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

by Masha Gessen

  “But I am certain the idea itself was not Putin’s,” he suddenly said.

  This made no sense to me. The explosions began just three weeks after Putin was appointed prime minister. That would suggest that preparations began while he was still head of the FSB. Berezovsky objected that this was not necessarily the case: “It was all organized in a very short time, and this was why there were so many obvious mistakes made.” Even if Berezovsky was correct, however, Putin was succeeded at the FSB by his right-hand man, Patrushev, who would hardly have hidden the plan from Putin. And if Putin had firsthand knowledge of such a relatively minor operation as the detention of Andrei Babitsky, then it seemed absurd to imagine he had not known of the planned bombing spree.

  Berezovsky agreed, although he still would not lay the entire enterprise at Putin’s feet. He said he had come to believe that the idea had originated in Putin’s inner circle but had not been intended to support Putin himself: it was designed to boost any successor of Yeltsin’s choosing. I thought Berezovsky might have devised this theory to allow himself to go on believing he had been the kingmaker and not just a pawn in 1999. On the other hand, I had to admit he was probably right that the explosions could have been used to elect anyone: if enough blood was shed, any previously unknown, faceless, and unqualified candidate could become president. Even if he was chosen practically at random.

  Official Moscow’s position remains that all of the explosions were organized by an Islamic terrorist group based in the Caucasus.

  Three

  THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A THUG

  The group Berezovsky had assembled to write Putin’s biography had only three weeks to produce a book. Their list of sources was limited: they had Putin himself—six long sit-down interviews—his wife; his best friend; a former teacher; and a former secretary from St. Petersburg’s city hall. They were not there to investigate the man; their job was to write down a legend. It turned out to be the legend of a postwar Leningrad thug.

  St. Petersburg is a Russian city of grand history and glorious architecture. But the Soviet city of Leningrad into which Vladimir Putin was born in 1952 was, in the lived experience of its people, a city of hunger, poverty, destruction, aggression, and death. Just eight years had elapsed since the end of the Siege of Leningrad.

  The siege had begun when Nazi troops completed their circle around the city, severing all connections to Leningrad, on September 8, 1941, and ended 872 days later. More than a million civilians died, killed by hunger or by artillery fire, which was unceasing for the duration of the blockade. Nearly half of these people died on their way out of the city. The lone route not controlled by the Germans bore the name the Road of Life, and hundreds of thousands of civilians died along this road, killed by bombs and famine. No city in modern times has seen famine and loss of life on this scale—and yet many survivors believed the authorities intentionally underestimated the number of casualties.

  No one knows how long it takes a city to recover from violence so profound and grief so pervasive. “Imagine a soldier who is living a life of peacetime routine but is surrounded with the same walls and the same objects as were with him in the trenches,” wrote, some years after the war, the authors of an oral history of the Siege of Leningrad, trying to conjure the extent to which the city was still living the siege. “The ceiling’s antique molding bears the traces of shrapnel. The glossy surface of the piano bears the scratches left by broken glass. The shiny parquet floor has a burned-in stain where the wood-burning stove used to stand.”

  Burzhuikas—movable cast-iron wood-burning stoves—were what Leningrad residents used to heat their apartments during the siege. The city’s furniture and books had gone into them. The black potbellied stoves were a symbol of despair and abandonment: the authorities, who had assured Soviet citizens they were well protected against all enemies—and that Germany was friend, not foe—had left the people of the country’s second-largest city to starve and freeze to death. And then—when the siege was over—they had invested in restoring the glorious suburban palaces looted by the Germans but not in restoring the residential buildings in the city itself. Vladimir Putin was raised in an apartment that still had a wood-burning stove in every room.

  His parents, Maria and Vladimir Putin, had survived the siege in the city. The elder Vladimir Putin had joined the army in the early days of the Soviet-German war and had been wounded seriously in battle not far from Leningrad. He was taken to a hospital inside the line of the siege, and Maria found him there. After several months in the hospital, he remained severely disabled: both of his legs were disfigured and caused him great physical pain for the rest of his life. The elder Putin was discharged from the military and returned home with Maria. Their only son, who must have been between eight and ten years old at the time, was staying at one of several homes for children organized in the city, apparently in the hope that institutions could provide better care than desperate and starving parents. The boy died there. Maria came close to death herself: by the time the siege was lifted, she was no longer strong enough to walk on her own.

  These were the future president’s parents: a disabled man, a woman who had come very close to dying from starvation and who had lost her children (a second son had died in infancy several years before the war). But by the measure of the postwar Soviet Union, the Putins were lucky: they had each other. Following the war, there were nearly twice as many women of child-bearing age as there were men. Statistics aside, the war had wrought tragedy in virtually every family, separating husbands and wives, destroying homes, and displacing millions. To have lived not only through the war but through the siege, and to still have your spouse—and your home—was, essentially, a miracle.

