The World

On 21 March 1997, Yeltsin, meeting Clinton in Helsinki, agreed that NATO could expand into the former Soviet empire, in return for $4 billion, but he warned that it was ‘a mistake, a serious one’ and ‘a sort of bribe’. Clinton himself could not believe what Russia was conceding – and nor could many Russians. It was just the start of a blistering humiliation. It was not magnanimous of the US but, worse, it lacked foresight. America encouraged Yeltsin’s reforms, but it could have offered a Marshall Plan to ease Russia’s transformation and find a way to invite Russia into the western system. It was not just America’s fault: Russian grandees still thought of Russia in terms of empire and autocracy. Moreover, America brushed aside Yeltsin’s protests to bomb Russia’s ally Serbia. Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary joined the European Union and NATO, as did the three ex-Soviet republics on the Baltic. Ukraine and Georgia were next to apply.^* Marxism had been defeated, Russia broken, and China was far behind. It looked as if the Leninist empire had fallen bloodlessly; in fact the fall of the USSR would extend over thirty years – and be far from bloodless: Russian resentment was felt viscerally by an ex-Chekist fallen, like his motherland, on hard times.

‘We lived like everyone, but sometimes I had to earn extra money,’ recalled an KGB colonel struggling to survive, ‘as a taxi driver. It’s not pleasant to speak about.’ The taxi driver was Vladimir Putin, now unemployed in St Petersburg. ‘What’s the collapse of the Soviet Union?’ he said. ‘It’s the collapse of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union.’^* As such it was ‘the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century’.

In March 1997, the Familia

summoned Putin to Moscow. Putin, then aged forty-four, had attached himself to the liberal, if venal, mayor of Petersburg, becoming his omnipresent fixer and deputy. Revealingly his first TV interview highlighted his KGB past and played the Stierlitz theme tune. When the mayor lost an election, Putin was offered a minor job in the presidential apparat in Moscow. But just a year later, he was appointed deputy chief of the presidential staff at the time of Russia’s deepest humiliation and America’s triumph.

It was bizarre moment. Russia was stumbling; Yeltsin fired one premier after another; gangsters killed their rivals; oligarchs strutted; the Chechens were defiant. Yet Yeltsin, half visionary liberal, half clumsy autocrat, understood the lessons of history. ‘We are all guilty,’ he said on 17 July 1998 as he presided over the burial of the skeletons of the murdered Tsar Nicholas II and his family in the Romanov crypt in Petersburg, but ‘the bitter lesson is that any attempts to change life by violence are doomed’. Now he considered his legacy: ‘We must finish this century, which has become the century of blood and lawlessness for Russia, with repentance and reconciliation’ but also strength. The Familia sought an heir.

Many claimed to have invented that heir. Berezovsky insisted he had first noticed Putin, but it was Yumashev who spotted him. In July 1998, they appointed this unknown as chief of the FSB, successor of the KGB. Swollen, dazed, yet imperious and mysterious, Yeltsin could not stop his authority from disintegrating; the opposition was preparing impeachment as the prosecutor-general investigated Familia corruption. In April 1999, Putin unveiled a grainy video of the prosecutor-general, paunchy and naked, cavorting flabbily with two prostitutes. The prosecutor-general was dismissed. Tatiana and Yumashev, guided by Abramovich, were impressed with Putin, young, tough, inscrutable. They made him an extraordinary offer – to be president, provided the Familia

would not be prosecuted. ‘How will I keep my wife and children safe?’ Putin asked – he had two daughters. The Familia explained that the Kremlin would keep him safe. But how would he win? A short, victorious war.

On 9 August 1999, Yeltsin suddenly appointed Putin as premier. ‘I wasn’t just offering a promotion,’ recalled Yeltsin. ‘I wanted to hand him the Cap of Monomachos’ – the tsar’s crown.^* In October, Putin invaded Chechnya, delighting Russians with his gangsterish swagger: ‘We’ll follow the terrorists everywhere; if we find them on the toilet, excuse me, yes, we’ll kill them in the crapper.’ Russia fought an unrestrained war against terrorists, and also against civilians, who were tortured, vanished and murdered at will. The army was a brutal, clumsy tool: Russian generals, said Putin admiringly, ‘don’t chew snot’. Yeltsin told Putin he was going to appoint him acting president. ‘I’m not ready,’ replied Putin. ‘It’s a difficult destiny.’ Yeltsin was determined. ‘I agree,’ said Putin finally, remarking, ‘It would be stupid to say, “No, I’d rather sell sunflower seeds.”’