Overreach, page 7
Kravchuk, independent Ukraine’s first president, refused Yeltsin’s offer to sign a new union treaty. Instead the two men, along with Stanislaŭ Shushkevich of Belarus, created the Commonwealth of Independent States, a new international body that the Central Asian republics joined on 21 December. The Soviet Union was no more. In his 2021 essay Putin would claim that ‘in 1991, all those territories, and, which is more important, people, found themselves abroad overnight, taken away, this time indeed, from their historical motherland.’10 He ignored the crucial fact that the ‘territories’ had not been taken away from their motherland but had overwhelmingly rejected it. The newly independent Baltic states, Belarus and Ukraine had no intention of continuing their subjugation to Moscow by another name.
Geopolitical Catastrophe
‘The collapse of the USSR was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,’ Putin told the Russian parliament and the country’s top political leaders in his 2005 state of the nation address. It is probably Putin’s single best-known quote. But few remember its context. The ‘genuine tragedy’ Putin spoke of was for the Russian people: ‘tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen [who] found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory’.11
Putin’s relationship with the legacy of the Soviet Union is actually more complex and ambivalent than one of simple nostalgia. In his 2021 essay Putin wrote that the ‘collectivisation and famine of the early 1930s [was] a common tragedy’ for both Russians and Ukrainians. He also criticised the Bolsheviks for their treatment of ‘the Russian people as inexhaustible material for their social experiments’.12 In 2007, as he laid flowers on a mass grave of KGB victims in Butovo near Moscow on the anniversary of Stalin’s great purge, Putin remembered the ‘hundreds of thousands, millions of people [who] were killed and sent to camps, shot and tortured. These were people with their own ideas which they were unafraid of speaking out about. They were the cream of the nation.’ Such ‘tragedies’ happen, said Putin, because ‘ostensibly attractive but empty ideas are put above fundamental values, values of human life, of rights and freedom.’13
Yet despite his later criticism, Putin had spent 20 years of his life not just as a loyal servant of the Soviet regime but of its most violent and fanatical wing – the KGB secret police. And he was undoubtedly one of the vast majority of Russians for whom life immediately after the fall was dramatically worse that it had been before it. On his return from his posting in Dresden in early 1990 Putin brought home a Volga car – once a sign of giddying privilege. But after he retired from the KGB with the honorary discharge rank of lieutenant-colonel the Putins had so little money that he had to moonlight as a taxi driver. ‘We lived like everyone, but sometimes I had to earn extra money … as a private driver,’ Putin told a Russian Channel One documentary in December 2021. ‘It’s not pleasant to speak about, honestly, but unfortunately that is what happened.’14
Dozens of books have been devoted to explaining the innermost secrets of Putin’s world view. However, I believe that there is less to Putin than meets the eye. Over his near quarter-century in power Putin has been described by Western commentators as a great tactician, manipulator and geopolitical mastermind. But most important for understanding the arc of his career, his uncanny tenacity in power and the path to the 2022 war is another, much more basic factor: that Putin is in many crucial ways the Russian everyman. Or more precisely, he is a smarter, fitter and more sober version of the Russian everyman – the kind of soft-spoken, effortlessly commanding man most Russians would like to be, or the kind of father, husband or son-in-law they would wish to have.
Putin’s defining characteristic is his ordinariness, not his extraordinariness. Like most of his generation, Putin spent the first four decades of his life believing that he lived in the greatest and most powerful nation on earth. He grew up in conditions of ordinary provincial Soviet post-war deprivation, was educated by the state and joined one of its most prestigious institutions for what he thought would be a lifetime’s career. Putin differed from most of his fellow citizens insofar as his posting in East Germany happened to give him a grandstand view of the collapse of the USSR’s might. But again in common with the rest of his generation, he certainly felt the material and moral humiliation ‘on his own hide’, in the Russians phrase.
