The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (18 page)

Sergei Yushenkov continued his political career. In 2002, he left the liberal faction of parliament in protest against his colleagues’ persistent support for Putin’s policies and what he called “a bureaucratic police regime.” On the afternoon of April 17, 2003, while walking from his car to his apartment building in northern Moscow, Yushenkov was shot in the chest four times. Writing his obituary for the political analysis website I was then editing, I said, “Sometimes, when we journalists are afraid to say something under our own byline, we call people like Yushenkov, who, without looking over his shoulder, will say something clear and definitive, and all the more necessary for being predictable. There are very few people like that left.”

Six

THE END OF
A REFORMER

O
nce Putin’s biography was published in February 2000, he ceased being the young democratic reformer of Berezovsky’s invention; he was now the hoodlum turned iron-handed ruler. I do not think his image-makers were even conscious of the shift.

One person who could not have imagined Putin’s public transformation from democrat to strong hand was Sobchak. The two were united in their antipathy to democratic processes, but in the early 1990s, a public allegiance to democratic principles was the price of admission to public life—and to the good life.

In the early 1990s, members of the new business and political elites were hacking apart the old system all over Russia. They were, without a doubt—and, apparently, without pangs of conscience—appropriating and redistributing chunks of the system; at the same time, the most enterprising of them were also conjuring up a new system—and changing with it. People like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a
Komsomol functionary turned banker turned oilman, and Mikhail Prokhorov, a clothing reseller turned metals mogul turned international investor, and Vladimir Gusinsky, an importer turned banker and media magnate, were self-invented entrepreneurs who started with shady moneymaking schemes but, as their worldview expanded and their ambitions grew accordingly, began to position themselves as not only businessmen but philanthropists, civic leaders, and visionaries. As their views evolved, they invested money and energy in constructing a new political system.

Sobchak abhorred this new system and so did Putin, and this is why he, unlike many of Sobchak’s early allies, remained with the mayor after the 1991 failed coup and the 1992 corruption scandal and the 1993 dissolution of the city council. I am not sure why Sobchak, who had had a brief but intense love affair with democratic politics, developed such a hatred for the ways of democracy; I think, as a megalomaniac, he was deeply wounded every time he did not get his way—and by political competition itself, by the very possibility of dissent. In addition, he had Putin at his side at all times, always trying to get him to see the disadvantages of the democratic system. It was Putin, for example, who convinced Sobchak—and manipulated a number of city council members—to institute the office of mayor in the city: otherwise, Putin told his biographers years later, Sobchak “could be removed by those very same city council members anytime.” Putin’s own opposition to democratic reform was no less personal than Sobchak’s, but ran much deeper.

Like most Soviet citizens of his generation, Putin was never a political idealist. His parents may or may not have believed in a Communist future for all the world, in the ultimate triumph of justice for the proletariat, or in any of the other ideological clichés that had been worn thin by the time Putin was growing up; he never even considered his relationship to these ideals. The way he has talked
about the Young Pioneers, from which he was kept as a child, or the Komsomol, or the Communist Party, in which his membership simply expired along with the organization itself, makes it clear that he never saw any substantive meaning in his belonging to these organizations. Like other members of his generation, Putin replaced belief in communism, which no longer seemed plausible or even possible, with faith in institutions. His loyalty was to the KGB and to the empire it served and protected: the USSR.

In March 1994, Putin attended a European Union event in Hamburg that included a speech by Estonian president Lennart Meri. Estonia, like the two other Baltic republics, was annexed by the Soviet Union at the start of World War II, then lost to the Germans, to be retaken by the Soviets in 1944. The three Baltic states were the last to be included in the Soviet empire and the first to emerge from it—in no small part because they had a population that still remembered a time before the Soviets. Meri, Estonia’s first democratically elected leader in half a century, had been active in the anti-Soviet liberation movement. Now, speaking in Hamburg, he referred to the Soviet Union as “occupiers.” At this point Putin, who had been sitting in the audience among Russian diplomats, rose and left the room. “It looked very impressive,” recalled a St. Petersburg colleague who would go on to run the Russian federal election commission under President Putin. “The meeting was held in Knights’ Hall, which has ten-meter-tall ceilings and a marble floor, and as he walked, in total silence, each step of his echoed under the ceiling. To top it all off, the huge cast-iron door slammed shut behind him with deafening thunder.”

That Putin felt the need to break diplomatic protocol—to literally turn his back on the president of a neighboring country and a very important trade partner for the city of St. Petersburg—shows just how personally he took the matter: what he perceived as an attack on the Soviet Union hurt him as deeply as personal insults that
had sent him into a rage when he was younger. The breathless manner in which his colleague recounted the story for Putin’s biographers shows how deep a vein of Soviet nostalgia Putin was tapping.

Putin loved the Soviet Union, and he loved its KGB, and when he had power of his own, effectively running the financial system of the country’s second-largest city, he wanted to build a system just like them. It would be a closed system, a system built on total control—especially control over the flow of information and the flow of money. It would be a system that aimed to exclude dissent and would crush it if it appeared. But in one way, the system would be better than the KGB and the USSR had been: this one would not betray Putin. It would be too smart and too strong for that. So Putin worked diligently to centralize control not only over all foreign trade but also over business that was springing up domestically—hence his effort to take over casinos, which had appeared suddenly and grew extremely fast. He also eventually moved to manage the city’s relationship with the media, both print and electronic, which he alternately isolated from city hall and strong-armed into covering particular stories in particular ways.

Sobchak had picked the right right-hand man: Putin hated the wishy-washy democrats even more than he did, and he was even better than Sobchak at working the politics of fear and greed.

