The New Tsar (11 page)

Though he had no electoral experience, Sobchak threw himself into politics. Like Gorbachev, he believed that the Soviet system could change with reforms, but he found himself and the country unprepared for the novelty of democracy after the decades of fear and suspicion that had fractured Soviet society. The peculiarities of the system—government-assigned employment, housing, and even vacations—meant that most people lived and worked within a narrow social circle and harbored a deep distrust of anyone outside it. “Never talk to strangers,” the famous line from
The Master and Margarita
, was an article of faith in the Soviet Union. Sobchak lived what he admitted was the rarefied life of the intelligentsia, comfortable and “increasingly circumscribed,” and when campaigning outside his milieu, he discovered how little he knew of how ordinary people lived.
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Once elected, Sobchak made an impression when the Congress of People’s Deputies convened in the spring of 1989. He joined a bloc of reformist legislators that included Andrei Sakharov, the dissident physicist, and Boris Yeltsin, the bearish party official who had become the first secretary in Moscow, and he passionately and eloquently hectored the Soviet leadership, the military, and the KGB in public hearings that were transmitted across the vast country. Sobchak chaired an investigation into the killing of twenty people during an anti-Soviet demonstration on April 9 in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, exposing the mendacity of the official version of the military’s crackdown there. The upheavals of 1989 had now spread to the Soviet Union itself—with unrest in Lithuania, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Despite their last, violent efforts to contain the fervor, the Soviet authorities no longer wielded enough power to hold the system together.
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A month after the Putins returned, Leningrad elected a new city council. Enough reformers and independents won to break the Communist Party’s monopoly on municipal power. The new legislators were earnest
but also inexperienced, disorganized, and leaderless. A bloc of them appealed to Sobchak to run for one of twenty-five remaining vacant seats and then, assuming he won, to compete for the job of council chairman. Sobchak’s prominence in the Congress of People’s Deputies in Moscow raised hopes that he would be a unifying leader for the city. He won his election and in May became the council’s chairman, effectively the city’s top elected official. Sobchak “personified the transition to a new form of government,” as one historian put it, where hope triumphed over reason.
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He was a legal scholar, not an administrator, and whatever his charisma, he had no experience governing a city of five million people—let alone at a time of political upheaval, with a recalcitrant bureaucracy still controlled by the Communists. Sobchak needed allies and expertise, and he turned to the one institution where he thought he could find competent aides able to navigate what was becoming a treacherous political transition. He turned to the institution he had excoriated from the dais of the Congress of People’s Deputies. He turned to the KGB.

Shortly after taking up his new position, Sobchak telephoned Oleg Kalugin, the former spymaster whose career fell afoul of KGB intrigue after his service in foreign intelligence, leaving him in “internal exile” in Leningrad. Kalugin had since joined the ranks of the democratic reformers and became one of the most prominent critics of his former agency. Now Sobchak had a favor to ask of him. Could he recommend someone inside the KGB whom he could trust as an adviser? He was suspicious of the bureaucracy. He needed a liaison to the security forces. Kalugin suggested a senior officer, a lieutenant general he trusted, but Sobchak dismissed the idea. Concerned that an outward alliance with the KGB might tarnish his democratic credentials, he wanted someone with a lower profile. A few days passed and Sobchak called again. He asked Kalugin if he had ever heard of a young officer named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
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Some would assume the KGB had a hand in directing the young officer into Sobchak’s office, but according to Kalugin, it was Sobchak who recruited him. Vladimir Putin remembered Sobchak from his lectures in law school but did not know him well. By his own account, a friend from law school had suggested he go see Sobchak, which he did with trepidation. He could hardly have agreed with some of Sobchak’s most blistering criticisms of the KGB, and Sobchak’s political future remained tenuous at best, like everything in the Soviet Union in 1990. Nevertheless, that May, he went to Sobchak’s new office in the Mariinsky Palace,
and Sobchak hired him on the spot. He said he would arrange his transfer with Merkuriev and told him to start the next Monday. First, though, Putin felt obliged to disclose his actual profession. “I must tell you that I am not just an assistant to the rector,” he told Sobchak. “I am a regular officer of the KGB.”

In Putin’s recollection, Sobchak hesitated and then, to Putin’s surprise, dismissed this issue. “Fuck it!” he replied.
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Putin insisted that he must inform his superiors and, if necessary, resign from the KGB. He agonized over the decision, his friends said. Although he had grown disillusioned, the KGB remained the institution he served loyally. In the event, whatever worries he had about the Center’s reaction were misplaced. The KGB was happy to have its own agent working undercover in the office of Leningrad’s rising political star. This new democratic experiment, after all, was a dangerous thing that required eternal vigilance. And so with the KGB’s blessing, perhaps at its insistence, Lieutenant Colonel Putin remained in the service, continuing to earn his meager, if steady salary, which was more than he earned as Sobchak’s adviser.

He was now living a double life, the life of the undercover agent at last—only inside his own country. He began to advise Sobchak even as he continued to work in a small office on the first floor of the university’s red and white Twelve Collegia building. His task there was to monitor foreign students and visitors who were arriving in increasing numbers as glasnost eased travel restrictions. He no longer worked in the Big House on Liteiny Prospekt, but he still paid occasional visits, the purposes of which could only have been to keep his superiors informed of the changing politics of the day—at the university and in Sobchak’s office. When a delegation from St. Petersburg Community College in Florida arrived in the fall of 1990 for an educational exchange, it was the lieutenant colonel who played host to the college’s unsuspecting president, Carl M. Kuttler Jr.

