Kitabı oku: «Putin’s People», sayfa 13

5
‘Children’s Toys in Pools of Mud’

Instead of falling to what they believed was a coup by forces from the Communist past, what the Yeltsin Family had in fact succumbed to was a creeping coup by the security men. Under siege from all sides, they’d had little choice but to reach an accommodation with the KGB.

‘They had to find a compromise figure,’ said one former senior KGB officer close to Putin.[1] ‘There was a huge army of former and current law-enforcement officers who were all still in position. They needed a person who could smooth relations with this force after Yeltsin’s departure. Their regime was under attack from all sides. They didn’t have any choice. It was a forced decision based on the fact that they very much feared that the departure of Yeltsin from power could lead to a real counter-revolution and the loss of everything they’d achieved with such effort. It was a question of security and agreements. They thought Putin was a temporary figure they could control. The only person who was strongly against it was Chubais. He feared that Putin’s background – his service in the KGB – would mean that he would not be a manageable puppet in the hands of the Family. His intuition did not let him down.’

For a long time, Putin has been portrayed as Russia’s ‘accidental president’. But neither his rise through the Kremlin nor his vault to the presidency seem to have had much to do with chance. ‘When he was moved to Moscow they were already beginning to check his suitability,’ said the close Putin ally from the KGB.[2] If, to the outside world, Russia under Yeltsin was a country of epochal change where the power of the security services had long been smashed, then inside Russia, beneath the surface, the security men were still a force to be reckoned with. Inside Yeltsin’s Kremlin, and in second-tier posts across the country’s institutions and companies, were representatives of the KGB, some of whom ten years before had backed efforts to bring the market to Russia, understanding all too well that the Soviet Union could not compete with the West under the planned economy. They had watched from the shadows as the reforms they began spiralled out of their control under Yeltsin’s rule. They’d been left largely on the sidelines as the freedoms of the Yeltsin era led to the ever faster rise of the oligarchs, who by the mid-nineties had outpaced their former KGB masters. The freedoms had created a robber-style capitalism under which, in the end, the security men had been able to compromise Yeltsin and his family. With the market crash, their moment had come. Yeltsin and his family were vulnerable over the Mabetex accounts and their close business ties to Berezovsky, while the men behind the scenes in the Kremlin had long been planning a statist revanche.

‘The institutions the security men worked in did not break down,’ said Thomas Graham, the former senior director for Russia on the US National Security Council. ‘The personal networks did not disappear. What they needed simply was an individual who could bring these networks back together. That was the future. If it hadn’t been Putin, it would have been someone else like him.’[3]

The broader caste of security men behind the scenes in the Kremlin were seeking only to secure the property and economic gains that had been made in the move to the market. Inside the Kremlin, the prevailing conviction was that after the chaos of the Yeltsin years the new president, whoever he might be, had to represent a statist revanche, a revanche of the losers from the Yeltsin years – when state workers – teachers, doctors and law enforcement – had suffered most. ‘We were looking for the glue for the pro-Kremlin coalition,’ said Gleb Pavlovsky, the Kremlin adviser and spin doctor at the time.[4] ‘A different style politician had to come to power, and complete the post-Soviet transition.’

‘It was the KGB in any case that was going to take over the regime,’ said Andrei Illarionov, the former presidential economic adviser.[5]

If Primakov, as Plan A, represented the threat of a Communist-style revanche and the very real risk that a combined Primakov–Luzhkov ticket could result in Yeltsin and his Family spending the rest of their years behind bars, then Putin was the silovik who was meant to save them, the charmer who’d spent his time assuring the Family he was progressive, that he was one of them. ‘Putin is an outstanding politician, and he carried out a very successful operation to win the trust of the Family,’ said Illarionov. ‘Primakov was seen as the main enemy for Yeltsin. The security men accurately calculated that Yeltsin would not hand over power just like that.’[6]

But in their rush to secure their position, the Yeltsin Family were handing over the reins to a faction of younger KGB men who were to prove far more ruthless in their bid to gain power than any among Primakov’s elder, more statesmanlike generation might have been. In the hurly burly of Kremlin intrigue and warring clans – even within the security services – they were handing over power to a clan of security men who’d forged their alliances in the violent battles of St Petersburg, who were far hungrier for power and who would stop at nothing to demonstrate their loyalty.

