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

by Masha Gessen

  Putin was campaigning to remain the undisputed leader of the country—a surprisingly easy goal to accomplish in the presence of a sitting president—and, as a natural consequence of his obvious ongoing leadership, to become president again once Medvedev’s term ran out in 2012. Indeed, within six months of becoming president, Medvedev introduced—and the parliament passed—a measure changing the constitution to increase the presidential term to six years. The plan, ostensibly, was for Medvedev to sit out his four years doing nothing but talking pretty, and then to cede the throne to Putin, this time for two consecutive six-year terms. But transparent as that plan was, hope persisted that Medvedev was sincere in his intentions or that, after being called president for a few years, he might develop actual presidential ambitions—or simply that the system Putin had created might crack, as all closed systems eventually do.

  The system’s greatest vulnerability stemmed from Putin’s and his inner circle’s pleonexia, the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belonged to others, that was exerting ever greater pressure on the regime from inside. Every year, Russia slid lower on the Corruption Perceptions Index of the watchdog group Transparency International, reaching 154th out of 178 by 2011 (for the year 2010). By 2011, human-rights activists estimated that fully 15 percent of the Russian prison population was made up of entrepreneurs who had been thrown behind bars by well-connected competitors who used the court system to take over other people’s businesses. By mid-2010, a thirty-four-year-old attorney named Alexey Navalny was drawing tens of thousands of daily hits on his blog, where, by combing government websites to find evidence of excess hidden in plain sight, he monitored the many outrages of an unaccountable bureaucracy. Here was the Voronezh region holding a tender to purchase five gold wristwatches at a cost of $15,000. Here was the city of Krasnodar in southern Russia offering to pay about $400 million for technical documentation on a planned railroad crossing. Here were two beds and two bedside tables plated with 24-karat gold, which the Ministry of the Interior was purchasing. Navalny dubbed the people in charge of Russia “The Party of Crooks and Thieves”—a name that caught on immediately. In the fall of 2010, the magazine I was editing published a long and detailed interview with Navalny, and in the lead I wrote, “An actual politician has suddenly been discovered in Russia.” Other magazines followed, putting the handsome blond Navalny on the cover, the attention culminating in a New Yorker profile in April 2011.

  On February 2, 2011, Navalny announced that he was taking his one-man anticorruption campaign public, and called for contributions to his newly formed organization. Within three hours he had his first $5,000, in donations ranging from five kopecks (less than a cent) to the equivalent of $500. Within twenty-four hours, he had his first million rubles (roughly $30,000)—an all-time speed record for online donations to any cause in Russia. This was as clear a sign as there could be that Russians were fed up with being had—and were willing to pay for change. But it was also clear that a lone fighter like Navalny could not bring about change. As chess champion Garry Kasparov had already learned, having money, being popular, and being right did not enable an outsider to put a dent in the system. Only someone who was already on the inside could crack the monolith.

  THAT MAN APPEARED to come on the scene in May 2011. Surprising everyone, including himself, Mikhail Prokhorov, now the second-richest man in Russia, announced that he was entering politics. Forty-six-year-old Prokhorov’s life story resembled that of other Russian superrich: he had entered business as a college senior, made his first money in the late 1980s by buying and selling anything he could get his hands on, amassed a fortune in the 1990s by privatizing wisely, and by shrewdly investing and reshaping what he had privatized. Unlike Gusinsky, Berezovsky, and Khodorkovsky, he had kept a distance from the Kremlin for most of his career, preferring to remain a hands-on manager and leave politics to his business partner.

  Entering politics now was not exactly his own idea—although he would protest that it was. He had been solicited on behalf of the president and the prime minister to take the reins of a foundering right-liberal political party. It was a familiar pattern by this point: every election year, the Kremlin would anoint one rightist party and one leftist party that would be allowed on the ballot, to take part, alongside Putin’s United Russia, in what amounted to a mock election. Real political parties with actual leaders and agendas, meanwhile, would be denied registration on the basis of the convoluted laws and regulations adopted in the early 2000s. So Prokhorov had been chosen to serve as the figurehead of a dormant rightist party that would be briefly resuscitated in time for the December 2011 parliamentary election: he would be expected to play a scripted role, perhaps make a few careless rich-guy statements that would help drum up support for regular-guy Putin, and then retire to the sidelines when so instructed.

  But I thought that this time the Kremlin puppeteers might have grown overconfident and made a fateful mistake. I knew Prokhorov a little: for the last three years I had been editing a magazine in which he was the principal investor. He seemed constitutionally incapable of being a figurehead. Moreover, he was actively looking for an arena in which he could apply himself fully. He had accomplished all he had set out to do in business in Russia, he was profoundly depressed about the state of the country, and he had been considering the disheartening option of selling off his assets and moving to New York, where he had bought the NBA team that would become the Brooklyn Nets. Now the alternative had presented itself: instead of leaving the country, he could fix it. He would get down to work, master this new undertaking just as he had set out to master metallurgy and the intricacies of management on the factory-floor level when he came into possession of the metals giant Norilsk Nickel, which he prided himself on having reformed from the bottom up, securing the workers’ support for the many changes he had instituted. Prokhorov was brilliant; at six-foot-eight he was, literally, a giant, and I believed he just might topple the system.

