The New Tsar (6 page)

—

I
n 1980, after he returned to Leningrad, Vladimir’s personal life—and career—took an important turn. Unusually for Soviet society, he remained unmarried at twenty-eight. His bachelorhood was ill suited to the conservative KGB. The First Chief Directorate, in fact, refused to post single men abroad, fearing that sexual liaisons outside marriage could leave them vulnerable to exposure or blackmail.
²⁰
Vladimir was not unattractive, with deep blue eyes. He was fit and quick-witted, if sardonically so. When it came to women, though, he seemed emotionally reticent, even stunted; he was far more at ease with the circle of male friends from his youth and the KGB. “I often used to tell him that he was terrible at making conversation,” Roldugin said.
²¹

Late in his university years, Vladimir had had his first serious relationship with a medical student. Her name was Lyudmila Khmarina, whose brother, Viktor Khmarin, was also a close friend. Roldugin described her as pretty and headstrong, inclined less to ask how Vladimir felt than to tell him when he was ill. They met at his family’s dacha in Tosno and dated through graduation and the launch of his career. In 1979 they became engaged. They applied for a marriage license, and their parents bought rings, a suit, and a dress. And then suddenly he broke off the relationship. He decided “it was better to suffer then than to have both of us suffer later,” but he never explained what happened, not even to Roldugin. He would only hint at “some intrigue,” though it seemed not to have been especially bitter, since he would remain friends with her brother Viktor for years to come. Vladimir had grown used to the bachelor’s life—perhaps preferred it, as a pampered son still living at home. He assumed he might never marry.
²²

In March 1980, however, he met another Lyudmila—Lyudmila Shkrebneva, a blue-eyed stewardess for Aeroflot who lived in Kaliningrad, the former Prussian province seized by the Soviet Union after the Nazi defeat. She was twenty-two and had blonde hair that flowed in waves to her shoulders. She and another stewardess, Galina, visited Leningrad for three days. On their first night in town, eager to take in as many of the city’s sights as possible, they went with Galina’s boyfriend, Andrei, to the Lensovet Theatre to see a performance by Arkady Raikin, an aging actor and satirist. Galina had invited Lyudmila, and so Andrei brought along his friend, Vladimir. Lyudmila was initially unimpressed, noting his shabby clothes and unprepossessing demeanor. Had she met him on the street, she recalled, she “would not have paid attention to
him.”
²³
During the intermission, though, she grew bold and asked if he could help them acquire tickets to the musical performance the next night. He did, and by the end of the second night he gave her his telephone number. Andrei was shocked. “Are you crazy?” he asked his friend later. He had never before seen him give his number to someone he did not know well.
²⁴
They met again the third night, and when she returned to Kaliningrad, she called the number.

When she flew again to Leningrad in July, they began a relationship. She joked that other girls took the bus or trolley to dates, while she flew to hers.
²⁵
Soon she resolved to move to Leningrad. Vladimir urged her to return to college—she had dropped out of a technical college to become a stewardess—and she enrolled in the philology department at his alma mater, Leningrad State University. The stress of the move and the studies ruptured their relationship at first, and she broke it off until he flew to Kaliningrad and persuaded her to return. By October, she had settled in a communal apartment that she shared with a woman whose son had left to serve in the army.
²⁶
Vladimir proved to be a demanding, jealous boyfriend; she felt he was always watching her, testing her, judging her. He would declare his intention—whether it was to go skiing, say, or for her to take a typing course—and leave her no room to argue. Unlike the first Lyudmila, she was more pliant. When Vladimir’s mother met her, she was not impressed and, worse, told her so. Her son already had another Lyudmila, Maria huffed, a “good girl.”

