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

by Gessen, Masha

  Vladimir Gusinsky spent just three days in jail. As soon as he was released on his own recognizance, he left the country, becoming the first political refugee from Putin’s regime—only five weeks after the inauguration.

  UNLIKE THE OWNER of my company, I was still in Moscow. And, it seemed, I was in a lot of trouble, just as prosecutor Vanyushin had warned me I would be. I had written an article about the Russkoye Video case; it was published a few days after Gusinsky left the country, and it was illustrated with the document I had found—the one signed by Putin. Next thing I knew, there was a man on a ladder parked outside my apartment door—twenty-four hours a day. “What are you doing here?” I would ask every time I opened the door to find him there. “Fixing,” he would growl.

  A few days later, my home phone was turned off. The telephone company claimed to have had nothing to do with it, but it took days to get it turned back on. These were classic KGB tactics, intended to make me understand I was never safe and never alone: this approach had not changed since the 1970s, when the same sorts of goons would take up residence in people’s stairways to let them know they were being watched. This knowledge did not make things any easier for me. The intrusion tactics worked just as well now as they had thirty years earlier: within a few days of this, I was going crazy with unidentifiable worry.

  I used a reporting opportunity to leave the country for a couple of weeks. And I decided to look for another job. Mine had been the best job in the world, and while I worked it, I risked my life many times over, going to Chechnya, the former Yugoslavia, and other post-Soviet war zones. But I was not prepared to live under constant threat, no matter how unspecific it was. There was an opening for Moscow bureau chief at the American weekly magazine U.S. News & World Report, and I jumped at the opportunity.

  Meanwhile, Gusinsky, shuttling between England and Spain, where he owned a home, was negotiating with the Russian state the fate of his media empire. Gusinsky personally owned 60 percent of his company; another 30 percent was held by the state gas monopoly, Gazprom, and 10 percent more belonged to private individuals, mostly top managers within the company. Gusinsky had borrowed heavily from a state-held bank to finance the setup of his satellite network. Less than a year earlier, he had still entertained well-founded hope that his debts would be forgiven: his once cozy relationship with Yeltsin and his role in his 1996 reelection campaign made this seem a reasonable expectation, at least to Gusinsky himself. Now some of the credits were overdue and the state was calling in the rest early, demanding stock instead of cash—aiming to enable the state gas monopoly to take control of the companies. Gusinsky was trying to restructure the debt in such a way that none of the stockholders would own a controlling share, which would guarantee the media outlets’ editorial independence.

  As negotiations grew more adversarial, someone—each side said it was the other—leaked to the press a document Gusinsky had signed before leaving the country. He seemed to have agreed, in writing, to cede a majority share of his company to Gazprom in exchange for his personal freedom. Most damningly, the document was signed not only by Gusinsky and the head of Gazprom’s media arm—reconstituted especially for the occasion—but also by the press minister, Mikhail Lesin. In other words, this was a classic organized-crime contract, formalizing the exchange of one’s business for one’s personal safety, and the state was a party to it. Once the document was leaked, Gusinsky said publicly that the minister had personally threatened him, forcing him to sign over his business under duress, “virtually at gunpoint.” He termed the entire process “state racketeering.”

  Putin refused to comment on the situation. Yet no one seemed to doubt that the order to wrestle the media company away from Gusinsky had come directly from him. His prime minister, the white-toothed Mikhail Kasyanov, appeared genuinely surprised and even shocked by the revelations and reprimanded Lesin publicly, before television cameras. Three days later, Mikhail Gorbachev emerged from nine years of de facto political retirement to meet with Putin and ask him to set the Gusinsky situation right. The older man left the meeting dejected, telling the media Putin refused to interfere. The next day Prime Minister Kasyanov opened the cabinet meeting by once again reprimanding his press minister, Lesin. Russian journalists and political analysts took this as a clear sign that the prime minister felt helpless in a situation orchestrated by the president himself.

