So why did the needle spin around to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin? Yeltsin had time and again shown a partiality for younger politicians. Putin, though, was older than many earlier favorites and, at forty-seven, was the very same age as Stepashin. Putin’s St. Petersburg roots could hardly have been decisive; Yeltsin had no network in Russia’s second city, and Chubais and Stepashin, among others, were also from there. In personal style, Putin was in some regards the un-Yeltsin—medium in height, trim, imperturbable, abstemious—but there were plenty of individuals out there who were different from Yeltsin. It has been suggested that Yeltsin chose Putin because Boris Berezovskii or some other master manipulator put him up to it, or because Putin had a unique ability to protect Yeltsin and his family from prosecution after his retirement. Neither of these interpretations holds water, either. There is no evidence that Berezovskii or anyone like him advocated Putin. My guess is that Berezovskii’s support, had it been extended and had Yeltsin known of it, would for Yeltsin have been the kiss of death to any candidate.87 Any senior politician Yeltsin would have considered, not only Putin, would have been happy to extend him the limited immunity Putin was to give him (not him and his family) by decree on December 31, and any presidential edict of this sort could subsequently have been superseded by legislation. Yeltsin never negotiated over immunity or any aspect of the Putin decree, which was finalized only in the hours after his resignation.88
Presidential Marathon drops a key clue to Putin’s appeal to Yeltsin when it harks back to the decision, which he soon repudiated, to make Nikolai Bordyuzha Kremlin chief of staff in 1998. “I was already coming to feel that society needed some new quality in the state, a steel backbone that would strengthen the political structure of authority. We needed a person who was thinking, democratic, and innovative yet steadfast in the military manner. The next year such a person did appear…. Putin.”89 Putin acquired the military manner while serving sixteen years in the foreign intelligence wing of the Soviet KGB. His democratic and pro-market qualifications, such as they were, were earned in the first half of the 1990s, when he was lieutenant to Anatolii Sobchak, the liberal mayor of St. Petersburg, and was in charge of attracting foreign investment to the city. After Sobchak was voted out of office in 1996, Putin came to Moscow and worked in successively more responsible positions under Borodin, Chubais, and Yumashev. On July 25, 1998, Yeltsin appointed him director of the FSB, over the heads of hundreds of more senior operatives. Putin soon showed his reliability behind the scenes by suppressing talk among disgruntled army officers of a coup against the civilian government.90 In March 1999 he made a public display of loyalty to the president by standing up for the authenticity of the scandalous charges against Procurator General Skuratov. Right after that, he was given the additional post of secretary of the Security Council.
On August 9, 1999, Yeltsin revealed that he had once again fired his prime minister and nominated a replacement. Whereas he had given Chernomyrdin a backhanded endorsement for president in August 1998, and had never linked any of his other changes in the premier’s chair to the succession, this time he explicitly put forward Putin as his designated heir. Putin, Yeltsin said, was capable of “consolidating society” and seeing to “the continuation of reforms in Russia” after him.
The whole plan would have been scuttled if the votes to confirm could not be found in the Duma. Two hundred and thirty-three were found in the first round, on August 16, and Putin was duly installed. It is worth noting that this was only seven votes more than the 226 required and was substantially less than the support given to Primakov, Stepashin, and even Sergei Kiriyenko on his third try. The KPRF caucus could have blocked Yeltsin and Putin if it had been united on the issue. It was disunited, and, like so many other actors, did not foresee the mallet blow that Putin was to strike against its interests.91
After August 16, there was but one potential impediment to the transfer of Monomakh’s Cap to Putin—the attitude of his patron in the Kremlin. Although Yeltsin in his retrospective memoir account treated the choice of Putin as hard and fast, in real time it was more tentative than that. In an interview with journalists shortly after the fact, Putin reported that in their conversation about the premiership Yeltsin was vague about the future: “He did not use the word ‘successor.’ Yeltsin spoke about ‘a prime minister with prospects’ [s perspektivoi] and said that if all went well he considered this [the presidency] to be possible.”92 In his public statement on August 9, Yeltsin reminded Russians that there was to be a presidential election in less than a year. Over that time, he was persuaded that Putin as prime minister would do “very useful things for the country,” which would allow citizens to evaluate his “professional and human qualities” for themselves. “I have confidence in him. But I want everyone who in July 2000 will go to the voting stations and make their choice to also be sure. I think this will be enough time for him to show himself.”93
What would happen if Putin faltered, the new man failed to catch fire with the public, and, by Yeltsin’s definition, his qualities proved inadequate for leading Russia into the twenty-first century? One must assume that, if time allowed, the president would not have hesitated to act again. Having done in four prime ministers in seventeen months, what was to stop him from doing it to a fifth? Putin was the latest in a long line of army- and police-related functionaries to have captured his imagination. The line stretches back through Stepashin, Bordyuzha, and Nikolayev to Lebed, Korzhakov, and Rutskoi. In every other case, Yeltsin sooner or later lost faith in the man with the military manner. In the appropriate circumstances, he might well have done so for this understudy, too.
Russia’s new prime minister did not falter, he did catch fire with the public, and the president did not reassess his vote of confidence. The politics of the four months following the August breakpoint belong more to the rising Putin era than to the fading Yeltsin one. Boris Yeltsin chose for himself the lame-duck status that pundits a year earlier saw as being inflicted on him by other people and by conditions. Putin as premier made almost no personnel changes, concentrating on mobilizing resources to deal with a pair of ripening crises.
The first of these was a deadly threat to the shaky peace in the North Caucasus, Russia’s most unruly area. On August 7, following several months of infiltrating villages, a force of 2,000 Chechnya-based guerrillas crossed into Dagestan, the multiethnic republic within Russia separating the Chechen lands from the western shore of the Caspian Sea. They proclaimed an independent Islamic Republic of Dagestan, with the desperado Shamil Basayev as its leader, on August 10. In early September, as the Russians were counterattacking in Dagestan, Moscow and two southern towns were rocked by nighttime terror bombings of apartment houses. Three hundred civilians were killed and the FSB blamed the violence on pro-Chechen fanatics. Putin was convinced that failure to respond would be the death knell for the country: “My evaluation of the situation in August, when the bandits attacked Dagestan, was that if we did not stop it immediately Russia as a state in its current sense was finished…. We were threatened by the Yugoslaviazation of Russia.”94 Russian tanks and troops entered Chechnya in early October and fought their way across the Terek River toward Grozny; they seized the city on February 2, 2000, and pushed on into the southern high country.