The ruin of Russia No rewriting of history can change the fact that neo-liberal reform produced undiluted economic decline Joseph Stiglitz, The Guardian, April 9, 2003. Ten years ago this month, Russia's parliament, the duma, was seeking to impeach President Boris Yeltsin, initiating a time of stalemate and struggle that ended seven months later when Yeltsin ordered tanks to fire on the duma's headquarters. Yeltsin's victory settled who ruled Russia and who would determine economic policy. But were Yeltsin's economic policy choices the right ones for Russia? The move from communism to capitalism in Russia after 1991 was supposed to bring unprecedented prosperity. It did not. By the time of the rouble crisis of August 1998, output had fallen by almost half and poverty had increased from 2% of the population to over 40%. Russia's performance since then has been impressive, yet its gross domestic product remains almost 30% below what it was in 1990. At 4% growth per annum, it will take Russia's economy another decade to get back to where it was when communism collapsed. A transition that lasts two decades, during which poverty and inequality increase enormously as a few become wealthy, cannot be called a victory for capitalism or democracy. Moreover, the longer-run prospects are far from rosy: with investment a mere 10% of what it was in 1990, even if that investment is better allocated, how can growth be sustained? IMF-style neo-liberals are now trotting out an interpretation that amounts to a belated declaration of victory. The pre-1998 period of economic decline, on their view, reflected a stalled transition process, whereas the rouble crisis finally jolted the authorities into action, with recovery following implementation of far-reaching reforms. But the real explanation lies elsewhere - and is much simpler. Until 1998, the rouble was overvalued, making it impossible for domestic producers to compete with imports. The IMF did not want Russia to devalue, and it provided billions of dollars to prop up the exchange rate. The IMF and the US Treasury worried that any change would restart inflation, because there was little or no excess productive capacity. This was a remarkable confession: these officials evidently believed that their policies had wrecked nearly half of Russia's economic capacity in the space of just a few years. They shunted aside micro-level data that showed that there was in fact excess capacity, just as they ignored a World Bank analysis showing that fresh IMF loans would not restore economic growth, but would only leave the country deeper in debt. Thee results were predictable: the 1998 bailout did not work, but devaluation did. It turned out that there was enormous excess capacity, and import substitution soon began, even in the midst of financial turmoil. Imports plummeted by nearly 50% in the year after devaluation, as consumers were forced to buy Russian-made food and goods. Later, higher world oil prices provided a further boost to the economy, generating funds for investment and expansion. Profits generated provided funds for expansion. Capital controls were imposed and domestic investors looked for opportunities at home instead of in New York or Cyprus. Yes, the market economy can provide incentives for wealth creation. Unfortunately, under the preceding years of IMF programmes, the market economy - with high interest rates, illegitimate privatisation, poor corporate governance and capital-market liberalisation - provided only incentives for asset-stripping. Growth was caused by the change in the economic environment, a change that Russia made for itself. The reformist parliament elected in December 1999 in tandem with President Vladimir Putin's reformist administration reduced tax rates, overhauled the judicial system, legislated private ownership of land and adopted new banking laws. These are positive reforms, but they do not explain the burst of post-crisis growth, which began before any of them were passed, let alone put in place. Indeed, even with the turmoil of default and devaluation, and despite the usual 12to 18-month lag in the impact of devaluation, Russia was growing at 5.4% annually by the end of 1999. In the long run, we should be concerned not just with the pace of economic growth but with the type of society that is created. To Russia's so-called reformers, the enormous concentration of ownership in Russia that emerged in the 1990s, is of no concern, so long as it generates growth. But there is another vision of a market economy, one based on greater equality, which uses the power of markets to bring prosperity not just to the few but to all of society. That Russia's transition did not achieve this is not a surprise. That goal was not a part of the reformers' vision. The great paradox is that their view of economics was so stilted, so ideologically driven, that they failed even in their narrower objective of bringing about economic growth. What they achieved was undiluted decline. No rewriting of history will change this. · Joseph Stiglitz is professor of economics at Columbia University, and the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize. He is the author of Globalization and Its Discontents www.project-syndicate.org How Russia Is Ruled David Remnick The New York Review of Books, April 9, 1998 1. If we have learned anything from the strange and epic story of Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin these past ten years it is that no tsar is hero to his bodyguard. Or not for long, anyway. We know this because, in the new tradition of Russian politics, the bodyguard in question has written a marvelously venomous memoir that seems truthful in spirit, if not in every fact. Aleksandr Korzhakov was working in the Ninth Directorate of the KGB when he was assigned in 1986 to guard a new Politburo member named Yeltsin who had just come to Moscow from the Urals. Korzhakov had no doubt of his abilities. He is a prideful man, proud of his training and physical capacities. He informs us that among his many skills as a guard is his ability to work an entire day without leave to visit a bathroom. Nor does Korzhakov betray any awe or illusions in the face of Communist Party satraps and big shots, the “ideal men” who traipse along the red and green runner carpets of the Kremlin halls. He recalls an earlier employment in which he was assigned to one Central Committeeman who took him along on his constitutionals. On one such walk, Korzhakov tells us gravely, his charge “began breaking wind loudly. I felt so uncomfortable that I was ready to fall through the ground, though the ‘ideal’ man felt perfectly at ease.” And so it was that Korzhakov was well prepared for Boris Yeltsin, a provincial chieftain from Sverdlovsk equipped with the high-handed manners of a “genuine Communist Party despot.” Yeltsin, whose background was in construction, behaved himself rather like a king, though one with an especially keen knowledge of joists, foundations, and reinforced concrete. Yeltsin had spent his career building things. (As it happens, his most famous job was a demolition. He leveled the Ipatiev House, where the Romanov family spent its last days; the Kremlin had not wanted the house to become a shrine for monarchist pilgrims.) Yeltsin was gruff, energetic, impulsive. Like all Soviet leaders, he told his interviewers that he read classical and contemporary literature. One doubts it very much. In the mid-1980s he was not, as Gorbachev was, intellectually curious; he never allowed himself, as Gorbachev did, to be bewildered by his surroundings, by the absurdity of Soviet political life, until perestroika was well underway. That all came later. Yeltsin ran a tight ship in Sverdlovsk and was promoted to Moscow Party chief because of it. He was a traditionalist, even at home. When Yeltsin returned to his apartment every evening, his wife, Naina, and his daughters ran to the door to greet him; they took his shoes off for him and treated him as he had been treated all day by the ministers and subministers of the Party. As Yeltsin’s powers increased, as he moved, in the course of a decade, from Politburo member to folk hero to imperial wrecker to Russian president, as his health declined and he no longer felt the urgent need to appear very much on television or in the papers, he began to behave very much like a tsar. His great achievements behind him, Yeltsin became more and more isolated and withdrawn from public life, more dependent on a very few aides. Those same aides came to refer to him, alternately, as “The Boss” and “Tsar Boris.” Yeltsin was meant to overhear these epithets as tribute and enjoy them. But even while Yeltsin had been bestowed with the title of a Romanov, he acted rather more like the captain of the Bensonhurst Democratic Party clubhouse. From Korzhakov’s memoirs, one gets the sense that by 1994 or so running the country ran a distant second to the more serious business of recreation: boozy swims in the Black Sea, boozy deer shoots in Zavidovo, and tennis—lots and lots of tennis. It is, as Mel Brooks says, good to be the king. At times, Yeltsin could even be a cruel king. At one point he hired a press secretary named Vyacheslav Kostikov, whom he came to despise and treat with pitiless disdain. (Korzhakov takes vengeance on Kostikov by mocking his “blue,” or gay, staffers and their “homosexual Orgies.”) Once, on a trip to Krasnoyarsk, Yeltsin and his advisers took a river cruise and, just for the hell of it, Yeltsin, well-lubricated by this time, shouted, “Kostikov overboard!” Three members of the entourage promptly hoisted the press secretary over the rail and tossed him into the frigid river water, where he almost froze to death. Thus baptized, Kostikov was soon reassigned to be ambassador to the Holy See. According to Korzhakov Yeltsin loves a good time. He is, it appears, a musically minded tsar. He is fond of traditional Russian drinking songs, though he is only good for a line or two of “Kalinka-malinka.” He is more of an instrumentalist. “Yeltsin’s sense of rhythm was good and he was a good player on the spoons,” Korzhakov writes. “Even on official trips, he would demand, ‘Bring spoons!’ Yeltsin was born in the village of Butka where playing spoons must have been prestigious.” Yeltsin’s favorite trick was to play knick-knack-paddy-whack with his spoons on the head of Yuri Zagainov, the chief of the President’s administrative department. “At first the boss would beat on his leg, as is normally done, and then he beat loudly on the head of his subordinate. The latter did not dare to take offense and smiled affectedly. The audience burst out laughing.” On one occasion, Yeltsin took aside the president of one of the former Soviet states, Askar Akayev of Kyrgistan, and played the spoons on his head. As Korzhakov writes, “He could torture one to death with this musical instrument.” Yeltsin’s international prestige drooped in the mid-1990s after the assault on the Russian parliament and the war in Chechnya. He became increasingly depressed. There was less spoonplaying, more drinking. He talked about resigning. He was constantly telling his chief of staff, Viktor Ilyushin, to stop bringing him “all that shit,” meaning his paperwork. He came to resent the imprecations of the precious few intellectuals in the street and in the press who were protesting the carnage in Chechnya. Yeltsin had started out his Moscow career as a reformer surrounded by intellectuals—he courted Sakharov intensely, he brought young academics into the Kremlin—but that was all in the past. He referred to one of his more liberal advisers, Sergei Filatov, as “a man who looks as if he has two flies fucking in his mouth.” Even losing at doubles in tennis would send Yeltsin into a funk, and so his faithful bodyguard, Korzhakov, always made sure that the President was paired with a professional. For ten years, Korzhakov could not have been more loyal to Yeltsin. When Yeltsin was fired from the Politburo in 1987, Korzhakov stayed with him and even drove him around town in his own car, a tuna can-size Neva. He was with Yeltsin on top of the tank when they faced down the coup in August 1991 and he was with him when they faced a dozen crises thereafter. Like mafia blood brothers they sliced open their arms and mixed together their vital bodily fluids—not once, but twice. We do not need to take Korzhakov’s word for this; Yeltsin, in