SEVEN
Remote Control
On New Year’s Eve 1999 Boris Yeltsin, by way of the traditional televised seasonal greeting to the nation, announced that he was stepping down as president and was passing the reins of power to Vladimir Putin. ‘Russia has to enter the new millennium with new politicians, with new faces, with clever, strong and energetic people. And we, who were in power for many years, we must leave. I am leaving… Russia will never go to its past. Russia will always move only forward. And I must not stand in the way of history.’
It was an emotional and moving speech. Yeltsin asked to be pardoned by those who ‘believed that we could, in one big swing, in one thrust, jump from a grey, totalitarian past into a bright, rich and civilized future. I believed this myself… It seemed one thrust and we would do it. We did not… I’ve done all I could. A new generation is coming to replace me – a generation of those who can do more and better.’
Yeltsin’s speech was followed, without as much as a pause, by Putin’s greeting. ‘Today I am entrusted with acting as the head of state… There will be no vacuum of power in the country – not for one minute. Any attempt to move outside the constitution will be decisively put down.’
A few hours earlier, Yeltsin had left the Kremlin for the last time. Handing over a case with nuclear codes and the pen with which he had signed his resignation and Putin’s appointment, he told Putin: ‘Take care… Take care of Russia.’ Television showed the two men standing shoulder to shoulder in Yeltsin’s office – a tall, towering figure with grey hair on his way out, a slim, short one on his way in.
The transfer of power seemed seamless. The ritual was unmistakably staged – the New Year’s address by the leader of the country had greater symbolic value than any election. Putin was the president. The actual presidential election three months later only confirmed the fact. Putin’s appointment represented continuity but also a visual contrast. By the time the country watched Yeltsin’s successor make his New Year’s statement, Putin was already in Chechnya. Celebratory programmes that night were interrupted by images of Putin in a parka, flanked by men in military uniforms, handing out awards to Russian soldiers. ‘This [war] is not just about restoring the honour and dignity of the country. It is about putting an end to the disintegration of Russia,’ Putin said.
In contrast to Yeltsin, who for better or worse saw Russia as a nation, Putin saw it first and foremost as a state and himself as its guardian, gosudarstvennik or statist. Two days before Putin was formally entrusted with Russia, Putin published his manifesto ‘Russia on the Threshold of the New Millennium’, that hailed the state as a key driver of Russia’s success and a force of consolidation. Russia did not need state ideology, the manifesto argued. Its ideology, its national idea, was the state. Personal rights of freedom were all well and good, but they could not provide the strength and security of the state. Russia, he asserted, would never become a second edition of Britain or America where liberal values had deep historic traditions. Russia had its own traditional, core values. These were patriotism, collectivism and derzhavnost – a tradition of being a great geopolitical state power that commands the attention of other countries – and gosudarstvennichestvo, the primacy of the state.
For Russians, a strong state is not an anomaly to fight against. Quite the contrary, it is the source and guarantor of order, the initiator and the main driving force of any change. Society desires the restoration of the guiding and regulating role of the state. In Russia, a collective form of life has always dominated over individualism. It is also a fact that paternalism is deeply grounded in Russian society. The majority of Russians associate the improvement in their lives not so much with their own endeavours, initiative and entrepreneurship but with the help and support of the state… And we can’t ignore them.1
It is tempting to project our knowledge of the current state of Russia and Putin onto the early years of Putin’s presidency; to describe Russia’s descent into a nationalistic corporatist state as part of a premeditated plan. In fact, few people paid attention to Putin’s statement at the time. Even fewer were alarmed by it.
Putin’s millennium message, drafted by Pavlovsky, reflected not just what Putin thought but also what people wanted to hear from him. An opinion poll conducted in January 2000 found that 55 per cent of the Russian population expected Putin to return Russia to the status of a great and respected derzhava and that only 8 per cent expected him to bring Russia closer to the West.2 As a man with a KGB background, Putin was clearly a statist, but he was also free of any ideology and in the minds of most Russians this did not contradict the idea of capitalism. Quite the opposite.
Many Russian liberals perceived Putin as an authoritarian modernizer who would restore the functioning of the state and economy. The media saw Putin as a blank sheet onto which they could write their own narrative. The corridor of opportunities, which was quite wide, was to be narrowed by those who were in charge of that narrative. The educated, well-off, Westernized middle class saw him as a centre-right, economically liberal president – a Russian version of Augusto Pinochet.
Five days after Putin’s formal election as president, Peter Aven, the head of Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest private bank, and a long-term acquaintance of Putin’s, evoked Pinochet as a model in an interview with the Guardian. ‘I’m a supporter of Pinochet not as a person but as a politician who produced results for his country. He was not corrupt. He supported his team of economists for ten years. You need strength for that. I see that parallel here. There are similarities in the situation.’3 If the president had to use authoritarian means to further reforms, so be it, Aven argued. Putin’s KGB past did not worry Russian liberal journalists much. Stigmatizing Putin because of his former intelligence work seemed like a form of social discrimination. Those who did object to Putin on the basis of his KGB past were considered marginal dissidents, intelligentsia, or demshiza or demskitz – a pejorative shortening of ‘democratic schizophrenics’.
The Union of Right Forces, a liberal economic party led by Gaidar, Nemtsov, Chubais and businesswoman Irina Khakamada, and which received a respectable 8.5 per cent in the parliamentary elections in 1999, campaigned under the slogan ‘Putin to the Kremlin, Kiriyenko to Parliament’. Nemtsov, who voted against supporting Putin, was overruled. The night after the December parliamentary elections of 1999, Putin attended a post-election party held by the Union of Right Forces and raised a toast ‘to our common victory’.
The next day, Putin gathered the leaders of all the winning factions in his office and joined in a toast to Stalin raised by the communist leader, Gennady Zyuganov, on the occasion of the 120th anniversary of the tyrant’s birth. Putin, whose grandfather had been a cook in Stalin’s court, did not cringe. To Putin, Stalin was not a symbol of repression, but the ultimate expression of state power. Putin was neither a Stalinist nor a liberal. As a man who had been trained to be a spy, he was nondescript and had skills for mimicry. He could assume whatever personality best suited the situation to win the trust and sympathy of his interlocutor. His ability to perform and to blend in made people who talked to him feel that he shared their views.