The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

by Gessen, Masha

  The session began, as planned by the coordinating committee, with three of its members making procedural announcements. When they came to the front, the hall erupted with laughter, because all three sported the standard-issue intelligentsia look—turtleneck sweaters and beards. “It was fantastical,” recalled a sociologist who was present at the session. “It was a total change of atmosphere: the suits with their mugs were out, and the informals were in.”

  Keeping with what one of them later termed “an acute sense of democracy” that brought them to the Mariinsky, the new deputies, in one of their first rulings, decided to remove all guards from the palace so that any citizen could gain access to any office or meeting hall. “The Mariinsky took on the look of a railroad station during the [Russian] Civil War,” one of the city council members wrote later. “Dozens of homeless men would stand at the entrance to the main assembly hall, grabbing deputies and trying to push typed papers into their hands. I remember a bearded man who kept trying to get the deputies to consider some brilliant invention of his. We had voted to remove the guards from the palace—and it was literally the next day that we were forced to calculate the cost of bronze details of the building’s interior that had gone missing.”

  The guard was soon reestablished, but the people kept coming. “People had so longed to be heard,” another city council member recalled later. “When voters came to see us, we felt somewhat like priests administering confession. We would say, ‘I cannot provide you with a new apartment; that would extend beyond the scope of my authority,’ and they would respond, ‘Just hear me out.’ And we would listen, attentively and patiently. And people would leave satisfied.”

  The realization that voters expected not only to be heard but also to be protected and fed would come a few months later.

  IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PRINCIPLES of radical democracy, the city council had no formal leader. This, however, proved impractical and even impolitic: as members of the new city council struggled to invent parliamentary procedure more or less from scratch, testing and reasserting rules of order in real time—and often on the air of the local television channel—Leningrad voters began to grow impatient. The city, the country, and life itself seemed to be falling apart all around them while the democrats practiced democracy without getting anything done.

  Marina Salye, still the city’s most popular politician, decided not to run for chairman of the council. Twenty years later, she was hard-pressed to explain that decision: “I wish someone could tell me the answer,” she said. “Was it my stupidity, my inexperience, my shyness, or my naiveté? I don’t know, but the fact is, I didn’t do it. And it was a mistake.”

  With Salye recusing herself, city council activists decided to reach out to one of the city’s other two perestroika heroes: Anatoly Sobchak, the law professor who had earned a reputation in Moscow as the democrat from Leningrad. Sobchak was different from the bearded, sweater-wearing informals: in contrast to their contemplative, usually unassuming air, he was an ostentatiously sharp dresser—the Communists liked to criticize him for his “bourgeois” outfits, and his trademark checkered blazer still comes up in political reminiscences over twenty years later—and a forceful speaker. He seemed to love the sound of his own voice. As one of his former colleagues recalled, Sobchak “could derail a working meeting by delivering an impromptu forty-minute speech on the benefits of building an imaginary bridge” and mesmerize listeners while saying nothing of substance.

  Though Sobchak belonged to Sakharov’s Interregional Group in the Supreme Soviet, he was actually far more conservative than the informals who were calling him back to Leningrad. A law professor who had taught at the police academy, he was in many ways part of the outgoing Soviet establishment. He had recently joined the Communist Party, clearly believing that, with all of Gorbachev’s reforms, the Party would continue to run the country. And in a divided city whose new democratic politicians were increasingly using its historic designation, St. Petersburg, he opposed changing the name of the city, arguing that the name Leningrad better reflected its military valor.

  Sobchak was also much more of a politician than any of the informals knew how to be. He had far-reaching ambition: it would not be long before he started telling everyone he would be the next president of Russia. Meanwhile, at the city level, he apparently wanted to preside over the entire city council without being beholden to the democrats who had called him to the throne. To that end, he did some advance—and highly secretive—lobbying among the minority Communist Party faction of the council, and the Communists surprised everyone by voting in favor of Sobchak. A few minutes later Sobchak, in turn, upset expectations by not nominating Salye or one of the other prominent democrats to be his deputy. Instead, he named Vyacheslav Shcherbakov, a Communist Party member and a rear admiral. The democrats, taken aback, nonetheless honored their agreement with Sobchak and voted to confirm Shcherbakov as his deputy.

  Sobchak then addressed the city council. He spelled out how he saw his mission: he was there to be the boss, not the leader. He viewed the city council as being bogged down in “democratic procedure for the sake of democratic procedure,” as he put it, and he wanted to get on with the business of actually running the city. His voice growing more confident with every passing minute, Sobchak informed the city council that things were about to change.

  “We realized our mistake as soon as we had voted for him,” recalled one of the city council members later. Sobchak was intent on destroying what a majority of city council members saw as the greatest accomplishment of the two months that had passed since their own election: the invention of a non-Soviet way of doing business. The informals went home shocked and dejected.

  Sobchak went to the airport to fly to a legal conference in the United States.

  “HIS ST. PETERSBURG PERIOD WAS MURKIEST,” Gevorkyan said of the campaign biography she and her colleagues wrote. “I never did figure out how he hooked up with Sobchak.”