Kuttler had met Putin’s university adviser, Valery Musin, when he visited Florida and proposed establishing links between the two cities and the two universities. When Kuttler and his delegation arrived, Putin met them at the airport and spent the next ten days handling all the arrangements of their meetings, meals, and concerts at the symphony and ballet. He did so with a punctuality and efficiency that surprised Kuttler, given the deteriorating economic conditions in the city, including a critical shortage of gasoline that produced long, frustrating lines. When Kuttler
went on an excursion out of the city, the government limousine was in danger of running out of fuel until Putin intervened and directed it to a city sanitation depot where it could find gas.

His dual careers increasingly began to intersect. He introduced Kuttler to Sobchak, and at a banquet on the last night Sobchak had a favor to ask of Kuttler. “Carl, would you do something for me?” he began. “We don’t have much travel money.” Sobchak had turned his sights to international travel and wanted to return again to the United States. “Would you pay for it?”
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Kuttler raised the money and Sobchak visited a month later. In Washington, he met President George H. W. Bush and senior congressional leaders. Procter & Gamble flew Sobchak’s delegation to Cleveland for a day. And he stayed in Florida at Kuttler’s house on the bay, where he marveled at the environmental restrictions that forbade him to fell a single tree without permission from the municipal authorities.
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Putin credited the trip to America with Sobchak’s decision to promote him to his permanent staff in 1991. He also remembered Kuttler’s behavior at the banquet. When it came time to reciprocate a toast, Kuttler asked the surprised guests to hold hands, and he said a prayer. “You prayed for our university,” Putin reminded him when they met again a decade later. “You prayed for our city. You prayed for our country. And you prayed for me.” Kuttler suspected the young university assistant had never before heard a prayer on his behalf. He never imagined that his host was a KGB officer.
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L
ieutenant Colonel Putin’s future was now increasingly affixed to a man apt to quote classical poets and artfully articulate what were once heresies. “We are all infected to some degree by the system,” Sobchak wrote only a year after his new adviser came to work for him, musing on Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman” and what he called the “system syndrome.” “From birth we have been taught intolerance, suspicion and paranoid fear of spies.” Sobchak envisioned a new Soviet Union that offered justice and hope, a democracy, a “normal, civilized state” in which “there is no need to slaughter half the population to make the other half happy.”
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The two men made an odd couple.

They differed in age, in temperament, and in philosophy. Sobchak was flamboyant, charismatic; Putin reserved, inherently suspicious, and secretive. He did not share Sobchak’s hostility toward the Soviet Union, but he nonetheless served his new boss as loyally as he had his KGB commanders, and over time
he began to absorb some of his superior’s views. Even as other KGB officers resigned on principle or in pursuit of new ways of making money, Putin hedged his bets. He never broke with the agency the way Kalugin had; he did not regret his service and never would. One of his superiors in Leningrad who had also served in East Germany, Yuri Leshchev, said service in the KGB was to Putin “a sacred business.”
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And yet Sobchak drew him deeper and deeper into the new politics of the era. He worked for the old regime—and for those who would overthrow it.

Leningrad’s city council, while democratic, proved inept. Its members quarreled endlessly among themselves and with Sobchak over the powers of the chairman, but did little to address the city’s dire needs for housing, food, and transportation. By the summer of 1990, the Soviet economy was lurching on the brink of collapse, and Leningrad and other cities began to run out of basic foodstuffs; the shelves of its meager stores emptied first of tea and soap, then sugar, cigarettes, and even vodka. Shortly after returning from the United States—where he had visited a well-stocked Kmart in Alexandria, Virginia—Sobchak forced the council to introduce ration cards. It was hardly famine—not with a black market flourishing—but rationing brought back horrifying memories of the siege. “Democracy is facing a hungry winter,” Sobchak said in defense of the plan. “It is crucial for democracy to survive this winter.”
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B
y then the KGB and Soviet military leaders had already begun to make emergency plans for the imposition of martial law. In January 1991, Gorbachev ordered the military to restore Communist rule in Lithuania after days of protests, reversing the republic’s declaration of independence the year before. The assault culminated with a tank attack on the television tower in the capital, Vilnius. Fourteen people died, but Lithuanian leaders continued to defy Moscow and pressed ahead with a referendum on independence in February, which Gorbachev declared illegal. In June Russia held its own presidential election, and Boris Yeltsin became a legitimately elected counterweight to Gorbachev’s increasingly erratic and unpopular rule. The same month, Sobchak took advantage of the national election to win election to a newly created executive branch that would wield authority over the unwieldy city legislature. Only a month before, he had forced the council to create the position of mayor, which only he was in a position to win. The council’s members were increasingly at odds with Sobchak’s role as their chairman, and they hoped that by creating separate branches of government,
they would be able to constrain his powers as the city’s leader. Leningrad also held a nonbinding referendum to restore the city’s prerevolutionary name, St. Petersburg. Sobchak had initially opposed the change, but he campaigned for the restoration of the city’s name with savvy and tact. He described the change as the natural evolution of Peter the Great’s vision of the city as a “window to Europe,” and he offered to remove Lenin’s waxy corpse from its Red Square mausoleum and bury him with his relatives in Leningrad, in keeping with the revolutionary’s last will and testament. His offer respected those who still revered Lenin and appeased those who wanted to end the cult that still surrounded him.
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When the election came, Sobchak won 66 percent of the vote, while a narrower majority—54 percent—voted to change the city’s name.
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Vladimir Putin played no role in the politics of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He merited no appearance in the many contemporaneous memoirs and histories of the monumental events of 1991—not even Sobchak’s, which he wrote in the year after Putin began working for him. He remained a young functionary, accustomed to working in the ranks and in the shadows. His loyalties and his fate, though, now rested with the city’s undisputed political leader, a man often mentioned as a future president of all Russia.