his own memoirs, praises Korzhakov as he does no other aide. He admits that during one depressed moment—a stormy confrontation with the parliament—he almost committed suicide-by-sauna; it was Korzhakov who came to the rescue, tearing open the door and pulling Yeltsin out before he was parboiled. It was Korzhakov who came to the rescue when Yeltsin was mysteriously thrown into a river outside Moscow and was dragged to a guardhouse, where he sat waiting, and weeping, on the cold floor. Korzhakov stripped the president to his underwear, wrapped him in a blanket, fed him sips of moonshine, and then rubbed the warming booze all over the presidential corpus. “It worked beautifully.” It was Korzhakov who organized the construction of a luxury apartment building for Yeltsin and his favorite aides on the southwestern edge of Moscow. Yeltsin had long since jettisoned his populist “campaign against privileges” and fallen deeply in love with the perquisites of power. “He also didn’t want to have to run into Gorbachev in the elevator,” Korzhakov explains. When a subordinate came running from the presidential office yelling, “What should I do? Boris Nikolayevich gave me a hundred-dollar bill and told me to go fetch a bottle,” it was Korzhakov who calmly cracked open his secret supply of watered-down vodka supplied especially for this purpose by the Department of the Interior. (“To give him no vodka at all was, alas, not an option.”) When Yeltsin, bombed on beer, spilled coffee all over himself in the car on the way to see Helmut Kohl in Berlin, it was Korzhakov who helped him into the extra suit on hand for just such occasions. Poor Korzhakov. “Even after he got strict doctor’s orders not to drink,” he writes, “Naina continued to give her husband cognac. Yeltsin always knew how to get around my ban. If he really needed a drink, he would invite in one of his most trusted friends for ‘an audience.”’ Korzhakov has two obsessions in his memoir. The first is to portray Yeltsin’s deterioration. The second is furniture—couches in particular. There is more furniture in From Dawn to Dusk than there is in the Ethan Allen catalog. Korzhakov remembers the first sofa his family ever had—he was five years old—and in his life each new piece of furniture becomes a measure of his increasing status. His rise in the secret services really began in 1978, “the year we bought an Arab bed.” He takes the measure of Yeltsin’s former defense minister, Pavel Grachev, noting that he once “bought a truly gigantic sofa for his new apartment. It could not be brought in through the door and so soldiers had to bring it in by ropes through the balcony.” When Korzhakov goes with Yeltsin to Helmut Kohl’s house, he notes sadly, “To be honest I expected to see expensive furniture. But there was no real luxury.” At Camp David “the modesty and plainness of the main residence flung me into a depression.” And even the White House is insufficiently furnished and far too cramped: “It was too old and, according to Russian standards, too small for the President.” The only time Korzhakov seems truly impressed with his charge’s antagonist, Mikhail Gorbachev, is when he takes note of his well-equipped bathroom (“a bath, a toilet, a bidet…”) and his unimaginably plush French couches. “Not to be believed,” Korzhakov remarks. Korzhakov’s intimacy with the furniture of power and the man with the biggest couches of all came to an end in June 1996, when Yeltsin fired him in the midst of his reelection campaign. This was inevitable. Yeltsin’s management style has always been to pit one adviser against the other, jettisoning them all over time. (Which is partly why he ended up so close to his bodyguard in the first place.) Korzhakov, who had been encouraging Yeltsin to postpone the elections, was at war with the barons of private business who were bankrolling the campaign and hoping to keep their man in power. These same businessmen thought that Korzhakov held a preposterously powerful position, and that he was influencing Yeltsin to jettison his most reformist advisers. They also believed he was hurting the campaign with his ignorance of retail politics. Korzhakov blames Yeltsin’s two key advisers—his daughter Tatyana Dyachenko and the first deputy prime minister, Anatoly Chubais—for risking the life of the President merely to keep him in office. At one point, in the southern city of Rostov, Tatyana encouraged her father to go out on stage and dance with a rock band that had been engaged to play a campaign benefit. (Who can forget the subsequent photographs of Tsar Boris snapping his fingers and doin’ the Funky Monkey?) “We just prayed that the candidate would not drop dead right on the stage before the shocked eyes of the Rostov public,” Korzhakov writes. “What are you doing with your father?” he asked Tatyana. “Sasha, you don’t understand anything!” she cried. Finally, Korzhakov overplayed his hand. His men arrested a couple of Chubais’s assistants as they were leaving the government administration building with a box stuffed with $500,000. Korzhakov claimed the money was illegal. Chubais claimed Korzhakov had no business meddling in such affairs. They charged that Korzhakov had become Yeltsin’s Rasputin, powerful well beyond his job description. Clearly both sides were playing politics and trying to force a razborka—a showdown. Yeltsin had to choose. It was an easy call. He needed the money. He needed those businessmen and their political representative, Chubais. He could no longer make the pleasures of the sauna his first priority. Suddenly, a poorly educated bodyguard was expendable. And so it came to be that the most loyal of men signed a book contract promising to tell all. 2. Korzhakov’s memoirs promise intimacy and, on some level, they do deliver. There are no fewer than six color photographs of the President of the Russian Federation wearing a tiny Speedo bathing suit. Yeltsin has the coloring of a mushroom and the belly of a hippo; if Korzhakov meant to discredit Yeltsin as candidate for the Mr. Universe title, then he has been quite effective. But, in fact, Korzhakov tells his readers very little that they did not know already. Russians have long understood that their president has a drinking problem and an imperfect physique. The man could be played in the movies by Wallace Beery or Broderick Crawford. And ever since the full press coverage of his multiple-bypass operation after the election, they have also known of his precarious health. The people are, in short, well-informed on the peccadilloes and weaknesses of their president. “Strangely enough,” writes Aleksandr Pumpyansky, the editor of New Times, the people “not only understand but also forgive their drinking leader, swearing and cursing him nevertheless. Reagan was called a Teflon president because all his mistakes were forgiven him. Similarly, Yeltsin’s pranks do not cling to him, going like water off a duck’s back. One can only guess why. He is far from an ideal ruler—our people do not tolerate ideal rulers. He is bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of his nation, and the whole set of the nation’s weaknesses and inclinations can be read in his face. No doubt, he has played enough pranks in his life, but he has also had enough trouble and enemies, with whom he did away so deftly, and the demon rum is far from the most dangerous of them.” The average Russian, Pumpyansky is pointing out, is himself quite familiar with the bottle, does not expect to live as long as they do in the West, and sees himself as long-suffering. And so it is not this collection of Russian traits that threatens Yeltsin in his quest for a decent place in history. For the more profound argument against Yeltsin, we might turn away from the likes of From Dawn to Dusk and to The Russian Intelligentsia, a series of lectures given at Columbia University by the great novelist and critic Andrei Sinyavsky shortly before his death last year. Sinyavsky’s bona fides, of course, are on a far higher plane than Korzhakov’s. He was born in 1925, served in the Soviet army during the war against Germany, and, by the 1950s, began writing essays critical of the reigning aesthetic of socialist realism, “a phantasmagoric art with hypotheses instead of a purpose.” Sinyavsky adopted the pseudonym Abram Tertz, borrowed from Abrashka Tertz, a Jewish outlaw bandit celebrated in the folk songs of Odessa. Like Pasternak before him, Sinyavsky attracted the notice of the Kremlin authorities when he began publishing his fiction and essays abroad. In October 1965, he was arrested along with his friend, the writer Yuli Daniel, who was publishing abroad under the name Nikolai Arzhak. Sinyavsky and Daniel’s four-day trial in Moscow in 1966—along with Joseph Brodsky’s trial in 1964 in Leningrad—marked the reestablishment of Stalinism in both the arts and society after the all-toobrief period of thaw. But unlike the Stalinist show trials of the Thirties, Sinyavsky and Daniel, as well as Brodsky, improvised remarkable defenses, the transcripts of which became samizdat classics. The verdict, of course, was never in doubt. Sinyavsky and Daniel were found guilty of “antiSoviet agitation” under the notorious Article 70 of the penal code and shipped off to Dubrovlag, an island of the gulag archipelago in Mordovia. During his sentence to hard labor, Sinyavsky managed to write two masterworks, A Voice from the Chorus, a kind of pastiche memoir fashioned out of his letters home to his wife, and Strolls with Pushkin, an irreverent portrait of the great Russian literary demigod, which, when it was published in Moscow during the perestroika years, came as a far greater shock to many intellectuals than any work of Solzhenitsyn, Orwell, or Grossman. Sinyavsky emigrated to France in 1973, where he wrote, taught at the Sorbonne, and was active in émigré polemics and literary magazines. In view of Sinyavsky’s literary achievement, as well as his reputation for honesty and courage, it is not easy to challenge his judgments about contemporary Russia. But they are deeply flawed judgments based on surprisingly erratic observation. The core argument of Sinyavsky’s three lectures is that since 1991 the Russian intelligentsia has abdicated its traditional role of opposition to power and has instead adopted a sickening affection for Yeltsin that resembles nothing less than the intelligentsia’s capitulation to Stalin in the Thirties. At the same time, Sinyavsky argues, the same intellectuals who roundly mocked Gorbachev for his errors now forgive Yeltsin’s far greater errors—especially the Draconian market reforms of 1992 devised by the economist Yegor Gaidar, the violent assault on parliament in October 1993, and the war waged against Chechnya in 1995. Sinyavsky draws an acid caricature of contemporary Russian intellectuals as a tribe thoroughly divorced from reality, as artists, writers, and scholars who are so grateful for their new freedoms and opportunities to travel abroad that they disdain “the people” and their complaints of poverty as hopelessly retrograde. Using a phrase from Nikolai Nekrasov’s Elegy, Sinyavsky asks, “Why in the past did the intelligentsia pity the people, sympathize with them, declare ‘I dedicated my lyre to the people,’ but now tremble? What happened?” Sinyavsky spent the last twenty-four years of his life living in France and not speaking much French; like so many older literary émigrés, he concentrated on his books and on learning what he could of home from Russian-language radio broadcasts, newspaper clippings, and other sources. Writing of his life both inside the Soviet Union and then in France, Sinyavsky tells his audience at Columbia, “Before perestroika, I had a wonderful life. The Soviet regime seemed unshakable. It was possible to clash with it and to end up in prison, as had happened to me. It was possible to thumb one’s nose at it behind its back, as many intellectuals did. It was possible to adapt to it—and even to love it. In a purely abstract sense, I understood that at some point it would collapse, perhaps in a hundred or two hundred years, but I did not think I would live to see that. There was no hope of that, nor could there have been any such hope. Instead, there was stability.” Sinyavsky is being partly ironic, of course—his arrest and imprisonment were hardly “wonderful.” And yet I think he is absolutely sincere about his sense of stability; almost no one