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

by Masha Gessen

  But Sobchak didn’t stop at the rhetoric. He talked too much, as had always been his way. Just as Putin was dictating his new official life story to the three journalists, Sobchak was reminiscing, in response to questions asked by other journalists, and recounting key episodes of Putin’s career in ways that contradicted the story told by his old protégé.

  On February 17, Putin asked Sobchak to travel to Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave wedged between Poland and Lithuania, to campaign for him. The request was urgent: Sobchak had to fly out that day, frustrating his wife, who did not like to see him travel on his own. She claimed she had to watch that he took his medicine. Most acquaintances believed the squeaky-voiced peroxide blonde simply did not trust her husband out of her sight. It is also possible that she feared for his safety. But she was in parliament in Moscow that day, and could not join her husband on his emergency campaign jaunt. The former mayor traveled with two male assistants who doubled as bodyguards. On February 20, Sobchak died at a private hotel in a resort town outside Kaliningrad.

  Local journalists soon picked up on some odd circumstances surrounding Sobchak’s death. Chief among them was the fact that two different autopsies had been performed on the body—one in Kaliningrad and one in St. Petersburg, at the military hospital run by Yuri Shevchenko, the same doctor who had helped engineer Sobchak’s escape to Paris; he was now Russia’s minister of health, but he had not given up his post at the hospital. The official cause of death was a massive but natural heart attack.

  Still, ten weeks following Sobchak’s death, the prosecutor’s office in Kaliningrad opened an investigation into a possible case of “premeditated murder with aggravating circumstances.” Three months later, the investigation was closed without a finding.

  At Sobchak’s funeral, held in St. Petersburg on February 24, Putin, sitting with the wife and a daughter of the deceased, appeared genuinely bereft. He was as emotional as Russian television viewers would ever see him. In his only public statement that day, Putin said, “Sobchak’s passing is not just a death but a violent death, the result of persecution.” This was widely understood to mean that Sobchak, unfairly accused of corruption, had succumbed to the stress before his former deputy could fully restore him to the grandeur he deserved.

  Back in Paris, Arkady Vaksberg decided to launch his own investigation into his acquaintance’s death. He was never a close friend or even a great fan of the imperious Russian politician, but he was an investigative journalist with actual forensics experience and a great nose for a story. It was Vaksberg who dug up the most puzzling detail of the circumstances of Sobchak’s death: the two bodyguard-assistants, both physically fit young men, had had to be treated for mild symptoms of poisoning following Sobchak’s death. This was a hallmark of contract killings by poisoning: many a secretary or bodyguard had fallen similarly ill when their bosses were killed. In 2007, Vaksberg published a book on the history of political poisonings in the USSR and Russia. In it, he advanced the theory that Sobchak was killed by a poison placed on the electrical bulb of the bedside lamp, so that the substance was heated and vaporized when the lamp was turned on. This was a technique developed in the USSR. A few months after the book was published, Vaksberg’s car was blown up in his Moscow garage; Vaksberg was not in it.

  Seven

  THE DAY THE MEDIA DIED

  I spent Election Day, March 26, 2000, in Chechnya. I wanted to avoid the entire question of going to the polls in an election I felt was a mockery, following a campaign best described as a travesty. In the course of less than three months since Yeltsin’s resignation, Putin had not made any political pronouncements—and this, he and his spin people seemed to think, was a virtue: he felt that dancing for his votes was beneath him. His campaign had consisted essentially of the book that put forward his vision of himself as a thug, in addition to a turn at piloting a fighter plane amid much press attention, landing it at Grozny airport a week before the election. His entire political message seemed to be: “Don’t mess with me.”

  So I accepted an invitation, extended by the military press office, to cover the voting from Chechnya. I knew I would have little opportunity to move around and that I would have Russian officers monitoring my every move, but I figured I would get some idea of the state of a place I had known fairly well; I had last been in Chechnya about three years earlier, soon after the cease-fire agreement had taken hold.