  Over the next few months, I watched Prokhorov undergo a remarkable transformation. He received expert coaching: he got out of baggy navy Brioni suits and into tailored beige and gray ones. He unlearned his Aspergian way of answering questions in complete, grammatically correct paragraphs, sounding completely certain, and learned to leaven his speech with qualifiers and misplaced modifiers. Most important, he gathered dozens of experts in politics, economics, and media to help him develop nuanced positions on Russian politics and started to form a power base. He blanketed the country’s largest cities with billboards featuring his face and slogans such as “Plan for your future.” He had the money not only to buy all the advertising space in the land but also to replace his ads immediately after local authorities in more than a few places, taken aback by his audacity, took them down.

  Whoever came up with the idea of using Prokhorov as a stand-in for the opposition obviously had not expected him to take the job so seriously. Vladislav Surkov, an assistant to Putin who had over the years built a reputation as the Kremlin’s chief puppet master—effectively taking the place vacated by Berezovsky—began calling Prokhorov in for almost daily talks. Prokhorov, unaccustomed to reporting to anyone, nonetheless submitted to a ritual he found odd and distinctly humiliating: giving Surkov a complete accounting of his political activities. Surkov in turn made suggestions, on at least one occasion advising Prokhorov to drop someone from the party’s rolls. Prokhorov ignored the suggestions and pressed on with what he thought was right—until September 14, 2011, when he found himself locked out of his own party’s scheduled congress. Many of the activists Prokhorov had recruited over the previous three months were not allowed to take part in the congress either, and an entirely different group of people elected an entirely different leadership. Whoever had given Prokhorov the party had now decided to take it away.

  Watching one of the richest and tallest men in Russia feeling utterly lost, confused, and betrayed was painful. Prokhorov called a press conference to announce that the lockout was illegal. He convened an
alternative congress the following day and spoke there. He promised to see to it that Surkov would lose his job. He promised to fight. He promised to come back in ten days and lay out his detailed plans for a political battle.

  Of course, Surkov—if it was indeed Surkov—was not the only one to have miscalculated badly. Prokhorov, living in the information bubble shaped by his experience in business, at a safe distance from the Kremlin, had overreached catastrophically. In the days after the congresses, he received enough messages about what would happen to him and his business to force him to give up on the idea of being a politician. Prokhorov never did come out with his battle plan; he all but disappeared from the public eye.

  It seemed that whoever had chosen Prokhorov to oppose Putin had made a classic mistake of overconfidence—but had caught it in plenty of time.

  ON SEPTEMBER 24, 2011, United Russia held its own party congress. Dmitry Medvedev addressed the throngs.

  “I believe it would be right to support the candidacy of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin for president,” he declared. The hall erupted in a standing ovation. When it finally quieted, Medvedev unself-consciously told the crowd that he and Putin had made the arrangement back when Medvedev first became president. And now, when Putin returned to the post of president, Medvedev would be his prime minister.

  Within hours, the Russian blogosphere filled with pictures of Putin doctored to look older and conspicuously like Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader who died after eighteen years in office, virtually immobile and completely incoherent. Putin, the bloggers reminded one another, would be seventy-one by the time his second six-year term was over.

  And with this, the transformation of Russia back into the USSR was, for all Putin’s intents and purposes, complete.

  Epilogue:

  A WEEK IN DECEMBER

  Saturday, December 3, 2011

  I am driving my family to see a vapid American comedy at an expensive shopping mall in central Moscow. Snow is late this year, and the city feels like it has been plunged into a permanent wet darkness. Excessive lighting on the Garden Ring, the eight-lane road that circles the city center, does little to change that feeling. But I am struck by a giant illuminated structure. One might call it a poster or a billboard, but neither description would do justice to the scale of the thing. It sits atop a two-story building from the eighteenth century, and it appears taller than the building. It is backlit and also illuminated brightly around the edges, some sort of King Kong digital photo frame. Inside the frame, Putin and Medvedev, one wearing a red tie and the other a blue, look resolutely past each other, over a giant caption: UNITED RUSSIA. TOGETHER WE WILL WIN.

  Tomorrow is the parliamentary election. That makes today, by law, a “day of silence,” meaning any and all campaigning is banned—outdoor advertising included. I pull over at an intersection, take a picture of the monstrosity with my cell phone, and upload it to Facebook. Within an hour, the picture collects seventeen comments—no world record, but more reaction than I expected on a Saturday night. Even more surprising, those commenting are not my usual gang of politically engaged friends. “Pigs!” writes a marketing manager. “You’d think we’ve seen worse, but it still makes you want to throw up, doesn’t it?” writes a former political reporter who gave up journalism fourteen years ago.

  I have not voted in a parliamentary election for more than a dozen years, because Putin’s laws rendered elections meaningless: political parties could no longer get on the ballot without the Kremlin’s approval, members of parliament were no longer elected directly, and the results were rigged by election officials anyway.

