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

by Gessen, Masha

  Nor did Baikalfinansgrup have financial assets. According to its registration documents, filed two weeks before the auction, its capitalization was ten thousand rubles, or roughly $300. But somehow the state-owned oil company Rosneft—the one whose president had declined to respond to Khodorkovsky’s questions about perceived corruption a year earlier—lent the unheard-of company more than $9 billion to buy Yuganskneftegaz; this was less than half the company’s estimated worth at the time. The auction, held on December 19, 2004, lasted all of two minutes.

  Speaking in Germany two days after the auction, Putin bristled at the suggestion that Yukos assets had been bought by an unknown entity. “I know the stockholders of the company, and they are individuals,” he said. “They are individuals who have been working in the energy sector for a long time.” Another two days later, Rosneft, the state oil company, bought Baikalfinansgrup, taking control of the Yukos assets—but also ensuring that it could never be sued for having purchased it in the course of a rigged auction.

  It had been just over a year since Khodorkovsky’s arrest, and it was now clear Russia had passed two milestones. With the country’s former richest man behind bars indefinitely, no one, not even the rich and powerful, could afford free agency. And with the assets of the country’s largest private company hijacked in broad daylight, Putin had claimed his place as the godfather of a mafia clan ruling the country. Like all mafia bosses, he barely distinguished between his personal property, the property of his clan, and the property of those beholden to his clan. Like all mafia bosses, he amassed wealth by outright robberies, as with Yukos, by collecting so-called dues and by placing his cronies wherever there was money or assets to be siphoned off. By the end of 2007, at least one Russian political expert—someone believed to have access to the Kremlin—estimated Putin’s personal net worth at $40 billion.

  THE $40 BILLION FIGURE can be neither confirmed nor disproved, but there was one story I was able to report in detail. It shed light not only on the scale of Putin’s personal fortune but also on the mechanics of amassing it. It took my good reportorial luck and one very brave man to tell it.

  In the early 1990s, Sergei Kolesnikov had been one of hundreds of Soviet scientists turned Russian entrepreneurs. A Ph.D. in biophysics, he started out manufacturing medical equipment and then began importing it. During the Sobchak administration, he formed a joint venture with the city and created a successful business outfitting St. Petersburg’s clinics and hospitals. After Sobchak was voted out of office, he bought out the city’s share and took the company private, staying in the same line of business.

  As soon as Putin was elected president, Kolesnikov was contacted by an old business associate from his St. Petersburg days. He outlined a scheme: some of Russia’s wealthiest men would donate significant sums of money earmarked toward purchasing medical equipment for Russian facilities. Kolesnikov would use his expertise to procure the equipment at significant volume discounts. The difference between the list price of equipment, which would be reported to the donor, and actual money spent had to be no less than 35 percent; if Kolesnikov obtained an even greater discount, he could keep the difference as profit. The 35 percent had to be deposited in a bank account set up in Western Europe and would later be used to invest in the Russian economy.

  Kolesnikov had no qualms about agreeing to the scheme. Like Browder, he thought he was living well while doing good for Russia: the much-needed medical equipment was an unquestionable good; on top of that, his new partners would be investing large amounts of money into the Russian economy. Sure, they were skimming off the top—more than a third of the money donated—but they were investing it in Russia, not lining their own pockets. And also, “we knew this was not money made by backbreaking labor. You can’t come by that kind of money honestly.”

  The first donor was Roman Abramovich, a secretive Russian oligarch, and future owner of the Chelsea Football Club. He donated $203 million, of which about $140 million bought equipment for the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg (run by Putin’s friend the minister of health, who had once helped ferry Sobchak out of the prosecutor’s office and out of Russia) and over $60 million stayed in a European bank account. His donation was followed by a number of smaller ones. By 2005, about $200 million had accumulated in this bank account. Kolesnikov and his two partners—one had started out with him in St. Petersburg and the other had brought him into this new line of business—formed a new company called Rosinvest, a wholly owned subsidiary of a Swiss company, which did business through a third company, also Swiss, ownership of which was fixed in bearer shares. In other words, whoever was in physical possession of the papers was the legal owner. Each of the three men got 2 percent of the shares; the remaining 94 percent was handed over to Putin himself.

