Putin

4 RUSSIA’S FALL, PUTIN’S RISE

In January 1990 when Putin returned home, the USSR was still the USSR, Leningrad was still Leningrad, and he was still KGB. None of that would last another two years.

Putin now became a member of the “active reserves,” meaning KGB officers who “were put in place as active agents in business, media and the public sector…. The status of an agent on active reserve is considered a state secret.”[128] Putin returned to his alma mater, a choice that would prove smart and useful. As he says: “I was happy to go ‘undercover’ at Leningrad State University. I wanted to write my doctoral dissertation, check out the university, and perhaps get a job there. So, in 1990 I became assistant to the president of the university, responsible for international liaisons.”[129]

Landing that position was a good solution for Putin. It allowed him to work on his dissertation, some fifteen pages of which would later prove to be plagiarized from an American textbook. It gave him a foothold in viciously fast-shifting Leningrad, where gang wars were fought in the streets, sometimes with the Kalashnikovs and RPGs filched from the collapsing military and sold on the black market, and where ration cards for meat, eggs, butter, and other commodities would soon be introduced, creating an urgent air of wartime poverty and shortage. Most important, the job gave him a piece in the game, one that in time could be moved to a better position.

Putin, like everyone else, was winging it. The system was in a state of slow-motion free fall; the only questions were when it would land and with how much bloodshed. Putin had been offered a KGB post in Moscow, but turned it down for reasons of sentiment and practicality. He wanted to be near his parents, who were getting old, and also because he knew “there was no future to the system. The country didn’t have a future. And it would have been very difficult to sit inside the system and wait for it all to collapse around me.”[130]

Life was becoming increasingly meaningless for Soviet people, Putin included. Putin’s wife, Lyudmila, could see that he “had lost touch with his life’s real purpose.”[131] Every day brought new revelations of crimes committed in the name of Communism, and the system could barely deliver basic goods and services. A grocery store might contain nothing but stale macaroni and large jars of homemade-looking apple juice. Russians started hoarding matches and salt as they always do when crisis approaches. Suddenly, there was a real threat of hunger.

The year before Putin had returned to the USSR, the country had come to a standstill, stunned by the spectacle of its first free elections for people’s deputies to parliament. Andrei Sakharov was elected a deputy only three years after Gorbachev released him from internal exile in the closed city of Gorky. Another deputy of note was the dashing, charismatic law professor Anatoly Sobchak, who would work closely with Sakharov and future Russian president Boris Yeltsin on such previously unthinkable projects as investigating, and condemning, the use of military force against civilian demonstrators.

In May 1990 Sobchak became the chairman of the Leningrad City Council, essentially the mayor, a title that would become official the following year. It was clear to him that Leningrad would soon go hungry without some foreign trade. That meant he needed a motivated, effective person, one with a mastery of a foreign language and experience of living abroad, to advise him on foreign relations. Leningrad State University, where Sobchak taught law, had just such a person heading its own Foreign Relations Department: Vladimir Putin, who had attended Sobchak’s lectures in the early seventies when he was a student, though there was no personal relationship at the time.

As a rule in Russia things move with either glacial slowness or lightning speed, and the latter predominated in those final months of the Soviet Union. Sobchak had Putin in for an interview and made up his mind in a matter of minutes, telling him he should start the following Monday. Putin was more than happy to accept the offer, but felt obliged to reveal that he was a KGB staff officer. After a long moment’s thought, Sobchak said: “Screw it!”[132]

This is Putin’s version of events. There are others. Some would have it that Putin was dispatched there as his next assignment as an officer in the active reserves. Or, as Masha Gessen thought, Sobchak himself might have chosen Putin because he “knew that it was wiser to pick your KGB handler yourself than to have one picked for you.”[133]

In any case, Putin took the position and began working in Smolny, an elegant building that had been a school for young ladies of the nobility before the revolution and Lenin’s headquarters during the revolution itself. He chose a picture of Peter the Great, emperor and reformer, to decorate his office.

Putin, however, remained worried that his KGB connections could be used against him or against Sobchak. The only foolproof means against being outed was to out yourself.

Putin contacted the well-known filmmaker Igor Shadkhan, telling him: “Igor, I want to speak openly about my professional past so that it stops being a secret and so that no one can blackmail me with it.”[134] Shadkhan had just returned from grueling fieldwork filming in the Gulags of the far north and was more interested in resting than in working, but apparently Putin’s ability to charm older men worked again, and it wasn’t long before the interview was broadcast on Leningrad TV.

Looking beefy and deeply tired with dark, raccoonish circles under his eyes, confident but unpolished, Putin not only revealed the crucial information about himself, but also demonstrated that he had mastered the new vocabulary of the time. He called Communism “a beautiful but dangerous fairy tale” and said of the USSR: “As soon as the barbed wire was removed, the country began falling apart.”[135]

Sobchak did not regret his choice of Putin. “He was utterly professional. He worked very well with others, knew how to talk to them. He was decisive.”[136] Putin was on his way up.

It had been a smart choice to turn down Moscow for Leningrad. Putin knew how to operate there and was a Leningrader by temperament—aloof, cerebral, acerbic.

In a referendum in the spring of 1991 the people of Leningrad chose to restore the city’s original name, St. Petersburg. To lead that newly named city into a very uncertain future they elected Anatoly Sobchak as mayor. As a sign that their political careers were now linked and in tandem, Sobchak immediately promoted Putin from adviser on international relations to head of that department. He went from an intellectual resource to an active player.

But Putin was not a month on the job before he and his country faced a crisis of the first order. In August 1991 the lurch and drift of the Soviet Union reached critical mass. A small group of high officials—among them the chairman of the KGB, the prime minister, the interior minister, and the vice president—attempted a putsch, placing Gorbachev under house arrest in the south of the country, where he was vacationing. It was the USSR’s last attempt to save itself and it lasted barely three days. The whole affair was a very Russian mix of the sublime, the ridiculous, and the tragic.

The iconic moment for Russia came when Boris Yeltsin stood on top of a tank that was threatening the White House, as the Russian parliament building in Moscow was known. He called on the army and the people to stand up for freedom and to defy the putschists. Moscow’s patriotic tarts lowered themselves down the tank turrets to distract any soldiers who weren’t yet on the side of the people and freedom.

The mood of Moscow was one of elation, bordering on exaltation. Referring to the three young men, one of them Jewish, who had lost their lives in the struggle for Moscow, one Russian woman said to me in conversation: “There can never be anti-Semitism in Russia again now that a Jew has given his life for Russia’s freedom!”

For Putin these were not days of exaltation but, he says, ones of agonized choice and self-definition. He was torn. The goal of the coup—“preserving the Soviet Union from collapse—was noble.” That, however, was not enough. “As soon as the coup began, I immediately decided whose side I was on. I knew for sure that I would never follow the coup-plotters’ orders. I would never be on their side. I knew perfectly well that my behavior could be considered a crime of office. That’s why, on August 20, I wrote a second statement resigning from the KGB…. All the ideals, all the goals that I had had when I went to work for the KGB, collapsed.”[137]

The bond with Sobchak grew tighter in those tense days when people in Russia were making the choice that would decide their own future and the country’s. In St. Petersburg, Sobchak played a role similar to Yeltsin’s. “Speaking from the steps of the Winter Palace, he gave heart to the thousands who did not want to see the clock turned back,” wrote the Economist in his obituary. “Deploying weapons no more violent than his personality and his command of language, he persuaded the commander of the armored troops moving on the city to withdraw.”[138]

But in the midst of trauma there was a certain grotesque levity. “Once I saw the faces of the coup-plotters on TV,” says Putin, “I knew right away that it was all over.”[139] At the junta’s one and only press conference, the “leader,” drab Soviet vice president Gennady Yanayev, kept sneezing into a handkerchief. Dictators should not make their debut blowing their noses.

In an iconoclastic rampage Russians began tearing down the images of Soviet rule. The immense statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the secret police, was torn from its pedestal in front of KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square. Though heavy, it proved hollow. Some, but not all, of the statues of Lenin were toppled. One of Stalin was struck in the face with a sledgehammer. All of them were taken to a park near an art museum, the New Tretyakov Gallery, and strewn on the grass in a random fury.

