From Russia with Blood. Heidi Blake
to let his own mask slip.
Putin had been picked to run the FSB for reasons much bigger than just the plot to kill Berezovsky. The increasingly harried aides to the ill and embattled Yeltsin were looking for a very particular sort of candidate, someone who would protect his boss at all costs, and there was one recent episode in Putin’s history that had convinced them that he was just the man they needed to take care of some unpleasant business.
Back in St. Petersburg the previous year, the old mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, had found himself under investigation for corruption by Russia’s vigorous new prosecutor general, Yuri Skuratov, and Putin had ridden in to the rescue. In November of 1997, when Sobchak suffered a heart attack while under interrogation, Putin arranged for his former boss to be spirited out of the hospital on a stretcher, past his police guard, and onto a waiting private jet, which whisked him away to Paris. Sobchak was now enjoying a happy exile in la belle France—and those optics were pleasing to the team of advisers worrying about how life after power would look for Yeltsin. Not least because the president and his close circle were having their own spot of bother with Skuratov.
The paunchy prosecutor general was a Communist sympathizer who had publicly declared war on Yeltsin in the aftermath of the 1996 election, vowing to use his role to root out corruption in the Kremlin. He had then mounted an investigation into the president’s administration for taking bribes in exchange for lucrative Kremlin contracts. Yeltsin’s team wanted an FSB chief willing to do whatever it took to get the president out of a corner. So when Putin arrived at the Lubyanka, getting rid of Skuratov was high on his agenda.
It wasn’t just Yeltsin in the frame: Skuratov was going after Berezovsky with equal vigor. On a February morning in 1999, dozens of camouflaged men burst through the doors of the oligarch’s Moscow offices brandishing automatic rifles. They were there on Skuratov’s orders. The problems had arisen after Berezovsky installed a new chief financial officer, Nikolai Glushkov, at Aeroflot three years earlier. Glushkov was a persnickety numbers man who liked to mellow his austere appearance with a jaunty bow tie, and he soon made a dangerous discovery. The state airline had for years been operating as a front for international espionage, Glushkov told Berezovsky. Around three thousand of its staff of fourteen thousand were spies, and proceeds from its ticket sales were being diverted into a vast network of foreign slush funds to bankroll their clandestine operations. Glushkov was not prepared to give the spooks a free ride, so he fired the spies and shut down their slush funds. Then he diverted the money to Swiss companies of which he and Berezovsky were the principal shareholders and wrote to Russia’s spy chiefs telling them to pick up their own tab from now on. Skuratov was now going after Berezovsky and Glushkov on suspicion of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars, and the raids on the oligarch’s offices caused a sensation in Moscow. Might the king of the robber barons finally be getting his comeuppance?
Not on Vladimir Putin’s watch.
Days after the raids, the FSB director showed up at a private party for Berezovsky’s wife wielding a huge bunch of roses to make it clear exactly whose side he was on. Then, the following month, the FSB struck against Skuratov. The state-controlled Russian TV channel used its prime-time slot to air grainy footage of a rotund man bearing a striking resemblance to the prosecutor general rolling around in bed with two prostitutes. It was a classic honey-trap operation straight out of the KGB playbook, and in case anyone missed the message, Putin personally held a press conference to tell the world that the man in the video was none other than Skuratov.
The lurid footage forced the prosecutor’s resignation. When the largely Communist parliament rallied to reinstate him, Yeltsin opened a criminal investigation into Skuratov’s use of prostitutes and used it as a pretext to sack him for good.
Yeltsin doubled down on Skuratov’s dismissal by sacking Russia’s prime minister, a potential presidential challenger who had been a staunch ally of the prosecutor general. The threat of prosecution thus averted, the Kremlin Family turned their attention to succession planning. They knew Yeltsin could not go on much longer, so they needed to find a replacement prime minister who had what it took to become president—and sooner rather than later. They did not have to look far. Putin had demonstrated his loyalty, his pliability, and his willingness to play dirty to protect his patrons.
Berezovsky was dispatched to Biarritz, where the FSB director was holidaying with his young family, to make the proposal. On August 9, 1999, the people of Russia woke to the news that not only was Vladimir Putin their new prime minister, he was also Yeltsin’s chosen successor.
Putin had not been in his post for a month when the bombings began. One by one, in early September of 1999, a series of massive explosions in Moscow and two other major Russian cities reduced four apartment buildings to smoldering rubble in the depths of night, blowing residents to shreds as they slept. Firefighters pulled a thousand people free from the ruins with terrible injuries, but almost three hundred were killed. Many of the blackened bodies they found buried in the wreckage were those of children.
The wave of terror attacks, some of the most deadly the world had known until the September 11 attacks in New York, two years later, were quickly blamed on rebels in the breakaway region of Chechnya, spreading fear and alarm throughout the land. And that was exactly what the new prime minister needed to make good the next stage in his ascent.
Putin’s gray-man image had served him well in convincing his various patrons that he was no more than the dour and dutiful stuffed shirt they needed to do their bidding. But what had gotten him this far was the very thing that would hold him back. It was no good just being anointed Yeltsin’s heir by the hated kleptocrats in the Kremlin; he also needed to win over a deeply disillusioned electorate. That meant striking a new and more powerful pose.
The Russian people were in a state of collective identity crisis after the capitalist dream they had been sold gave way to years of poverty and rank inequality. They didn’t miss the drab authoritarianism of the Soviet era, but the orgy of looting and cronyism under Yeltsin had instilled a fundamental distrust of the alternative. All that was left behind was a longing for a lost sense of greatness—a nostalgia for the time when Russia could really call itself a superpower. What they needed in a leader, Putin intuited, was a man of action to satisfy the national yearning for a strong and sure-footed Russia. That was the new posture he needed to pull off, and the apartment bombings provided the perfect opportunity.
In the wake of the attacks, Putin leaped into action, ordering air raids that reduced swaths of the Chechen capital to rubble and triggering the outbreak of a war that killed tens of thousands of civilians. What really stuck in the national consciousness was the television address in which Putin issued a blunt warning to the region’s rebels. “Wherever we find them, we will destroy them,” he vowed. “Even if we find them in the toilet, we will rub them out.” It played perfectly with the people, and Putin’s popularity ratings soared.
But critical observers of the apartment bombings and their aftermath noticed several things about the official picture that looked all wrong. The first sign was a strange declaration by the speaker of the Russian parliament, who announced soon after the third attack that a bomb had destroyed an apartment block in the city of Volgodonsk, a thousand kilometers south of Moscow. The problem was that there hadn’t been an explosion in Volgodonsk—not yet at least. That fourth bomb went off three days after his announcement, killing another seventeen people. Then, the following week, residents of an apartment building in another city spotted men planting explosives in the basement and raised the alarm, sparking a national manhunt by the local police. The issue this time was that, when the cops caught up with the culprits, they turned out to work for the FSB. The agency’s new director had to claim hurriedly that the bomb had only been a dummy and the agents had been involved in a training exercise to test local vigilance. But in some skeptical quarters, that story just didn’t wash.
Litvinenko had by then been fired from the FSB for revealing agency secrets, but he had gone to work as a private security consultant for Berezovsky, and he was still tapping into his old informant networks. Based on the intelligence he was gathering, he was convinced that the bombings were an FSB plot set in motion by Putin before his departure from the agency as an excuse for bombing Chechnya to get a boost in the polls. If that was true, Russia’s new prime minister