The New Tsar (59 page)

And then, four paragraphs into the article, came the supposed bombshell: The Putins had secretly divorced in February, and according to
“our informer” he planned in June to remarry. The bride would be Alina Kabayeva, a world champion rhythmic gymnast, winner of the bronze medal in the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and a gold medal in Athens four years later. Kabayeva, then not quite twenty-five, was one of the most glamorous celebrities in Russia. By 2001, with her sporting career taking off, she had become the public face of the political party that would become United Russia; in the elections in December 2007, she even stood as a candidate on the party’s slate, recruited as part of an effort to make the party more attractive and duly assigned a seat in the Duma when it swept the vote.

Despite having lived in the public eye for eight years, Putin had shielded details of his private life from virtually any scrutiny or public discussion. His daughters, especially, disappeared into a sheltered world of pervasive security, shaped by their father’s fears and paranoia. “I have taken my wife and children away and hid them,” he once told his old friend, Sergei Roldugin, Masha’s godfather.
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In the beginning, at a time when the war in Chechnya struck the very heart of Moscow, Putin feared for their security, and few questioned his motives. Unlike the children of other Russians, politicians and businessmen, Putin’s daughters did not use the advantages of birth to propel their careers or celebrity. They simply vanished, accepting the lives of comfortable, if constrained, anonymity. Except for the early interviews they gave—intended to hone his image as a doting, if stern, father—he never again used them in the way politicians elsewhere use their children as props. They finished school in the isolation of tutors behind maximum security. They both learned to play piano and violin, encouraged by Roldugin and Putin’s own interest in music. Roldugin believed they could have become professional musicians “if they had a different fate.” They attended their father’s alma mater but under assumed names; even their acquaintances were unaware of their relation to the nation’s leader. Over time, Putin’s relationship with them became more distant, consumed as he was by the duties of power. Together, they once recorded a CD for their father of their music that included Bach’s Concerto in B Minor. After they moved on to university, Putin would listen at night, silencing anyone who tried to interrupt when he listened. By the time they reached adulthood, no one outside their family circle even knew what they looked like.

Lyudmila had never settled comfortably into the public life of a politician’s wife. Early in her husband’s presidency, she had granted occasional
interviews and accompanied him on his state visits, appearing beside the first ladies of the United States and Britain, among others, but only as protocol dictated, but later on less and less. She curated an organization called the Center for the Development of the Russian Language, devoting herself to the promotion of reading and education and the unifying bonds of the language in the
Russki mir
, or “Russian world,” including those who, as Putin would often point out, found themselves abandoned beyond Russia’s borders when the Soviet Union collapsed.
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Putin adopted the theme more explicitly after the humiliation of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and created a government organization, the Russian World Foundation, to champion the rights of the diaspora and keep them, at least culturally, in the motherland’s embrace. Lyudmila’s influence on her husband’s policies, though, was inconsequential, even in private. “She never meddled in Putin’s politics,” Roldugin said, and Putin never asked her to. They were rarely seen being affectionate, or even cordial, in public. Their appearances together bordered on the uncomfortable and had become less and less frequent by Putin’s second term. Privately, they lived together, dined together with their daughters when they were still at home, and rarely quarreled openly, according to Roldugin, but they ceased to be intimate.

The Kremlin’s grip on the media, of course, ensured that even the most benign scrutiny of his private life was taboo. He was no different in that than most previous Russian and Soviet leaders, who were traditionally portrayed as preeminent and thus remote figures. He was the father of the nation as much as father of his own family, an image the Kremlin relentlessly crafted. A film that appeared in February was seen as a new effort to portray Putin as a dedicated husband at a time when the rumors to the contrary were becoming more persistent. Its title,
A Kiss Off the Record
, came from a scene in which an influential politician very much resembling Putin kisses a woman very much resembling Lyudmila before a phalanx of photographers and playfully admonishes the journalists not to publicize the encounter. The producer-director, Olga Zhulina, insisted the film was fictional, but the details came straight from Putin’s life: his KGB service in Dresden, Lyudmila’s car accident, his unexpected rise to power. The film’s hero even went by Platov, Putin’s code name from his days in the KGB academy, a knowing allusion to the ultimate inspiration for the project. It departed from Putin’s life only in depicting Lyudmila’s role: in the dramatic climax, she fills in for Platov when he is late to an important press conference abroad, showing such poise and intelligence
that she earns a standing ovation from the press. One interpretation of the film—that it was intended to “feed the fantasies of Putin’s female admirers”—suggested that its underlying message was that the political fate of the country rested on the stability of the Platovs’ marriage.
²¹