  Grozny had been a city of nearly a million people before the first war, at least half a million after it was over. I was reasonably familiar with Grozny’s geography: it was a manageable-size city, with a few hills and identifiable neighborhoods, most with enough high-rise buildings to allow one to get one’s bearings. Soon after the bombing of the city during the first war, some European observers had compared it to Dresden, the German city bombed into oblivion by the British and Americans toward the end of World War II. I had felt it was a fair comparison—and yet, Grozny had retained its basic landscape.

  Now it was gone. I could see no high-rise buildings. I could not identify any monuments, though there had been many. Every part of the city looked the same and smelled the same: burning flesh and concrete dust. It was horribly, deafeningly quiet. I obsessively took in the signs, the only reminder of human life and human communication in the city: CAFÉ; INTERNET; AUTO PARTS; PEOPLE LIVE HERE. The last was the wording of signs people had put up as they returned to their homes after the last war, hoping to prevent looting and shooting.

  A dozen loudspeakers had been mounted around what used to be a city, as audible markers of polling stations or of soup kitchens set up by the federal Ministry for Emergencies. People, mostly women, walked the streets in twos and threes, silently moving toward the sound coming from the nearest speaker, surely hoping to find a soup kitchen rather than a polling station.

  We journalists were escorted by our military guides to one of the nine polling stations. We arrived around noon to find a crowd of people, again mostly women, who had been there since sunrise. They had come in hopes of receiving humanitarian aid: either someone had promised them food and clothing would be distributed at polling stations, or it was simply a rumor that had brought them there. DEMOCRACY IS DICTATORSHIP OF THE LAW, the sign over the entrance to the small building proclaimed, quoting an oxymoronic pronouncement of Putin’s in direct violation of election law. There was no humanitarian aid in sight.

  An old woman came up to me and asked me to write that she had been reduced to living in the street.

  “Did you vote?” I asked her.

  “I voted,” she responded.

  “Who did you vote for?”

  “I don’t know,” she responded simply. “I can’t read. I had a ballot and I put it in.”

  Hours later, at a polling station in a different part of town, I saw some people approaching from a distance. I ran to them before my handlers could stop me, in the hopes of catching some Grozny residents outside the polling station. They turned out to be three people, two of them very old, whom I had seen at the first polling place. All three were dragging empty carts behind them. They told me that after the bus with the journalists left, local officials told them there would be no humanitarian aid; they had spent hours walking back to what had been their homes.

  Using my brief moments out of sight of the handlers, I tried to ask these people why they had returned to Grozny. The old couple directed the younger woman to tell me her story. She tried to resist, saying, “What is the point of talking about it?” but in the end did not dare disobey her elders. “We came back to get our relatives’ bodies. They took us to them. They were all tied up with wire. But there is one head they never found.” Eight members of her family had been among the thousands detained and then summarily executed by Russian troops. The woman and her immediate relatives had left Grozny months before, and stayed with relatives in a small village. The eight relatives had not had the money to leave the city: every time one passed through a checkpoint set up by the Russian troops, one had to pay. As we talked, anot
her woman approached us with two of her nieces in tow, a pale eight-year-old and a surly teenager. “Their father was killed in the shelling,” she said. “Their mother couldn’t take it and died, and their grandmother died too. The girls buried them in the yard. We dug the father up yesterday, washed the body, but the men are scared to go outside to bury him, so he is just lying there at home.” She asked the teenager to confirm her story, but the girl started crying and stepped away from our group.

  These people told me they had voted for a human-rights activist whose final tally was in such low single digits that most media outlets did not even mention her. But I saw a lot of Putin voters among the Chechens too. “I’m sick of war,” a middle-aged man in Grozny told me. “I am sick of being passed on, like a baton, from one gang of thugs to the next.” I looked around: we were in an area of Grozny that had consisted mostly of private homes; now there were only metal fences separating one ghost property from another. “Wasn’t it Putin who did this?” I asked.