No one had any idea what tomorrow would bring, though it was clear the USSR’s days were numbered. What would the next Russia look like? Whose voices would be heard?

Wandering on the grass where the statues were strewn I saw an older man in glasses and a sweater-vest who looked like a retired shop teacher. When he opened his mouth to rant he revealed steel-plated teeth, common in the USSR: “They were nearly all kikes, the Communists. Lenin was part kike on his mother’s side and the rest of him was Asiatic. And the capitalists are all kikes too, and now they’re trying to finish up what the Communists didn’t get around to doing. The kikes want the death of Russia!”[140]

But there were other voices, equally passionate and brighter with intelligent hope. As winter and the fear of hunger crept into the cities, a TV producer I knew, a great battleship of a woman who issued opinions like salvos, said: “We are so happy, you can’t imagine. We did something wonderful. We stood up for freedom. And now we are free. Yes, maybe there will be starvation this winter but at least we’ll be starving as free people. We’ve starved before but we’ve never been free before.”[141]

Other stars besides Putin’s were on the rise and moving with greater speed than his, though his, of course, would in time eclipse them all. Like him they came out of nowhere, a good sign, proof that Russia’s long-suppressed ambitions and creative force had been loosed. For people alert to the moment and its possibilities there were three questions: how best to dismantle the old system; what to build in its place; how to get rich in the process.

Rules, law, and the rule of law were never very much respected anyway in Russia, which had “a décor of laws,” as the dissident writer Andrei Amalrik put it.[142] Proverbs spoke of the law as a cart that went where the driver wanted. In the transition between systems there were fewer rules and guidelines than ever. Clear-eyed ambitious men entered that vacuum with great energy. Everyone had stolen from the state when it was a going concern, and now that it had collapsed there was even less reason not to loot the ruins.

Others were more intent on dismantling the system than on exploiting the transition. One of those was Anatoly Chubais, who was born in 1955 and was thirty-six when the USSR fell. His father was a Soviet army colonel, a World War II vet, and a believer in Marxism who lectured on it to the troops. A lanky redhead, Chubais was drawn to economics, a subject that had been his mother’s major, but she stayed home with the children and never practiced her profession. Chubais, who would quickly become known as “the most hated man in Russia”[143] for the pain he inflicted on the country during the shock-therapy phase, did not himself come swiftly to his new worldview. In the beginning he was an economics Ph.D. student in Leningrad trying to figure out why command-and-control economies were always economies of shortage. He gradually came to the conclusion that only prices set by the open market could provide realistic and reliable information as to what goods and services were needed. But, once convinced, he had something of his father’s Soviet steel in his convictions.

He was a natural for Mayor Sobchak’s team and quickly became one of its top economic advisers, dealing with the attempt to create a Free Economic Zone in Leningrad. That was in 1990. By the end of 1991, Chubais had moved to the center of power, Moscow, and the highest echelons of President Yeltsin’s government. He was appointed chairman of the Committee for the Management of State Property, which was in charge of privatizing state property. Chubais became the “architect of the largest transfer in history of state-owned assets to private hands,” as David Hoffman put it in The Oligarchs, by now a classic text.[144]

No one knew what they were doing, for two very good reasons. First, the people in charge of dismantling the Russian economy were mostly men in their early thirties who, apart from receiving an education, had not done very much at all, certainly nothing on the order of running large enterprises. Second, what they were doing was historically unprecedented. It also contradicted the Marxism on which they had all been reared and that held that Communism was the stage of development that came after capitalism, not vice versa. And so turning Communism into capitalism was as absurdly impossible as trying to turn fish chowder back into fish.

But Chubais and his ilk had strongly held attitudes, goals, and assumptions. The attitude was a visceral hatred and contempt for the system. “I hate the Soviet system. There is little in life I have hated like the Soviet system,” said Chubais.[145] The goal was the absolute destruction of the Soviet economy and thus the Soviet state by putting the USSR’s assets in private hands. The assumption was that the laws of the market would sort things out. The inefficient would die away, the efficient would thrive. Private ownership and personal freedom were two aspects of the same thing. Russia would leap into both democracy and capitalism all at once.

The process would be modeled on the Polish experiment with “shock therapy.” The first step was to free up prices so that they would reflect market realities and not the decisions of bureaucrats in the planning commission. As the Russians quipped bitterly, they got the shock but not the therapy.

Between 1990 and 1994 prices increased by well over 2,000 percent. By the hideous magic of inflation, $100,000 turned into $400. The stores were “pristinely empty,” as Egor Gaidar, the other main leader of economic reform, put it.[146] The farmers weren’t delivering grain. “Why should they? To get some piece of paper that, out of habit, people still called money?”[147]

Huge trucks appeared in downtown Moscow bearing potatoes from the countryside. People bought as much as they could, staggering away bent parallel to the ground by immense burlap bags. In apartments potatoes were everywhere—in cabinets, in closets, under beds.

Everything was for sale. Old women stood in the cold holding up a single knit shawl, like human stores. For people raised on socialist ideals, which considered property to be theft, there was a particular shame in the act of selling, not to mention the fact that these goods were often family heirlooms or simply all people had left in the world. Those with nothing to sell simply knelt on the freezing sidewalks and offered up their own pain and self-abasement. The younger women chose other strategies, equally desperate. Flocks of prostitutes chased every car that slowed in the downtowns of Russian cities. Many were nurses and teachers who could no longer feed their families on their meager salaries, if they were even paid.

In the street markets and flea markets treasures could be had for a song—amber necklaces, icons, rugs from Asia. You could buy Red Army uniforms from fur hats to high boots, medals for valor included. The currency was meaningless, life was meaningless, there was a whiff of Weimar in the air. Groups favoring black clothing and the hatred of Jews (and Masons) emerged quite naturally from that context of empty air and violent streets.

My reportage from the first post-Soviet winter of 1992 captures something of that time and place:

But for most that winter, shivering in a restaurant would have been an unimaginable luxury:

Meanwhile, even at this early stage before the large state enterprises began to be auctioned for a song to insiders in sweetheart deals, there were still plenty of people fast on their feet who saw ways to make big money either from the falling value of the ruble—borrow cheap, repay even cheaper—or by buying up the vouchers that were issued in 1992 to every citizen in an effort to make Soviet serfs into shareholders. Factory managers and the party elite had already concocted schemes for gaining control over state property.

But a good percentage of the population simply couldn’t cope with the new reality. The environment had shifted radically and they could not adapt. People demonstrated in the streets with signs reading: “Put the redhead behind bars.” They meant Chubais.

There was a violent nostalgia for the Soviet past. For the democracy of poverty, cheap goods, brutal certainties. The extreme tensions in Russian society were expressed in the battle waged by the nationalists and Communists in parliament against the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. In mid-1993 the parliament declared itself the supreme power in the country, which now seemed on the verge on civil war. In response Yeltsin suspended parliament to protect, as he put it, “Russia and the whole world against the catastrophic consequences of the disintegration of the Russian state, against anarchy recurring in a country which has an enormous arsenal of nuclear weapons.”[150]

The rebellious deputies seized the White House. Well armed—five hundred submachine guns, six machine guns, two hundred pistols—the rebels’ numbers shifting from 400 to 800. Outside, the building was ringed by supporters bearing the black-and-yellow flags of the nationalists and the red banners of Communism along with signs: “Revive the Communist Party of Russia,” “Let’s reveal the ethnicity of all those who were in the mass media!” (meaning Jews), “Blacks out of Moscow!” (meaning people from the Caucasus mountain region, often referred to as “blacks” or “black asses”).

The sporadic violence came to a head on October 4, 1993, when Yeltsin ordered an attack. There was a fifteen-minute tank barrage followed by a mop-up action inside the building in which twenty soldiers and forty rebels were killed.

The ironies were heavy-handed even by Russian standards. Some two years before, Yeltsin had stood atop a tank in front of that same White House to save Russia from a putsch, and now he had ordered tanks to fire on parliament. The blackened front of that white building became a sort of tragic icon of its own.

