The New Tsar (84 page)

3 
. Gevorkyan, Nataliya, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Kolesnikov,
First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin
(New York: Public Affairs, 2000), p. 7. Putin recalls that “our guys” held the bridgehead throughout the war, which is not true.

4 
. Testimony at the Nuremburg trials,
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/02–22–46.asp
. Anna Reid,
Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941–1944
(New York: Walker, 2011), also cites the order, p. 135. In addition to Reid’s and Jones’s histories of the siege, see also Harrison E. Salisbury,
The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad
(New York: Harper & Row, 1969), and Alexander Werth,
Russia at War, 1941–1945
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1964), part 3.

5 
. Reid, p. 114.

6 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 3.

7 
. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin,
The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB
(New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 99.

8 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 6.

9 
.
Oleg M. Blotsky,
Vladmir Putin: Istoriya Zhizni
[Vladmir Putin: A Life Story] (Moscow: Mezhdunarodniye Otnosheniya, 2004), p. 83.

10 
. Werth, p. 308.

11 
. Max Hastings,
Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), p. 169. Hastings notes that the privileged “escaped most of the suffering.”

12 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 5. The English translation mistakenly refers to Maria’s brother as Peter, when in fact Putin did not name the brother. The captain was Ivan Ivanovich Shelomov. Maria did have a brother, Pyotr, who died on the front in the very first days of the war.

13 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 6. Putin himself has retold this story repeatedly, though with shifting details that are impossible to verify. In 2012, he told Hillary Rodham Clinton that his father had found Maria in a stack of corpses, recognizing her by her shoes. He demanded to have her body and discovered she was still alive. Clinton recounts the anecdote in
Hard Choices
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), p. 243.

14 
. Gevorkyan et al., pp. 8–9.

15 
. Jones, p. 249. Also see Werth, p. 309, and
Nezivisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye
[Independent Military Review], March 14, 2003.

16 
. Jones, p. 141.

17 
. Gevorkyan et al., pp. 8–9.

18 
. Reid’s
Leningrad
provides a wrenching history of the siege, as does Hastings’s
Inferno
, pp. 164–171. See also Salisbury, and Jones.

19 
. Nikolai Zenkovich,
Putinskaya Entsiklopediya
(Moscow: Olma-Press, 2006), p. 363.

20 
. In 2012, a group in St. Petersburg found a record of his brother’s death and burial in the cemetery, which Putin said he had not previously been told about, though he mentions it in Gevorkyan et al.,
First Person;
and
New York Times
, Jan. 28, 2012.

21 
. The names of Putin’s uncles who died during the war can be found in a searchable online catalogue of casualties from the war,
www.obd-memorial.ru
. Richard Sakwa, in
Putin: Russia’s Choice
(London: Routledge, 2004), describes the losses to Putin’s mother’s family.

22 
. Russians use the patronymic of their father’s first name: Vladimir Spiridonovich is the son of Spiridon; Vladimir Vladimirovich, the son of Vladimir; etc. The use of both first name and patronymic in address is a sign of respect and formality.

23 
. Reid, p. 402.

24 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 3.

25 
. Ibid., p. 17.

26 
. A rumor has circulated for years that Putin was in fact born to another woman and later given up for adoption to distant relatives, Vladimir and
Maria Putin. The rumor resurfaced in 2008 when a woman in Georgia claimed to be his mother, but no evidence has emerged that would lend it credibility.

27 
. Putin has recounted this story on various occasions with different details. Of course, he would not remember himself and thus was relying on the story his mother told him. He told this version in remarks to reporters outside the cathedral at Christmas, 2000. See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=u3d_yxJhmjk
.

28 
. Sakwa, p. 3.

29 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 11. In Putin’s recollection of the neighbor, he did not seem impressed by the neighbor’s faith, recalling him “droning on” in Hebrew. “Once, I could not hold back any longer and asked what he was chanting. He explained about the Talmud, and I immediately lost interest.”

30 
. Ibid., p. 10.

31 
. Ibid., p. 18.

32 
. Ibid., p. 16.

33 
. Ibid., p. 11.

34 
. Viktor Borisenko, quoted in
Moskovsky Komsomolets
, Aug. 1, 2003; also Allen C. Lynch,
Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft
(Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2011), p. 14.

35 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 18.

36 
. Ibid., p. 18.

37 
. Ibid., p. 19.

38 
.
Moskovsky Komsomolets
, Aug. 1, 2003.

39 
. Interviewed in 2012 in a German documentary,
I, Putin
, which later appeared on NTV for Putin’s inauguration for a third term on May 7, 2012.

40 
.
Moskovsky Komsomolets
, Aug. 1, 2003.

41 
. Vera Gurevich,
Bspominaniya o Budushchem Prezidente
[Recollections of the Future President] (Moscow: Mezhdunarodniye Otnosheniya, 2001), p. 31.

