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

by Masha Gessen

  Sambo, with its discipline, became part of Putin’s transformation from a grade school thug into a goal-directed and hardworking adolescent. It was also linked to what had become an overriding ambition: Putin had apparently heard that the KGB expected new recruits to be skilled in hand-to-hand combat.

  “IMAGINE A BOY who dreams of being a KGB officer when everyone else wants to be a cosmonaut,” Gevorkyan said to me, trying to explain how odd Putin’s passion seemed to her. I did not find it quite so far-fetched: in the 1960s, Soviet cultural authorities invested heavily in creating a romantic, even glamorous image of the secret police. When Vladimir Putin was twelve, a novel called The Shield and the Sword became a bestseller. Its protagonist was a Soviet intelligence officer working in Germany. When Putin was fifteen, the novel was made into a wildly popular miniseries. Forty-three years later, as prime minister, Putin would meet with eleven Russian spies deported from the United States—and together, in a show of camaraderie and nostalgia, they would sing the theme song from the miniseries.

  “When I was in ninth grade, I was influenced by films and books, and I developed a desire to work for the KGB,” Putin told his biographer. “There is nothing special about that.” The protestation begs the question: Was there something else, besides books and movies, that formed what became Putin’s single-minded passion? It seems there was, and Putin hid it in plain sight, as the best spies do.

  We all want our children to grow up to be a better, more successful version of ourselves. Vladimir Putin, the miraculous late son of two people maimed and crippled by World War II, was born to be a Soviet spy; in fact, he was born to be a Soviet spy in Germany. During World War II, the senior Vladimir Putin had been assigned to so-called subversive troops, small detachments formed to act behind enemy lines. These troops reported to the NKVD, as the Soviet secret police was then called, and were formed largely from the ranks of the NKVD. They were on a suicide mission: no more than 15 percent of them survived the first six months of the war. Vladimir Putin’s detachment was typical: twenty-eight soldiers were air-dropped into a forest behind enemy lines about a hundred miles from Leningrad. They had had about enough time to get their bearings and blow up one train when they ran out of food supplies. They asked the locals for food; the villagers fed them and then turned them in to the Germans. Several of the men managed to break out. The Germans gave chase, and Vladimir Putin hid in a swamp, submerging his head and breathing through a reed until the search party had given up. He was one of only four survivors of that mission.

  Wars give birth to bizarre stories, and the legend with which the younger Vladimir Putin grew up is as likely to have been true as any other tale of miraculous survival and spontaneous heroism. It may also very well explain why he signed up for a German-language elective in fourth grade, when he was still a notoriously poor student. It certainly explains why, as a schoolboy, Putin had a portrait of the founding father of Soviet spyhood propped up on his desk at the dacha. His closest childhood friend recalled it was “some intelligence officer for sure, because Volod’ka told me it was,” and Putin supplied his biographers with the name of his idol. Yan Berzin, hero of the Revolution, founder of Soviet military intelligence, creator of spy outposts in all European countries, was, like many early Bolsheviks, arrested and shot in the late 1930s for an imagined anti-Stalin plot. His name was restored to honor in 1956 but has remained obscure ever since. You would have had to be a true KGB geek not only to know the name but to have secured the portrait.

  It is not clear whether the elder Vladimir Putin had worked for the secret police before the war or continued to work for the NKVD after. It seems probable enough that he remained part of the so-called active reserve, a giant group of secret police officers who held regular jobs while also informing for—and drawing a salary from—the KGB. This may explain why the Putins lived so comparatively well: the dacha, the television set, and the telephone—especially the telephone.

  At the age of sixteen, a year before finishing secondary school, Vladimir Putin went to the KGB headquarters in Leningrad to try to sign up. “A man came out,” he recalled for a biographer. “He did not know who I was. And I never saw him again after that. I told him I go to school and in the future I would like to work for the state security services. I asked if it was possible and what I would have to do to achieve it. The man said they don’t usually sign up volunteers, but the best way for me would be to go to college or serve in the military. I asked him which college. He said a law college or the law department of the university would be best.”

  “He surprised everyone by saying he would be applying to the university,” his class teacher—the equivalent of a homeroom teacher in the United States—told his biographers. “I asked, ‘How?’ He said, ‘I’ll handle it myself.’”Leningrad University was one of the two or three most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the Soviet Union, certainly by far the most competitive in the city. How a mediocre student from a family that could by no means be considered well connected—even if I am correct in assuming that the elder Putin worked for the secret police—planned to gain admission was a mystery. His parents apparently protested, as did his coach: all of them favored a college to which Putin would be more likely to be accepted, which, in turn, would keep him out of mandatory military service and close to home.

  Putin graduated from secondary school with the grades of “excellent” in history, German, and gym; “good” in geography, Russian, and literature; and “satisfactory” (the equivalent of a C) in physics, chemistry, algebra, and geometry. Leningrad University reportedly had forty people applying for a single spot. How did Putin get in? It is just possible that his determination was great enough that he could prepare himself for the grueling exams, at the expense of his high school work—a strategy that would have taken advantage of the fact that the university based admissions decisions solely on a series of written and oral exams, not on transcripts. It is also possible that the KGB ensured he would get in.