In winter 1992 St. Petersburg was in a panic over a possible famine. The city council put Marina Salye in charge of food supplies, and it was she who introduced rationing and ration cards. Every resident of the city had the right to three pounds of meat per month, two pounds of processed meats, ten eggs, one pound of butter, half a pound of vegetable oil, one pound of flour, and two pounds of grain or dry pasta—if he or she could find any.

Salye, a geologist by profession, had spent much of her adult life far from the tense, polluted cities. Geology was a romantic profession that allowed for travel over all the vast yet still somehow claustrophobic territory of the USSR. Days of hard work in nature, nights of campfires, wine, guitars. Nevertheless, Salye proved totally adept at politics and quickly emerged as one of the leaders of the democratic movement in Leningrad. “With a cigarette dangling from her lips, she could lead a crowd up and down Nevsky, stopping traffic,” as one of her political opponents described her.[151]

Her attempt to feed her starving city would prove the misfortune of her life. She could not help but notice that an agreement to ship Russian raw materials—gas, oil, timber, metals—in exchange for food to a foreign concern had gone totally awry. The nearly $100 million of raw materials had indeed been shipped, but not a ruble’s worth of food had arrived. Looking into the matter further, Salye discovered documents indicating that Vladimir Putin, as head of the Foreign Relations Committee, had entered into contracts with legally dubious companies. Working with a colleague, Yuri Gladkov, she collected more evidence and presented it to the city council, which concluded that the money had been stolen and recommended to Mayor Sobchak that Putin be dismissed.

Sobchak’s response was to dissolve the city council. He wasn’t about to impede Putin, whose achievements were obvious. “Judge his success—he was in charge of foreign investment, and by 1993 we had 6,000 joint ventures, half the total in Russia.”[152] Putin helped attract American firms like Coca-Cola, Wrigley, and Gillette. And foreigners enjoyed working with Putin. Graham Humes, an American who set up a charity in St. Petersburg, said of him: “I found him great to deal with compared with these other Russian bureaucrats who all wanted to fleece you. He was very intense; he controls everything in the room. You felt he wanted to be feared but didn’t want to give you cause to fear him.”[153]

Putin succeeded in completing a project to lay fiber-optic cable to give St. Petersburg world-class international phone service. So what if $100 million disappeared? A thousand tons of gold also disappeared as the USSR was collapsing. Later on, Russia’s chief comptroller at the time called the case “not radically more serious than what was going on in the rest of Russia…. It was just a typical case at the time.”[154] You hardly threw away one of your most gifted and dogged assistants over such a measly sum, such a typical case.

Like all important moments in Putin’s life, his role in the missing hundred million is blurred with multiple ambiguities. Only three things are certain—the money disappeared, the food never arrived, and Putin had a hand in the paperwork. He does not seem to have benefited personally from the deal. His wife says that they returned from the GDR with a twenty-year-old washing machine that an East German friend had given them and which lasted them another five years. If Putin had been siphoning off some of the money from the food deal, he presumably would have found enough to buy his wife a new washer. The American Humes said he didn’t want to “fleece you.” Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch and kingmaker who would figure greatly in Putin’s destiny (as would Putin in his), describes meeting Putin in the early nineties: “And what was absolutely surprising for me was that he was the first one who didn’t ask for a bribe.”[155]

If he didn’t get any money out of it, why would he have risked his high position in the new government?

It’s possible that Putin was simply chumped—in Russia, swindling is an art form. Inexperienced in the ways of commerce, Putin may have unwittingly helped abet a scam. In the chaos of those years anything was possible. More likely, however, is that Putin knew some people would line their pockets with the money and he wanted those people in his own pocket for later use. It was a time when sudden and immense fortunes could be made, but it was also a time when sudden and immense power could accrue to those alert to the utility of secrets and favors. Putin preferred power.

Marina Salye tried to raise the issue again when Putin was running for president in 2000. In her version of events, she was made to understand that any such effort would simply cost her her life. She disappeared into a tiny village in northwest Russia far from Moscow.

There were no good years for Russia in the nineties, but 1994 seems particularly bad.

Something had changed in Russia after fall 1993 when Yeltsin ordered the tanks to fire on parliament. The society became more violent, precipitate, unhinged. In June of 1994, the oligarch Boris Berezovsky climbed into the backseat of his Mercedes. His driver and bodyguard were in front. As they left the courtyard a remote-controlled bomb in a nearby parked Opel exploded with tremendous force, decapitating the driver, taking an eye from the bodyguard, injuring seven pedestrians, and shattering windows a block away. Boris Berezovsky stumbled from the wreckage, badly burned but able to walk away.

There had already been fifty-two bomb blasts in Moscow alone by that June. The use of lethal force had become a part of business as well as of politics.

In July the giant pyramid scheme known as MMM collapsed, leaving millions penniless. The 27 percent plunge in the ruble’s value on Black Tuesday, October 11, inflicted suffering on those who still had rubles left to lose. Two months later, on December 11, Russian troops were sent into Chechnya. To chaos, poverty, and desperation now war had been added.

After simmering for three years since Chechnya had declared its independence in 1991, hostilities broke out in late December between Russia and Chechnya, a war that would quickly prove “barbaric on both sides.”[156] In the Kremlin’s eye oil-rich Chechnya was a lawless land with impudent aspirations to independence. But business mattered more than war.

To succeed in business in Russia during the 1990s three things were needed: capital, connections, and chutzpah. When Gorbachev tried to revive the economy, new, looser laws allowed for various cooperative-type enterprises, including financial ones that were essentially banks. Some people acquired capital by reselling goods bought abroad for fantastic profit. As one Russian exclaimed on selling a computer for 70,000 rubles: “It was my salary for forty-eight years!”[157] Others dealt in cars, designer clothes, it almost didn’t matter, since everybody needed everything. It wasn’t that long ago that enterprises like these could have cost you prison time or, in some cases, death. Russians were well aware that the last time anything like this was attempted was Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), which flourished for a few years before ending very badly. That this could happen again no one doubted. The Communists could come back into power—with a vengeance. The Red attempt to seize power in 1993 had been quashed by tanks firing at the White House, but there was an election coming in 1996 that at the least would be bitterly contested, a Communist defeat by no means a certainty.

It was an odd atmosphere that prevailed in those days. A mix of Klondike Gold Rush and Feast in Time of Plague, a sense that anything was possible, calamity included. Though Russian gangsters were making small fortunes via extortion, protection, drugs, and casinos, the great fortunes would end up in the hands of educated men like Boris Berezovsky, who held a Ph.D. in mathematics, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who, before he became Russia’s richest man and then its most famous prisoner, earned a degree in engineering. Though a few of the future oligarchs had street smarts, what they all had, and what made them all superrich, was knowing how to work the system. It really didn’t matter which system it was—the crumbling Soviet system, the system for transitioning to capitalism, or the new rudimentary capitalist system itself—as long as there was some sort of system they would find some way of gaming it.

The image of Berezovsky stumbling away from the smoking wreckage of his Mercedes is, in its way, an oligarch icon. It was a perfect example of Nietzsche’s “What does not kill us makes us stronger.” Only prison and death could stop those men in Russia who had dedicated their every waking moment to the acquisition of fabled wealth.

Berezovsky, born in 1946, an only child, a Jew, took Russian maximalism to the max. His applied-mathematics lab needed not only to flourish but to win the Nobel Prize. When he pursued wealth, only billions would do. Others said of him, “He uses every person to the maximum. That is his principle of life,” and he said of himself: “Everything I do, I do to an absolutely maximum degree.”[158] If Berezovsky wanted to speak with you, he would wait on your doorstep for hours or follow you fully dressed into the shower at your athletic club. Short, dark-haired, dark-eyed, he vibrated with incessant nervous energy. If he ever had a moment’s peace in his life, he would not have had the slightest idea what to do with it. “He was in one place one minute. And in another the next. He had a million phone calls. A million places where he was to arrive. Another million places where he promised to arrive but never went,” recalled a colleague.[159] He was insistent, infuriating, charming.

The USSR was officially based on so-called scientific socialism, and in the country’s waning days its rulers hoped science would save socialism. A great deal of hope, trust, and credence were placed in institutes and labs, like Berezovsky’s, which studied the mathematics of decision making. That plugged him into industry, specifically the auto industry, on a high level and allowed him to make a fortune by obtaining cars from the state with loans that soaring inflation allowed him to pay back with much cheaper rubles.