The Kremlin spin doctors worked incessantly to portray Putin as acting decisively against the Chechen incursions into Dagestan. But in the first month of his premiership, Putin’s approval rating barely grew. He was still frequently described as colourless. He remained a grey and obscure bureaucrat, while Primakov’s newly announced alliance with Luzhkov was gathering in force – one by one, Russia’s powerful regional governors were lining up to join it. All the while, the news about overseas investigations was setting alarm bells ringing. The revelations about the Bank of New York probe, and its potential to lead to the Yeltsin Family, were like a ticking time bomb, and the breaking news about the link between the Mabetex investigation and the Yeltsin Family credit cards intensified the pressure further still. Somewhere, locked in a safe inside the deputy prosecutor’s office in the stately mansion on Petrovka Street, arrest warrants were lying, signed.

There was still one more crucial metamorphosis to come.

It was at this time, Pugachev told me, that he’d proposed the most audacious step yet. He began trying to convince Tatyana and Yumashev that Yeltsin should step down early, so Putin could succeed him before the next election. It was the only way to secure his vault to the presidency. ‘We’re not going to be able to hold on to power till the presidential elections the following summer,’ he told them. ‘The fact that Yeltsin said he wants him to be his successor is not going to help. We still have to get him there.’ The discussions went on for hours. Yumashev, for one, was convinced that Yeltsin would not agree. ‘I told him, this is a question of your personal safety, of the safety of his family, and for you and for all of us. It’s a question of the future of the country. But he said, “You understand he’ll never give up power.”’

In the end, according to Pugachev, Yumashev said he would go to Yeltsin. They parted late in the evening, and the next day, when Pugachev was back in the Kremlin, he said he received a call from Yumashev: ‘He told me the question has been decided.’[7] Yumashev, however, insisted that no such decision was made then. The official Kremlin line has always been that Yeltsin only decided to step down early much later, towards the end of the year.

But two other former Kremlin officials also indicated that the decision had been made earlier than that,[8] and one of Putin’s close KGB allies noticed that something serious was afoot. Towards the end of August Putin had retreated with one of his closest comrades to his old dacha in the Ozero compound for a few days. He went there to be alone, the close ally said.[9] He was deep in thought, and something was clearly weighing on him.

It was only after three weeks of tragedy and terror that September that public perception of Putin was turned around. The headlines surrounding Mabetex were blown away, while Putin rose to take command and Yeltsin disappeared from sight.

*

Late in the evening of September 4 1999 a car bomb ripped through an apartment building in the Dagestani town of Buynaksk, killing sixty-four people, most of them family members of Russian servicemen. The blast was seen as a response to the escalation of the armed struggle with Chechen rebels, who had launched a new incursion into Dagestan that same weekend, seizing several villages just one day after Putin, the newly anointed prime minister, had declared victory for federal forces in Dagestan. It seemed yet another tragic twist in the sporadic clashes Russia had been forced to engage in ever since Yeltsin launched a war against Chechen separatists in 1994.

When, just four days later, another blast tore out the central section of an apartment building in a sleepy working-class suburb of south-east Moscow, killing ninety-four people as they slept in their beds, Russia’s military struggle in the Caucasus seemed to have acquired a deadly new reach. At first, investigators said the blast might have been an explosion of natural gas.[10] Few of the families who lived in the building had anything to do with the breakaway Chechen republic. How could the blast have anything to do with a far-off military struggle? But one by one, without presenting any evidence, officials began to denounce the bombing as an attack by Chechen terrorists. Emergency workers had barely finished digging out the last few charred bodies from the wreckage of what had been number 19 Guryanova Street when, four nights later, another blast completely obliterated a drab nine-storey apartment building on Kashirskoye Shosse in the south of Moscow. One hundred and nineteen people died. The only evidence that seemed to remain of human life were children’s toys left floating in pools of mud.[11]

Panic spread through Moscow. It was unprecedented for the near decade of on-off war against separatist rebels in the south to reach into the heart of the capital. As the national sense of emergency and fear grew, the financial scandals surrounding the Yeltsin Family were pushed far off the front pages, and Vladimir Putin was thrust to the fore. This was the pivotal moment at which Putin took over the reins from Yeltsin. Suddenly, he was the country’s commander in chief, leading a bombastic campaign of airstrikes against Chechnya to avenge the attacks.

