In terms of Russian psychology – to the extent that this can be gauged – the shock of the 1990s seemed to be wearing off. I had the feeling (totally subjective, I admit) that people felt less patronised by the West than they had in the Yeltsin era. The foreign advisers were gone, and much of the new growth had a home-grown feel to it. Supermarkets filled up with Russian produce – but not the substandard Russian produce that used to be sold, packaged in identical brown bags; now it came in shiny packaging to match Western products. Russians went back to their old preferences – Vologda butter instead of Lurpak; molochnaya kolbasa (‘dairy sausage’) instead of imported German wurst. Wages were being paid again. The tens of thousands who lined the streets in the early 1990s selling their possessions had vanished. Moscow was brash and vulgar, but it had a vibrancy too, with new buildings going up everywhere and businesses opening up every day.
There were causes for optimism. The reason people were shopping at IKEA, after all, was because they were refurbishing their apartments, finally throwing out those ancient cracked tiles and Soviet-era fittings. Only now were many people (at least in the big cities) seeing the real break with communism, after a decade of uncertainty and poverty.
By the summer of 2002 things were looking relatively good. Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush were best friends, and Putin’s team was turning Russia into a booming market economy.
But there were darker forces at work too. They threatened both Russia and its relations with the West.
4
THE DARKER SIDE
Muzzling the media
Boris Yeltsin is rocking a baby Vladimir Putin in a cradle. The baby is wailing. Yeltsin tries to sing him to sleep.
‘Oh, oh,’ sighs Yeltsin. ‘You’re so ugly. And – God forgive me – your origins are so dark… and your looks so… murky… Oh, Lord, why did I – a democrat to the marrow – give birth to this?’
A fairy appears above him. It is Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch who helped bring Putin to power at the end of the 1990s. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘your first-born were prettier.’
Yeltsin yawns and puts his head down, saying, ‘Oh, I am so exhausted. I am going to take a well-earned rest.’ He falls asleep.
‘Poor man,’ says Berezovsky. ‘He’s worn himself out.’
Suddenly the baby starts crying out loud: ‘Wipe ’em out in the outhouse,’ he shouts. ‘All of ’em… wipe ’em out in the toilet!’
‘Sssh,’ says Berezovsky. ‘Not all of them… Calm down, lad. We’ll make a human out of you.’
The scene is based on a fairy tale, Little Zaches, by the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, the story of an ugly dwarf who has a spell cast on him by a fairy so that others find him beautiful. It was just one episode in the brilliant satirical puppet show Kukly (Puppets) which used to be shown on the independent television channel NTV.
Putin had to endure such mockery week in week out at the start of his presidency. He hated it. The ‘wipe ’em out in the toilet’ line was, of course, a reference to his notorious threat to annihilate Chechen terrorists. Berezovsky was the oligarch who used his television channel to ‘beautify’ Putin and paper over his KGB past to make him electable. And the dwarf? Well, every Russian viewer understood the reference to Putin’s lack of inches.
The scriptwriter of Kukly was Viktor Shenderovich, an impish, bearded writer with an irrepressible sense of humour and disdain for authority. He is sure Putin never forgave them for Little Zaches. ‘Several people told me independently that Putin went mad after this programme.’1
But Kukly was not the only thing on NTV that offended Putin. When the channel started up under Yeltsin it quickly gained a reputation as a free-thinking outlet, which broadcast unvarnished reports about the war in Chechnya (including the shocking truth about Russian atrocities and the demoralised state of Russian conscripts). Sunday evening’s Itogi, a political chat-show hosted by the channel’s leading journalist, Yevgeny Kiselyov, was unmissable viewing for every thinking Russian.
Russian broadcasting was still in its infancy. Western traditions of balance and independence had not taken root. NTV was used quite openly by its owner Vladimir Gusinsky to further his own interests, as was the main channel, ORT, by its prime shareholder Boris Berezovsky. They had both helped to get Yeltsin elected in 1996, when their business interests could have been threatened by a communist comeback. But in the December 1999 Duma elections, while Berezovsky’s ORT had thrown its weight behind Putin’s Unity Party, NTV had campaigned for his rivals.
Now, two days before the presidential election in March 2000, NTV broadcast a programme that caused apoplexy in the Kremlin: an investigation into the murky circumstances surrounding the apparent failed apartment bombing in Ryazan the previous summer and a discussion of the possible involvement of the FSB (see Chapter 1). Gusinsky’s deputy, Igor Malashenko, was told by the information minister, Mikhail Lesin, that NTV had now ‘crossed the line and were outlaws in their eyes’.
From this moment, it seems, NTV was doomed. Gusinsky’s business empire, Media-Most, which owned NTV, was in deep financial trouble. In the 1990s it had borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars to implement extravagant plans to extend its reach. It had even launched its own satellite, at huge expense, hoping that the emerging middle classes would soon buy NTV receivers and programming. Gusinsky was preparing to float the company on the New York stock market, to raise capital to repay the debts. But after the August 1998 crisis, those plans evaporated, as did the TV advertising market in Russia, and Media-Most found itself saddled with loans it could not repay. Its main creditor was the state-owned gas monopoly, Gazprom – and this gave the Kremlin great leverage when it decided to throttle Gusinsky. According to Kiselyov, Gusinsky had been in talks with Gazprom about restructuring the debt, but when Putin became president he ordered the gas company to demand immediate repayment of the entire debt – and, if Media-Most refused, to seize NTV’s assets. On 11 May, four days after Putin’s inauguration, dozens of armed and masked tax police and FSB troops stormed Media-Most’s headquarters. By the end of the day they had carted out hundreds of boxes of documents, cassettes and equipment. Malashenko described the raid as ‘purely political in character, an act of revenge and intimidation’.
There was, perhaps, still a slim chance to survive. At around the same time, Malashenko received an offer directly from the Kremlin: fulfil certain conditions and the reprisals would stop. The conditions, according to Shenderovich, were: to stop investigating corruption in the Kremlin, to change their coverage of Chechnya and, above all, to ‘remove the “First Person” from Kukly’ – in other words, Putin’s latex physiognomy had to disappear from the show.
To Shenderovich, this was a red rag to a bull. He responded by writing a hilarious episode of Kukly that lampooned the edict itself. Since they could not show Putin, they showed a burning bush instead. Moses – in the form of Putin’s chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin – receives tablets from his invisible leader with the Kremlin’s ‘ten commandments’. At the end the leader is referred to as ‘Gospod Bog (The Lord God), GB for short’ (which for every Russian means KGB). In English it sounds convoluted. In Russian, it could not have been more direct, or more provocative.
Two weeks later, on 13 June, Gusinsky was arrested. Putin feigned complete innocence when asked about it by a television reporter. ‘It was unexpected for me,’ he said, barely able to stop a little smile playing on his lips. ‘I hope the authorities who made this decision – I suppose it was the prosecutor’s office, yes? – have good reasons to justify their action.’