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

by Masha Gessen

  As for Chubais, he had known Putin briefly when he served as an economic adviser to Mayor Sobchak in St. Petersburg and Putin had just been appointed deputy. He remembered Putin as he had been during his first year of working for the mayor: it had been a uniquely charged year, and Putin had been uncharacteristically energetic and curious, always asking questions. Chubais had left St. Petersburg in November 1991 to join the government in Moscow, and his initial impressions had remained untempered.

  And what did Boris Yeltsin himself know about his soon-to-be-anointed successor? He knew this was one of the few men who had remained loyal to him. He knew he was of a different generation: unlike Yeltsin, his enemy Primakov, and his army of governors, Putin had not come up through the ranks of the Communist Party and had not, therefore, had to publicly switch allegiances when the Soviet Union collapsed. He looked different: all those men, without exception, were heavyset and, it seemed, permanently wrinkled; Putin—slim, small, and by now in the habit of wearing well-cut European suits—looked much more like the new Russia Yeltsin had promised his people ten years earlier. Yeltsin also knew, or thought he knew, that Putin would not allow the prosecution or persecution of Yeltsin himself once he retired. And if Yeltsin still possessed even a fraction of his once outstanding feel for politics, he knew that Russians would like this man they would be inheriting, and who would be inheriting them.

  Everyone could invest this gray, ordinary man with what they wanted to see in him.

  On August 9, 1999, Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin prime minister of Russia. A week later he was confirmed in that position by a wide majority of the Duma: he proved just as likable, or at least unobjectionable, as Yeltsin had intuited.

  Two

  THE ELECTION WAR

  You know, some people are saying the FSB is behind the bombings,” my editor, one of the smartest people I knew, said to me when I walked in one afternoon in September 1999. “Do you believe it?”

  For three weeks, Moscow and other Russian cities had been terrorized by a series of explosions. The first occurred on August 31 in a crowded shopping mall in the center of Moscow. One person died, and more than thirty people were injured. But it was not immediately clear that this explosion was anything more frightening than a giant prank, or perhaps a shot fired in a business dispute.

  Five days later, an explosion brought down a large part of an apartment block in the southern city of Buynaksk, not far from Chechnya. Sixty-four people were killed and one hundred and forty-six injured. But all of the building’s residents were Russian military officers and their families—so, although the dead included twenty-three children, the blast did not have the effect of making civilians, especially civilians living in Moscow, feel vulnerable and scared.

  Four days later, however, at two seconds before midnight on September 8, a giant blast sounded in a bedroom neighborhood outside Moscow’s city center. A densely populated concrete city block was ripped in half, two of its stairwells—seventy-two apartments in total—completely obliterated. Exactly one hundred people died; nearly seven hundred more were injured. Five days later, another explosion brought down another building, on the outskirts of Moscow. The eight-story brick building folded in on itself like a house of cards; the journalists in the crowd that rushed to the building that morning talked about the fact that concrete buildings apparently explode outward, while brick ones collapse inward. The blast came at five in the morning, which meant that most residents were home at the time; almost all of them were killed: one hundred twenty-four people were dead and seven injured.

  Three days after that, on September 16, a truck blew up in the street in Volgodonsk, a city in southern Russia. Nineteen people died, and over a thousand were injured.

  Panic set in all over the country. Residents of Moscow and other Russian cities formed neighborhood patrols; many people went out into the streets simply because it felt safer than sleeping in their apartments. Volunteers stopped anyone they considered suspicious, which often meant everyone who was not a part of the patrol. At least one group of Moscow volunteers stopped everyone walking a dog—to check the dog. The police all over the country were inundated with calls from people who thought they had seen suspicious activity or suspicious objects. On September 22, police responding to a call in Ryazan, a city about a hundred miles from Moscow, found three bags of explosives planted under the stairway of an apartment building.

  In a country stricken with fear and grief, no one doubted that the Chechens had done it, and I was not an exception. I had spent the previous couple of days driving around Moscow visiting Chechen families: refugees, professionals who had settled there long ago, temporary workers living in dormitories. All of them were terrified. Police in Moscow were rounding up young Chechen men, detaining hundreds of them in connection with the bombings. Many of the men I interviewed not only stopped going outside but refused even to open their apartment or dormitory-room doors. One family’s child had come home from school saying the teacher had written the Russian words for “explosion” and “Chechens” side by side on the chalkboard.

  I knew the police were detaining hundreds of innocent men, but I could easily imagine that whoever was guilty was a Chechen or a group of people who came from Chechnya. I had covered the 1994–1996 war in Chechnya from beginning to end. The first time I ever heard a bomb explode within yards of where I was standing, I was in the stairway of an apartment building for the blind on the outskirts of Grozny, the Chechen capital. It was January 1995—the first month of the war—and I had gone to that particular quarter of the city because the Russian army claimed it was not bombing civilians; I could imagine no one who fit the very definition of civilian better than the residents of that building: blind, helpless, unable to leave the city. When I stepped outside the building, I saw bodies and body parts strewn around.

