Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution

Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution

Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution

Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution

eBook

$17.99 

Available on Compatible NOOK Devices and the free NOOK Apps.
WANT A NOOK?  Explore Now

Related collections and offers


Overview

In the tradition of Hedrick Smith's The Russians, Robert G. Kaiser's Russia: The People and the Power, and David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb comes an eloquent and eye-opening chronicle of Vladimir Putin's Russia, from this generation's leading Moscow correspondents.
With the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia launched itself on a fitful transition to Western-style democracy. But a decade later, Boris Yeltsin's handpicked successor, Vladimir Putin, a childhood hooligan turned KGB officer who rose from nowhere determined to restore the order of the Soviet past, resolved to bring an end to the revolution. Kremlin Rising goes behind the scenes of contemporary Russia to reveal the culmination of Project Putin, the secret plot to reconsolidate power in the Kremlin.
During their four years as Moscow bureau chiefs for The Washington Post, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser witnessed firsthand the methodical campaign to reverse the post-Soviet revolution and transform Russia back into an authoritarian state. Their gripping narrative moves from the unlikely rise of Putin through the key moments of his tenure that re-centralized power into his hands, from his decision to take over Russia's only independent television network to the Moscow theater siege of 2002 to the "managed democracy" elections of 2003 and 2004 to the horrific slaughter of Beslan's schoolchildren in 2004, recounting a four-year period that has changed the direction of modern Russia.
But the authors also go beyond the politics to draw a moving and vivid portrait of the Russian people they encountered -- both those who have prospered and those barely surviving -- and show how the political flux has shaped individual lives. Opening a window to a country on the brink, where behind the gleaming new shopping malls all things Soviet are chic again and even high school students wonder if Lenin was right after all, Kremlin Rising features the personal stories of Russians at all levels of society, including frightened army deserters, an imprisoned oil billionaire, Chechen villagers, a trendy Moscow restaurant king, a reluctant underwear salesman, and anguished AIDS patients in Siberia.
With shrewd reporting and unprecedented access to Putin's insiders, Kremlin Rising offers both unsettling new revelations about Russia's leader and a compelling inside look at life in the land that he is building. As the first major book on Russia in years, it is an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of the country and promises to shape the debate about Russia, its uncertain future, and its relationship with the United States.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780743281799
Publisher: Scribner
Publication date: 06/07/2005
Sold by: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format: eBook
Pages: 464
Sales rank: 557,731
File size: 951 KB

About the Author

Peter Baker and Susan Glasser were Moscow bureau chiefs for The Washington Post from January 2001 to November 2004. They are married and live in Washington, D.C., with their son, Theodore.

Read an Excerpt


Introduction: Tatyana's Russia

In this country, something happens and you never know where it will lead.

-- Tatyana Shalimova

A bit of this, yet also half of that.

-- Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Tatyana Shalimova's high heels sank into the mud as we rounded the corner to her brother's house. To our left, four chickens feasted in a large, open garbage bin. Ahead, her brother's wife stood alone in the kitchen, a gigantic pot of slops simmering on the stove to feed their pig, Masha. Inside the house, there was no toilet, no hot water, and no telephone. Pulling on her Ray-Bans, Tatyana shook her head as she considered the gap separating her life in Moscow from her brother Misha's in the "workers' settlement" of Mokshan. "I can't stay here for more than a few days at a time," she said. Then came a question, the question: "Why don't the people here change their lives?" Her unspoken rebuke hung in the air: "I did."

It was nearly ten years to the day after the failed coup by hard-line Communists in August 1991 set in motion the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia was now a family divided by differing post-Soviet realities, struggling to come to terms with a painful decade of dislocation. For some like Tatyana, there were new hopes and expanded horizons -- "the appetite," she explained to us, "grows while eating." For the majority like her brother, there were the ruins of an old system and no more than rare glimpses of something new to replace it.

