The New Tsar (13 page)

Rumors of imminent military action continued to swirl, including a report around three in the morning that elite special operation troops had been deployed from a secret location inside the city and would
march on Sobchak’s office. “They can polish us off in five minutes,” Shcherbakov told Sobchak. For their safety, Sobchak and Putin fled and spent the night in the Kirov factory.

By dawn on August 21, though, the putsch had crumpled. Gorbachev had been freed from house arrest and was returning to Moscow. Boris Yeltsin, the public face of the resistance, would become the leader of the new Russian nation that emerged. Sobchak had led the resistance in Leningrad, and became one of that nation’s most prominent new democrats. Not at all by his design, Vladimir Putin landed on the winning side of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And yet he did not share the euphoria that many Russians felt. On the contrary, the experience was for him a difficult one. Lyudmila and his friends described the period as the most trying of his life. “In fact,” he said, “it tore my life apart.”
⁴⁹
Colonel Leshchev, who had been a superior in the Leningrad KGB headquarters, said Putin’s resignation was more pragmatic than idealistic. “There were no prospects and in general it was not clear what would happen with the intelligence service.”
⁵⁰
It was a calculated risk. Had the putsch succeeded, he could have faced arrest. At a minimum, he would certainly have been unemployed after having resigned. As it was, he waited until the momentum had swung against the putsch. Leonid Polokhov, who studied law with him at Leningrad State University and later became a military prosecutor who exposed the terrible rituals of hazing in the Soviet military during the glasnost era, was simply stunned when he learned that his friend had left the service. “Volodya surprised me greatly two times: the first time, when he joined the KGB—and the second when he left it,” he said.
⁵¹

PART TWO

CHAPTER 5

The Spies Come In from the Cold

I
gor Shadkhan spent four months in 1991 filming a documentary in Norilsk, the bleak, industrial city in the far north of Siberia. This place, above the Arctic Circle, was scarcely inhabitable, but underneath it lay some of the most valuable minerals on earth: nickel, copper, and other metals. Beginning in the 1930s, the Soviet Union built a prison camp and then a city to extract the wealth in the mines that extended for miles underground. Shadkhan was there to document a darker truth that would never have been revealed before glasnost: Norilsk was not a glorious Soviet conquest of nature; it was a desolate, frozen island of the Gulag Archipelago built on the bones of those who did not survive.

Shadkhan, fifty-one and all but bald, was a native of Leningrad. He achieved fame as the director of a television series,
Test for Adults
, that began in 1979 and was still on the air in 1991. In it, he filmed interviews with a group of ten children and their parents, charting the evolution of their lives over the years. Shadkhan’s talent was his ability to converse; he elicited the hopes of his subjects in tender interviews that avoided topics which might have offended the censors during the Brezhnev years but seemed illuminating nonetheless. He planned to turn his interviews with the Gulag survivors in Norilsk into a new series, to be called
Snow: My Fate
, but the general director of his channel, Dmitri Rozhdestvensky, had something else in mind for him first. He asked Shadkhan to profile the staff of Leningrad’s mayor. Rozhdestvensky, who would go on to start a television production company called Russian Video, thought it would be good for business, since the mayor now effectively owned the station, and he suggested Shadkhan start with an aide who held an important position.

“Who is this Putin?” Shadkhan asked.
¹

When Shadkhan returned from Norilsk that fall, his hometown was
suddenly a different city, under the control not of the Communist Party, but of the democrats. The collapse of the August putsch hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union, then in its final weeks of existence. The conspirators were arrested, including Vladimir Kryuchkov, the chairman of the KGB, which would itself subsequently be broken into disparate departments under the political control of Russia’s new leaders. The Fifth Chief Directorate, which hunted dissidents, was abolished. Gorbachev returned to his post but as president of a country now devolving into fifteen separate states. The Russian parliament in Moscow—comprising the Congress of People’s Deputies and a smaller Supreme Soviet with 252 members—was now the undisputed legislative power in the land. On September 6, it formally ratified the results of the referendum that Leningrad had held three months earlier. The city once again became St. Petersburg, as Peter the Great had christened it nearly three centuries before. Sobchak presided over a formal rechristening celebration on November 7, pointedly choosing the seventy-forth anniversary of the Russian Revolution as the date.

