Vladimir Putin’s performance as Russian premier had, by the first of November, won him high approval. The ex-KGB professional, publicly tapped by Boris Yeltsin as his preferred successor, has begun to show the political acumen that attracted the attention of Yeltsin and his “family,” the presidential entourage, who are very worried about the anti-family coalition formed by Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and Yevgeni Primakov, whom the Kremlin now fears far more than the Communists. Putin’s task is to undermine Primakov, and the Kremlin may have concocted an appropriate crisis to help him do it.

The plot—as described by the many Kremlin deep throats looking to distance themselves from the family as the end of Yeltsin’s term approaches—goes like this: Disappointed by Sergei Stepashin’s unwillingness to do their dirty work, Yeltsin and the family needed a suitable replacement. Putin is an old KGB hand with great experience in collecting—and effectively using—kompromat (“compromising material”), and his connections in the “power ministries” (Defense, Internal Affairs, Intelligence, Security) could prove useful. To undermine the popular Primakov, the Kremlin had to stage an event which would place the spotlight on their man, showing him to be as adept at geopolitics as the wily “Primo,” distracting voters from the Kremlin’s involvement in the Bank of New York-Mabatex scandals, and, finally, uniting Russians behind their government. The Kremlin’s splendid little war in the Caucasus was made to order.

Chronicles readers are already familiar with a related plan involving Kremlin courtier Boris A. Berezovsky (BAB), who probably made use of his ties with Chechen warlords to encourage—and, along with Osama bin Laden and assorted Muslim states, help pay for—the Islamists to launch their invasion of Dagestan last summer. BAB may also have been involved in planning the series of terrorist bombings that left some 300 Russians dead this fall. The idea seems to have been to push the Kremlin to declare a state of emergency and then call off the upcoming elections, but somewhere along the line the plot took an unexpected turn, as the Russian General Staff pushed events in a new direction.

The generalitet has been thirsting for revenge since the 1994-96 Chechen debacle, which left the Russian army humiliated and transformed the mountainous republic into a criminal wonderland where the chief growth industry is kidnapping and the oil refineries are manned by Russian techno-slaves. The combat in Dagestan and NATO’s bombing of Kosovo deeply impressed Moscow’s generals, who are neither as stupid nor as clumsy as they appeared during the Chechen fiasco. The fighting in Dagestan turned the tables on the Chechens. With the Islamists now cast in the role of the aggressor, the Russian public supported efforts to turn back the Islamic hordes. Then came the bombings. The terrorists, according to sources in the Federal Security Service, employed a very rare ingredient called hexogen, which is used b’ the Russian military in its latest generation of munitions and is stored in a few high-security defense plants. The fear ignited by the terrorists bombings and the momentum gained by the military during the Dagestan fight gave the generalitet the opening it wanted, first invading Chechnya (ostensibly to set up a “security zone” in the third of Chechen territory north of the Terek River), then expanding the operation, blasting the Chechen “infrastructure” to bits, and setting off a mass exodus from the rebel republic. Putin and the generalitet closely followed NATO’s blueprint, setting up a “Russian Information Center” to carefully ration—and manipulate—information from the Caucasus battleground. In the meantime, Putin has talked back to the NATO and E.U. busybodies, telling them that if NATO can act as it has, so can Russia. The Russian public is eating this up, and Putin’s poll numbers are now nudging Primakov’s.

Still, the Kremlin probably looks at Putin as a stopgap who can put the brakes on the Luzhkov-Primakov alliance, shifting support from their Fatherland-All Russia political block to the Putin-approved (and BAB-organized) Unity movement before the December parliamentary elections. After that, much depends on how things go in Chechnya. Leaks about the “RosInformCenter” falsifying official casualty reports may already be undermining public backing of the Kremlin’s police action. In any case, bombing villages and storming Grozny, the Chechen capital, which the Russians will have to do if they wish to force the rebel republic back into the fold, are two very different animals, and Putin’s poll numbers could take a nose dive as quickly as they took off If so, the Kremlin could dump Putin and back the “hidden successor,” Unity’s Sergei Shoygu, who, as minister of Emergency Situations, has been slowly cultivating public good will by aiding the growing number of displaced, hungry, and just plain exhausted people in this suffering land. The “family” does, after all, take care of its own.