expected anything like the cataclysm of 1991 and no one at all was prepared for the shock, the pleasures, the disorientation, and the tragedies it would bring. In the summer of 1992, Sinyavsky went to “Gaidar’s Moscow” and, to his horror, discovered a new world of beggars and dirt, widows selling off the contents of their closets. “We had the feeling that we had returned to the wartime years of our youth,” he writes. “History was repeating itself.” When his fellow intellectuals told him that every country in the West had poverty and crime, Sinyavsky would not accept it. “I am not an economist,” he writes. “If you ask me what a monetary system is, I answer that I don’t know. The International Monetary Fund? I don’t know about that either. But I do know that economics—perhaps more than any other area of human activity—must be based on common sense.” And common sense, he adds, does not entail workers being paid in sanitary napkins or vodka or bras or newborn calves—all legal tender, at times and in various places, in modern Russia. One can—and must—understand Sinyavsky’s despair. The collapse of communism was soon followed by industrial collapse, rising crime, rising mortality rates, disappearing funding for the arts and sciences, and, perhaps worst of all, the increasing violence and imperious isolation of central power. One can argue about the economic policies of 1992, but not about the Kremlin’s indifference to corruption and bloodshed. And yet, Sinyavsky’s understanding of the Russian transition is curiously incomplete. In his book there is no sense at all that every country in the East has experienced to one degree or another many of the same ills—the organized crime, the economic uncertainty—that Russia has. Considering the degree of calcification in the Soviet Union compared to Poland or the Czech Republic, considering the degree of economic, social, and political pathology experienced in Russia since 1917, it is only natural that the transition would be so much more painful and longlasting. There is also little mention in Sinyavsky’s lectures of even the partial freedoms that have been won: the freedom of worship and expression, the irreversible dismantling of the command economy, the end of an imperial and hostile foreign policy, the sense of promise among millions of young people. Sinyavsky fails to note the seeds of entrepreneurship in the cities, the openness to useful Western influences even in the deepest provinces. Sinyavsky’s is an analysis based on emotion, conspicuous omission, disorientation, and anecdote. He writes of newspapers and political parties being shut down after the October 1993 crisis, but does not care to remind the reader that they were all quickly reopened and reactivated. He writes of street beggars but fails to remind his American audience that the Soviet Union in its waning years was already a landscape of poverty, a region of terrible infant mortality rates, rural collapse, rampant alcoholism, overburdened and insufficient health care facilities, and on and on. Sinyavsky seems to give the impression that a purely benevolent Gorbachev, whom he rightly admires, unleashed perestroika in order to publish censored books and to screen unseen films. He did not. Glasnost, the policy of openness in the arts and sciences, was a deliberate means of encouraging the intelligentsia to join the world and work for obnovleniye—the renewal of the Communist system. Yeltsin can be criticized for his inadequate response to corruption, but he must also be given credit for encouraging foreign investment, the rise of normal market mechanisms, the privatization of state enterprises, and a reversal of initially enormous inflation rates. Sinyavsky’s most wounding charge, that the intelligentsia has behaved miserably, is as anecdotal and errant as his economics. “Once again the flower of the Russian intelligentsia went over to the authorities, supporting Gaidar’s looting and Yeltsin’s firing on the White House, chanting: ‘Right on, Boria! Give it to them Boria, go to it, Boria! Crush our enemies!”’ he writes. “No one thinks of what our children and grandchildren will say or whether they will be ashamed of us. Our times are interesting because they are so ironically congruent with our unhappy past.” He condemns such intellectuals as Sergei Averintsev, Bulat Okhudzhava, Bella Akhmadulina, and Marietta Chudakova for signing letters in support of Yeltsin during the October crisis. Never once does Sinyavsky mention that the “parliamentarians” who precipitated the October crisis amended the constitution hundreds of times as part of a political battle waged against Yeltsin. Nor does he mention repeated rejections at a political settlement or, worst of all, the leader of the insurrection, Aleksandr Rutskoi (Yeltsin’s former vice-president), calling on armed crowds to capture key buildings around Moscow. Sinyavsky says that the intellectuals have failed to point out the fall in living standards among ordinary people. “This reminded me of the beginning of the 1930s when the intelligentsia closed its eyes to the horrendous famines and disasters in the villages and maintained its silence.” There are undoubtedly a few intellectuals in contemporary Russia who have made fools of themselves, who sold themselves out simply “to clink glasses” with Yeltsin at a Kremlin reception. And in the October crisis there were some whose fury led them to bloody rhetoric. But to compare Yeltsin to Stalin? To compare monetary reform to Stalin’s artificially induced famines, his slaughter of the peasantry? To say that the intelligentsia has kept silent on poverty? And yet the most astonishing statement in Sinyavsky’s book is this: The democrats have let their opportunity slip. I don’t like the Communists, but they are better for the people than the democrats. It is not fortuitous that the very word democrat has been compromised and that people call democrats ‘demo-thieves.’ Democracy is associated with poverty, theft, corruption, and other horrors. Against that background the Communists look wonderful. Sinyavsky could not have met the current leadership of the Communist Party and made that statement; they are much like the old leadership, but dumber, less competent. The cream of the Party has long since left to set up businesses. All the real supporters of the Gorbachev reforms, the reforms Sinyavsky so much admires, abandoned the Communist Party before its collapse or soon thereafter. What’s left are the true believers, the cranks. Sinyavsky rightly points out that Yeltsin has failed to deliver on his promise of erecting a European model of civilization, but what was he thinking when he said that “everything in Russia is being done the way things were done in Uganda under President Idi Amin”? 3. Both Korzhakov’s and Sinyavsky’s critiques are insufficient—Korzhakov’s because it is limited to personal anecdote and the dorsal vantage point of the bodyguard, Sinyavsky’s because it is limited to economic anecdote and a kind of intellectual version of sensationalism. Yet even as contemporary Russia fades from the front pages and becomes a gigantic developing nation with nuclear weapons, there is a serious critique to be made. It is true that Yeltsin’s commitment to democracy is, as one of his former chiefs of staff Gennady Burbulis, once told me, “purely situational.” He is a democrat when it suits him. Happily, democratic means often appealed to him between 1988 and 1992: the result was the dissolution of communism and the imperial Soviet state. But had Yeltsin believed in 1996 that he had no chance to win the elections, he would surely have postponed the balloting indefinitely. The present Russian constitution allows a president only two terms in office, but I am not at all sure that Yeltsin, despite his health, will retire gracefully. Will he once more come to believe that he, and only he, can save Russia? Will he try to amend the constitution to allow for a third try in the year 2000? Those are questions Russians are asking now in advance of the next campaign. But to concentrate too much on Yeltsin himself is to overlook the structures of power, property, and influence that are taking hold in Russia today. Constitutionally, the Russian presidency is enormously powerful, far more so than the American office, but, in fact, the most powerful men in the country today are seven business barons—”the seven boyars,” “the Magnificent Seven”— who own nearly the entire news media and a fantastic proportion of the national wealth. These boyars are not mentioned at all in Sinyavsky’s lectures, and yet they are at the core of the “crony capitalism” that now dominates Russian public life. The seven men are: Boris Berezovsky of Logovaz (automobiles, television, oil); Mikhail Friedman of the Alfa Group (oil, tea, sugar, cement); Mikhail Khodorkovsky of Ros-Prom (banking, oil); Vladimir Gusinsky of Media-Most Group (television, newspapers, banking, real estate); Mikhail Smolensky of SBS-Agro (banking); Vladimir Potanin of Uneximbank (banking, real estate, oil and gas, media, ferrous metals); Vladimir Vinogradov of Inkombank (banking, metals, oil). Other imperial beachheads include Gazprom, the country’s immense natural gas conglomerate, which has Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin as its patron, and various regional potentates, including Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow. The ascent of this oligarchy began with the collapse of the old system and the legalization of commercial banking in 1988, but really accelerated in 1995 when Yeltsin instituted a “loans for shares” privatization scheme whereby the new breed of Russian bankers, who had made their initial fortunes by speculating on the international currency markets at a time of runaway inflation, could make loans to the cash-starved state. The state could not pay back the loans and instead allowed the bankers to participate in rigged insider auctions for some of the most valuable industrial properties in the country. Although Russian manufacturing is in a sorry state, the country’s natural resources—its oil and natural gas, its precious metals and minerals— represent a vast Klondike. The bankers were pleased to be picking up these bargains; and Yeltsin was pleased to give out the bargains to friendly bankers rather than to the provincial industrialists who backed the Communists. And the bargains! It was like shopping for conglomerates at Filene’s Basement. Berezovsky, for example, paid $100 million for Sibneft, the Siberian oil giant; Western investors, who were going to join in with Berezovsky on the deal, backed out because they were nervous that Yeltsin might be voted out of office. After Yeltsin won, Berezovsky claimed he was offered a billion dollars for the property. Khodorkovsky bought three quarters of Yukos Oil for $168 million; annual revenues for Yukos are now around $3 billion. The various empires resemble one another in that they always have a political patron, a series of media outlets to protect their business and political interests, and a vast “security” apparatus which acts as a kind of private army and KGB, shielding them from physical attack and gathering intelligence on their rivals and other businesses. Gusinsky’s MOST security force is well over ten thousand men; he counts a former deputy chairman of the KGB as an “adviser.” The new barons have also acquired a certain style gleaned from their trips to the west: posh business clubs, private jets, fleets of armored cars, immense gated dacha-mansions on the edge of Moscow, vacation retreats in Cyprus, London, Switzerland, Vienna. All of them can get a Kremlin minister on the phone in an instant. Sometimes, as in the cases of Potanin and Berezovsky, they themselves have worked for a stint in the Kremlin. With Chubais as their leader and patron, the barons (some of whom had been intense rivals) came together in 1996 to ensure that Yeltsin would defeat the Communist Party. They had a lot to offer: money, control of the media, expertise. After the election, Berezovsky and Potanin spent some time in the Russian government before leaving again to pursue their increasing fortunes. Not long ago, Business Week declared Potanin “the most powerful man in Russia.” His companies are worth around $32 billion and his personal wealth is somewhere between $1.5 billion and $3 billion. His Uneximbank is the biggest private bank in the country