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

Alexander Belyaev was then the head of city assembly. He was so disturbed by the food scandal that he called for Putin’s head. Twenty years later this white-haired man with strangely long legs and eyes that never stop moving tries to choose his words carefully. He remembers Putin’s faltering first speech – fending off food accusations – with stumbling pauses. Putin was then nervously speaking in his own defence, as Belyaev was trying to have him fired. We talk as Belyaev smokes Marlboro Reds one after another, with unconscious drags, in a gloomy corridor – not in his office, I presume, for fear of bugs. He whispers hoarsely:

‘When the assembly discussed these Putin matters we decided that it was either corruption or unprofessionalism. This is why we called on Mr Sobchak to dismiss Mr Putin. He didn’t. He stood by him and we didn’t have the power to get rid of him. But all these facts gave us the impression that corruption could have been involved.’

He remembers Putin as no unprofessional fool. ‘You see this man had good qualities too. He was an expert at making friends, of being loyal to those friends. He is a brilliant observer of human nature, and he is very good at tactics.’ Embezzler or not, he saw Putin behaving no differently from the other officials:

‘You need to understand that there were no anticorruption laws, there were no clear rules how anything should be done, no code of conduct for any of these state officials. They were flying abroad on the expense accounts of banks, taking huge ‘gifts’, on which there was no limit in monetary value, they were going on vacations on other’s expenses. This was the time of “privatization”. Putin was enjoying all this too.’

Sobchak protected Putin from the assembly. The deputy mayor claimed he was being persecuted ‘for being a KGB agent’. 26Incidents like this explain the extent to which the Sobchak–Putin team discredited themselves. They ended up being despised, like the Yeltsin cabal, and lost the mayoral race in 1996 to a group of politicians who were even more brazenly corrupt and in hock with the mafia. More importantly, Sobchak had fallen out with Yeltsin’s then blood brother and moonshine drinking partner Alexander Korzhakov, his KGB chief bodyguard, who wielded enormous power in court. He threw his weight against them. Anti-Sobchak leaflets were dropped from helicopters. This election was Putin’s only real, traumatic, experience of running a competitive vote as the losing side’s campaign manager. He refused to serve the new mayor and withdrew dejected to his dacha, to train dogs. A personal failure.

The year that Sobchak lost his election was the year that Boris Yeltsin, unsteady on his feet after five heart attacks, but desperate not to lose power, began to turn Russia into a ‘managed democracy’. He had grabbed a conductor’s baton next to Chancellor Helmut Kohl on live TV, uncontrollably drunk, and waved it wildly at the brass band playing as Russian forces withdrew from Germany. At home his bodyguard’s wife was watching and burst into tears of shame. He then sent over 7,500 soldiers to die in a botched war against Chechen rebels, which he lost, humiliating the remains of the army that had trained to defeat NATO by dashing through the Fulda Gap. His ratings were in single figures and, had the 1996 election been free and fair, he would never have won.

Yeltsin forgot his promise to serve only one term, but knowing full well how loathed he was, he dithered in his decision, mired in depression. Then he woke up one morning and, in a barely audible voice, told bodyguard Korzahkov: ‘I’ve decided to run.’ 27To win the Kremlin he made a pact with the new tycoons, known as the oligarchs. These coarse, half-bandit multi-millionaires were epitomized by Boris Berezovsky, who would boast (inaccurately) how he and seven bankers controlled over 50 per cent of Russian GDP. 28They called him ‘the comet’, because he thought so fast, a man who had been festering in late socialism as a mathematician dreaming of winning the Nobel prize. But by the time I met him, in summer 2012, Berezovsky had lost the will to defend his past. His mind was back in the nineties. ‘At first,’ he said, ‘nobody understood what was business.’ He barely made eye contact; the bombast was gone. Eight months later he was found dead on his bathroom floor.

In his glory days, he radiated power and menace. He and the other oligarchs had made every right call in a country falling to bits. These men had just started going to Davos, the annual gathering of the world’s super-elite in the Alps, when they realized that Yeltsin might actually lose the election. They saw the Western elites rushing to shake hands with Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the opposition Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), which seemed poised to return to power, like its rebranded ex-siblings had already done in parts of Eastern Europe.

‘We were shocked at Davos,’ remembered Berezovsky in the gloom of his London office, decorated with portraits of Lenin, Gorbachev and Khrushchev. There was also one of himself, poking his grinning face round a column, as Yeltsin spoke at a podium. ‘We had a very short psychological experience of the West and we were shocked. We had expected the West to help us. We thought they were now scared of new competition.’ His eyes were fixed on a repulsive silver statuette of Picasso in his meeting room, which he seemed particularly proud of. Its stomach opened up to reveal a miniature silver woman bathing in gold coins. He spoke almost comically fast:

‘We didn’t think about others. About those who were not ready for the transition, or who couldn’t make it at all. We didn’t recognize at the time how dangerous it was to split society – how much jealousy and violence that would engender. Those left behind were not as sophisticated or as creative as us, but they were not bad. We, the class that was more advanced in feelings, creativity and understanding of the future, did not take responsibility. We just focused on making more and more money.’

Under the Alpine peaks the richest oligarchs made the ‘Davos Pact’. If the West was not going to save Yeltsin, they would. This was the moment the Kremlin began to build a power system based on patronage. In exchange for bankrolling a media blitz, importing every PR and campaigning technique they could afford and pushing any positive coverage of Zyuganov off their TV stations, they were allowed to ‘privatize’ the ‘crown jewels’ of the Russian economy at knocked-down prices for their loyalty, in a corrupt scheme known as ‘loans-for-shares’. This way, nearly 60 per cent of the state’s industrial assets were handed to the oligarchs despite the resistance of the left-dominated parliament. 29These included the gigantic Siberian oil, mining and mineral mega-complexes – the heart of the Soviet economy.

By this point all respect for democratic procedure was secondary to staying in power for Yeltsin. He was so frightened of losing the election that he came within inches of a decree suspending it for two years, banning the Communist Party and imposing emergency rule. The decrees drawn up, he was talked out of this move at the last minute, as the first part of his conspiracy went into action, a ‘bomb alert’ in parliament that sent the frightened deputies running into the street.

The night of the first round of the presidential election, after weeks of hysterical propaganda warning of civil war and the Bolshevik menace, dubious returns came in from the provinces. There were many results so statistically improbable, they seemed to point only to fraud. Yeltsin suffered another heart attack before the second round. To the end, Berezovsky denied there was outright vote rigging, but recalled: ‘If you ask me whether the Yeltsin government used administrative resources to win, the answer is yes.’ By this he meant the government used the bureaucracy to campaign for the government candidate.