POLITICIANS LIKE SOBCHAK are usually the last to learn their luster is gone. When Sobchak ran for reelection in 1996, the city hated him. Under his rule, St. Petersburg had been transformed in ways both tragic and farcical—though much of this was hardly Sobchak’s fault. The city’s economy was in shambles: more than a million of its five million residents had been employed by the military-industrial plants, which had slowed down or stopped altogether. As was the case elsewhere in Russia, a few people were getting very rich very
fast, first by buying and selling anything and everything (for example, exporting Russian timber and importing Chinese umbrellas), then, gradually, by privatizing Soviet industrial plants and creating new institutions. Many Russians, however, got poorer—or at least felt a lot poorer: there were so many more goods in the stores now, but they could afford so little. Nearly everyone lost the one thing that had been in abundant supply during the Era of Stagnation: the unshakable belief that tomorrow will not be different from today. Uncertainty made people feel even poorer.

St. Petersburg’s economic problems made much of the rest of Russia seem well-off in comparison. Three-quarters of the city’s population lived below the poverty line. Its infrastructure, already weak in the late 1980s—which provided part of the impetus for the informal preservation movement—was now in ruins. Streets had not been repaved in so long that, whenever it rained or snowed—which in this northern seaside city was often—the streets turned into rivers of mud. Public transport was at a standstill: the city was not replacing buses that had to be retired. In a city composed entirely of large apartment buildings, working elevators were becoming extinct. Electricity in the center of town was flickering off and on. In studies of relative levels of standard of living, the country’s second-largest city regularly ranked in the twenties among Russian cities.

Against this backdrop, Sobchak insisted on maintaining the persona of a worldly, sophisticated politician: always meticulously turned out, with his blond wife on his elbow, shuttled around in limousines, surrounded by bodyguards. Alexander Bogdanov, a young pro-democracy activist, remembered being snubbed by Sobchak in 1991, just two months after the failed coup, on the first Revolution Day in post-Communist Russia: “There was a concert in Palace Square. No one quite knew whether we should be celebrating or commemorating this day as a day of tragedy. So there was a rally in the afternoon and a dance at night. While Sobchak and [his wife
Ludmila] Narusova were holding a banquet in the Tavrichesky Palace, with an entrance fee of five hundred rubles! That was before hyperinflation hit, this was a huge sum of money…. So there we were, walking around the dance carrying banners with the words ‘A Day of National Tragedy,’ looking and feeling like idiots. And I said, ‘You know what? Why are we wasting our time here? Let’s go to the Tavrichesky Palace, where they are having a feast.’ We arrived at the Tavrichesky just as they were all getting into their cars. Sobchak came out in tails, with Narusova wearing a beautiful dress and some sort of wraparound turbanlike hat. Sobchak had a bodyguard who would go on to be Putin’s chief bodyguard. He had this stupid habit: he would go up to me and just about curse me out, saying, ‘You are getting to me! Get out of here! Disappear, I am sick of you!’ So I said to Sobchak, ‘Why is your bodyguard always threatening me?’ And Ludmila Borisovna [Narusova] said to me, ‘Why are you always making a fool of yourself?’ And Sobchak was all relaxed, all important, getting into his limousine, and he said to me, ‘Shut up, the people elected me!’ I remembered that for the rest of my life. That’s the kind of snob he was.”

As Sobchak’s deputy mayor, Putin performed the jobs that Soviet tradition had reserved for KGB men in the “active reserve”: in addition to being responsible for foreign trade, he also aimed to control the flow of information in and out of the government. Yuri Boldyrev, Yeltsin’s chief comptroller who had unsuccessfully tried to follow up on Salye’s allegations, served as a senator from St. Petersburg in 1994–1995. “Not once during this time was I allowed to go live on air on St. Petersburg television,” he recalled later. “Only after I had stopped being a senator was I allowed to speak live—and even then the anchors kept interrupting me, so in the end I said nothing.”

Whenever I went to St. Petersburg on a story, the first person I would go see was Anna Sharogradskaya: her office was on Nevsky Prospekt, just down the street from the railroad station, and she knew
everything. She ran the Independent Press Center, which provided space for press conferences for anybody who wanted to hold one—including those who would be turned down by every other space in town. She knew everyone, and she feared no one. She was in her late fifties by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, and she remembered a time when things had been a lot more scary. One time Sharogradskaya organized a press conference that exposed the Sobchak administration’s practice of bugging the offices of journalists and politicians, including his own employees. Many people had known or suspected this was the case, but only the local English-language newspaper, run and staffed by expats, dared run the story. Sharogradskaya was always convinced that Putin, who was largely responsible for the mayor’s relationship with the media, organized the bugging.

In keeping with KGB practices, the information that Sobchak was allowed to receive was heavily edited. This was certainly part of the reason he never suspected how unpopular he had become. Some of St. Petersburg’s television-viewing audience saw Sobchak making this unpleasant discovery. “There was a show called
Public Opinion
,” recalled Sharogradskaya. “It was a popular show during the 1996 election. When Sobchak saw that his popularity rating was six percent, he shouted, ‘That’s impossible!,’ jumped up, and left the studio. The show was shut down. The host, Tamara Maksimova, was fired. Her husband, Vladimir, who was the director of the show, called me and said he wanted to hold a press conference. I said, ‘No problem,’ and scheduled it for noon the next day. Vladimir called the following morning, three or four hours before the scheduled press conference, and said it had to be canceled: ‘We cannot do this, because we are being threatened: something might happen to our daughter.’ I said, ‘Please tell that to the journalists. I cannot not explain the reason for the cancellation.’ They came and told everyone that they were being threatened and they were scared. Journalists tried to ask them questions, but they would not respond.”