Susan B. Glasser
14 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
presidential administration to head o the
post-Soviet successor to the ¶³, known
as the Federal Security Service, or μ.
From there, he was appointed prime
minister, one in a series o what had been
up until then replaceable young Yeltsin
acolytes. Putin, however, was dierent,
launching a brutal war in the breakaway
republic o Chechnya in response to a
series o domestic terrorist attacks whose
murky origins continue to inspire con-
spiracy theories about the μ’s possible
role. His displays o macho activism
transformed Russian politics, and Yel-
tsin’s advisers decided that this ¶³
veteran—still only in his 40s—would be
just the sort o loyalist who could protect
them. In March 2000, Putin won the ¿rst
o what would be four presidential
elections. As in those that followed, there
was no serious competition, and Putin
never felt compelled to oer an electoral
program or a policy platform.
But his agenda from the start was
both clear and acted on with breathtaking
speed. In just over a year, Putin not
only continued to wage the war in
Chechnya with unforgiving force but
also reinstated the Soviet national
anthem, ordered the government takeover
o the only independent television
network in Russia’s history, passed a new
Çat tax on income and required Russians
to actually pay it, and exiled powerful
oligarchs—including Boris Berezovsky,
who had helped him come to power and
would later suspiciously turn up dead in
his British home. Over the next few
years, Putin would further consolidate
his authority, canceling elections for
regional governors, eliminating politi-
cal competition in the State Duma,
and surrounding himsel with loyal
advisers from the security services andEast Germany and the poverty he was
used to back home. Now, he saw his
country’s leadership, weak and uncertain,
abandon him, too. “We cannot do
anything without orders from Moscow,”
he was told. “And Moscow is silent.”
This is perhaps the most memorable
passage from Putin’s 2000 as-told-to
memoir, First Person, which remains both
the key source for understanding the
Russian president’s history and a prescient
document in which he laid out much o
the political program he would soon start
implementing. The revolution in East
Germany, as scarring as it was for Putin,
turned out to be only the prelude to
what he considered and still considers
the greater catastrophe, the collapse and
dissolution o the Soviet Union itself,
in 1991. This was the signal moment o
Putin’s adult life, the tragedy whose
consequences he is determined to undo.
Putin would go from his ¶³ posting
in the backwater o Dresden to presi-
dent o Russia in less than a decade,
ascending to the Kremlin on New Year’s
Eve in 1999 as Boris Yeltsin’s handpicked
successor. Yeltsin, aging and alcoholic,
had brought democracy to Russia after
the Soviet collapse but had soured his
country on the word itself, which had
come to be associated with economic
crisis, gangster rampages, and the crooked
giveaway o state assets to communist
insiders turned capitalists. By the end o
his two terms in oce, Yeltsin was barely
able to speak in public and was sur-
rounded by a corrupt “Family” o relatives
and associates who feared they would
face prosecution once they lost the
protection o his high oce.
Putin had arrived in Moscow at an
opportune moment, rising in just a few
years from an obscure job in Yeltsin’s