  AT UNIVERSITY Putin kept to himself—as he had in the last couple of years of secondary school—staying out of community and Komsomol activities. He kept his grades up and spent his free time training in judo (his coach and teammates had traded in Sambo for an Olympic martial art) and driving around in his car. Putin was, more than likely, the only student at Leningrad University who owned a car. In the early 1970s a car in the Soviet Union was a rarity: mass car production was in gestation—even twenty years later, the number of cars per thousand people in the USSR barely reached sixty (compared with 781 in the United States). A car cost roughly as much as a dacha. The Putins won the car, a late-model two-door with a motorcycle engine, in a lottery, and rather than take the money—which would have been enough to get them out of the communal apartment and into a separate flat in a newly constructed building on the outskirts—gave the car to their son. That they gave the younger Putin this lavish gift, and that he accepted it, are further examples of the Putins’ extraordinarily doting relationship with their son, or their incongruous riches—or both.

  Whatever the reason, Putin’s relationship to money—extravagant and strikingly selfish for his social context—appears to have taken shape during his university years. Like other students, he spent his summers working on far-flung construction sites, where the pay was very good: the state compensated laborers well for the danger and hardship of working in the Far North. Putin made a thousand rubles one summer and five hundred the following year—enough to, say, put a new roof on the dacha. Any other young Soviet man in his position—an only son, living with and entirely financially dependent on his parents, both of them past retirement age—would have been expected to give all or most of that money to his family. But the first summer Putin joined two classmates in traveling straight from the Far North to the Soviet south, the town of Gagry on the Black Sea in Georgia, where he managed to spend all his money in a few days. The following year, he returned to Leningrad after working on a construction site, and spent the money he had ma
de on an overcoat for himself—and a frosted cake for his mother.

  “ALL THROUGH my university years I kept waiting for that man I spoke to at KGB headquarters to remember me,” Putin told his biographers. “But they had forgotten all about me, because I had been a schoolboy when I came…. But I remembered they do not sign up volunteers, so I made no moves myself. Four years went by. Silence. I decided the issue was closed and started looking around for other possible job assignments…. But when I was in my fourth year, I was contacted by a man who said he wanted to meet with me. He did not say who he was, but somehow I knew right away. Because he said, ‘We will be talking about your future job assignment, that is what I would like to discuss with you. I am not going to be any more specific for now.’ That’s when I figured it out. If he does not want to say where he works, that means he works there.”

  The KGB officer met with Putin four or five times and concluded that he was “not particularly outgoing but energetic, flexible, and brave. Most important, he was good at connecting with people fast—a key quality for a KGB officer, especially if he plans to work in intelligence.”

  The day Putin learned he would be working for the KGB, he came to see Viktor Borisenko, who had remained his best friend since grade school. “He says, ‘Let’s go.’ I say, ‘Where are we going, why?’ He doesn’t answer. We get in his car and go,” Borisenko told an interviewer. “We pull up at a Caucasian food place. I’m intrigued. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on. But I never did. It was just clear that something extremely important had happened. But Putin isn’t telling me what. He is not even giving any hints. But he was all very celebratory. Something very important had happened in his life. Only later did I understand that this was how my friend was celebrating, with me, his going to work for the KGB.”

  Later, Putin made no secret of his work for the KGB. He told a cellist named Sergei Roldugin, who would become his best friend, almost as soon as the two met. Roldugin, who had traveled abroad with his orchestra and had seen KGB handlers at work, says he was apprehensive and curious at once. “Once I tried to get him to talk about some operation that had gone down, and I failed,” he told Putin’s biographers. “Another time I said to him, ‘I am a cellist, and that means I play the cello. I’ll never be a surgeon. What’s your job? I mean, I know you are an intelligence officer. But what does that mean? Who are you? What can you do?’ And he said, ‘I am an expert in human relations.’ That was the end of the conversation. He really thought he knew something about people…. And I was impressed. I was proud and very much treasured the fact that he was an expert in human relations.” (The skeptical note in Roldugin’s “He really thought he knew something…” is as clear and unmistakable in the original Russian as it is in the English translation, but it seems that both Roldugin and Putin, who certainly vetted the quote, missed it.)

  Putin’s own descriptions of his relationships paint him as a strikingly inept communicator. He had one significant relationship with a woman before meeting his future wife; he left her at the altar. “That’s how it happened,” he told his biographers, explaining nothing. “It was really hard.” He was no more articulate on the subject of the woman he actually married—nor, it seems, was he successful at communicating his feelings to her during their courtship. They dated for more than three years—an extraordinarily long time by Soviet or Russian standards, and at a very advanced age: Putin was almost thirty-one when they married, which made him a member of a tiny minority—less than ten percent—of Russians who remained unmarried past the age of thirty. The future Mrs. Putin was a domestic flight attendant from the Baltic Sea city of Kaliningrad; they had met through an acquaintance. She has gone on record saying it was by no means love at first sight, for at first sight Putin seemed unremarkable and poorly dressed; he has never said anything publicly about his love for her. In their courtship, it seems, she was both the more emotional and the more insistent one. Her description of the day he finally proposed paints a picture of a failure to communicate so profound that it is surprising these people actually managed to get married and have two children.

