or if it had been directed at all U.S. officials present in keeping with his speech’s exaggerated attack, although in the Q&A he had managed to say a few nice words about President Bush. But I am certain he meant to convey hostility to s
omeone in that room. “I’ll be damned,” I said. “That seemed kind of personal.”