In the Kremlin, a onetime KGB spy who had sat out the implosion of the Soviet empire in a backwater posting in East Germany had become president of Russia. Few knew what to make of Vladimir Putin, a political cipher who came into office speaking of democracy while preparing to dismantle democratic institutions. Fewer still had a sense of where Russia was headed after its first tumultuous post-Soviet decade. The age of Boris Yeltsin, with all the attendant drunken antics and economic crises, had ended. The age of Putin, whatever it would be, had begun.

We had arrived in Russia as correspondents for the Washington Post on the eve of Putin's election as president in 2000 and would stay on through nearly four years of change in a country the world thought it had gotten to know under Yeltsin. We found the place in the throes of a nationalist reawakening, cheered on by a proud, young leader, and yet such a weakened shadow of its former superpower self that it faced an epidemic of young conscripts running away from an army that couldn't properly feed them. It was a time of economic boom as oil revenues floated Russia out of the bank runs and ruble collapses of Yeltsin's presidency. And yet it was also a place ruled by ambivalence and anxiety, when fears of the future crowded out memories of the brutalities in the not-so-distant Communist past. This was a newly assertive Russia, rejecting international loans instead of defaulting on them, glorifying its lost empire rather than exulting in the downfall of dictatorship, a Russia where the clichés of the 1990s, of begging babushkas, gangster capitalism, and oligarchic excess, were no longer operative. The grinding, brutal war in the breakaway region of Chechnya -- and the spillover wave of gruesome terror attacks against subway riders and airline passengers, schoolchildren, and theatergoers -- became a grim constant linking the two eras.

A friend of a friend we first met at an Italian café in the center of Moscow, Tatyana would turn out to be one of our first and most reliable guides to Putin's Russia, helping us explore the post-Soviet fault lines that fissured the vast country. Hers was a Russia banking on the promises of an unfinished capitalist revolution; her brother remained behind in the crumbled wreckage of their childhood, trapped in isolation and the unforgiving legacy of the past. Tatyana's was the world of Moscow's emerging, tenuous middle class, a whirl of European vacations and after-work aerobics classes, supermarkets and traffic jams, rising expectations and perpetual insecurity. Brother Misha's Mokshan, 440 miles to the southeast, was a place of rusting factories and Communist-era bosses, where money remained more concept than reality and the summer harvest of cabbage and potatoes supplied food for the long winter.

"All the positive changes that happened in my life are the consequences of the new system," she said.

"Things are harder now," he countered. "There's not enough jobs and not enough money."

On the overnight train from Moscow to Mokshan, a twelve-hour-and-forty-five-minute journey from one country to another, Tatyana told us her story of wrenching change in Russia's decade of upheaval. At thirty-four, she was part of the transitional generation, the last to receive a fully Soviet education and the first to work mostly in the free market. She grew up with Leonid Brezhnev's stagnation in the 1970s, came of age during Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika in the 1980s, and became an adult amid the democratic chaos and corrupted capitalism of Boris Yeltsin's 1990s. Now she had forgotten her mandatory classes on Marxism and worked for a foundation trying to reform the Russian judiciary. Ten years earlier, she had never been outside the country. Today, she was fluent in world capitals, most recently Paris and London, a connoisseur of beaches from Spain to Egypt. Where once she lived in a crowded communal apartment with four roommates, one grimy kitchen, and no shower, now she rented a tiny studio and dreamed of owning her own home.

The gulf between her Moscow and her family's Mokshan had always existed. But never had it been so wide -- the difference between the $1,500 a month that Tatyana considered "normal" for herself and her Moscow friends and the $70 monthly salary of her brother, between the French cognac she now preferred and the home-brewed vodka he kept in his cupboard. On the short walk from Misha's house to the polluted river where they had swum as kids, he described the berry-picking season just ended, the mushroom-hunting soon to begin, and the cow he wanted to purchase that fall. Tatyana, meanwhile, was looking back at his crooked wooden outhouse. "I am between two worlds," she told us.

