Strongman, The

President Putin’s first steps in foreign policy and economic reform, described in the first two chapters of this book, was tempered from the start by wariness about his understanding of democracy.
    One of Putin’s earliest decisions as president was to start creating what he called the ‘vertical of power’ – the gathering-in of all political power to the centre, and effectively into his own hands. He believed that lack of central control lay at the heart of Russia’s woes, that Yeltsin’s weak leadership had allowed crime and corruption to flourish, oligarchs to amass power and the country’s regions to spin off into separate orbits. Yeltsin had encouraged the regions to ‘take as much sovereignty as you can swallow’, which had had the unwanted effect of allowing governors quietly to ignore or even sabotage edicts from the centre, threatening the disintegration of the federation. Many regions passed laws that contradicted the Russian constitution, withheld taxes from the centre and struck bilateral agreements with foreign countries. Some of them could have survived well as independent countries: the republic of Yakutia, for example, produces one-quarter of the world’s diamonds (and has a population of less than half a million); Khanty-Mansiisk (population 1.5 million) is the world’s second largest oil producer.
    On 13 May – just six days after his inauguration – Putin announced that the country’s 89 regions would be placed under the control of seven ‘super-governors’ personally appointed by the president. Five of Putin’s seven enforcers turned out to be siloviki 2 – men with careers in the security services and armed forces. They included Viktor Cherkesov, first deputy director of the FSB, whose work in the past had included the persecution of Soviet dissidents.
    Six days later Putin initiated a reform of the upper chamber of parliament (the Federation Council or ‘senate’). Previously, elected regional governors and heads of regional legislative councils were ex officio senators; now the regional bosses were replaced by nominated representatives, allowing the Kremlin to fill the Federation Council with ‘friendly’ senators.
    Putin then moved to centralise the collection and distribution of taxes, which had been about 50–50 between the centre and the regions, to 70–30 in favour of the central government.
    The apex of the new vertical of power was not the federal government, however, but rather Putin himself – something he achieved by appointing trusted colleagues from the security services or from his home town, St Petersburg, to key positions. Many of them, moreover, were also given directorships in state companies, thereby enmeshing the country’s political and business structures in a vast spider web, at the centre of which sat Putin.
    Igor Sechin had the perfect pedigree: he had worked with Putin in St Petersburg, and by some accounts may also earlier have been a spy, working undercover as a translator in Portuguese-speaking African countries. He became Putin’s most trusted adviser, and followed his master from St Petersburg to Moscow in 1996. When Putin became acting president he retained Yeltsin’s chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, but immediately appointed Sechin as deputy chief of staff, controlling the flow of papers that crossed his desk, and in effect running the energy industry. In 2004 he also became chairman of the board of Rosneft, the state oil company.
    Viktor Ivanov, from the Leningrad KGB, became Putin’s deputy chief of staff in charge of personnel matters – and also chairman of both the Almaz air defence corporation and Aeroflot. Sechin and Ivanov were considered the most powerful siloviki in Putin’s circle.
    Dmitry Medvedev, another former colleague of Putin’s from St Petersburg, came to Moscow in 1999 to become a third deputy chief of staff, and also chairman of the state gas monopoly, Gazprom.
    Putin brought his St Petersburg colleague Alexei Miller to Moscow to become deputy minister of energy and then CEO of Gazprom.
    The two chief economic reformers, German Gref and Alexei Kudrin, also came from St Petersburg. Gref served on the board of Gazprom, and Kudrin became chairman of both VTB bank and the diamond producer Alrosa.
    Sergei Naryshkin, another Leningrader and former colleague at KGB school, was promoted in Putin’s second term to government chief of staff, as well as chairman of the board of Channel One television and deputy