  The newly formed company had sixteen different investment projects, mostly in industrial production; they were well chosen, naturally afforded a variety of tax and legal benefits, and brought a handsome profit—94 percent of which belonged to Putin. All along, there was also what Kolesnikov thought of as a small personal project of Putin’s, a house on the Black Sea budgeted at $16 million. “But things kept getting added,” Kolesnikov told me. “An elevator to the beach, a marina, a separate high-voltage line, a separate gas pipeline, three new motorways that led directly to the palace, and three helicopter pads. The building itself was changing, too: an amphitheater was added, then a winter theater. And then it all had to be decorated too: furniture, artwork, silverware. It’s all very expensive!” Kolesnikov traveled to the Black Sea coast twice a year to monitor the project; last time he was there, in the spring of 2009, what had been a house had become twenty buildings, and the total budget had long since passed the billion-dollar mark.

  Something else had happened a few months earlier. In the aftermath of the world financial crisis, Kolesnikov’s partner informed him that Rosinvest would no longer be making investments: its only purpose now was the completion of the Black Sea palace. Kolesnikov, who had not exactly been a stickler for legalities but had been very proud of his work and sincerely convinced that he was creating wealth for his country, was deeply offended. He fled Russia, taking the company’s documentation with him, and paid a Washington law firm a considerable sum of money to review the papers and verify his story. And then he went public with the story of what became known as Putin’s Palace. But the story, while it attracted a fair amount of attention when I wrote about it in Russia, drew little reaction from the government: first Putin’s press secretary dismissed it as rubbish and then, when copies of some building contracts were published by Nevaya Gazeta, the Kremlin confirmed that the Black Sea project existed.

  IT WOULD BE fair to assume that the palace scheme was just one of many similar schemes for squeezing wealth out of Russia. The question is: What is the nature, the motivating principle, behind these schemes? In other words, the question is, once again: Who is Mr. Putin?

  There is the story of Putin the bureaucrat who did not take bribes—a key narrative that explains Boris Berezovsky’s attraction to him, which, in turn, was key to making Putin president. Berezovsky’s right-hand man, Yuli Dubov, who had long since become one of the London exiles, told me one of the most striking of the upstanding-Putin stories. Once, in the early 1990s, Dubov was having trouble with some of the documentation for the car service station Berezovsky was opening in St. Petersburg. He needed Putin to make a phone call to facilitate the process, and to this end he scheduled lunch with him. Dubov arrived at city hall early, as, uncharacteristically, did Putin. As they both waited for their appointed time to be able to leave for lunch, Dubov broached the subject of the phone call. Putin immediately took care of the matter, but then refused to go to lunch: “Either you have me help you with your business, or you take me to lunch,” Dubov remembered him saying. This was clearly not just a bureaucrat who did not take bribes: this was a bureaucrat whose entire identity rested on his incorruptibility.

  And then there was the Putin on whose guard $10
0 million worth of contracts evaporated, as Marina Salye documented. The remarkable part of this story is not the occurrence of theft—it is abundantly clear that some theft occurred absolutely everywhere in Russia in those days and in similar situations, which was the reason Salye’s revelations never gained momentum—but that all the funds appear to have been stolen. I suspect that if Putin had shaved off only 5, 10, 20, even 30 percent, he would not have created an enemy for life, as he did with Salye—just as Kolesnikov would not have waged his campaign had the palace stayed merely a very expensive side project.

  But it is as if Putin could not resist taking it all. And I think this is literally true. On several occasions, at least one of them embarrassingly public, Putin has acted like a person afflicted with kleptomania. In June 2005, while hosting a group of American businessmen in St. Petersburg, Putin pocketed the 124-diamond Super Bowl ring of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. He had asked to see it, tried it on, allegedly said, “I could kill someone with this,” then stuck it in his pocket and left the room abruptly. After a flurry of articles in the U.S. press, Kraft announced a few days later that the ring had been a gift—preventing an uncomfortable situation from spiraling out of control.

