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

by Masha Gessen

  In March 1994, Putin attended a European Union event in Hamburg that included a speech by Estonian president Lennart Meri. Estonia, like the two other Baltic republics, was annexed by the Soviet Union at the start of World War II, then lost to the Germans, to be retaken by the Soviets in 1944. The three Baltic states were the last to be included in the Soviet empire and the first to emerge from it—in no small part because they had a population that still remembered a time before the Soviets. Meri, Estonia’s first democratically elected leader in half a century, had been active in the anti-Soviet liberation movement. Now, speaking in Hamburg, he referred to the Soviet Union as “occupiers.” At this point Putin, who had been sitting in the audience among Russian diplomats, rose and left the room. “It looked very impressive,” recalled a St. Petersburg colleague who would go on to run the Russian federal election commission under President Putin. “The meeting was held in Knights’ Hall, which has ten-meter-tall ceilings and a marble floor, and as he walked, in total silence, each step of his echoed under the ceiling. To top it all off, the huge cast-iron door slammed shut behind him with deafening thunder.”

  That Putin felt the need to break diplomatic protocol—to literally turn his back on the president of a neighboring country and a very important trade partner for the city of St. Petersburg—shows just how personally he took the matter: what he perceived as an attack on the Soviet Union hurt him as deeply as personal insults that had sent him into a rage when he was younger. The breathless manner in which his colleague recounted the story for Putin’s biographers shows how deep a vein of Soviet nostalgia Putin was tapping.

  Putin loved the Soviet Union, and he loved its KGB, and when he had power of his own, effectively running the financial system of the country’s second-largest city, he wanted to build a system just like them. It would be a closed system, a system built on total control—especially control over the flow of information and the flow of money. It would be a system that aimed to exclude dissent and would crush it if it appeared. But in one way, the system would be better than the KGB and the USSR had been: this one would not betray Putin. It would be too smart and too strong for that. So Putin worked diligently to centralize control not only over all foreign trade but also over business that was springing up domestically—hence his effort to take over casinos, which had appeared suddenly and grew extremely fast. He also eventually moved to manage the city’s relationship with the media, both print and electronic, which he alternately isolated from city hall and strong-armed into covering particular stories in particular ways.

  Sobchak had picked the right right-hand man: Putin hated the wishy-washy democrats even more than he did, and he was even better than Sobchak at working the politics of fear and greed.

  POLITICIANS LIKE SOBCHAK are usually the last to learn their luster is gone. When Sobchak ran for reelection in 1996, the city hated him. Under his rule, St. Petersburg had been transformed in ways both tragic and farcical—though much of this was hardly Sobchak’s fault. The city’s economy was in shambles: more than a million of its five million residents had been employed by the military-industrial plants, which had slowed down or stopped altogether. As was the case elsewhere in Russia, a few people were getting very rich very fast, first by buying and selling anything and everything (for example, exporting Russian timber and importing Chinese umbrellas), then, gradually, by privatizing Soviet industrial plants and creating new institutions. Many Russians, however, got poorer—or at least felt a lot poorer: there were so many more goods in the stores now, but they could afford so little. Nearly everyone lost the one thing that had been in abundant supply during the Era of Stagnation: the unshakable belief that tomorrow will not be different from today. Uncertainty made people feel even poorer.

  St. Petersburg’s economic problems made much of the rest of Russia seem well-off in comparison. Three-quarters of the city’s population lived below the poverty line. Its infrastructure, already weak in the late 1980s—which provided part of the impetus for the informal preservation movement—was now in ruins. Streets had not been repaved in so long that, whenever it rained or snowed—which in this northern seaside city was often—the streets turned into rivers of mud. Public transport was at a standstill: the city was not replacing buses that had to be retired. In a city composed entirely of large apartment buildings, working elevators were becoming extinct. Electricity in the center of town was flickering off and on. In studies of relative levels of standard of living, the country’s second-largest city regularly ranked in the twenties among Russian cities.

