The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (11 page)

“The people of our generation saw only a dead end ahead: if you did not escape, you’d face degradation,” Yelena Zelinskaya recalled twenty years later. Zelinskaya put out one of several samizdat publications that united the informals. “We could no longer breathe among the lies, the hypocrisy, and the stupidity. There was no fear. And as soon as the first rays of light seemed to break through—as soon as people whose hands had been tied were allowed to move at least a few fingers—people started to move. People weren’t thinking about money, or about improving their standing in life; all anyone thought about was freedom. Freedom to conduct your private life as you wish, freedom to travel and see the world. Freedom from hypocrisy
and the freedom not to listen to hypocrisy; freedom from libel, freedom from feeling ashamed for one’s parents, freedom from the viscous lies in which all of us were submerged as if in molasses.”

But whatever the informals were saying in the privacy of their homes, the state machine of mindless destruction kept moving. On March 16, 1987, a rumor spread through the city: The Angleterre Hotel was about to be razed. Informals of every stripe began to gather in front of the building. The leader of an informal preservation society, Alexei Kovalev, went inside the city government building, conveniently located in the same city square, and attempted to negotiate with a high-level bureaucrat there. She assured him the building was safe and implored him to “stop misinforming people and spreading panic.” Barely half an hour later, the blast sounded, and the building the size of a city block turned into a huge cloud of coarse dust.

This was when something entirely unprecedented happened. “It seems, after the dust and smoke settled where the hotel had been, all that should have remained were memories,” recalled Alexander Vinnikov, a physicist turned city activist. “That is what happened, but the memories were outstanding. Never before this moment could people have imagined that they could protest the actions of authorities and remain intact, not end up behind bars or at least out of work. We carried away the memory of an amazing sense of being right, the sense that comes to a person who stands among like-minded people in a public space, listening to a speaker giving voice, convincingly and precisely, to everyone’s shared thoughts. And most important, we felt the full humiliation of the authorities’ utter disregard for our opinion, and a sense of personal dignity began to well up, a desire to affirm our right to be heard and to have an impact.”

So the crowd did not disperse. By the following afternoon, several hundred people were gathered in front of what used to be the Angleterre. The fence surrounding the demolition site was covered with homemade posters, fliers, poems written right on the fence, and
simply the names of people who had taken part in the protest—and had bravely chosen to make their names known.

“We all found one another in St. Isaac’s Square,” read a prescient article written by Zelinskaya, then thirty-three years old, and posted on the fence. “We have set out on a difficult path…. We will probably make a lot of mistakes. Some of us will probably lose our voices. We will probably fail to accomplish everything we will set out to do, just as we failed to save the Angleterre. There really is a lot we do not know how to do. Can people whose opinion no one ever asked really be expected to argue well? Can people who have long been kept out of any sort of public activity be expected to have honed their fighting skills while sitting in their basements? Can people whose decisions and actions have never had tangible consequences even for their own lives be expected to calculate the trajectory of their activities?”

Hundreds of people continued to rally at the site for three days. The protest that would not end became known as the Battle of the Angleterre. And even after that, the fence, with its many posters and articles, remained, and so did an ongoing small gathering in front of it. People would now come to the Angleterre to find out what was happening in their city and their country, or to tell others; the site became known as the Information Point. The kitchen and living room discussions had come out, and the fence turned into a living page on which scores of samizdat publications were emerging from the underground.

Elsewhere in the city, other discussion venues were taking shape. In April, a group of young Leningrad economists formed a club. At their gatherings at the Palace of Youth, they took up unprecedented topics, such as the possibility of privatization. Before the year was out, one of them would float the idea of privatizing state enterprise by issuing stock vouchers to every Soviet adult. The concept was not
well received at the time, but years later, this is exactly what would happen, and most of the club’s participants would go on to play key roles in shaping post-Communist economic policy.