  “One evening we were sitting in his apartment, and he says, ‘Little friend, by now you know what I’m like. I am basically not a very convenient person.’ And then he went on to describe himself: not a talker, can be pretty harsh, can hurt your feelings, and so on. Not a good person to spend your life with. And he goes on. ‘Over the course of three and a half years you’ve probably made up your mind.’ I realized we were probably breaking up. So I said, ‘Well, yes, I’ve made up my mind.’ And he said, with doubt in his voice, ‘Really?’ That’s when I knew we were definitely breaking up. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I love you and I propose we get married on such and such a day.’ And that was completely unexpected.”

  They were married three months later. Ludmila quit her job and moved to Leningrad to live with Putin in the smaller of two rooms in an apartment he now shared with his parents. The apartment, in a new concrete-block monstrosity about forty minutes by subway from the center of town, had been the Putins’ since 1977: the younger Vladimir Putin had a room of his own for the first time at the age of twenty-five. It was about 130 square feet, and it had a single window placed so oddly high that one had to be standing to be able to look out of it. The newlyweds’ living conditions, in other words, were roughly similar to those of millions of other Soviet couples.

  Ludmila enrolled at Leningrad University, where she studied philology. She became pregnant with their first child about a year after the wedding. While she was pregnant, and for a few months after she had Maria, her husband was in Moscow, enrolled in a yearlong course that would prepare him for service in the foreign intelligence corps. She had known he worked for the KGB long before the wedding, even though initially he told her he was a police detective: such was his cover.

  THAT PUTIN SEEMS not to have been conscientious about using his cover is probably an indication that he was not sure what exactly he was covering up. His ambition—or, more accurately, his dream—had been to have secret powers of sorts. “I was most amazed by how a small force, a single person, really, can accomplish something an entire army cannot,” he told his biographers. “A single intelligence officer could rule over the fates of thousands of people. At least, that’s how I saw it.”

  Putin wanted to rule the world, or a part of it, from the shadows. That is very much the role he ultimately achieved, but when he first joined the KGB, his prospects of ever having anything significant or remotely interesting to do seemed far from certain.

  In the middle to late 1970s, when Putin joined the KGB, the secret police, like all Soviet institutions, was undergoing a phase of extreme bloating. Its growing number of directorates and departments were producing mountains of information that had no clear purpose, application, or meaning. An entire army of men and a few women spent their lives compiling newspaper clippings, transcripts of tapped telephone conversations, reports of people followed and trivia learned, and all of this made its way to the top of the KGB pyramid, and then to the leadership of the Communist Party, largely unprocessed and virtually unanalyzed. “Only the Central Committee of the Communist Party had the right to think in broad political categories,” wrote the last chairman of the KGB, whose task it was to dismantle the institution. “The KGB was relegated to collecting primary information and carrying out decisions made elsewhere. This structure excluded the possibility of developing a tradition of strategic political thinking within the KGB itself. But it was unparalleled in its ability to supply information of the sort and in the amount in which it was ordered.” In other words, the KGB took the concept of carrying out orders to its logical extreme: its agents saw what they were told to see, heard what they were told to hear, and reported back exactly what was expected of them.

  The internal ideology of the KGB, as of any police organization, rested on a clear concept of the enemy. The institution thrived on a siege mentality, which had driven the massive manhunts and purges of the Stalin
era. But Putin entered the service not only in the post-Stalin era but also during one of the very few, very brief periods of peace in Soviet history: after Vietnam and before Afghanistan, the country was involved in no ongoing armed conflict, covertly or openly. The only active enemies were the dissidents, a handful of brave souls who drew a disproportionate amount of KGB force. A new law, Article 190 of the Penal Code, made it a crime to “spread rumors or information detrimental to the Soviet societal and governmental structure,” giving the KGB virtually unlimited power in hunting down and fighting those who dared to think differently. Dissidents, suspected dissidents, and those leaning toward activity that might be considered dissident were the objects of constant surveillance and harassment. Putin claims not to have taken part in anti-dissident work but has shown in interviews that he was thoroughly familiar with the way it was organized, probably because he was lying about not having done it. A perfectly laudatory memoir of Putin written by a former colleague who defected to the West in the late 1980s mentions matter-of-factly that in Leningrad, Putin worked for the Fifth Directorate, created to fight the dissidents.

  After university, Putin spent half a year pushing papers at the KGB offices in Leningrad. Then he spent six months going to KGB officer school. “It was an entirely unremarkable school in Leningrad,” he told his biographers—one of dozens across the country where university graduates got their secret-police qualifications. After graduation, Putin was assigned to the counterintelligence unit in Leningrad. It was a backwater of backwater assignments. Counterintelligence officers in Moscow spent their time trailing suspected or known foreign intelligence agents, almost all of whom worked at foreign embassies in the city. There were no embassies in Leningrad, and no one, really, to trail.