Lyudmila did not know he worked for the KGB. He had told her, too, that he worked for the criminal investigations branch of the Ministry of the Interior. It was a common cover for intelligence agents, and he had even been issued a false identification card.
²⁷
Whenever she asked what he did during the day, he evaded her questions with quips. “Before lunch, we caught,” he told her once, as if he and his colleagues had spent the day fishing. “After lunch we released.”
²⁸
It was not until 1981, after they had been dating for a year and a half, that she learned his true employment—and even then it was from the wife of a friend. She felt a tingle of excitement and pride. Unlike Roldugin, she had no reason to fear the KGB, or this young man. His taciturn manner now seemed understandable, explaining what had seemed elusive. When her friend told her, it was a revelation, but also an unsettling one. Being with him meant accepting that a part of him would always remain beyond her grasp.
²⁹
It even occurred to her that the woman who had revealed
his secret might well have been instructed to do so. She was never sure. Only then did she remember an odd encounter some months before.

She had agreed to phone Putin one evening at seven o’clock, as she often did. Because her communal apartment had no telephone, she went to a public telephone in a courtyard nearby. As it grew dark, she dialed his number, but he did not answer. She gave up, knowing his penchant for working late. As she was leaving, a young man approached her in the quiet, empty space. She turned to return to her apartment through the courtyard’s arched entrance, and still he followed. He quickened his pace, and so did she.

“Young lady, please, I’m not doing anything bad. I only want to talk to you. Only two seconds.” He seemed sincere, speaking from the heart. She stopped. “Young lady, it’s fate. It’s fate! How I wanted to meet you.”

“What are you talking about?” she replied dismissively. “It’s not fate.”

“Well, please, I beg you. Give me your telephone number.”

“I don’t have a telephone.”

“Then write down mine,” he said. He was offering his number the way Putin had on their second date.

“I won’t,” she replied, before at last he let her go.
³⁰

The half-forgotten episode came back to her in a puzzling rush. Had the KGB—had Vladimir—tested her on the darkening street? If she were the type of woman who would strike up a relationship with any man on the street, that might provoke a husband’s jealousy, exposing her or him to counterespionage or blackmail. Or maybe he was just a brash young man who hoped to get to know her. She was not unnerved exactly, but now she grasped what kind of life she would enter with this man. Some might be afraid of such a test, she assured herself, but it would be silly to let it upset her. She had nothing to hide, after all. She did not resent his work—“Work is work,” she shrugged—but when she asked him about the encounter, more than once, he refused to answer, which did upset her. She knew he would never tell her anything about the other world he occupied, never put her mind at ease by explaining why he came home say at midnight instead of nine o’clock. She would worry, then grow angry, but always have to wait, alone and unknowing. His work at the KGB would leave its mark on her. She could never speak of his job or be open with people about her life or theirs together. Marrying Putin would be a “private ban” on her own life, she knew. She fell in love with the man, slowly, but it felt oppressive.
³¹

Vladimir could be bold and impetuous, but in courtship, he dallied. He did use his position—and his salary—to travel with her. Twice they went to the Black Sea, which he had loved since his trip as a young student staring at the stars. They once drove with friends to Sochi, the resort town more than a thousand miles to the south. They stayed in a two-room apartment reserved for the guards of Bocharov Ruchei, the seaside mansion built on the orders of Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s for the Soviet elite and that one day in the unforeseeable future would become the retreat of the presidents of a new Russia. Leonid Brezhnev convalesced there in the listless final years of his rule. From the balcony of their room, they could see the beach, but access to it was forbidden. In 1981 they returned to the Black Sea, this time staying two weeks in Sudak on the Crimea, their first trip alone.
³²
It was hardly a whirlwind romance, though. When at last he asked her to marry him, it was April 1983, and she thought he was breaking off the relationship.

“In three and a half years, you have probably made up your mind,” he told her at his apartment.

“Yes,” she said, hesitantly, fearing the end. “I have made up my mind.”

He seemed doubtful. “Yes?” he replied, and then added, “Well, then, if that’s the way it is, I love you and propose that we get married.”
³³

He had already settled on the date: July 28, then only three months away. They had a civil ceremony, not a religious one, which would have been forbidden for a KGB officer, and then two wedding celebrations. Twenty friends and relatives attended the first aboard a floating restaurant moored to the embankment beside Leningrad State University. A night later they held a different gathering in a more private space, a banquet hall in the Moscow Hotel. To Lyudmila, the first was warm and joyful; the second was more ceremonial, pleasant enough, but “a little bit different.” In attendance were Vladimir’s colleagues from the KGB who could not risk their confidentiality, even to the relatives and closest friends of one of their comrades.

