The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (14 page)

Whether Sobchak was right in believing he was picking his own handler, however, is an open question. A former colleague of Putin’s in East Germany told me that in February 1990, Putin had a meeting with Major General Yuri Drozdov, head of the KGB illegal-intelligence directorate, when the major general visited Berlin. “The only possible purpose of the meeting could have been giving Putin his next assignment,” Sergei Bezrukov, who defected to Germany in 1991, told me. “Why else would the head of the directorate be meeting with an agent who was scheduled to be going home? That sort of thing just did not happen.” Bezrukov and other officers wondered what Putin’s new job would be and what made it important enough for the top brass to be involved. When Putin went to work for
Sobchak, Bezrukov believed he had his answer: his old friend had been called back in order to infiltrate the inner circle of one of the country’s leading pro-democracy politicians. The university job had been a stepping-stone.

Putin informed the Leningrad KGB that he was about to change jobs. “I told them, ‘I have received an offer from Anatoly Alexandrovich [Sobchak] to transfer from the university and work for him. If this is impossible, I am willing to resign.’ They responded, ‘No, why should you? Go work at the new job, no problem.’” The dialogue seems to be another absurd fiction, even in the very unlikely event that he had not been steered to Sobchak by the KGB itself. Putin would have had no reason to suspect that the opportunity to plant him alongside the city’s most prominent democrat would be greeted with anything but enthusiasm in the KGB.

By this time the new democrats had become the KGB’s main focus. The previous year, Gorbachev had created the Committee for Constitutional Oversight, a law enforcement body intended to bring Soviet governing practices in line with the country’s own constitution. In 1990, the committee began its fight against covert KGB operations, banning any actions based on secret internal instructions—and the KGB ignored it. Instead, it conducted round-the-clock surveillance of Boris Yeltsin and other prominent democrats. It tapped their phones, including ones in hotel rooms they rented. It also tapped the phones of their friends, relatives, hairdressers, and sports coaches. So it is extremely unlikely that Putin told his biographers the truth when he claimed not to report to the KGB on his work with Sobchak, all the while drawing a larger salary from the secret police than he did at the city council.

How, if, and when Putin finally severed his connection with the KGB is, astoundingly, not only not a matter of public record but not even the subject of coherent mythmaking. Putin has said that within a few months after he came to work for Sobchak, a member of the
city council began blackmailing him, threatening to expose him as a KGB officer. Putin realized he had to leave. “It was a very difficult decision. It had been nearly a year since I de facto stopped working for the security service, but my entire life still revolved around it. It was 1990: the USSR had not yet fallen apart, the August coup had not yet happened, so there was no final clarity as to which way the country would go. Sobchak was certainly an outstanding person and a prominent politician, but it seemed risky to tie my own future to his. Everything could have been reversed in a minute. And I could not imagine what I would do if I lost my job at city hall. I was thinking I might go back to the university, write a dissertation, and take odd jobs. I had a stable position within the KGB, and I was treated well. I was successful within that system, yet I decided to leave. Why? What for? I was literally suffering. I had to make the most difficult decision in my life. I thought for a long time, trying to collect my thoughts, then gathered myself together, sat down, and wrote the resignation letter on my first attempt, without writing a draft.”

This monologue, pronounced ten years later, is in fact a remarkable document. If Putin did leave the most feared and frightening organization in the Soviet Union, he never—not even retrospectively—framed his decision in ideological, political, or moral terms. Ten years later, as he prepared to lead a new Russia, he readily admitted that he had been willing to serve any master. Most of all, he would have liked to hedge his bets and serve them all.

Hedge his bets he did. The KGB lost his letter of resignation—whether by clever arrangement or by virtue of being an organization chronically incapable of managing its own paperwork. Either way, Vladimir Putin was still an officer of the KGB in August 1991, when the KGB finally undertook the state coup for which it seemed to have been designed.

Five

A COUP AND A CRUSADE

I
t took me two years to get Marina Salye to talk to me. And then it took me about twelve hours of tough driving, including half an hour of nearly impossible driving—my instructions were to “drive as far as you can and walk the rest of the way”—to get to Salye’s house. At the end of the road I was to look for the tricolor Russian flag flying high over a wooden house. It would have been hard to miss: Russians are not in the habit of flying the flag over their homes.

Salye was now living in a village, if you can call it that: twenty-six houses and only six people. Like so many Russian villages, this one, hundreds of miles from the nearest big city and about twenty miles from the nearest food shop, was an empty nest, forgotten, futureless. Seventy-five-year-old Salye lived there, with the woman she called her sister, because no one could find them there.

The other woman, who was a few years younger and seemed to be in better health, brought out the boxes of papers Salye had taken with her when she disappeared from view. Here were the results of
months of ceaseless digging she had undertaken—after uncovering the story of the missing meat.

IN 1990, the world was going to hell. Or at least the Soviet Union was. On January 13, 1990, pogroms broke out in the streets of the Azerbaijan capital, Baku, historically the most diverse of all the cities in the Russian empire. Forty-eight ethnic Armenians were killed and nearly thirty thousand—the city’s entire remaining Armenian population—fled the city. World chess champion Garry Kasparov, a Baku Armenian, chartered a plane to evacuate family, friends, and their friends. On January 19, Soviet troops stormed Baku, ostensibly to restore order, and left more than a hundred civilians—mostly ethnic Azeris—dead.

The Soviet empire was splitting at the seams. The center was helpless to hold it together; its army was brutal and ineffectual.

