Putin by Chris Hutchins

Author:Chris Hutchins [HUTCHINS, CHRIS]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd

11

Yeltsin’s Bombshell

IT WAS COMMON KNOWLEDGE among Vladimir Putin’s friends that he had familiarised himself with the history of Napoleon Bonaparte, the ‘Little General’ who had imposed order on France after the chaos and bloodshed of the French Revolution. Anatoly Sobchak certainly knew this. ‘Putin has the same principles and goals that Napoleon had in his time,’ he said in an interview in 2000. ‘Restoration of state authority.’ Sobchak was confident that, once in power, his one-time pupil would restore that authority to Russia, although he could never have anticipated how difficult the task was to prove and how painfully slow its progress would be.

Sobchak had spent a year and a half in voluntary exile in France before returning to Russia in July 1999, a month before Putin was appointed Prime Minister. More than 100 journalists thronged St Petersburg airport to meet his plane. Exuberant as ever, Sobchak said he would never go away again. ‘You don’t need to rush,’ he said, ‘because I have returned forever. I have arrived in my city, and I am happy to be home.’

When his protégé was installed as prime minister, Sobchak believed himself immune from prosecution. By late 1999 all criminal charges against him had been dropped and the former law professor was poised to return to national politics.

Unity became a credible force within a matter of weeks and helped to consolidate Putin’s position, but he held back from personally endorsing the party. It was an untried enterprise and if it failed in the parliamentary elections he would be severely handicapped in the upcoming presidential race. His advisers were stunned when, during a television interview, he suddenly committed himself. Asked which party he would vote for, he replied: ‘There is only one party that clearly and definitely supports our cause, and that’s Unity’. He had considered Abramovich’s advice that Unity was a winner and acted on it. In the event, he made the right choice: on 19 December 1999, Unity won 23 per cent of the vote. It polled only around 10 per cent in Moscow, where Luzhkov dominated the electorate (and was re-elected mayor), but it was a different story in the regions, owing to Abramovich’s intervention with the governors. Sobchak and his wife Lyudmila, however, both lost their bids to be elected.

If Primakov and Luzhkov thought they had time to recover before the presidential election, which was expected to take place the following summer, they were about to be wrong-footed in a most spectacular way. Twelve days after the Duma elections, Yeltsin did the unthinkable: he resigned his presidency on primetime television during his annual New Year address. The wily old fox had taped his address as usual on 28 December but, after signing off with New Year greetings to his people, he told the producer that he was not happy because he sounded hoarse. He said he would tape it again shortly before its transmission on New Year’s Eve. He knew all along what he intended to do – use his

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