They honeymooned in Ukraine, first driving to Kyiv, where they met friends who traveled with them, often sharing a room. They toured Moldova, then Lviv in western Ukraine, Nikolayev, and finally Crimea, staying in Yalta, all holiday landmarks of the vast Soviet empire. In Yalta, the newlyweds had a room of their own, and they stayed for twelve days, swimming and sunbathing on the rocky shore.
³⁴
Crimea seemed a magical, sacred place to him. They returned, via Moscow so he could drop by the KGB headquarters—the Center, as it was known—and then
they moved into his parents’ two-bedroom apartment on Stachek Lane. He was thirty, she twenty-five, and together they settled into a happy, if constrained, marriage.

One colleague, Igor Antonov, believed Vladimir married to advance his career, knowing that bachelorhood would hold him back.
³⁵
He certainly seemed to have thought it all out carefully, and his career break came a year later. The KGB promoted him to major after nine years of service and sent him to study in Moscow at the elite school of foreign intelligence, the Red Banner Institute. Founded in 1938, it was boot camp for the Soviet Union’s foreign spies. The institute was not only ideologically exclusive, it also discriminated on racial and ethnic lines. Jews were banned, as were Crimean Tatars, Chechens, and Kalmyks. Religious practice of any sort was forbidden. His admission may well have resulted from the KGB’s version of affirmative action. By the 1980s, the First Chief Directorate began to complain that too many of its cadets were “the spoiled children of privileged parents” who used their influence and connections in Moscow to gain entry. Instead, it wanted robust candidates with an aptitude for languages and absolute devotion to the Soviet cause. The directorate tried to expand its recruiting pool by increasing the proportion of cadets from the provinces, asking regional headquarters to nominate young officers.
³⁶
Leningrad sent Vladimir Putin.

The institute was now named after Andropov. After his long reign at the helm of the KGB, he took over as the secretary general of the Communist Party after Brezhnev’s death in 1982, raising the hopes of those who wanted to modernize the state under the firm hand of the security services. Instead, Andropov served only fifteen months before he died suddenly in February 1984, beginning a tumultuous turnover of geriatric Soviet leaders. Konstantin Chernenko replaced Andropov just months before Vladimir began attending the Red Banner Institute, and barely survived a year before dying in March 1985. The great Soviet nation suddenly seemed unable to generate new leaders, lumbering through a period of economic and political stagnation that left it falling ever further behind the West and the “main adversary,” the United States. The Soviet war in Afghanistan had descended into a quagmire, and those in Vladimir’s intelligence circles had the confidence to discuss truths about it that could never be uttered publicly. He was stunned by the revelations, having believed reflexively in the righteousness of the intervention.
³⁷

The institute was a secret facility located in a forest outside Moscow,
where it remains today under a new name, the Academy of Foreign Intelligence. It offered courses that lasted one to three years, depending on a cadet’s education, experience, and expected assignment.
³⁸
Lyudmila, now pregnant, remained in Leningrad, living with his parents. It was here that Vladimir learned spy craft—how to recruit agents, to communicate in code, to conduct surveillance, to lose a tail, to make and use dead-letter boxes. Above all, he was learning the art of deep cover. Throughout the training, cadets adopted code names, derived from the first letter of their names. Putin became Comrade Platov, protecting his real identity even from other students. They wore civilian clothes, not uniforms, preparing for their futures posing as journalists, diplomats, or trade delegates in countries they would be expected to know intimately, before having visited them. Vladimir showed up in September 1984, wearing a new three-piece suit, eager to impress, even though it was a warm fall day. “Look at Comrade Platov, now!” an instructor, Colonel Mikhail Frolov, told the other cadets, citing this slight young man as a model.
³⁹