and owns major stakes in credit-card and insurance companies; he is co-founder of MFK-Renaissance, the biggest investment bank in Russia; he owns 85 percent of Sidanko, the third biggest oil producer; he owns the Norilsk Nickel works, which he bought for a song; he owns the majority share in Izvestia, Komsomolskaya Pravda, and Russky Telegraf; he owns the Central Army basketball and hockey teams. Potanin is thirty-six years old and a former leader of the Young Communists. He plays chess and likes jet-skiing very much. In a series of articles for The Washington Post, David Hoffman compared the new Russian conglomerates to the South Korean model; others have mentioned the Japanese keiretsu. Hoffman compares the barons themselves to the American railroad barons of the late nineteenth century who, using the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862, won land grants from the government and then formed companies to develop and sell the lands, and then used the money to hire their own construction companies to build the rails at an inflated price. The situation in Russia is much the same. A small core of businessmen whose political connections are so great that they are able to call themselves capitalists without yielding any of the monopolistic tendencies of their Soviet predecessors. The Russians, however, suffer by the comparison to South Korea and Japan. The rise of those economies in the Seventies and Eighties was based on the export of cheap, well-made manufactured goods to highly competitive foreign markets. The Russian conglomerates are based mainly on the exploitation of natural resources, where competition is minimal and government connections are at a premium. The seven boyars and the other monopolies dominate the stock markets but they do not, generally, make anything; there is minimal technological innovation. At the same time, tens of thousands of medium-size businesses are floundering because they attract minimal foreign or domestic investment, suffer under Draconian tax codes, continually battle organized crime, and get no favors from political patrons. The creation of capitalism on the ash heap of communism has not been a pretty sight. The question is whether the Russian system will develop over time into something resembling the West or whether it will calcify into a stagnant oligarchic arrangement. The optimistic view is that the new barons will become increasingly competitive among themselves and that they will also begin investing more heavily in smaller enterprises—a turn of events that will hasten the creation of a middle class not merely in Moscow, where it is already evident, but elsewhere in Russia. There is little doubt, too, that the business culture of Russia is growing more sophisticated. The biggest business story of 1994 was the collapse of a gigantic pyramid scheme called MMM run by a con man named Sergei Mavrodi. The likes of Mavrodi have been replaced on the pages of the newspapers by the latest arrivals from Morgan Stanley, West-Deutsche LandesBank, and dozens of others. One of the most encouraging signs in the Russian political scene in the past year was the appearance of the first real fissure in the seven-sided oligarchy. Customarily, one of the seven barons would enter into the privatization auctions as a “walkaway” partner—a designated low bidder present only to give the appearance of fair play. Last year, the government put up 25 percent of an enormous corporation called Svyazinvest for auction. The company is the parent concern of 88 local telephone companies and the main long-distance carrier. Gusinsky, who had not been very active in the snatching up of other industrial properties in the past, was especially interested in this deal and assembled a bidding consortium that included Friedman, the Spanish telephone company Telefonica, and Crédit Suisse First Boston. Gusinsky thought he had clear sailing. At the time the deal was first mentioned, Potanin was still in the government—he was vice premier in charge of economic policy and privatization—and could not participate. Unfortunately for Gusinsky, however, Potanin quit his Kremlin post in time to take part. Potanin had been instrumental in designing the “loans for shares” scheme in the first place which ensured that the oligarchs—and not the Communist factory chieftains—would win the most valuable properties. The two first deputy prime ministers, Chubais and Boris Nemtsov, told Gusinsky that this time the bidding would be open and real. The auction was scheduled for July 25. In the run-up, Potanin’s newspapers attacked Gusinsky for corruption and foul deeds, and Gusinsky’s media outlets did the same to Potanin. (The oligarchic system has been terrible for press freedoms.) To compete with Gusinsky, Potanin brought in $980 million from George Soros’s Quantum Fund and help from Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Morgan Grenfell to come up with a bid of $1.87 billion, topping Gusinsky by $160 million. It was perhaps the most significant deal in the short history of Russian capitalism and by far the largest foreign investment. The final price was 50 percent more than the government had expected. Leonid Rozhetskin, a member of the Renaissance Capital investment bank, predicted that the consortium’s investment would triple by the year 2000. “From a bandit-like amassing of capital, the country is moving to a more or less civilized regime,” the first deputy premier, Boris Nemtsov, said. Perhaps. Granted, this new and dominant story of Russian politics does not have the euphoria and allure of perestroika in the late 1980s or the heroic battles of 1991. Sakharov is gone, Solzhenitsyn ignored, and heroes, in general, are absent from the scene. It is hard to warm to an auction as a heroic event. And yet if business can advance in a way that begins to benefit more than a few Moscow tycoons, if Yeltsin finally fades away in a peaceful transition of power, then Russia might then be on the way toward becoming what it has always said it has wanted to be: part of the world, a normal country. The New Yorker October 13, 2003 POST-IMPERIAL BLUES; Billionaire oligarchs, Chechen suicide bombers, generals nostalgic for empire-and the reign of Vladimir Putin. DAVID REMNICK Pg. 78 On a murky day twenty years ago, I sat in a Soviet railcar (Helsinki-Leningrad; rain-drizzled windows) reading a collection of stories by Vladimir Nabokov. There was then, as there no longer is, an illicit thrill in crossing over, West to East: the neat Finnish streets and houses thinning, then vanishing, near the border; just minutes later, the signs of Soviet dilapidation. A puttering Zhiguli towing another Zhiguli by a rope along a muddy road; waterlogged posters ("Communism = Soviet power plus Electrification of the whole country!") nailed to the sides of a shack; a scaly drunk in a padded jacket, oblivious of the rain, stomping his boots in a puddle. The train stopped with a creak at the border town of Vyborg. The ventilation coughed and went still. A trio of clean-jawed men in uniform-they could not have been more than twenty years old-climbed on board and made their way down the aisles, checking passports and visas, making cursory searches of our bags. As agents of state security, the guards tried to affect a haughty expression, but they managed to radiate only nervousness, the sense that, just as they were watching us, someone of greater consequence was watching them. By the time the guards reached my row, they had already gathered a small stack of Bibles tied together with twine and a cache of German skin magazines. They looked through my duffelbag and saw nothing of interest. Then one of them extended his index finger and tipped back the book of stories in my hand in order to examine its foxed cover. The cover illustration was of a generically pretty girl with shimmery light hair, though curiously un-Russian, more like a model for the House of Breck. The guard paused and narrowed his eyes. The book was not "Lolita," but it was Nabokov, illegal all the same. Authors are banned not by title; they are banned whole. He knew. And yet he looked me over and moved on, leaving me to my counter-revolutionary pleasure. A few minutes later, the train eased once more into the trip eastward, the pleasingly numb hours of birches and rain, the villages going by. Soon it was dark and the windows were fogged. I turned to "The Visit to the Museum," in which a Russian emigre finds himself wandering through a provincial museum in France. In a dreamlike state, he comes to realize that he has passed through a magical portal into his native land, into Russia, and yet he has the dawning sense that this is not quite his Russia. Everything is vivid: the coolness of the air, and "the stone beneath my feet was real sidewalk, powdered with wonderfully fragrant, newly fallen snow." But as he approaches a shoe-repair shop and sees the word "shoe," he realizes that something is wrong; there is no tvyordy znak, the "hard sign" at the end of the word. The letter was largely eliminated by the Bolsheviks. They'd set out to remake the world, including its orthography: I knew irrevocably where I was. Alas, it was not the Russia I remembered, but the factual Russia of today, forbidden to me, hopelessly slavish, and hopelessly my own native land. . . . Oh how many times in my sleep I had experienced a similar sensation! Now, though, it was reality. Nabokov left Russia in 1919 on a ship called the Hope and became a permanent exile: Berlin, Paris, Cambridge, Ithaca, Montreux. His revulsion for what had become of Russia was such that in "The Visit to the Museum" he could never bring himself to call the place "the Soviet Union." The train slowed. The suburbs of Leningrad, then the ghostly apartment blocks of the outer city, sluiced by. With a jolt, we arrived. The Finland Station. The doors opened with a rubbery kiss. The air that rushed in was damp and cold and smelled of cheap tobacco. On the platform, I bought a roll stuffed with a few pebbles of bluish meat. I needed help getting around, and so, for a few kopecks, I bought a copy of Pravda and a map and set off on my way. 2 "The Visit to the Museum" is a story steeped in the exile's nostalgia. When I return to Moscow now, I find myself thinking that this state of temporal, even historical, disorientation also resembles a quality within Russia, within Russians. Twelve years after the collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union itself, Russians live in a state of historical disjunction and simultaneity. The kopecks I spent at the Finland Station are no longer in circulation; Pravda's readership has dropped from nine million to a hundred thousand; in some cities, many of the street names on the map have been changed to new or prerevolutionary names; in others, the streets are named for Lenin, Labor, the Red Banner. Russians exist in an economy that is neither socialist nor capitalist; they live in distinctly Soviet apartments, in Soviet conditions, and yet in television commercials they are comfortable, clean, rich, in a Scandinavian sort of way. In the larger cities, even in smaller, unexpected places, every material delight or spiritual degradation known to the modern world is available for cash or credit; and yet there are still thousands of towns and villages where men and women wear high boots and walk on muddy roads that are just as they were in the time of the tsars. Not long ago, I took a room in Moscow on the city's main drag, Tverskaya Ulitsa. In the nineteenth century, Tverskaya was among the most fashionable streets in Russia: Tolstoy lost a fortune playing cards at the English Club; the food stores supplied the tsars. In the Communist era, the English Club became the Central Museum of the Revolution, and Food Store No. 1 still had its chandeliers but hardly any food. Now the delicacies, the caviar and the crab-at Tokyo prices-are back. Few can afford them; many come just to gaze, the way they once did at Lenin's cap and his Rolls-Royce at the museum devoted to his memory. When consumerism (legal and not) began to appear in the early nineties, it seemed to matter only to a few wealthy Russians and foreigners. This was the era of "the New Russians": vulgar, brash, and, often enough, criminal. It was the era of American gangster movies, bulletproof windows, strip joints, porn palaces, casinos with naked women swimming in enormous