So, too, was Putin's Russia, no longer Communist yet not quite capitalist, no longer a tyranny yet not quite free. The heady idealism of the day that Yeltsin had clambered atop a tank in 1991 and brought down the Soviet Union was long since dead and often unmourned. "Democracy" was not now -- if it had ever been -- a goal supported by much of the population, and the very word had been discredited, an epithet that had come to be associated with upheaval rather than opportunity. Polls consistently found that no more than a third of the population considered themselves democrats a decade into the experiment, while an equally large number believed authoritarianism was the only path for their country. Yeltsin had, in other words, succeeded in killing off Communism but not in creating its successor.

Instead, the Russia we found on the eve of the Putin era remained a country in between, where strong-state rhetoric played well even as the state collapsed, where corruption and the government were so intertwined as to be at times indistinguishable, and where the president from the KGB set as his main priority the establishment of what he euphemistically called the "dictatorship of the law." Like everyone else, we were left to wonder where these slogans would in reality lead, certain only that the Putin presidency would be very different from what had preceded it.

For Tatyana and her friends, there was respite but no real refuge from the uncertainty. And this perhaps was the most useful introduction for us to Russia, a reminder that while Moscow was now a place of sushi for the few and new cars for the many, of seemingly unlimited freedoms and a decade's worth of openness to the West, there were no guarantees. One Sunday afternoon, at the health club that was her favorite hangout, Tatyana sipped freshly squeezed pear juice at the sports bar after changing out of her neon yellow leotard and electric blue spandex shorts. She and her friends were preoccupied with the minutiae of life in the big city at the turn of the millennium, with Internet dating and vacations abroad and families in the provinces who couldn't relate. But unlike the pre-September 11 cocoon of Americans who felt free to ignore the realities of the wider world, Russians did not have the luxury of completely tuning out.

"In this country, something happens and you never know where it will lead," Tatyana told her friends.

Heads nodded and soon the conversation broke up. Two of the women were late for appointments to get their legs waxed.

From our first trip there together, the Russia that we experienced was Putin's. During his election campaign in 2000, in a grim March that was neither winter nor spring, we had our initial encounter with what would become an ever more artfully "managed democracy" -- a term that came into wide use for the first time that political season as Moscow's intelligentsia struggled to understand the political goals of the little-known secret police chief who on New Year's Eve, 1999, had become Boris Yeltsin's handpicked successor.

Trying to understand the Putin appeal, we flew to Magnitogorsk, the rusting steel town straddling Europe and Asia in the Ural Mountains whose founding had been the proudest achievement of dictator Joseph Stalin's first five-year plan back in 1929. When we got off the plane late at night, we were met on the tarmac by a local police official who had been informed that the Washington Post was coming to town and insisted on checking our documents -- an echo of a Soviet past we thought long gone. After negotiating our way through that encounter, we found a city where the plant managers themselves organized Putin's campaign and workers shrugged at the inevitability of the anointed president's victory. As the sky turned a hideous orange outside the mammoth steel plant's gates in a daily light show of environmental hazard, we talked to Soviet leftovers who were so indifferent to politics they told us that it did not matter to them that Putin refused to offer a program for governing the country. If anything, they said, it was a positive. "Stalin's words -- that each person is just a small wheel in a big state machine -- are still in our psyche," mused the editor of the local newspaper, founded like the rest of the gritty town by Stalin's political prisoners. "That is why people are content with slogans and don't feel they need detailed programs."

On television, on billboards, in the newspapers, were all the apparent hallmarks of democracy -- a large field of competing candidates, genuine differences over the country's future, shamelessly pandering photo ops. But rather than being the flourishes of a vibrant new political culture, these proved to be deceptive, reflecting Russian expertise in the arts of pokazukha -- displays meant only for show. In the end, what struck us about the election was not only the absence of real choice but the mystery of Putin's appeal. After not yet a decade of democratic experimentation, how could it be that this product of the KGB was the best the country had to offer itself?

