Six days later Putin initiated a reform of the upper chamber of parliament (the Federation Council or ‘senate’). Previously, elected regional governors and heads of regional legislative councils were ex officio senators; now the regional bosses were replaced by nominated representatives, allowing the Kremlin to fill the Federation Council with ‘friendly’ senators.
Putin then moved to centralise the collection and distribution of taxes, which had been about 50–50 between the centre and the regions, to 70–30 in favour of the central government.
The apex of the new vertical of power was not the federal government, however, but rather Putin himself – something he achieved by appointing trusted colleagues from the security services or from his home town, St Petersburg, to key positions. Many of them, moreover, were also given directorships in state companies, thereby enmeshing the country’s political and business structures in a vast spider web, at the centre of which sat Putin.
Igor Sechin had the perfect pedigree: he had worked with Putin in St Petersburg, and by some accounts may also earlier have been a spy, working undercover as a translator in Portuguese-speaking African countries. He became Putin’s most trusted adviser, and followed his master from St Petersburg to Moscow in 1996. When Putin became acting president he retained Yeltsin’s chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, but immediately appointed Sechin as deputy chief of staff, controlling the flow of papers that crossed his desk, and in effect running the energy industry. In 2004 he also became chairman of the board of Rosneft, the state oil company.
Viktor Ivanov, from the Leningrad KGB, became Putin’s deputy chief of staff in charge of personnel matters – and also chairman of both the Almaz air defence corporation and Aeroflot. Sechin and Ivanov were considered the most powerful siloviki in Putin’s circle.
Dmitry Medvedev, another former colleague of Putin’s from St Petersburg, came to Moscow in 1999 to become a third deputy chief of staff, and also chairman of the state gas monopoly, Gazprom.
Putin brought his St Petersburg colleague Alexei Miller to Moscow to become deputy minister of energy and then CEO of Gazprom.
The two chief economic reformers, German Gref and Alexei Kudrin, also came from St Petersburg. Gref served on the board of Gazprom, and Kudrin became chairman of both VTB bank and the diamond producer Alrosa.
Sergei Naryshkin, another Leningrader and former colleague at KGB school, was promoted in Putin’s second term to government chief of staff, as well as chairman of the board of Channel One television and deputy chairman of Rosneft.
Another old Leningrad KGB colleague, Nikolai Patrushev, became chairman of the FSB, following Putin himself.
Rashid Nurgaliyev worked under Putin in the FSB and then became interior minister. Cherkesov, mentioned above, was another subordinate of Putin’s in the FSB.
Sergei Chemezov, a fellow spy with Putin in Dresden, was brought in to run Rosoboronexport, the country’s chief arms exporter. And another ‘Chekist’, Vladimir Yakunin, was brought in to the transport ministry and eventually became head of Russian Railways.
Yakunin has another link to Putin: they are both founding members of a so-called ‘dacha cooperative’ known as Ozero, which manages their adjacent country houses on Komsomolskoye lake near St Petersburg. All of Putin’s other friends from the Ozero group (as we shall see in Chapter 12) now hold top positions in government, banking and the media.
The Chechen war and the backlash
During Putin’s first years as president events in Chechnya cast a long shadow over his claims to be bringing Russia into the ‘European family’. I spent several months in Chechnya during the earlier war (1994–96) and saw for myself how the republic was ravaged by Russian forces. It seemed to me that there was more than sufficient evidence of serious war crimes and human rights violations, which I and scores of other journalists documented, but the international community – perhaps because it was preoccupied with the simultaneous wars in the Balkans – did nothing about them. The total devastation of the capital, Grozny, and the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, whose apartment blocks were literally pulverised by Russian air power and artillery, could not be justified by the alleged purpose of destroying ‘bandits’, as the rebel forces were known. I interviewed survivors of Russian ‘filtration camps’ – notorious prisons where Chechens were tortured to extract confessions, or just for fun. I visited huge open graves, filled with hundreds of bodies, some with their hands tied behind their backs. I met dozens of grieving families, saw murdered women and children, hundreds of homes destroyed in villages all across Chechnya, streams of refugees fleeing from Russian troops, people cowering in basements from air attacks. I met defenceless, bedridden old people, all but freezing and starving to death in the rubble of their homes. But this was under Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, and the West, besotted with his alleged devotion to democracy, offered only limp condemnation, considering the conflict to be an ‘internal affair’.
The second war, unleashed by Putin in 1999, was by all accounts even more brutal. But fewer Western journalists covered it, because it was simply too dangerous. At least in the earlier war the Chechens had been generally well disposed to journalists; since then the republic had turned into a lawless quagmire, where the risk of kidnapping and murder were just too great. The rebel fighters themselves were now as barbarous as the Russians had been. It was left mainly to courageous journalists like Anna Politkovskaya of Novaya gazeta to bring the truth to the world this time. (And even so no Western leader has called for any Russian commander or politician to be tried for war crimes.)
In the first war it was relatively easy for journalists to move around in Chechnya. It was this that led to the highly critical coverage – not only in the West but in Russia too, especially on NTV. The authorities learned their lesson, and the second time around tried to restrict access to the war zone. One Russian journalist, Andrei Babitsky, who worked for Radio Liberty, was even kidnapped by federal forces in early 2000 because of his critical reporting. They then handed him over to Chechen fighters in exchange for Russian prisoners of war, as though he himself were a combatant – a fallacy apparently supported by Putin, who indicated that he saw nothing wrong with the swap because Babitsky – a journalist, let’s not forget – was a traitor: ‘This was his own decision,’ Putin told the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. ‘He went to the people whose interests he effectively served.’2
If Putin believed that critical reporting was tantamount to serving the enemy, then there could be no doubt about what he must have thought of Politkovskaya. After the taming of NTV she became the most important chronicler of Russian barbarity in Chechnya, a patient listener to the cries of pain that the Kremlin wished to stifle.
The authorities maintained that the campaign in Chechnya was a ‘security operation’, aimed solely at eliminating terrorists. Politkovskaya spoke to eyewitnesses of Russian ‘security sweeps’, men like 45-year-old Sultan Shuaipov, a refugee from the Grozny suburb of Novaya Katayama. He told Politkovskaya how he had personally gathered up 51 bodies from his street and buried them. Here is just part of his story.
When 74-year-old Said Zubayev came out of No. 36 on Line [street] 5 he ran into the federals and the soldiers made him dance, firing their rifles at his feet to make him jump. When the old man got tired, they shot him. Thanks be to Allah! Said never knew what they did to his family.