Berezovsky also wormed his way into the Kremlin by publishing Yeltsin’s ghostwritten memoirs in a deluxe edition that greatly pleased the “author,” who was even more pleased by the tremendous checks from the inflated, if not in some cases utterly bogus, foreign sales that Berezovsky routinely presented. Bribes disguised by vanity as royalties.

Now in the Kremlin’s inner circle, Berezovsky could put his capital to good use. He gained a controlling interest in the national airline, Aeroflot, and the television broadcast company ORT, which gave him access to the burgeoning advertising revenue; but more important, it gave him political power because Russians got their news and views from TV, as they do to this day.

His two daughters attended Cambridge. He had a new, glamorous trophy wife. He had attained both significant wealth and significant power. Nothing could stop him.

The post-Soviet Russian government may still have had enough nuclear power to destroy the planet, but it couldn’t pay its bills. Teachers, nurses, pensioners, weren’t being paid. Inflation was still sky-high. And there were presidential elections coming in 1996. Yeltsin could easily lose. Already there was a powerful nostalgia for Soviet stability, which the Communist Party promised to restore.

Yelstin was increasingly seen as a fool, a has-been, a drunk. Gorbachev had alienated Russians by his clampdown on vodka; Yeltsin had alienated them by his overreliance on it. At the final ceremony for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Germany in August 1994, Yeltsin grabbed the baton from the Berlin Police Orchestra leader’s hand and began vigorously conducting himself. Good for a laugh, but an uncomfortable one. His popularity rating was in the single digits and flirting with zero.

To win the upcoming election, Yeltsin needed money. A deal was worked out and given the rather innocuous name “Loans for Shares.” The oligarchs with cash would loan the government money; shares in state-owned industries would be held as collateral. It was clear to all that the government would never be able to pay back the loans. And when the time came to auction off those shares held as collateral, the people currently holding them made sure the auctions were rigged in their favor, though a few face-saving forms were observed. Still, if an airport had to be closed to prevent unwanted prospective bidders from arriving, that airport would be closed.

Chrystia Freeland, who covered those turbulent times as Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times, called Loans for Shares a “Faustian bargain”[160] because the young and still committed reformers like Chubais knew the sale of the immense state enterprises to a handful of rich men would put an end to the free-wheeling capitalism they dreamed of. Chubais and Yeltsin consistently said: “We do not need hundreds of millionaires, but millions of property owners.”[161] But the choice was stark: either give the tycoons control of the economy or lose the election to the Communists. Chubais found an eschatological formulation: “Isn’t it clear that there is one and only one question facing Russsia today: will there be a second coming of communism—or not?”[162] A Red scare in Russia of all places.

The Communists’ leader, a colorless apparatchik by the name of Gennady Zyuganov, had suddenly come to life and been the hit of the World Economic Forum in Davos in February 1996. He presented Western leaders and businessmen with an image of sober, serious dependability. To Chubais’s horror, those Western leaders danced attendance on Zyuganov: “The world’s most powerful businessmen, with world-famous names, who with their entire appearance demonstrated that they were seeking support of the future president of Russia, because it was clear to everyone that Zyuganov was going to be the future president of Russia.”[163] At Davos, George Soros warned Boris Berezovsky that if Zyuganov was elected, as he certainly would be, Berezovsky would “hang from a lamppost”[164] and advised him to leave Russia.

But nothing energized Berezovsky like a good crisis. He made peace with his enemy Vladimir Gusinsky, who owned the other major TV network. Now the airwaves that had throbbed with criticism of Yeltsin’s prolonged, expensive, and apparently unwinnable war in Chechnya began to sound the alarm of a Communist resurgence and to beat the drums for Yeltsin. Zyuganov, though taking advantage of the free television time due him by law and buying some in addition, preferred to communicate with his constituency in written form—poster, newspaper, leaflet. This was a throwback to Soviet times, but not entirely a foolish decision, since the Communist Party still had 500,000 members, a large percentage of whom could be mobilized for door-to-door campaigning. Better a personable youth delivering a leaflet to your door than yet another talking head on the screen.

But there were other deeply retro aspects to the Communist campaign. The evil stink of anti-Semitism was very much in the air. When Zyuganov spoke of “the cosmopolitan elite of international capital,”[165] which was using the United States to destroy Russia, everyone knew what he meant—the cabal of Jews that ran the world as described in the tsarist secret-police forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Yeltsin and company were not just political opponents but “the turncoats, destroyers and traitors of the Fatherland who currently rule in the Kremlin.”[166] But Zyuganov made practical proposals as well—rents would not exceed 15 percent of income, the army would be rebuilt, natural resources would be renationalized, but law-abiding, tax-paying privatized enterprises would, though with great distaste, be tolerated.

Like Berezovsky, Yeltsin was a man who could be energized by crisis. He came alive, regaining “his spark and charisma.”[167] He quit drinking and lost close to twenty pounds. Chubais was running his campaign Western-style, replete with “sound bites, daily photo ops and nervous advance men.”[168] He began dealing with the war in Chechnya and used some of the Loans for Shares money to begin paying long overdue salaries and pensions. What Yeltsin had that Zyuganov did not was a strong, clear, positive message. “Five years ago we chose freedom. There can be no retreat.”[169] And, as he said to voters: “I will ensure you freedom of choice, but the choice is up to you. Vote for a free Russia!”[170] He reminded voters of what the “circles of Bolshevik hell”[171] had been like: the camps, the hunger, the fear. It hadn’t been that long ago either—people did not need much reminding. “I was under a communist regime once, and I don’t want a replay of it,” said the leader of one of Russia’s most popular bands, the aptly named Time Machine. “Come cast your vote on June 16 so Time Machine can keep on playing.”[172]

Rock ’n’ roll was on Yeltsin’s side. How could he lose?

On June 16 he didn’t lose, but he didn’t win either. Yeltsin received 35 percent of the vote, Zyuganov 32 percent. The rest of the vote was split among other candidates. This was still a time when Russia was gloriously messy with its new democracy, dozens and dozens of parties competing, even the Beer Lovers won 428,727 votes. A runoff was scheduled for July 3.

In the meantime there had been another election—for mayor of St. Petersburg—which at first seemed mainly of local importance. Putin ran the election campaign for Mayor Sobchak, his boss and mentor. “Politicians like Sobchak are usually the last to learn their luster is gone,” as Masha Gessen put it.[173] And Sobchak was mostly luster to begin with. He had made some progress, with Putin’s help, in attracting foreign business to St. Petersburg but had done very little for the people, to improve their daily lives, the ultimate measure of all politics. Corruption, crime, and a crumbling infrastructure were what people saw. And there was always some ambiguity about Sobchak, how much of his attachment to reform was genuine, or did that tall, telegenic man just wear democracy as if it were a well-cut foreign suit?

Defeated in the election, Sobchak would remain in office until June 12, at which point both he and Vladimir Putin would be officially unemployed. But no moves could be made until the presidential runoffs were held.

This time the results were clear and striking—54 percent to Yeltsin, 40 percent to Zyuganov. As Yeltsin’s biographer Leon Aron said: “In the end he won because the election had, as he intended it to, become a referendum on democracy and communism, rather than on market reforms or the Russian version of capitalism.”[174]

If things had gone the other way—a Yeltsin defeat and a Sobchak victory—Putin would probably have remained in St. Petersburg, dabbling in democracy and corruption, at the margins of history.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, Chubais, the much-hated chief of privatization and the successful manager of Yeltsin’s reelection campaign, contacted Putin with a job offer—deputy chief of the Kremlin’s Property Department. It was an important post, dealing with the $600 billion in property that Russia had acquired from the USSR. Putin would be “in charge of the legal division and Russian property abroad.”[175] He accepted and moved to Moscow.

It’s probably axiomatic that no one gets to the top without fierce ambition, especially the top of the heap of Russian politics. But Putin himself could hardly have dared set his sights as high as he in fact rose, nor imagined how swift that ascent would be. A year after moving to Moscow he had become deputy chief of staff to the president; the next year he would be named director of the FSB, the successor to the KGB; and in the following year, 1999, he would be appointed prime minister, a post he did not hold for very long because, during his annual December 31 speech to the nation, President Yeltsin shocked the country by announcing that he was retiring prematurely, with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to take the his place effective immediately.

