As fate would have it, Putin’s first appearance on the television screen was in ‘the character’ of Stierlitz. In 1992 the St Petersburg mayor’s office, where Putin served at the time, commissioned a documentary series about the city’s government. The only part of it that actually got made was about Putin – on his own initiative. Putin used the film to declare himself a former KGB operative. To make the film more entertaining, its director, Igor Shadkhan, set Putin up as a modern version of Stierlitz. ‘I decided to stage the last episode of the film where Stierlitz is driving a car,’ Shadkhan recalled.2 Driving a Volga, Putin ‘re-enacted’ the last episode of the film in which Stierlitz drives his car back to Berlin. The famous theme tune from Seventeen Moments of Spring played in the background. Putin was a perfect fit.
The public longing for a real-life Stierlitz who could deal with any crisis calmly and efficiently was not a fanciful notion. In early 1999 Kommersant commissioned a public opinion survey asking which film character Russians would like to see as their next president. Stierlitz was runner-up to Second World War Marshal Zhukov, a real historic figure. Kommersant’s weekly supplement put Stierlitz on the cover with the caption ‘President-2000’. This was not, strictly speaking, a surprise. For all its history, the KGB had a mystique, an aura of knowledge and professionalism. Like secret agents anywhere else, KGB spies in Russia were seen as dashing, clever and protective of their motherland. In the public’s eye the KGB was a pragmatic, if also ruthless, force that supported economic modernization. After all, it had been Andropov who championed Gorbachev in the early 1980s.
Having lost faith in liberals, the country was searching for its Stierlitz. Yeltsin, too, looked towards the former and present members of the military or security services for a possible successor. Opinion pollsters told Yeltsin that his successor had to be young, ethnically Russian, a former member of the security services and non-drinking. Yeltsin, a man of great political instinct, agreed. ‘For some time now, I had been sensing the public need for a new quality in the state, for a steel backbone that would strengthen the whole government. We needed a man who was intellectual, democratic, and who could think anew, but who was firm in the military manner.’3 A year later such a person did appear, and was greeted with enthusiasm: Vladimir Putin. In September 1998 nobody had yet heard of him.
Goodbye America
In September 1998 Yeltsin appointed Evgeny Primakov, a sixty-nine-year-old foreign minister and veteran of Soviet politics, as Russia’s prime minister. It was more of a necessity than a wish. The oligarchs, including Berezovsky, who, a few months earlier, had helped to get Chernomyrdin fired, lobbied for his return, seeing him as a guarantee of continuity.
Yeltsin twice submitted Chernomyrdin’s nomination to the communist-dominated parliament and twice he was vetoed. It was a battle Yeltsin felt he could not win and in the end he was forced to nominate Primakov – a wily and experienced member of the Soviet nomenclatura, a candidate for the Politburo and an old spymaster who headed the first post-Soviet intelligence service. He was supposed to be a consensus figure, fulfilling the same role that Chernomyrdin performed in 1992: he would be loyal to Yeltsin, could lead a left-leaning government and satisfy communists in the parliament who could not possibly object to him as a liberal Westernizer.
Primakov was two years older than Yeltsin and had come into politics at the end of the Stalinist era. He started in state Soviet television, which often provided cover for ‘spooks’, worked at Pravda newspaper and specialized in foreign affairs which meant frequent trips abroad. His connections with the KGB were never formally declared, but always taken for granted. Primakov was an Arabist, a personal friend of Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat. But he had also worked with Gorbachev.
Primakov’s appointment had a therapeutic effect on the country, which had been shaken by the financial crisis. His slightly slurred speech and his Soviet manner were reassuring without being too threatening – at least not to ordinary people. He was measured and conservative and had an air of solidity and unhurried wisdom. Most people felt relieved – as though an old and steady hand was taking over the levers of power after a team of young and reckless pilots had nearly crashed the plane. ‘Don’t worry, the experiments and the turbulence are over,’ Primakov’s demeanour said. In public he spoke about a greater role of the state in the economy and played to the paternalistic sentiments in the country. At the same time he oversaw some budget cuts and took advice from American economists.
He took no revolutionary steps. In fact, his biggest achievement was that he hardly took any action at all, letting the economy run its own course, which soon turned into growth. Primakov’s popularity rating shot up – not because of what he did or did not do, but because of the image he projected of a statist.
In fact, Primakov was more concerned with the media than he was with the economy. He obsessively read newspapers and watched television programmes, often calling editors and owners to complain. In his memoirs, Yeltsin recalled how Primakov brought him a special dossier which contained newspaper cuttings that criticized his government, with words and sentences highlighted with a marker pen. Yeltsin, who had always tolerated all the mud that was thrown at him, found it odd. ‘Evgeny Maximovich, I am used to this. Every day newspapers write such things about me. But what can you do? Close newspapers?’4
Russian liberal journalists, those who had taken Yeltsin’s side in 1993 and who had set the narrative for much of the 1990s, saw Primakov as an alien figure. They took against him in a way that sometimes seemed almost irrational. They were put off by his Soviet manners more than his actions (or the lack of action). They considered him a Soviet-era dinosaur. The best he could offer Russia, they felt, was stagnation. At worst, he could take the country in the direction of Stalinism-lite. Primakov’s instincts were far from being liberal, but he was a pragmatic and rational politician with real knowledge of the country. Alexander Yakovlev felt that ‘democrats are wrong to be so antagonistic towards Primakov, calling him a conservative! He simply does not rush to his conclusions. He prefers not to say anything today that can be said tomorrow.’5
But it was also a question of power. Throughout the 1990s journalists had enjoyed a highly privileged position and status. Primakov, on the other hand, eschewed journalists whom he thought to be untrustworthy and antagonistic. As a statist, he naturally relied on the old-style Soviet nomenclatura: the security services, bureaucracy and diplomats. He instantly made the government less accessible to journalists and gave a dressing-down to television executives for distorting and blackening its image, telling them what and how they should report. Journalists found this more of a snub and a humiliation than a threat. They associated the loss of their dominance with Primakov. As Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs: ‘Willingly or not, Primakov consolidated anti-market and anti-liberal forces and infringed on the freedom of the press.’6 Primakov’s premiership also coincided with a shift in Russia’s attitude towards the West.
The biggest event of Primakov’s short term in office was the bombing of Yugoslavia by NATO forces. On 23 March 1999 – the eve of the NATO strikes – Primakov was in the air, on his way to Washington to negotiate financial aid for Russia, when he learned that the air-strike on Belgrade was imminent. In a powerful gesture, loaded with symbolism, Primakov ordered his plane to turn around over the Atlantic and fly back to Moscow.