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

by Masha Gessen

  Goldfarb’s theory is logically impeccable; everyone in it has motive and means. But I find it too complicated, or, perhaps, too specific. The murder of Alexander Litvinenko is indisputably the work of the Russian government authorized at the very top: polonium-210, which killed him, is manufactured exclusively in Russia. Its production and export are tightly controlled by federal nuclear authorities, and the extraction of the needed dose from the manufacturing chain required top-level intervention in an early stage of the manufacturing process. The authorization for such an intervention had to have come from the president’s office. In other words, Vladimir Putin ordered Alexander Litvinenko dead.

  Once the poison was identified, British police were easily able to identify their suspects in the murder: polonium, while harmless unless ingested, leaves radioactive traces everyplace it touches. This allowed the police to pinpoint the people who transported polonium to London and the exact place and time at which the poisoning occurred. The two men they identified were Andrei Lugovoy, the former head of security for Berezovsky’s business partner, who had gone on to build a lucrative private-security firm in Moscow, and his business partner, Dmitry Kovtun. For reasons the British police will not disclose, they have identified Lugovoy as the murder suspect and Kovtun as a witness. Russia has refused extradition requests for Lugovoy; moreover, he has been made a member of parliament, giving him immunity from prosecution, including extradition requests. Britain, for its part, has treated the case as a purely criminal matter and has not made political demands for Lugovoy’s extradition.

  No other killing in the long line of murders of journalists and politicians has quite so clear-cut and obvious a story. It is indeed possible that Anna Politkovskaya fell victim to the power struggle in Chechnya. It is possible that Yuri Shchekochikhin was killed by some businessman or politician whose dirty laundry he had aired. It is possible that Sergei Yushenkov was, as the police later claimed, killed by a political rival. It is possible that Anatoly Sobchak died of a heart attack. But all of these possibilities, taken separately, seem unlikely, and taken together seem almost absurd. The simple and evident truth is that Putin’s Russia is a country where political rivals and vocal critics are often killed, and at least sometimes the order comes directly from the president’s office.

  Ten

  INSATIABLE GREED

  Writing now about Putin’s early years as president, I am struck by how quickly and decisively he acted. Even when I was covering the story in real time, it seemed to move at breakneck speed. Putin changed the country fast, the changes were profound, and they took easily. He seemed instantly to reverse Russia’s historical evolution. And for an excruciatingly long time, no one seemed to notice.

  Or almost no one. After the December 2003 parliamentary election, in which Putin’s United Russia took nearly half the seats and the rest were divided among the Communist Party, the absurdist-nationalist and outrageously misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, and a new ultranationalist party called Rodina (Motherland) while all remaining liberals and democrats lost their seats, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) reported: “The… elections… failed to meet many OSCE and Council of Europe commitments, calling into question Russia’s willingness to move towards European standards for democratic elections.” The New York Times reported something entirely different, publishing a condescending but approving editorial titled “Russians Inch Toward Democracy.” The paper of record did not mention international observers’ criticism in its news story the day of the election but published a separate piece on the critics the following day; The Washington Post and The Boston Globe left the critics out of their coverage altogether. The Los Angeles Times went even further: in a mammoth news story, it managed to downplay the OSCE’s conclusion in such a way that it sounded like the opposite of itself. The paper quoted an OSCE official saying the balloting “was well-organized and we have not noted any major irregularities.” The paper also lauded Putin’s now unchallenged control of the Russian parliament as a chance for the president to “push through additional reforms, including cleaning up the entrenched corruption.”

  Publications outside the United States were more critical. The day before the election, the National Post of Canada ran a news item that had the whole story right in the headline: “Racists, killers and criminals run for Duma: Parliamentary elections. Two decades after decadent Yeltsin era, corruption plagues Russia.” The Economist declared the death of democracy in Russia in an editorial a month before the election, and then followed the election with a special report that called the new parliament “a democrat’s nightmare” and stressed the ballooning influence of ultranationalists.

  But the world’s most influential media, with by far the largest journalist corps in Moscow, were asleep at the wheel. Why? In part, because U.S. politics took precedence. In the fall of 2000, when Putin was nationalizing television, American media were fully focused on the hung Bush–Gore election. I joined the staff of U.S. News & World Report then, and I idled through my first few months on the job: the magazine had no room for Russia.

  Once the election story was finally over, American media had to deal with the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, beginning a wave of budget cuts and rollbacks that would last more than a decade. Many media outlets cut back on their foreign coverage, including Russia—and sometimes beginning with Russia. It became a self-perpetuating story: having told their audiences and themselves that Russia was safely entering a period of political and economic stability, American media effectively declared the Russian story dead, cut the resources available to cover it, and thereby killed their ability to report the story. ABC, which had had several dozen staffers occupying an entire building in central Moscow, closed its bureau altogether. Other outlets’ cuts were not as dramatic but just as drastic: entire bureaus were replaced by part-time freelancers. Only a few papers—The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times—maintained complete bureaus with full-time reporters and supporting staff.