Even for a man of ferocious ambition and killer instincts to rise from unemployed bureaucrat to president in the space of some three and a half years would be a dizzying achievement, but for a man of no particular outward ambition it assumes the sheen of legend. How did it happen?

First, neither Putin’s uniqueness nor the scale and speed of his rise should be exaggerated. Stalin, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin all seemed to come from nowhere. And as vice mayor of St. Petersburg, Putin had been the number two man in Russia’s number two city, not exactly nowhere. Still, it’s a long way from there to the Kremlin.

Putin had already caught the Kremlin’s eye when amazing Boris Berezovsky by not asking him for a bribe. In refusing that bribe, Putin won a reputation for both integrity and something worth more than integrity in the Russian political situation—the brains to know which bribes to take and which not to. Berezovsky was a man of great power behind the scenes, a “kingmaker”—better to have his respect than his rubles.

The Russia of the late nineties was ruled by “the Family,” meaning Yeltsin’s own family and a few others, like Berezovsky, who were allowed into that inner circle. Among the members of the Family none was more important than Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana. At one point she needed an apartment in St. Petersburg. The one that would be perfect for her was, unfortunately, being occupied by some important Americans and other foreigners. Putin made the problem go away.

When Sobchak lost the race for mayor of St. Petersburg, Putin was offered the chance to stay on as deputy mayor. But he had pledged not to if Sobchak was not elected, and he kept his word. Sobchak was not important to the Kremlin, but Putin’s reflexive loyalty was duly noted.

In Moscow it looked like Putin was fated to forever remain the number two man, distinguished by his loyalty and ability, but without the drive and charisma to reach the top of any one governmental body, not to mention the government itself. He would be the deputy chief of the Kremlin’s Property Department, then Boris Yeltsin’s deputy chief of staff, and, later, one of three first deputy prime ministers in August 1999.

But in the meantime Putin had actually headed something. To the immense chagrin of his former colleagues, between July 1998 and August 1999, Putin served as director of what would soon be called the Federal Security Bureau, the FSB. That organization is often described as the successor to the KGB, which is not entirely accurate. Until the fall of the USSR the KGB was like a combination, at the minimum, of the FBI and the CIA. After the fall, those two functions were separated, and now everything connected with foreign intelligence is handled by the SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service.

Putin claims to have been in no hurry to return to the closed, arcane world of the security services. He would not make any dramatic shake-ups during his tenure, but two developments of significance would occur in that year and a month. For the first time he tasted the pleasure of being the boss. Of course, there were still a few people above him, but it was a foretaste of the Kremlin, where, as he put it, “I control everybody.”[176]

The second development was more tied to specific events. The prosecutor general, Yury Skuratov, had launched a corruption investigation that was coming too close to Yeltsin and the Family for comfort. Ruin and prison were among the possibilities they were facing. Suddenly in March 1999 state TV broadcast footage of the prosecutor general cavorting in bed with two prostitutes. A short time later FSB chief Vladimir Putin also appeared on television to attest that experts from his organization had analyzed the video and ascertained its authenticity. This compromising material, known as kompromat, effectively put an end to the investigation and the prosecutor general’s career. Yeltsin and the Family owed a debt of gratitude to Putin, who had exhibited not only loyalty but fierce, impressive effectiveness.

Yeltsin now understood that as long as he held power it would be possible to fend off attacks like that of the prosecutor general, but once out of office, he would be defenseless, easy prey. And that time was rapidly approaching. Conferring with Boris Berezovsky among others, Yeltsin began developing a plan.

In midsummer 1999 kingmaker Berezovsky was dispatched to Biarritz in the South of France, where Putin and his family were vacationing, to convince Putin to accept the post of prime minister. There two things impressed Berezovsky. One was “the very modest, absolutely simple apartment” where Putin was living. The other was Putin’s lack of eagerness, confidence: “He wasn’t sure he was capable.”[177] Neither money nor power seemed greatly to tempt him, and what else was there?

Of course, there may have been a dose of cool calculation in Putin’s coyness. The post of prime minister was a stepping-stone to oblivion. Yeltsin was changing prime ministers every few months, at such a dizzying rate that, upon the appointment of Putin, the editor of the Financial Times asked his Moscow bureau chief: “Do I really need to remember this one’s name?”[178]

In the event, he took the position of first deputy prime minister, one he would hold for a bit less than five months. That was time enough for Yeltsin and Berezovsky to hold their magnifying glass over Putin.

He had already demonstrated strength, loyalty, and effectiveness. In addition, he was vigorous, unlike Yeltsin, who was suffering heart attacks and undergoing quintuple bypasses, and had the flushed, puffy look of those who are not long for this world. Putin was tough on Chechnya and knew how to use the security service to neutralize enemies. A bit colorless, a bit ordinary, but that might be just what Russia needed after extravagant Gorbachev and flamboyant Yeltsin.

But most important were Putin’s strength and loyalty to keep the deal Yeltsin would offer—power for immunity.

Yeltsin’s vital interests and Putin’s chief characteristics aligned and clicked. A perfect fit.

And so it was that on December 31, 1999, on the eve of a new century, President Boris Yeltsin, in his annual address to the nation, asked Russians for their “forgiveness for the fact that many of the dreams we shared did not come true and for the fact that what seemed to us so simple turned out to be tormentingly difficult.”[179] And thereupon he handed Russia—its eleven time zones and its nuclear weapons, its thousand-year history and future fate—over to Vladimir Putin.

Lenin had famously said: “Any cook should be able to run the country.”[180] A cook’s grandson would now have the chance.

5 THE RUSSIA PUTIN INHERITED AND ITS SPIRITUAL ILLS

Few lamented the demise of the Soviet Union more than Vladimir Putin; none benefited from it more.

The man who in his state-of-the-nation speech on April 25, 2005, called the collapse of the USSR the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century” was propelled from an obscure KGB posting in East Germany to the leadership of twenty-first-century Russia by the very forces unleashed by that collapse. Had the Center held and the Soviet Union remained essentially intact, today Putin would be a KGB retiree with a thickening waist and thinning hair, out fishing on a quiet river or pestering his grandchildren with kisses. Instead, in one capacity or another, he has led the new Russia since the year 2000 and will continue to do so until 2018 at the very least, unless calamity intervenes again, this time not necessarily in his favor.

Though Putin’s fate is singular, in some ways it resembles that of those who were born and grew up under the old Soviet dispensation and were forced to reinvent themselves when their world gave way around them. There was a no-man’s-land between the last Soviet generation and the first real post-Soviet one. A woman who had done well in real estate told me her mother was continually berating her: “You help a fellow human being find a place to live and for that you take money!?”

Both in being nostalgic for the USSR and in facing the need to reinvent himself, Putin is ordinary. Russians sense that ordinariness and are comforted by it. That is of course especially true for Putin’s main electoral demographic, older working-class types who do not live in central Moscow or St. Petersburg but on the outskirts and are strung out across the country’s eleven time zones. A good many of those voters are even more nostalgic for the Soviet Union than Putin. They yearn for the cozy democracy of poverty, for cheap rent, cheap utilities, free schools, and free health care, and find the hurly-burly of the marketplace vulgar, alien, and confusing.

For Putin and everyone else the fall of the USSR came as a shock because no one saw it coming. For most people in the 1980s the USSR had always existed during their lifetime, and the opposition between the USA and the USSR was part of the architecture of reality, even its keystone. The United States and the USSR seemed interlocked, as if MAD stood not only for mutual assured destruction but mutual assured duration. The only likely end to the dynamic impasse of U.S.-Soviet relations was nuclear war. That was certainly easier to imagine than the Marxist fantasy of the withering away of the state or what in fact happened, the soft and largely bloodless implosion of the largest empire the world had ever seen.

The events of 9/11 were formative for the United States, or perhaps deformative is a better word. The Middle Eastern wars, the debate over drone strikes, Guantánomo, surveillance, torture, liberty vs. security, everything that has bedeviled America since 2001, flows directly from that date and those incidents.

