Strongman, The

the facts were murdered and a third was killed in a car accident, while the commission’s investigating lawyer was arrested and jailed for alleged illegal arms possession. The journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, both of whom investigated the bombings, were murdered in 2006.
    The second Chechen war was intended to avenge the humiliation suffered by Russia in the first, and to put a halt to what Putin apparently regarded as an Islamist threat to the entire country. One of his closest advisers told me on condition of anonymity that Putin feared his tenure as prime minister might last only a few months (like that of his predecessors) and he wanted to use the time to prevent Russia from falling apart. ‘The Chechen invasion into Dagestan was a signal from the bandits that they could go further, along the Volga river into some of our Muslim republics – Bashkortostan and Tatarstan.’
    I have never heard Putin (or any other Russian leader) speak about the real grievances of the Chechen people – their mass deportation from their homeland to Central Asia under Stalin, the swamping of their culture and language by the Russians during the Soviet period. Nor is there much awareness of the fact that it was the brutal Russian invasion in 1994 that radicalised the Chechen fighters and encouraged Islamic fundamentalism – of which there was not a whiff when I visited the republic before the first war. It was the war, and the atrocities committed by Russian forces, that turned mere separatists into ideologically driven terrorists. Without that understanding, Putin’s new war was bound to make matters even worse.
    He soon began to reveal the sharp tongue and earthy language that became his trademark. Asked about the ferocity of the Russian campaign, he replied, on 24 September: ‘We’ll pursue the terrorists wherever they are. If they’re in an airport we’ll get ’em there. If we catch ’em – excuse the expression – in the toilet ... we’ll wipe ’em out right there, in the outhouse. End of story.’
    Putin’s campaign quickly raised him out of obscurity. But he was not yet the country’s most popular politician. One of his predecessors as prime minister, Yevgeny Primakov, had publicly denounced the corruption in Yeltsin’s entourage and declared his intention of running for president. Together with the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, he created a political bloc, Fatherland–All Russia, which looked set to do well in parliamentary elections in December, giving him a springboard for the presidential election scheduled for June.
    It was at this point that Boris Berezovsky stepped in to ensure the victory of the Family’s candidate, Putin. Berezovsky threw the entire weight of his ORT channel behind him, while mounting a sustained smear campaign against Primakov and Luzhkov. He hired a well-known presenter, Sergei Dorenko, who specialised in scandal, sensation and brazenly biased commentary. Berezovsky was delighted to let him take fire at Primakov, who as prime minister had had his companies raided and threatened to jail businessmen like him for economic crimes. Night after night, Russia’s main TV channel harped on about Primakov’s old age and infirmity and Luzhkov’s alleged corruption, while glorifying Putin’s heroics in Chechnya.
    Meanwhile the inner circle – Berezovsky, Yumashev and Tatiana Dyachenko – met secretly at the dacha of Alexander Voloshin, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, to create a political force to support Putin. In September, three months before the Duma election, a new party was born, called Yedinstvo (Unity). It had no roots, no philosophy, practically no policy other than its support for Putin, but it did have the unabashed endorsement of Berezovsky’s ORT and several of his newspapers. On 19 December it won almost twice as many votes as Fatherland–All Russia. The scene was now set for Yeltsin to resign on New Year’s Eve and hand over power to his prime minister and chosen successor.
    The day after the Duma election was ‘Chekists Day’. Continuing a Soviet-era tradition, most professions in Russia have one day in the calendar in their honour, and this was the day of homage to the country’s present and former secret police (originally known as the Cheka). In the morning Putin restored a plaque on the wall of the FSB headquarters, the Lubyanka, in memory of Yuri Andropov, the KGB chief when Putin joined up. The plaque had been removed