The Russia Conundrum

For a while, at first, I thought that maybe Putin was a good choice. I had been involved in Kremlin politics on and off for a decade and I was conscious that we were living through one of those great turning points in history when Russia’s future is up for grabs: when the nation can go in radically differing directions and that the slightest nudge of events can send her hurtling along the right or wrong path. At all her moments of destiny – the Mongol invasion in 1237, the reigns of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, the liberation of the serfs in 1861, the revolutions of 1917, the death of Stalin in 1953 and the attempted coup of 1991 – Russia has found herself at a crossroads between the path of democracy and the continued domination of autocracy. When such moments occur, the individual characters of our leaders have had a disproportionate influence on their outcome. So, I held my breath and hoped Vladimir Putin would make the right choices.

The first time I met him, I had the impression I was dealing with a fairly sensible guy, someone who shared the liberal views of Yeltsin and the rest of us. After that first meeting, he used to call on me at times when he needed advice or information about the economy or Yukos and the company’s activities. We usually met in his offices, but one particular meeting stands out, because on this occasion he invited me and my colleagues to an outdoor barbecue. It was in May 2000, when he was already president, and Putin used the occasion to suggest a deal, a sort of nonaggression pact: the state, he said, would promise not to interfere in our business affairs if we, the so-called oligarchs, would agree not to use the power of our businesses to put pressure on the authorities. He wasn’t demanding an end to commercial lobbying, of course – that would have been naive – but, rather, an agreement not to use the powerful resources of our companies to cause trouble for the government by inciting protests against the authorities or sabotaging deliveries, for instance, and it seemed to me at the time that this was a fair request. Because of the circumstances of the encounter, it became known as ‘the barbecue meeting’ and people started talking about the ‘barbecue agreement’ between the two sides. There were plenty of more formal meetings between us, always in the Kremlin, sometimes sitting at the large round negotiating table in St Catherine Hall, often with other members of the Bureau of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs.

Putin, without a doubt, has a convincing manner. It’s a skill that I think he acquired in the KGB and then developed when he was deputy mayor of St Petersburg, when Mayor Anatoly Sobchak had used him as a go-between in the three-way conspiracy of officials, security forces and criminals that ruled the city, divvying up the loot between them. He acquired a talent for taking people in, and he used it in the first period of his time in power: if Putin needed your help, he would do everything possible to convince you that you shared the same aims and opinions. One conversation I had with him in those early days was in a basement restaurant next to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, a few hundred metres from the Kremlin. Putin started by saying ‘This is what the state needs…’ but immediately corrected himself. ‘No, it’s not the state,’ he said. ‘It’s the country! The country is much more than the state; it’s the country that’s the important thing!’ And, of course, I immediately thought that he was a right-thinking and well-meaning man. It seemed that he knew the needs of Russian citizens are more important than the interests of a powerful state – he must be one of us. Even Yeltsin didn’t really understand that politicians must work for individual rights rather than for ‘the state’.