fish tanks. The grotesqueries and the poverty of the first years of post-Soviet life are still reality. The naked women still swim in their tanks. Gangsters abound. But now, in the postrevolutionary era, there is something else in evidence in Moscow and in many other cities: a certain stifling calm, a disinterest in politics, a slowly growing middle and professional class, a more normal commercialism, a sense that while a new Russia-independent, prosperous, and linked to the West-has not yet been achieved, not by a long shot, it is no longer inconceivable. And the embodiment of modern times in Russia is its President, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. Putin is not a man of imagination or spark. He is intelligent, competent, blandly agreeable-a bureaucrat thrust forward in history. His is the bearing of the vigilant listener, of the intelligence agent. After he joined the K.G.B., he used to tell his close friends, "I am a specialist in human relations." His language is usually flavorless in a particularly Soviet fashion. His gaze is flat, even dead, and gives nothing away. That is why most Russians thought it riotously funny when President Bush declared in 2001 that he had "looked the man in the eye" and got a "sense of his soul." Rather than mark himself completely a man of the future, a democrat, a European-or, to the contrary, a Soviet, a man of traditional autocratic values-Putin has achieved the distinction of seeming everything to nearly everyone. His embrace of the ideals of the democracy movement in Russia-a free press, constitutionalism, civil liberties-is slight. He never fought for an end to Communism; he merely inherited a set of post-Communist realities. Putin is, first and foremost, a gosudarstvennik-a "statist"-who values the growth and stability of Russia before all else. If that means prosecuting a media baron or a business leader who displays even a trace of political ambition, so be it. If that means filling the state bureaucracy with thousands of former intelligence officers, then it must be so. And yet, paradoxically, no less than Mikhail Gorbachev or Boris Yeltsin, Putin has decided that Russia does not have an ideologically or mystically determined "special path" of development; rather, Russia's destiny is allied to Europe's and to the United States'-its future could easily include membership in the European Union and nato. Yeltsin staked his historical reputation on destroying the Communist system and the empire known as the Soviet Union. Putin has cast himself as a man of evolution. He makes gestures toward the old order, if only to soothe the bruised feelings of the Russian people. He praises the honesty of the dissident hero Andrei Sakharov, but he also has kind words for Stalin's dubious military acumen. Although Putin is realistic about Russia's diminished standing in the world, and even admits (up to a point) to a history of horrific cruelty and loss, he constantly assures his countrymen that theirs is a nation of historical greatness and that greatness, in some new form, will surely return. At the celebrations this spring for the threehundredth anniversary of his native St. Petersburg, he lauded the city's imperskii blyesk-its "imperial splendor." The pro-Kremlin party in parliament, United Russia, uses figures such as Pushkin and Stolypin, the early twentieth-century economic reformer, to advertise its virtues. Putin, who was appointed acting President when Yeltsin suddenly resigned, on December 31, 1999, won election in 2000, with fifty-two per cent of the vote. He will surely win reelection in 2004. His popularity rating runs to more than seventy per cent. Some new Russian textbooks describe his childhood in the same hagiographic terms once reserved for general secretaries of the Communist Party. For now, Russia is lucky, floating along on a tide of profits from the oil-and-gas industry. The ruble is strong, world energy prices are high, inflation is declining, and economic growth, for the fifth year in a row, is robust. Nevertheless, Putin's opponents, be they Moscow liberals or provincial Communists, complain that oil provides only a fleeting security; they talk of zastoi-"stagnation"-a term evocative of the Brezhnev era. A Web site called vladimir.vladimirovich.ru features dozens of absurdist anekdoty about Putin's coldbloodedness, his neo-Soviet habits; political jokes have not been in such fashion since the days of the last Kremlin dinosaurs, in the early eighties. "The atmosphere is not as oppressive as it was under Brezhnev, but it's sickening, and it says a lot, that such a Web site would appear and gain such popularity," Masha Lipman, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said. Putin's supporters just shrug. They welcome the lethargy. "Putin arrived as the man to stop the revolution," Gleb Pavlovsky, a bumptious intellectual with a dissident past who cultivated an image as the shadowy operative in Putin's last campaign, told me. "This is why the theme of his election campaign was Thermidor. His message to voters was that this will be the end of revolution. "Putin is an unrealized Louis Philippe," Pavlovsky went on. "He prefers family life and would like to keep his workday to eight hours and forget about it afterward. He's like the rest of the country in that way. After twenty years of revolution and surprises, people are tired. They're exhausted by the notion of thinking about an entirely new world, a new state, a new form of economy and thinking-new everything! And so they forgive Putin his weaknesses, because they know he feels the same things that they do." 3 When Yeltsin handed power to Putin, Putin, in turn, handed Yeltsin a package of comforts (the dacha, security, cars, drivers, etc.) and, more important, a grant of legal immunity. By the time he left office, Yeltsin was despised by so many people, and by so many politicians, that there was always the chance that he could become the object of prosecution. His rash and disastrous decision to unleash a war in Chechnya, the new economy of corrupted winners and resentful losers, and the collapse of basic industries and social services all made it impossible for most Russians to give Yeltsin credit for making the break with Soviet Communism. Indeed, the majority resented what the West most celebrated: the demise of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin and "the Family"-a team composed of his daughter Tatyana Dyachenko, various business tycoons, and several close aides such as Valentin Yumashev (who married Dyachenko) and the chief of staff, Aleksandr Voloshin-gave Putin the Russian Presidency mainly because he seemed competent and loyal. Putin ascended, in part, because after a decade of revolution hardly any political reputations had survived. As Boris Nemtsov, one of the many Kremlin ministers once thought to have a chance to succeed Yeltsin, told me, "Revolutions eat their young, to say nothing of their young politicians." In less than four years, Putin was summoned to work as a Kremlin aide, then was made chief of intelligence, then prime minister, then President. "Yeltsin's people created Putin out of a pot of clay," Leonid Parfyonov, one of Russia's leading television journalists, said. "We don't have a real party system, so the Kremlin gave birth and breath to this man." In many respects, Putin has maintained, and even furthered, Yeltsin's political course, especially in foreign policy and in his general support for the legislation needed to create a functioning market economy and legal system. Yeltsin has complained publicly only once about his successor. That was when Putin supported an effort to reinstate the Soviet national anthem, composed, with Stalin's approval, in 1943. Putin called on the deeply conservative writer Sergei Mikhalkov, who co-wrote the Soviet-era lyrics ("Party of Lenin, the strength of the people / To Communism's triumph, leads us on!"), to write some new verses to suit the modern era: From the southern seas to the polar region Spread our forests and fields. You are unique in the world, inimitable. Native land protected by God! Yeltsin took the revival as an affront. He had replaced the Soviet red flag with the tsarist-era tricolor and the hammer and sickle with the two-headed eagle, a symbol originating from the fifteenth century. Throughout the Yeltsin era, when a national anthem was called for, orchestras played Mikhail Glinka's 1833 hymn, "A Patriotic Song"-a tune without lyrics. Putin's anthem was an offense to the leaders of the democracy movement. "This is the music that accompanied the murder of tens of millions of people!" Aleksandr Yakovlev, a close adviser to both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, told me. "The entire literary and musical and artistic intelligentsia spoke out against it-Rostropovich, Solzhenitsyn, all of them! But Putin felt he had to make some sort of compromise with the Communist Party," which is still the leading opposition party in the country. "He also decided to revive the state prize called the Order of Lenin. And yet Lenin was a criminal who should be tried for crimes against humanity!" Putin's reasoning for having what Russians call a "postmodern" collection of symbols-some tsarist, some Soviet, some sui generis-is part of his everything-to-everyone strategy. Most Russians do not regret the loss of Communist ideology or their dominion over Eastern Europe, but they do mourn the past greatness of the "inner empire," the non-Russian republics that are now on their own. The Soviet Union, like the tsarist empire before it, commanded respect and fear in the world, and the anthem was consonant with that sense of position. Putin always wins applause when he tells a crowd, "Anyone who does not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union has no heart, but anyone who wants it restored has no brain." Putin's anthem is a hymn to past greatness and a promise of return-a popular and unifying sentiment. And so Putin felt he could summarily dismiss Yeltsin's objections. "We respect the first President, we listen to his opinions, and take them into account making decisions," he said. "But we act on our own." In Moscow and St. Petersburg, I rarely met anyone who did not say of Putin that he is "a good guy," "a normal fellow," "trying his best." He is even more unassailable in the provinces. To be sure, there were plenty of urban journalists and intellectuals who told me that they find Putin weak, indecisive, or even a closet authoritarian guilty of war crimes in Chechnya and determined to stifle dissent and an independent judiciary. For some, he resembles Alexander III, the conservative tsar who followed Alexander II, who liberated the serfs. "This is a time of an inert public," Aleksei Venediktov, the chief editor of the independent radio station Echo of Moscow, said. "Putin has no understanding of democracy in the Western sense. For him, order precedes everything else in the social contract." But that is an elite, minority view. Putin is equally popular among poor retirees, who often vote Communist, and young professionals, who barely remember the world before Gorbachev's perestroika. Yeltsin, too, came to office with high approval ratings, but he quickly exhausted those reserves by instituting painful (and often botched) economic reforms and committing, as with Chechnya, horrendous mistakes. Putin is intent on husbanding his rating, not merely because it will insure reelection but also because such a rating represents the very idea of his Presidency: post-revolutionary calm. In private, Yeltsin objects to a great deal more than the Stalinist anthem. "Now Boris Nikolayevich complains about Putin all the time," one politician told me. "It's not just the symbols. It's everything they stand for. He thinks Putin is too cautious. I think if he didn't depend on Putin for his well-being he would be a lot more open about it. As it is, he sits at home and bitches to the people he thinks he can still trust. And Putin knows this. Putin's relationship is easier now with Gorbachev than it is with Yeltsin. Sometimes it's easier to get along with your grandfather than it is with your father." Yeltsin, since leaving the Kremlin and transferring custody of the nuclear-weapons codes to Putin ("Take care of Russia!" he told his successor as he walked out the door), has lived almost obscurely, in a village about an hour from the