Free Strongman by Angus Roxburgh Page A

... he was a
tank, an engine, and totally committed to the reforms’.
    Gref’s Centre was a kind of brains trust. He recalled in an interview later: ‘You know, what we were trying to do was to have consensus in society. We wanted to shape the programme
with maximum input from intellectuals, academics, researchers, managers, economists. Part of the reason why we wanted public consultation was so nobody would think that it came from nowhere, so
everybody would help to implement it. So the first task was to involve as many people as possible.’ 2
    Not all the ideas that came flooding in were exactly what he had in mind. Gref smiled wryly as he recalled one contribution. ‘We received all sorts of ideas, and some of them were pretty
exotic, to be honest. One of the institutes of the Academy of Sciences offered us a set of measures which in effect would have brought back socialism. I remember their idea was to create a national
fund for the payment of all salaries and then to standardise them all.’
    Over the next six months the team held scores of briefings and brainstorming sessions, gradually sifting through all the proposals and pulling together a plan. Putin would occasionally attend,
mainly listening and asking questions, often raising the question of how the reforms would impact upon social welfare. He also had his own economics guru, Andrei Illarionov, whom he used as a
sounding board, and in some regards as a counterbalance to the Gref team.
    Gref had invited Illarionov, the director of the Institute of Economic Analysis, to join the Centre, but according to Illarionov it was ‘too Keynesian’ for his liking, so he
declined. Illarionov was, and remains, something of an oddball, a maverick who likes to challenge conventional wisdoms. Today he is a leading climate-change sceptic. In the late 1990s he had been
fiercely critical of the policies that led to the country’s financial crisis and default in August 1998. Perhaps it was his willingness to speak out that attracted Putin’s attention
(though some years later it would cost him his job). On 28 February 2000 the acting president called him and asked him to come out to his dacha at Novo-Ogaryovo, just outside Moscow, to
‘chat’.
    The two men spent all evening discussing the economy – or rather, economics. ‘He didn’t just want to know about interest rates and so on,’ Illarionov said in an
interview. ‘He wanted to get a general understanding of economic reforms, what kind of economy we needed, what should be done, and how it should be put together. He was clearly learning a lot
in a very narrow area that was not his speciality.’ 3
    At one point they were interrupted by an officer who handed Putin a piece of paper. The acting president was delighted: it was news that the rebel-held town of Shatoy in Chechnya had just been
retaken by Russian forces. Illarionov was quick to pour cold water on Putin’s celebration. A longstanding opponent of Russia’s intervention in Chechnya, he told him bluntly that what
was going on there was ‘a crime’. Illarionov says he argued that Chechnya should be allowed to become independent, that it could never be crushed militarily and that the response would
be an upsurge in terrorism which would backfire on the Russian people.
    They had a furious argument. Putin insisted the rebels had to be annihilated. ‘His voice even changed,’ said Illarionov, ‘from the normal one he’d used when discussing
economics. Suddenly some sort of iron, or ice, came across. It was a kind of transformation of the personality in front of your eyes – like seeing a completely different person. It seemed we
could fall apart at any moment, without any possibility of reconciliation.’
    After about half an hour, when it was clear there could be no meeting of minds, Putin suddenly announced: ‘OK, that’s enough. We will not talk any more about Chechnya.’
Illarionov recalled: ‘He just stopped this conversation,