The World

‘Today I want to ask your forgiveness, because many of our hopes have not come true,’ said Yeltsin, on New Year’s Eve, 1999. ‘I am standing down … The country has a strong man, fit to be president.’ He named this mysterious person as acting president.

The first decree Putin signed was entitled ‘On guarantees for the former president and his family’.

On 26 March 2000, Putin won the presidency. Yeltsin showed him into Stalin’s old office: ‘It’s your office now, Vladimir.’ The Familia

believed they would control this ‘accidental’ president. Yet Putin brought the focus and tactics of a judo blackbelt to the Kremlin. ‘I toil,’ he said, ‘like a galley slave.’ Proud to sit in Stalin’s office, he invited visitors to open books from the former general secretary’s library kept in the Little Corner. Absolute power crafts a new character. Initially awkward and clumsy, he quickly developed the ferocious vigilance needed to thrive in the Kremlin, his relish in deploying targeted violence and military hardware scarcely tempered by gallows humour. Revelling in his machismo, he posed bare-chested and gun-toting, cradling tigers and stalking bears. Questioned about his ruthless reputation, he joked, ‘There’s no one to talk to since Mahatma Gandhi died’ – and on his birthday his courtiers gave him a bust of Gandhi. His favourite saying was, ‘It’s like shearing a piglet – too much squealing, too little wool.’

Putin swept the Familia aside and restored the power of the state, controlled elections, emasculated the Duma (parliament), broke the press and promoted a mix of liberals and KGB veterans. ‘The government’s undercover FSB team has completed its first assignment,’ he joked to a gathering of secret policemen, often adding, ‘There’s no such thing as an ex-KGB man.’

He ‘pacified’ Chechnya, appointing a murderous princeling, the twenty-nine-year-old Ramzan Kadyrov, as ruler. Kadyrov became his loyalest courtier, vying with his secret police to be his most lethal grandee.^* Putin then turned on the oligarchs, inviting them to Stalin’s mansion, to warn them against meddling in politics. When they disobeyed, they were broken: one was arrested and sent to a labour camp. Berezovsky, outraged that his puppet had seized the sceptre, was driven out of Russia. Putin ordered his security forces to liquidate traitors: ‘Enemies are right in front of you, you fight, you make peace, everything’s clear. But a traitor must be destroyed’ – even in England: Berezovsky died mysteriously – found hanged in his Surrey mansion; his associate ex-KGB Colonel Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium. ‘I don’t know who killed him but he was a traitor,’ said Putin. ‘It wasn’t us, but a dog’s death for a dog.’ In the former imperium, he was determined to restore not the USSR – he was appalled by Lenin’s creation of a Ukrainian Soviet republic out of Russian national lands – but its traditional empire. Russia, he believed, was a ‘unique civilization’, the mother of all Russias, and he espoused autocracy and an ethno-nationalism, envisioning an exceptionalist Orthodox Russian World, a Eurasian successor to Kyivan Rus and the Romanov empire, superior to the west, channelling the ideas of Slavophiles and White philosophers in the Russian civil war. As the other ex-Soviet republics developed their identities as nations, Russia, created as an empire, found no other vision of itself – except it was now an empire with a grievance.

Putin denounced American paramountcy. ‘What’s a unipolar world?’ he asked. ‘It’s a world where there’s one master. And that’s pernicious not only for all those within this system but for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.’

In November 2000, as Putin orchestrated the crushing of Chechen resistance, the Americans – after a near draw that led to a legal standoff – elected another inexperienced leader in his forties. While Putin grew up feral on a Leningrad housing estate, George W. Bush was sailing yachts at his family compound Kennebunkport.

Son of a president, grandson of a senator, a Yalie aristocratic fratboy who had remade himself as a swaggering Texan, making money in oil, owning the Texas Rangers baseball team, he won the presidency on his first attempt. The two Bush presidents – father and son, along with Clinton – presided over the climax of the American century. Simultaneously, US entrepreneurs spearheaded technical advances that dovetailed with America’s global vision – and the globalized economy that it dominated.