He provided both ‘continuity’ and ‘contrast’. Yeltsin was old, ailing and increasingly divorced from reality. Putin was young, sharp and energetic. Yeltsin had a large frame, a swollen face and grey hair. Putin was short, had chiselled features and thin hair. Putin could fly a military jet, pose on a warship, fight on a judo mat. He spoke clearly, calmly and decisively. After Yeltsin, who was quintessentially Russian – emotional, a drinker, impulsive – Putin seemed almost un-Russian. He was secretive, restrained, sober, unemotional and almost pedantic. In opinion-focus groups people described him as Germanic, a true Aryan character – an ideal Stierlitz.
The fact that Putin seemed to have come from nowhere, had no political ‘baggage’, was not associated with Perestroika or the communists, worked in his favour. Even in April 2000, when he was already elected as president, two-thirds of the Russian population said they knew little about Putin, despite his round-the-clock presence on the television screen. He could be ascribed any qualities. Putin was a man with no features, a perfect spy.
The close association between Putin and Yeltsin’s family was the only line of attack left to our opponents, said Pavlovsky. The most effective way to free Putin from this association was for Yeltsin himself to resign early. This was a crucial part of the Putin ‘succession’ plan and Yeltsin agreed to it. However, he decided to wait until the December parliamentary elections to make sure that the pro-Putin Unity Party did well. The party itself was a purely artificial creation. It had no political agenda other than Putin himself. The job of the Kremlin spin-doctors was to link Putin with the Unity Party.
The party’s fortunes were sealed the moment when Putin ‘casually’ appeared next to the party leader, Sergei Shoigu. The ‘appearance’, which lasted only a few seconds on the television screen, was carefully staged by his media managers, according to Pavlovsky, as was Putin’s ‘off-the-cuff’ response to the question of ‘whom he was planning to vote for in the parliamentary elections’. As a state official with no party affiliation, Putin said he was not supporting anyone, but, as an individual, he was planning to vote for Unity.
On Itogi, Kiselev protested that ‘as a private person’ Putin should speak in a ‘banya [bathhouse] or in a kitchen’ rather than on television. But Putin’s endorsement fitted in with the logic of a television game show and was worth more than any political programme or statement. ‘Putin asked the audience to support him in his pursuit of power. In the popular imagination he was a [television] hero who was getting ever closer to his ultimate goal but might not succeed unless the “audience” gave him a baseball bat to club his enemies with,’ Pavlovsky explained.40
The ‘audience’, used to this format – in which they pressed buttons or dialled a number in support of one character or another – obliged. In the December general elections, the Unity Party, which had been created only a few months earlier, won nearly 24 per cent of the votes. As the sociologist Yuri Levada wrote, ‘In Soviet days the only party in the country declared itself in power. Now the state power declared itself the only right party in the country.’41 Luzhkov’s and Primakov’s Fatherland–All Russia alliance was in third place with just 13 per cent. Within a year it would merge with Putin’s Unity Party to form United Russia. Both Primakov and Luzhkov agreed not to stand in the presidential elections.
Yet to say that Putin’s popularity was the result of media games or that Gusinsky’s NTV lost out because it was less effective than Berezovsky’s Channel One would be as untrue as to deny it. Victories have many parents. The oligarchs’ idea that a few men could decide on the future president actually worked. But while the oligarchs, the media and political technologists fought battles, claimed victories and engaged in cunning projects, thinking they were the prime players, real events were taking place in the country which were outside their control but not beyond their ability to exploit in their own interests. As a politician, Putin may have been a media invention, but the events that turned him into a president were not.
A day before Putin’s appointment as prime minister, a group of Chechen rebels led by Shamil Basayev staged an incursion into neighbouring Dagestan as part of his grand plan to create a Caucasus emirate. After an exchange of fire between Russian troops and Chechen rebels, Putin, with Yeltsin’s blessing, ordered a military invasion of Chechnya, thus starting the second war in five years. As Putin said on 8 September, ‘Russia is defending itself. We were attacked. And we must cast away all syndromes, including the syndrome of guilt.’
That night Moscow was shaken by the first in a series of explosions in residential apartment blocks which killed over 300 people and spread terror throughout the country. Nobody ever claimed responsibility for the bombings.
Malashenko was on his way to an airport in Spain to fly back to Moscow when he learned about the explosion.
When the first apartment block was bombed, I did not want to believe this was the work of Chechen terrorists. But after the second bombing, I realized that this was the end, that the whole situation had changed, that there would be no more “normal” television, that everything we had worked towards was over… It was like watching an avalanche moving towards you with the speed of a train when you know you can neither stop it nor jump aside.42
The bombings, he understood, would give Putin and the security services complete carte blanche in restoring the state. In 1994 NTV was able to counter it. This time, public opinion was against them.
Malashenko’s fears were fully borne out. The apartment explosions were a turning point both towards Putin and also towards the war in Chechnya. Its impact on people’s minds was similar to the bombing of the New York Twin Towers two years later. Until that moment Chechnya was seen as a black hole, a lawless territory where people got kidnapped and killed by bearded terrorists. Only four days earlier, a similar explosion had ripped through a residential block in the small town of Buynaksk in Dagestan, killing sixty-four people, twenty-three of whom were children. But even that was ‘somewhere over there’, behind the television screen.
On 9 September, shortly after midnight, the ‘television screen’ got shattered. Millions of people momentarily experienced the same emotion of fear and danger in their own lives. This was not something happening on television. It was happening to them. They came out of their houses, organizing watch groups to stand guard and look for suspicious clues. Conspiracy theories started to circulate almost immediately.
This was prompted by the discovery of bags with explosives in Ryazan’, a city south of Moscow. The residents who spotted the bags called the police, who initially confirmed they contained an explosive. The Russian interior minister told the parliament that a terrorist attack had been foiled. Then, half an hour later, the head of the FSB said this was, in fact, a civil defence exercise and the suspicious bags contained sugar not hexogen, a white crystalline explosive. Many people smelled a rat. Perhaps the FSB was behind the previous bombing and had just botched this one, or maybe the terrorists were assisted by Berezovsky who wanted to boost Putin’s rating. Warranted or not, the desperate search for conspiracies revealed one thing: people were prepared and willing to think that everything happening in the country was orchestrated by someone behind the stage. NTV hosted a discussion about the Ryazan’ incident, which irked the Kremlin. Yet, however warranted or not the conspiracy theories were, they did not change the fact that the explosions were real.
Putin was away in New Zealand when the first explosion ripped through a block of flats. When he came back, a few days later, he appeared on television, making a statement, looking shell-shocked. This, said Olson, who was measuring Putin’s rating every week, was the moment when people first ‘saw and recognized Putin’. When he came to pay his respects to the victims, he said what everyone felt: ‘Incredible. Unbelievable. Inhuman cruelty.’ The explosions, he said, were a threat to the existence of the Russian state. ‘We have to use force, there is no other way.’