Boris Yeltsin, as president of the new Russia, had banned the Communist Party after the putsch, and Sobchak used every opportunity to bury the party in his city, too. He seized the party’s power, assets, and infrastructure, including its headquarters in the Smolny Institute, the eighteenth-century convent and later girls’ academy where Lenin had set up his Bolshevik government. The baroque landmark now became his office. The move symbolized “the victory of democratic forces” in a new Russia, but it also signaled “Sobchak’s intention to grab real power for himself in the very beginning of the post-Communist era.”
²

Sobchak now appointed Putin to be the head of the city’s new committee on foreign economic affairs, and Putin settled into a new office in Smolny. Following Sobchak’s lead, he replaced the portrait of Lenin that decorated apparatchiks’ offices with an engraving of Peter the Great. In his new capacity, Putin joined Sobchak in fighting the rearguard efforts of the Communist Party to throttle the city’s new authorities, enforcing Sobchak’s decrees that had usurped the party’s perquisites. The House of Political Enlightenment, a modern marble-clad edifice across Dictatorship of the Proletariat Street from Smolny, had long been the Communist Party’s property, but Sobchak decided to turn it into an international business center, which soon began to attract savvy Soviet entrepreneurs who had already seen the potential for trade and commerce in the new Russia. They included men like Dmitri Rozhdestvensky from the state
television channel and Vladimir Yankunin, a former trade diplomat at the United Nations. Their liaison in the corridors of power would be the unprepossessing former KGB officer put in place by Sobchak.

The rump of the city’s Communist Party continued to occupy a wing of the new business center, however, and its members defiantly raised the Soviet Union’s red hammer and sickle from the roof. It was a symbolic act and nothing more, but Putin ordered the flag removed, only to have the Communists raise another the next day. Again Putin ordered it removed. Things went on in this way long enough that the Communists ran out of proper flags and began hanging handmade ones, one of the last more dark brown than red. Eventually, Putin had had enough. He ordered workers to cut down the entire flagpole.
³
Putin, echoing Sobchak, never had much patience for opposition.

—

T
he idea for a television documentary about the mayor’s staff was Sobchak’s. Understanding the role television played in his own rise to prominence in the Congress of People’s Deputies, Sobchak believed that showing his managers at work would cement the idea that he, not the city council, was the central figure of authority in the new St. Petersburg. Shadkhan was not enthusiastic. He had just finished filming interviews with people who had spent years suffering in the Gulag because of an abuse of power. Now he was sent to the building that had until a few weeks before housed the Communist Party that had been responsible for their plight. He had been there only once before, he said, and found its corridors sterile and chilling. Now he found it bustling with clusters of people speaking not only Russian but also foreign languages—in the very seat of political power.

The man who greeted him in Putin’s office on Smolny’s first floor was Igor Sechin, whose lowly position and bearish demeanor belied his world travels and fluency in Portuguese.
⁴
A classmate of Putin’s at university, he had worked in Mozambique and then Angola in the 1980s as a translator for Soviet military advisers, though many suspected he, too, worked for the KGB or for military intelligence. He became an inseparable aide to Putin, whose office—and soon Sobchak’s—was full of men like Sechin, veterans of the Cold War, cast adrift when the Soviet empire caved in on itself. Putin explained Sobchak’s idea for the documentary to Shadkhan and flattered him by praising his work on
Test for Adults
, but he also tried to set conditions, asking for the questions in advance. Shadkhan refused. “There is one rule: you should not know the questions—and I
the answers,” he told him, and Putin relented.
⁵
The interviews continued over a number of days in November 1991. Putin looked younger than the thirty-nine he was, his hair still blond, though thinning. He was so short and lean, so diminutive, that he seemed out of proportion to the grand committee rooms where Shadkhan filmed. In his office, though, Shadkhan drew the camera claustrophobically close, focused on his deep blue eyes and soft lips, his cheeks discolored by stubble. He began with banal questions about his age, his family, his education, even his zodiac sign. (“Libra, I think,” Putin said, “but I’m not sure.”) He asked about his dog, his work, and the politics of a new Russia.