  The younger Vladimir Putin’s birth was another miracle, so unlikely that it has given life to the persistent rumor that the Putins adopted him. On the eve of Putin’s first presidential election, a woman came forward in Georgia, in the Caucasus, claiming she had given him up for adoption when he was nine years old. A number of articles and a book or two advancing this story followed, and indeed even Natalia Gevorkyan was inclined to believe the story: she found his parents strikingly doting, and the fact that the team of biographers found no one who remembered knowing the boy before he reached school age reinforced her suspicions. It is, however, not only impossible to prove or disprove the adoption theory but also unnecessary: the indisputable fact is, whether biological or adopted, Vladimir Putin, by the standards of his time, was a miracle child.

  BECAUSE VLADIMIR PUTIN WAS CATAPULTED to power from obscurity, and because he spent his entire adult life within the confines of a secret and secretive institution, he has been able to exercise greater control over what is known about him than almost any other modern politician—certainly more than any modern Western politician. He has created his own mythology. This is a good thing, because, to a far greater extent than is usually possible for any man, Vladimir Putin has communicated to the world directly what he would like to be known about him and how he would like to be seen. What has emerged is very much the mythology of a child of post-siege Leningrad, a mean, hungry, impoverished place that bred mean, hungry, ferocious children. At least, they were the ones who survived.

  One entered the building in which Putin grew up through the courtyard. St. Petersburg residents call these formations “well courtyards”: enclosed on all sides by tall apartment buildings, they make a person feel as if he were standing at the bottom of a giant stone well. Like all such courtyards, this one was strewn with trash, potholed, and unlit. So was the building itself: the nineteenth-century stairs were crumbling, and the stairwell rarely had a working lightbulb. Chunks of the handrail were missing, and the rest of the construction wobbled wildly. The Putins lived on the top floor of the five-story building, and the journey up the dark stairs could be risky.

  Like most apartments in central Leningrad, this was part of a flat once built with well-off renters in mind, then divided into two or three apartments, only to be split agai
n among several families. The Putins’ apartment did not have a proper kitchen, so a single gas stove and a sink were stationed in the narrow hallway one entered from the stairwell. Three families used the four-burner stove to prepare their meals. A makeshift but permanent toilet had been constructed by annexing part of the stairwell. The small space was unheated. To bathe, the residents would heat water on the gas stove and then wash themselves while perched over the toilet in the tiny cold room.

  Vladimir Putin the younger was, naturally, the only child in the apartment. An older married couple lived in a windowless room that was eventually judged uninhabitable. An old observant Jewish couple and their grown daughter occupied a room on the other side of the hallway-cum-kitchen from the Putins. Conflicts flared regularly in the communal kitchen, but the adults apparently cooperated in shielding the boy from their quarrels. Putin often spent time playing in the Jewish family’s room—and, speaking to his biographers, he made a striking assertion, claiming he did not differentiate between his parents and the old Jews.

  The Putins had the largest room in the flat: around twenty square meters, or roughly twelve feet by fifteen. By the standards of the time, this was an almost palatial abode for a family of three. Almost incredibly, the Putins also had a television set, a telephone, and a dacha, a cabin outside the city. The elder Vladimir Putin worked as a skilled laborer at a train car factory; Maria took backbreaking unskilled jobs that allowed her to spend time with her son: she worked as a night watchman, a cleaning woman, a loader. But if one examines the fine shades of postwar Soviet poverty, the Putins emerge as practically rich. Given their unceasing doting on their son, this sometimes produced noteworthy results, such as first-grader Vladimir’s sporting a wristwatch, a rare, expensive, and prestigious accessory for any age group in that time and place.

  The school was just a few steps from the building where the Putins lived. The education offered was, from what one can gather, unremarkable. The teacher for the first four grades was a very young woman who was finishing her college education by going to night school. Not that education was a priority in 1960, when Vladimir Putin entered first grade at the age of almost eight. His father was, by all accounts, concerned primarily with discipline, not with the quality of schooling his son received. Nor was education part of the younger Putin’s idea of success; he has placed a great emphasis on portraying himself as a thug, and in this he has had the complete cooperation of his childhood friends. By far the largest amount of biographical information available about him—that is, the bulk of the information made available to his biographers—concerns the many fistfights of his childhood and youth.

  THE COURTYARD is a central fixture of postwar Soviet life, and Vladimir Putin’s personal mythology is very much rooted in it. With adults working a six-day week and child care generally nonexistent, Soviet children tended to grow up in the communal spaces outside their overcrowded apartment buildings. In Putin’s case, this meant growing up at the bottom of the well—in the well courtyard, that is, strewn with litter and populated by toughs. “Some courtyard this was,” his former classmate and longtime friend Viktor Borisenko told a biographer. “Thugs all. Unwashed, unshaven guys with cigarettes and bottles of cheap wine. Constant drinking, cursing, fistfights. And there was Putin in the middle of all this…. When we were older, we would see the thugs from his courtyard, and they had drunk themselves into the ground, they were hitting bottom. Many of them had been to jail. In other words, they did not manage to get good lives for themselves.”

  Putin, younger than the thugs and slight of build, tried to hold his own with them. “If anyone ever insulted him in any way,” his friend recalled, “Volodya would immediately jump on the guy, scratch him, bite him, rip his hair out by the clump—do anything at all never to allow anyone to humiliate him in any way.”

