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

by Masha Gessen

  Putin’s department in the mayor’s office was now called the Committee for Foreign Relations. Most of its activities ostensibly centered on providing for foodstuffs to be brought into the city from other countries. The city had no cash with which to buy the food: the ruble was not a convertible currency; Russia’s monetary system, inherited from the Soviet Union, was out of balance, and efforts to right it immediately led to hyperinflation. But Russia had plenty of natural resources, which it could trade, directly or indirectly, for food. To that end, the government in Moscow allowed subjects of the federation to export natural resources.

  Salye found that Putin’s department had entered into a dozen export contracts, together worth $92 million. The city agreed to provide oil, timber, metals, cotton, and other natural resources granted to it by the Russian state; the companies named in the contracts undertook to export the natural resources and import foodstuffs. But Salye’s investigation found that every single contract contained a flaw that made it legally invalid: all were missing seals or signatures, or contained major discrepancies. “Putin is a lawyer by training,” she wrote later. “He had to know that these contracts could not be used in court.” In addition, Putin had violated the rules of these import-export barter operations, set by the Russian government, by picking the exporting companies unilaterally rather than by holding an open competition.

  The food that by contract was supposed to be brought into Leningrad never made it to the city. But the commodities mentioned in these dozen contracts apparently had been transported abroad; in fact, another irregularity to which Salye’s investigation drew attention was the inordinate nature of the commissions written into the contracts: between 25 and 50 percent of the sum of each contract, for a total of $34 million in commissions. All evidence seemed to point to a simple kickback scheme: handpicked companies received lucrative contracts—and they did not even have to hold up their end.

  Asked about the investigation by his biographers, Putin acknowledged that many of the firms with which he had signed contracts had failed to bring any food to the city. “I think the city did not do all it could, of course,” he said. “We should have worked more closely with law enforcement, we should have beaten it out of their firms. But it made no sense to try to go to court: the firms would just disappear instantly, stop functioning, remove their goods. In essence, we had no claim against them. Remember that time: it was full of shady businesses, financial pyramids, that sort of thing.” This was the same man who, just a day or two earlier, had emphasized to his biographers how vicious he could be if someone so much as seemed to cross him, the same man who flared up instantly and had a hard time winding down, the same man whom his friends remember all but scratching out his opponents’ eyes when he was angered. Why would this man sit idly while one private company after another violated the terms of the contracts he had signed with them, leaving his city without the food supplies it so badly needed?

  Because it was rigged to end that way from the beginning, Salye believes. “The point of the whole operation,” she wrote later, “was this: to create a legally flawed contract with someone who could be trusted, to issue an export license to him, to make the customs office open the border on the basis of this license, to ship the goods abroad, sell them, and pocket the money. And that is what happened.”

  But that, Salye believed, was not all that happened. Moscow had actually given St. Petersburg permission to export a billion dollars’ worth of commodities, so the twelve rigged contracts she found represented only a tenth of the wealth that should have traveled through Putin’s office. What was the rest of the story? She eventually found evidence that all, or nearly all, of the commodities, including aluminum, oil, and cotton, had been exported, or, as she put it, “had vanished”: there was simply no documentation. But her report to the city council focused only on the twelve contracts for which there was documentation; nearly a hundred million dollars’ worth of commodities ostensibly bartered for food that never arrived.

  The city council reviewed Salye’s report and resolved to forward it to Mayor Sobchak with the recommendations that the report be submitted to the prosecutor’s office and that Sobchak dismiss Putin and Putin’s own deputy, whose signature was on many of the contracts. Sobchak ignored the recommendations and the report itself. The prosecutor’s office would not launch an investigation without Sobchak’s permission. Salye had already hand-delivered a three-page letter to Yeltsin outlining some of the biggest violations and asking that they be investigated. There had been no reaction. Only Boldyrev, Russia’s chief comptroller, had reacted with understanding, immediately sending a letter to the foreign trade minister and pursuing the case.

  Boldyrev reviewed the documents Salye had brought him. His findings were essentially the same as Salye’s: someone had been stealing from the people of St. Petersburg. He summoned Sobchak to Moscow to respond. “Sobchak came and brought all of his deputies with him,” Boldyrev recalled in an interview later. Putin came. “They wrote down their versions of the events…. I then reported the findings to Yeltsin.”

  And then nothing happened. The Russian president’s office in Moscow forwarded some documents to the Russian president’s representative office in St. Petersburg—and the story died.

  “IT WAS JUST AN ORDINARY INVESTIGATION,” Boldyrev explained many years later. “It uncovered significant violations, but they were not radically more serious than what was going on in the rest of Russia. They were standard-issue violations having to do with obtaining the right to export strategically important resources in exchange for foodstuffs that never materialized. It was just a typical case at the time.”