On election day, when Putin would become Russia's second elected president in its thousand-year history in an election marred by vote fraud, media manipulation, and irregularities politely overlooked by the world's other great powers, we spent the afternoon in Moscow asking voters about the spy who became president. Their answers surprised us then and still do.

"He knows what order is," Putin voter Tatyana Gosudareva told us, a sentence we heard so often in the coming years it would come to seem a refrain. We found a young couple huddled together in the sculpture garden of fallen Soviet statues outside the House of Artists, paying homage to the stern visage of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police. The monument had been pulled off its pedestal outside KGB headquarters in August 1991 in one of the signal moments of the revolution that spelled the end of the Soviet Union. But more and more these days, the curious who came to glance at the fallen spymaster were not democrats thrilled at his symbolic toppling but Russians like Sergei and Lena, who idolized the strong hands that ruled a state they were barely old enough to remember. Sergei, twenty-four, worked for the latest incarnation of the secret police, the Federal Security Service, the domestic successor to the KGB that was known by its Russian initials as the FSB. He and his teenage girlfriend, Lena, had voted for Putin because of his background. "Absolutely it prepared him to be president," Sergei said before patiently explaining to us why Russians would be proud of Putin's past. "They like it. They see [the KGB] as strong. They see it as severe, harsh."

It was the first of many times we were to be confronted with a version of recent Russian history so radically opposite to what we thought we understood that it might as well have been about a different country. In the revisionist variant we started to hear that day, there was nothing about the crippling legacy of totalitarianism or the follies of Communist central planning. The gulag was a minor bump in the road, an error in 1937 long since acknowledged and forgotten. History, in this view, did not really begin until 1991 with the tragic sundering of the Soviet empire. All chaos, crises, bank collapses, crazy corruption, and crony capitalism came from this disaster. And this, we eventually came to learn, was no minority view but the sentiment of a majority rarely represented in Western portraits of the new Russia.

It was also the groundwork laid for what Putin's deputy campaign manager called Project Putin, an ambitious effort to reshape Russian politics starting with the election of an unknown secret police chief.6 The goal was consolidating power back in the Kremlin, where Putin and his advisers firmly believed it belonged by virtue of centuries of Russian history. To do so, Putin would, over the coming years, methodically go after all possible sources of alternative views, from independent media and fiefdom-seeking governors to national legislators and even the very same oligarchic tycoons who had helped orchestrate his rise to power. He could be brutal, as in waging a war in Chechnya that fueled his surprising ascension in 1999 and cost tens of thousands of lives. And he could be subtle, as when he was wooing his counterparts in the West, who embraced him as a new-generation leader only to be surprised by his old-style tendencies.

Through it all, we were on hand to watch as the project unfolded, an effort combining the tools of modern politics with timeworn tactics from the playbook of the fallen dictatorship. It was not Soviet but neo-Soviet. The Communist manifestos were gone, the borders were open, the surface attributes of free speech seemed intact. But the project was clearly aimed at resurrection of Russia as the superpower it had been in Soviet times, if through economic and political means rather than military might. "There is no ideology at all," as one senior official told us, just a belief in the value of seizing power and holding on to it. There was no empty rhetoric about the proletariat this time, but there were Komsomol-style pro-Putin youth groups ordered up by the authorities and trumped-up spy cases and even the revival of the Soviet national anthem first introduced by Stalin. "USSR" T-shirts were all the rage, and old habits of subservience to the authorities, never unlearned, guided political responses to the reempowered president even as a new market world of consumerism took shape in Moscow and a handful of other big cities.

