The day Putin took power

The civilians still there lived in cellars, the entrances covered by broken doors or planks. “People live here” had sometimes been scrawled on a nearby wall: both a public information message, and a cry of despair. These underground dwellers emerged only during daylight hours to buy what they could at makeshift market stalls by the side of roads, scarred by shells.

Food and water were scarce. Shelter, such as it was, hardly afforded safety or comfort. As the temperature rose with the approach of spring, dust filled the warming air. What it might have contained, with countless decomposing bodies beneath the broken buildings, it was better not to imagine.

Yet there was one part of democratic civilization that the Kremlin was especially keen to offer to these distressed and traumatised citizens at the southern edge of its territory: a vote. That Sunday in late March, Russia was due to go to the polls in only the second presidential election of its post-Soviet history, and only its third ever.

That Sunday in late March, Russia was due to go to the polls in only the second presidential election of its post-Soviet history, and only its third ever.

The previous summer, a little-known former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, had been appointed prime minister. He built his political image on his tough line against the rebels, sometimes making his point using language more suited to the barracks than the cabinet table. His popularity soared.

Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first post-Soviet leader, resigned on the last day of 1999. Putin, as prime minister, became acting president. He immediately showed his enthusiasm for his new role. New Year’s Eve is the biggest celebration of the year in Russia, but he did not spend time at home contemplating his new job. He flew to Chechnya, warning the separatists there that he would “wipe them out in the shithouse”, if that was where they chose to hide.

The Russian army did have some success on the battlefield to celebrate just weeks later. At the end of January, the bulk of the rebel force decided to retreat from their positions in Grozny. Their route lay across a minefield. The rebel commander, Shamil Basayev, was among those who lost limbs. Few tears were shed in Russia for a man who had previously masterminded the siege of a hospital during which thousands of patients had been held hostage.

On polling day, we foreign journalists were brought into Grozny by the Russian army: the military escort was both a security measure and a means of making sure we didn’t spend too much time talking to the civilians. The people from the cellars might have been a little too revealing about the behaviour of the troops who were supposedly there to protect them, but also largely responsible for their predicament. We left the city well before nightfall. At night, militants emerged to rule the streets that the Russian army still feared after dark. Basayev and his men had left, but they knew the city better than their enemies. They could sneak back to strike.

The presidential election confirmed Putin in his position at the summit of Russian power. A quarter of a century later, he is still there.

The Chechen War, with its disregard for civilian lives, set the tone for the landmarks of Putin’s career: further conflicts in Georgia, Crimea, Syria, and then, eight years after the seizure of Crimea, an attempt to conquer the rest of Ukraine. The pattern was grimly repetitive: heavy bombardment of civilian areas, with little care for casualties, to destroy everything that could not be captured. This is where it began.

There was another reason why my cameraman colleague and I needed to leave in plenty of time. In those days, you could only send broadcast television material from a television station, or from a satellite dish large and powerful enough to give the required picture quality. We had a long drive ahead of us to send our report. It was also that day that, for the first time, I saw a news agency photographer sending digital pictures via a satellite phone.

It seems now like a prophecy of how, under Putin, Russia would also make use of the coming technological revolution to export political chaos around the world. But the day when Russian propagandists could send disinformation directly to devices that we all carried in our pockets seemed then like science fiction.

Putin was inaugurated as president in early May. Keen to show that the rebellious region of Chechnya was being brought back fully under the Kremlin’s control, the foreign ministry started to organise regular trips for foreign correspondents. I returned in June. The mild air of spring had given way to the parching heat of a Caucasus summer.

We had to travel, as before, under military supervision. One of the civilian officials with us was fluent in the Chechen language, which was an extreme rarity among Russia’s majority Slavic population. Chechen bears no resemblance to Russian, and so I assumed this linguistic skill had been learned during KGB training. Despite the close oversight, we did learn some things we were probably not supposed to hear.

One afternoon our bus picked up two hitchhikers, a young Russian officer and his girlfriend. The officer bragged at length about the amount of racketeering his unit was involved in, in particular the illicit sale of army petrol supplies. I thought of him afterwards when reading a dispatch from the war written by the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, in which she described soldiers selling their ammunition to buy vodka and hashish.

The encounter with the racketeering officer said much about Putin’s new Russia. Corruption cursed almost every aspect of the system: from the petty bribes demanded by traffic police, to an army unable to subdue militant groups because it was also trying to do business with them. Politkovskaya’s peerless reporting of all that was wrong with the war was a perfect example of something else: the stunning work that Russian journalists once produced. They will do so again, when they are allowed.

Politkovskaya herself writes no more. It took an assassin’s bullet to stop her pen: she was murdered in the entranceway to her apartment block on 7th October 2006. It also happened to be Putin’s birthday. I met her twice, and I remember the long conversations in which we compared our experiences of reporting from Chechnya. Her undaunted determination to tell the story struck me then, and stays with me now.

For in her work lay clues to Russia’s warlike future. It seems clear now that most western policy makers never understood the depth of the humiliation Russia felt at the end of the Cold War, and ignored its road to revenge until it was too late. That road started in Grozny, that dusty spring, and continued in Russia’s assault on its southern neighbour, Georgia, in the summer of 2008. That short war created two separatist territories within Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Russian protectorates in all but name.

The world shrugged. There was condemnation, but Russia remained part of the G8, as the leading group of industrial nations was then called. For Putin, the objective was achieved: stopping his southern neighbour from joining Nato for the foreseeable future, something that Georgia, along with Ukraine, had been promised months earlier at a Nato summit in Bucharest.

For the last three years, I have been working on a history of Russia’s relations with the West since the the Cold War. The problem with the promise made at Bucharest is that it gave no detail or timescale. One of the senior diplomats I have interviewed described it as, “probably the worst bit of diplomatic drafting ever”.

You can argue about the wisdom or otherwise of Nato’s post-Cold war eastern enlargement. It is a matter of opinion. It is a matter of fact that Putin has used it to considerable domestic political advantage as he portrayed Russia being surrounded: something only he was capable of stopping.

That has meant repression at home, and, eventually, aggression abroad. War in South Ossetia was followed by the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and an even greater war on Ukraine that began in 2022.

Putin is now the leading threat to European security. When he strolled through the Kremlin’s gilded halls in May 2024 to be inaugurated for a fifth time as Russian president, his armies were at war in Ukraine. His critics were dead, jailed, or exiled. Now, taken seriously by Trump, Putin sees Russia back where he wanted it to be: respected, even feared, as the Soviet Union once was. It all began in the dusty, deadly, ruins of Grozny a quarter of a century ago.

James Rodgers’s next book, on Russia and the West since the Cold War, will be published by Yale University Press