The real reporters in the Kremlin pool knew not to ask, let alone write, about Putin’s family. By the end of his presidency, though, it was impossible not to notice what Topol called the widely discussed rumors that “all was not well with the second half” of the first couple. “The fact that Vladimir Putin, as well as any healthy man, is not indifferent to beautiful sporty women is well known in his inner circle,” Topol wrote, and then went on to mention the “gossip” that linked him with other women, including a well-known anchor of the state television news on Channel One, Yekaterina Andreyeva, a former basketball star. He even alluded to the journalist Yelena Tregubova and her story of Putin’s taking her to an emptied restaurant for sushi. The article referred to the personal relationships and “scandals” of other world leaders—from Sarkozy to Bill Clinton to Václav Klaus of the Czech Republic—and suggested that perhaps the Russian public, too, was prepared to accept a leader’s divorce as the normal state of affairs, rather than the mythology that the Kremlin had created of the contented domicile.

As speciously sourced as the article was—Kabayeva’s spokeswoman denied it, and the marriage in June did not, in fact, take place—the article created a sensation, titillating the foreign press and terrifying the Russian journalists who knew it had gone further than any had dared before. The article spread on the Internet, which was then still outside the control of the Kremlin’s minders, testing the once-ironclad shield erected around Putin’s personal life. Dmitri Medvedev’s presidential election campaign had promised a more open Russia, a freer place, and perhaps now it was possible to speak of issues that had long been forbidden.

After a week of churning rumors, it became impossible for Putin to avoid the matter any longer. He had to address the matter during a press conference in Italy, with Silvio Berlusconi, whose own personal proclivities provided endless material for the freewheeling Italian press. Berlusconi, who had just won the latest round of elections, had a deep admiration for Putin and his political style, and the feeling was mutual. Putin took to wearing suits made by Berlusconi’s tailor, and they became close in business and in private, negotiating deals and exchanging visits and lavish gifts, including a four-poster bed with curtains that would
become fodder in Berlusconi’s much-publicized tryst with an aggrieved prostitute, Patrizia D’Addario. The Italian leader called it “Putin’s bed.”
²²

The question came from a Russian reporter, Nataliya Melikova of
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
. She was careful to note that the rumors had reached the Italian press, but she appeared trepidatious anyway. She began with a question about the purpose of the visit, but tacked on one about the rumored divorce and whether the Putins’ eldest, Masha, had in fact moved to Germany and married. After a short aside, Putin emphasized that he did not intend to duck the more incendiary question. “The first thing I want to say is this: there is not a word of truth in what you said,” he replied. It was clear he was familiar with the article because he went on to mention Andreyeva, too, and rumors of other relationships, even though the reporter had not. He then tried to make light of it. “I think that nobody will be surprised if I say that I like them all, just as I like all Russian women. I think that no one will be offended if I say that I personally believe that our Russian women are the most talented and the most beautiful. The only women who can compare with them in this regard are Italian women.” After the translation, the Italians chuckled in approval, as Berlusconi beamed and nodded. Then Putin turned icy. “I am, of course, aware of the cliché that politicians live in glass houses, and people, of course, have a right to know how those who are involved in public activities actually live, but even in this case there have to be some limits.”