  In June 2001, George W. Bush met Putin for the first time, famously “looked the man in the eye,” and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” Exuberant press reports took little notice of the fact that Putin not only was considerably less enthusiastic about his new friend but actually warned the United States that the period of hostility that began with the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia in 1999 was far from over. Then 9/11 happened, and suddenly the Russian war in Chechnya was recast as part of the Western world’s struggle with Islamic fundamentalist terrorism—against all available evidence, which included, among other things, Putin’s abrogation of an agreement reached under Yeltsin, according to which Russia was to stop selling arms to Iran and selling arms to Arab states to the tune of several billion dollars a year. And by geographic happenstance, major U.S. media started viewing Moscow as not so much the capital of Russia as base camp for reporters traveling to Afghanistan and, later, Iraq. The hunger for war stories was insatiable, and Russia was relegated to the sort of story that reporters did on the run, between truly important assignments. Their dispatches from Russia were articles that could only serve to affirm the existing narrative, shaped by the people who had invented the image of Putin the young, energetic liberal reformer.

  That there was not a whole lot to report along this particular story line did not seem to concern most American journalists and editors. They glossed over the nationalization of the media, portrayed the appointment of federal envoys to supervise elected governors as making order out of chaos, completely ignored rollbacks in judicial reform—and increasingly chose to focus on economic topics. Unlike Yeltsin, who seemed always to take two steps forward and one step back on economic reform in a perennial effort to pacify the opposition, Putin filled both his staff’s and the cabinet’s economic arm with avowed liberals. His premier was the former finance minister, an apparatchik steeped in the Soviet bureaucratic tradition but one sincerely committed to building on the reforms actually instituted in the 1990s—
and, conveniently for Putin, focused on this task to the exclusion of any other government business. Even before becoming acting president—while he was still merely the anointed successor—Putin had formed a think tank charged with creating a plan for the economic development of Russia, and appointed a liberal economist who had once worked for Sobchak to run it. After the election, the head of the think tank became minister for economic development, a post created especially for him.

  Most notably, Putin appointed Andrei Illarionov to be his economic adviser. It was the president-elect’s first appointment, and it was intended as a resonant gesture. Illarionov’s views were well-known: a member of the 1980s St. Petersburg economists’ club, he had evolved into a full-fledged, articulate libertarian. In the United States, he would have been called ultraconservative (and, fittingly, he eventually took a post at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C.), but in Russia his views landed him on the politically liberal side of the spectrum. Illarionov did not believe in global warming and did believe in the limitless self-regulating potential of free markets. He was also known for his brilliant analytical mind and his testy temperament, which had kept him on the sidelines of most of the key events of the 1990s. His appointment came as a surprise to everyone, including himself.

  ON THE AFTERNOON of February 28, 2000, Illarionov was working in his cluttered office at a tiny think tank he ran in Moscow. Located across Moscow’s Staraya Ploshad (Old Square) from the offices of the presidential administration and less than a kilometer from the Kremlin itself, Illarionov’s Institute of Economic Analysis was as far from power as it could get, considering that Illarionov was still on a first-name basis with most people who had been making economic policy for years. Illarionov was occasionally called in to give a lecture to the policymakers—as he had, for example, on the eve of the 1998 default, warning of the looming disaster—but his counsel seemed to be perceived as an academic exercise. Frustration had been his status quo for years: he had the respect of his powerful peers but no influence on them.

  But at four in the afternoon on February 28, less than a month before the presidential election, his phone rang and he was asked to meet with Putin that evening. The meeting lasted three hours. At some point during the meeting, an assistant entered to inform the president-to-be that federal troops had just taken the city of Shatoy in Chechnya. “Putin was so happy,” Illarionov recalled later. “He was gesticulating emotionally, and he was saying, ‘We showed them, we did them in.’ And since I had nothing to lose, I told them everything I thought about the war in Chechnya. I told him I thought Russian troops were committing a crime under his command. And he kept saying that they were all bandits there and that he would rub them out and that he was here to make sure the Russian Federation stayed intact. The words he said to me in private were exactly the same as what he always said on the topic in public: this was his sincere position. And my sincere position was that it was a crime.” The exchange went on for twenty or thirty minutes, growing more heated. The undiplomatic Illarionov knew exactly how these sorts of exchanges always ended: he would never be invited back, and another avenue of potential influence would be closed to him because, as usual, he, with his passionately held views, did not fit in.

  And then something remarkable happened. Putin grew quiet for a second, rearranged his facial expression, erasing all passion from it, and said, “This is it. You and I will not be discussing Chechnya.” For the next two hours, the two men talked about the economy—rather, Putin allowed Illarionov to lecture him. In parting, Putin suggested they meet again the following day. Illarionov immediately committed two more faux pas: he said no, and he cited the reason for his refusal—he was committed to celebrating the anniversary of his American wife’s arrival in Russia, which, because she happened to have moved to Moscow in a leap year, could be celebrated only once every four years. Yet rather than take affront at the refusal, or the reason for it, Putin simply suggested a different date to meet. Illarionov lectured him on economics again, and two weeks after the election, on April 12, 2000, he was appointed the new president’s adviser.

