was proposed. That’s what hurt. They just dropped everything and went away.”
Putin saw Moscow’s failure to recognize its weaknesses and then adapt as a catastrophe. Having been its foot soldier, left practically alone to defend its interests from an angry mob, he longed for the strong, sovereign Russian state that had once been. He felt frustration that the center had never listened to the periphery. “Didn’t we warn them about what was coming? Didn’t we provide them with recommendations on how to act?” recalled Putin.
Nearly ten years later to the day, that young KGB agent would become Russia’s second president, unexpectedly replacing Boris Yeltsin as his health and personal popularity failed him. Putin’s experience from those years may explain what he meant when, later as president, he said, “He who does not regret the break-up of the Soviet Union has no heart; he who wants to revive it in its previous form has no head.”
“A Kind of Dream of the Soviet Past”
On January 1, 2000, Putin made a pledge to the Russian people. Few people he addressed that day were happy with what Russia had become. The decade that had followed the collapse of the Soviet Unionhad been marked by economic hardship, crisis, and unpredictability. The country’s early experiment in democracy had seemingly spawned little more than feuding politicians and fractious political parties that everyone assumed (probably rightly) were on the take. Cynicism rose as Russians came to believe that they had traded the sins of communism for the false promises of a corrupt democratic system. Worse yet, they felt as though they had been duped: they had followed the democratic model set by the West and had only been repaid with suffering, as a few profited at the expense of everyone else. And as if to add insult to injury, their country had been reduced from a superpower to something far more middling.
The moment, therefore, was ripe for what Putin promised on the first day of the new century. Beyond the pledges of growth and renewal, Putin offered the thing that everyday Russians missed most: “stability, certainty, and the possibility of planning for the future—their own and that of their children—not one month at a time, but for years and decades.” They were welcome words to those yearning for safety and security after a decade that left Russians feeling vulnerable and forced to fend for themselves. Putin’s vision was of a strong, resilient Russia that would return to its natural place as a great power. Moscow would no longer be silent.
Although he did not spell out how this stability would be achieved, Putin’s plan gradually revealed itself. If there is one defining characteristic of Putin’s brand of authoritarianism, it is the centralization of power. If Russian politics had become too noisy, divisive, and tumultuous, Putin set out to tame it. Russia would become more stable and predictable because it would, in essence, be directed by one man and the small circle of people around him. It was, as Putin and others would sometimes describe it, a “power vertical.” Among Russia’s political and economic institutions, the Kremlin would not settle for being first among equals; everything would be subordinate to it.
Putin began with the oligarchs. These Russian tycoons, many of whom had been awarded sweetheart deals for major centers of industry like gas, minerals, and steel, had become fabulously wealthy during the years of cowboy capitalism that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse. Within two months of Putin’s inauguration, the Kremlin warned these billionaire businessmen that they would be either loyalor out of business. Those who challenged this advice quickly found themselves in exile or prison. None learned this lesson harder than the oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was arrested when SWAT teams stormed his corporate jet in 2003 and placed him under arrest. His prosecution was clearly politically