The Soviet economy, too, was nearing collapse. Shortages of food and everyday products had reached catastrophic proportions. If Moscow was still able, albeit barely, to mobilize the resources of the entire huge country to get basic goods onto at least some of its store shelves, then Leningrad, the country’s second-largest city, reflected the full extent of the disaster. In June 1989, Leningrad authorities had begun rationing tea and soap. In October 1990, sugar, vodka, and cigarettes joined the list of rationed products. In November 1990 the democratic city council felt compelled to take the terrifyingly unpopular step of introducing actual ration cards—inevitably reminiscent of the ration cards used during the siege of the city in World War II. Every Leningrad resident now had the right to procure three pounds of meat per month, two pounds of processed meats, ten eggs, one pound of butter, half a pound of vegetable oil, one pound of flour, and two pounds of grains or dry pasta. In introducing the ration cards, the city councillors hoped not only to stave off hunger—the word, in all its
obscenity, was no longer perceived as belonging to history or to faraway lands—but also to prevent public unrest.

The city came perilously close to mass violence twice that year: during the tobacco riot of August 1990 and the sugar riot a few weeks later. Cigarettes had been scarce for some time, but the big stores in central Leningrad generally had at least one brand for sale. One day in late August 1990, though, even the stores along Nevsky Prospekt had no smokes. A crowd gathered in front of one of the stores in the morning, in anticipation of a delivery that never came. The store closed for lunch, to reopen an hour later, its shelves still empty. By three in the afternoon, a mob of several thousand enraged smokers had blocked traffic on Nevsky and was getting ready to start crashing store windows. Police leadership called the city council in a panic: if violence broke out, they would be unable to prevent either injury or property damage. Some of the deputies, led by Sobchak, rushed over to Nevsky to try to calm the crowd.

The politicians arrived just in time. The protesters had already uprooted a huge sidewalk planter and dislodged a long piece of fence from a nearby yard and were constructing barricades across the city’s main avenue. Traffic was at a standstill. Police special forces, formed just a couple of years earlier and already known for their brutality in breaking up rallies—their batons were nicknamed “the democratizers”—had arrived at the scene and were getting ready to storm the protesting smokers and their barricades. Unlike the regular police, these troops in riot gear did not seem at a loss: they were certain there would be blood. Sobchak and several other well-known deputies tried to reason with different groups within the crowd, picking out people who seemed to recognize them and striking up conversations. Former dissident and political prisoner Yuli Rybakov, now also a city council member, walked over to the special forces to assure their brass that a truckload of cigarettes would be arriving any minute and the protest would be resolved peacefully.

Another city council team, led by Salye, was combing the city’s warehouses, looking for a stash of cigarettes. They found some and delivered them to the protesters on Nevsky well after dark. The smokers lit up and dispersed, leaving the city council members to disassemble their makeshift barricades and consider the prospects of future riots that might not be resolved with such relative ease, because eventually, it seemed, the city would run out of everything.

A few weeks later, at the height of late-summer preserves-making season, sugar disappeared from store shelves. Fearing a repeat of the tobacco riot, a group of city councillors began investigating. They uncovered what they believed was a Communist Party conspiracy to discredit the city’s new democratic regime. Taking advantage of the fact that no one really knew any longer who held what authority in the city, Communist Party functionaries had apparently pulled some old levers in order to prevent the unloading of freight trains that had transported sugar to Leningrad. Marina Salye called an emergency meeting of some city council members and dispatched them personally to monitor the arrival, unloading, and delivery of sugar to stores. A riot was thus averted.

By this time Marina Salye, the geologist, had been elected to chair the city council’s committee on food supplies. Somehow it seemed that a woman who had never had anything to do with food or retail, who had never been much of a professional organizer or anyone’s boss, but who appeared inherently uncorrupted and incorruptible would do the best possible job of preventing hunger in Leningrad. The city’s most trusted politician was logically given the city’s most important and most difficult job.

IN MAY 1991, Salye, in her capacity as chairwoman of the Leningrad City Council’s committee on food supplies, traveled to Berlin to sign contracts for the importing of several trainloads of meat and potatoes
to Leningrad. Negotiations had more or less been completed: Salye and a trusted colleague from the city administration were really there just to sign the papers.

“And we get there,” Salye told me years later, still outraged, “and this Frau Rudolf with whom we were supposed to meet, she tells us she can’t see us because she is involved in urgent negotiations with the City of Leningrad on the subject of meat imports. Our eyes are popping out. Because we are the City of Leningrad, and we are there on the subject of meat imports!”

Salye and her colleague rushed to call the food supplies committee of the Leningrad city administration, a counterpart to her own committee: the only explanation they could imagine was that the executive branch had, inexplicably, elbowed in on the contract. But the chairman of the committee knew nothing of the negotiations. “So I call Sobchak,” Salye remembered. “I say, Anatoly Alexandrovich, I have just found out—and by now I have been given figures—that Leningrad is buying sixty tons of meat. Sobchak calls the External Economic Bank while I am hanging on—I can hear him speaking—and he names the firm and the bank confirms that, yes, a credit line for ninety million deutsche marks has been opened for this firm. And he doesn’t tell me anything else: he says, ‘I have no idea what is going on.’”

Salye went home empty-handed, only half hoping that the sixty tons of meat supposedly bought by the city would actually materialize. It did not, which meant she hardly had time to pursue the mystery meat story, which kept nagging at her. Three months later, however, it was subsumed by another event, much more frightening and no less mystifying—and, in Salye’s mind, inextricably connected with her German misadventure.