What happened that autumn, as the death toll from the apartment blasts rose to over three hundred while the Kremlin rolled out a meticulous PR campaign, has become the most deadly and central conundrum of Putin’s rise. Could Putin’s security men have bombed their own people in a cynical attempt to create a crisis that would ensure he took the presidency? The question has often been asked, but answers have been thin on the ground. Anyone seriously involved in investigating the issue seems to have died or been arrested unexpectedly.[12] Yet without the blasts and the concerted military campaign that followed, it’s impossible to imagine that Putin would ever have garnered the support to pose a serious challenge to Primakov and Luzhkov. The Yeltsin Family would have remained mired in the Mabetex and Bank of New York investigations, and Putin by association, as Yeltsin’s chosen successor, would have been ground down with them too. Now, as if on cue, he suddenly emerged confident and prepared. He was the all-action hero who by September 23 had launched airstrikes against the Chechen capital Grozny, while Yeltsin had completely disappeared from view. Putin spoke to the Russian people in the language of the street, vowing to ‘wipe out’ terrorists ‘in the outhouse’,[13] lashing out at the breakaway republic as a criminal state where ‘bandits’ and ‘international terrorists’ roamed free, enslaving, raping and killing innocent Russians.[14] To the Russians it seemed like a breath of fresh air. Compared to the sick and ailing Yeltsin, suddenly they had a leader who was in charge.

In a series of slick TV encounters with the military leadership in Dagestan, Putin was seen bounding from a descending military helicopter, dressed for action in khaki trousers and light jacket. He was shown solemnly raising a toast in a field tent with military commanders. ‘We have no right to show a second of weakness, because if we do it means all those who died have died in vain,’ he declared with firm conviction.[15] He was presented as the saviour of the country, a Russian James Bond who would restore order and hope.

The campaign was a shot in the arm for Russians’ humiliated sense of national identity. It immediately distinguished Putin from the chaos and collapse of the Yeltsin years. The all-out air assault gave vent to a decade of pent-up nationalistic frustration that had escalated earlier that year when NATO forces had launched an incursion into Russia’s traditional Eastern European sphere of interest, bombing Kosovo in the former Yugoslavia. As the airstrikes stretched into the autumn, demolishing more and more of Chechnya and indiscriminately killing thousands of civilians, Putin’s approval ratings soared from just 31 per cent in August to 75 per cent by the end of November.[16] If it had been a plan, Operation Successor, as it later became known, was working: an enormous pro-Putin majority had been formed.

But nagging doubts over the Moscow blasts were expressed almost immediately. Communist deputy Viktor Ilyukhin was one of the first to raise the alarm, claiming that the Kremlin could be behind the bombings in an attempt to fan hysteria and discredit Luzhkov.[17] For months rumours had been rife in Moscow that the Kremlin might provoke some kind of crisis as a pretext for cancelling elections. The Duma’s speaker, Gennady Seleznyov, had informed lawmakers that another bomb attack had taken place in the southern Russian city of Volgodonsk three days before it actually happened.[18] The biggest red flag appeared late in the evening of September 22 in the town of Ryazan, not far from Moscow, when a resident reported to the local police that he’d seen three suspicious-looking individuals carrying sacks into the basement of his apartment building. By the time the police arrived, the suspects had left in a car whose licence plates had been partially papered over.[19] The police searched the basement of the building, and emerged shocked and white-faced: they’d found three sacks, connected to a detonator and a timing device.[20] The entire building was swiftly evacuated, its terrified residents not allowed back to their homes until the evening of the following day. The police initially said that tests had found the sacks to contain traces of hexogen,[21] a powerful explosive that had been used in the other apartment blasts. The local FSB chief said the timer had been set to go off at 5.30 that morning, and congratulated the residents on escaping with just hours to spare.[22]

