Death of a Dissident (31 page)

There was not a hint of irony or malice in the remark. Putin was genuinely concerned about the girl’s safety.

“That was it, the KGB mind-set,” Malashenko explained to me. “The moment I heard it, it was crystal clear. How could we possibly support a man like that to be our president?”

Later on, there were many instances that widened the great divide between Putin and Malashenko’s NTV. But the casual remark at that dinner was the start of a chain of events that ended in the storming of NTV studios by Putin’s police just one year later.

On July 11, Yeltsin and his family went to Zavidovo, the rural retreat seventy-five miles northwest of Moscow. Four days later Yumashev came back to town and sought out Boris.

“Boris Nikolaevich made up his mind,” he said. “It’s Putin. Will he accept? What do you think?”

Boris replied that he had already asked and Putin was not interested.

“Well, you are the only one who can make him change his mind,” said Valya.

On July 16 Boris’s Gulfstream landed in the French resort town of Biarritz on the Bay of Biscay. He found Putin, his wife, and the girls in an inexpensive hotel overlooking the water. The two men went out for lunch.

“Boris Nikolaevich sent me. He wants you to become the prime minister.”

There was no need to explain. In all likelihood, it meant Putin would become the next president of Russia, the latest in the regal dynasty of Kremlin rulers.

“I am not sure that I am ready for that,” was Putin’s immediate response. Boris noted that he had been thinking about it.

“Yes, I know, you would rather be me.”

“I was not joking,” interrupted Putin. “Why don’t you guys give me Gazprom to run? I could handle that.”

By then Boris had realized something about Putin’s character. He was an officer who could not function outside the chain of command. Once he was at the top, there would be no one to give him orders. This was probably the reason for his insecurity. But Boris also knew that Putin was loyal, a team player, and it was a quality he could make use of.

“Volodya, I understand. Who needs the headache? But consider this: there is no one else. Primus would beat anybody but you. And we will always be around to help. You cannot let us down.”

There was a pause. Putin replied, with almost a sigh of resignation, “Yes, that’s true. But then I need to hear it from Boris Nikolaevich himself.”

“Of course, that’s why he sent me, to sound you out. That’s part of being presidential, he does not want to hear no for an answer.”

Putin accepted.

Makhachkala, Dagestan, August 7, 1999: Russian forces use artillery and air in an assault on Wahhabi militants holding several villages near the border of Chechnya. Eyewitnesses among 2,000 refugees camped at the central square of the Dagestani capital report seeing two Russian helicopters shot down. The 2,000-strong Wahhabi force is led by Shamil Basayev, who is trying to expand the area that has been administered by the militants for nearly a year. On August 8, Russian Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin returns to Moscow from touring the area, only to learn that he and his entire cabinet have been sacked by President Yeltsin, the third change of government within a year
.

Prime Minister-designate Vladimir Putin vows to restore order in the south
.

Buinaksk, Dagestan, September 4, 1999: A car bomb destroys a building housing military families, killing sixty-four and injuring 133. The next day, hundreds of gunmen led by radical warlord Shamil Basayev enter Dagestan from Chechnya, aiming to reclaim several border villages that were taken by Russian forces just two weeks earlier. Thousands of refugees arrive in the provincial capital of Makhachkala. Aslan Maskhadov’s government denies involvement in the incursion and disowns the militants. In Moscow, Prime Minister Putin convenes a National Security Council meeting
.

Washington, DC, September 1999

The rise of Vladimir Putin was a surprise to many.

On a sunny day in September the Soros Foundation brought to Washington a Russian regional governor, Viktor Kress of Tomsk, Siberia. I took Kress to a luncheon at the State Department, where Russia watchers and policy planners had gathered from all over town.

“Mr. Kress, who will be the next president of Russia?” was the first question.

“Whom do you think?” asked Kress.

“Primakov? Luzhkov? Yavlinsky? Nemtsov? Lebed? Zyuganov?”

“Vladimir Putin,” said Kress.