To those on the inside, Soviet society seemed to be changing at breathtaking speed. But the motion was two steps forward, one step back. In May, Soviet authorities stopped the jamming of most Western radio programs; on May 31, Leningrad city authorities shut down the Information Point in front of the Angleterre. In June, the local council elections contained a small but revolutionary experiment: in 4 percent of the districts, instead of the usual single name, two appeared on the ballot; for the first time in decades, a few voters were allowed to choose between candidates, even if both were advanced by the Communist Party. On December 10, Leningrad saw its first political rally that was not broken up by police. At least two of the speakers were men who had served time in the camps for opposing the Soviet regime.

THE PROCESS CONTINUED the following year. More discussion groups gradually formed, and their activities became more structured. Over time, actual leaders—people well-known and trusted outside their small social circles—emerged. In a couple of years, they would become the first post-Soviet politicians.

In the spring, some Leningrad residents announced they were launching what they called “Hyde Park” in the Mikhailov Gardens in the center of the city. One afternoon a week, anyone could make a public speech. “The rules were, anybody could speak for five minutes on any topic, excepting the propaganda of war, violence, and xenophobia of any sort,” recalled Ivan Soshnikov, who was a thirty-two-year-old taxi driver at the time, and one of the masterminds behind the outdoor debating space. “You want to talk about human rights?
Go right ahead! One man brought the 1949 Declaration of Human Rights with him. Myself, I had already read it in samizdat, but people who had never seen it before were just beside themselves. And this went on for four hours every Saturday, from twelve to four. It was open mike. I should mention that this was before there was freedom of the press. So a lot of journalists would come and listen, but they could not publish what they heard.”

After a few months, the police kicked “Hyde Park” out of the Mikhailov Gardens. The organizers took their show to the Kazansky Cathedral, a grand structure on Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main avenue. No longer shaded by the trees or shielded by a fence, the speakers and the listeners became even more visible than they had been in the original location. Rather than chase them away again, city authorities apparently decided to drown them out with sound. One Saturday, “Hyde Park” participants showed up in front of the cathedral, only to discover a brass band playing in front of it. The band came complete with its own audience, whose members shouted at the debaters: “Look, the band is here so that people can relax, this is no time or place for your speeches.” During a break in the music, Ivan Soshnikov tried to chat up the conductor, who immediately volunteered that the band had been stationed in front of the cathedral by some sort of authority.

Ekaterina Podoltseva, a brilliant forty-year-old mathematician who had become one of the city’s most visible—and most eccentric—pro-democracy activists, produced a recipe for fighting the brass band. She asked all the regular “Hyde Park” participants to bring lemons with them the following Saturday. As soon as the band began playing, all the activists were to start eating their lemons, or to imitate the process of eating if they found the reality of it too bitter. Podoltseva had read or heard somewhere that when people see someone eating a lemon, they begin, empathetically, producing copious amounts of saliva—which happens to be incompatible with
playing a wind instrument. It worked: the music stopped, and the speeches continued.

On June 13, 1988, the Supreme Court of the USSR reversed the more than fifty-year-old guilty verdicts that had launched Stalin’s Great Terror. The following day, a rally in memory of victims of political repression took place in Leningrad—the first such legal large-scale gathering in the history of the Soviet Union.

But the most important stories of 1988—not only in Leningrad but in all of the USSR—were the formation of an organization called the People’s Front and the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The People’s Front came into being more or less simultaneously and, it seemed, spontaneously in more than thirty cities all over the Soviet Union. Its avowed goal was to support perestroika, which was battling a growing backlash within the Party. But the People’s Front’s most important function was, probably, to conduct an experiment of unprecedented scope and scale: in a society that had almost no experience with social change or, for that matter, any other citizen activity that was not directed from the top, to form an organization, even a network of organizations, that was truly democratic in nature and structure.

