10. How and Why Putin got elected, & extent of his power

Pavlovski in 1996, with a small group of ‘political technologists’ achieved the impossible, by getting Boris Yeltsin re-elected as president. Soon, he would help mastermind the ascendancy of V. Putin.

The Yeltsin campaign heralded the arrival of ‘political technology’ – the application of Western-style political communications and instruments to a partly authoritarian Russian context. The Soviet Union had been ruled by brute force and ideology, while the new era dawning in 1996 was ruled by post-modernistic manipulations and television. In 1997 Pavlovski’s influence was increasing, and he would soon win more fame for his role in what was arguably one of the greatest political manipulations in Russian history since 1917. (3,000 words)

Pavlovsky, by all accounts, is a uniquely talented political operative who has had a hand in virtually every election since 1996. His reputation as the black prince of Kremlin piar (Russian for PR). In a profile from 2001, it described Pavlovsky as someone who possessed ‘the combination of cynicism with a rare talent for orienting himself in the information space’.¹⁴ At his political consultancy, the Foundation for Effective Politics, Pavlovsky had been one of the pioneers of the use of Western-style political communications – public opinion polls, quantitative methods, television advertising, and direct messaging. And in 1996, with Yeltsin lagging badly in the polls in the election race of that year, Pavlovsky was put in charge of television propaganda.

He ran a ‘thermonuclear’ campaign, as he put it. All television channels bombarded the public with images of the Communist leader Zyuganov as a loathsome fascist who wanted to bring Russia back to the dark ages. Television stations ran documentaries about the Stalinist gulag, and lines for bread in Brezhnev’s time, reminders that the Soviet Union was not the cheerful place many now remembered it after a decade of market reforms. There was also the frequent and mysterious appearance on national television of neo-Nazi groups flinging Hitleresque salutes and shouting ‘Heil Zyuganov!’ Meanwhile, a more positive image of Yeltsin was beamed into Russian living rooms. He even danced on stage – something unheard of and unprecedented for an official of his standing. ‘It was an exercise in mass hypnosis’, said Kremlin pollster Alexander Oslon of the campaign.

In July, Yeltsin won in a run-off, with 53 % per cent of the vote.

But things were heading from bad to worse, and within months of his election Yeltsin’s presidency had begun to go off the rails. First came quintuple bypass surgery in 1996, after which Yeltsin’s behavior was increasingly erratic. He was visibly unsteady on his feet, and made headlines with seemingly drunken antics.

The nail in the coffin of Yeltsin’s presidency, however, was Chechnya, which had become a graphic demonstration of the impotence of the Kremlin under his leadership, and of the danger to Russia’s statehood caused by the country’s weakness. Some 5,000 Russian soldiers had died during the two-year campaign to re-establish federal control, and Russia had still been defeated by the tiny nation: in the winter of 1996, Russia signed a peace accord with the breakaway state of Ichkeria at the border town of Khasavyurt.

Few ordinary Russians cared about losing Chechnya – quite the opposite, they were only too glad to see the end of the horrific war. But to the patriotic segments of the elite, especially the officer class, it represented a threat to the core of the nation. ‘It was a huge blow, so huge that it changed our relationship to the state’, according to Pavlovsky, who said that discussion of a successor to Yeltsin started almost immediately after Khasavyurt (peace accords). The disaster in Chechnya was the once-and-for-all rupture between Yeltsin and much of the political class, according to Pavlovsky, particularly the military and security elite, known as the siloviki or ‘strong guys’:

There was a very severe problem that the siloviki – that is, the army, the FSB, the police – had become alienated from the state, that is, fallen outside the state’s control. They were criminalized. It was a very dangerous situation. We had to somehow integrate the power structures back into the state apparatus.¹⁵

Meanwhile, regional potentates seemed increasingly indifferent to federal authority. In 1998, the governor of the Krasnoyarsk region threatened to take control of strategic nuclear missiles located in the province, while another governor of far-eastern Primorsky Kray denounced a border demarcation agreement with China. The president of Tatarstan, Russia’s largest autonomous Islamic republic, established independent diplomatic ties with both Iraq and Iran, and warned that if Russia sent troops to fight on the side of Serbs in the Balkans, they could end up facing ‘volunteers’ from Russia’s Muslim regions.

Things were falling apart faster than they could be fixed. In August 1998, following a six-month run on the ruble, after a dip in the price of oil and the Asian financial crisis, the ruble crashed; and with it the bank deposits of most of the population. The fortunes of liberalism in Russia were closely tied to whether its ideas could bring prosperity to the population. And just as the shortages of the 1980s discredited communism, so the crash of 1998 was a most spectacular demonstration that the market democracy model promoted by Yeltsin in the 1990s had failed as well. Russia’s liberal dream was in tatters.

Yeltin’s unsteady, flailing personality began to symbolize the waywardness of Russia. It became clear that he had to go, but his exit had to be handled carefully, said Pavlovsky:

‘We knew Yeltsin had to go, but how?’ ‘If Yeltsin went just like that, the state would stop existing.’

