In the final days of 1999, Konstantin Ernst prepared to film the Russian President’s annual New Year’s address, just as he had every December for several years. Ernst, who was thirty-eight, with floppy brown hair and a look of perpetual bemusement, had recently become the head of Channel One, the state television network with the largest reach, a post he retains today. The position makes him one of the most powerful men in Russia, with the ability to set the visual style for the country’s political life—at least the part its rulers wish to transmit to the public.

The ritual of the New Year’s address began in the seventies, under Leonid Brezhnev, who sat stolidly atop the Soviet hierarchy for two decades, and continued in the eighties under Mikhail Gorbachev, the architect of perestroika. After the Soviet collapse, Boris Yeltsin, the first President of independent Russia, kept the tradition alive. Yeltsin began his term as a charismatic advocate of democratic reform, but, by the late nineties, he seemed aged and defeated. Russia was only a year removed from a devastating financial crash that led the government to default on its debt, and its troops were fighting their second costly war in a decade in Chechnya, a would-be breakaway republic in the Caucasus. Yeltsin seemed primarily concerned with leaving office in a way that would keep him and his family immune from prosecution. On December 29th, Ernst and a crew from Channel One made their way to the Kremlin to film his address.

Ernst watched as Yeltsin sat in front of a tinsel-covered fir tree in a reception hall and held forth on the opportunities of the New Year, which included, in the spring, a Presidential election that would determine his successor. As the Channel One staff was packing up, Yeltsin told Ernst that he wasn’t satisfied—he was hoarse, and didn’t like the way his words had come out—and asked if they might record a new version in the coming days. Ernst agreed to go back on New Year’s Eve at five in the morning.

When he returned, he was handed a copy of the new address, and tried to contain his shock: Yeltsin was about to resign, voluntarily giving up power before his term was over, an unprecedented gesture in Russian history. His chosen successor was Vladimir Putin, a politician whom most Russians were just getting to know: Putin had risen from bureaucratic obscurity to become the head of the F.S.B., the post-Soviet successor to the K.G.B., and had been named Yeltsin’s Prime Minister only four months earlier. Ernst had a production assistant enter the text of the speech into the teleprompter without letting the rest of the crew in on the news. It would come as a surprise to everyone.

Yeltsin spoke with the labored cadence of a tired man. “I said that we would leap from the gray, stagnating totalitarian past into a bright, prosperous, and civilized future,” he said. “I believed that we would cover the distance in one leap. We didn’t.” He went on, “I am leaving now. I have done everything I could.” He rubbed a tear from his eye. Someone from Channel One started to clap, and soon they were all giving him a standing ovation. A woman cried, “Boris Nikolayevich, how can it be?” Yeltsin and the journalists drank champagne, and marvelled at the scene they had shared.

Soon after, Channel One filmed a New Year’s address from Putin, which would air after Yeltsin’s. “The powers of the head of state have been turned over to me today,” Putin said, his tone calming and businesslike. “I assure you that there will be no vacuum of power, not for a minute.”

Ernst got into a waiting car with recordings of Yeltsin’s and Putin’s speeches and, with a police escort, sped through the capital to Ostankino, a sprawling complex of television studios. At noon, as night fell in Russia’s Far East, he gave the order to broadcast Yeltsin’s address. Yeltsin was hosting a luncheon with his ministers and generals in the Presidential quarters at the time. “The chandeliers, the crystal, the windows—everything glittered with a New Year’s glow,” Yeltsin recalled later, in his memoirs. A television was brought in, and his guests watched the announcement in silence. Putin’s wife at the time, Lyudmila, was at home, and didn’t see the broadcast, so she was confused when a friend called to congratulate her; she assumed that the friend was offering a standard New Year’s greeting. Later in the day, a news segment showed Yeltsin and Putin standing side by side in the Presidential office. “Take care of Russia,” Yeltsin told Putin as they left the room.

The following morning on Channel One, after a kitschy variety show, the network cut to breaking news from Chechnya. Putin had gone on a surprise trip to visit Russian troop positions, where he wore a fur-trimmed parka and handed out hunting knives. He told the soldiers that the war they were fighting was “not just about defending the honor and dignity of the country” but also “about putting an end to the disintegration of Russia.” Ernst worried that the separatism in Chechnya could spread, and believed that Russia’s institutions of power were atrophied and vulnerable to collapse. “In moments when everything has gone to hell, a person shows up, who might not have known of his mission ahead of time, but who grabs the architecture of the state and holds it together,” he told me recently. He thought that this person was Putin.

In the lead-up to the election, Channel One, under Ernst, portrayed Putin as Yeltsin’s inevitable successor, and relentlessly attacked his rivals, presenting them as infirm, corrupt, even murderous. Putin’s poll numbers began rising by four or five points in a week, and he quickly went from an unknown entity to the most popular politician in the country. Channel One had backed politicians before, but this was something new: the invention of a candidate from thin air, a television phenomenon from the start. Putin won handily and, afterward, Ernst began to craft a visual language for his Presidency. He suggested that the inauguration be moved from the State Kremlin Palace, a modernist concrete box, to St. Andrew’s Hall, an ornate tsarist throne room that would provide an imperial spectacle. He felt that the old era, for both Russia and Channel One, was giving way to another. As Ernst put it, “We would find a new intonation together.”

Ernst was born in 1961, the son of a well-known Soviet scientist. He was bright and ambitious and, by the time he was in his twenties, bristled at the restrictions imposed on citizens by the country’s decaying gerontocracy. From a young age, Ernst was obsessed with film. In 1986, when he was twenty-five, he left a senior post at a state genetics laboratory and, inspired by the convulsions of perestroika, drifted among Moscow’s quasi-underground directors and filmmakers. He shot several music videos, including a concert by Aquarium, the godfathers of Russian rock, who, in 1988, performed in Leningrad with Dave Stewart from the British pop band Eurythmics.

I met with Ernst in the summer of 2018, in a voluminous conference room at Channel One. He described his early days with vibrating enthusiasm. A central part of his self-image is clearly still grounded in that period, when he was not an all-powerful television demigod but a scrappy outsider. “I felt like a person who was deceiving everyone,” he told me. “The Soviet Union was still in full force—and yet there I was, with no formal education as a director, filming some Western musicians, not to mention my rocker friends, who themselves had been banned only two or three years before.”