With a hypocrisy well-honed by a lifetime in the USSR, Putin both abhorred the corruption and thievery of the 1990s and partook of it when he could – just like all the rest of his generation. St Petersburg’s newly elected mayor Anatoly Sobchak became Putin’s new political mentor, hiring the 37-year-old ex-KGB man as his deputy in May 1990. A bribe here, a kickback there – Putin, in his new job as liaison between St Petersburg’s deeply criminalised business world and the mayor’s office, was simply doing on a high level what every Russian was doing, or would do if they had the chance.
Most importantly, even as he was ducking and diving, Putin held on to a characteristically Russian form of aggrieved patriotism that was formed of hurt and pride in equal measure. Whatever the humiliations Russia was forced to suffer by a vindictive and victorious West, she nonetheless remained a great country. ‘A man may find himself drunk and broke, but at least he has the comfort of knowing that it is not his fault, but the work of enemies,’ explained Yulia Mostovaya, editor-in-chief of Kyiv’s Zerkalo Nedeli magazine. ‘He may beat his wife. He may wallow drunk under a fence. But whatever his personal shortcomings he knows that whatever else fate may take from him it cannot take his Russianness, his membership of a mighty nation.’15
I lived in Moscow for much of the 1990s. The Russia I knew had caught a viral dose of the century’s chaos. For Russians the shock of the implosion of the system that had sustained their every physical, spiritual and intellectual need was far more profound than anything the Soviet system had ever thrown at them – even the Purges, even the Second World War. Both those horrors, at least, had easy-to-understand narratives of enemies at the gate, enemies inside the house. But now Russians were hit by something entirely inexplicable – not an enemy, but an ideological vacuum and giddying economic collapse. During the first half of 1992, the average income of the population declined by an average of 70 per cent; the economy shrank by 40 per cent.
The first years of Yeltsin’s rule were a constant – and at times bloody – battle with reactionary nationalists and communists, both of whom demanded the restoration of Soviet greatness. In parliamentary elections in 1993 the largest party – with 23 per cent – was led by ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who called for Russian soldiers ‘to wash their boots in the Indian Ocean’. Diehard communists and nationalists in the Congress of People’s Deputies repeatedly refused to ratify the Belavezh Accords on the termination of the existence of the USSR. Leaders of oil-rich republics such as Tatarstan and Bashkiria, as well as Chechnya, Ingushetia and diamond and gold-rich Yakutia, called for full independence from Russia. Russia’s vice president, Aleksandr Rutskoy, denounced the Yeltsin programme of market reforms as ‘economic genocide’, and in October 1993 led an armed occupation of the White House where Yeltsin had made his famous speech from atop a tank two years earlier. Yeltsin shelled the rebels into submission.
The following year, with oil prices crashing, Yeltsin desperately filled the state’s coffers by selling off swathes of state property – notably oil, steel, aluminium and nickel production, as well as TV and communications infrastructure – in rigged auctions to a tiny group of wealthy men who would become known as the oligarchs. He also sent Russian troops into Grozny, the capital of the rebel republic of Chechnya, to forcibly bring it back under Moscow’s control. The assault failed spectacularly. In 1996 Yeltsin’s re-election against the communists was won through wholesale (through voluntary) mobilisation of Russia’s supposedly independent media to support the Kremlin. By 1998 Russia was so broke that it defaulted on its sovereign debt – and a $22 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund was largely plundered by the oligarch owners of failing Russian banks. A year later NATO bombed Belgrade, capital of Russia’s historic ally Serbia, to put an end to the genocide of Kosovo Albanians. To Yeltsin’s profound anger – and also in a sign of how strategically insignificant NATO now considered Russia to be – Moscow was not consulted.