At the start of Putin's presidency, few understood the scale and scope of the Kremlin's Project Putin. Instead, experts debated the question "Who is Mr. Putin?" Western-oriented democrats claimed him as one of their own and took comfort from the team of Yeltsin holdovers and economic liberals Putin assembled to lead further modernization of the Russian economy. Nationalists cheered his war in Chechnya and his vow to end the "disintegration" of the state. Soviet nostalgists -- some of them still Communist stalwarts, others simply those who thought back wistfully to the country's former superpower status -- welcomed his embrace of symbols like the Soviet red star he ordered back onto the army's banners and the disgraced KGB coup plotter he invited to his Kremlin inauguration.

Putin carefully cultivated these uncertainties about his intentions. As a politician, he had the gift of seeming to be all things to all people, of uniting an otherwise fractured society with soothing words about stability and order. At least initially, that was all that most people had to judge him by. "Putin has said he wants to end the revolution," his political consultant Gleb Pavlovsky told us early on in the presidency, "not to start a new one."

One afternoon, we sat with the president's pollster, Aleksandr Oslon, in his Moscow office on the southwestern outskirts of the burgeoning city, where new American-style malls jostled with concrete apartment towers. We were trying to understand, years later, the appeal of Project Putin. "Putin was a break from the time of chaos. The word chaos was the key word in people's understanding," Oslon told us. Yeltsin and his young band of reformers, the new team in the Kremlin believed, had embraced a course of democratic and economic transformation that Russians never really wanted. But Putin came to office determined not to force-feed democracy to Russia; he would, in the metaphor Oslon used with us, simply let the river revert to its authoritarian course and ride along with it. "If you think about politics and culture as a huge river, and there is a person in it going against the tide, you can swim that way, but not for long," the pollster said. In other words, the counterrevolution had begun.

Project Putin was not entirely a surprise, although it may have seemed that way to outsiders who hoped Russia would turn out otherwise. Back in 1989, amid the hopes and anxieties unleashed by the beginning of this latest Russian revolution, when Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, or openness, offered the novelty of free speech to the people, the popular bard poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko had written of the dangers of incomplete reform, of freedom only partially won, and of a Soviet state only partially dismantled. In his poem "Half Measures," written when Vladimir Putin was still a nobody spy, Yevtushenko foresaw the failure of democracy in Russia if its central precepts were never fully embraced. The poem was meant as an exhortation to Gorbachev to continue on his course of restructuring Soviet society, but when we read it, many years of partially executed reforms later, it served also as foreshadowing, a rendering of Russia as we would find it:

...[W]ith every half-effective half measure

Half the people remain half pleased.

The half sated are half hungry.

The half free are half enslaved.

We are half afraid, halfway on a rampage...

A bit of this, yet also half of that

...Can there be with honor

A half motherland and a half conscience?

Half freedom is perilous,

And saving the motherland halfway will fail.

By the time we began to write this book, the Kremlin had already carried out much of its takeover. All three national television networks were once again controlled by the state, Russia's richest man was in jail after challenging Putin's rule too openly, and his oil company, the country's largest and best run, was on its way to being renationalized. National elections criticized by international observers as free but not fair had produced a pocket parliament unswervingly loyal to the president. Putin had surrounded himself at the upper echelons of power with a cadre of like-minded KGB and military veterans -- so many so that one-quarter of the political elite was now composed of such siloviki, as Russians called these "men of power," compared with just 3 percent under Gorbachev. The military budget had tripled, and the secret services received their long-awaited first increases since the breakup of the Soviet Union. In March 2004, Putin won his second term as president after a campaign so pointless the only real suspense was whether his challengers would drop out en masse or let the farce play itself out with their names still on the ballot.

By then, the debate was no longer over who Putin was, but just how far he intended to take things.

And the answer would come not long after the president's pomp-filled second-term inauguration at the Kremlin, when, standing underneath the golden tsarist sunburst of St. Andrew's Hall, Putin began his next four years in office with a speech that no longer even mentioned the word democracy. Just as it had vaulted him to power, Chechnya would provide the clarifying moment. As the conflict there hit the decade mark, a new wave of Chechen-related mayhem broke out across Russia, starting with the assassination of Putin's handpicked president for the region within days of the viceroy's inauguration and culminating in September 2004 with the seizure of School Number 1 in the town of Beslan not far from the Chechen border.