  “War has been going on for ten years,” the man responded, exaggerating only slightly: the first armed uprisings in Chechnya dated back to 1991. “What could he have changed? We long for a strong power, power that is united. We are the kind of people who need an arbiter.”

  There was a Chechen man among the ten little-known candidates hopelessly competing with Putin in this election. A Moscow millionaire, a real estate developer, he had shipped tons of flour to Chechen refugee camps in advance of the election. “No point in voting for him,” the Chechen deputy manager of one of these camps, in neighboring Ingushetia, told me. “I might vote for him, but nobody in Russia is going to.” He was going to vote for Putin: “He is a good man. He didn’t do this to us for himself: there were many others interested in starting this again.”

  The man’s boss, a fifty-year-old wizened man named Hamzat, told me, “They said to vote for Putin because he is going to be president anyway.” Hamzat had spent twenty-nine days in Russian detention during the first Chechen war; he still bore two scars on his head and a permanent dent over his shoulder blade where he had been hit with the butt of a rifle. He showed me a picture of his son, a puffy-lipped, curly-haired sixteen-year-old who was now in Russian detention himself. Hamzat found the camp where his boy was, but his jailers demanded a thousand dollars ransom—a perfectly common practice on both sides of the conflict. Hamzat did not tell me what happened next, but other residents of the refugee camp did: they took up a collection in the camp but managed to scrape together barely a tenth of the required sum. The boy was still in captivity.

  The camp was made up of a field full of surplus military tents and a ten-car train that had been towed there. It was a common enough solution to the lack of intact housing; I myself was staying in a military train a few towns over. Hamzat’s office was in a train car. A sheet of paper was posted on the outside with sixty-one names, written by hand, under the headline “Located in the Naursk Jail, Later Transported to the Pyatigorsk Hospital.” Ages from sixteen to fifty-two were noted next to the names. These appeared to be inmates who had been moved to a hospital before a press visit to Chechnya’s most notorious jail. A fellow inmate had made the list in hopes of helping relatives find their lost ones. Someone had written “killed” in blue ballpoint pen next to one of the names.

  In accordance with the military’s regulations, I was spending most of my time in the company of Russians in uniform. I would have much preferred to stay on the Chechen side—not so much because I found their cause more sympathetic, but because I found the atmosphere of constant fear on the Russian side exhausting. With soldiers getting ambushed every day, the young conscripts and their commanding officers could not relax even when they tried to drink themselves into oblivion, as they did every night, to drown out the gunfire that never seemed to stop. There was fire all around us during the day, too, even on Election Day. When I tried to wander into a formerly densely populated neighborhood of Grozny, my two handlers begged me to stop. “There isn’t anybody there anyway,” one of them pleaded. “What do you need to go there for? We’ll all get turned off.” He meant killed. These troops—all of whom voted for Putin, as directed by their brass—were supposed to be in control of Grozny. But Russians would be losing people here every day for years to come.

  A new Russian-appointed district head in Grozny sang Putin’s praises on cue. “A golden man has come to power in Russia today,” he said. “A firm man.” Before the election, local organizers had combed the cellars in the neighborhood, making lists of voters. They came up with 3,400 and got as many ballots, but ran out by midday. “I told them there would be additional people,” the district head complained, “and they wouldn’t listen! But where did all these people come from? It’s not like they emerged from under the ground!”

  In fact, they had very much emerged from underground, not just in the sense that they had been living in the cellars of their demolished buildings, but in the sense that many of the people who came to vote—most of them older women—came to the polling station bearing two or three passports each, their own and those of their family members who, I presumed they hoped, were still alive. Those who had lost their passports could use a special form to cast their vote, although this also meant their own documents could be used to vote elsewhere. I tested my theory as I moved from precinct to precinct: everywhere I went, I was welcome to cast my vote, using my Moscow documents or nothing at all.