  Putin brought his fighting ways to grade school with him. References to fistfights abound in the recollections of his former schoolmates, but the following description gives a telling snapshot of the future president’s temperament: “The labor [shop] teacher dragged Putin by the collar, from his classroom to ours. We had been making dustpans in his class and Vladimir had done something wrong…. It took him a long time to calm down. The process itself was interesting. It would start to look like he was feeling better, like it was all over. And then he would flare up again and start expressing his outrage. He did this several times over.”

  The school punished Putin by excluding him from the Young Pioneers organization—a rare, almost exotic form of punishment, generally reserved for children who were held back repeatedly and essentially deemed hopeless. Putin was a marked boy: for three years, he was the only child in the school who did not wear a red kerchief around his neck, symbolizing membership in the Communist organization for ten-to-fourteen-year-olds. Putin’s outcast status was all the more peculiar considering how well-off he was compared with the other children at his school, most of whom were statistically unlikely to be living with two parents.

  But to Putin, his thug credentials represented true status, flaunted in his responses to his biographers in 2000:

  “Why did you not get inducted into the Young Pioneers until sixth grade? Were things really so bad?”

  “Of course. I was no Pioneer; I was a hooligan.”

  “Are you putting on airs?”

  “You are trying to insult me. I was a real thug.”

  Putin’s social, political, and academic standing changed when he was thirteen: as a sixth-grader, he began to apply himself academically and was rewarded not only with induction into the Young Pioneers but, immediately after, by election to the post of class chairman. The fighting continued unabated, however: Putin’s friends told his biographers a series of fighting stories, the same plot repeating itself year after year.

  “We were playing a game of chase out in the street,” a grade school classmate recalled. “Volodya was passing by, and he saw that a boy much older and bigger than me is chasing me and I am running as hard as I can. He jumped in, trying to protect me. A fight ensued. Then we sorted it out, of course.”

  “We were in eighth grade when we were standing at a tram stop, waiting,” recounted another friend. “A tram pulled up, but it was not going where we needed to go. Two huge drunken men got off and started trying to pick a fight with somebody. They were cursing and pushing people around. Vovka calmly handed his bag over to me, and then I saw that he has just sent one of the men flying into a snowbank, face-first. The second one turned around and started at Volodya, screaming, ‘What was that?’ A couple of seconds later he knew exactly what it was, because he was lying there next to his buddy. That was just when our tram pulled up. If there is anything I can say about Vovka, it’s that he never let bastards and rascals who insult people and bug them get away with it.”

  As a young KGB officer, Putin reenacted his earlier fights.

  “He once invited me to witness the Procession of the Cross at Easter,” recalls still another friend. “He was on duty, helping cordon off the procession. And he asked me if I wanted to come see the altar in the church. I said yes, of course: it was such a boyish thing to do—no one was allowed there, but we could just go in. So after the Procession of the Cross we were on our way home. And we were standing at a bus stop. Some people came up to us. They didn’t look like criminals, more like college students who had had a bit to drink. They say, ‘You got a smoke?’ Vovka says, ‘No.’ And they say, ‘What are you doing, answering like that?’ And he says, ‘Nothing.’ And I didn’t even have time to see what happened after. One of them must have hit him or pushed him. I just saw someone’s stocking feet slide past me. The guy went flying somewhere. And Volod’ka says to me, all calm, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ And we left. I really liked the way he threw that guy who tried to pick on him. One second—and his feet were up in the air.”

  The same friend recalled that a few years later, when Putin was attending spy school in Moscow, he came home to Leningrad for a few days, only to get into a
fight on the subway. “Someone picked on him and he took care of the thug,” the friend told Putin’s biographers. “Volodya was very upset. ‘They are not going to be understanding about this in Moscow,’ he said. ‘There will be consequences.’ And I guess he did get into some kind of trouble, though he never told me any details. It all worked out in the end.”

  Putin, it would appear, reacted to the barest provocation by getting into a street brawl—risking his KGB career, which would have been derailed had he been detained for the fight or even so much as noticed by the police. Whether or not the stories are exactly true, it is notable that Putin has painted himself—and allowed himself to be painted by others—as a consistently rash, physically violent man with a barely containable temper. The image he has chosen to present is all the more remarkable because it seems inconsistent with a discipline to which Putin devoted his teenage years.

  At the age of ten or eleven, Putin went shopping for a place where he could learn skills to supplement his sheer will to fight. Boxing proved too painful: he had his nose broken during one of his first training sessions. Then he found Sambo. Sambo, an acronym for the Russian phrase that translates as “self-defense without weapons,” is a Soviet martial art, a hodgepodge of judo, karate, and folk wrestling moves. His parents were opposed to the boy’s new hobby. Maria called it “foolishness” and seemed to fear for her child’s safety, and the elder Vladimir forbade the lessons. The coach had to pay several visits to the Putins’ room before the boy was allowed consistently to attend the daily training sessions.