We had to create a certain situation, elections in such a way that the successor to Yeltsin would be chosen, who would have the legitimacy of being elected, but at the same time would be one of ‘ours’ belonging to the state, not disposed to liquidating it.¹⁶

In other words, Yeltsin could not just roll the dice in the next election and hope for the best. It was understood that whomever he handed over to, had to be appointed. Yeltsin would resign and name a successor, who would run as an incumbent and would grant Yeltsin amnesty as one of his first acts. It even became known as ‘Operation Successor’ within the Kremlin. The mandarins around Yeltsin gradually convinced him that he would have to step down early. The last years of Yeltsin’s second term saw a revolving door of prime ministers – Sergey Kirienko, Evgeny Primakov, Sergey Stepashin, and finally Vladimir Putin. ‘We were looking for the successor, the way a director casts a film’, recalls Pavlovsky.

There were a number of criteria they were looking for. First of all, Yeltsin’s priority was loyalty: it should be someone who could guarantee that his family and their interests would be protected, and who would not succumb to public pressure to revoke his amnesty. Secondly, Pavlovsky said, they needed someone with a military or security services background to inspire loyalty in Russia’s increasingly rebellious siloviki. But most importantly, they needed someone who could win. In its search for the perfect candidate, the Kremlin combed mountains of sociological data that its department of domestic politics used to keep track of the public mood.

At the end of 1998, at the Kremlin’s behest, the agency Imidzh Kontakt (two English words: ‘Image’ and ‘Contact’), conducted a poll of 204 federal districts and 350,000 respondents. This went little-noticed at the time, but it was the clearest signal yet that they were conducting ‘casting’ (as Pavlovsky put it) for a new president.

[THEY RAN A POLL ASKING, “WHICH TV CHARACTER WOULD YOU VOTE FOR”!]

It was perhaps the largest poll ever carried out in Russia at the time, and it found that the electorate overwhelmingly wanted candidates in the forthcoming presidential election ‘of military bearing, who say little but act decisively’.

One poll interested them the most, according to Pavlovsky. In May 1999, polling agencies Romir and VTsIOM (Russian Public Opinion Research Center) put out multiple-choice polls which asked Russians ‘Which film character would you vote for in the upcoming presidential elections?’ The most popular answers were: Marshal Zhukov, commander of Soviet forces during the Second World War, who had often been portrayed in film; Gleb Zheglov, a hard-bitten detective from the 1979 crime thriller The Meeting Place Must Not Be Changed; and a third name – Max Stierlitz, the protagonist of a hugely successful television series called Seventeen Moments of Spring, broadcast on Soviet television as far back as 1973.

Stierlitz was the stoic, yet human, model for Soviet manhood. The 12-part series detailed the exploits of this fictional KGB deep-penetration agent inside the German Gestapo during the Second World War. He uncovers plans for the Americans to violate the Yalta accord with Stalin and conclude a separate peace with Hitler, shutting the Soviets out of Eastern Europe. Decisive, introspective, patriotic, (but gentle), he was a clever marketing tool for the KGB, which had funded the series, and a moral compass for a generation of Russians. Now, he would become the presidential ideal.

Pavlovsky said this poll was particularly exciting because at the time the Kremlin was working on ‘Operation Successor’ with a shortlist of two ex-security officers – Prime Minister Sergey Stepashin, formerly of the Soviet Interior Ministry, and Vladimir Putin, a former Dresden-based colonel in the KGB, who was at the time head of the Federal Security Service. Now things fell into place. They needed a KGB agent who had been based in Germany. That narrowed the shortlist down to one name.

It was a sign of the times: the Kremlin, in an effort to avoid actual politics, was to rule instead with political technology, with television avatars straight out of Viktor Pelevin’s fiction. The Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s phrase ‘the medium is the message’ had been transformed from harmless cocktail-party chatter into a deadly serious axiom of statecraft.

Putin had never got very far in the KGB, rising only to the rank of lieutenant colonel. But in a sense, this made him the perfect candidate. He spoke the language of the chekists, or spies, but clearly owed his job to Yeltsin – and he wouldn’t forget it. Yeltsin, in his memoirs, indicates that Putin was all along his top choice as a successor, and he had settled on him in 1998, even before appointing him head of the FSB. ‘I will work wherever you assign me’, Putin supposedly told Yeltsin, according to the latter’s memoirs, after being offered the post of prime minister.

‘And in the very highest post?’ Yeltsin asked. Putin hesitated. ‘I sensed that, for the first time, he truly realized what the conversation was about’, according to Yeltsin. ‘I had not thought about that. I don’t know if I am prepared for that’, said Putin. ‘Think about it, I have faith in you’, Yeltsin told him.

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Getting a KGB officer elected was not going to be easy. Old memories died hard, and the KGB’s popularity hovered somewhere above organized crime but below Russia’s notoriously corrupt traffic cops on the scale of public approval. Putin, uncomfortable in front of a microphone, would be a tough sell.

But all the polling showed that after the disappointment of democrats, Russians wanted order, and were willing to tolerate an authoritarian figure and fewer freedoms in exchange. The stern, expressionless and teetotaler Putin contrasted positively with the carousing and reckless Yeltsin. Russians wanted a strong hand. Putin was an exceptional leader, and he arrived at a unique time, when a series of still unexplained events made Russians increasingly fearful for their security.

