Putin

Like Berezovsky, Yeltsin was a man who could be energized by crisis. He came alive, regaining “his spark and charisma.” He quit drinking and lost close to twenty pounds. Chubais was running his campaign Western-style, replete with “sound bites, daily photo ops and nervous advance men.” He began dealing with the war in Chechnya and used some of the Loans for Shares money to begin paying long overdue salaries and pensions. What Yeltsin had that Zyuganov did not was a strong, clear, positive message. “Five years ago we chose freedom. There can be no retreat.” And, as he said to voters: “I will ensure you freedom of choice, but the choice is up to you. Vote for a free Russia!” He reminded voters of what the “circles of Bolshevik hell” had been like: the camps, the hunger, the fear. It hadn’t been that long ago either—people did not need much reminding. “I was under a communist regime once, and I don’t want a replay of it,” said the leader of one of Russia’s most popular bands, the aptly named Time Machine. “Come cast your vote on June 16 so Time Machine can keep on playing.”

Rock ’n’ roll was on Yeltsin’s side. How could he lose?

On June 16 he didn’t lose, but he didn’t win either. Yeltsin received 35 percent of the vote, Zyuganov 32 percent. The rest of the vote was split among other candidates. This was still a time when Russia was gloriously messy with its new democracy, dozens and dozens of parties competing, even the Beer Lovers won 428,727 votes. A runoff was scheduled for July 3.

In the meantime there had been another election—for mayor of St. Petersburg—which at first seemed mainly of local importance. Putin ran the election campaign for Mayor Sobchak, his boss and mentor. “Politicians like Sobchak are usually the last to learn their luster is gone,” as Masha Gessen put it. And Sobchak was mostly luster to begin with. He had made some progress, with Putin’s help, in attracting foreign business to St. Petersburg but had done very little for the people, to improve their daily lives, the ultimate measure of all politics. Corruption, crime, and a crumbling infrastructure were what people saw. And there was always some ambiguity about Sobchak, how much of his attachment to reform was genuine, or did that tall, telegenic man just wear democracy as if it were a well-cut foreign suit?

Defeated in the election, Sobchak would remain in office until June 12, at which point both he and Vladimir Putin would be officially unemployed. But no moves could be made until the presidential runoffs were held.

This time the results were clear and striking—54 percent to Yeltsin, 40 percent to Zyuganov. As Yeltsin’s biographer Leon Aron said: “In the end he won because the election had, as he intended it to, become a referendum on democracy and communism, rather than on market reforms or the Russian version of capitalism.”

If things had gone the other way—a Yeltsin defeat and a Sobchak victory—Putin would probably have remained in St. Petersburg, dabbling in democracy and corruption, at the margins of history.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, Chubais, the much-hated chief of privatization and the successful manager of Yeltsin’s reelection campaign, contacted Putin with a job offer—deputy chief of the Kremlin’s Property Department. It was an important post, dealing with the $600 billion in property that Russia had acquired from the USSR. Putin would be “in charge of the legal division and Russian property abroad.” He accepted and moved to Moscow.

It’s probably axiomatic that no one gets to the top without fierce ambition, especially the top of the heap of Russian politics. But Putin himself could hardly have dared set his sights as high as he in fact rose, nor imagined how swift that ascent would be. A year after moving to Moscow he had become deputy chief of staff to the president; the next year he would be named director of the FSB, the successor to the KGB; and in the following year, 1999, he would be appointed prime minister, a post he did not hold for very long because, during his annual December 31 speech to the nation, President Yeltsin shocked the country by announcing that he was retiring prematurely, with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to take the his place effective immediately.

Even for a man of ferocious ambition and killer instincts to rise from unemployed bureaucrat to president in the space of some three and a half years would be a dizzying achievement, but for a man of no particular outward ambition it assumes the sheen of legend. How did it happen?

First, neither Putin’s uniqueness nor the scale and speed of his rise should be exaggerated. Stalin, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin all seemed to come from nowhere. And as vice mayor of St. Petersburg, Putin had been the number two man in Russia’s number two city, not exactly nowhere. Still, it’s a long way from there to the Kremlin.