  Soon enough, this kind of takeover of private businesses large and small would become commonplace. But the system Boris Yeltsin had left behind was not quite ready to accommodate “state racketeering.” Yeltsin’s successive governments had not succeeded in turning the Russian courts into a functioning justice system, but they had succeeded in planting the seeds of ambition in them. Now these courts, mostly at the lower levels, would refuse some of Gazprom’s claims, with one city court even throwing out the case against Gusinsky altogether. In the end, it took the state monopoly almost a year to gain control of Gusinsky’s media empire. In April 2001, after a nearly weeklong standoff when NTV staff maintained a live broadcast of the takeover, the old editorial staff was forced out. A week later, my former colleagues at the magazine Itogi came to work to find the doors locked and every last staff member fired.

  I WAS ALREADY GONE, having taken the job at U.S. News & World Report the previous summer. Before I started, I had flown to the Black Sea for a short vacation. But after just a couple of days in the sun, I had to fly back up north: a nuclear submarine was sinking in the Barents Sea, taking 118 seamen with it.

  Of all the heartbreaking stories I had ever had to cover and the people of Russia had ever had to witness, the Kursk disaster was possibly the most devastating. For nine days, the mothers, wives, and children of the sailors aboard the submarine—and the entire country along with them—maintained hope that some of them were still alive. The country kept vigil while the navy and the government flailed in their rescue efforts. Norwegian and British teams offered to help but were turned away, supposedly because of security concerns. Worst of all, the new president was silent: he was on vacation on the Black Sea coast.

  The Kursk makes an easy metaphor for the post-Soviet condition. Its construction began in 1990 as the Soviet Union neared collapse; it was commissioned in 1994, easily the lowest point in Russian military history, but just as the Russians’ superpower ambitions, temporarily set aside while the empire was being dismantled, began to reassert themselves. The nuclear submarine was huge, as those ambitions had once been—and would be again, with Putin in power, promising to rub the enemy out in the outhouse. The Kursk, which had barely been maintained since it was launched, served its first mission in the summer of 1999, when Putin came to power, and was to undertake its first significant training exercise in August 2000.

  It would become clear later that neither the submarine nor its crew nor, really, the entire Russian Northern Fleet had been ready for the exercise. In fact, the training exercise was not officially called one, at least in part because the participating ships and their men would have been unable to fulfill all the legal and technical requirements of a full-fledged exercise. Instead, the submarine and other battleships going out to sea on August 12 were called to an “assembly march,” a term that was nonexistent and therefore carried no clear requirements. The submarine went to sea with an unpracticed and undertrained crew that had been pulled together from several different vessels, so the men had no experience as a team. The submarine was equipped with training torpedoes, some of which were past their expiration dates, while the rest had not been properly serviced. Some torpedoes had visible rust holes; others had rubber connector rings that had been used more than once, in violation of safety regulations. “Death is on board with us,” one of the crew told his mother six days before the accident, referring to the torpedoes.

  It was one of these torpedoes that, evidently, caught fire and exploded. There were two blasts aboard the submarine, and most of the crew died instantly. Twenty-three survivors moved to an unaffected section of the vessel to a
wait rescue. They had the equipment necessary to survive in the submarine for some time; they could reasonably expect to be saved—after all, they were engaged in a training exercise, there were several battleships in the near vicinity, and the accident should have been discovered almost instantly.

  But while the tremors caused by the explosion were picked up by a Norwegian seismic station, Russian ships located much nearer to the submarine seemed to take no notice of its fate. It was nine hours before the fleet acknowledged there had been an accident; it was about this long again before the vacationing president was informed. Rescue efforts commenced, but the rescue crews apparently lacked the training necessary to do their jobs. They never even succeeded in docking to the sub.

  Most of the twenty-three survivors could conceivably have climbed out themselves—the accident had occurred in relatively shallow waters—but this section of the submarine was, contrary to regulations, not equipped with a hose necessary to evacuate the crew. The twenty-three seamen sat in the dark until one of their air-regeneration plates caught fire, filling the compartment with noxious fumes that killed the men.