  In September 2005, Putin was a special guest at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. At one point his hosts brought out a conversation piece that another Russian guest must have given the museum: a glass replica of a Kalashnikov automatic weapon filled with vodka. This gaudy souvenir costs about $300 in Moscow. Putin nodded to one of his bodyguards, who took the glass Kalashnikov and carried it out of the room, leaving the hosts speechless.

  Putin’s extraordinary relationship to material wealth was evident when he was a college student, if not earlier. When he accepted the car his parents won in a lottery, though the prize could have been used to greatly improve the family’s living conditions, or when he spent almost all the money he made over the summer to buy himself an outrageously expensive coat—and bought a cake for his mother—he was acting in ways highly unusual and borderline unacceptable for a young man of his generation and social group. Ostentatious displays of wealth could easily have derailed his plans for a KGB career, and he knew this. The story told by the former West German radical—of Putin demanding gifts while in Dresden—completes the picture. For a man who had staked most of his social capital on conforming to the norm, this was particularly remarkable behavior: it seems he really could not help himself.

  The correct term is probably not the popularly known kleptomania, which refers to a pathological desire to possess things for which one has little use, but the more exotic pleonexia, the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others. If Putin suffers this irrepressible urge, this helps explain his apparent split personality: he compensates for his compulsion by creating the identity of an honest and incorruptible civil servant.

  Andrei Illarionov discovered this less than a month after becoming Putin’s economic adviser: just days after his inauguration, Putin signed a decree consolidating 70 percent of the country’s alcohol manufacturers in a single company and appointing a close St. Petersburg associate to run it. At the time, oil prices had not yet taken off and alcohol was arguably the country’s most lucrative business. As Illarionov found out, no one on the new president’s economic team had been consulted about or even informed of the decision. Over the next few months, Illarionov would grow accustomed to this: Putin continued to talk a good economic line to the public and the media, and continued to appear to listen to his sterling team of liberal advisers, while consistently broadsiding them with decisions that consolidated all of the country’s resources in the hands of his cronies.

  Is this what happened with Khodorkovsky? Did Putin have him arrested because he wanted to take possession of his company rather than for reasons of political and personal competition? Not exactly. He put Khodorkovsky behind bars for the same reason that he abolished elections or had Litvinenko killed: in his continuing attempt to turn the country into a supersize model of the KGB, there can be no room for dissidents or even for independent actors. But then, independent actors are inconvenient in part because they refuse to accept the rules of the mafia. And once Khodorkovsky was behind bars, the opportunity to rob him presented itself. In seizing this opportunity, Putin, as usual, failed to distinguish between himself and the state he ruled. Greed may not be his main instinct, but it is the one he can never resist.

  Eleven

  BACK TO THE USSR

  On October 2, 2011, Boris Berezovsky was jumping around his office excitedly. I was in London to cover a trial he had initiated in an attempt to recover some of his assets more than ten years after he became an exile, and he had asked me to come to his office the Sunday before hearings started, to reveal to me what he was thinking about the Russian political situation.

  “You understand?” he began. “The Russian regime has no ideology, no party, no politics—it is nothing but the power of a single man.” He was painting a picture of a Wizard of Oz figure, clearly feeling no need to acknowledge that he had invented the man. “All someone has to do is discredit him—him personally.” Berezovsky even had a plan, or a couple of plans—but here I was sworn to secrecy.

  I went away amused at the man who would not give up being kingmaker, yet I had to admit Berezovsky’s analysis was correct. The whole edifice of the Russian regime—which, in the eyes of the world, had long since graduated from showing “authoritarian tendencies” to full-fledged authoritarianism bordering on tyranny—rested on this one man, the one Berezovsky thought he had chosen for the country a dozen years earlier. This meant the current Russian regime was essentially vulnerable: the person or persons to topple it would not have to overcome the force of an ingrained ideology—they would merely have to show that the tyrant had feet of clay. It also meant the tipping point in Russia was as unpredictable as in any tyranny—it could come about in months, years, or decades, triggered perhaps by a small event, most likely the regime’s own mistake that would suddenly make its vulnerability evident.