capital, at the same gated dacha compound that he used while he was in power. In the last several years of his Presidency, Yeltsin was a feeble sight. He was often drunk, sometimes in public, and almost always sick. Weeks would go by with Yeltsin bedridden, incommunicado. "Boris Nikolayevich is reviewing documents," the Kremlin press service would tell reporters. "You should see him now," one of his closest advisers, Anatoly Chubais, told me not long ago. "Boris Nikolayevich has not looked so healthy in years. He barely drinks. He swims." In Yeltsin's totalist scheme of the world, you were with him or against him. Putin, by contrast, has repeatedly said, through statement and gesture, that he bears no grudges, makes no judgments, about the past. At his inauguration, in 2000, Putin invited his former boss at the K.G.B., Vladimir Kryuchkov, who engineered the failed 1991 coup against Gorbachev and has never apologized for it. "We have nothing to regret," Kryuchkov said at a roundtable discussion of former K.G.B. chiefs. "We only tried to save the Union. It's those who unleashed the present chaos who should think about repentance." "Kryuchkov was a true believer in Communism, who sided with the coup plotters," Putin has said, "but he was also a very decent man. To this day, I have the greatest respect for him." Another of the plotters, the former Soviet prime minister Valentin Pavlov, went out of his way to celebrate the new regime. "Today, they are trying to do what we attempted to do in the Soviet Union in 1991," he said. On the tenth anniversary of the defeat of the coup, two years ago, Putin made sure to draw no attention to an event that he knew the world recalled with joy and his countrymen with profound ambivalence: there were no Kremlin parades, no official speeches. The President went trout fishing in Karelia. At a dinner at "21" hosted by Tom Brokaw a few years ago, I sat with Putin, his translator, and some other media guests. Unlike Gorbachev, a notorious boltun-"windbag"-Putin spoke only when addressed. (And, unlike Yeltsin, he hardly touched his wine.) He parried our questions with cursory answers and even an occasional charmless roll of his eyes. In the interviews he has granted to Western outlets, generally before a foreign visit, he seems to go out of his way to be as boring as possible. When he spoke to students and invited guests at Columbia University a couple of weeks ago and at a meeting with American reporters at his dacha outside Moscow recently, he droned on in a style familiar to the reader of "The Collected Speeches of Yuri Andropov." As I sat with him at the "21" dinner, I felt that I had been with such men dozens of times in Moscow-ascetic former officers of the K.G.B. who were, thanks to their preparation and years abroad, comfortable in any setting yet who often betrayed a steely disdain for all the ignorance and opulence around them. ("I am not sure you understand what you are talking about," he told Katie Couric at one point.) With time, it's become clear that Putin's blandness and reserve are only in part a matter of innate character and professional posture; they are also a tactical choice, a determination that Russia endured long enough Gorbachev's soliloquies and Yeltsin's unpredictable and autocratic nature. This year, one of the most popular television programs in the country was a serialization of Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot." In the novel, the narrator says of Russia that "people are constantly complaining that we have no practical men," that the civil service is filled with incompetents who let the crops rot in the fields and the trains smash into one another. Although Putin is late to every appointment, he has carefully cultivated an image as Russia's first practical man, a distinctly un-Russian efficiency expert. Putin, the saying goes, "is our German." Putin's grandfather was a cook for Stalin at one of his country estates near Moscow. During the Second World War, Putin's mother nearly starved to death during the nine-hundred-day Nazi blockade of Leningrad (at one point, she fainted from hunger and was thrown onto a stack of corpses); his father was wounded at the front and survived only because one of his comrades dragged him across the frozen Neva River to safety; one child, a son, died of diphtheria. Putin was born after the war, in 1952. He grew up in Leningrad, and, like so many in that city, he and his family lived in a kommunalka, a communal apartment, where there was no bath, no hot water, and plenty of rats. "My friends and I used to chase them around with sticks," Putin once said. He was a mediocre student and spent most of his time playing in the city courtyards. If he had a real ambition, he got it from reading thrillers. "Even before I graduated from school, I wanted to work in intelligence. It was a dream of mine, although it seemed about as likely as a flight to Mars," he told the interviewers for a book-length conversation called "First Person," published in 2000. "Books and spy movies like 'The Sword and the Shield' took hold of my imagination. What amazed me most of all was how one man's effort could achieve what whole armies could not. One spy could decide the fate of thousands of people. At least, that's the way I understood it. "In order to find out how to become a spy, sometime back around the beginning of the ninth grade I had gone to the office of the K.G.B. Directorate," Putin continued. "A guy came out and listened to me. 'I want to get a job with you,' I said. 'That's terrific, but there are several issues,' he said. 'First, we don't take people who come to us on their own initiative. Second, you can come to us only after the Army or after some type of civilian higher education.' I was intrigued. 'What kind of higher education?' I asked. 'Any!' he said. He probably just wanted to get rid of me. 'But what kind is preferred?' I asked. 'Law school.' And that was that. . . . When I accepted the proposition from the Directorate's personnel department, I didn't think about the Stalin-era purges. My notion of the K.G.B. came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education." Putin studied law at Leningrad State University, and in his fourth year was recruited to join the K.G.B. Eventually, Putin was assigned to work in East Germany. A tremendous amount of journalistic energy has been spent trying to discern what Putin actually achieved in East Germany, and the answer is, clearly, not a lot. Dresden, where he was stationed, was a thirdrate assignment, as opposed to, say, Berlin. Putin collected information on visiting foreigners, he spent time trying to cultivate agents and sources, but he never had the chance to emulate the heroes of "The Sword and the Shield." His work was, in the main, dull. There were many idle days and nights in Dresden for Putin, his wife, Lyudmila, whom he married in 1983, and their two young daughters. "We used to go to a little town called Radeburg where there was one of the best breweries in East Germany," he said in "First Person." "I would order a three-litre keg. You pour the beer into the keg, you add a spigot, and you can drink straight from the barrel. So I had 3.8 litres of beer every week. And my job was only two steps from my house, so I didn't work off the extra calories." Putin gained twenty-five pounds in Dresden. The most eventful time in Putin's career as a spy came in his last weeks in Dresden, when signs of the collapse of Communism-and the Berlin Wall-became plain. Rather than face a potential insurrection and exposure as agents of the Soviet oppressor, Putin and his colleagues at the K.G.B. and the East German secret police, the Stasi, began to burn their files. "We destroyed everything-all our communications, our lists of contacts and our agents' networks," he said. "We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst. We burned papers night and day. All the most valuable items were hauled away to Moscow." Crowds began to demonstrate around the Stasi buildings and the K.G.B. outpost. "Those crowds were a serious threat. We had documents in our building. And nobody lifted a finger to protect us. . . . These people were in an aggressive mood. I called our group of forces and explained the situation. And I was told, 'We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.' . . . But that business of 'Moscow is silent'-I got the feeling then that the country no longer existed. That it had disappeared." Putin experienced Moscow's silence not as an ideological loss but, rather, as a betrayal of loyal professionals. He was a salaried satrap of the empire, and, as if in an instant, there was no empire, no rivalry with the United States, no stature, no money. Putin was ill-prepared for this. He and his family had not experienced at first hand the changes that Gorbachev had initiated in Moscow, the revelations about the Soviet past, the protests against the Party and the K.G.B. One former K.G.B. associate told me that if Putin had had any sort of future after Dresden he would have been assigned to the K.G.B.'s central headquarters, in Moscow. Instead, he was charged with watching foreign students at Leningrad State University-a lowly calling. The K.G.B. was already beginning to cut back on personnel as it became clear that the Cold War was over, and it was equally clear that Putin's intelligence career was coming to an end. Before it did, however, he encountered Anatoly Sobchak, a law professor at the university and a leading democrat, who would soon become mayor. A man of liberal ideals but a hopelessly inept administrator, Sobchak eventually hired Putin to help him run the city. Putin proved adept at learning the new rules of the market, though many of the deals he made collapsed. Boris Fyodorov, who served as finance minister under Yeltsin, told me that in those days he met "a dozen times" with Putin. "He was always extremely careful. He didn't look you in the eye. He mostly listened. He was still living in a communal apartment"-with his wife and daughters-"and he talked only about business and politics." When the coup plotters sent tanks into Moscow on the morning of August 19, 1991, Yeltsin led the resistance there; in Leningrad, the leader of the resistance was Sobchak. Putin, despite his K.G.B. background and his high regard for Kryuchkov, returned from vacation to help his boss. Sobchak, with Putin working the phones in the Mariinsky Palace, rallied the city against the coup; the demonstration on the square behind The Hermitage rivalled the biggest rallies in the capital. The post-coup euphoria was pervasive in Leningrad; Sobchak, like Yeltsin, was enormously popular. But as the years passed, and as Yeltsin's Kremlin came to resemble a Byzantine court, with warring factions of business barons and security chiefs, idealists like Sobchak became less welcome. Sobchak came up for reelection in 1996, and the most conservative faction in the Kremlin, led by Yeltsin's personal bodyguard, Aleksandr Korzhakov, propped up an opponent named Vladimir Yakovlev, who won by less than two per cent. "When Sobchak lost the election, Putin submitted his resignation," Sobchak's widow, Lyudmila Narusova, told me. "He said, 'Better to be hanged for loyalty than live rich from betrayal.' " Sobchak lived for a while with his family at his dacha outside St. Petersburg and then accepted a job in Moscow, in the Kremlin's property office. Even out of power, Sobchak remained a focus of attack: the St. Petersburg press became filled with accusations of corruption. In 1997, Sobchak, who was in his fifties, suffered a heart attack, and Putin, calling on his old connections in the K.G.B., organized a private plane to smuggle Sobchak to Paris for medical treatment. When Sobchak died of another heart attack, three years later, Putin wept at the funeral. "He did not die of natural causes," he told Narusova. Putin's demonstrations of fealty to Sobchak were a crucial part of what led Yeltsin and the Family to accelerate his career and, finally, to appoint him tsar. "They figured that he was a man of loyalty," Anatoly Chubais said, "and that his loyalty was transferrable." 