Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

Publications outside the United States were more critical. The day before the election, the National Post of Canada ran a news item that had the whole story right in the headline: “Racists, killers and criminals run for Duma: Parliamentary elections. Two decades after decadent Yeltsin era, corruption plagues Russia.” The Economist declared the death of democracy in Russia in an editorial a month before the election, and then followed the election with a special report that called the new parliament “a democrat’s nightmare” and stressed the ballooning influence of ultranationalists.

But the world’s most influential media, with by far the largest journalist corps in Moscow, were asleep at the wheel. Why? In part, because U.S. politics took precedence. In the fall of 2000, when Putin was nationalizing television, American media were fully focused on the hung Bush–Gore election. I joined the staff of U.S. News & World Report then, and I idled through my first few months on the job: the magazine had no room for Russia.

Once the election story was finally over, American media had to deal with the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, beginning a wave of budget cuts and rollbacks that would last more than a decade. Many media outlets cut back on their foreign coverage, including Russia—and sometimes beginning with Russia. It became a self-perpetuating story: having told their audiences and themselves that Russia was safely entering a period of political and economic stability, American media effectively declared the Russian story dead, cut the resources available to cover it, and thereby killed their ability to report the story. ABC, which had had several dozen staffers occupying an entire building in central Moscow, closed its bureau altogether. Other outlets’ cuts were not as dramatic but just as drastic: entire bureaus were replaced by part-time freelancers. Only a few papers— The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , and the Los Angeles Times —maintained complete bureaus with full-time reporters and supporting staff.

In June 2001, George W. Bush met Putin for the first time, famously “looked the man in the eye,” and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” Exuberant press reports took little notice of the fact that Putin not only was considerably less enthusiastic about his new friend but actually warned the United States that the period of hostility that began with the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia in 1999 was far from over. Then 9/11 happened, and suddenly the Russian war in Chechnya was recast as part of the Western world’s struggle with Islamic fundamentalist terrorism—against all available evidence, which included, among other things, Putin’s abrogation of an agreement reached under Yeltsin, according to which Russia was to stop selling arms to Iran and selling arms to Arab states to the tune of several billion dollars a year. And by geographic happenstance, major U.S. media started viewing Moscow as not so much the capital of Russia as base camp for reporters traveling to Afghanistan and, later, Iraq. The hunger for war stories was insatiable, and Russia was relegated to the sort of story that reporters did on the run, between truly important assignments. Their dispatches from Russia were articles that could only serve to affirm the existing narrative, shaped by the people who had invented the image of Putin the young, energetic liberal reformer.

That there was not a whole lot to report along this particular story line did not seem to concern most American journalists and editors. They glossed over the nationalization of the media, portrayed the appointment of federal envoys to supervise elected governors as making order out of chaos, completely ignored rollbacks in judicial reform—and increasingly chose to focus on economic topics. Unlike Yeltsin, who seemed always to take two steps forward and one step back on economic reform in a perennial effort to pacify the opposition, Putin filled both his staff’s and the cabinet’s economic arm with avowed liberals. His premier was the former finance minister, an apparatchik steeped in the Soviet bureaucratic tradition but one sincerely committed to building on the reforms actually instituted in the 1990s—and, conveniently for Putin, focused on this task to the exclusion of any other government business. Even before becoming acting president—while he was still merely the anointed successor—Putin had formed a think tank charged with creating a plan for the economic development of Russia, and appointed a liberal economist who had once worked for Sobchak to run it. After the election, the head of the think tank became minister for economic development, a post created especially for him.

Most notably, Putin appointed Andrei Illarionov to be his economic adviser. It was the president-elect’s first appointment, and it was intended as a resonant gesture. Illarionov’s views were well-known: a member of the 1980s St. Petersburg economists’ club, he had evolved into a full-fledged, articulate libertarian. In the United States, he would have been called ultraconservative (and, fittingly, he eventually took a post at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C.), but in Russia his views landed him on the politically liberal side of the spectrum. Illarionov did not believe in global warming and did believe in the limitless self-regulating potential of free markets. He was also known for his brilliant analytical mind and his testy temperament, which had kept him on the sidelines of most of the key events of the 1990s. His appointment came as a surprise to everyone, including himself.

ON THE AFTERNOON of February 28, 2000, Illarionov was working in his cluttered office at a tiny think tank he ran in Moscow. Located across Moscow’s Staraya Ploshad (Old Square) from the offices of the presidential administration and less than a kilometer from the Kremlin itself, Illarionov’s Institute of Economic Analysis was as far from power as it could get, considering that Illarionov was still on a first-name basis with most people who had been making economic policy for years. Illarionov was occasionally called in to give a lecture to the policymakers—as he had, for example, on the eve of the 1998 default, warning of the looming disaster—but his counsel seemed to be perceived as an academic exercise. Frustration had been his status quo for years: he had the respect of his powerful peers but no influence on them.

But at four in the afternoon on February 28, less than a month before the presidential election, his phone rang and he was asked to meet with Putin that evening. The meeting lasted three hours. At some point during the meeting, an assistant entered to inform the president-to-be that federal troops had just taken the city of Shatoy in Chechnya. “Putin was so happy,” Illarionov recalled later. “He was gesticulating emotionally, and he was saying, ‘We showed them, we did them in.’ And since I had nothing to lose, I told them everything I thought about the war in Chechnya. I told him I thought Russian troops were committing a crime under his command. And he kept saying that they were all bandits there and that he would rub them out and that he was here to make sure the Russian Federation stayed intact. The words he said to me in private were exactly the same as what he always said on the topic in public: this was his sincere position. And my sincere position was that it was a crime.” The exchange went on for twenty or thirty minutes, growing more heated. The undiplomatic Illarionov knew exactly how these sorts of exchanges always ended: he would never be invited back, and another avenue of potential influence would be closed to him because, as usual, he, with his passionately held views, did not fit in.

And then something remarkable happened. Putin grew quiet for a second, rearranged his facial expression, erasing all passion from it, and said, “This is it. You and I will not be discussing Chechnya.” For the next two hours, the two men talked about the economy—rather, Putin allowed Illarionov to lecture him. In parting, Putin suggested they meet again the following day. Illarionov immediately committed two more faux pas: he said no, and he cited the reason for his refusal—he was committed to celebrating the anniversary of his American wife’s arrival in Russia, which, because she happened to have moved to Moscow in a leap year, could be celebrated only once every four years. Yet rather than take affront at the refusal, or the reason for it, Putin simply suggested a different date to meet. Illarionov lectured him on economics again, and two weeks after the election, on April 12, 2000, he was appointed the new president’s adviser.