The fall of the Soviet Union was also formative in that way. Russians watched with a similar amazed horror as their own society collapsed with all the helplessness of a bad dream. First, it was the Soviet empire that was disintegrating, the nations that were never part of the Soviet Union itself, but always under Kremlin control. Those countries had only been in the Soviet dominion since the end of World War II and had never made any secret of their reluctance to be there, rebelling every twelve years—Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1980. Later when he was criticized for giving away the farm, i.e., Eastern Europe, Gorbachev testily replied: “I gave Poland to the Poles. Who else should I give it to?”[181] To that rhetorical question the imperialist answer is: “No one.”

But to see cracks spreading through the edifice of the Eastern Bloc was one thing; to see them spread to the Soviet Union itself was quite another. Even the loss of the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania—could somehow be justified: culturally and historically they belonged to Europe and had initially been acquired as part of the dirty deal, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, that Stalin struck with Hitler in 1939. But it was unthinkable that Kazakhstan could be lost, Kazakhstan with its enormous prairies and wheat fields, its oil, uranium, and gold, its launching platforms from which the Soviets had sent the first Sputnik, dog, and male and female cosmonauts, into space. Even more unthinkable was that Ukraine could be lost. Kazakhstan may have been conquered and settled by Russians, but, to the Russian mind, Ukraine was Russia. All Russian history flowed from Kiev. Every schoolchild learned: Kiev is the mother of Russian cities, Ukraine is Russia’s breadbasket.

And the losses weren’t only emotional and symbolic. Ukraine was rich in coal, industry, agriculture. It had the port where the Black Sea Fleet was stationed, it had the only shipyard where aircraft carriers were built. Even Kazakhstan might in the end be arguable. But Kazakhstan was lost. And so was Ukraine.

It all seemed impossible, incredible. But as Putin put it: “There’s a lot that seems impossible and incredible and then—bang! Look what happened to the Soviet Union. Who could have imagined that it would simply collapse? No one saw that coming—even in their worst nightmares.”[182]

The loss was indeed catastrophic. The USSR’s population had been somewhat over 300,000,000. Now Russia was down to half that, with its population continuing to fall for years, 170 people dying for every 100 babies born. The country was losing the equivalent of a San Francisco a year to alcohol, heart attacks, car wrecks, suicide.

The economic losses were immense not only in and of themselves, but in their consequences. The centralized command-and-control economy dictated where certain machines or parts were to be produced; many were concentrated in places that had now broken away. That system had never worked well anyway, and now that parts had to be not only shipped but imported, things only grew worse. The military losses were also immense. Both Tsarist and Soviet Russia had been known for their huge standing armies, but now there were 150,000,000 fewer people to draw from.

And over it all hung the malodorous air of farce and fiasco, defeat and disgrace. To make matters worse, the United States and the West were not only now the victors in the Cold War; they also wanted to take credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union. In his book Heroes British historian Paul Johnson epitomizes what was for Russians the West’s unbearable preening and triumphalist self-love: “Three people won the Cold War, dismantled the Soviet empire and eliminated Communism as a malevolent world force: Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.”[183] As if the writings of Solzhenitsyn, the actions of Sakharov, and the decisions of Gorbachev had not played the slightest part whatsoever. The actual physical losses—territory, population, agriculture, industry, space, and military—were horrendous enough, but the incessant crowing of the West was galling beyond measure.

In an ornate tsarist palace turned high-tech gym in St. Petersburg I had a conversation with a Russian gangster who, behind his very broad back, was called simply “Tank.” But his mind was sharp and he liked to sprinkle the occasional English phrase into his conversation. He took a very Darwinian view of power and the relations between states—to the victor the spoils and to the loser bitter humiliation. Speaking of the Cold War in particular, he said: “You won, we lost. We have to bow down to you. You have the right to teach us how to live.”

That same sense of humiliation, which Thomas Friedman has called “the single most underestimated force in international relations,”[184] was present in President Yeltsin’s voice when he exclaimed to President Clinton: “Russia isn’t Haiti!”[185] The Russia Hand by Clinton’s Russian adviser Strobe Talbott records Russian foreign minister Andrey Kozyrev saying in regard to the U.S. bombing of Serbia: “You know, it’s bad enough having you people tell us what you’re going to do whether we like it or not. Don’t add insult to injury by also telling us that it’s in our interests to obey your orders!”[186]

After the pain and humiliation of losing Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, after the pain and humiliation of losing all the Soviet republics, it would seem that the hideous course had been run, that there was no more loss that could occur, no further humiliation that could be inflicted.

But in fact the greatest dangers lay ahead. Russia itself was at risk. The cracks that started in the Eastern Bloc and broke the USSR into fifteen separate countries were now threatening the new Russian Federation itself. The centrifugal demon wasn’t done yet.

The epicenter of schism was Chechnya. It was hardly a new problem. The fierce mountaineers of the Caucasus—Chechens, Ingush, Dagestanis—had been resisting the Russians since the eighteenth century. That resistance flared into war in the mid-nineteenth century when a great leader arose. The Imam Shamil, a Dagestani, was able to unite the various tribes and nations of the Caucasus, becoming both their spiritual and military leader. Handsome in a fierce, severe way (to this day his picture, along with that of Jean-Claude Van Damme or Rambo, adorns the bedroom walls of many teenage boys in the Caucasus), he was a cunning and valiant leader, able to resist the tsar’s armies for nearly thirty years until he was taken prisoner in 1859. The Russians treated him with honor and he died a white-bearded patriarch in the holy city of Medina in 1871.

But his fighting spirit lives on, especially among the Chechens, the Comanches of Islam. And Shamil’s hometown of Gimry is kept under strict government control so that it does not become a sacred place and rallying point—all residents have a five-digit number that they must recite to police at checkpoints when entering or leaving town.

The outbreak of war in 1994 between Chechnya and Russia sent existential shock waves to the north. This wasn’t just another tiny republic seeking vainglorious independence; this could be the beginning of Russia’s unraveling, the secret sweet dream of the United States and NATO. That same year NATO launched airstrikes against the Bosnian Serbs. Strobe Talbott describes the reaction of the Russian hawks: “NATO’s war against Belgrade over Kosovo was a warm-up for the one it would someday unleash against Moscow over Chechnya.”[187]

NATO bombing or invasion aside, the parallels with Yugoslavia were ominous. Putin was obsessed by what he called “the Yugoslavization of Russia,”[188] the breaking apart into ever smaller fragments. Chechnya, said Putin, “is a continuation of the collapse of the USSR.”[189] And it wasn’t just Chechnya. “The entire Caucasus would have followed … and then up along the Volga River … reaching deep into the country.”[190] Putin was very clear about his “mission”: “If we don’t put an immediate end to this Russia will cease to exist.”[191]

America from time to time is troubled by the prospect of decline. But for all-or-nothing Russia decline is not an issue. Its very existence is always at stake. It is the default position of the Russian mind. A former legislator, Vladimir Ryzhkov, says: “Under Putin’s police state we are headed for another Time of Troubles in the best case scenario, if not a total collapse of the Russian state.”[192] A museum director says that unless Russia creates a harmonious society within five generations “Russia will perish. Only the Duchy of Moscow will be left.”[193] A columnist wonders—Will Russia survive until 2024?

Very prevalent today, the idea of Russia ceasing to exist is nothing new. In 1836 Peter Chaadayev published the first of his Philosophical Letters. Like a good Russian aristocrat, he wrote them in French, and later on they had to be translated into Russian. In those Philosophical Letters Chaadayev despaired of Russia, which he said belongs to neither Europe nor Asia. It neither partakes of the dynamic of those great civilizations nor possesses a dynamic of its own. “We belong to that number of nations which do not seem to make up an integral part of the human race, but which exist only to teach the world some great lesson. The lesson which we are destined to give will, naturally, not be lost; but who knows when we shall find ourselves once again in the midst of humanity, and what affliction we shall experience before we accomplish our destiny?”[194]

In a move that predated Soviet abuse of psychiatry by a century, Chaadayev was declared insane and forcibly placed under medical care, his papers seized.