When the grim standoff ended with the spectacle of hundreds of tiny dead, burned bodies pulled from the rubble, the world watched in horror. For Putin, it was the moment finally to reveal his hand. For three days, his government had lied about everything having to do with the siege, from the number of children trapped inside to the identity of the hostage-takers, who authorities insisted were led by Al Qaeda-affiliated Arabs rather than homegrown Chechen terrorists, a claim swiftly debunked by the evidence but never officially disavowed. Putin chose to blame unnamed nefarious forces in the West in a return to Cold War-style rhetoric that would increasingly mark his statements from that point on. Then, within days, he announced a sweeping Kremlin power grab -- the cancellation of gubernatorial elections in all of Russia's eighty-nine regions, with the governors from now on to be appointed by the president, and the end of independent representatives in parliament, with only his puppet parties picking future candidates. He justified the moves as an antiterrorist step "to prevent further crises." When governors rushed to endorse the proposal with statements so fawning that even a tsarist courtier might have blushed, Russia was suddenly as clear as it would ever be. The counterrevolution was over, and Putin had won.

Our book, then, begins and ends with Beslan -- a bloodbath of innocents that was also a horrendous unanticipated consequence of Project Putin, when state television broadcast soap operas rather than risk airing the battle, and the president deflected criticism onto Westerners and elected politicians rather than fire a single senior officer in his own corrupted, bloated security forces responsible for handling the hostage-taking.

On the pages between, we hope to provide a wide-ranging tour of Putin's Russia as the Kremlin rose again, from vantage points as varied as the rock music nationalists at Moscow's Nashe radio station to the high school students in Irina Suvolokina's history class who were pretty sure that Lenin had been right after all. Organized roughly chronologically, the book moves from the unlikely rise of Putin through key moments of his tenure, from the early disastrous sinking of the submarine Kursk and his decision to take over Russia's only independent television network, to the thoroughly "managed" elections in 2003 and 2004. Putin himself is a presence throughout, whether thwarting efforts to reform Russia's calcified behemoth of an army or charming George W. Bush with a skillfully chosen cross around his neck.

But this is not just a book about politics. Our goal was also to provide a sense of a place where many people have long since given up on politics, where parties of any ideology are permanently discredited after seven decades of one-party rule, and where the modest but tangible economic improvements of the last few years have turned many into at least reluctant Putin converts. If the trade-off of the time has been framed as greater stability but less freedom, many Russians have proved willing to accept that deal. Our guides to this other Russia were many and varied, from a would-be nuclear physicist turned ambivalent underwear salesman in Nizhny Novgorod, who helped us understand Russia's halfhearted embrace of capitalism, to the forgotten residents of the desolate arctic towns of Kolyma, the graveyard of the gulag where many dislocated by the recent turmoil profess longing for the Soviet rulers who sent them there.

One chapter reconstructs the war in Chechnya from the perspective of the most wrenching case to arise from it -- that of Colonel Yuri Budanov, a tank commander who admitted strangling a young Chechen woman to death but whose long-running trial became a Rorschach test of the political divisions fracturing Russia in the Putin era. Boomtown Moscow itself is the protagonist of another chapter, as we look at the smart, cynical tastemakers who made the city a place of restless innovation and yet one so indifferent that the band of Chechen terrorists who seized a theater there in 2002 told their hostages they did so in order to shake the city out of its complacency about the war down south.

Along the way, we had encounters with hundreds of Russians who helped us understand Putin's Russia: AIDS patients in Siberia whose government has devoted a total of five Health Ministry staffers to stopping an epidemic spreading more rapidly in Russia than anywhere else in the world; anguished mothers like Natasha Yaroslavtseva, whose only son, Sasha, killed himself after serving his mandatory two years in the troubled Russian military; and brash Kremlin political "technologists" like Marat Gelman, who thought nothing of creating artificial opposition political parties dreamed up in the Kremlin and turning state television into Putin's personal election machine.