42 
. Vadim Kozhevnikov,
Shield and Sword
(London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1970).

43 
.
Kommersant
, July 25, 2010.

44 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 22.

45 
. Chris Hutchins with Alexander Korobko,
Putin
(Leicester, UK: Matador, 2012), p. 26.

46 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 23.

47 
. See
http://www.scotsman.com/news/international/mccartney-rocking-back-in-the-ussr-1-1385940
.

48 
.
Moskovsky Komsomolets
, Aug. 1, 2003.

49 
. Blotsky,
Vladimir Putin: Istoriya Zhizni
, p. 180.

50 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 21.

51 
.
Komsomolskaya Pravda
, Oct. 4, 2007. In an interview, Mina Yuditskaya disclosed that Putin had given her an apartment during an official visit
to Israel, where she immigrated shortly after he finished school. See
www.kp.ru/daily/23979.3/74288
.

52 
.
New York Times
, February 20, 2000.

53 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 22. In an interview, Vera Gurevich said, “Volodya was not especially interested in girls, but they were certainly interested in him.”

54 
. See
http://english.pravda.ru/society/stories/04-03-2006/76878-putin-0/
. See also Hutchins and Korobko, p. 27.

55 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 22.

56 
. Lynch, p. 23; Masha Gessen,
The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin
(New York: Riverhead Books, 2012), p. 55.

57 
. Putin recounted the story of his coat and the trip to Gagri during an interview with journalists in Abkhazia on Aug. 12, 2009, available, like virtually all his public remarks, at
www.kremlin.ru
or
en.kremlin.ru
. Hereafter, unless otherwise noted, all of Putin’s official remarks cited can be found by searching these sites, by day or subject, in Russian and English. One word of caution: the English versions of some speeches or comments can be truncated or edited, especially in cases of controversial comments.

58 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 32.

59 
. Ibid., p. 36.

60 
. Ibid., p. 41.

61 
. Blotsky,
Vladimir Putin: Istoriya Zhizni
, p. 266.

62 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 40.

63 
. Ibid., p. 42.

CHAPTER 2: A WARM HEART, A COOL HEAD, AND CLEAN HANDS

1 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 42.

2 
. Blotsky,
Vladimir Putin: Istoriya Zhizni
, pp. 288–89.

3 
. J. Michael Waller,
Secret Empire: The KGB in Russia Today
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), pp. 14–17.

4 
. Yuri C. Bortsov,
Vladmir Putin
(Moscow: Fenix, 2001), p. 74.

5 
. Blotsky,
Vladimir Putin: Istoriya Zhizni
, p. 105.

6 
. A. A. Mukhin,
Kto Ect’ Mister Putin i Kto c Nim Prishol
(Moscow: Gnom i D, 2002), p. 27.

7 
. Andrew and Mitrokhin, p. 5.

8 
. Vladimir Usoltsev,
Sosluzhivets: Neizvestniye Stranitsi Zhizni Prezidenta
[Comrade: The Unknown Pages of the President’s Life] (Moscow: Eksmo, 2004), p. 186. Usoltsev, writing under a pseudonym, refers to Putin’s work in the Fifth Chief Directorate in an offhand manner and does not dwell on it in an otherwise laudatory memoir of their time together in Dresden. Putin denied working against dissidents, but the details of Usoltsev’s recollections have never been specifically refuted.

9 
. Koenraad De Wolf,
Dissident for Life: Alexander Ogorodnikov and the Struggle
for Religious Freedom in Russia
, translated by Nancy Forest-Flier (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2013), pp. 116–17.

10 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 40. The editors of the English translation note that Putin’s description of informants did not appear in Russian newspaper articles based on the interviews.

11 
. Oleg Blotsky,
Vladimir Putin: Doroga k Vlasti
[Vladimir Putin: Path to Power] (Moscow: Osmos Press, 2002), p. 95.

12 
. Ibid., p. 113.

13 
. Yuri B. Shvets,
Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 84.

14 
. Blotsky,
Vladimir Putin: Doroga k Vlasti
, p. 121.

15 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 52.

16 
. Ibid., p. 44.

17 
. Andrew and Mitrokhin, p. 5.

18 
. Bortsov, p. 77; see also Kalugin, quoted in Lynch, p. 18.

19 
. Andrew and Mitrokhin, p. 214.

20 
. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky,
KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev
(New York: HarperCollins, 1990), p. 615.

21 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 39.

22 
. Ibid., p. 56. The name of his first fiancée, Lyudmila Khmarina, was reported by Vladimir Pribylovsky on his website,
Antikomprimat
,
http://www.anticompromat.org/putin/hmarina.html
, and cited in Karen Dawisha,
Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), p. 142.

23 
. Gevorkyan et al., p. 57.

24 
. Blotsky,
Vladimir Putin: Doroga k Vlasti
, p. 15.