From “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” by Timothy Snyder
When Putin was appointed prime minister by a failing Boris Yeltsin in August 1999, he was an unknown with a nugatory approval rating. The following month a series of buildings were bombed in Russian cities, apparently by the Russian secret state police. Its officers were arrested by their own colleagues with evidence of their guilt; in another case the speaker of the Russian parliament announced an explosion a few days before it took place. Nonetheless, Putin declared a war of revenge against Russia’s Muslim population in Chechnya, promising to pursue the supposed perpetrators and “rub them out in the shithouse.”
The Russian nation rallied; Putin’s approval ratings skyrocketed; the following March he won presidential elections. In 2002, after Russian security forces killed scores of Russian civilians while suppressing a real terrorist attack at a Moscow theater, Putin exploited the occasion to seize control of private television. After a school in Beslan was besieged by terrorists in 2004 (in strange circumstances that suggested a provocation), Putin did away with the position of elected regional governors. Thus Putin’s rise to power and his elimination of two major institutions – private television and elected regional governorships – were enabled by the management of real, fake, and questionable terrorism.