He went on: “There is such a thing as one’s private life with which nobody should be allowed to interfere. I have always reacted negatively to those who, with their snotty noses and erotic fantasies, meddle in other people’s lives.” Then he changed the subject, citing the growth of the economy under his presidency. Russia had reduced the number of those who lived in poverty twofold; real incomes were growing; and at least “no one is asking about Chechnya anymore.” The answer proved revealing: his public accomplishments were what mattered, not his personal life. Berlusconi shook his head as Putin spoke: he, above all, could empathize. As his friend finished, he put his two hands together to mime the firing of a machine gun, pointing directly at the young journalist who had asked the question.

On the same day, back in Moscow, the owner of the newspaper announced that he was closing it. He cited its low circulation, but no one believed that.

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T
he depth of Putin’s relationship with Kabayeva, or any other women, would remain unknown to any but his closest friends. And yet there was more than a passing political acquaintance between the two. She had clearly moved into the circle of friends from Petersburg who had emerged during Putin’s second term. Only a month before her name surfaced in connection with Putin’s, she had joined the advisory council of the newly formed National Media Group, a holding company controlled by Yuri Kovalchuk, whose banking empire had expanded to include some of the country’s most prominent television stations and newspapers. Sergei Fursenko, the brother of Putin’s minister of education, Andrei, and like him a founding member of the Ozero dacha cooperative, took over as the director of the company, which would continue to expand its media holdings, forming an ever more potent instrument of the propaganda that girded Putin’s power. Kabayeva’s inclusion signaled an intimacy with the clique—if not with Putin personally—that had quietly enriched itself during his presidency. Only at the end of his presidency, as he grappled with the 2008 problem, did the veil of secrecy lift a bit. The rumors of their relationship, some thought, might have been a symptom of the struggle under way.

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I
n February 2008, on the eve of Medvedev’s election, two of Putin’s most prominent critics, Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov, had published a seventy-six-page pamphlet that for the first time detailed the business connections that united Putin’s circle, including the stunning rise of Yuri Kovalchuk’s fortunes.
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The acquisitions that made up National Media Group, they wrote, included the media assets of Gazprom, purchased in 2005 for $166 million, which Medvedev himself valued two years later at $7.5 billion. As former ministers Nemtsov and Milov did not come from the radical fringe of Russia’s opposition, but they struggled to have an impact. They hoped the pamphlet would at least encourage a political debate before Medvedev’s election; perhaps Medvedev would even listen to the litany of problems they intended to highlight. Nemtsov, with a doctorate in mathematics, had served as a governor in Nizhny Novgorod and a deputy prime minister under Yeltsin. He had been an early supporter of Putin’s, even skiing with him in the Austrian Alps when the Sochi Olympic dream took root. Milov had been a deputy energy minister under Putin. Both had grown disillusioned, however, with the authoritarian trends that followed Putin’s early reforms. The pamphlet,
Putin: The Results
, challenged the very foundation of Putin’s valedictory speeches, in which he claimed to have resurrected the country from the ashes of the 1990s, working, as he himself would put it, like a “galley slave.” The authors acknowledged the stunning rise in GDP and average incomes, the drops in unemployment and poverty, but they argued that Putin’s economic miracle was a Potemkin mirage, erected with the profits from rising oil prices and papering over structural problems and a numbing growth in corruption. When Putin took office Russia ranked 82nd in Transparency International’s annual list of the least corrupted countries; by their writing, it had since plummeted to 143rd, putting it in the company of countries like Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Togo. The disclosure of $90,000 in book advances during Yeltsin’s presidency had created a political scandal that led to the dismissal of Anatoly Chubais and other presidential aides, but “today’s practitioners of corruption laugh at this pathetic sum,” they wrote. “Today theft by civil servants is measured in billions and is hidden from the eyes of the people: large share-owners cover for dozens of secret beneficiaries, ‘friends of president Putin,’ hiding behind their backs. Information on who the real owners are is carefully protected by the secret services, and the subject of corruption in the higher echelons of power is taboo for the Kremlin-controlled media.”