So, on the eve of the new millennium and the tenth anniversary of the Soviet collapse, the country clinked glasses to the tune of the Soviet anthem. It was also a powerful statement that Putin did not see freedom and post-Soviet political order as the essence of the new country called Russia, but only as a decoration that could be dismantled as easily as a theatrical set. As the astute columnist Kirill Rogov wrote at the time, like any symbolic act, the restoration of the Soviet anthem had practical consequences that were beyond the will of its authors. The symbol was first. The meaning came later.7
Unlike Yeltsin, Putin felt no alienation from the Soviet past. A year earlier he had unveiled a plaque and laid flowers to Yuri Andropov, who had been the head of the KGB at the time when Putin as a young man joined the organization. Andropov, who died only nineteen months after becoming the head of the Soviet Union, was seen as an enlightened and authoritarian modernizer. His short stint at the helm of the country contributed to a myth that he could have transformed the Soviet Union into a functioning economy, while keeping the country together, had he not died prematurely at the age of seventy.
It was not just the liberals who tried to wind back the tape of history and find the point where things had gone wrong – so did the siloviki who saw Putin’s promotion to the top post in the country as a chance to fulfil Andropov’s ideas.[1]
Like most people who served in the KGB, Putin had little respect for Gorbachev and saw him not as a man who gave Russia freedom, but as someone who had lost the country and the job as a result of his weakness. As Putin said many years later, a person who does not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union has no heart and one who wishes to restore it has no brain. Putin certainly had a brain. He did not try to restore the Soviet Union; he saw his mission in preventing further disintegration. And since it was Gorbachev’s liberalization of the media that had undermined the Soviet system, he had no intention of repeating that mistake.
‘Magic TV Comb’
Boris Nemtsov recalled visiting Putin in his office soon after his election as president. It was the same office Nemtsov had visited many times when Yeltsin was president. ‘We had a conversation and in the middle of it, Putin asked me if I minded watching the 3 p.m. news. It was odd. I looked around the familiar office. Nothing seemed to have changed there. Apart from one thing. The only object that had been on Yeltsin’s otherwise empty desk was his pen – it was the pen that he gave to Putin when he signed his own resignation. Putin’s desk was also empty, but the pen was gone. Instead, Putin had a TV remote control on his desk,’ said Nemtsov.8 (Nemtsov could hardly have imagined that he would fall victim to the hatred that this remote control of television would incite in Russia a decade and a half later.)
That remote control was to become one of Putin’s tools, the sceptre of his power. Unlike Yeltsin, who had rarely watched himself on television and simply turned off the channels he disliked, Putin developed an obsession with television. At the end of each day he watched how the different channels covered him. Having observed the role played by television in his own coming to power and the destruction of Primakov and Luzhkov, Putin knew that the power of the oligarchs lay in their control over the media and he did not wish to leave it in their hands.
In January 2000 NTV showed a scathing Kukly sketch based on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novella Klein Zaches, genannt Zinnober (1819) – the story of a small town that blindly takes an ugly dwarf Zaches for a beautiful youth, thanks to the magic spell cast by a fairy who has pity on Zaches. Whatever little Zaches does elicits adulation and he turns into a minister. In the end, one of the characters finds that Zaches’s magical power is contained in the three hairs on his head. The hairs are pulled out and Zaches loses the spell and drowns in a chamber pot. Kukly showed a puppet Yeltsin cradling a dwarf with Putin’s face. Berezovsky was cast as the ‘fairy’ who combs the dwarf’s hair with a ‘magic TV comb’, thus turning him in the eyes of all Russian officials into a wise and handsome president.
The Kukly skit was aired a few months before the presidential elections – just as the state television channels showed Putin, with great adulation, flying a military jet from his residence in Sochi to Grozny, posing on a submarine and inspecting a farm. The parody cut too close to the bone, particularly given Putin’s lack of height. According to Russian media reports, Putin took it personally.
A few weeks later, a Soviet-style letter was published in a small St Petersburg newspaper denouncing Kukly’s programme as a criminal act. ‘Kukly has evoked a feeling of deep outrage and indignation by misusing the freedom of speech,’ the letter said.9 One of the signatories was promptly appointed by Putin as his ‘trusted representative’ in the presidential campaign. Soon, prosecutors opened an investigation against Gusinsky and his Media Most group.
Viktor Shenderovich, the scriptwriter of Kukly, received a message – apparently from the Kremlin – saying that the attack on Media Most would stop if NTV fulfilled three conditions: changed its coverage of Chechnya; halted its criticism of the ‘family’; and removed ‘the first person’, that is, Putin, from Kukly. In response, Shenderovich publicized the message and made an even more provocative skit based on the Bible, in which Putin was portrayed as God. His puppet did not make an appearance, though: he was represented by a burning bush and a stormy cloud. Chief of Staff Voloshin was Moses conveying the Ten Commandments: ‘Don’t kill anyone, except people of Caucasus nationality in a shit-hole’ and ‘Don’t have any other gods apart from Him – at least for two terms’ and ‘Don’t steal unless it is federal property’. Asked how ‘He’ should be referred to, Voloshin said: ‘Just call him Lord God, abbreviated as GB.’ In Russian, GB stood for KGB.
If that was not enough, on 24 March, just two days before Putin was elected president, NTV aired a talk show called Nezavisimoe rassledovanie (Independent Investigation) that questioned the official version of the apartment block explosions in the autumn of 1999. It focused on the foiled apartment bombing in Ryazan. The programme’s host interviewed former and present FSB officers and tenants of the apartment block who had discovered the bags of a white substance that was first identified as hexogen, but which the FSB later claimed was sugar. While the programme did not prove anything definitively, it certainly raised the strong suspicion that the FSB was concealing the truth and had actually tried to blow up the apartments for real. Putin saw this as a deliberate and subversive attack timed for the elections.
On 11 May, only four days after Putin’s pompous inauguration, the offices of Media Most were raided by armed men in camouflage uniform and in black ski masks. There was little doubt that the raid had received a green light from Putin, who was shown that day on television talking about democracy and the freedom of speech to Ted Turner, the founder and owner of CNN. The raid reminded everyone of the winter of 1995 when Gusinsky’s security guards were made to lie face down on the snow by Korzhakov’s men. At the time, however, NTV was on the ascent and history was on its side. This time NTV was sailing against the wind.
1
Soon after being appointed prime minister, Putin half-jokingly told an assembly of intelligence officers on the anniversary of the foundation of the Soviet secret police: ‘The intelligence operatives planted inside the Russian government have successfully completed the first stage of the operation.’