To try to understand the KGB tactics and mentality that Putin brought to the Kremlin, we spent many hours interviewing more than a dozen of his fellow former agents now in high-ranking positions in business, politics, and government, a fascinating exercise that revealed to us the enormous sense of entitlement and absolute lack of remorse on the part of Russia's once and present ruling class. These "servants of the state," as they called themselves, fervently believed Putin would rescue Russia from the corruption and liberal permissiveness that had taken hold in the 1990s -- and saw nothing wrong with the police state methods that they, and Putin, had learned back in the time of Brezhnev. We spent time as well with the dwindling ranks of Soviet-era dissidents who opposed the Communist regime and now fought an increasingly marginalized fight against its successor. The day after parliamentary elections, in December 2003, evicted Russia's two Western-oriented democratic parties from parliament, we spoke with one of them, a courageous human rights activist named Lev Ponomaryov. "For democrats now," he warned us, "a period is coming very similar to Brezhnev times. They are going to be dissidents now."

Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution is also the story of how Project Putin came to pass with the world only offering a passing nod of puzzlement or occasional mild criticism. When we first arrived in Moscow, the new president's mantra of stability had seemed like a code word for boredom, and Western news outlets were scrambling to relocate their correspondents. Then came September 11 and the war in Afghanistan. Putin and President George W. Bush proclaimed themselves not just allies but friends. For a while, in the run-up to the U.S.-led war in Iraq, we began to hear about the Bush administration's plans to declare that Russia had "graduated" from its transition away from Communism, to a full-fledged democracy no longer in need of assistance. It had been more than a decade, after all, and these were monies that would soon be desperately needed in Baghdad. But Putin's Russia had hardly graduated to anything resembling the Western-style liberal democracy of the 1990s collective fantasy. If anything, Russia could serve as a textbook study in how not to reform a dictatorial political system and how not to wage a war on terror. The country's retreat from democracy was a cautionary tale more relevant than ever at a time when Washington spoke of bringing democracy to the Middle East and wrestled with the painful questions of how to balance the freedoms of an open society with the constraints of fighting a shadowy foe. Bush began his second term vowing to promote freedom everywhere, confront "every ruler and every nation" about internal repression, and work toward the goal of "ending tyranny in our world" -- and then had to begin with his friend Vladimir at an awkward summit in February 2005. Certainly, Russia was a more open society, with a considerably shrunken state role in the economy and a new web of connections to the outside world that had started to reshape a place warped by decades of isolation and willful ignorance. But the counterrevolution launched by Putin and his circle was not about completing the transition to democracy; it was about rolling it back.

For many still shaped by the past, this was not a bad idea at all, as we started to learn right from the start of our tour in Putin's Russia, when we accompanied Tatyana Shalimova on her trip home to a very different country from the one we had expected to find.

Tatyana's father was standing in the kitchen in Mokshan, bragging about his potatoes again. "I am proud that these are my own potatoes. That we have them through our own labor," said Gennady, an engineer at the phone company who counted on his garden, not his paycheck, to supply their food for the winter.

"I don't agree," Tatyana interrupted. "I've offered to buy them three sacks of potatoes, which is enough for the whole winter."

She turned to her father. "Why do you need to do this work? It's not good for you at your age."

"No, no, no," he sputtered. "It's our work. We are proud of it."

For Tatyana, every visit to her parents' apartment on Engels Street was a series of such confrontations between their Russia and hers. Although she was close to her mother, Valentina, their everyday lives had little in common, from the way they spent their time to the food they ate. ("I like something low-fat, not fried," she told us on the train; within hours, her mother was frying fish and potatoes for us.)