  For the more than two days they survived underwater, the twenty-three men beat out their SOS, attempting to aid in rescue efforts that were first nonexistent, then useless. At the very end, their knocking grew haphazard and desperate. They never heard a response to their message: obeying an unwritten rule of the fleet, the rescuers kept silent, ostensibly to prevent enemy vessels from identifying their location. It was for the same essential reason that early offers from British and Norwegian divers to help with the rescue effort were turned down. When a Norwegian crew was finally allowed to enter Russian waters and descend to the Kursk, eight days after the accident, they easily managed to dock to the submarine on their first try. When they did not succeed in opening the hatch, they fashioned a suitable tool for the job and, nine days after the accident, were able to enter the submarine and confirm there were no survivors.

  For ten days, the country stayed glued to its television sets, waiting for news from the Kursk. Or from the new president, the one who had promised to restore Russian military might. First he said nothing. Then, still on vacation, he made a vague comment that seemed to indicate that he considered salvaging the equipment on board the Kursk more important than rescuing the crew. On the seventh day of the disaster, he finally agreed to fly back to Moscow—and was duly cornered by a television crew in the Black Sea resort city of Yalta. “I did the right thing,” Putin said, “because the arrival of nonspecialists from any field, the presence of high-placed officials in the disaster area, would not help and more often would hamper work. Everyone should keep to his place.”

  The remark made it clear Putin viewed himself as a bureaucrat—a very important and powerful bureaucrat, but a bureaucrat still. “I’d always thought if you became president, even if you were merely appointed to this role, you had to change,” Marina Litvinovich, the smart young woman who had worked on Putin’s preelection image, told me. “If the nation is crying, you have to cry along with it.”

  By the time of the Kursk disaster, Litvinovich, who was still in her twenties, had become a permanent member of what had become a permanent media directorate at the Kremlin. Once a week, the heads of the three major television networks and Litvinovich would meet with Putin’s chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, to discuss current affairs and plan their coverage. In August 2000, only three members of the group were present: Litvinovich, Voloshin, and the head of the state television and radio company; everyone else was on vacation, as Muscovites usually are in August. “I was screaming at Voloshin,” Litvinovich remembered. “I screamed that he [Putin] had to go there. And finally Voloshin picked up the phone and called Putin and said, ‘Some people here think you should go there.’ And I was thinking, Putin should be the one calling and screaming, ‘Where is my plane?’ And I realized that if I had not gone to that meeting, he would not have gone to the Arctic.’”

  THE CLUSTER of military towns that make up the home of Russia’s Northern Fleet is a world unto itself, closed to outsiders and hostile to them, but generally resigned to and trusting of the authorities. Journalists were not allowed to enter Vidyayevo, the town that served as the Kursk’s home port. Families of crew members were loaded onto chartered buses that took them through checkpoints at breakneck speed. A few times, some of the relatives braved the three-mile trek (no transportation was available to them once they had been brought in) from their accommodations in Vidyayevo to the checkpoint, where journalists kept vigil. One group of women who came out of Vidyayevo wanted to record a video address demanding that rescue efforts continue. A woman asked journalists to drive a separate group to the local big city of Murmansk to buy memorial wreaths to deposit at sea.

  Locals looked on these anxious women with a mixture of pity and fear. Here, in towns full of dilapidated five-story concrete buildings with missing windowpanes and, often, no central heating, everyone was used to danger and decay. “Accidents happen,” seamen and their women told me over and over again. Meanwhile, women armed with brooms and buckets washed the sidewalks and public squares with soap and water, hoping to protect against radiation that might be leaking from the Kursk—even though the authorities posted bills assuring the public there was no radiation danger.