  The many children I saw on the streets of Grozny on that day and on subsequent days had seen the same thing. They were the children who would be hanging around the open fires on Grozny’s sidewalks in the coming weeks, watching their mothers prepare food. These were the same children who would then spend years cooped up in tiny apartments—packed half a dozen to a room, because so many of the buildings had been bombed out of existence—and forbidden to go outside for fear of hitting a land mine or a Russian soldier, who might rape a girl or detain a boy. And still they went outside and were raped, detained, tortured, disappeared—or saw it happen to their sisters, brothers, and friends. These children were young adults now, and I had no trouble believing some of them would be capable of horrific revenge.

  Most Russians had not seen what I had seen, but they saw television footage of the explosion sites, each one more terrifying than the last. The war in Chechnya had never really ended: the arrangement brokered three years earlier by Berezovsky, among others, amounted to a cease-fire. Russians were very much a nation at war, and, like all nations at war, they believed the enemy to be both less than human and capable of inflicting unimaginable horror.

  On September 23, a group of twenty-four governors—more than a quarter of all governors in the federation—wrote a letter to President Yeltsin asking him to yield power to Putin, who had been in office as prime minister for just over a month. The same day, Yeltsin issued a secret decree authorizing the army to resume combat in Chechnya; the decree was also illegal, because Russian law forbids the use of regular troops within the country’s borders. That day, Russian military planes once again began bombing Grozny, starting with the airport, the oil refinery, and residential neighborhoods. The following day, Putin issued his own order authorizing Russian troops to engage in combat in Chechnya; this time the order was not classified, though Russian law in fact gives the prime minister no authority over the military.

  The same day, Putin made one of his first television appearances. “We will hunt them down,” he said of the terrorists. “Wherever we find them, we will destroy them. Even if we find them in the toilet. We will rub them out in the outhouse.”

  Pu
tin was using rhetoric markedly different from Yeltsin’s. He was not promising to bring the terrorists to justice. Nor was he expressing compassion for the hundreds of victims of the explosions. This was the language of a leader who was planning to rule with his fist. These sorts of vulgar statements, often spiced with below-the-belt humor, would become Putin’s signature oratorical device. His popularity began to soar.

  BEREZOVSKY THE PH.D. and his small propaganda army formed of highly educated men seemed to see no contradiction between their stated goal of securing Russia’s democratic future and the man in whom they had chosen to vest their hopes for this future. They worked tirelessly on their campaign, using the might of Berezovsky’s Channel One to smear former prime minister Primakov and his governor allies. One memorable program explained Primakov’s recent hip surgery in repulsive anatomical detail. Another focused on Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov’s ostensible resemblance to Mussolini. But in addition to discrediting his opponents, Putin’s allies—who thought of themselves more as his authors than his supporters—had to create and put forth an image of their own candidate.

  Strictly speaking, Putin was not running a campaign—the presidential election was not expected for nearly a year, and Russia did not have a political culture of protracted campaigns—but the people who wanted to see him become president were very much campaigning. An influential political consulting firm called the Foundation for Effective Politics, located in one of the city’s most beautiful historic buildings, just across the river from the Kremlin, was tasked with creating the image of Putin as a young, energetic politician who would advance much-needed reform. “Everyone was so tired of Yeltsin, it was an easy job to do,” a woman who had been instrumental in the campaign told me.

  Her name was Marina Litvinovich, and like many people who worked at the Foundation for Effective Politics, she was very young, very smart (she had just graduated from one of the best universities), and very inexperienced in politics, even naive. She had come to work at the foundation part-time when she was still a student, and three years later she was a key person on the presidential campaign team. She believed herself to be entirely devoted to democratic ideals, and yet she saw nothing wrong with the way the future president was being invented and sold to the public: she simply trusted the people who had thought the whole thing up. “There were some articles coming out saying he was from the KGB,” she told me years later, “but the headquarters was staffed with liberals and we were convinced these were the people who would make up his inner circle.”

  Nor did one have to be young and naive to believe that. In the late summer of 1999, I had a memorable dinner with Alexander Goldfarb, an old acquaintance who had been a dissident in the 1970s; he had played the role of Andrei Sakharov’s translator, become an émigré, spending the 1980s in New York, and turned into a highly effective social activist in the 1990s. He had served as billionaire philanthropist George Soros’s adviser on Russia; he had then launched a campaign to publicize and fight Russia’s epidemic of drug-resistant tuberculosis, bringing it to the world’s attention almost single-handedly. Now Alex and I were having dinner and talking about Putin. “He is the KGB’s flesh and blood,” I said to him, then still testing a theory more than making an argument. “But I hear from Chubais that he is smart, effective, and worldly,” Alex countered. Even a former dissident was nearly convinced that Putin was the modern young politician the Foundation for Effective Politics was inventing.

