Voloshin was granted access to every top official – Vice-President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, the Senate leader. But it was his meeting with commerce secretary Donald Evans that astonished him most. Evans asked if they could speak privately, and they went to his office. Evans said: ‘You are close to Putin, I am close to President Bush, and he has asked me to put it to you – what do you want in exchange for supporting us?’
Voloshin understood that they were offering a bribe: Russia stood to lose billions of dollars’ worth of contracts in Iraq, and Washington was offering to compensate. ‘We don’t want to bargain,’ Voloshin said. ‘This is a bad war which will harm everyone. And Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism.’
In a final, rather pathetic, move the Americans tried to prove to Voloshin that there was a connection between Saddam and Chechnya. An American official recalled in an interview: ‘We thought this would be an issue that would catch the Russians’ attention, but Voloshin came out at the end saying, “That was totally uninteresting, there is nothing new in this presentation.”’
Voloshin confirms: ‘They told me a long, touching story about a terrorist who fought in Chechnya and later turned up in Iraq. It was pretty primitive, but they tried it on.’
Even scratching Putin’s rawest itch achieved nothing. The two sides were poles apart. Operation Shock and Awe began on 19 March.
Putin snubbed
For Putin, Iraq was not the be all and end all. There were still important prizes to aim for: the cancellation of America’s missile defence plans, WTO membership, increased trade, and so on. He decided not to let his failure stand in the way of his friendship with Bush.
Another opportunity was coming to impress the world with his openness and ‘Europeanness’. At the end of May, his home town of St Petersburg – built by Peter the Great as Russia’s ‘Window on the West’ – would celebrate its 300th anniversary. No wall was left unpainted, no stucco ornament ungilded, as the city was refurbished for a long weekend of partying, to which every major leader was invited. Putin planned to bask in the glory of St Petersburg’s Italianate avenues and palaces.
On the Friday he opened a Baltic youth festival, hosted a summit of Asian leaders on board a river ship, and took the leaders of Germany, Britain, France, Canada and Austria on personal guided tours of the city. In the evening the Mariinsky Theatre had never seen so many world leaders at one time. Next day he had talks with more presidents, and a summit with the entire European Union leadership. The world’s elite toured the Hermitage art gallery, and attended a water festival on the Neva river.
And then, finally, on the second evening, George W. Bush turned up for the last supper. He had decided to visit Poland first – New Europe, a country that had contributed to the Iraq war. Putin was insulted.
Maurice Gourdault-Montagne caught the Russian mood. ‘I think it was a tremendous disappointment for the Russians. It was surprising that Condi [Rice], with whom I have a good relationship and who is supposed to know what is in the Russian brain, gave Bush this terrible advice to go to Warsaw prior to St Petersburg. I just couldn’t understand it.’
MGM then heard Putin and Chirac in conversation, and registered that the love affair with America was over. Putin was saying to Chirac: ‘My priorities were the following: first a relationship with America, second with China, third with Europe. Now it is the other way around – first Europe, then China, then America.’
May 2002 had witnessed the triumphant signing of the Moscow treaty on nuclear arms reduction and the creation in Rome of the NATO–Russia Council. One year later, the mood had changed. And things were about to get even worse.
6
PUTIN MARK II
Georgia looks West
On the evening of Saturday 22 November 2003 Russia’s leaders retired after their regular Security Council meeting to Genatsvale, one of the best Georgian restaurants in central Moscow. The solid oak table was laden with appetisers – hot khachapuri cheese bread, pots of red and green lobio beans, aubergine and walnut rolls, chicken tsatsivi… Smoke from the logs burning in the hearth curled under the wooden rafters, and vines were growing on the timber walls. Waiters hovered with Russian vodka and Georgian wine, serving Russia’s power elite: President Putin, Prime Minister Kasyanov, chief of staff Medvedev, security council secretary Rushailo, foreign minister Igor Ivanov, defence minister Sergei Ivanov, and FSB chief Patrushev.
The choice of venue had been influenced by the leadership’s discussions earlier in the day about events unfolding in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. For three weeks President Eduard Shevardnadze – the former Soviet foreign minister – had been facing down growing protests in the streets following parliamentary elections that everyone believed were fraudulent. Shevardnadze himself was due to rule as president for a further two years, but there was widespread dissatisfaction at the corruption and misrule of his government. Opposition leaders were demanding his resignation. Putin was no big fan of Shevardnadze, holding him partly responsible for the collapse of the USSR, but he did not like the idea of unruly crowds trying to seize power in a country on Russia’s border. He was aware, too, that the student protests, under the slogan ‘Kmara’ (Enough) were modelled on the movement that had brought down Serbia’s president, Slobodan Milosevic, in 2000, and were supported by American democracy groups, including the Open Society Institute of the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, and the National Democratic Institute, an organisation dedicated to the strengthening of democracy around the world (the kind of democracy Putin feared).
Suddenly an aide asked Putin to take a call on a secure telephone. It was Shevardnadze. Earlier that Saturday events had finally spun out of his control. He had gone to the parliament, determined to convene it and thereby legitimise the election results, but the main opposition leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, told a huge rally in the main square: ‘We have only one aim – to rid the country of this man (Shevardnadze).’ Mayhem broke out as the opposition leaders swept into the debating chamber, each carrying a rose, and Shevardnadze was hustled out to safety by his bodyguards. The speaker of parliament, Nino Burjanadze, declared that she was assuming presidential powers. It was the start of what became known as the Rose Revolution – the first of the so-called ‘coloured revolutions’ that brought democracy to countries on Russia’s borders, revolutions that Putin came to regard as a threat to Russia itself. Shevardnadze retreated to his residence and declared a state of emergency. And then he called Putin.
Back in the 1970s, when he was Georgia’s Communist Party leader, Shevardnadze had notoriously affirmed his republic’s subservient position to Russia in the USSR by saying: ‘For us in Georgia the sun rises in the north.’ Now, as he desperately tried to cling to power in the independent state of Georgia, he effectively confirmed that little had changed, by turning to Putin for help. To the group seated around the table in Genatsvale it was obvious which of them should be dispatched to Tbilisi. Igor Ivanov, the foreign minister, had a Georgian mother and even knew a smattering of the language. He also knew Shevardnadze from the 1980s, when he had worked as his adviser in the foreign ministry. Putin sent him straight to the airport, with a posse of security guards and clear instructions to do whatever he could to avoid bloodshed in the streets of Tbilisi and ensure things were done in accordance with the Georgian constitution (which effectively meant: don’t let a mob overthrow the president).