  Illarionov was very much seduced. For years he had thought that Russian economic reforms were being carried out in a misguided and possibly even harmful manner, but he had been helpless to affect policy. Now he would have unfettered access to the head of state, who seemed genuinely interested in what he had to say—and not at all put off by his communication style. Like most people, when Illarionov encountered traits in others that he himself lacked, he was inclined to interpret them as manifestations of some sort of outstanding ability. Speaking to me eleven years after his appointment, Illarionov insisted that Putin was “an extraordinary person,” and cited as primary evidence his ability to control his emotions. Plenty of evidence to the contrary had accumulated by this point, including several instances of Putin losing his temper in public. But as someone constitutionally incapable of keeping his opinions to himself, Illarionov continued to be impressed by Putin’s ability simply to “turn off” the talk of Chechnya—and even, it seems, by Putin’s flattened affect. At base, Illarionov had a difficult time imagining he might be systematically deceived—which is exactly what allowed him to be deceived for a rather long time.

  Illarionov and the other economists in Putin’s inner circle sent a strong signal to the U.S. press by their very presence. But most of all, American journalists seemed to miss the essence of the Putin story because some of their most important sources were missing—or willfully ignoring—the story. Big business was happy with Putin. The economy had been growing steadily since hitting a low point in 1998, when the ruble dropped so far that domestic production, inefficient as it was, finally became profitable. By the early 2000s, oil prices began rising, but not yet so much as to render domestic industry irrelevant (this would happen later). This was starting to yield some handsome results for investors who had entered the Russian market when it hit bottom.

  A KEY FIGURE among these investors was William Browder, grandson of a former head of the Communist Party USA, and his Russian wife. Browder was a true ideologue: he had come to Russia to build capitalism. He fervently believed that by making money for his investors, he was creating a bright capitalist future for a country it was his legacy to love.

  Browder’s investment strategy was straightforward and effective. He would buy a small but significant stake in a large company, such as the gas monopoly or an oil giant, conduct an investigation that inevitably exposed corporate malfeasance, and then launch a drive to reform the company. Corruption was pervasive and fairly easy to expose. Most large corporations were conglomerates of companies privatized within the last three to five years, with managers working at cross-purposes, often openly hostile to the new owners. So-called red directors had been stealing from their employers under the Soviets and saw no reason to stop; some of the new owners took a rape-and-pillage approach to their property. Browder’s revelations met with various levels of resistance, but more often than not he was able to effect at least some changes. As a result, the value of stocks, which had invariably been purchased at rock-bottom prices, rose exponentially.

  The new administration took an active interest in Browder’s investigations. More than a few times his people were summoned to the Kremlin, where their PowerPoint presentations never failed to make an impression. Browder was certain he was on a roll. Every time he was able to secure another court or oversight-agency decision that would force another Russian company to pay a bit more attention to the law, a cheer would roll across the ostentatiously named Hermitage Fund offices. “The esprit de corps was like no other office that you’ve ever had,” he told me wistfully years later, “because it’s very rare that you could make money and do good at the same time.” At its peak, the fund, which had started with $25 million worth of investments, had $4.5 billion invested in the Russian economy, making it the largest foreign investor in the country. Such was the extent of Browder’s faith in his own strategy and in the country t
hat even when Russia’s richest man was arrested—especially when Russia’s richest man was arrested—Browder let out one of his cheers: to him it indicated that the new president would stop at nothing to establish law and order.

  THE RICHEST MAN in Russia was on tour. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, born in 1963, shared a key character trait with both Illarionov and Browder, one that made all three men extremely different from Putin and vulnerable to him: their behavior was driven by ideas. Khodorkovsky’s parents, two Moscow engineers who spent their entire careers working at a measuring-instruments factory, had chosen to keep their own political skepticism from their only son. Theirs was a common dilemma: Speak your mind about the Soviet Union and risk making your child miserable with the constant need for doublethink and doublespeak, or aim to raise a contented conformist. The results of their efforts, however, far exceeded their expectations: they managed to rear a fervent Communist and Soviet patriot, a member of a species that had seemed all but extinct. After getting his degree in chemical engineering, Mikhail Khodorkovsky opted to work at the Komsomol committee. He had no hidden agenda, but in the middle to late 1980s this career choice positioned him well to take advantage of quasi-official and often extralegal opportunities to dabble in business. Before he was out of his mid-twenties, Khodorkovsky had tried his hand at trade, importing personal computers to the Soviet Union, and, more significant, at finance, devising ways to squeeze cash out of the Soviet planned-economy noncash behemoth. He served as an economic adviser to Yeltsin’s first government when Russia was still part of the USSR. During the failed August 1991 coup, he was on the barricades in front of the Russian White House, physically helping to defend his government.