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Chapter 1
Floating Past the Hermitage
Who lost Russia? It’s an old argument, and it misses the point. Russia was never ours to lose.
Bill Burns, director of the CIA, March 8, 2019
It was a perfect “White Night” on the Neva River in late May 2002. The sun barely set, and Vladimir Putin’s romance with the United States—and the West—seemed at its zenith. The shock of the September 11 attacks, just eight months before, had not worn off. America was at war in Afghanistan, and George W. Bush was still struggling to define—in his own mind, and the world’s—what a “war against terror” would look like.
Bush had gone to Moscow to seek the help of Putin. As midnight neared, Putin and his wife at the time, Lyudmila Verbitskaya, were floating down the Neva River in St. Petersburg on a luxury yacht, headed toward the Hermitage, the vast collection of the Tsar’s treasures built on the site of Peter the Great’s Winter Palace.
Their guests that evening were Bush and his wife, Laura, and a gaggle of Bush’s aides. Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security advisor and later his secretary of state, was along, too. The sounds of traditional Russian music and laughter from their yacht wafted across the river as they cruised past the city’s spectacular waterfront, bathed in orange hues, and ate dinner on the deck.
The menu that evening included black caviar with chopped eggs, foie gras, and filet of beef—elegantly served during the dinner cruise by a brooding man in a dark suit. That night aboard the New Island yacht, we only knew he was Putin’s favorite caterer. Only years later did I learn that the man I saw that night was Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former convict turned restaurateur. He would, of course, go on to become a central player in much that would go wrong between Moscow and Washington, from trying to manipulate the United States’ 2016 election to recruiting prison inmates to fight in Ukraine for the private army he had founded—an army that he briefly tried to turn against Putin’s own regime. But that night, he was just Putin’s chef.
Just a few hours before, the Putins and the Bushes had been at the Mariinsky Theatre, watching a performance of The Nutcracker—not the lighthearted version typically served up around the holidays, but a much darker story. The set, the costumes, and the production were all done by a former Soviet dissident who had fled to America during the Cold War and returned after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The presidential visit, of course, was as choreographed as The Nutcracker. The storyline of the evening was that the Cold War was over, never to return. Like the Neva itself, Russia was flowing toward Europe, soon to be seamlessly intermingled in its waters.
Putin seized on that perception to show he was the man to run the project—helping Bush fight terrorism and guiding Russia toward international markets. On this evening, Putin played the gracious host, chatting with Laura Bush and joking with the American president.
Earlier in the day, the two leaders had signed an arms control treaty—not much of one, but a significant achievement since Bush had just abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, fearing it was getting in the way of his effort to defend America against a North Korean attack. Putin’s willingness to negotiate a new treaty, with modest cuts in each side’s nuclear arsenal, seemed to indicate that the two countries could still work together in limiting the fearsome weapons. The day was marked less by discussion of eliminating warheads than by their mutual agreement that terror was the biggest threat. There was vague talk of cutting arsenals even further.
The two men then headed to a vast lecture hall at St. Petersburg State University, where Russian students were invited to ask them anything—another stage-managed signal that a new era had dawned.
On stage, Bush and Putin’s seeming ease with each other was stunning to anyone who had witnessed the stiff meetings between U.S. and Soviet leaders during the Cold War. The two cracked jokes at each other’s expense and seemed overly familiar, referring to each other as “George” and “Vladimir.” The students asked not a single question about the arms control treaty, which to them may have seemed a remnant of a lost age. But they were deeply interested in Russia’s integration with Europe—and their prospects of studying and working abroad and, ultimately, finding lucrative employment back in Russia.
The sense of the evening, of the whole trip, was not simply that the Cold War was over but that with effort it could almost be erased from history. Bush’s visit—one of some two dozen with Putin during his presidency, ranging from the inner sanctums of the Kremlin to Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas—would come to seem emblematic not only of a lost age but of a lost last chance. Those visits, the performance, their walk by the burial place of the tsars in Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, were all part of an elaborate, consciously designed effort by both countries to convince each other and the rest of the world that Russia was coming into the West, and being embraced in return.
In background briefings, officials made clear they had even figured out the progression: Russia would join the World Trade Organization, just as China had done. Then, perhaps, the European Union. And maybe—just maybe—NATO itself, the organization that had been created to contain, and ultimately crush, the Soviet Union. There remained plenty of brewing disputes, many of them concerning the Western drift of the former Soviet states. But the idea that Russia might follow them into NATO didn’t, at that moment, sound insane.
Long after, Russians complained it was all a hoax, a vast shell game by the United States to keep Russia neutered. In their telling, America never intended to let Moscow into the club. It was just dangling enticements to tame the country into submission. The Russians suspected, in fact some said later that they knew, that in private American officials preferred to think of Russia as a vanquished former superpower. A common wisecrack was that it was “Italy, but with nuclear weapons.”
The Russians did not find such jokes particularly amusing. Even during that 2002 visit, one could sense the tension running just beneath the surface—even if few acknowledged it publicly. And for their part, as my New York Times colleague Michael Wines wrote early that week, the United States was not a particularly gracious winner. “American officials are not trying to spare Russian sensibilities,” he wrote. Wines quoted one of Russia’s top America experts, Anatoly I. Utkin: “For five centuries Russia never paid tribute to anybody. Now for the first time we became a minor partner. You are boss; we are partner.”
Years later, it would become nearly accepted wisdom in Washington that the Vladimir Putin of 2002 was playing out the early scenes of a drama of his own making, darker than The Nutcracker’s fantasies. But an alternative explanation considered that perhaps, back then, he was a different Putin—one who thought he could execute his agenda without overt confrontation. Or perhaps a bit of both versions was true—that he just wanted to extract what he could from the West until Russia was stronger.
Eight months before that sparkling night on the Neva River, Bush and Putin had found common ground following the September 11 attacks. Putin had been the first to call Bush—an act of goodwill that Bush brought up often. As the Pentagon and the World Trade Center towers burned, the Russian leader agreed to keep nuclear alert readiness levels to a minimum. It was the kind of thing responsible leaders do to make sure that military moves are not misread and do not lead to accidental escalation. But it was also a signal that, in the minds of the two men who oversaw more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, there was not even a whiff of superpower involvement in the attacks.
“For one brief moment the thought flashed through my head: The Cold War really is over,” Condoleezza Rice told me years later.
That declaration meant something coming from Rice. Long before she was George W. Bush’s right hand on foreign policy, Rice was known as one of the U.S. government’s most prominent young Russia experts. Her PhD dissertation, submitted at the age of twenty-six, focused on the military and politics of Czechoslovakia. She had studied Russian at Moscow State University. Her faculty mentor at the University of Denver, Josef Korbel, was the father of Madeleine Albright. Then she worked for Bush’s father and for Brent Scowcroft, the man many considered the model national security advisor.
By the time Bush took office in 2001, he already relied on Rice for everything from advice to admonishment. So it was no surprise she was along that night on the river, as advisor and occasional translator. When we talked about it almost exactly twenty years after that night on the river, she spoke of the trip—and the era—almost sentimentally.
Putin was the opposite of a communist fanatic. He was a royalist. He didn’t keep a bust of Lenin in his office; he kept one of Peter the Great.Highlighted by 206 Kindle readers
