Russia’s new prime minister did not falter, he did catch fire with the public, and the president did not reassess his vote of confidence. The politics of the four months following the August breakpoint belong more to the rising Putin era than to the fading Yeltsin one. Boris Yeltsin chose for himself the lame-duck status that pundits a year earlier saw as being inflicted on him by other people and by conditions. Putin as premier made almost no personnel changes, concentrating on mobilizing resources to deal with a pair of ripening crises.
The first of these was a deadly threat to the shaky peace in the North Caucasus, Russia’s most unruly area. On August 7, following several months of infiltrating villages, a force of 2,000 Chechnya-based guerrillas crossed into Dagestan, the multiethnic republic within Russia separating the Chechen lands from the western shore of the Caspian Sea. They proclaimed an independent Islamic Republic of Dagestan, with the desperado Shamil Basayev as its leader, on August 10. In early September, as the Russians were counterattacking in Dagestan, Moscow and two southern towns were rocked by nighttime terror bombings of apartment houses. Three hundred civilians were killed and the FSB blamed the violence on pro-Chechen fanatics. Putin was convinced that failure to respond would be the death knell for the country: “My evaluation of the situation in August, when the bandits attacked Dagestan, was that if we did not stop it immediately Russia as a state in its current sense was finished. . . . We were threatened by the Yugoslaviazation of Russia.”94 Russian tanks and troops entered Chechnya in early October and fought their way across the Terek River toward Grozny; they seized the city on February 2, 2000, and pushed on into the southern high country.
Putin asked Yeltsin to entrust day-to-day coordination of the military effort to him. Yeltsin “did not hesitate to support him,” the first time he had delegated so many of his national-security powers.95 Putin’s forceful prosecution of the war, and his verbal jabs at the rebels, had speedy impact on public opinion. He won further respect for announcing increases in pension payments from the federal budget, something the incipient economic recovery enabled. His approval ratings skyrocketed, and so did the number prepared to vote for him in a presidential election. If in August 1999 some 2 percent of prospective voters said they would cast their ballots for Putin, by September that was 4 percent and in October it jumped to 21 percent, overtaking Yevgenii Primakov and Gennadii Zyuganov. In November Putin’s forecast vote share had doubled to 45 percent; by the time of the election to the State Duma, on December 19, it stood at 51 percent.96
With Yeltsin’s encouragement, Putin also intervened in the Duma campaign, the second critical event that autumn. The favorite in the election had been the alliance patched together over the preceding year by Yurii Luzhkov. It took final shape in August as the Fatherland–All Russia Bloc, with the widely esteemed Primakov heading its electoral slate. The bloc was center-left and nationalistic in policy orientation and included many of Russia’s most powerful regional chiefs. With the involvement of Vladimir Gusinskii and the NTV television network, its materials depicted the central government and “the Family” around Yeltsin as corrupt and devoid of ideas. The burden of fending off Fatherland–All Russia was assumed by a pro-Kremlin coalition called Unity, which took shape only in September. Led by Sergei Shoigu, the minister for emergency management in all cabinets going back to 1990, Unity put forward a hazy program that mixed liberal ideas with populism, patriotism, and national unity. Berezovskii-controlled ORT television promoted Unity, sparred with Gusinskii and NTV, and attacked Fatherland–All Russia.