  Against this backdrop, Sobchak insisted on maintaining the persona of a worldly, sophisticated politician: always meticulously turned out, with his blond wife on his elbow, shuttled around in limousines, surrounded by bodyguards. Alexander Bogdanov, a young pro-democracy activist, remembered being snubbed by Sobchak in 1991, just two months after the failed coup, on the first Revolution Day in post-Communist Russia: “There was a concert in Palace Square. No one quite knew whether we should be celebrating or commemorating this day as a day of tragedy. So there was a rally in the afternoon and a dance at night. While Sobchak and [his wife Ludmila] Narusova were holding a banquet in the Tavrichesky Palace, with an entrance fee of five hundred rubles! That was before hyperinflation hit, this was a huge sum of money…. So there we were, walking around the dance carrying banners with the words ‘A Day of National Tragedy,’ looking and feeling like idiots. And I said, ‘You know what? Why are we wasting our time here? Let’s go to the Tavrichesky Palace, where they are having a feast.’ We arrived at the Tavrichesky just as they were all getting into their cars. Sobchak came out in tails, with Narusova wearing a beautiful dress and some sort of wraparound turbanlike hat. Sobchak had a bodyguard who would go on to be Putin’s chief bodyguard. He had this stupid habit: he would go up to me and just about curse me out, saying, ‘You are getting to me! Get out of here! Disappear, I am sick of you!’ So I said to Sobchak, ‘Why is your bodyguard always threatening me?’ And Ludmila Borisovna [Narusova] said to me, ‘Why are you always making a fool of yourself?’ And Sobchak was all relaxed, all important, getting into his limousine, and he said to me, ‘Shut up, the people elected me!’ I remembered that for the rest of my life. That’s the kind of snob he was.”

  As Sobchak’s deputy mayor, Putin performed the jobs that Soviet tradition had reserved for KGB men in the “active reserve”: in addition to being responsible for foreign trade, he also aimed to control the flow of information in and out of the government. Yuri Boldyrev, Yeltsin’s chief comptroller who had unsuccessfully tried to follow up on Salye’s allegations, served as a senator from St. Petersburg in 1994–1995. “Not once during this time was I allowed to go live on air on St. Petersburg television,” he recalled later. “Only after I had stopped being a senator was I allowed to speak live—and even then the anchors kept interrupting me, so in the end I said nothing.”

  Whenever I went to St. Petersburg on a story, the first person I would go see was Anna Sharogradskaya: her office was on Nevsky Prospekt, just down the street from the railroad station, and she knew everything. She ran the Independent Press Center, which provided space for press conferences for anybody who wanted to hold one—including those who would be turned down by every other space in town. She knew everyone, and she feared no one. She was in her late fifties by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, and she remembered a time when things had been a lot more scary. One time Sharogradskaya organized a press conference that exposed the Sobchak administration’s practice of bugging the offices of journalists and politicians, including his own employees. Many people had known or suspected this was the case, but only the local English-language newspaper, run and staffed by expats, dared run the story. Sharogradskaya was always convinced that Putin, who was largely responsible for the mayor’s relationship with the media, organized the bugging.

  In keeping with KGB practices, the information that Sobchak was allowed to receive was heavily edited. This was certainly part of the reason he never
suspected how unpopular he had become. Some of St. Petersburg’s television-viewing audience saw Sobchak making this unpleasant discovery. “There was a show called Public Opinion,” recalled Sharogradskaya. “It was a popular show during the 1996 election. When Sobchak saw that his popularity rating was six percent, he shouted, ‘That’s impossible!,’ jumped up, and left the studio. The show was shut down. The host, Tamara Maksimova, was fired. Her husband, Vladimir, who was the director of the show, called me and said he wanted to hold a press conference. I said, ‘No problem,’ and scheduled it for noon the next day. Vladimir called the following morning, three or four hours before the scheduled press conference, and said it had to be canceled: ‘We cannot do this, because we are being threatened: something might happen to our daughter.’ I said, ‘Please tell that to the journalists. I cannot not explain the reason for the cancellation.’ They came and told everyone that they were being threatened and they were scared. Journalists tried to ask them questions, but they would not respond.”

  When Sharogradskaya told me stories like these in the 1990s, I heard them as tales from a different land. Russia was a messy, often illogical place in those years, but never had I felt unsafe working as a journalist—not until I started writing from and about St. Petersburg, that is. At Sharogradskaya’s invitation, I taught a reporting course at the Independent Press Center, taking the train in on weekends to work with a group of university journalism majors. (I was teaching the same course at Moscow University, but St. Petersburg University wanted no part of it—which is why Sharogradskaya’s organization ended up hosting it.) On election weekend, I sent the students out to take notes at polling stations in the center of town. The students returned with bloodied noses and black eyes; two young people needed medical attention. They had presented themselves as journalism students at two polling stations; the guards had radioed for instructions and had then roughed them up. This was how St. Petersburg politicians treated St. Petersburg journalists.

  Realizing too late that he was about to lose the election, Sobchak made desperate attempts to fix the situation. He asked Alexander Yuriev, a political psychologist at St. Petersburg University who had tried to warn Sobchak he was desperately unpopular, to run his campaign. A few days after Yuriev agreed, he faced a brutal attempt on his life: someone rang his doorbell and then tossed sulfuric acid through the open door. Because the door opened inward, some of the acid settled on the door itself and some even ricocheted back at whoever had thrown it; this was probably why Yuriev did not get a lethal dose. He was then also shot—and survived that as well. It took him long months, and two skin transplants, to recover.

  In the run-up to the election, Sobchak also tried to buy the loyalty of the city’s press corps, giving out loans and grants, driving the city’s budget ever deeper into debt. It was too late. The press hated him, other politicians hated him, and ordinary people hated him. Sobchak lost the election. His campaign manager in the end was Vladimir Putin.

  FOR ITS NEXT MAYOR, St. Petersburg elected Sobchak’s own public works deputy, a man in every way his opposite: plain-looking, poorly turned-out, Vladimir Yakovlev could barely put two words together. But in a city where public transportation was at a standstill, buildings were crumbling, and electricity was flickering on and off, he somehow inspired hope that he would try to fix the right things. Or, at the very least, he would not lie about them. Yakovlev would not, in fact, be successful at fixing what ailed St. Petersburg—the city continued to get poorer, dirtier, and more dangerous—but four years later, Yakovlev easily won reelection because St. Petersburg was still battling the hated ghost of Mayor Sobchak.

  In losing the election, Sobchak lost not only power and influence but also immunity from prosecution—which, at this point, was probably what he feared most. For almost a year, a special prosecutor’s team of nearly forty investigators dispatched by the prosecutor general’s office in Moscow had been looking into allegations of corruption in the mayor’s office. One person, a real estate developer, had already been arrested and was testifying against city officials. This part of the investigation concerned an apartment building in the center of St. Petersburg that had allegedly undergone illegal reconstruction, and city funds had allegedly been used in the process. Almost all the building’s residents, including Sobchak’s own niece, were either highly placed city employees or their close relatives.

  Now Sobchak, too, was likely to join the list of suspects. Most of his allies had abandoned him, some before the election, like the deputy who replaced him in the mayor’s office; others joined the new regime after Sobchak lost the vote. Putin turned down a job offer in the new administration—the display of loyalty that had placed him so high in Berezovsky’s esteem—and soon decamped for Moscow, as though airlifted by an invisible hand. The way he told the story to his biographers, an old Leningrad apparatchik now working in the Kremlin remembered Putin and arranged a good post for him in the capital. Putin was now deputy head of the presidential property management office, which sounds very much like another “active reserve” posting. Whether this was the product of secret-police design, providence, or habit is probably unimportant: Putin once again had a job with little public responsibility but a lot of access.

  Putin’s new job and his old connections were clearly a boon to Sobchak, who was now living with the daily threat of arrest. The prosecutor’s office was chasing Sobchak, trying to deliver a summons so he could be interrogated. Not until October 3, 1997, did Sobchak finally arrive at the prosecutor’s office; he was accompanied by his wife, who was a parliament member. During the interrogation, Sobchak said he felt ill and Narusova demanded an ambulance. With television cameras looking on, Sobchak was taken straight from the prosecutor’s office to the hospital, where he was reportedly diagnosed with a heart attack. Exactly a month later, Narusova informed the press that Sobchak was now well enough to be transferred to a different clinic, at the Military Academy Hospital, where he would be in the care of Yuri Shevchenko, a family friend of the Putins, who had personally treated Ludmila Putina following a serious car accident a few years earlier.

  Around the time Sobchak was transferred into Shevchenko’s care, Putin flew to St. Petersburg from Moscow. He visited his old boss at the hospital. Four days later, during a national holiday—November 7 was no longer called Revolution Day, but the country still got a day off—Sobchak was taken by ambulance to the airport, where a Finnish medevac plane was waiting to take him to Paris. The planning was brilliant: no one noticed that Sobchak was gone until the holiday weekend ended three days later. Russian correspondents immediately stormed the American Hospital in Paris, where Shevchenko said Sobchak was being treated—but hospital officials said they had no such patient. The same day, Narusova told the media that Sobchak had undergone an operation and was feeling better. Airport officials, meanwhile, told journalists that the former mayor had seemed perfectly well boarding the plane: the ambulance had driven straight onto the tarmac, and, contrary to their expectations, he had emerged on foot, all but running to the plane.

  Sobchak commenced the life of an émigré in Paris: he roomed with a Russian acquaintance, walked around town a lot, occasionally lectured at the Sorbonne, and wrote a memoir in which he portrayed himself as a man betrayed many times over; the title was A Dozen Knives at My Back. Yuri Shevchenko became the Russian minister of health care in July 1999, as soon as Putin commenced his sudden ascent to state power.

  What was Putin himself doing at the Kremlin? His new posting seems to have been something of a sinecure. He used the time to write and defend a dissertation, a goal he had set for himself when he went to work at Leningrad University seven years earlier. The dissertation, oddly, was not on international law, as he had originally planned, but on the economics of natural resources, and he defended it at St. Petersburg’s little-known Mountain Institute rather than the university. Nine years later, a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., decided to study the dissertation closely; he said he found about
sixteen pages of text and no fewer than six charts taken verbatim from an American textbook. Putin never acknowledged the plagiarism charges.

  Whatever Putin’s actual responsibilities in the Kremlin, his influence would have been considerable: he was now as well placed and well connected as any person in Russia could be without at the same time being a public person. That may well be why the special prosecutor’s team never turned up much against the former mayor and his close allies: the three officials who were charged in the case were all acquitted, and the prosecutors turned their attention elsewhere. It no doubt helped that the former mayor himself was out of their reach and not testifying.

  ENCOURAGED BY his former deputy’s meteoric rise, Sobchak decided to end his Paris exile and go back to Russia in the summer of 1999. He returned full of hope and even more full of ambition. As Sobchak was leaving Paris, Arkady Vaksberg, a forensics specialist turned investigative reporter and author with whom Sobchak had become friendly during his years in France, asked him whether he hoped to return to Paris as an ambassador. “Higher than that,” replied Sobchak. Vaksberg was sure the former mayor was aiming for the foreign minister’s seat: the rumor in Moscow’s political circles was that Sobchak would head up the Constitutional Court, the most important court in the country.

  With characteristic overconfidence, Sobchak immediately ran for parliament—and suffered an embarrassing loss. But once Putin launched his election campaign, he appointed his former boss his “empowered representative”—a job that basically entitled Sobchak to campaign for Putin (candidates may have dozens and even hundreds of “empowered representatives”). Campaign Sobchak did, seeming to forget that his political reputation had once rested on his democratic credentials. He called Putin “the new Stalin,” promising potential voters not so much mass murder as an iron hand—“the only way to make the Russian people work,” Sobchak said.