  Back in Leningrad, Putin’s KGB colleagues seemed to be seeking ways not to fight the new political reality but to adapt to it, and initially it seemed that this was what Putin would have to do as well: rather than leave the KGB in a huff, stay with it in a sulk and look around for new friends, new mentors, and perhaps new ways of wielding influence from the shadows.

  The saying “Once a spy, always a spy” was factually correct: the KGB never let its officers off the leash. But where did all those used-up spies go? The KGB actually had a name and a structure of sorts for its bloat—“active reserve.” These were the nearly uncountable and possibly uncounted numbers of KGB officers planted throughout the civilian institutions of the USSR.

  Just over a year later, when a liberal Gorbachev appointee named Vadim Bakatin took over the KGB with the goal of dismantling the institution, it was the active reserve that he found most puzzling and intractable. “These were officers of the KGB who were officially employed by all state and civic organizations of any significance,” he wrote. “Most often, many if not all staff within the organization were aware that these people worked for the KGB. Active reserve officers performed a variety of functions: some of them managed the systems of security clearances while others concentrated on monitoring the moods and conversations within the organizations and taking what they considered to be appropriate actions in regards to any dissidents…. Certainly, there exist situations when a secret police organization needs to have a person planted within some organization or another, but one would expect this kind of arrangement to be secret. What kind of a secret service has staff that everyone can identify?”

  Bakatin answered his own question: “The KGB, as it existed, could not be termed a secret service. It was an organization formed to control and suppress everything and anything. It seemed to be created especially for organizing conspiracies and coups, and it possessed everything necessary to carry them out: its own specially trained armed forces, the capacity to track and control communications, its own people inside all essential organizations, a
monopoly on information, and many other things.” It was a monster that had its tentacles everywhere in Soviet society. Vladimir Putin decided to take his place at the end of one of those tentacles.

  Putin told his friend the cellist that he was thinking of moving to Moscow to join the vast KGB bureaucracy in the capital. But then he decided to stay in Leningrad and, perhaps because he was always drawn to the familiar, turned to the only institution outside the KGB with which he had ever been linked: Leningrad State University. Putin’s new job title was assistant chancellor for foreign relations. Like all organizations in the USSR, Leningrad State University was just beginning to recognize that the possibility of foreign relations existed. Its instructors and graduate students were starting to travel abroad to study and take part in conferences: they still had to overcome major bureaucratic hurdles, but the option of foreign travel, which had been reserved for a very select few, was now accessible to many. Students and instructors were also starting to come in from abroad: once again, an option that had been open only to students from Socialist bloc countries and a few handpicked graduate students from the West was now accessible to pretty much anyone. Like thousands of other Soviet organizations, Leningrad State University saw its state funding drastically cut and hoped that foreign relations, whatever form they might take, would bring in much-needed hard currency. It was a perfect job for a member of the active reserve: not only had such postings been traditionally reserved for KGB appointees, but everyone generally believed they really were better than anyone else at seeking and shoring up relations with foreigners; they were, after all, the only ones with experience.

  Putin has said he planned to start writing a dissertation and perhaps stay at the university indefinitely. But in fact, like so many other things in the Soviet Union at the time, this job had an air of transition about it. He stayed at Leningrad State University less than three months.

  THE STORY of how Putin came to work for Anatoly Sobchak during his tenure as chairman of the Leningrad City Council is well-known, often recounted, and most certainly untrue in many or all of its best-publicized details.

  In the apocryphal version, Sobchak, the law professor and celebrity politician, was walking down the hall at the university, saw Putin, and asked him to come to work for him at the city council. In Putin’s own version, a former classmate at the law faculty arranged a meeting in Sobchak’s office. In Putin’s version, he had attended Sobchak’s lectures at the law faculty in the 1970s but had no personal relationship with him.

  “I remember the scene well,” Putin told his biographers. “I entered, introduced myself, and told him everything. He was an impulsive person, so he immediately said, ‘I’ll speak with the chancellor. You start work on Monday. That’s it. I’ll make all the arrangements and you’ll be transferred.’” In the Soviet system of job assignments, office workers were indeed often transferred like serfs, by agreement of their owners. “I couldn’t not say, ‘Anatoly Alexandrovich, it would be my pleasure to come to work for you. I am interested. I even want the job. But there is a fact that will probably be an obstacle to this transfer.’ He asks, ‘What’s that?’ I say, ‘I have to tell you that I am not just an assistant to the chancellor. I am a staff officer at the KGB.’ He got to thinking, since this was a truly unexpected turn for him. He thought for a bit and then said, ‘Well, screw it!’”

  The dialogue is certainly fiction, and mediocre fiction at that. Why does Putin claim to have “told him everything” if he did not tell Sobchak about his KGB affiliation until after Sobchak extended the job offer? Why does Putin make Sobchak out to be both an ignorant fool—everyone at Leningrad State University knew Putin was a KGB officer—and a vulgarian? Probably because this was not a well-rehearsed lie when he told it to his biographers, whom he had likely expected to sidestep the delicate and too-obvious question of how a career KGB officer came to work for one of Russia’s most prominent pro-democracy politicians.