  Before the start of the second war, Chechnya had an official population of 380,000. By the time of the election, its voter rolls swelled to 460,000, padded not only by Russian troops but by the dead souls whose real or imaginary passports were used. Just below 30 percent voted for Putin, his worst showing in all of Russia. Overall, however, the man without a face, who did not have a political platform and did not campaign, emerged with over 52 percent of the vote, eliminating the need for a second tour.

  ON MAY 7, 2000, Vladimir Putin was inaugurated as president of Russia. Strictly speaking, this was the first such ceremony in history: Yeltsin had been elected to his first term when Russia was still a part of the Soviet Union. So Putin had the opportunity to shape a ritual. At his prompting, the ceremony, originally planned for the Kremlin’s modernist State Palace, where the Communist Party had held its congresses and Yeltsin’s administration had organized conferences, was moved to the Kremlin’s historic Great Palace, where the czars had once lived. Putin walked through the hall, down a long red carpet, swinging his left arm and holding his right arm, slightly bent at the elbow, oddly immobile, a gait that would soon become familiar to Russian TV viewers and would give one American observer cause to speculate Putin had suffered a trauma at birth or perhaps a stroke in utero. I am more inclined to think the gait is just what it looks like: the manner of a person who executes all his public acts mechanically and reluctantly, projecting both extreme guard and extreme aggression with every step. To Russians, his walk also looked like an adolescent affectation, as did the habit of wearing his watch on his right hand though he is right-handed; this fashion immediately caught on among bureaucrats at every level, and the country’s leading watch factory, in Tatarstan, soon launched a new model, called the Kremlin Watch for the Left-handed, and shipped the first watch in the series to Moscow as a gift for Putin. He was never seen in public wearing the inexpensive, domestically manufactured watch, although he was photographed wearing several different timepieces over the next few years, most often a $60,000 white-gold Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar.

  There were fifteen hundred invited guests at the inauguration ceremony, an inordinate number of them in uniform. One guest deserved particular note: Vladimir Kryuchkov, the former head of the KGB and an organizer of the 1991 coup. A reporter at the scene described him as “an old man of short stature who had difficulty standing and rose only once, when the national anthem was played.” Kryuchkov was easy to spot because he sat apart from the rest of the guests: he was not exactly a member of the contemporary Russian political elite. Yet no one dared objec
t publicly to the presence of a man who had attempted to use arms to quash Russian democracy. He had spent seventeen months in jail and was pardoned by the parliament in 1994. Most newspaper reports of the inauguration ignored his presence altogether. Kommersant, the leading business daily, gave Kryuchkov paragraph twenty out of thirty-four. Had journalists had the gift of foresight, they probably would have featured him a lot more prominently, for Russia was commemorating not only the change of leader but a change of regime—one that Kryuchkov had come to welcome.

  Just a few months earlier, on December 18, 1999—two weeks before becoming acting president—Putin had spoken at a banquet celebrating the day the Soviet secret police was founded, an obscure professional holiday that was destined to gain prominence in the coming years, with congratulatory banners adorning the streets, and television reports of the celebrations. “I would like to report,” Putin said at the banquet, “that the group of FSB officers dispatched to work undercover in the federal government has been successful in fulfilling the first set of assignments.” The roomful of secret police brass roared with laughter. Putin later tried to downplay it as a joke, but on the same day he had restored a memorial board on the FSB building, reminding the world that Yuri Andropov, the only secret police chief to have become general secretary of the Communist Party, had worked there.

  Since the campaign to elect Putin and the man himself had seemed to exist parallel to each other, Putin had taken few other public actions between December and the inauguration. He had chosen his prime minister, a man whose imposing stature, booming bass voice, and Hollywood-actor good looks and white-toothed smile belied his lack of political ambition. Mikhail Kasyanov seemed to have bureaucracy in his bones: he had come up through the ranks of Soviet ministries, made a smooth transition to working for ministers in a series of Yeltsin’s cabinets, and recently become finance minister.