“An organization that aims to democratize society must itself be democratic,” proclaimed a founding document of the Leningrad organization. “This is why the bylaws of the People’s Front will incorporate an effective firewall against bureaucratic and authoritarian tendencies. To this end, the coordinating council shall be elected by secret vote and may be reconstituted at any general meeting of the People’s Front. To this end, the coordinating council does not have a permanent chairman but all of its members shall serve as chairman by turn. To this end, no member of the People’s Front shall represent the organization’s position on any issue if the issue has not been discussed at a general meeting of the People’s Front. It is expected that all decisions taken by the coordinating council or by the general
meeting shall be recommendations: members who are in the minority should not be obligated to participate in a decision with which they disagree but neither shall they have the right to counteract the actions of the majority in any way other than through the power of conviction.” In other words, the main purpose of the People’s Front was not to be the Communist Party.

Incredibly, it worked. Twenty years later, a mathematician who became an activist in the late 1980s recounted discovering the People’s Front: “They would gather at the Food Industry Workers’ House of Culture. Anyone could come. Some of those who came were not particularly mentally healthy people. The first impression was that of a complete madhouse: some of the speeches were totally nonsensical. This would go on for an hour or an hour and a half, discussions of god knows what, and then other people would start taking the mike—I later found out they were some of the leaders of the group. In the end, when they actually took a vote on some question or another, the resulting text of the resolution would be quite reasonable; it would have a definite political component and be written in good Russian. So it turned out that the people who were leading the organization at the time were people with whom one could really discuss things.” The ability to discuss things was still the most highly valued commodity in the Soviet Union.

A woman quickly emerged as the evident leader and most trusted de facto spokesperson for the Leningrad People’s Front. Marina Salye was unlike any politician the Soviet Union had ever known. In fact, she had little in common with any politician anywhere in the world. In her fifties, unmarried (she had long lived with a woman she called her sister), she had spent much of her adult life in the farthest reaches of the Soviet Union, studying rocks: she had a Ph.D. in geology. It was a path taken by many a member of the intelligentsia: find a profession that is not ideologically charged and get as far as possible away from the Soviet center of command. Never
having joined the Communist Party, Salye was not part of any institution that had been discredited. At the same time, she had impeccable St. Petersburg credentials. Her great-great-grandfather was one of the most prominent residents in the history of St. Petersburg: Paul Buhre, watchmaker to the czar, made timepieces that are still working and highly valued in the twenty-first century. Two of her great-grandfathers had come to St. Petersburg in the nineteenth century, from France and Germany. Brilliant, well-spoken in the way of those who never mince words, Salye elicited instant trust and a desire to follow. “With a cigarette dangling from her lips, she could lead a crowd up and down Nevsky, stopping traffic,” a political opponent of hers recalled twenty years later. “I saw her do it once, and it made a very strong impression. No one had a chance competing with her.”

IN FEBRUARY 1988, conflict erupted between Azerbaijan and Armenia—the first of what would be many ethnic conflicts in the Soviet Caucasus. In relatively wealthy, overwhelmingly Muslim Azerbaijan, a region called Nagorno-Karabakh, populated mostly by ethnic Armenians, declared its intention to secede and join Armenia, a small, poor, mostly Christian republic of the USSR. With the exception of a few visionary dissidents, no one at the time could imagine that the Soviet empire would break apart—much less break apart soon. The events in Nagorno-Karabakh showed that the unthinkable was possible. Not only that, they showed exactly how it was going to happen: The USSR would break apart along ethnic lines, and the process would be painful and violent. But now pro-independence demonstrators came out into the streets of Nagorno-Karabakh in large numbers, and just days later, pogroms erupted in Sumgait, an Azerbaijan city with a sizable ethnic Armenian population. More than thirty people died; hundreds more were injured.

The Soviet intelligentsia watched in dismay as ethnic and
religious enmities rose to the surface. In June, after Nagorno-Karabakh’s regional government officially declared the region’s intention to secede, more than three hundred people came out into a Leningrad square to demonstrate solidarity with the Armenian people. Toward the end of the summer, Leningrad pro-democracy activists arranged for Armenian children from Sumgait to travel to summer camps outside Leningrad. A Leningrad anthropologist named Galina Starovoitova—the one whose murder I would be covering ten years later—became the nation’s most visible spokesperson for Armenian issues. On December 10, 1988, most members of the pro-secession Karabakh Committee in Nagorno-Karabakh were placed under arrest.