The Ryazan FSB and police mounted a huge operation to track down the apparent terrorists, cordoning off the entire city. A day later, on September 24, Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo reported to law-enforcement chiefs in Moscow that another apartment bombing had been averted. But just half an hour later Nikolai Patrushev, the hard-bitten, salty-tongued FSB chief who’d worked closely with Putin in the Leningrad KGB, told a TV reporter that the sacks had contained no more than sugar, and that the whole episode had been no more than an exercise, a test of public vigilance.[23] Patrushev was as ruthless as he was relentless in manoeuvres behind the scenes,[24] and his new explanations not only contradicted Rushailo, but seemed to surprise the Ryazan FSB, which had apparently been on the verge of capturing the men who’d planted the sacks.[25] The local resident who originally contacted the police later said that the substance he saw in the sacks was yellow, with a texture more like rice than sugar – a description that, according to experts, matched hexogen.[26]

For months afterwards, the residents of the apartment building at 14 Novoselyeva Street were angry at, confused and traumatised by the conflicting accounts. Several insisted that they didn’t believe it could have been a mere exercise.[27] A report later emerged that local law enforcement had intercepted a phone call they believed had been made by the apparent terrorists to an FSB-linked number in Moscow.[28] If this was true, it was starting to look as if Patrushev had declared the incident was just an exercise to make sure the investigation went no further. Local authorities involved in the investigation clammed up, refusing to comment to the press except to confirm the official line that it had all been an exercise. The police explosives expert who carried out the initial tests was transferred to a special unit whose employees are forbidden from speaking to the press.[29] The case files were immediately classified.[30]

A few years later, in 2003, a brave former FSB colonel, Mikhail Trepashkin, who stuck his neck out to investigate the Moscow bombings, was tried and sentenced to four years in a military prison. He had been arrested just days after telling a journalist that a composite sketch of one of the suspects in the first blast, at 19 Guryanova Street in Moscow, resembled a man he recognised as an FSB agent.[31] (The sketch, based on a description by one of the eyewitnesses, a building manager, had later been switched to a more suitable subject, a Chechen who claimed he’d been framed. The original sketch had been disappeared from police files.[32])

If this really was the deadly secret behind Putin’s rise, it was the first chilling indication of how far the KGB men were willing to go. For years, questions have swirled over the bombings, while investigative journalists have penned exhaustive accounts of everything that happened then, only to be met by a wall of denial from Putin’s Kremlin. But one of the first chinks in the Kremlin’s version has recently appeared. A former Kremlin official has claimed he heard Patrushev directly speak about what actually happened in Ryazan. Patrushev had raged one day about how the interior minister Vladimir Rushailo, a holdover from the Yeltsin years with close ties to Berezovsky, had nearly exposed the FSB’s involvement in the bombings: his officers had been close to catching the agents working for the FSB who planted the explosives. Rushailo had nearly blown the whole operation, seeking compromising information against the FSB and Patrushev. The FSB had been forced to backtrack and say the sacks contained no more than sugar to prevent any further investigation.[33]

Patrushev had apparently expressed no remorse, only anger at being threatened with the FSB’s exposure. The former Kremlin official said he still could not quite fathom what he recollected hearing: ‘There was no need for the bombings. We would have had the election all sewn up in any case.’ The Kremlin propaganda machine was powerful enough to ensure Putin’s victory in any case. But Patrushev, he said, ‘wanted to tie Putin to him and cover him in blood’.[34]

The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, dismissed the claim as ‘total rubbish’. And to this day, Valentin Yumashev insists that there could never have been any FSB conspiracy behind the apartment bombings: ‘I am absolutely sure this is not correct. The country categorically didn’t want a second Chechen war.’[35] The first war had been so humiliating, Russia’s once-great army losing so many lives in a tiny republic that barely even appeared on the map, that ‘to be an initiator of war in Chechnya was suicide’. ‘To organise explosions in apartment buildings so as to start a second war,’ said Yumashev, ‘would be to completely destroy the political future of the person you are trying to support.’ But the campaign Putin conducted was vastly different to the war waged by Yeltsin that lost so many lives. It consisted mainly of airstrikes, rather than sending in ground troops, and Putin had made the distinction clear from the start: ‘This time we will not put our boys under fire,’ he said.[36] Pavlovsky, the Kremlin spin doctor, also denied that there could ever have been any plot: ‘The apartment bombings … seemed to us to be electorally advantageous for Luzhkov. But all of a sudden he disappeared from view … That September of hexogen, the Moscow mayor lost the chance for leadership of Russia.’[37]

