All this provided a favourable background for the new Duma elections of 19 December 1999. This time the Kremlin was determined to ensure the election of a supportive Duma—in contrast to the hostile majorities that prevailed in the 1993 and 1995 elections. Within a month of Putin’s appointment as prime minister, pro-Kremlin figures established a new party, ‘Unity’ (Edinstvo), to represent the regime in the election; it offered no specific programme other than to proclaim a commitment to the country’s ‘territorial integrity and national greatness’. Bankrolled by the oligarchs, bathed in favourable media coverage, and endorsed by a growing number of weathervane governors, the new party catapulted from nothing to win almost as many votes as the long-established Communist Party. Together with allied parties and independents, Unity headed a pro-government majority in the Duma and, given Putin’s popularity (even among Communists), ensured a cooperative Duma—quite unlike what Yeltsin had had to endure.
In the flush of that electoral victory, Yeltsin used his new year’s address on 31 December 1999 to drop a bombshelclass="underline" he announced his resignation, effective immediately, with Prime Minister Putin (as the constitution stipulated) ascending to the office of acting president. Although Yeltsin rhetorically spoke of inaugurating a new millennium with a new president, the main purpose was to hasten the elections, which by law had to be held within three months of his resignation. Seeking to capitalize on Putin’s popularity, perhaps fearful that it might fade by summer (especially if the country became mired in a protracted Chechen war), Yeltsin resigned early in order to ensure Putin’s election. Putin immediately rewarded the former president: his first act was to guarantee immunity to Yeltsin and his immediate family from prosecution—a step widely regarded as a payback (if not precondition) for his early promotion.
With elections scheduled for 26 March 2000, Putin was the only real candidate. The few serious contenders, such as the former prime minister Evgenii Primakov and Moscow mayor Iurii Luzhkov, became the target of smear campaigns in oligarch-owned media and withdrew their candidacy. As in 1996, the nominally ‘independent’ media provided lavish coverage of Putin, from his everyday perorations to his bravado as co-pilot in a military jet flown to Chechnya six days before the election (a dramatic contrast to ‘Tsar Boris’). Putin won a majority (53 per cent) in the first round and thus avoided a run-off such as Yeltsin had had to endure in 1996. Indeed, whereas Yeltsin barely edged out the communist Gennadii Ziuganov in the first round in 1996, Putin received nearly twice as many votes (39.7 million) as Ziuganov (21.9 million). Despite claims of vote-rigging, Putin was a clear winner; even if a run-off had been necessary, few doubt that he would have dealt Ziuganov a crushing defeat. Putin thus became president with both a cooperative Duma and a popular mandate; he had an unprecedented opportunity to embark on a new course and realize his vision of a new, more prosperous, and more powerful Russia.
The Putin Vision
Boris Yeltsin had no coherent political philosophy or goals, but the same could hardly be said of Vladimir Putin. On 29 December 1999, two days before Yeltsin resigned and made him acting president, Putin posted on the internet a manifesto called ‘Russia at the Turn of the Millennium’, which had been prepared under his guidance by the newly established Centre for Strategic Development. Thereafter Putin regularly presented his views in an address to the Federal Assembly (a joint session of the two houses of parliament), a ‘state of the union’ speech identifying achievements, elucidating problems and setting goals. He also held an annual televised press conference ‘with the nation’, a kind of virtual town meeting, where citizens phoned in, wrote emails, and appeared on live TV asking Putin to address broad issues and their own personal problems. These three-hour town meetings were carefully staged, excluded political critics, and allowed Putin to demonstrate his amazing grasp of detail and data (aided, to be sure, by having the questions in advance). But these personal appearances, interviews, and speeches (routinely posted on the presidential website) revealed a firm commitment to several core principles and values.
One was patriotism—a salient theme in his rhetoric. He emphasized that patriotism was essential for binding so heterogeneous, so dispersed a nation together, especially at a time of adversity which required the country to rebuild its basic institutions, economy, and power. In his first day in office Putin reiterated that a crisis dictates decisive action: ‘Russia is in the midst of one of the most difficult periods in its history. For the first time in the past 200–300 years, it is facing a real threat of sliding into the second, and possibly, even third echelon of world states.’ In the face of adversity, he declared, ‘patriotism is a source of courage, staunchness and strength of our people. If we lose patriotism and national pride and dignity, which are related to it, we will lose ourselves as a nation capable of great achievements.’ To nurture that patriotism, Putin refurbished evocative, and unifying, national symbols. In December 2000, for example, he persuaded the parliament to adopt a new national anthem (with new lyrics, including references to God, but using the music from the Soviet anthem), to proclaim the two-headed tsarist eagle as a state emblem, and to codify the use of the tricolour as the Russian flag. He also amended Yeltsin’s decision to rename 7 November (the Soviet commemoration of the October Revolution) as ‘the day of concord and reconciliation’. Putin shifted the holiday to 4 November to celebrate ‘the day of national unity’, recalling the defeat of Polish occupiers in the Kremlin by a popular militia in 1612. He later restored the red flag, and then the red star, for Russian military forces. It seemed entirely natural when, asked at a town meeting ‘What do you love most?’ Putin instantly replied: ‘Russia.’ Disingenuous or not, such rhetoric helped to consolidate his image as national leader and to revalorize commitment to the country and its resurrection.
A second leitmotif was Putin’s nuanced conception of Russia’s past and its place in the larger scheme of things. In general, he portrayed Russia as an integral part of Europe and bore little sympathy for the then fashionable theory of ‘Eurasianism’, which holds that Russia is a civilization nurtured by both European and Asian roots. Although a Europeanist, Putin none the less rejected the idea that Russia must replicate European development and insisted that it must follow its own course, that it need not obey the demands of Western countries: ‘We are a major European nation; we have always been an integral part of Europe and share all its values and the ideals of freedom and democracy. But we will carry out this process ourselves, taking into account all our specific characteristics, and do not intend to report to anyone on the progress we make.’ He also expressed a positive, but qualified, view of the Soviet experience. His ‘Millennium Manifesto’ declared that it ‘would be a mistake not to recognize the unquestionable achievements’ of the Soviet era, but added that ‘it would be an even bigger mistake not to realize the outrageous price our country and its people had to pay for that social experiment’. He reiterated that view in April 2005 when he characterized the break-up of the Soviet Union as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’ but promptly added that it was impossible to fantasize about resurrecting the old Soviet state. That qualified nostalgia corresponded to the general public mood; a 2001 poll showed that 79 per cent regretted the breakup of the USSR, but that 58 per cent deemed its re-establishment impossible.