  Sobchak himself told a different fiction. “Putin was most certainly not assigned to me by the KGB,” he said in a newspaper interview the same week that Putin was speaking to his own biographers—and this explains the discrepancy. “I found Putin myself and asked him to come and work for me because I had known him before. I remembered him very well as a student for his work at the law faculty. Why did he become my deputy? I ran into him, entirely by accident, in the hallway of the university. I recognized him, said hello, and started asking him what he had been up to. It turned out he had worked in Germany for a long time and was now working as an assistant to the chancellor. He had been a very good student, though he has this trait: he does not like to stand out. In this sense he is a person devoid of vanity, of any external ambition, but inside he is a leader.”

  Anatoly Sobchak certainly knew that Putin was a KGB officer. Moreover, that is exactly why he sought him out. This was the sort of politician Sobchak was: he talked a colorful pro-democracy line, but he liked to have a solid conservative base from which to do it. This was also why he chose a Communist and a rear admiral to be his deputy on the city council. Not only did Sobchak feel more secure surrounded by men who had emerged from various armed services, he felt more much more comfortable with these men than with the overeducated, excessively talkative, process-oriented pro-democracy activists like Salye and her ilk. He had taught law at the police academy in Leningrad; he had taught men who were just like what he perceived Putin to be: dependable but not brilliant, not outwardly ambitious, and ever mindful of the chain of command. In addition, he needed Putin for the exact same reason the university had needed him: he was one of the very few people in the city who had ever worked abroad—and the city needed foreign help and foreign money. Finally, Sobchak—who had risen through the ranks both at the university, where he was now a full professor, and in the Communist Party—knew that it was wiser to pick your KGB handler yourself than to have one picked for you.

  Whether Sobchak was right in believing he was picking his own handler, however, is an open question. A former colleague of Putin’s in East Germany told me that in February 1990, Putin had a meeting with Major General Yuri Drozdov, head of the KGB illegal-intelligence directorate, when the major general visited Berlin. “The only possible purpose of the meeting could have been giving Putin his next assignment,” Sergei Bezrukov, who defected to Germany in 1991, told me. “Why else would the head of the directorate be meeting with an agent who was scheduled to be going home? That sort of thing just did not happen.” Bezrukov and other officers wondered what Putin’s new job would be and what made it important enough for the top brass to be involved. When Putin went to work for Sobchak, Bezrukov believed he had his answer: his old friend had been called back in order to infiltrate the inner circle of one of the country’s leading pro-democracy politicians. The university job had been a stepping-stone.

  Putin informed the Leningrad KGB that he was about to change jobs. “I told them, ‘I have received an offer from Anatoly Alexandrovich [Sobchak] to transfer from the university and work for him. If this is impossible, I am willing to resign.’ They responded, ‘No, why should you? Go work at the new job, no problem.’” The dialogue seems to be another absurd fiction, even in the very unlikely event that he had not been steered to Sobchak by the KGB itself. Putin would have had no reason to suspect that the opportunity to plant him alongside the city’s most prominent democrat would be greeted with anything but enthusiasm in the KGB.

  By this time the new democrats had become the KGB’s main focus. The previous year, Gorbachev had created the Committee for Constitutional Oversight, a law enforcement body intended to bring Soviet governing practices in line with the country’s own constitution. In 1990, the committee began its fight against covert KGB operations, banning any actions based on secret internal instructions—and the KGB ignored it. Instead, it conducted round-the-clock surveillance of Boris Yeltsin and other prominent democrats. It tapped their phones, including ones in hotel rooms they rented. It also tapped the phones of their friends, rela
tives, hairdressers, and sports coaches. So it is extremely unlikely that Putin told his biographers the truth when he claimed not to report to the KGB on his work with Sobchak, all the while drawing a larger salary from the secret police than he did at the city council.

  How, if, and when Putin finally severed his connection with the KGB is, astoundingly, not only not a matter of public record but not even the subject of coherent mythmaking. Putin has said that within a few months after he came to work for Sobchak, a member of the city council began blackmailing him, threatening to expose him as a KGB officer. Putin realized he had to leave. “It was a very difficult decision. It had been nearly a year since I de facto stopped working for the security service, but my entire life still revolved around it. It was 1990: the USSR had not yet fallen apart, the August coup had not yet happened, so there was no final clarity as to which way the country would go. Sobchak was certainly an outstanding person and a prominent politician, but it seemed risky to tie my own future to his. Everything could have been reversed in a minute. And I could not imagine what I would do if I lost my job at city hall. I was thinking I might go back to the university, write a dissertation, and take odd jobs. I had a stable position within the KGB, and I was treated well. I was successful within that system, yet I decided to leave. Why? What for? I was literally suffering. I had to make the most difficult decision in my life. I thought for a long time, trying to collect my thoughts, then gathered myself together, sat down, and wrote the resignation letter on my first attempt, without writing a draft.”