For an entire generation of Russians – including Putin – the 1990s were a decade of humiliation, failure and poverty. The deep scars that period left on both ordinary people and on the political class that lived through it are the key to understanding their later support for Putin’s aggressive push to restore Russia’s standing in the world. It was not Putin who invented that nationalist narrative. ‘The belief that we Russians are a significant power – one that can push back against hostile powers and hostile influence from the outside world – is an important part of our collective identity,’ said Lev Gudkov, director of Moscow’s independent Levada-Center polling group. ‘This belief in the Soviet Union and Russia’s unique authority and in the fact that we are a special civilisation – this compensates for the feeling of dependence, poverty and humiliation that people have in their private lives.’ In a poll conducted by Levada at the end of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency in 1999, respondents had two main wishes of their new president: to end the economic crisis and to restore Russia to the status of superpower. Yeltsin had tried to drag the Russian people in the direction of democracy, capitalism and free speech – and by the outset of the final year of his first term his popularity had dropped to 10 per cent. Putin, by contrast, never tried to drag his people anywhere other than where they wanted to go – which was towards prosperity and national greatness.16
Vladimir Vladimirovich
In the final years of Yeltsin’s presidency the members of his family – both in the literal sense and the mafia sense of the tight coterie of oligarchic cronies who controlled much of Russia’s wealth – were looking for a man firm enough to take over the presidency but sufficiently loyal not to use his new powers to attack the people who had placed him on the throne. Vladimir Putin – modest and self-effacing, with a shy smile that hid inner toughness – seemed just the man for the job. Aleksandr Voloshin, the head of Yeltsin’s presidential administration, had headhunted Putin from the St Petersburg mayor’s office in 1997 and brought him to Moscow as his deputy. ‘Part of [Putin’s] head is KGB and Soviet, part of it is progressive,’ Voloshin told me.17 That seemed to make Putin a perfect compromise between the old world and the new – competent, level-headed, a safe pair of hands who knew the ‘understandings’ on which power in Yeltsin’s Russia was based. With the support of leading oligarch and Yeltsin ‘family’ member Boris Berezovsky, Putin was promoted to head the KGB’s successor, the Federal Security Service, and then to prime minister. ‘I am a bad judge of people,’ Berezovsky told me after he had been forced to flee to London. ‘I was wrong about Putin. He would say anything to anyone. He looked modest and moderate. But in reality he was a street punk.’18
But as much as the support of the Yeltsin family, it was war that brought Putin to power as president. Putin’s tough talk over Chechnya and the unrestrained brutality of the second war he unleashed against the rebel republic in September 1999 gave Russians their first military victory since the crushing of rebel Czechoslovakia in 1968. I spent six months with both Chechen rebels and pro-Moscow Chechen fighters during that war. In January 2000, standing on the roof of a nine-storey building in Grozny’s northern suburbs, I watched the artillery of five Russian divisions pound the already-ruined remains of the city to drive out a final handful of rebels. I counted more than 60 detonations a minute – including massive half-tonne bombs dropped by low-flying Su-24 fighter-bombers. As the planes roared over our heads Beslan Gantemirov, head of a force of pro-Moscow Chechens, grinned like a delighted boy, pumping his hand in the air as the detonations came like titanic doors slamming under the earth.
The Ukraine campaign would be a re-run of that conflict. ‘I have found it almost impossible to look away from the images of the carnage unleashed by Russian troops on occupied Ukrainian towns,’ wrote Lana Estimirova, whose mother Natalia was one of Chechnya’s most outspoken human rights campaigners before she was kidnapped and brutally murdered in 2009. ‘All I can think is: “They have done this before. They are doing it again.” The indiscriminate shelling, the looting, the evidence of rape, torture and executions, and, above all, the sense of enthusiasm with which these war crimes are being carried out are painfully familiar … Before Bucha and Irpin there was Samashki, where on 7 April 1995, Russian troops carried out a zachistka – a “clean-up” operation. Soldiers shot civilians, raped women, and set homes on fire. At least 103 were murdered on that day.’19
Not only the military methods of the Chechen and Ukrainian wars but the propaganda narratives would be the same. In the run-up to the September 1999 invasion Kremlin TV spoke of a ‘genocide of Russians’ inside Chechnya. ‘Russia’s modus operandi in Chechnya served as something of a blueprint for the next two decades of the Kremlin’s military and political strategy,’ wrote Estemirova. ‘A macabre methodology for breaking the will of restive populations in pursuit of its imperial interests. In the years since, we have seen – from Tskhinval [South Ossetia] to Aleppo [Syria], from Crimea to Central African Republic – a willingness to deploy violence with impunity across the world stage … As a Chechen, I am tied to the Ukrainian people through a bloody bond. A victory for them would be a victory for every victim of Putin’s regime.’
