It was not what Putin said and what he did. It was the way he looked and sounded that allowed people to identify themselves with him. His appearance resonated with the feelings of millions of people, causing something of a ‘short circuit’ moment, according to Olsen. Suddenly, Putin, a bland, ‘accidental’ man, the joker in a pack of cards, turned into an ace. He was a ‘hero’ that people did not even know existed before. People turned to Putin as their only hope, a man who was capable of defending them whatever it took. He was offering to take responsibility and deal with a problem which they were unwilling and unable to deal with. A few weeks later Putin delivered the words which became his hallmark for years to come: ‘We will pursue them everywhere. If it is in the airport, then in the airport. If we catch them in the toilet, we’ll wipe them out in the shit-hole. That is it. Subject closed.’
Putin was different from other politicians; in fact, he did not behave or talk like a politician at all – he talked like an ordinary man, like the guy next door. ‘The meaning of Putin’s words was not just that we are going to be tough, but also “who are these Chechens for us to be afraid of”’ Pavlovsky explained.43 In his streetwise talk and his readiness to fight against Chechens who terrorized the country, he matched a character from one of the most important post-Soviet films. It was called Brat (Brother) and told the story of a young, open-faced, charismatic Russian, Danila Bagrov, who after serving his two-year conscription in Chechnya, returns to a criminalized St Petersburg. His older brother, a small-time gangster, asks Danila to help him eliminate competitors – ethnic Chechens – who control street-market trade in the city. Danila turns into a hitman who administers justice like Robin Hood, helping the poor and homeless along the way and eliminating the ‘dirt’ from the streets.
In one of the opening scenes of the first Brat movie, Danila confronts two swarthy, heavily accented men – obviously from the Caucasus – who cockily refuse to pay a fine for riding on a trolley-bus without a ticket. Danila takes out a gun and points it at the crotch of one of the loudmouths. ‘Don’t shoot, brother,’ says the terrified Caucasian man. ‘I am not a brother to you, you black-arsed shit,’ Danila replies. He then takes his wallet, pays the fine, drops it on the floor and tells them to run. Danila was Russia’s first real hero – strong, charismatic, sincere, simple and organic.
The film was released in 1997 – the same year as Elena Masyuk, the NTV journalist, was kidnapped in Chechnya. It was a huge success, mainly because it captured the shift in the mood towards Chechnya and the first, almost unconscious, signs of rising nationalist resentment towards the outside world. When, in the spring of 1999, Putin’s spin-doctors surveyed the attitude of the Russian public towards different fictional characters, Danila from Brat was up there along with Stierlitz.
Like Danila, Putin came from ‘nowhere’ into this ugly and cruel world to protect his ‘brothers’.[2] Just like Brat, Putin effectively licensed and justified the use of extra-judicial force. Like Danila he was a strong and positive character unconstrained by political correctness and Western convention. Dorenko, in his programmes, also appealed to the image of Putin as a ‘brother’, contrasting him with Primakov. ‘I was whispering to the audience: “Look, we have a father, Primakov, who while he may mean well, is too ill and can’t fight, but we have a brother, a bro, who is strong, decisive and will defend us.”’44
Dorenko, who regularly travelled to Chechnya with the Russian army, had a message for Putin, whom he interviewed every couple of weeks. ‘Every time I saw him we talked about Chechnya: “The army wants more, more fighting, heavier, more aggressive, please, let’s advance deeper into Chechnya,” I told him. And every time Putin’s eyes lit up. “Are you prepared to say it on air?” he asked. “Me – I am screaming about it every week!” I told him. Bomb it, burn it with napalm along with the people, destroy, kill. We had to press a button and destroy it.’45
The button in Dorenko’s hands belonged to television and he used it to the same effect. He was among the first reporters into Grozny when the Russian military finally took it over after levelling it to the ground. Dressed in black, he reported from the central square of Chechnya’s capital, with Russian APCs driving around in the background. He leaned over military maps as the commander of the Russian forces explained his army’s disposition and showed the minefields where hundreds of Chechen soldiers had met their death. He interviewed Russian soldiers who told him that Chechen fighters should not be allowed to return to their cities. Those who had stopped the war in 1996 were traitors. Putin, who allowed them to finish the job, was obviously a hero.
On Itogi, Kiselev tried to say something about an ‘excess’ of force and human rights abuses in Chechnya, about the criticism from the West – as though the West still mattered. His words drowned in the general support for the war. The coverage of the second Chechen war could barely have been more different from the first one. One practical reason was that journalists were barred from entering what the Kremlin described as a ‘counter-terrorist zone’ without special permission from the Russian security services. Whereas in the first war much of the reporting had been done from the Chechen side, the only footage emerging from Chechnya in the second war was from the Russian army side. While in the first war even soldiers, interviewed on camera, had talked about the senseless violence they themselves had perpetrated, in the second war soldiers talked about ‘Russian unity’. ‘It is our land. Our core is our vlast [state power],’ one soldier told an NTV correspondent.
A minority made up of old Soviet intelligentsia types and human rights activists opposed it. Grigory Yavlinsky, the leader of the liberal Yabloko Party, called for negotiations with Maskhadov, the Chechen president. But most of those who were still called young liberal reformers were firmly on Putin’s side. As Chubais said in response to Yavlinsky: ‘The war in Chechnya is the rebirth of the Russian army; it reinforces faith in the army and any politician who thinks otherwise… is a traitor.’46
Gusinsky and Malashenko, who were against the war, could barely control their own television. Malashenko recalls watching video footage on NTV which showed the beheading of a Russian hostage by Chechen fighters. ‘The image had enormous power and I called Dobrodeev to ask him why he had decided to show it without even warning us. He told me that Rushailo [the interior minister] asked him to do it. It was clear that Dobrodeev engaged in war propaganda.’47 Dobrodeev understood the change of mood and not only ‘jumped aside’ from the approaching avalanche, but decided to ride its wave.
Shortly after the beginning of the war, Dobrodeev gave an interview entitled ‘The Army: These Are Our Brothers and Sons’ to Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), an army newspaper, saying, ‘When in real time the defence ministry generals are giving you information, you don’t have to ask anyone for anything else…’ The army and the media, he asserted, are doing one job and anyone who tried to create an impression that there is a wall between us – is wrong. ‘It is clear that Russia will soon enter a new stage of its development. We cannot live like we lived before,’ he said.48 A few months later, Dobrodeev left NTV, which he had helped to set up, and was appointed the head of the state television. It was from this high and comfortable chair that Dobrodeev observed Putin destroy NTV and expel its founders. The time of the pro-Western individualists who had put themselves above the state was coming to an end.
2
A member of a criminal gang in Russia was often described as ‘