A paradigm emerged from Chaadayev’s ideas. Cut off from the West by the Mongol conqueror and by obscurantist tsars, Russia had missed all the developmental stages of civilizational progress—Renaissance, Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Enlightenment. The lack of any developmental dynamic meant that progress came from above, from the omnipotent ruler, the tsar. It was a country held together by power, religion, and fear—in Chaadayev’s excellent phrase “a realm of brute fact and ceremony.”[195]

Russia’s inherent shakiness was sensed not only by Russian philosophers, but by travelers to those parts in the nineteenth century. “Russia may well fall to pieces as many expect,” noted the dashing British intelligence officer Arthur Conolly, who often traveled through Central Asia in native guise, using the name Khan Ali, a pun on his own.[196] Not only is he credited with creating the term “great game,” he played it to the hilt until he was beheaded in Bukhara in 1842 at the age of thirty-four.

For the anti-regime intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the destruction of Russia was something they not only sensed but actively desired. One of the major poets of that period, Alexander Blok, claimed he could actually hear the empire collapsing. Blok, who hailed the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 as proof that Nature was still mightier than man and his arrogant works, longed for an elemental revolution that would sweep away all the cant and rot, making a place for a new and better civilization to arise. Deeply disillusioned by the actual revolution that took place, he died in 1921, no longer able to hear history in the making because, as he said, “all sounds have stopped.”[197]

In Russia the sense of shaky enterprise, the tendency to build structures that collapse, is balanced by a genius for survival. A Russian hacker with the handle “Lightwatch” put it like this: “The Russians have a very amusing feature—they are able to get up from their knees, under any conditions, or under any circumstances.”[198]

Russia withstood and outlasted the invasions of Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler. Russia survived its own tyrants from Ivan the Terrible to Joseph Stalin. It survived the implosion of its state structure during the Time of Troubles in the early 1600s, again in 1917, and yet again in 1991.

Those events have inspired great works of art—the opera Boris Godunov about the Time of Troubles, War and Peace about the invasion of Napoleon, Life and Fate about World War II. And those works of art have in turn inspired further acts of heroic survival by Russians, and have spread the fame of Russian fortitude throughout the world. It seems to have always been there. In the mid-900s the Arab traveler Ibn Miskawayh called them “a mighty nation … with great courage. They know not defeat, not does any of them turn his back until he slays or be slain.”[199]

Even one of the American Mafia families took inspiration from Russia when going to war against the other families. As Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, underboss to John Gotti, put it: “Fuck the battle. You learned that from the Russians. Yeah, they were dogs, they kept backing up. They let them Germans come right into their country. They made them freeze their asses off, run out of supplies, and then they destroyed them. So it’s not the battle, it’s the war.”[200]

The principal Russian holiday is Easter, not Christmas. Of course, that is as it should be, because the rising of Christ from the dead is the central mystery and promise of Christianity. (How all that was reduced in the West to bonnets, bunnies, and eggs is a mystery in itself.) The Russians do not wish each other Happy Easter but exchange passionate affirmations: “Christ is risen!” “Truly He is risen!”

The myth of rebirth is central to the work of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov (1829–1903). Said to be the only person in whose presence Count Leo Tolstoy ever felt humble, Fyodorov was an inspiration to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of Russian rocketry and thus of the Soviet space program. Fyodorov’s main idea was that Christianity and science were not at all at odds, but in fact were destined to work together for the greatest of all possible goals, the resurrection of everyone who had ever lived, the rescue of our ancestors from hated death.

The myth of rebirth also animates the Russian body politic at its moments of crisis. No invasion is too great not to be withstood and ultimately repelled, no collapse of the state from within can lead to permanent diminishment or ruination. What explains this? Is it the inbred hardiness of people who have endured centuries of harsh winter? Is it the cunning, also developed over centuries from dealing with the severities of invasion and tyranny? Is it simply a straightforward response to the straightforward Darwinian imperative: Do or Die? It is all of these, but there is also something else.

The source of Russia’s ability to overcome any trauma has been the cluster of values, images, and ideas that gave the nation its irreducible identity. But now there is a void at the core of the collective psyche. For the first time in its more than thousand-year history, Russia is without icons.

The Russians were iconoclasts even before they had icons.

In 988 Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev, “a fundamentally good man who led a life of lechery and murder,”[201] had a spiritual awakening and decided to convert his people from paganism to one of the three great religions in that part of the world. According to the ancient Chronicles, a mixture of legend and history, Vladimir dispatched envoys to see what those religions had to offer. The loss of Israel did not make Judaism seem a fortunate enterprise. Islam’s prohibition on alcohol made it out of the question, for, as Vladimir himself remarked in a two-line poem:

However, his envoys reported from Constantinople that the beauty of the cathedrals was such that “we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth.”[203] So, beauty won the day. Or at least beauty coupled with realpolitik, for it made more economic and military sense for Vladimir’s domain, Kievan Rus as it came to be called, to ally itself with Byzantium, the great power in those parts.

But before Christianity with all its beliefs, rituals, and icons could be fully implemented, the old paganism had to be done away with. In that belief system life was a struggle between the Dark God and the Bright God, but there were many lesser deities as well, chief among them Perun, god of thunder and lightning. Grand Prince Vladimir “directed that the idols be overthrown and that some should be cut to pieces and others burned with fire. He thus ordered that Perun should be bound to a horse’s tail and dragged … to the river. He appointed twelve men to beat the idols with sticks.”[204]

In all this can be observed several tendencies that would persist through the centuries: Change comes from the top down. Ideology tends to be imported. Not only must new sacred images be introduced, but the old ones must first be desecrated and destroyed.

The tenacious persistence of cultural forms in Russia is at times nothing short of amazing, as James Billington observed in his classic The Icon and the Axe: “Just as the iconostasis of a cathedral was generally built over the grave of a local saint and specially reverenced with processions on a religious festival, so these new Soviet saints appeared in ritual form over the mausoleum of the mummified Lenin on the feast days of Bolshevism to review endless processions through Red Square.”[205]

And in 1917 Vladimir Lenin showed himself little different from Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev when it came to a passion for iconoclasm. Lenin, who actively hated the very idea of God, persecuted both the symbols of Christianity and its priests, who were imprisoned and executed in large numbers. In his book Soviet Civilization Andrei Sinyavsky describes “the Bolsheviks’ extravagant acts against sacred objects, as when they did not just remove the icons from a church but used them to make floors for the village baths without even sanding off the saints’ faces. Or when they lined them up against a wall and shot at them, as if, for these atheist resisters of God, the icons were living beings.”[206]

In 1931 Stalin ordered the demolition of Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral, built in the mid-1800s to commemorate the victory over Napoleon. It was to have been replaced by a Palace of Soviets, much larger than the Empire State Building and topped with a 260-foot statue of Lenin. However, after the demolition of the cathedral, the ground proved too marshy to support such a grandiose edifice, and for years the gaping hole was left empty. Later, Khrushchev hit on the idea of turning it into the world’s largest outdoor swimming pool, which fit nicely into the totalitarian cult of mass sport, if not rising to the iconic heights of the original concept. It was only after the fall of the USSR that the Christ the Savior Cathedral was rebuilt from scratch at enormous expense by Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov. And so it was into that long-suffering, much-manipulated, and symbol-drenched cathedral that one day in 2012 three young women, their faces concealed with balaclavas, began singing a discordant song of protest against Putin, a punk prayer. They were immediately arrested and almost as immediately became famous as members of Pussy Riot. Though they were quite sincere in protesting the suspect coziness of church and state, they had also inadvertently entered a labyrinth of symbols that led, as do so many things in Russia, to prison.

A desacralization and desecration of images had also occurred when the Soviet regime began falling in the late 1980s. Statues of Lenin—though not all of them—were torn down, and of course he himself, so to speak, remains in his mausoleum on Red Square. Immediately to the left of Lenin’s tomb is Stalin’s grave and the bust with its oddly crafty eyes. Stalin too had been embalmed and entombed alongside Lenin in the mausoleum until 1961, when Khrushchev, as part of his anti-Stalin campaign, ordered the body removed under cover of night, then buried. Stalin’s body was then placed under a concrete slab, just to be on the safe side. Who knows, maybe the corpse had even been dragged by a horse and beaten with sticks.

