By this time, his former judo tutor Anatoly Sobchak had become the first democratically elected mayor of St Petersburg and he immediately recruited Putin as Chairman of the City Council’s International Relations Committee. By 1994, a year after his wife suffered a serious spinal injury in a car crash, Putin became First Deputy Mayor, gaining a reputation for probity and an ascetic lifestyle. Even his bitter enemy Berezovsky admits that his future nemesis was not corrupt: ‘He was the first bureaucrat that I met who did not ask for some money and he was absolutely professional.’11
In June 1996 Mayor Sobchak, having failed to address the economic crisis and rising levels of crime, lost his bid for reelection. His successor offered to keep Putin on but he declined and resigned out of loyalty to his former boss. Now unemployed in St Petersberg, he moved to Moscow where he became Deputy Chief of the presidential staff, overseeing the work of the provincial governments. Tough, aloof, and relentlessly focused, he was renowned for his industriousness and severity.
In contrast to the wild, erratic Yeltsin, Putin was the solid, reliable apparatchik. Impressed by his honesty, diligence, and loyalty, by June 1998 Yeltsin was beginning to see him as a potential FSB Director. The following month the current incumbent Nikolai Kovalev was forced to resign over an internal scandal, whereupon Putin received a sudden summons to meet Prime Minister Kirienko at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. After they shook hands, Kirienko offered Putin his congratulations. When Putin asked why, he replied, ‘The decree is signed. You have been appointed director of the FSB.’12
Within days, Putin had purged the FSB of potential enemies, firing nearly a dozen senior officials and replacing them with loyal subordinates. Many of these came from the ‘Chekists’, the clan of agents based in St Petersburg when Putin was the director there, and named after the brutal early Soviet-era ‘Cheka’, or secret police. One man who welcomed his appointment was Berezovsky. At this point their interests coincided: Putin needed political allies and the oligarch was rid of at least one enemy, the spymaster Kovalev, who had been leaking damaging stories about his business methods. By 1998, Berezovsky had lost his post at the National Security Council and much of his former influence at the centre of power and saw the security apparatus - which mostly resented the rise of the oligarchs - as a real threat. To survive in the feral atmosphere of Russian politics, Berezovsky needed new, powerful allies and was delighted when Putin was appointed over more senior KGB figures. ‘I support him 100 per cent,’ he said.13
But within a few months, another cloud appeared on Berezovsky’s horizon: the appointment of a new hardline Prime Minister, Yevgeny Primakov, former head of foreign intelligence. The timing was especially bad for Berezovsky. Ordinary citizens blamed the oligarchs for bankrupting the economy, Yeltsin was mentally and physically in decline, and, amid the tensions and continuing jockeying for position that dominated Yeltsin’s second term, Berezovsky’s power base was slipping further away. When the calculating but now vulnerable Berezovsky realized that the Yeltsin ‘family’ was warming to Putin, he swung his own media empire behind the new FSB boss, later leading the cabal that backed him as Prime Minister. In return, he expected Putin to be both compliant and loyal.
Berezovsky now began courting Putin, once even inviting him on a five-day skiing holiday in Switzerland. The two became friends. On one occasion Putin called Berezovsky ‘the brother he never had’. On 22 February 1999 - by which point state investigations into his business empire had already been launched - Berezovsky threw a birthday party for his new partner, Yelena Gorbunova. The party was intended to be a small, private gathering, but Putin turned up uninvited with a huge bouquet of roses. This appeared to be a genuine act of solidarity towards Berezovsky because they shared a common enemy in the form of Prime Minister Primakov, a man who disliked Putin because he had been chosen to head the FSB over the Prime Minister’s far more senior colleagues.
In July 1999 Berezovsky flew to France, where Putin was staying in Biarritz with his wife and daughters. By this time, Primakov himself had been dismissed by Yeltsin and replaced with an interim Prime Minister, Sergei Stepashin. The two men met for lunch and Berezovsky, now sidelined but still well informed about Kremlin politicking, told Putin that Yeltsin was about to appoint him Prime Minister. The following month, as predicted, Yeltsin dismissed Stepashin and appointed Putin. He was Yeltsin’s fifth Prime Minister in seventeen months.
At first Putin was deeply unpopular, with an approval rating of only 5 per cent, mainly because of his association with the despised figures of Yeltsin and Berezovsky. What turned his fortunes was a series of devastating Moscow apartment bombings in September that led to 246 deaths. Political enemies of Putin later alleged that the bombings were deliberately engineered by the state to turn the public mood and justify the latest attacks on Chechnya. Whether or not the Chechens were indeed the perpetrators of the outrages, Putin responded aggressively, first bombing Chechnya and then initiating a land invasion. Militarism played well with the Russian people and the Prime Minister’s popularity soared.
Putin’s newly formed Unity Party took 23 per cent of the vote in the Duma elections in December 1999, compared with 13 per cent by Primakov’s Fatherland All-Russia Party. Yeltsin, now close to the end of his presidency, capitalized on the new popularity and offered the top post to Putin. When asked to take the reins, Putin initially declined, but Yeltsin was persistent. ‘Don’t say no,’ he pressed. Berezovsky also urged him to accept. In his New Year’s Eve address in 1999 Yeltsin famously announced his resignation and Putin’s appointment as interim President. This gave him the advantage of being able to campaign as an incumbent President. Three months later, in the 2000 presidential election, Putin took a remarkable 53 per cent of the vote. Kremlin watchers satirized his success, comparing it to Chauncey Gardiner’s unwitting rise to power as President of the United States in Jerzy Kosinski’s 1971 novel Being There. Berezovsky, who had continued to use the media to publicly declare his support for the way that he believed Putin would run Russia, expressed delight.
Putin’s dramatic decision to take on the oligarchs within weeks of coming to power had been carefully planned. He knew he had to stem the disastrous outflow of capital and quickly encouraged the authorities to toughen up on the collection of taxes. He had come to two conclusions about the oligarchs. First, as Yeltsin had also discovered, the oligarchs had the potential to be as - if not more - powerful than the President himself. Second, because the vast majority of ordinary Russians loathed them, Putin knew there would be a beneficial political dividend in being seen to take them on.
Some oligarchs certainly had no shortage of enemies, among them the senior ranks of the security apparatus whose power had ebbed away during the Yeltsin years. They resented the way that these tycoons had sapped their own political strength and reaped a vast financial windfall. They saw them as upstarts. Few of them had served as senior officials during the Soviet era and they were viewed as outsiders. When Putin, so recently the head of the FSB, came to power, the security and intelligence apparatchiks, especially the ‘Chekists’, returned to favour. Of the President’s first twenty-four high-level appointments, ten were drawn from the ranks of the old KGB. This group, known as the siloviki - individuals with backgrounds in the security and military services - now saw their chance for revenge. ‘A group of FSB operatives, dispatched undercover to work in the Russian government, is successfully fulfilling its task,’ said the new President. He was only half joking.14
Putin also had a powerful collective ally in the Russian people. While the oligarchs enriched themselves, by the end of the 1990s the government could claim that as many as 35 per cent of Russians lived below the official poverty line.15 Many felt that the nation’s resources had been sucked dry by what Karl Marx had referred to as ‘Vampire Capitalism’, whereby ‘the vampire will not let go while there remains a single muscle, sinew, or drop of blood to be exploited’.
To show how they feel, Russians love to tell popular jokes to foreign visitors. ‘A group of “new Russian”