  But a couple of months ago, when a group of well-known liberal writers, artists, and political activists called on people to go to the polls and write an obscenity on the ballot, I criticized the idea online as a losing tactic. The government had made a mockery of elections, but, I argued, you cannot outmock a cynic. What we really needed was a meaningful alternative to the mockery—like, perhaps, a reason to vote. In the back-and-forth that followed in various publications, a few people chimed in with actual reasons to go to the polls: first, to make sure the Party of Crooks and Thieves did not vote in your name; second, to vote for one of the quasi-opposition parties on the ballot, so that Putin’s United Russia did not win a constitutional majority in parliament. Amazingly, these geeky exhortations went viral.

  Having written her dissertation on elections, my girlfriend is a principled always-voter. She woke up the other day and asked me, “Did I dream it, or did you say you were going to vote?”

  “Yes, I am going to vote.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I can’t quite explain it,” I said. “But I feel something is afoot.”

  I said this because over the last few days I have had several discussions with my friends, who are also going to vote: we have been trying to decide which so-called party to pick. And thousands of people, including a number of my friends, have registered and trained as volunteer election observers either on their own or as part of an effort called Citizen Observer, organized by a prominent political scientist, Dmitry Oreshkin (who also happens to be my girlfriend’s father). They will be spending tomorrow at the polls trying to forestall attempts at falsification. And people are discussing the picture of Putin and Medvedev on my Facebook page as if, all at once, they really cared.

  Sunday, December 4

  I go to the polls a half-hour before they close, as the geeks told me to, so that I can catch the election thieves red-handed if they have already used my name to vote. But no, neither I nor my ninety-one-year-old grandmother, registered at the same address, has voted. Nor do I observe any other violations. I cast my vote uneventfully, photograph it, post it to Facebook as a potential aid in exposing vote-count violations (another geek idea), and go to a former colleague’s fortieth-birthday party.

  It is a mixed crowd: book-publishing people, journalists, designers, and at least one wealthy manufacturer—my friend is one of those people who seem to know everyone. And everyone is talking about the election. Thirty-somethings come in declaring, “I voted for the first time in my life!” After a while it gets predictable that anyone who reached legal majority after Putin came to power will utter this phrase within minutes of walking through the door. A couple of guests who worked as volunteer election observers regale us with tales of violations: young people who were paid to hide prepared ballots under their clothing and slip them in along with their own; election officials who removed observers once the counting began. (Tomorrow we will find out that many officials simply forged their final tallies, with no regard for the actual ballots.)

  None of this is news to me or Darya.

  What is new is the fact that we are talking about all this at a party, late into the night. And that we all voted. And something else, too: the election observers tell us that their fellow observers included a schoolteacher, a businessman’s wife who arrived in a Range Rover, and other people who are… not like us. Something has shifted, and not only for us media junkies glued to our Facebook pages.

  “What do you think it will take for people to take to the streets?” Vladimir, a smart young reporter from the leading business daily’s presidential pool, asks those gathered in the kitchen.

  “I’m not sure,” I say, “but I feel like something is in the air.”

  Monday, December 5

  Driving the kids to school, I listen to reports of partial returns on the radio. United Russia supposedly has just under 50 percent of the vote. I know this is not an accurate figure, but it is considerably lower than the similarly falsified results of the previous parliamentary election, when United Russia supposedly got 66 percent. Perhaps this time the true numbers are so low that some local election officials felt they could take the lie only so far. As I will also find out later today, some precincts resisted altogether the pressure to cook their numbers. Citizen Observer’s five hundred election observers, posted at 170 precincts in Moscow, saw no major violations of voting procedures
at thirty-six of them. When the results from just those precincts were tallied, United Russia came in second, with just over 23 percent of the vote, trailing the Communist Party. Assuming this selection of precincts was representative, it would appear that the official count more than doubled the real one. Citizen Observer also reports that 49 percent of eligible voters took part—far more than in any other recent Russian election.

  A protest is planned for tonight, and I plan to go. I do not want to: protests in Moscow are dreary or dangerous, or both. The way it works now, anyone planning to stage any kind of public rally or demonstration has to notify the authorities ten to fifteen days in advance; the city can then deny permission or grant it, for a specific location and a specific number of participants. If permission is denied but the demonstration goes on anyway, participants are likely to be arrested, and roughed up in the process. If permission is granted, the police set up cordons marking off space for the expected number of participants, and metal detectors at the perimeter. Protesters have to undergo a sometimes unpleasant search procedure and then hold their rally behind the police cordon, quite literally talking to themselves. I dislike the legal gatherings even more than the illegal ones, but once every few months, I feel I must go. This is one of those times.

  My friend Ana instant-messages me with a quote from today’s New York Times article on the Russian election. Ana, whom I met in Kosovo, spent several years in Moscow as a foreign correspondent, and now lives in The Hague. “‘Democracy is in action,’ Mr. Medvedev said, standing with Mr. Putin at United Russia’s campaign headquarters, where both appeared a bit shaken.” She adds: “If it wasn’t sooo sad, it would be quite funny.”