The black-and-white photos from Tatyana's high school that we pored through after lunch could have been a hundred years old: somber, unsmiling girls in frilly white aprons and uncomfortable black woolen dresses, sitting behind wooden desks. They were taken in 1984. Out of her class of thirty or so, Tatyana was the only one to have made it to Moscow. Her high school boyfriend was now buying food in the nearby city of Penza and reselling it in Mokshan. They broke up during her first year in the city, she recalled as we flipped through the photo albums her mother kept carefully in the tiny bedroom that was Tatyana's when she was growing up. "He didn't like all these things -- foreigners, foreign languages. 'It's anti-Russian,' he said."

Such thinking still echoed in Mokshan, a town of twelve thousand that was founded in the seventeenth century but retained a Soviet look and feel. Economic problems were easier to talk about in a place where average wages were officially just $35 a month at the start of Putin's tenure, among the lowest in the country. Tatyana's brother Misha was an army veteran who worked as a phone company repairman -- and considered himself lucky to have any work at all. Her father would soon retire from the same company with a $70-a-month pension. No one in her family, or most others there, had ever owned a car, and travel in Mokshan for them was exclusively on foot, down muddy, rutted lanes, dodging stray dogs.

The town lived with old fears as well, habits of totalitarianism that influenced Russia's tenuous stabs at democracy. While Tatyana said she felt free to say what she thought, her parents and their friends were wary of talking to a foreigner, citing fear of retribution from the FSB.

One family friend proudly told us that she was never afraid in Soviet times. "My whole life, I always said what I thought. I never thought that something was forbidden," she said in an indignant huff. The next day, she begged Tatyana's mother to make sure we did not quote her by name, saying she could be fired. Another man, asked to describe life there when he pulled up in a truck on the mud-rutted track outside Tatyana's brother's house, replied immediately that he could not answer. "The FSB wouldn't like that," he explained.

Later, back in the city, Tatyana struggled to make sense of these encounters, precursors to many more we would have in the coming years. "Moscow is speaking one language about democracy," she said, "but everybody in the provinces, they are speaking another language, an older one."

Tatyana objected to anyone connected with the old state-security apparatus. "I don't accept any former KGB leaders, including Putin," she said. "People had no real choice; they were offered Putin and they accepted him." But she knew that hers was a minority view. Both in Moscow and Mokshan, she heard regular praise of Putin as the antidote to what was missing from Russia's post-Soviet decade. "My mom used to say, 'You are in Moscow, you can look for the truth and find it. But here we don't have many choices,'" Tatyana said. "There are no jobs in Mokshan, and if you lose yours, you will not find another one. The boss there rules like a king. These people say they are not Communists anymore, but they still have this mentality."

Tatyana, for one, had left that fear behind. "I am not very much afraid. If I were to lose my job, I am sure I could be a teacher. I can be a nurse. I can wash the floor," she reflected. "In Moscow, you have so many choices. You can control your life."

But she was also aware that this was a luxury in Putin's Russia, a privilege available to the small minority that truly believed themselves to be living in a new country of openness and opportunity. For the rest, there was Mokshan, and new iterations of an old past.

Copyright © 2005 by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser

Table of Contents


Introduction: Tatyana's Russia     1
Fifty-two Hours in Beslan     15
Project Putin     38
Time of the Patriots     63
The Takeover Will Be Televised     78
Just an Ordinary Crime     99
Soul Mates     121
Boomtown     139
Fifty-seven Hours in Moscow     156
Sick Man of Europe     179
Runaway Army     197
What Sort of Allies?     214
Dictatorship of the Law     231
Back in the USSR     251
Twilight of the Oligarchs     272
Agitation     293
Putin's Russia     312
Scam of the Year     335
Lenin Was Right After All     354
Epilogue: After Beslan     371
Afterword     383
Acknowledgments     395
Notes     399
Selected Bibliography     445
Index     449
From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews