by Masha Gessen
Sobchak, meanwhile, completed his negotiations with General Samsonov and finally went to his office at the Mariinsky Palace, where Putin had posted and was personally supervising a heavy guard. By the middle of the day, tens of thousands of people had gathered in front of the Mariinsky Palace, hoping for news—or an opportunity to act. Sobchak eventually appeared in the window of his office and read a statement—not his own, but that of Russian president Boris Yeltsin and other members of his government. “We call on the people of Russia to respond appropriately to the putschists and to demand that the country be allowed to return to its normal course of constitutional development.” After nine in the evening, joined by his deputy the rear admiral, he finally traveled to the Leningrad TV station, where he read his own address—inspired and eloquent as ever. The speech was particularly important because Leningrad television broadcast to many cities all over the country, and though the GKChP apparently tried to stop the broadcast as soon as Sobchak started to speak, Leningrad persisted. Sobchak called on the city’s residents to come to a rally the following day. He sounded defiant, but he was not: he had previously cleared the plan with General Samsonov, promising to keep the demonstrators confined to a clearly circumscribed space. After he finished speaking, Sobchak, and Putin with him, went into hiding: he would spend the next two days in a bunker beneath Leningrad’s largest industrial plant, emerging only once to appear at a press conference. He was terrified.
On the second day of the coup, the strangest thing happened. Marina Salye was manning the phones at the city council’s makeshift resistance headquarters when Yeltsin’s vice president, General Alexander Rutskoy, called and started screaming into the phone: “What the hell did he do? He read a decree? What the hell did he read?” It took a few minutes for Salye to figure out what Rutskoy was talking about, and it took her much longer than that to understand what it meant. Rutskoy had issued a decree removing General Samsonov from his post as the head of the Leningrad Military District and replacing him with Rear Admiral Shcherbakov, Sobchak’s deputy. Replacing a hard-liner loyal to the GKChP with someone loyal to the democratic mayor seemed like a logical step, and one that Sobchak should have welcomed. Except it upset Sobchak’s carefully constructed hedge and would in essence have forced him to take Yeltsin’s side not only in his speeches, which he had done, but also in his actions. So Sobchak, the lawyer, fudged the language in Rutskoy’s decree, which he read at his press conference, rendering the document invalid.
There was a barrage of decrees, statements, addresses, and orders coming from both sides of the barricades. It was a war of nerves rather than a legal battle, for any organization, or any person, obeyed only the decrees issued by the authority he recognized. This was why Yeltsin could not just call Samsonov and order him to clear out of his office: Samsonov reported to the GKChP, not to Yeltsin. So the democratic government in Moscow had hoped that Sobchak, by reading the decree aloud, with all his eloquence and all his authority, would invest the document with enough power that the troops stationed in Leningrad would believe Rear Admiral Shcherbakov to be their new commander. But when Sobchak read the decree, he replaced the job title now assigned to Shcherbakov with something called “top military chief,” a term no one recognized, a fictitious job from some parallel world that cast no doubt on General Samsonov’s authority. This was Sobchak’s way of keeping his own situation undefined and stable.
AND THEN THE COUP CRUMPLED. After a two-day standoff in the center of Moscow, most of the troops failed to move on the White House, and the few armored personnel carriers that did were stopped by a handful of unarmed volunteers and the barricades they had constructed from sidewalk stones and overturned electric buses. Three people died.
Gorbachev returned to Moscow. The incredibly fast process of taking apart the Soviet Union commenced. At the same time, the Russian and Soviet governments launched the process of taking apart the Soviet Union’s most powerful institution, the KGB, although this effort would prove much more complicated and much less efficient.
On August 22, the Russian Supreme Soviet passed a resolution establishing a white, blue, and red flag as the new flag of Russia, replacing the Soviet-era red flag with its hammer and sickle. A group of city council members, led by Vitaly Skoybeda—the one who had slugged the hard-liner three days earlier—set off to replace the flag in Leningrad. “The flag was on a corner of Nevsky Prospekt, over the Party headquarters,” Yelena Zelinskaya, the samizdat publisher, recalled in an interview years later. “It was the most noticeable place in the city. They started taking it down, a group of people including journalists and city council members. An orchestra showed up for some reason; it was the brass band of the military school. And a television crew was there filming. They lowered the red flag carefully. As the orchestra played, they raised the tricolor. The man who took down the flag was standing right there among us, on Nevsky. So there we were, a group of people, standing in the street, with an orchestra playing, and this man with a red flag in his hands, and we were suddenly totally lost as to what to do. Here we had a flag that for eighty years had been the symbol of the state; we had all hated it but we had also all feared it. And then one of our staff members says, ‘I know what to do: we are going to give it back to them.’ The district Party headquarters was across the street. And he grabbed the flag and ran across the Nevsky, without looking left or right. Cars stop. The orchestra is playing a march, and he is running across the very wide Nevsky, and just when the orchestra is playing the last note, he tosses the flag as hard as he can against the Party headquarters doors. There is a pause. And then the door opens slowly just a crack; a hand reaches out and quickly yanks the flag inside. The door closes. This was the highlight of my entire life. I saw the Russian flag raised over Nevsky.”
Five days after the coup began, Moscow held a funeral for the three young men who died trying to stop the troops. Three Leningrad politicians, including Salye, flew in for the ceremony. They joined Nikolai Gonchar, chairman of the Moscow City Council and a prominent democrat, at the head of the funeral procession. “The procession kept starting and stopping,” Salye told me later. “And every time we stopped, Gonchar turned to me and said, ‘Marina Yevgeniyevna, what was it?’ He said it about ten times.” By the end of the day, Gonchar had Salye convinced that the coup was not what it had seemed.
So what was it? Why did the coup, so many months in the making, fall apart so easily? Indeed, why did it never really take off? Why were the democratic politicians, with the exception of Gorbachev, allowed to move around the country freely and have telephone contact? Why were none of them arrested? Why, in the three days that they ostensibly held power in the Soviet Union, did the hard-liners fail to capture the main communication or transportation hubs? And why did they fold without a fight? Was the coup simply a mediocre attempt by a group of disorganized failures? Or was there something more complicated and more sinister going on? Was there, as Salye ultimately came to believe, a carefully engineered arrangement that allowed Yeltsin to remove Gorbachev and broker the peaceful demise of the Soviet Union but also placed him forever in debt to the KGB?
I happen to think it was neither—and both. Even while it was going on, on either side of the barricades, different people were telling themselves different stories about the coup. When it ended, the nominal winners—the people who fought for democracy in Russia—failed to shape or advance a story that would have become the common truth of the new Russia. Everyone was thus left with his or her individual narrative. In the end, for some people those three days in August 1991 remained a story of heroism and the victory of democracy. For others, they remained—or became—the story of a cynical conspiracy. Which story is right depends on which of them belongs to the people who hold power in Russia. So the question becomes: What is the story that Vladimir Putin tells himself about the coup?
OVER THOSE THREE DAYS IN AUGUST, Putin was even less visible than usual. He stayed by Sobchak’s side at all times. It was Sobchak’s other deputy, Shcherbak
ov, who had the visible role, who acted as both spokesman and point man: he stayed behind in the mayor’s office, night and day and night again, as Sobchak, accompanied by Putin, hid in the bunker. We know that Sobchak was playing both sides of the barricades; in fact, the barricades may have bisected his inner circle. Early in the crisis, Shcherbakov discovered that someone had placed a tiny tracking device on his lapel. On the morning of August 21, Shcherbakov remembered, “I had pushed five chairs together in my office and lain down to sleep on them. I woke up because I sensed someone looking at me. Anatoly Alexandrovich [Sobchak] had returned. ‘Go back to sleep, Vyacheslav Nikolayevich,’ he said. ‘Everything is fine and good. Congratulations.’ I immediately reached for my lapel to feel for the bug—and it was no longer there. So someone in my immediate circle had placed it and then removed it so it would not be found. Someone who was working for the other side.”
Nine years later, Putin answered his biographers’ questions about the coup. “It was dangerous to leave the city council building in those days,” he reminisced. “But we did many things, we were active: we went to the Kirov industrial plant, spoke to the workers there, and went to other factories, even though we did not feel particularly safe doing so.” This is mostly a lie: many independent eyewitnesses describe Sobchak, and Putin with him, going into hiding in the bunker at the Kirov industrial plant, where Sobchak may or may not have given a speech before literally going underground. There is no indication they went to any other factories or did anything during the last two days of the crisis but emerge for that single press conference.
“What if the hard-liners had won?” the biographers asked. “You were a KGB officer. You and Sobchak would certainly have been put on trial.”
“But I was not a KGB officer anymore,” Putin responded. “As soon as the coup began, I made up my mind as to which side I’m on. I knew for a fact that I would never do anything as directed by the coup organizers and would never be on their side. And I knew full well that this would be considered at least a violation. So on August 20 I wrote my second letter of resignation from the KGB.”
This makes no sense. If Putin knew that his first letter of resignation, supposedly written a year earlier, was lost, why did he not write a second one immediately—especially if, as he claimed, he had initially decided to resign under threat of blackmail? In addition, how would he have known that the letter was lost? Presumably, there was only one way: he continued to draw a salary from the KGB, meaning he was very much a KGB officer when the coup began.
But now, he claimed, he mobilized all efforts to break with the organization. “I told Sobchak, ‘Anatoly Alexandrovich, I wrote a letter of resignation once but it “died” somewhere along the way.’ So Sobchak immediately called [KGB chief and one of the coup leaders Vladimir] Kryuchkov and then the head of my district. And the following day, I was told that my letter of resignation had been signed.”
This part of the story seems to be pure fiction. “I do not think the phone call he describes could have taken place on August 20,” said Arseniy Roginsky, a Moscow human-rights activist and historian who spent about a year after the coup combing through KGB archives and studying that institution. “Kryuchkov simply would not have handled a personnel question, especially one that concerned a not particularly senior officer, that day.” Nor is it easy to imagine Sobchak, who was so busy playing both sides, acting essentially to sever his own ties to the KGB. In addition, it is not clear how Putin managed to deliver a physical letter—the one that was supposedly signed the next day—to KGB headquarters that day, especially if he never left Sobchak’s side. Finally, even if some of what Putin said were true, it would mean that his resignation was accepted on the last day of the coup, when it was all but clear that the hard-liners had failed.
Most likely, Putin, like his boss, spent the days of the coup on the fence and, if he resigned from the KGB at all, did so only once the coup was over. Unlike Sobchak and many other people, he had not even taken Yeltsin’s lead a few months earlier and resigned from the Communist Party: Putin’s membership expired two weeks after the failed coup, when Yeltsin issued a decree dissolving the Party. So the question is still: What is the story that Putin told himself during the coup? Is there a chance he was the person or one of the people in Sobchak’s inner circle who actively supported the hard-liners? The answer is yes.
THE NINETY MILLION DEUTSCHE MARKS’ worth of meat that Marina Salye had caught wind of in May had never materialized in Leningrad, but she did not forget about it in the dramatic events that followed. Insulted and mystified by what had happened in Germany, Salye continued to try to get to the bottom of the story. After the failed coup, when access to records of all sorts briefly got easier, she was finally able to get her hands on some documents, and by March 1992 she had pieced together the story.
In May 1991, Soviet prime minister Valentin Pavlov granted a Leningrad company called Kontinent the right to negotiate trade contracts on behalf of the Soviet government. Within weeks, Kontinent had signed the meat contract with the German firm. The meat was delivered—but to Moscow rather than Leningrad. The reason was plain: The future GKChP, of which Pavlov was a leader, was trying to stock Moscow food warehouses in order to flood store shelves once they seized power.
The name of the man who had negotiated with the Germans on behalf of Kontinent? Vladimir Putin.
Once Salye thought she knew what had happened, she tried to take action. In March 1992 she traveled to Moscow to see an old acquaintance from the Leningrad pro-democracy movement. Yuri Boldyrev, a handsome, moustachioed young economist, had been elected to the Supreme Soviet alongside Sobchak; now he was working as the chief comptroller in the Yeltsin administration. Salye hand-delivered a letter describing the initial results of her investigation: the peculiar story of the meat that had apparently traveled from Germany to Moscow. Within days, Boldyrev had written a letter to another Leningrad economist, who was now the foreign trade minister, asking him to curtail Putin’s powers. The letter was ignored. Putin had presumably created a base of wealth and influence from which he could not easily be shaken.
What exactly was Putin’s role in the government of Russia’s second-largest city? A woman who worked at the mayor’s office at the same time recalls Putin as a man with an empty office save for a desk with a lone glass ashtray sitting atop it, and with similarly colorless glassy eyes looking out from behind the desk. In his early months in city government, Putin had struck some of his colleagues as eager, curious, and intellectually engaged. Now he cultivated an impervious, emotionless exterior. The woman who worked as his secretary later recalled having to deliver a piece of upsetting personal news to her boss: “The Putins had a dog, a Caucasian shepherd named Malysh [Baby]. He lived at their dacha and was always digging holes under the fence, trying to get out. One time he did get out, and got run over by a car. Ludmila Alexandrovna grabbed the dog and drove him to the veterinary clinic. She called his office from there and asked me to tell her husband that the veterinarian had been unable to save the dog. I went into Vladimir Vladimirovich’s office and said, ‘You know, there is a situation. Malysh is dead.’ I looked—and there was no emotion in his face, none. I was so surprised at his lack of reaction that I could not keep from asking, ‘Did someone already tell you?’ And he said calmly, ‘No, you are the first person to tell me.’ That’s when I knew I had said the wrong thing.”
The “wrong thing” in the story presumably refers to the question about whether Putin had already been informed of his dog’s death. But the scene as a whole is remarkable for the palpable sense of uncertainty and even fear that it conveys.
When his biographers asked him about the nature of his work in St. Petersburg, Putin responded with the lack of subtlety that had come to characterize his answers to sensitive questions. He had tried to take over the casinos, he said. “I believed at the time that the casino business is an area where the state should have a monopoly,” he said. “My position ran opposite to the law on monopolies
, which had already been passed, but still I tried to make sure that the state, as embodied by the city, established control over the entire casino industry.” To that end, he said, the city formed a holding company that acquired 51 percent of the stock of all the casinos in the city, in the hopes of collecting dividends. “But it was a mistake: the casinos funneled the money out in cash and reported losses every time,” Putin complained. “Later, our political opponents tried to accuse us of corruption because we owned stock in the casinos. That was just ridiculous…. Sure, it may not have been the best idea from an economic standpoint. Judging from the fact that the setup turned out to be inefficient and we did not attain our goals, I have to admit it was not sufficiently thought through. But if I had stayed in Petersburg, I would have finished choking those casinos. I would have made them share. I would have given that money to elderly people, teachers, and doctors.” In other words, said the incoming president of Russia, if the law got in the way of his ideas of how things should be done, that would be too bad for the law. He had little else to say about his years as Sobchak’s deputy.
In early 1992, Marina Salye had set out to learn exactly what the little man with the empty office was actually doing. The city council launched a full-fledged investigation, the results of which—twenty-two single-spaced typed pages plus dozens of pages of appendices—Salye presented to her colleagues less than two months following her visit to Boldyrev. She discovered that Putin had entered into dozens of contracts on behalf of the city, many if not all of them of questionable legality.