But Luzhkov, as Moscow mayor, had no power to command airstrikes on Chechnya in vengeance for the attacks. Though he was supported by the NTV channel of media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky, he was never going to be able to marshal a propaganda machine like that of the state-owned TV channel, RTR, and Berezovsky’s ORT to slavishly promote his every action, as Putin did. All of the Kremlin’s counter-arguments seemed weak. If the bombings were an FSB plot, they could have been undertaken without the knowledge or involvement of the Yeltsin Family. Putin’s KGB men might have ruthlessly taken the initiative themselves. ‘We all thought it was an act of terror. We had no idea it could be anything else,’ said one person close to the Yeltsin Family.[38] But if there was an FSB plot, it went far beyond even the KGB playbook that since the 1960s had supported terrorist groups in the Middle East and Germany as a way of disrupting and dividing the West. German terrorist groups handled by the Stasi and the KGB had blown up American servicemen in Berlin nightclubs and German bankers on their way to work,[39] with Vladimir Putin – if the account of one former member of Germany’s Red Army Faction is to be believed – handling members of these groups while stationed in Dresden.[40] It was another matter entirely, of course, to direct such tactics at Russia’s own citizens. ‘I couldn’t believe it at the time, that any citizen of Russia would be ready to kill such a number of civilians for their own political aims,’ said one Russian tycoon who’d been close to Berezovsky. ‘But now, though I don’t know whether they participated or not, I know only one thing: that they really are capable of more than this.’[41] ‘Whichever way you look at it, he began the election campaign with the apartment bombings,’ said a senior Russian banker with ties to foreign intelligence.[42]

Putin had emerged as a tough-talking leader from a new generation. ‘The campaign acquired the stylistic mask of national liberation revolution,’ said Pavlovsky. ‘Here was a simple guy from a Leningrad communal apartment who in the name of the people was taking the Kremlin … Putin’s decision to go to war to avenge the bombings was spontaneous, but it didn’t destroy our model. It fitted with the idea of a strong new regime.’[43]

*

For a long time in the years that followed, Boris Berezovsky, the fast-talking mathematician who’d been the arch-insider oligarch of the Yeltsin era, had been haunted by the apartment bombings. Later, at odds with Putin’s Kremlin and forced into exile in London, he’d made repeated claims that the FSB was involved in them.[44]

But in those days Berezovsky was still on board, and as the parliamentary elections in December 1999 loomed, he put aside his qualms about Putin’s KGB past[45] and got firmly behind the Putin campaign. Despite being hospitalised with hepatitis, he waged a devastating media campaign that autumn through his ORT federal TV channel that sought to destroy the reputations of Primakov and Luzhkov. The two men had formed a powerful parliamentary alliance called Fatherland-All Russia, and the Duma elections were to be a crucial first test of its potency. From his hospital bed, Berezovsky would call ORT late at night with instructions for Sergei Dorenko,[46] a popular, deep-voiced anchor who savaged Primakov and Luzhkov in weekly broadcasts that broke boundaries even by the standards of Russia’s mud-slinging media wars. In one, Dorenko accused Luzhkov of taking $1.5 million in kickbacks from the corrupt mayor of a Spanish seaside town, while his wife, Yelena Baturina, Moscow’s biggest construction tycoon, had allegedly funnelled hundreds of millions abroad through a chain of foreign banks.[47] The sixty-nine-year-old Primakov, Dorenko said in another broadcast, was unfit to become president because of hip surgery he’d undergone recently in Switzerland. Graphic footage of blood and bone in a similar operation being performed on another patient in Moscow was shown to underline the argument. Sticking the boot in further, Dorenko claimed that while Primakov was Russia’s foreign-intelligence chief he could have been involved in two assassination attempts against Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze. The programme also played footage of Skuratov with the prostitutes almost on a loop, in an effort to discredit the regional governors who’d joined Fatherland-All Russia and given their backing to Skuratov.[48]