Strongman, The

close friends, often visiting each other with their families. Putin would even fly out to the chancellor’s home town of Hanover just to celebrate Schröder’s 60th birthday with him. Putin enabled Schröder to adopt two children from St Petersburg. After leaving office Schröder became chairman of Nord Stream, a Gazprom affiliate that would bring natural gas straight from Russia to Germany (which he had supported as chancellor), and dropped all criticism of Putin’s policies. (Chirac, by contrast, turned down Putin’s offer of a highly paid job with Gazprom.)
    In an interview, Schröder looked back at his relationship with Putin and described him as a ‘man you can trust’. ‘He was open, and in contrast to his image he has a lot of humour. He is very family-oriented, and he doesn’t let down his friends. He’s someone I would be glad to have a beer or glass of wine with even if I didn’t have to deal with him politically.’ 8 Those were clearly the words of a man who had no intention of disparaging a colleague who was still in office and with whom he maintained close business and personal ties. But that does not make them irrelevant. On the contrary, the close relationship between Putin and Schröder – and between Putin and Chirac – was a major factor in the early 2000s as Russia tried to position itself in the world.
    With the UK balanced somewhere between the ‘European’ view and the American, compromises had to be thrashed out – among them NATO’s two major decisions of 2002. In May the NATO–Russia Council was set up, bringing Russia closer to the club. But six months later, at a historic summit in Prague, NATO invited seven former Soviet satellites to become members of the club. It wasn’t quite what Putin had in mind when demanding to be treated as an equal.
    NATO’s sun shines on eastern Europe
    The lights go down in the seventeenth-century Spanish Hall of Prague castle. On a stage two dancers perform a hilarious piece by a Czech-born choreographer, Ji ř í Kylián, to music by Mozart. The dancers are dressed (somewhat scantily) in period costume and wigs. In one part of the performance they leap about like fleas, performing crazy mating rites on a huge four-poster bed. But the audience is not composed of President Václav Havel’s bohemian buddies from a Prague theatre: they are the heads of state and 700 guests from NATO’s present and future member states – not all of them expecting such a raunchy curtain-raiser to the alliance’s enlargement process.
    The Prague summit on 21 November 2002 was Havel’s swansong as president of the Czech Republic. The playwright-turned-politician wanted it to be remembered both for its artistic panache and its historic significance. He had spent most of his life as a dissident, stubbornly resisting communist rule and protesting at the Soviet occupation of his country. His own country was already a member of NATO; now he wanted to celebrate the freedom of seven more nations.
    It was hard for the Russians to understand that this really was about celebrating freedom (from communism), not threatening Russia. The foreign ministry spokesman, Alexander Yakovenko, spoke darkly about ‘the appearance of NATO’s military potential at Russia’s borders, just a few dozen kilometres from St Petersburg’.
    The foreign minister himself, Igor Ivanov, put a positive gloss on the event: ‘Moscow no longer considers NATO’s eastward expansion as a threat, since the alliance has undergone a radical transformation since the end of the Cold War and now concentrates on the fight against global terrorism.’ But the Russians did not really understand why enlargement was necessary. It was not just that they believed that Gorbachev had been promised it would not happen. They also could not understand why, if Russia was accepted as a partner, anyone should feel they needed protection from them – and they understood perfectly well that despite all the protestations to the contrary, NATO would defend its new members against Russia if necessary. After the handshake of the NATO–Russia Council, Prague came as a slap in the face.
    What the Russians failed to do was make any connection between their policies and behaviour at home and the way they were perceived abroad . This was a problem I had to grapple with a few years later when I worked as a media adviser for the Kremlin: my clients were unable to grasp that the key to improving their ‘image’ abroad was not