There was a murmur at the table. Putin was the new prime minister—the sixth in Yeltsin’s presidency—but his approval rating stood at 2 percent. Primakov’s was at 22. Nobody had ever heard of Putin until two months ago. Who was this guy?

The man whom Sasha Litvinenko would accuse of his murder was born on October 7, 1952, in Leningrad (presently St. Petersburg), the son of a laborer in a train-car factory. According to
First Person
, a series of interviews with and about Putin hastily compiled and released on the eve of the 2000 presidential elections, his mother was a “kind … [but] not highly educated woman.” She’d had a series of menial jobs: as a worker in a grocery store, a glassware washer in a laboratory, a night security guard in a secondhand clothing shop. She was a survivor of the famine during the German blockade of Leningrad. When Putin was born, she was forty-one. He was a sickly child.

His father, a veteran of NKVD (wartime KGB) forces, who sustained a severe leg injury in the war, seemed a “serious, solid and angry” man, in the opinion of Putin’s schoolteacher Vera Gurevich, who visited the family to discuss the boy’s poor performance and unruly behavior. She noted that “there was no kissing and cuddling” in the family; “his father had a tough character” but “was kind in his soul.” For major transgressions, he disciplined the young Putin with his leather belt.

The train-car factory allocated the family a 220-square-foot room in a communal apartment on the fifth floor of a dreary walk-up at No. 15, Baskov Street, twenty minutes by foot from Nevsky Prospect, Leningrad’s main street. Gurevich recalled that the apartment “did not have any amenities. No hot water, no bathtub. A horrific toilet, cold and depressive, leading to the stairwell…. There was practically no kitchen, only a square dark windowless hallway. A gas stove stood on one side and a wash-basin on the other, leaving hardly any space to squeeze through. And behind this so-called kitchen dwelled another family.”

As a boy, and later to his friends, Vladimir was known as
Volodya. One of Volodya’s early impressions in life was of the hordes of rats that lived in the front entryway. He used to chase them with sticks. “Once I saw a huge rat and went after it, until I got it in a corner…. It turned around, and rushed at me. It was unexpected and very scary. Now the rat was chasing me … but I was faster, and I slammed the door shut behind me, in its nose.” That was how he “learned, once and forever, the meaning of the word ‘cornered.’”

By his own admission the young Putin was a
shpana
, the slang term for a juvenile delinquent. Later it became the source of the many street-gang profanities in his public vocabulary. Even though he was small, he was a ferocious fighter. As one of his classmates recalled, in schoolyard fights the preteen Putin was “like a little tiger. He would leap at his enemy, scratch, bite, pull hair.” Despite a concerted effort by his teacher and his father, he fell in with bad company: two brothers, who dwelled in the world of the rooftops, garages, and warehouses of the neighborhood. He became fiercely loyal to his friends.

In
First Person
Putin admitted that it was hard to predict “where it would have ended” if, at the age of eleven, he had not taken up martial arts. His judo coach “played a decisive role” in his childhood by “pulling [him] out of the street.” His initial motivation to start judo was “to be able to stand up” for himself “in the street and in school.” Judo taught him discipline, concentration, and tactical skills. It became his overwhelming passion. According to his coach, he fought like a “snow leopard, determined to win at any cost.”

His teacher Vera Gurevich welcomed his new obsession, because it kept him out of trouble. But she noted that from then on he preferred sports to the company of his classmates. He became a black belt and a winner of citywide competitions.

In college he became the all-Leningrad champion for judo, and he continued the sport while learning the tradecraft of espionage. A classmate at School 101 of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (also known as the Red Banner Institute of Yuri Andropov), who now lives in Washington, recalls that whenever he passed the gym, he heard “shrieks and screeches.” He knew “even without looking [that] it was Putin, training.”

In
First Person
Putin himself makes it clear that he learned lessons in social Darwinism as a street kid and school menace, and his descriptions of several of his judo fights are full of telling details of violence and of his fighting attitude. Years later, as president, these qualities would reappear as subdued aggression, both in word and deed. For example, one of his most quoted remarks as president is this aphorism of power: “We demonstrated weakness, and the weak are beaten.”