On 14 March 2000, after Vladimir Putin was elected, the weekly magazine Kommersant Vlast ran a banner headline, with a photo of Stierlitz (the TV character used in the polls), in his Gestapo uniform: ‘Stierlitz – Our President’.

Taking the reins as prime minister in August, Putin was confronted by his first major military crisis. Chechen militants under the leadership of warlord Shamil Basaev launched an invasion of the neighboring province of Dagestan. For the first time since the Khasavyurt accords, it appeared that the Chechen militants were expanding their ambitions and threatening the surrounding north Caucasus region with renewed war. Russian commandos were sent into Dagestan to repel the invasion, as Putin’s government once again declared war on Chechnya.

But Russia’s appetite for more war in the mountain hinterland was questionable, until a set of terrible and mysterious bombings transformed the war from a minor police action into a national crusade that dominated television news around the country.

Further moves by Putin to gather strength

On 4 September, at 22:00, a car bomb detonated outside a five-story building in the town of Buynaksk, in Dagestan, near the Chechen border. It housed Russian border guards and their families, and 64 people died. Five days later, another, larger bomb went off in a nine-story building on Guryanova Street, in a Moscow suburb, killing 94 and cleaving the building down the middle like a collapsed wedding cake.

Moscow, September 1999

Over the next week, two more buildings were bombed – one in Moscow and the other in Volgodonsk – while a number of attempted bombings were reportedly discovered in the nick of time.

Pictures of imploded apartment blocks, toilet fixtures hanging from rooms carved in two, seared themselves into the minds of Russian television viewers. Huge amounts of hexogen explosives had been used, and nothing of this sort had been experienced in Russia’s cities since the Second World War. Neighborhood watch committees were formed and citizen patrols organized. Russians were terrified, and were ready to accept a new war in exchange for order.

Putin came into his own during the second Chechen war. Cool under fire, his tough-guy TV personality was tailor-made for a war commander, and his approval ratings skyrocketed during the autumn to over 50 % per cent – at the time an unheard-of rating for any senior government official. At this level, his succession to the presidency the following spring was assured.

However, the murky events surrounding the beginning of the second Chechen war would fuel many conspiracy theories, rivalling August 1991 and October 1993 in the lore of mysterious and weird events of the decade. There are still some troubling facts about the bombings. Four bombs exploded, but several more were discovered and defused, including one that was planted in the city of Ryazan. On 22 September, that was found by vigilant residents before it could go off. Hours later, tipped off by a suspicious phone intercept, local police and security services closed in on the hideout of the suspected bombers.¹

Then something very strange happened: on 24 September, FSB chief Nikolay Patrushev announced on national television that the Ryazan ‘bombing’ had been an FSB drill all along, and the ‘bombers’ were in fact FSB operatives using three bags of sugar made up to look like real explosives. ‘The incident in Ryazan was not a bombing, nor was it a foiled bombing. It was an exercise.’ ????

It looked more than a little suspicious: the ‘bombers’ were about to be (or had already been) captured and revealed to be FSB operatives, so the FSB stepped in and gave them an alibi – but having waited a day and a half to do so. Things did not add up: clearly no one else had been informed of this exercise, and FSB spokesman General Alexander Zdanovich had gone on a chat show on 23 September to praise the vigilance of local residents; he had said nothing about an exercise. While the FSB insisted that the bomb was fake, the Ryazan police bomb-disposal expert who defused the device insisted it was real. Meanwhile, Patrushev’s suspiciously timed announcement was followed by a string of contradictory statements. There was also a failure to explain why such a drill would have been held in the first place – why were war maneuvers being held in the midst of a war?

Russia’s State Duma has never investigated the bombings, despite having been two motions to do so. Duma deputy and investigative journalist Yury Shchekochikhin, who filed the motions for the investigation, died in a manner consistent with radiation poisoning in 2003.

Few people in Russia believe that the full truth of the events of August and September 1999 has been told.² The bombings, like the invasion of Dagestan, fit a bit too neatly into Putin’s rise to power, a bit too coincidentally for comfort. Putin and his team have spent years fending off allegations that he or the Kremlin was in some way involved in the bombings, as part of a ‘false flag’ operation designed to justify the reconquest of Chechnya. They certainly had the means and the motive to try and provoke a conflict – the future of Russia as a federal state depended on reconquering Chechnya; but it also couldn’t hurt to boost the ratings of the chosen candidate for president.

But at the time it was impossible to predict how association with a war in Chechnya would reflect on Putin’s popularity. It was a fact that every politician who ever became identified with war in Chechnya lost popularity, including Yeltsin.

But Russia’s army won easy victories, bolstered by the timely defection of several senior Chechen figures, including Akhmad Kadyrov, rebel Chechnya’s mufti and a powerful clan leader. Putin’s popularity skyrocketed.

And Yeltsin, according to the plan, stood down on New Year’s Eve 1999 to make way for his heir, who won an easy election the following spring.

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