4 Not long after he became President, Putin said he would tame the small group of selfdescribed "oligarchs" who had used their political connections to take ownership, or control, of the oil industry; banking; mineral, chemical, and metal plants; construction and realestate concerns; and, the most political of the economic sectors, the media. In 1996, the oligarchs had joined forces to help Yeltsin win reelection over the Communist Party candidate; they acted out of pure self-interest. "Don't forget the seriousness of that threat," Yegor Gaidar, the most liberal of Yeltsin's many prime ministers, said. "A return of the Communists to power in Russia really would have been a terrible danger for the world. Expectations are always high after a revolution and people are invariably disappointed, and so the Communists come to power again." The benefits that came to the oligarchs after Yeltsin's reelection-the properties, the contracts-were incalculable. As President, Putin soon met with the principal oligarchs and delivered a message: So long as you stay out of politics, you will be allowed to keep your properties, no matter how they were obtained. The Kremlin was already moving against the two who showed the greatest impudence: Boris Berezovsky, an industrialist and media magnate, whose political pretensions were too blatant for Putin to tolerate, and Vladimir Gusinsky, who had made his fortune in banking and Moscow real estate and his name by starting NTV, the first privately owned network in the country. Both were forced out of the country. Berezovsky lives in London, where he has tried, with little success, to launch an opposition movement against Putin. Gusinsky lives in Israel and in Greenwich, Connecticut; he lost control of NTV to a state gas monopoly, and now the network, while still less obsequious than the rest, is far less rambunctious than it had been. The most prominent oligarch remaining was a moonfaced oil executive named Mikhail Khodorkovsky. A former officer in the Young Communist League, Khodorkovsky is now forty and, according to Fortune, wealthier than any other man or woman in Europe. During the Gorbachev era, he was among the privileged young people who were granted the chance to test the new semi-capitalist market. In the late eighties, Khodorkovsky used Communist Party sponsorship and connections to begin a successful bank called Menatep; and by becoming an adviser to the Russian government he had unparalleled access to crucial information. Eventually, Khodorkovsky got into the most lucrative of all Russian businesses, the oil business, and through his connections, and through a ruthless series of maneuvers, he came to run the newly merged oil conglomerate Yukos-Sibneft. His company is so wealthy, and the rest of the economy so weak, that Khodorkovsky, by his estimate, contributes seven per cent of Russia's total tax revenue. He is worth around a billion dollars personally and told me that another eight billion is "under my control." I met Khodorkovsky at his head-quarters in Moscow, a glass office building that looked as if it had been airlifted from Houston. The Moscow of the twenty-first century is filled with such buildings. The old-style Soviet offices still functioning have the customary worn red runner carpets and smell like an overflowing ashtray; these offices have the smell of a new car, and they are invariably equipped with dozens of armed security men and six-foot-tall beauty queens dressed in Versace and Armani suits and bearing leather binders. Khodorkovsky grew up in a middle-class family, but his years of experience in the Young Communist League business offices and in the new Russian economy show. Many of the figures in big business felt that in the conference rooms of Europe and the United States a decade ago they were regarded as rubes-"They treated us like educated monkeys," the banker Pyotr Aven complained-but Khodorkovsky betrays no resentment. He seems at ease, self-contained, as if he had been born to riches. Although Khodorkovsky has never been as brazen in his political ambitions as Gusinsky and Berezovsky, he discovered that he was not immune from Kremlin pressure. Occasionally, Putin meets with the leading business figures in Moscow, and at one such session, earlier this year, the President attacked him sharply. When I asked Khodorkovsky about it, he flushed and smiled. He told me that he had been called on to talk about corruption involving a financial transaction between two oil companies. "Evidently, this was not the first time the issue had been raised with him, and it struck a raw nerve," Khodorkovsky said. Putin, various sources told me, grew angry with Khodorkovsky and, in paraphrase, told him to watch who was calling the kettle black where corruption was concerned. Everyone, the President said, knew how the men in the room had become so rich so fast. Khodorkovsky does not feign innocence. "I don't set myself up as a shining example," he told me. "Nor have I ever said that I've been a model citizen. On the other hand, it's possible to develop and change, especially in rapidly changing times. You can't just accord the right to change to successive generations. My life is a good example of this. It shows that in a single lifetime there can be two or more watersheds. Until I was in my mid-twenties, I was raised as a model Soviet citizen. I thought there was no other way to live. There were people, with more humanistic educations, who thought there was something not quite right with our lives. But not me. I thought it was all going quite well. It's funny to hear myself saying this now, but it's true. Then, from twenty-five till my mid-thirties, I was convinced that everything had been wrong and that absolutely everything was permissible. You could get away with not breaking any laws because there weren't really any laws. People, even in the West, tried to say I broke the law, but they were never able to prove it. Not everything was ethical. This is not something for me to be proud of. Those were tough times; the way we dealt with minority shareholders was not ethical. Then, from thirty-five onward, I've had a third life. You can't be involved in business and engage in politics successfully. Many have tried. They are abroad now." In his "third life," Khodorkovsky has championed "transparency" in corporate accounting and in the economy generally. He established a charitable foundation that has contributed huge sums to universities, the arts, and other causes. When he travels in the United States, he meets with top figures in Congress and the federal bureaucracy and mixes easily with other oil barons. These moves are as purposeful as Putin's seeming blandness. To encourage foreign investment, to borrow from foreign banks at normal rates, Russian businessmen like Khodorkovsky cannot have outlaw reputations. They must advance yet another generation or two, from John D. Rockefeller to David Rockefeller, from robber baron to scion of established industry. "In the West, things evolved more slowly," he said. "It took more than one hundred years to develop contemporary society. We've started from scratch. But we have a model to look at. It's easier to do your homework when you have the answers." A few weeks after we met, Khodorkovsky and his company came under attack from the Kremlin. Police arrested his partner and chief financial adviser, Platon Lebedev-himself a billionaire-on charges of theft, and prosecutors announced that they were investigating instances of tax evasion, fraud, and even murder. For weeks, there were interrogations, searches, threats. Analysts in Moscow said the affair was the result of an ongoing feud in the Kremlin between those who support the new capitalists and those who support the traditional bureaucracy. They say that Khodorkovsky's involvement in politics, his support for potential opposition factions, was something neither Putin nor the security forces would tolerate. Putin, for his part, denies as "utter nonsense" that he is behind the pressure; it is just the law at work. Either way, one Russian journalist said, "Everyone is taking bets about if and when Khodorkovsky will be forced to leave the country." 5 Putin may periodically lash out at the oligarchs, but, in general, the arrangements of power and influence have altered less than one might think. Putin, unlike his volatile predecessor, rarely fires anyone. Yeltsin's chief of staff, Aleksandr Voloshin, a bald and bearded man in his forties, has remained in place under Putin and, if anything, is more powerful than before. Two of the most influential aides, Igor Sechin and Viktor Ivanov, come from Putin's old haunt, the K.G.B.'s headquarters in St. Petersburg. And then there are smaller factions centered on the oil companies, the state gas monopoly, and other concerns. There is constant talk in Moscow political circles about Putin's lack of commitment to democratic principles, especially civil liberties. When I asked Anatoly Chubais, who now runs the state's vast electric-power system, whether Putin was a democrat, he laughed and said, "Is Silvio Berlusconi a democrat?" (As it happens, Putin is personally close to the Italian leader; his family has vacationed with the Berlusconis in Sardinia.) "The question should not be if he is a democrat or not," Chubais went on. "There is a spectrum of democrats that ranges from, say, Berlusconi to Tony Blair. Putin is somewhere within the spectrum, but he is closer to Berlusconi than he is to Blair. What he is not is Fidel Castro." Perhaps the comparison to Berlusconi is apt. Putin's control of the airwaves is, in its way, as complete as Berlusconi's. Putin has systematically neutered serious opposition in the media. In an international press-freedom index, Russia ranks a hundred and twenty-first out of a hundred and thirty-nine nations, according to the respected monitoring group Reporters Without Borders. Yelena Tregubova, a columnist at Kommersant, a leading daily newspaper in Moscow, told me that Presidential aides routinely call editors and threaten to "freeze out" their papers if they don't install "friendlier" correspondents at the Kremlin. Tregubova says that her own editor transferred her out of the Kremlin after feeling the pressure. "Putin reacts to criticism like a K.G.B. person," she said. "Everything that is not praise is some kind of threat to him." At his recent meeting with American reporters, Putin admitted, "I don't like provocative questions." Twelve years after the fall of communism, there is no Soviet-style censorship at work, no Central Committee's ideology department reviewing every news broadcast. Instead, in 1999, the Kremlin, which has full control of state television, installed a genial, like-minded fellowKonstantin Ernst, a former scientist-to run Channel One, the main station. Putin and his advisers know they can rely on him to keep matters under control. There are, of course, politicians and commentators who criticize the government. But within limits. "Freedom of speech is a relative notion," Ernst told me one afternoon in his office, a sleek lair of steel and leather where several televisions were playing soundlessly. "It does not exist anywhere in its ideal form. It's like an ideal gas that does not exist in nature, only in theory. In reality, freedom of speech depends on the government, on the editors and producers. Everyone has a different sense of what it means." Ernst admitted that he spoke from time to time with Kremlin officials, especially with Voloshin, and when I asked what would happen if they disagreed about editorial policy he flapped his hand and smiled, as if to dismiss so absurd a notion. "That's impossible," Ernst said. "It's easy for me to work here, because the Kremlin's foreign and domestic policy is always clear and understandable to me. A minimum of mistakes have been made. There is no mental distance between the majority view and government policy." Putin's opposition is weak, sporadic, disorganized, and ill-defined. Although the Communists remain the biggest opposition party in Russia, they are an aging party, one that likely missed its chance to capture the Kremlin in 1996. The leading liberal opposition parties these days are small and timid: the Union of Right Forces, which is "liberal" in the Friedmanite-Thatcherite sense; and Yabloko, which is "liberal" in the European socialdemocratic sense. These factions are represented in the Duma by some intelligent voices, but they are pathologically incapable of forming a coalition and tend to draw nearly all their votes in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and a few other large cities. When they show any sign of