Ben Judah: Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell in and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin

He was the man from nowhere, but Putin thought his career could go up in flames. Yeltsin had made his decision the day after Arab-led Islamist fighters had crossed out of rebel Chechnya into Russian-controlled Dagestan. The new prime minister was convinced that the country was on the verge of an all-out Christian–Muslim conflagration, akin to that raging in Yugoslavia. He claims that when the fighting broke out again in the Caucasus he tried to calculate how many Russian refugees the United States and Europe could absorb:

My evaluation of the situation in August, when the bandits attacked Dagestan, was that if we did not stop it immediately, Russia as a state in its current form was finished. We were threatened by the Yugoslavization of Russia. 47

In the last year of the Yeltsin regime, the Kremlin began preparing to reinvade Chechnya. In a state of paranoia, Russia was preparing for war. The widespread belief that the first war in Chechnya was started to boost Yeltsin’s popularity fed rumours of extensive collusion between the ‘family’ and the militant band that attacked Dagestan, led by Shamil Basayev. 48These include allegations, which some scholars claim to have verified, of a meeting in a villa in the south of France ‘agreeing’ on the incursion, as the pretext to help the self-styled emir to take Grozny as his own and to give the ‘family’ the event it needed to install its heir. 49When I met Anton Surikov, the military intelligence agent alleged to have organized the meeting, he told me: ‘You have to realize that all Russian politicians today are only bandits from St Petersburg.’ A few months later he was dead. The facts themselves are murky, but the conspiracy theory points to something very real: not official collusion, but the complete collapse of trust in Russian authorities.

The fighting that began in Dagestan and turned into the second Chechen war became Putin’s campaign, but it began as his inheritance. Yeltsin took a shine to his steely support for the war plans. The public, however, had not. In mid-September only 5 per cent said they planned to vote for Putin in the 2000 presidential elections, less than wanted to vote for ‘against all’. 50

The invasion only went ahead after Russians began dying in their beds. The carnage turned Putin from a nobody into the most popular politician in the country. Between 4 and 16 September 1999 the country was hit by a series of bomb attacks that blew apart mostly suburban apartment blocks, claiming the lives of 305 and injuring over 1,000 in Moscow and the provincial cities of Volgodonsk and Buynaksk.

These mysterious bombings killed sleeping families in the city outskirts. For a few unsteady weeks, normal folk patrolled their stairwells and courtyards in vigilante gangs against an enemy that was attacking the most nondescript, suburban apartment blocks. Who was behind these blasts is unclear. Another in provincial Ryazan was foiled by vigilant residents. They had spotted men of ‘Slavic appearance’ acting suspiciously in their basement. They claim they were placing explosives under the apartment block in sacks labelled ‘sugar’. When the local police arrived they announced they had defused a live bomb. Yet days later the head of the FSB Nikolai Patrushev made a statement – rather oddly – that it had been a ‘training exercise’ to test popular vigilance. The FSB claimed that they themselves had placed the sacks of ‘sugar’ there. The local police and city FSB were shocked: they believed they had found a live bomb. Had Patrushev, desperate for positive coverage, said something stupid – or revealed something sinister?

These explosions were not a complete surprise. For weeks, the gutter press – hostile to the regime – had been filled with hysteria that ‘state terror’ was being planned. 51There was an atmosphere of conspiracy and dread in the country. One Duma deputy even claimed he was warned from within the FSB that there was a plot. 52Yeltsin’s enemies such as General Alexander Lebed accused the ‘family’ of the bombings in order to: ‘create mass terror, a destabilization which will permit them at the moment to say you don’t have to go to the election precinct, otherwise you’ll risk being blown away by the ballot boxes’. 53

As many as 40 per cent of Russians polled have suspected the Kremlin. 54They felt this way as, after the shelling of parliament in 1993 and the near cancelling of the 1996 elections, it was clear Yeltsin’s cabal were ready to kill to stay in power. The mystery of the explosions, and the conspiracy theories surrounding them, are as important as who actually carried out the attack. They show either the complete state of disrepair, uncoordination and clownish unprofessionalism of the country’s security services, or something far darker, their utter disregard for Russian blood. The widespread belief amongst Russian journalists that the FSB, Putin and the ‘family’ are responsible is telling. It shows how the Kremlin had by the decade’s end become so intensely distrusted by its own people that it could conceivably have carried out mass murder to fix an election result. All of the possible scenarios – part of the establishment ‘blackmailing’ Yeltsin–Putin, the ‘family’ planting the bombs themselves as a false flag to win the vote, the authorities ignoring the warnings on purpose or agents ‘faking’ a prevention in order to restore their shredded reputation, or even the security services simply being outstandingly incapable – tell the same story: that of a broken-down state.

Hexogen is at the heart of this story: this is the explosive found in the basement in Ryazan. Researchers have claimed that it was only found in Russia at the time in tightly guarded FSB installations. But is this evidence that the FSB itself planted a ‘false-flag’ or that it could no longer secure its own stockpiles? 55

The key people investigating the explosions have died in suspicious circumstances. These deaths have been gruesome. Several members of the investigative commission died in apparent assassinations, others in hit-and-run incidents, one from a tropical disease that caused his skin to peel off. Under any of the likely scenarios a ‘cover-up’ would have been carried out by the security services. They have as much need to avoid embarrassment as not being exposed in a conspiracy

These questions remain unanswered, but the consequences were clear. A new era had begun, blurred in the uncertainties between incompetence and amorality that defined it. The only beneficiary of the apartment bombings was the Kremlin’s chosen successor. Russia reinvaded Chechnya; Putin acted the part of a macho-saviour in front of the cameras and his popularity exploded. ‘We will waste them in their outhouses,’ he snarled at the perpetrators in salty criminal slang. As he said it, his popularity rating was soaring up to 79 per cent in December 1999 and the pro-Kremlin faction Unity which had been cobbled together to support him came second to the Communist Party in the race for parliament. 56

In the 2000 presidential elections Putin was swept into the Kremlin atop a shaky wave of nationalist fear, the crescendo of the double disaster that made the new Russian state. The bombings seemed to change everything, even the language of politics itself. Now liberal TV anchors were the ones calling for the ‘carpet bombing’ of Chechnya and for the army to use ‘napalm’. 57This wave was the exact inverse of the tsunami of liberal euphoria that had crowned Yeltsin in 1991. Fear of terrorism was so intense in Russia – greater than the hysteria in the USA after 9/11 – that Putin took control of the government with ease.

His performance of calm fury throughout these atrocities meant that Putin now had an approval rating of almost 80 per cent and Yeltsin resigned early on 31 December 1999. Shuddering, he asked Russia to forgive him: ‘For many of our dreams did not come to pass.’ That night, Berezovsky had every reason to uncork imported champagne. He had found a man who was all things to all people: he was loyal but he was brave, he was KGB but a Yeltsin–Sobchak democrat, and he was essentially martial but economically liberal. He was grey – you could project your dreams onto him. But as it would turn out, this is exactly what Berezovsky himself was doing…