  Russia’s new elite was busy redistributing wealth. This is not to say that all of them behaved like Putin—the scale and the brazen nature of the embezzlement uncovered by Salye is shocking even by early-1990s Russia standards, especially if we take into account how fast he acted—but all of the country’s new rulers treated Russia like their personal property. Less than a year earlier, it had all belonged to other people: the Communist Party of the USSR and its leaders. Now the USSR no longer existed, and the Russian Communist Party was a handful of stubborn retirees. All that had been theirs was now nobody’s. While economists tried to figure out how to turn state property into private property—a process that still is not completed twenty years later—the new bureaucrats were simply taking the old state edifice apart.

  Sobchak was handing out apartments in the center of St. Petersburg. They went to friends, relatives, and valued colleagues. In a country where property rights had not really existed and where the Communist ruling elite had long enjoyed the status of royalty, Sobchak, who basked in his early popularity, saw nothing wrong with what he was doing.

  “And here are the papers on an entire city complex Sobchak tried to give away to some development company,” Salye told me all these years later, fishing several more sheets of paper from her pile. “This was a rare situation where we managed to get it reversed, but what a fight it was.”

  “But wasn’t he acting just like some regional party boss?” I asked. “They were always giving away apartments.”

  “This was different,” said Salye. “It was different because he talked a good line. He knew he had to present a different exterior, and he succeeded in doing this. He played the democrat when he was really a demagogue.”

  Perhaps because Sobchak was so good at projecting the image of a new kind of a politician, Salye and her colleagues seem to have believed he would take action when presented with evidence of Putin’s wrongdoing. But why should he have? Why would he have drawn a line between his own habits of handing out city property and Putin’s ways of pocketing profits from the sale of public resources? Why should he have listened to the democrats in the city council at all? He could not stand them—and what irked him most was precisely their militant idealism, their absurd insistence on doing things as they should be done rather than as they had always been done. This adherence to an imaginary ethical code invari
ably got in the way of doing things at all.

  So Sobchak did not get rid of Putin. Instead, he got rid of the city council.

  BY FALL 1993, Boris Yeltsin was fed up with the Russian legislature. It was an oddly constituted body: over a thousand representatives who had been elected, in a convoluted quasi-democratic procedure, to the Congress of People’s Deputies, of whom 252 belonged to the Supreme Soviet, a two-chamber body that attempted to perform the functions of a representative branch of government in the effective absence of relevant law. The Russian Federation did not yet have a new, post-Soviet constitution, and it would be years before its civic and penal codes would be rewritten. Among other things, the law still criminalized possession of hard currency and a variety of acts that involved the possession and sale of property. In this situation, the Congress of People’s Deputies granted Yeltsin the right to issue decrees on economic reform that violated the laws that were on the books—but the Supreme Soviet was charged with the job of reviewing these decrees, and granted veto power. In addition, the Supreme Soviet had a presidium constituted of more than thirty people who, in the Soviet system of government, functioned as a collective head of state; in the post-Soviet system, once the position of president had been established, the function of the presidium was unclear. In effect, though, the Supreme Soviet had the power to stall or block any action of the president. As Yeltsin’s economic reforms drove prices higher and higher—even as food shortages stopped, as though by magic—his government grew less and less popular and the Supreme Soviet moved to oppose almost all of his initiatives.

  On September 21, 1993, Yeltsin issued a decree dissolving the Supreme Soviet and calling for the election of a proper legislative body. The Supreme Soviet refused to disband, barricading itself inside the White House—the very same building where Yeltsin’s people had set up camp during the coup two years earlier. This time troops did open fire and shelled the White House, forcing Supreme Soviet members out on October 4.

  Leading democratic politicians, including former dissidents, supported what became known as “the execution of the Supreme Soviet,” so exasperated were they with seeing the president stonewalled. The idealistic St. Petersburg City Council was more or less alone in taking a stand against Yeltsin’s actions. A few weeks after the “execution,” just days before a new Russian constitution was published, heralding an era of relative legal stability, Sobchak traveled to Moscow and convinced Yeltsin to sign a decree dissolving the St. Petersburg City Council. A new election would not be held until the following December, leaving Russia’s second-largest city in the hands of one man for an entire year.

  Marina Salye decided to leave city politics. She became a professional political organizer, later moving to Moscow to work there.

  SIX YEARS LATER, in the period leading up to Putin’s election as president of Russia, perhaps the only critical voice belonged to Marina Salye. She published an article, “Putin Is the President of a Corrupt Oligarchy,” in which she detailed and updated the findings of her St. Petersburg investigation. She tried in vain to talk her liberal colleagues out of supporting Putin in the election. She found herself increasingly marginalized: she recalled that, during a meeting of the right-liberal political coalition, she and Yeltsin’s first prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, were the only two people—out of over a hundred—who did not vote in favor of supporting Putin.

  A few months after the election, Salye went to see one of the few politicians whom she still believed to be an ally. They had talked of forming a new organization. Sergei Yushenkov was a career military man who had become a strong convert to liberalism during perestroika and held fast to his beliefs throughout the 1990s. The visit to Yushenkov scared Salye so much that even ten years later she refused to divulge the details.

  “I got there, and there was a certain person in his office,” she told me.

  “What kind of person?”

  “A certain person. We had a conversation that I wouldn’t call constructive. I went home and told Natasha that I’m going to the country.”

  “Did he threaten you?”

  “No one threatened me directly.”

  “So, why did you decide to leave?”

  “Because I knew this person.”

  “And what did seeing him mean?”

  “It meant that I should get as far away as possible.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I persisted, feeling I was on the verge of being thrown out of Salye’s hideout.

  “I knew what this person was capable of. Is that clearer?”

  “Yes, thank you. But what was he doing in Yushenkov’s office? Did they have something in common?”

  “No. I did not know what he was doing there, and most of all I did not know why Yushenkov did not get him out of there when I came. It means he was unable to get rid of him, even though the conversation Yushenkov and I were about to have was not meant for anyone else’s ears.”

  “I see.”

  “That is all I am going to say.”

  Salye gathered her things and moved to that house, a twelve-hour impossible drive from Moscow, where I found her ten years later. For years, rumors circulated that she was living abroad, perhaps in France (I assume it was her French surname that gave rise to that fantasy), and that she had received a threatening New Year’s Eve postcard from Putin. I heard several people quote the imaginary postcard using exactly the same wording: “I wish you a Happy New Year and the health to enjoy it.” Salye told me there was never any postcard; as I had suspected, the persistent rumor told me more about the image Putin had created for himself than about Salye’s fate. But postcard or no postcard, Salye was terrified.

  Sergei Yushenkov continued his political career. In 2002, he left the liberal faction of parliament in protest against his colleagues’ persistent support for Putin’s policies and what he called “a bureaucratic police regime.” On the afternoon of April 17, 2003, while walking from his car to his apartment building in northern Moscow, Yushenkov was shot in the chest four times. Writing his obituary for the political analysis website I was then editing, I said, “Sometimes, when we journalists are afraid to say something under our own byline, we call people like Yushenkov, who, without looking over his shoulder, will say something clear and definitive, and all the more necessary for being predictable. There are very few people like that left.”

  Six

  THE END OF A REFORMER

  Once Putin’s biography was published in February 2000, he ceased being the young democratic reformer of Berezovsky’s invention; he was now the hoodlum turned iron-handed ruler. I do not think his image-makers were even conscious of the shift.

  One person who could not have imagined Putin’s public transformation from democrat to strong hand was Sobchak. The two were united in their antipathy to democratic processes, but in the early 1990s, a public allegiance to democratic principles was the price of admission to public life—and to the good life.

  In the early 1990s, members of the new business and political elites were hacking apart the old system all over Russia. They were, without a doubt—and, apparently, without pangs of conscience—appropriating and redistributing chunks of the system; at the same time, the most enterprising of them were also conjuring up a new system—and changing with it. People like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Komsomol functionary turned banker turned oilman, and Mikhail Prokhorov, a clothing reseller turned metals mogul turned international investor, and Vladimir Gusinsky, an importer turned banker and media magnate, were self-invented entrepreneurs who started with shady moneymaking schemes but, as their worldview expanded and their ambitions grew accordingly, began to position themselves as not only businessmen but philanthropists, civic leaders, and visionaries. As their views evolved, they invested money and energy in constructing a new political system.

  Sobchak abhorred this new system and so did Putin, and this is why he, unlike many of Sobchak’s early allies, remained with the mayor after the 1991 failed coup and the 1992 corruption scandal and
the 1993 dissolution of the city council. I am not sure why Sobchak, who had had a brief but intense love affair with democratic politics, developed such a hatred for the ways of democracy; I think, as a megalomaniac, he was deeply wounded every time he did not get his way—and by political competition itself, by the very possibility of dissent. In addition, he had Putin at his side at all times, always trying to get him to see the disadvantages of the democratic system. It was Putin, for example, who convinced Sobchak—and manipulated a number of city council members—to institute the office of mayor in the city: otherwise, Putin told his biographers years later, Sobchak “could be removed by those very same city council members anytime.” Putin’s own opposition to democratic reform was no less personal than Sobchak’s, but ran much deeper.

  Like most Soviet citizens of his generation, Putin was never a political idealist. His parents may or may not have believed in a Communist future for all the world, in the ultimate triumph of justice for the proletariat, or in any of the other ideological clichés that had been worn thin by the time Putin was growing up; he never even considered his relationship to these ideals. The way he has talked about the Young Pioneers, from which he was kept as a child, or the Komsomol, or the Communist Party, in which his membership simply expired along with the organization itself, makes it clear that he never saw any substantive meaning in his belonging to these organizations. Like other members of his generation, Putin replaced belief in communism, which no longer seemed plausible or even possible, with faith in institutions. His loyalty was to the KGB and to the empire it served and protected: the USSR.