  Ten days after the disaster, relatives of the crew were finally gathered in Vidyayevo’s assembly hall, expecting to see Putin. While they waited—and they waited for hours—military fleet commander Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov addressed the audience. The admiral, a big man with a rough, leathery face, used his finely honed skills to deflect all questions. Here is how one of the very few journalists allowed to witness the event, one of the coauthors of Putin’s official biography, described the scene:

  “Do you believe that the guys are alive?” he was asked.

  And you know what he said?

  “That’s a good question! I am going to respond to it as directly as you asked it. I still believe that my father, who died in 1991, is alive.”

  Then he was asked another question—probably also a good one.

  “Why didn’t you ask for foreign help right away?”

  “I see,” he said, “that you watch Channel 4 more than you watch Channel 2.”

  “When did you inform the authorities that you did not have the necessary equipment to save them?”

  “Three years ago,” he said.

  I thought someone would hit him. But instead, they all just kind of wilted and lost interest in the conversation.

  Kuroyedov left a frustrated audience. Vice Premier Ilya Klebanov, who had been placed in charge of the rescue efforts, was present; a woman jumped up onstage, grabbed Klebanov by the lapels, shook him, and screamed, “You bastard, you go there and save them!” When Putin finally arrived, four hours after the appointed time, wearing a black suit with a black shirt to signify mourning but looking, as a result, vaguely like a mafioso, the crowd attacked him too. Now his biographer was the only journalist allowed to remain in the room, and here is part of how he described the meeting in his article the next day:

  “Cancel the mourning immediately!” someone interrupted him from the other end of the hall. [A national day of mourning had been declared for the following day.]

  “Mourning?” Putin asked. “I was, like you, full of hope to the last, I still am, at least for a miracle. But there is a fact we know for certain: People have died.”

  “Shut up!” someone screamed.

  “I am speaking of people who have definitely died. There are people like that in the submarine, for certain. That’s who the mourning is for. That’s all.”

  Someone tried to object, but he would not let them.

  “Listen to me, listen to what I’m about to say. Just listen to me! There have always been tragedies at sea, including the time when we thought we were living in a very successful country. There have always been tragedies. But I never thought that things were in this kind of condition.” …

  “Why did
you take so long in attracting foreign help?” a young woman asked.

  She had a brother aboard the submarine. Putin took a long time explaining. He said that the construction of the submarine dated back to the end of the 1970s, and so did all the rescue equipment that the Northern Fleet had. He said that [defense minister] Sergeev called him on the 13th at seven in the morning, and until then Putin had known nothing…. He said that foreign aid had been offered on the 15th and had been accepted right away….

  “Don’t we have those kinds of divers ourselves?” someone shouted out in despair.

  “We don’t have crap in this country!” the president answered furiously.

  The article reported that Putin spent two hours and forty minutes with the families of the crew and managed, in the end, to bring them around—in large part because he devoted an hour to detailing compensation packages for them. He also agreed to cancel the day of mourning, which was in the end, in a twist of macabre irony, observed everywhere in Russia except Vidyayevo. But Putin emerged from the meeting battered and bitter, and unwilling ever again to expose himself to such an audience. After no other disaster—and there would be many in his tenure as president—would Putin allow himself to be pitted publicly against the suffering.

  IN SHORT ORDER, two things happened to cement Putin’s view of his visit to Vidyayevo as a disaster. On September 2—three weeks after the Kursk sank—Sergei Dorenko, the Channel One anchorman who had done most of the legwork in Berezovsky’s television campaign to create Putin a year earlier, did a show criticizing Putin’s handling of the submarine disaster. Dorenko obtained audiotapes of the meeting with relatives and aired excerpts that made the biographer’s newspaper report seem laudatory in comparison. In one of the excerpts, Putin could be heard descending into a rant. “You saw it on television?” he screamed. “That means they are lying. They are lying! They are lying! There are people on television who have been working to destroy the army and the navy for ten years. They are talking now as though they are the biggest defenders of the military. All they really want to do is finish it off! They’ve stolen all this money and now they are buying everyone off and making whatever laws they want to make!” Putin ended with a high-pitched shout.