By February 2000 the Russian army, applying the same kind of overwhelming and indiscriminate firepower that they would later bring to bear on Mariupol and Severodonetsk, had crushed the Chechen rebel government that had defied Moscow since 1994. In presidential elections in March, Putin – already acting president – easily triumphed over his rivals with 53.4 per cent of the vote. It would be the first and only time Putin ever faced anything like real electoral opposition.
For Putin, the lesson of the second Chechen war was simple, according to a senior government minister who worked with him for eight years. ‘Russia’s might and empire could indeed be restored through military aggression – that was clear to all of us,’ said the official. ‘And it was also clear that Russian voters were sick of weakness and admired strength.’20
Chechnya had been bloodily and triumphantly subdued. But the rest of the old Soviet Empire fell into three distinct camps. The Baltic states, well on the road to membership of both the European Union and NATO, were far beyond recovery. The Central Asian states remained economically and politically tied to Russia by a physical network of Soviet-era gas pipelines on which they relied for their prosperity. Belarus had elected Aleksandr Lukashenko, a strongman Soviet nostalgist who favoured close ties to Moscow. But Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia remained on the fence, torn between the ambitions of their leaders and peoples for closer ties to the West and their economic dependence on Moscow.
Of these it was Ukraine that was by far the largest and most politically important. Ukraine had the biggest Russian-speaking population beyond the borders of Russia itself, and occupied a strategic position straddling the entire underbelly of southern Russia. More, the Crimean port of Sevastopol – home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet, including more than three hundred ships and 25,000 servicemen – was not a Russian sovereign base but leased from Kyiv on terms that varied depending on the political climate. It was a crucial military and strategic asset that the Kremlin was not prepared to forfeit to the Ukrainians, much less to NATO.
Tug of War
The first decade of Ukraine’s independence was as chaotic as Russia’s – and also encompassed economic collapse, the rise of an oligarch class that seized the country’s assets with the connivance of a corrupt ruler and the rise of ultra-nationalism on the political fringes. And just as in Russia, many of Ukraine’s best-educated and most motivated citizens emigrated. Among them were 78 per cent of its Jewish population, including the co-founders of PayPal (Max Levchin) and WhatsApp (Jan Koum). Between 1989 and 2001 Ukraine’s population fell by nearly 5 per cent.21
After 1991 about half the USSR’s strategic nuclear arsenal had been inherited by the Soviet Union’s successor states. Formally, the weapons left in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan were controlled by the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS. But in practice, especially after Ukraine’s parliament refused to ratify the CIS agreement, Ukraine found itself the world’s third-largest nuclear power, with some 1,700 warheads. Washington, alarmed at politically unstable countries controlling strategic nukes, persuaded the three accidental post-Soviet nuclear powers to destroy the weapons and their installations. In exchange, in December 1994 the United States, Russia and Great Britain signed the Budapest Memorandum that offered security assurances to Kyiv and promised to ‘respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine’.22 Two decades later when Putin invaded Crimea, the supposed guarantors of Ukraine’s security would utterly ignore their Budapest obligations.
But in the short term Ukraine’s cooperation with disarmament and new status as a non-nuclear, Western-friendly power brought dividends. In 1994 Kyiv signed a cooperation agreement with the European Union, the first such agreement that the EU had offered a post-Soviet state. In the same year Ukraine signed up for NATO’s Partnership for Peace agreement, which was upgraded in 1997 by a Charter on Distinctive Partnership, the second of many steps towards eventual full membership. Yeltsin objected strenuously, but according to declassified records he was assured by US President Bill Clinton at a personal meeting at the White House on 27 September 1994 that ‘NATO expansion is not anti-Russian; it’s not intended to be exclusive of Russia, and there is no imminent timetable … the broader, higher goal [is] European security, unity and integration – a goal I know you share.’23