The obvious question, about his career before government, was soon to come. Putin, years later, claimed he had arranged the interview himself to disclose his association with a loathed organization that was then being dismantled. Sobchak’s critics and others warned Putin that his still-secret KGB background, once exposed, could be turned against him or the mayor, and he believed that disclosing the fact on his own would defuse the whole matter. Shadkhan obliged perhaps more than he had expected. Being “a slave to metaphor,” he filmed the young mayoral aide driving his Volga and added to the scene a piano sonata from
Seventeen Moments of Spring
, a beloved television miniseries from 1973 based on a novel written, like
The Shield and the Sword
, with the cooperation of the KGB.
⁶
Its hero was a double agent in Nazi Germany named Max Otto von Stirlitz, and the series was another of the Soviet-era spy thrillers that Putin adored.
⁷
When Shadkhan asked him about his vocation on camera, however, he sounded defensive and petulant.

“It seems that we cannot leave the subject,” Putin said.

“You will agree, though, that one does not meet an intelligence officer that often—well, at least one who admits being one,” Shadkhan replied.

“You never know,” Putin said cryptically. “You may be meeting them quite often. He knows it, and you don’t.”
⁸

His coming out continued with a lengthy interview published on November 25 in the newspaper
Chas Pik
, or
Rush Hour
.
⁹
He did not expunge his past, but he wanted to distinguish his career from the KGB’s crimes, from the ruthless crusades against dissidents to the abortive putsch. He told the interviewer that the KGB had become “a monster” that no longer carried out the “tasks for which it was created,” that is, the protection of the state from its external enemies. He insisted that his work involved foreign intelligence and that he had no connection to the KGB’s internal repression. He also emphasized that no intelligence
agency in the world could work without secret agents. “So it was, so it is and so it will be.” That past was behind him, he said, but he felt no remorse about the career he had chosen.

“You don’t repent of your past?” the interviewer, Nataliya Nikiforova, asked.

“No, I don’t repent,” he replied. “I repent of crimes. I did not commit any crimes. And I don’t justify, though to justify is easier than taking a decisive step.” By “decisive step,” he meant his resignation from the KGB, which he emphasized repeatedly.

Far from disqualifying him from public service, he said, his background, his experience, his fluency in German, and his familiarity with international economics would serve the city’s needs and Russia’s new democracy. When Nikiforova asked if the city’s “international partners” would look askance at the presence of KGB spies on Sobchak’s staff, he simply noted that the American president, George H. W. Bush, had previously served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and no one disqualified him from holding office.

Such were the heady days that followed the events of August. Everything was mixed up, and anything seemed possible, even to speak of secrets long hidden. Except for three deaths in Moscow, the people turned back the putsch, without violence, simply by refusing to accept the outcome of a power struggle in the high ranks of the Soviet hierarchy. This new Russia offered the exhilarating, disorienting opportunity to be free, to live without fear, to be honest and accountable, to remake oneself for the new era. Russia faced economic hardship, but the diminished heir of the Soviet Union could now establish a democratic government, end its Cold War isolation, and open itself to Europe and the rest of the world. In his first foray into the public spotlight, unthinkable only months before, Vladimir Putin portrayed himself as an avowed democrat. And yet even then, at the dawn of democracy in Russia, he warned that the imperative of the strong state—and the people’s willingness to accept, even desire it—remained part of the collective Russian temperament. “No matter how sad, no matter how terrible it sounds, I believe that a turn towards totalitarianism for a period of time is possible in our country. The danger, though, should be seen not in the organs of law enforcement, the security services, the police, or even the army. The danger is in the mentality, the mentality of our people, in our very own mentality. It seems to all of us—and I will admit, to me sometimes as well—that by imposing strict order with an iron fist, we will all begin to
live better, more comfortably, more securely. In actual fact that comfort would very quickly pass because that iron fist would very quickly begin to strangle us.”
¹⁰