Vladimir Yakunin - The Treacherous Path - An Insider's Account of Modern Russia

Yeltsin had always been fond of grand gestures, but it was only after we had become acquainted with their consequences that we realised how dangerous this could be. In 1990 he had cheerfully encouraged Russia’s federal subjects ‘to take as much sovereignty as you can swallow’. Maybe he did not think his audience would take him seriously, or perhaps he simply did not understand what the likely repercussions of his statement might be (like Gorbachev, he was in favour of national expression, but appalled by the idea of secession). His words were followed almost immediately by a flourish of ethnic violence, the rise of a number of extreme nationalist movements, and even the return of a number of ghosts from the past, with fevered talk of the creation of a Siberian Republic. Chechnya declared independence unilaterally the following year and saw its economy turned over to racketeers, and its morality entrusted into the hands of Islamic radicals. Their demands were echoed by many of the other republics, such as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, gathered along Russia’s south-eastern fringe. [11] The Soviet Union had been made up of fifteen national republics (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Georgia, Armenia, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan). In theory, each republic had equal status within the arrangement, but in practice it was dominated by Moscow (interestingly, the only republic without its own Communist Party was Russia). For most of its existence Russia (formally, the Russian Socialist Federative Republic) itself contained seventeen autonomous republics, some of which, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the formation of the Russian Federation, could not understand why they too had not been given independence. Republics like Tatarstan, for instance, pointed to territory the size of Texas and the fact that it contributed as much as 20 per cent of the country’s GDP. Though the December 1993 constitution took the first steps towards establishing federalism, the country’s weakness and volatility mean that Moscow’s grasp over its subjects was slipping.

Governors began to openly defy the federal state as provincial political and economic elites collaborated with gangs of bandits to enrich themselves on a grand scale. Government money was ruthlessly expropriated and those who had come to try and reclaim it were sent back to Yeltsin with their tails between their legs. Many regional legislatures adopted laws declaring sovereignty. They asserted ownership over natural resources, laid claim to the airspace above their territory and even began to start conducting foreign policies independent of Moscow.

The inevitable offensive launched in Chechnya in 1994 was as badly conceived and ill thought through as the policies that had preceded it and was soon attended by catastrophe. It seemed that even when Yeltsin tried to preserve the country’s fragile integrity, his every clumsy swipe only made it weaker. As the ’90s wore on, the idea that the collapse of the Soviet Union might be followed by the disintegration of Russia itself ceased to be only a nightmare and became instead a disturbingly plausible possibility.

Before long, the violence that had become such a feature of life on Russia’s periphery found its way to the country’s centre. Politicians were shot in the stairway of their homes, the blood spreading from their still-warm bodies just another stain on the dismal body politic. I still remember vividly the assassination in St Petersburg of the vice governor Mikhail Manevich, who was gunned down on his way to work in August 1997. As I stood at the memorial service alongside Mr Chubais and a number of the other men who figured in the city’s political life, such as Alexei Kudrin and Herman Gref (I would encounter many of them again when I moved to Moscow), as well as the massed ranks of the city’s officials, and people from every echelon of St Petersburg society, an air of disbelief – that this kind, gentle man had been given a gangster’s death – reigned. In the weeks that followed, there was a rapid expansion of the personal security market. Soon it was no longer unusual to see black-clad men wielding Kalashnikovs guarding the entrances to the city’s restaurants. [12] Despite its viciousness, perhaps because of it, this violence eventually petered out. This was partly because many of those criminals involved slipped into business suits and involved themselves in legitimate activity, but mostly because after five years there was nobody left to kill. The most prominent protagonists were either dead or had fled abroad. It was a tragic state of affairs that eventually consumed itself.

The President’s reckless attempts over the years to fold the fledgling democracy into his personality – so that to many they were almost one and the same – meant that the government’s struggles were ascribed to his own failings. There had been a time when the sight of enemies circling would have been a source of energy, a sign that he was moving in the right direction. By 1999, however, he was increasingly trapped, wracked by thoughts about how he, his family and his circle might survive after his resignation. If it had been 1994, or even 1996, he might have been able to channel his populist gift and summon some kind of escape; a deal could have been struck and catastrophe averted. As it was, ‘the Family’ began to search frantically for a successor who they could trust to protect them. They knew their history, and did not need to be told how vulnerable those who have recently lost power quickly become. Soon, they settled upon the director of the FSB, a former KGB lieutenant colonel from St Petersburg called Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Putin was not born a president. At the time of his elevation he was still, despite his time as head of the FSB and the President’s Chief Control Directorate, someone with a reputation as a local politician. Though St Petersburg is Russia’s second city, few major politicians have emerged from it since the wild days of the 1917 revolution. It was very rare, during the Soviet era, that anyone from St Petersburg was brought into the highest echelons of power – the city’s proximity to the West, its democratic traditions, its assertive intelligentsia and persistent appetite for freedom, all served to make its residents suspect in the eyes of the Communist Party apparatus. But Putin had one significant feature that marked him out from almost all of his contemporaries: he kept his word. This, as much as anything, recommended him to ‘the Family’.

The Russian people were undoubtedly ready for a man like Putin – he looked a different type of leader from Yeltsin. But Putin’s presidency also depended on the kingmakers around Yeltsin. They had seen the loyalty he had shown to his boss Anatoly Sobchak, the mayor of St Petersburg; Putin had stood shoulder to shoulder with the guards protecting Sobchak’s office during the failed coup of 1991, and had remained loyal after he was deposed as mayor in 1996. They were confident they were bringing to power a man who never broke his promises – a quality without which Putin might not have become President, or at least not so soon.

There were other things about him they approved of too. His very obscurity, his ostensible lack of political ambition – he was, to begin with, incredibly reluctant to accept their proposal to lead the country, for he knew the price one pays, the life one loses, for taking on such a role – meant that he seemed to them a tabula rasa onto which they could inscribe their own agendas. Men like Berezovsky, who pushed hard for his appointment, were keenly excited by the prospect of installing another puppet in the government, the rest of ‘The Family’ looked forward to an untroubled future, and the only dissenting voice within the Yeltsin inner circle was the arch-moderniser Chubais, who would later admit he was wary of Putin’s past.