  I had seen something like this happen in Yugoslavia eleven years earlier: Slobodan Miloševic´, who had held on to power using terror on the one hand and exploiting nationalist fervor on the other, called an early election, mistakenly certain that he would win—and lost, and understood that he was losing too late to quash the rising wave of protest. And in 2011, we had seen Arab dictators drop like dominoes, toppled by crowds made suddenly fearless by the power of the word and the example of others. The problem with Russia, however, was that the huge country was as atomized as it had ever been. Putin’s policies had effectively destroyed public space. The Internet had developed in Russia over the last ten years, as it had in other countries, but it took on the peculiar shape of a series of information bubbles. American researchers who “mapped” the world’s blogospheres found that unlike the American blogosphere—or, for that matter, the Iranian one—which formed a series of interlocking circles, the Russian blogosphere consisted of discrete circles, each unconnected to any other. It was an anti-utopia of the information age: an infinite number of echo chambers. Nor was this true just of the Internet. The Kremlin was watching its own TV; big business was reading its own newspapers; the intelligentsia was reading its own blogs. None of these groups was aware of the others’ realities, and this made mass protest of any sort seem unlikely.

  IN THE 2000 ELECTION, Putin got almost 53 percent of the vote, while his ten opponents each garnered between 1 and 29 percent. When he ran for reelection in 2004, he had 71 percent—a typical authoritarian-regime result—and his five opponents received between 0.75 and 14 percent apiece. As Putin’s second term was drawing to a close in 2007, the politicized classes in Russia wondered what would happen. Would Putin change the constitution to allow himself more than two consecutive terms? Would he go the Yeltsin route and direct the country to vote for a handpicked successor? For a time, Putin seemed to be favoring Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, a former KGB colleague. But in Decembe
r of that year, Putin held a televised meeting with the leaders of four puppet parties, who together declared they wanted to nominate First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev for president. Medvedev just happened to be present for this well-scripted watershed event. In the election that followed, in March 2008, he garnered more than 70 percent of the vote, while his three opponents each received between zero and 17 percent. Once inaugurated, Medvedev appointed Putin his prime minister.

  Forty-two-year-old Medvedev made Putin look charismatic. At just over five feet (his exact height was a carefully guarded secret, but rumors abounded, as did pictures of Medvedev sitting on a pillow or standing on a step stool to reach a microphone), he also made Putin look tall. He was a lawyer by education, he had worked in city hall in St. Petersburg, and he had never held a job leading a team or running anything, much less a country. He mimicked Putin’s robotic way of enunciating his words, except where Putin made every syllable sound menacing, Medvedev sounded like a voice synthesizer. And unlike Putin, Medvedev did not make vulgar jokes. That—and perhaps a desperate need to vest someone with hope—was enough to endear Medvedev to Russia’s intellectuals.

  For the first time since Putin destroyed the media and shut down Russian politics, the man in the Kremlin addressed the thinking public of Russia. Medvedev talked of what his speechwriters thought to call “The Four I’s”: institutions, infrastructure, investment, and innovation. Flashing an iPhone and, once it had been introduced, an iPad, Medvedev seemed to be trying to imbue his own dense vocabulary with a modern, Western spirit. The intelligentsia ate it up. When Medvedev called on human-rights activists, liberal political analysts, and assorted thinking others to join a newly formed presidential council, they all came, willingly sacrificing their time to write white papers that evidently were never read. When journalists at opposition media dared criticize not only Putin but also Medvedev, editors pulled their stories. When Medvedev told a group of activist historians he would finally approve a long-stalled plan for a national museum honoring the memory of victims of Stalinist terror, the historians dropped everything to draw up plans, draft documents, and do the work federal bureaucrats should have been doing, all to enable Medvedev to sign the decree—which he never did. What he did was keep giving speeches, promising to fight corruption and modernize the country, while nothing changed. Mikhail Khodorkovsky stood trial for the second time. Sergei Magnitsky died in prison. And Vladimir Putin not only built his palace on the Black Sea but continued to run the country.