Strongman, The

in February 2004, Serdyukov was immediately moved to the tax ministry – where he was put in charge of the case against Khodorkovsky, and within two weeks promoted to be head of the Federal Tax Service. Putin now had a man he could trust to assemble the most damaging evidence against his enemy.
    The two faces of Putin
    The events described in this chapter – the stifling of the media, the establishment of the ‘vertical of power’ and appointment of Putin’s cronies to key jobs, the war in Chechnya, the callous response to the sinking of the Kursk , the taming of the oligarchs and the persecution of Khodorkovsky – all had a salutary effect on those in the West who had decided from the outset to do business with Putin. The man who was stretching his hand out to Western leaders, and implementing welcome economic reforms at home, was at the same time acting true to type, confirming his own phrase: there is no such thing as an ex-Chekist. His actions strengthened the hand of those in the West – particularly in the Bush administration – who from the start had advocated a tough stand against him.
    In Britain, the Observer newspaper expressed a common view, saying it was now ‘crunch-time’ for Putin, and he must decide who he wanted to be. ‘Is he the westward leaning ally of President Bush and Tony Blair, or someone whose real affection is for the bad old days of the Soviet Union? ... If Mr Putin opts for the authoritarian path, then it is time for London and Washington to reassess relations.’ 17
    But just as the West was disillusioned with Putin, so Putin was also becoming disillusioned with the West he’d been so keen to court.

 
    5
NEW EUROPE, OLD EUROPE
    A foot in NATO’s door
    It was Tony Blair, perhaps, who best understood the ache that gnawed at Vladimir Putin’s KGB soul. The two men continued to meet regularly after the ground-breaking first visit to St Petersburg before Putin was elected. As well as formal talks they had jeans-and-shirt-sleeves get-togethers at Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence, and tête-à-têtes over vodka and pickled gherkins at Pivnushka, a Moscow beer hall. Blair tried to soothe the Russian’s anxieties about American plans for a missile defence shield. And behind Putin’s bluster about how Moscow would have to take counter-measures he sensed a deeper problem.
    One of Blair’s aides, in an off-the-record interview, put it in terms that were so condescending they would have incensed Putin had he known this was what Blair thought: ‘The main thing Tony took away from those meetings was the need to treat them seriously. Their problem was that they felt excluded from the top table and weren’t being treated as a superpower. You had to show them respect. Even if they weren’t really a superpower any more, you had to pretend they were . This was the point Tony made to the Americans.’
    To put flesh on the idea, Blair came up with a proposal to create a new NATO–Russia Council (NRC), to bind the Russians more closely to the Western alliance – stopping well short of membership, but at least giving them a sense of belonging to the club. The NRC would represent a significant upgrading of relations from the consultative ‘Permanent Joint Council’ that had existed since 1997 and given Russia zero influence over the alliance’s actions. Russia would now have a permanent ambassador at NATO headquarters, who would participate in sessions of the NRC on a par with each of the 19 other ambassadors – not ‘Russia plus NATO’, in other words, but ‘Russia plus the US, France, Britain, Germany’, and so on.
    Blair’s initiative went down well in Western capitals, where it was seen as a realistic alternative to the more fanciful vision of actual NATO membership, which some, including the German chancellor, had discussed. The idea soon got hijacked by the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who had also been striking up a bond with Putin. The two men were rather similar in temperament – equally ‘blokeish’, equally vain and with a similar taste in earthy or tasteless jokes. Putin also saw in Berlusconi’s media empire some justification for his own control of Russian television.
    One Friday evening early in 2002, NATO’s secretary general, George Robertson, had just got off a plane at Edinburgh airport, heading for a weekend at home in Scotland, when his mobile phone rang. It was Berlusconi. He had decided that Italy would host a special