  The more the military campaign in Chechnya escalated, the more the entire country seemed to be in thrall. Berezovsky, meanwhile, came up with the idea of a new political party, one that would be entirely devoid of ideology. “Nobody would hear the words if we said them,” he told me nine years later, still apparently convinced this had been a stellar invention. “I decided we would replace ideology with faces.” Berezovsky’s people cast about for faces and came up with a couple of celebrities and one cabinet minister. But the face that mattered most belonged to the man who had been faceless just weeks earlier: as Putin’s popularity soared, so did the new political party’s. In the parliamentary election on December 19, 1999, nearly a quarter of the voters chose the two-month-old bloc called Yedinstvo (Unity) or Medved (The Bear), making it the largest faction in the lower house of parliament.

  To cement Putin’s lead, someone in the Family—no one seems able to recall who it was any longer—proposed a brilliant move: Yeltsin should resign early. As prime minister, Putin would, by law, become acting president, turning into an instant incumbent in the upcoming race. His opponents would be caught by surprise, and the lead time to the election would be shortened. In fact, Yeltsin should do it on December 31. It would be a very Yeltsin move: he would upstage the millennium, the Y2K bug, and any other news story that might occur almost anyplace in the world. It would also come on the eve of the traditional two-week New Year’s and Christmas hiatus, making the time available for Putin’s opponents to prepare for the vote that much shorter.

  NEW YEAR’S, a secular holiday, had long since superseded all other occasions as Russia’s biggest family holiday. On this night, Russians everywhere would gather with friends and family; just before the end of the year they would assemble in front of their television sets to watch the clock on one of the Kremlin towers strike midnight—to raise their glasses of champagne and only then to sit down to a traditional meal. In the minutes leading up to midnight, the nation’s leader would give a speech; this had been a tradition in the Soviet Union, and it had been picked up by Boris Yeltsin on December 31, 1992 (on December 31, 1991, as the Soviet Union officially ended its existence, the nation was addressed by a comedian).

  Yeltsin appeared on television twelve hours ahead of schedule. “My friends,” he said. “My dears. Today is the last time I am going to address you on New Year’s Eve. But that is not all. Today is the last time I address you as the president of Russia. I have made a decision. I spent a long and difficult time thinking about it. Today, on the last day of this century, I am going to resign…. I am leaving…. Russia should enter the new millennium with new politicians, new faces, new, smart, strong, energetic people…. Why should I hold on to my seat for six more months when the country has a strong person who deserves to become president and to whom virtually every Russian has linked his hopes for the future?”

  Then Yeltsin apologized. “I am sorry,” he said, “that many of our dreams failed to come true. That things we thought would be easy turned out to be painfully hard. I am sorry that I did not live up to the hopes of people who believed that we could, with a single effort, a single strong push, jump out of our gray, stagnant, totalitarian past and into a bright, wealthy, civilized future. I used to believe that myself…. I have never said this before, but I want you to know. I felt the pain of each of you in my heart. I spent sleepless nights, painful periods thinking about what I could do to make life just a little bit better…. I am leaving. I have done all I could…. A new generation is coming; they can do more, and better.”

  Yeltsin spoke for ten minutes. He looked bloated, heavy, barely mobile. He also looked dejected, helpless, like a man who was burying himself alive in plain view of over a hundred million people. His facial expression barely changed throughout the speech, but his voice cracked with emotion as he signed off.

  At midnight, it was Vladimir Putin who appeared on television. He looked noticeably nervous at first, and even stuttered at the beginning of his speech, but seemed more confident as he went on. He spoke for three and a half minutes. Remarkably, he did not seem to use the opportunity to give his first stump speech. He made no promises and said nothing that could be interpreted as being inspiring. He said instead that nothing would change in Russia and assured viewers that their rights were well protected. In closing, he proposed Russians raise a glass to “Russia’s new century”—though he had no glass of his own to raise.

  Putin was now acting president, and the election campaign was officially under way. Putin, recalled Berezovsky, was disciplined and even docile
: he did as he was told—and he was told not to do much. He was already so popular that this was, in essence, a non-campaign campaign, leading up to a non-election election. All Putin had to do was never seem too different from whatever it was voters wished to see in him.

  On January 26, 2000, exactly two months before the election, the moderator of a Russia panel at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, asked, “Who is Mr. Putin?” Chubais—the man who had seven months earlier argued that Putin would make an ideal successor—was holding the microphone when the question sounded. He fidgeted and looked questioningly at a former Russian prime minister sitting to his right. The former minister, too, was clearly unwilling to respond. The panel’s four members started looking back and forth at each other anxiously. After half a minute of this, the room exploded in laughter. The world’s largest landmass, a land of oil, gas, and nuclear arms, had a new leader, and its business and political elites had no idea who he was. Very funny indeed.

  One week later, Berezovsky commissioned three journalists from a newspaper he owned to write Putin’s life story. One of them was a young blonde who had spent a couple of years in the Kremlin pool but had managed to remain unnoticed next to more colorful colleagues. Another was a young reporter who had won acclaim for his humorous reports but had never written about politics. The third member of the team was a star, a veteran political reporter who had spent the early eighties covering wars all over the world, and the late eighties writing about politics and, especially, about the KGB for Moscow News, perestroika’s flagship publication. Natalia Gevorkyan was a reporter’s reporter, the undisputed leader of the team, and the journalist Berezovsky knew best.