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

But if Chubais feared that the new president would be a revanchist who would interrupt the liberalising reforms that had been initiated, with mixed results, during Yeltsin’s reign, then his concerns would soon be assuaged.

Putin’s political education had come at the hands of men like the liberal Sobchak. If his first life might be said to have been lived in the KGB, his second was in the crucible of St Petersburg politics during the ’90s. He believed as strongly as his mentor in the urgent need to transform the fortunes of Russia’s sick economy – and once he became President he continued the economic policies that had been initiated by his predecessor’s government. (He had in fact agreed with the Family that he would not abandon the reforms they had begun.) If, for instance, you were to revisit his 2000 address to the Federal Assembly, you would see how much attention he devoted to fiscal issues. And given the strength of the neo-Communist faction in the Duma at the time, this was essential. Neither the people nor the country’s elite wanted the apparatchiks to regain their grip on power. What reforms had been achieved since 1991 still rested on fragile foundations, and turning the clock back would erode them entirely (however, even this attitude was occasionally bent out of shape by contradictions – for example, by the early 2000s, only a minority of the population opposed the renationalisation of state assets).

Putin’s faith in liberalism was complemented by experiences and qualities that set him apart from his contemporaries, whether at home or abroad. Perhaps the most notable difference is that he served for many years in the KGB, a fact that has been the source of endless specious speculation. (George H. W. Bush was another national leader in recent history with a secret-service background – he was briefly the director of the CIA – but I cannot help but note that nobody ascribes the same importance to this as they do to Putin’s time in the KGB.)

There are things one learns in the secret services that are taught in few other trades. Some are very specific: for example, you are given the psychological tools to help you understand the motives of other people, to the point that sometimes you are able to divine things about your subject that he does not know himself. I do not pretend to know the contents of Vladimir Putin’s thoughts; I have, after all, been privy to only a small proportion of his conversations. But there are times when it has been clear to me as a spectator that he has used his ability to negotiate, persuade and cajole in order to achieve the result he wants. Perhaps the most notable example of this would be the way that he turned Akhmad Kadyrov, the Chechen commander who for years had been one of Russia’s staunchest enemies, into an ally. When, finally, Kadyrov was detained, Vladimir Putin wasted no time in arranging a meeting. Nobody knows, least of all me, what kind of a talk they had, but he obviously found the right words to earn his trust and establish a foundation of mutual respect. Before long, a war that had once threatened to drag on for years had come to an end.

Another aspect of the education one receives in the secret services is harder to articulate, since it bears little relation to any other discipline. There is only one rule: when you are presented with an order you must follow it; you do not have the right to challenge what you are being asked to do. And few people ask any questions as long as you achieve your targets. Perhaps this can be best summed up by a popular Russian saying: ‘Winners cannot be prosecuted.’ (Though, increasingly nowadays, I have noticed that people are more interested in means than they are ends.)

It is a mindset evolved for coping with extremity, and yet much about it – full-blooded devotion to a cause, an unflinching sense of duty and self-sacrifice, and an adamantine singleness of purpose, among others – might easily be seen to have a place in politics too. Not that this type of experience is without its own drawbacks. Lucky is the man who, in the course of this work, has not been involved in something – whether as a protagonist or only a witness, whether deliberate or accidental – that cripples for ever their human nature. Vladimir Putin is, I believe, one of those fortunate few that have managed to survive with their conscience intact.

(It is extremely rare for civilians to ever find themselves exposed to such potentially compromising circumstances, but in the dark years in which their country was demolished, years in which ordinary people found themselves in situations more brutal and distressing than they could ever have imagined, almost everybody in Russia has done something that one could judge as immoral.)

Putin also benefited from the fact that although he was seen by many as embodying some of the best features of the old regime, because he had been an agent working in the GDR rather than a politician operating in Moscow, he was not tainted with its failures.

So while Putin’s appointment was initially greeted with surprise – few outside his home city knew much of him – for the first time in years it seemed as if there was a reason to feel positive about the future of Russia. Not, of course, that this optimism blinded anyone to the gravity of the nation’s situation as it entered a new millennium.

The questions that had plagued the end days of Yeltsin’s administration had not gone away just because a new face was sitting in the Kremlin. Would Russia as we knew it continue to even exist? Would it remain a plaything of the oligarchs? How could the rule of law be re-established and power consolidated? What could be done to transform an ailing economy? It was an awkward, tense time. One wrong step could see the President tumbling out of power or, worse, could lead to violence on the streets.

Though in large part Putin left the management of the economy to his finance and economic ministers, Kudrin and Gref, who were encouraged to continue with privatisation and liberalising reforms, steadily the administration of the country began to be structured differently. In quick succession, measures were introduced to crack down on tax evasion, and to provide state funding for political parties so that they could no longer act as vehicles for billionaires’ resentments and ambitions. The extension of private land ownership was followed by the establishment of a judicial system based on the Napoleonic Code. A civil code and laws on arbitration courts were introduced, the status of judges was approved and the courts themselves were strengthened.

These were all small steps in themselves, but each was vital, and each was a reminder that any progress the country was making in the right direction was the result of enormous collective effort by a number of politicians. I sometimes get the sense that people outside Russia think that our president enjoys unlimited power. But it is not possible for just one man by himself to turn a country upside down; even the tsars did not enjoy this kind of undiluted, omnipotent influence. (Though, in my opinion, President Putin does possess a gift for making decisions, which I believe is one of the hallmarks of a strong leader.)

It was clear too from the beginning that this was not a programme that could be implemented overnight. Nor, in fact, was it a programme that could be implemented fully within a year. It is easy to transform a small country of 1.5 million people like Estonia in a comparatively short space of time, but reforming a colossus like Russia is an entirely different proposition. I do not think it is surprising that, eighteen years later, there still remains much to be done.

One of the new President’s most significant achievements in his first years in the Kremlin was to arrest the ascendancy of the oligarchs, a group of fabulously rich power-brokers who, during the ’90s, had come to play an outsized role in the nation’s political and economic life. While in 1996 Yeltsin had only been able to win the election by handing over huge chunks of state assets to these men in exchange for their support, in 2000, Vladimir Putin was confirmed as Russia’s leader, winning a majority with almost no campaigning. It was in the face of this surge of popular excitement that these wealthy corrupt men realised, too late, that they had endorsed a politician who threatened their pre-eminence. Over the past decade, each of these men had accumulated titanic wealth and influence. They had come to believe that there was little left to stop them turning Russia into something approaching a personal fiefdom, so as soon as it became clear that Russia had elected a president willing not only to defy them, but to actually challenge the foundations of their hegemony, they realised that they would have to try to fight back.