Putins Character Was Clear Long Before He Retreated to the Far End of the Table – Vanity Fair

Today, the world sees Vladimir Putin from a distance, isolated at the end of a very long table. When I first met him, in September 2000, he was at a very different table, in a private room at New Yorks 21 Club, at a dinner hosted by Tom Brokaw for 20 or so media luminaries. Brokaw had interviewed the recently elected Russian president for NBC a few months earlier. I was invited because I had just closed a lengthy profile of Putin for Vanity Fair, and also because my late husband, Tim Russert, was the anchor of NBCs Meet the Press.

The number one topic was why Putin had not interrupted his vacation when the Russian Kursk submarine sank, killing all 118 crew members. By then, Russians were fed up with years of his predecessor Boris Yeltsins often drunken antics, and Putin had quickly sought to impose order and restore government control over two media empires that were ruled by oligarchs he considered too independent. He was already making moves to eventually crush them. Hed also installed ruthless former KGB officials in key geographic super zones to supervise the unruly Russian parliament. Putin himself had won the presidency in no small part by promising to brutally eliminate separatists who had fought back in Chechnya, not entirely dissimilar to how the Ukrainians are fighting back today.

My head stuffed with facts about Russia after months of reporting out my Vanity Fair story, I immediately raised my hand when Brokaw said Putin would answer some questions. We had a back and forth about press freedoms that ended with Putin finally saying, Who are you? Where are you from? Why did you not come to me personally to ask me these questions? I pointed to his spokesman at the time, Alexey Gromov, sitting nearby. I have been trying for four months to interview you and he always said no.

A few months earlier, in June 2000, I had been present when President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and Clintons chief of staff, John Podesta, met Putin for the first time for bilateral talks on U.S.-Russian relations. The confab took place in the grand St. George Hall of the Kremlin, which had been freshly refurbished in Tsarist splendor. Clinton, who was buddies with Yeltsin, began a smiley, rambling talk that appeared mostly content-free. Meanwhile, the unsmiling Putin, who was very much prepared, sat by himself at his own table, dressed in a yellow-beige suit that matched both his complexion and demeanor. As Clinton went on, Putin, who slumped inattentively in his chair, began to drum his fingertips on the tabletop. Then they all retired to a smaller room with a conventional conference table, where some of us in the press were allowed to glimpse Putin presenting a bouquet of flowers to the American ambassador on his birthday. Later, at a carefully vetted press conference, Western journalists and Russian journalists sat apart and each group was allowed exactly four questions that had been submitted and chosen beforehand.

Going to St. Petersburg a few days later to research Putins origins, I learned about two qualities that defined him: the price he put on loyalty, and his reverence for the motherland, which was fueled by a deep resentment for the humiliation that he and his close circle of former KGB agents believed had been visited upon them by the U.S. and the West after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Shock therapy was the informal name of U.S. policy toward Russia in the 1990s. It was perpetrated by a group of Harvard professors led by Jeffrey Sachs and Andrei Shleifer, who were mentored by Larry Summers. Vice President Al Gore oversaw its implementation. The idea was to quickly replace the state-run economy with a free market one, but in practice the sudden removal of price controls and subsidies sparked hyperinflation, wiping out the savings of millions of ordinary Russians, and even causing starvation in some places.

I witnessed the hardship myself when I made my first reporting trip to Russia for Vanity Fair, in 1994, to chronicle the rise of the bernationalist politician and white supremacist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who I discovered had been secretly sponsored by the ever-powerful intelligence services to siphon votes off from Yeltsin. Zhirinovsky sat down with me in front of a map of the world and circled the old Soviet empire, then blithely drew an arrow straight down through Iran and wrote across 11 time zones, Russia. This belongs to us, he said. The U.S. can have North and South America, Europe can have Africa.

When the Soviet Union fell, the KGB was never dissolved, just halved into domestic and foreign branches. The domestic branch was rechristened the FSB. Putin is not a democrat, I was told in St Petersburg. Do you know what dermocracy is in Russia? In Russian, dermo means crap. I also learned that Putin, the only surviving child of working-class parents, came from a family that hates democracy. Indeed, Putins grandfather worked as a cook for Stalin. In his youth, the slight, 135-pound Volodya first gained recognition as a judo champion, renowned among his teammates for his ability to throw men twice his weight through cunning and surprise.

See the rest here:

Putins Character Was Clear Long Before He Retreated to the Far End of the Table - Vanity Fair