The Russia Conundrum

An enduring memory of my childhood was being allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. From my earliest years, I knew that at a few minutes before midnight – in the moments before national television broadcast the Kremlin chimes, signalling the advent of a new year – the country’s leader would address us, the Russian people. The tradition had begun in 1941, in the darkest days of the war, when the titular head of state Mikhail Kalinin took to the radio to rally Soviet spirits in the face of Hitler’s inhuman onslaught against us. In my early memories, it was Leonid Brezhnev who would slur his way through a summary of what had been achieved and what was expected in the year ahead. In 1985, we watched with especial excitement as the new broom in the Kremlin, Mikhail Gorbachev, outlined his vision for change. Then in 1987 and 1988, there was the extraordinary spectacle of Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan swapping roles, so that Reagan spoke to us and Gorbachev addressed the American people on New Year’s Eve, which brought us tangible proof that the Cold War was thawing.

But it was 1999 that produced the biggest surprise. The millions of viewers switching on their TV sets at midnight, expecting to see the familiar red-nosed, puffy-cheeked face of Boris Yeltsin, champagne glass in hand, were in for a shock. In his place, a small, unfamiliar man in an ill-fitting suit was sitting in front of a decorated Christmas tree, trying to look presidential. Breaking with years of tradition, Yeltsin had already made his New Year speech, and instead of the usual, well-worn expressions of national congratulation, he had startled us. ‘I want to apologise,’ Yeltsin said, ‘for failing to make all our dreams come true, for failing to foresee that what at first seemed easy would turn out to be agonisingly hard. I apologise for betraying the hopes of all of us who believed we would be able to jump in a single leap from the grey, retrograde, totalitarian past to the shining, rich and civilised future.’ Yeltsin announced that he was resigning, in order to hand over the presidency to a new man, ‘a strong person who deserves to become President’, who would ensure that Russia never again regressed to its discredited, authoritarian past. For those who did not know who this ‘strong person’ was – possibly the majority of those watching – a helpful caption appeared, naming him as ‘Acting President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.’

To most of us, the first words of the new president seemed reassuring, a categorical reaffirmation that he would continue the open, West-friendly policies of his predecessor so that Russia would remain on the path of liberal, free-market democracy. ‘I assure you there will be no vacuum of power,’ Putin pledged. ‘The Russian state will stand firm in the defence of freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the media, private ownership rights and all the fundamental elements of a civilised society. Russia has opted irrevocably for democracy and reform and we will continue to pursue those goals … New Year is a holiday when dreams come true, and that is certainly the case this year. I believe the hopes and dreams that all of us cherish will undoubtedly come true.’

Putin’s promises were comforting; most of us went to bed relieved. But we might not have done so if we had known what had occurred earlier, behind doors. When Yeltsin told Putin on 14 December that he was about to become the leader of a superpower, the ‘strong man’ replied that he ‘wasn’t ready’ (at least, that is what both Yeltsin and Putin wrote in their account of the meeting). But it wasn’t long before the ‘strong man’ allowed himself to be persuaded. A meteoric rise from obscurity had whisked him from an undistinguished career in the lower echelons of the Soviet Union’s intelligence service, the KGB, via civil service posts in St Petersburg and then the Kremlin, to a surprise one-year stint as boss of the KGB’s successor organisation, the Federal Security Service (FSB), before three months as interim prime minister and, finally, the commanding heights of power.

Having received the news of his elevation, Putin knew exactly who he must report to; a day or so later, he went straight to his old stamping ground – the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the FSB and formerly that of the KGB. At a gala evening in honour of Lenin’s punitive organ of repression, the Cheka secret police,³ Putin raised a glass to his former FSB colleagues. ‘Comrades,’ he had just declared in a speech of welcome, ‘I wish to inform you that the group of FSB colleagues despatched by you to work undercover in the national government has succeeded in the first phase of its mission!’