The collapses of Tsarist Russia in 1917 and of Soviet Russia in 1991 were greatly different. Though Lenin was caught by surprise by events, having despaired of seeing any revolution in his lifetime, he and the other far-left revolutionaries had one enormous advantage: they knew what they wanted to be rid of and what they wanted to replace it with. The Bolsheviks had a worldview, a theory of politics, government, economics, foreign policy; they had a flag and a color—red, the color of flame, blood, and revolution; they had songs that could move the masses, they had artists itching to use the instruments of modernism to create a new art for all of society and not just one for an elite of connoisseurs. They had a philosophy of life and a theory of history as a progressive dynamic evolving through contradiction toward social justice for all. The state would gradually wither away as people achieved ever higher levels of consciousness, a vision described by Leon Trotsky in the concluding words of his book Literature and Revolution:

In 1991 there was no Lenin waiting in the wings. Instead of the drama of violent armed clashes, there was only a void that only grew the more it was fed.

The questions about this period are myriad: Did the United States do too little to help in the critical early nineties? Or, on the contrary, did the United States interfere too much and propose solutions that were ill-suited for the reality of Russia? Or was there in fact very little that any outside nation could do, since Russia’s resurgence, like its demise, would largely be a matter of its own making?

One thing is, however, certain. No one had a vision for post-Soviet life apart from generalizations about constitutions, human rights, and free markets. But what actual policies to pursue, what flag should be saluted, what anthem sung, what holidays and heroes celebrated, what icons should be smashed and which new ones created, no one had the slightest idea.

Survival needs no justification, but tribulation is always easier to bear in the name of something higher. For Russians that has traditionally been what they themselves call “the Russian Idea,” meaning a sense of national identity and purpose crystallized into a specific vision and a way of life. The Russian Idea also has a a quasi-mystical nationalistic aura about it, “the conviction that Russia has its own independent, self-sufficient and eminently worthy cultural and historical tradition that both sets it apart from the West and guarantees its future flourishing,” wrote Tim McDaniel in The Agony of the Russian Idea.[208]

The Russian sense of national self, like the history that produced it and the history it produces, clearly tends toward the extremes rather than to cluster around some middle point. The country’s greatest twentieth-century philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev, wrote in his book The Russian Idea:

And another philosopher, V. M. Mezhuev, put it another way: “We are not suited for moderation and measure, which are the marks of rationality.”[210]

In the view of these two philosophers the Russian collective psyche keeps its balance by going from one extreme to the other, rather than by seeking a midpoint. This makes Russia both fragile and tenacious, able to survive any ordeal, but unable to construct states that do not sooner or later implode. To some extent, it is precisely that fear of the tendency to fly off to extremes that causes Russians to create rigid hierarchical states that in time ossify and break apart to release the very forces they were created to contain.

Out of the thousands of signs, markers, and symbols of a national identity, anthem and flag have to rank high. A piece of decorated cloth, a few minutes of music, might not seem important in and of themselves, but their lack, or, as in Russia’s case, their presence in a stunted form, is indicative of a profound malaise, a failure to achieve integrity, that touches every schoolchild who must salute the flag and sing the national anthem.

The Bolsheviks had a flag and a song. Post-Soviet Russia really has neither. Instead of creating a flag as new as the new Russia, the government adopted a tricolor from the late tsarist period. From top to bottom it is white, blue, and red. Whether there’s any subliminal significance to the counterrevolutionary white being on top with the revolutionary red on the bottom is anybody’s guess. To provide some aesthetic/emotional continuity the music of the Soviet anthem was kept, but the words were rewritten. Lenin was now tossed out as Stalin had been in an earlier rewrite. God, however, is back.

But these are very new and still raw “traditions.” It means that parents and children will have grown up saluting different flags, singing different anthems.

There is a similar problem with holidays. Victory Day, May 9, celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany, and New Year’s are the only holidays that provide some kind of continuity with the Soviet past. Though a large portion of the population is Russian Orthodox, many Russians aren’t religious, and there are also ten to fifteen million Muslims in Russia, not to mention Jews and Buddhists. No holiday with a religious tinge can become truly national.

For schoolchildren there’s not only the problems of flag and anthem but the problem of what history they’re taught. As it used to be said with a more sinister tone in Soviet times, it’s even harder to predict the past than the future.

The question remains—how to integrate the Soviet past into the post-Soviet present, what sense to make of it. “Russia should not repent for Soviet history,” said Duma Speaker Sergei Naryshkin.[211] Others would vehemently disagree.

Principally, the issue revolves around the image of Stalin, an icon that has been neither utterly smashed nor quite restored to a place in a new pantheon.

The Germans “lucked out” with Hitler. He was so evil, so destructive, and so unsuccessful that it was easy to reject him completely. But the Russians were not so lucky with Stalin.

Tomes have been written comparing the two great dictators, but in the end what matters most is their differences. The main difference is that in World War II Hitler lost and Stalin won. That meant suicide for Hitler and the Nuremburg trials for his high command. For Stalin, it meant the spoils and honors that come with being the victor, not least of which was a seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Russians are of course aware of the cost of Stalin’s Gulag, which the historian Norman Davies says “accounted for far more human victims than Ypres, the Somme, Verdun, Auschwitz, Majdanek, Dachau and Buchenwald put together.”[212]

But Stalin himself knew such comparisons carry little weight, supposedly saying: “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.”

Stalin’s terror ended with his death, but his achievements live on after him. Those achievements include the industrialization of Russia, the defeat of the Nazi invader, making his country an atomic superpower. One of the worst mass murderers in history had atomic weapons for five years and never came close to using them. The crisis occurred with his successor, the more liberal, humane, anti-Stalinist Nikita Khrushchev.

There are other of Stalin’s achievements that continue to elicit admiration: the Moscow Metro, a wonder of the world, and the many solid residential buildings, which were much better constructed than those of his successors, especially Khrushchev. Perhaps the best recommendation for a building is that it was constructed in Stalin’s time by German POW slave labor.

Even the seven sisters, the Soviet wedding-cake high-rises that dominate the Moscow skyline, which seemed grim and overbearing in Soviet times, have now acquired a sort of retro imperial chic. In fact at least two of the more daring new buildings shaping the contemporary Moscow skyline deliberately echo their shape.

Stalin’s name still has magic power whether it is invoked with hatred or respect. In 1956 Khrushchev banned Stalin’s name from the national anthem. Later, to be on the safe side, all the lyrics were removed, and for more than twenty years the Soviet Union’s national anthem was a song without words. When the new version appeared in 1977 the lines

had been airbrushed out. That would have seemed to be the end of that, but then in 2009 the elegant Kurskaya Metro Station finished its redo to its original Soviet purity, and, lo and behold, the lines airbrushed from the anthem had reappeared in large golden letters along the top of the interior wall, instantly generating controversy between those for whom Stalin’s name only signified suffering and those who preferred the uplift of imperial grandeur.

Word magic, the making and breaking of verbal icons, is also widespread in Russia. St. Petersburg was changed to the less German-sounding Petrograd (same meaning—Peter’s city) during World War I, then to Leningrad in 1924 when Lenin died, then back to its original name in 1991 with the fall of the USSR. In a nice twist, the new St. Petersburg is also the capital of Leningrad province, which they haven’t gotten around to renaming yet.

Right after the fall of the USSR, Moscow cabdrivers had to consult bulky volumes to find out the new names of Soviet streets, which had in turn been changed from their names in Tsarist Russia. “They even changed Chekhov Street back to its prerevolutionary name,” said one cabdriver plaintively. “What did Chekhov ever do to anybody?”

By the time Putin assumed office in early 2000, neither in words nor in images had post-Soviet Russia found any new icon to guide it into a future that looked hazardous at best.

Not only had enormous power been bestowed on Putin; he had also been charged thereby with resolving enormous tasks. He had to restore stability, strength, and status to his country. No easy tasks, but these were mostly tangible, solvable with time, money, and skill. But Putin was also faced with somehow curing the spiritual ills from which Russians and he himself suffered—the anxiety and suspicion generated by the country’s post-traumatic condition, and as well the lack of any clear vision of cultural values, national aim. Putin could not of course hammer out new icons for Russia, but good leadership could help create the matrix from which those new icons could yet arise.

Presented with immense power and daunting tasks, Vladimir Putin had been given a shot at greatness.