influence, Putin easily coopts them or slaps them down. I've known Grigori Yavlinsky since he was a young economist in the Gorbachev circle. Since 1993, he has led the Yabloko faction in the Duma. Now he is fifty-one, and he seems even more caustic, more frustrated than when I first met him. When I asked him about the opposition to Putin, he scowled and grew defensive. "Do you have a real opposition in Great Britain or Japan, much less in the United States?" he said. "So, if you are looking for one here, it's rather difficult. To have an opposition you need serious preconditions-an independent media, or at least a media that are not all in one hand. You need independent financial resources, a civil society, a special environment. The Duma is filled with people who are on the take, as if they were staff members for the government administration or one interest or another. We have no independent elections. This is almost a corporate, semicriminal system, and there are no alternatives that can be presented to the people. The system entirely serves one person." Yavlinsky blamed Yeltsin for the "rotten" state of affairs. "We tried to bring the Yeltsin era to a close as soon as possible. His time was over in 1993," he said. "Everything that came after was counterproductive: Chechnya, the default in 1998, criminal privatization. But Yeltsin tricked us in a special way. He brought a successor onto the scene. And his system was cemented in place. This system can create one successor after another. So be prepared for a very long and winding road. In this situation, you can either be a dissident or help to create a civil independent party. You need a strategy and you need to keep on the vector of human rights, liberal policy, human dignity, private property. The challenge is to be independent while accepting money from the likes of Khodorkovsky"-Yabloko is almost completely funded by Khodorkovsky-"or keeping an open dialogue with Putin, and understanding the regional bureaucracy, which is as loyal as animals to the President. Either people wake up and act or you wait indefinitely for the appearance of a 'good tsar.' My task in this system is to create an independent Russian democratic party. Eventually, we have to overcome, we have to create a post-Yeltsin era. Maybe in twenty years we'll get there." 6 In the days when Moscow was still the capital of an empire, the city was militarized. It wasn't just a matter of the occasional parades on Red Square, with all the ICBMs and tanks rumbling across the cobblestones, and the Politburo members waving absently atop Lenin's tomb. Everyday life was somehow militarized. Driving to work, you were forever following a troop truck with the sign "Lyudi"-"People"-tacked to a wooden back panel. Inside, a few dozen recruits in khaki uniforms sat on benches smoking and kidding around: there were recruits from every corner of the empire. The Russian Army, the inheritor of the structures, arms, and tactics of the Soviet armed forces, is now a shambles: a psychological wreck, a material ruin. Conscription is still universal, but only notionally so. It's easy to bribe your way out of the draft for a couple of thousand dollars. It is only the least skilled, the least educated, who enlist. Many of the draftees are illiterate and in such poor physical condition that they are useless as anything more than cannon fodder in Chechnya or as sources of abuse for their predatory superiors. Dyedovshchina, the sadistic, often fatal, hazing of recruits, is ubiquitous: soldiers are routinely humiliated and tortured by their commanders, beaten with sticks, chains, chairs, anything at hand. Every year, thousands are wounded and hundreds are killed or commit suicide; thousands more go awol as a result of the abuse. The Russian Army is preposterously top-heavy-there are five times the number of generals as in the American armed services-and, for many of those officers and commanders, life has been so leeched of a sense of mission and pride that they destroy themselves with drink; their salaries are so low that they ease into a life of corruption, petty or grand. In a rare case of prosecution, Colonel General Georgy Oleinik, a former financial official in the Defense Ministry, was convicted last year of "misappropriating" funds; it seems he misappropriated four hundred and fifty million dollars. Dmitri Trenin, a former career officer in the Soviet Army, is now a scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center. He remains well connected at the Defense Ministry. When we met one afternoon for coffee, he described the ministry as a "ghost town," with innumerable generals sitting at their clean desks doing little more than trying to maintain some semblance of the status quo and their own positions. These generals and officers, Trenin said, suffer from "a huge inferiority complex." Having spent their careers as the heads of a colossal military machine preparing for the possibility of an Armageddon clash in Europe, they have refused to change strategy or tactics. Even as Putin talks about the possibility of Russia one day joining nato, the Russian commanders still spend their energies devising ways to defeat it. Putin has so far been unwilling to reform the Army, to make it professional, smaller, more modern. The Army has lost, in effect, its last three wars: after a decade of fighting, the Soviet armed forces retreated from Afghanistan; in 1994-96, Yeltsin foolishly tried to bomb Chechnya into submission, but failed; the revival of that war in the late nineties has, until now, resulted only in-as Russians say-the "Palestinization" of Chechnya, a conflict that now includes suicide bombers. The Russian troops in Chechnya are incapable of keeping any kind of peace in the region, and routinely rape, harass, loot apartments, demand protection money from local merchants, execute prisoners, and even sell arms to the rebels. Key Chechen militant groups have accepted help from Islamic radicals, including Al Qaeda. "As a nuclear power, Russia is still potent. It still makes Russia the No. 2 country in strategic nuclear power," Trenin said. "But, apart from that, this military is so bad that it is a miracle that people are willing to go to Chechnya and risk their lives for the meagre pay that they get. The commander of the Kursk submarine"-which sank in 2000 owing to a mysterious explosion in the Barents Sea, killing a hundred and eighteen sailors-"got a salary of two hundred dollars a month. It is hard for me in Moscow to find a kid who will work here as an assistant for less than five hundred dollars a month. And this was a nuclear submarine with the power to annihilate a major country." The politicians who support fundamental reform of the Army insist that Russia requires around five hundred thousand troops, not the more than one million in uniform today, and a total rethinking of its structures and strategy. Alexei Arbatov, the deputy chairman of the Duma's defense committee, told me, "We are still oriented toward a war against the West. This stems from Russian military strategy since the days of Peter the Great. To change this is like telling the astronomers to stop relying on Newton and Kepler." When we met at his office in the Duma, I asked him how the Russian military leadership had reacted to the American military performance in Iraq. I expected him to attack the motives for the war and the manipulation of intelligence, the failure to discover chemical or biological weapons. "They reacted with shock and awe," he said with a smile. "They still do not understand that the American victory was due not just to technological prowess. It's civilian control of the military since the days of McNamara. In order to use that technology, you need a highly professional army." 7 Obsession with American power is universal. The Russians are obsessed with American power in their own way. Theirs is the reaction of the humbled rival learning to deal with an unaccustomed sense of weakness. This may be the most important emotion in all of Russian politics, and it shapes Putin's foreign policy almost completely. Two of Russia's leading political pollsters, Aleksandr Oslon and Lev Gudkov, both told me that anti-Americanism in Russia is far different from what it is in, say, France. The feeling comes and goes. During the American military actions in Kosovo and Iraq, and during the last Winter Olympics, when Russian skaters were accused of winning a gold medal through bogus judging, antipathy toward the United States ran high. But then it faded. "Generally, Russians have a positive attitude toward the United States, but there is this complex of defeat and humiliation and even neurotic sensitivity that flares up," Gudkov said. "Fifty-five per cent think the West and the United States are trying to colonize Russia, but the U.S. is still seen as a utopia because it is the most vivid example of a normal country." Putin's attitude toward the United States has proved flexible. When he began his term of office, the foreign-policy elites in Moscow-the Foreign Ministry lifers, the generals and admirals-anticipated that Putin would "stand up" to the United States more than Yeltsin ever did. With the exception of fairly marginal liberal politicians, most believed that Yeltsin was capable of great bluster with Washington but in the end would cave to every American demand and desire, be it in arms control, diplomacy, or trade. At first, Putin did seem a steelier, more readily offended negotiating partner than Yeltsin. Then came September 11th. "Right after 9/11, Putin gathered many politicians to talk about the role of Russia in the situation," Grigori Yavlinsky, the head of Yabloko, said. "The absolute majority of politicians said that Russia should be either neutral or even on the side of the Taliban. Only a few spoke up and said that we should support the United States." Putin went with the minority, with the liberals. He was, as it happened, the first leader of a major foreign country to call George Bush and pledge his support. That support included giving the American military critical intelligence reports on the Taliban forces in Afghanistan. These moves allowed Putin to make the argument to the West that, at this stage, the war in Chechnya was not a brutal assault but, rather, another front in the war against terrorism, and Washington, which had always at least lightly protested Russia's actions in Chechnya, now no longer does so with any conviction. Putin's decision on how to react to September 11th was easy compared with the question of Iraq. He was wary of an American invasion, and he came under heavy pressure from German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder and French President Jacques Chirac to join their opposition to Washington in the United Nations. He was also under heavy pressure at home. "People in the K.G.B. and the military-industrial complex wanted to block Putin's 'American connection,' " Sergei Karaganov, a former foreign-policy adviser to Yeltsin, said. According to several well-informed diplomatic and intelligence sources, Putin was told by his generals and intelligence chiefs that the United States would have an impossible job finding physical evidence of any weapons of mass destruction and that an invasion would take months, if not years, to accomplish. Putin does not seem to entirely trust his own Foreign Ministry to conduct day-to-day relations with the United States. During the Iraq crisis, he sent Voloshin, his chief of staff, to meet with officials at the White House. On other occasions, he has dispatched Dmitri Rogozin, the chairman of the Duma's foreign-affairs committee. Rogozin is an emotional nationalist, and is known around Moscow as a skeptic where the United States is concerned. "We see something of ourselves in America, for better or worse, and America is going through its golden age and we are at our nadir," he told me. "But we are having a rollercoaster ride, we are out of phase with each other. This is why our attitude to you is almost condescending." When I asked Rogozin about the war in Iraq, he smiled, as if with infinite pity, and said, "Everyone in Europe thinks it's a calamity. But we shrugged and realized there was nothing we could do about it. . . . Before the end of the eighties, there were still some forces deterring you. There was the Soviet Union a...
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