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

by Masha Gessen

  IN FEBRUARY 1988, conflict erupted between Azerbaijan and Armenia—the first of what would be many ethnic conflicts in the Soviet Caucasus. In relatively wealthy, overwhelmingly Muslim Azerbaijan, a region called Nagorno-Karabakh, populated mostly by ethnic Armenians, declared its intention to secede and join Armenia, a small, poor, mostly Christian republic of the USSR. With the exception of a few visionary dissidents, no one at the time could imagine that the Soviet empire would break apart—much less break apart soon. The events in Nagorno-Karabakh showed that the unthinkable was possible. Not only that, they showed exactly how it was going to happen: The USSR would break apart along ethnic lines, and the process would be painful and violent. But now pro-independence demonstrators came out into the streets of Nagorno-Karabakh in large numbers, and just days later, pogroms erupted in Sumgait, an Azerbaijan city with a sizable ethnic Armenian population. More than thirty people died; hundreds more were injured.

  The Soviet intelligentsia watched in dismay as ethnic and religious enmities rose to the surface. In June, after Nagorno-Karabakh’s regional government officially declared the region’s intention to secede, more than three hundred people came out into a Leningrad square to demonstrate solidarity with the Armenian people. Toward the end of the summer, Leningrad pro-democracy activists arranged for Armenian children from Sumgait to travel to summer camps outside Leningrad. A Leningrad anthropologist named Galina Starovoitova—the one whose murder I would be covering ten years later—became the nation’s most visible spokesperson for Armenian issues. On December 10, 1988, most members of the pro-secession Karabakh Committee in Nagorno-Karabakh were placed under arrest.

  Two days later, a wave of police apartment searches swept through Leningrad. The five people whose apartments were raided were all radical pro-democracy activists; they included former political prisoner Yuli Rybakov and Ekaterina Podoltseva, the mathematician who had come up with the idea of eating lemons to silence the brass band. All five were listed in criminal proceedings initiated under Article 70 of the Soviet Penal Code, which provided for six months’ to seven years’ imprisonment for spreading anti-Soviet propaganda (more for repeat offenders). This would be the last Article 70 case in the history of the country.

  The transformation of Soviet society, in other words, maintained its two-steps-forward, one-step-back mode: public rallies, which would have been unthinkable just two years earlier, were followed by search warrants, and the wrong kind of talk could still land one in prison for years. Censorship was lifting gradually: Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago was finally published in the USSR that year, but Alexander Solzhenitsyn was still off-limits. Andrei Sakharov, though now allowed to live his private life in peace, faced often insurmountable hurdles in his public life. In the summer of 1988, the dissident and Nobel Prize winner visited Leningrad; the city’s best-known television journalist taped an interview with Sakharov, but the censors kept it from the air. A producer decided to sneak it into the broadcast of a pioneering late-night public affairs program that was rapidly gaining popularity. She kept Sakharov’s name out of the script that had to be vetted by the censors, and they readily signed off on what seemed, on paper, like innocuous banter: “Tonight on our program you will see this.” “You don’t say!” “And this!” “Impossible! Seriously?” “It’s the honest truth!” “Can it be?” What the censors did not realize was that images of Sakharov would be flashing on screen as this dialogue went on, not only leaving no doubt as to what the producers planned to show but also giving viewers enough time to call everyone they knew to tell them to turn on the television.

  No one was fired for fooling the censors, and this was perhaps one of the strongest indications that the changes under way in the Soviet Union were profound and possibly irreversible—and that they would transform not only the media but also the country’s seemingly intransigent political institutions. On December 1, 1988, a new election law went into effect, effectively ending the Communist Party’s monopoly on state power.

  The year 1989 began with pro-democracy activists meeting in Leningrad to organize what had seemed unthinkable just months ago: an election campaign. A committee called Election-89 formed, led by Marina Salye, among others; it printed out fliers that explained how to vote: “There will be two, three, or four names on the ballot. These are candidates who are competing with one another. You need to choose only one name and cross out the rest.” It was, in fact, a convoluted system: 2,250 representatives were to be elected all over the Soviet Union, including 750 to be elected from territorial districts, 750 to be elected from administrative districts, and 750 to be elected by the Communist Party or institutions it controlled. Still, it was the first time voters in most areas could actually choose between two or more candidates.

  In Leningrad, Communist Party functionaries were trounced. Galina Sarovoitova, the Leningrad anthropologist, was elected to represent Armenia in the Supreme Soviet. She joined a minority of the newly elected representatives—about three hundred of them—in forming a pro-democracy faction led by Sakharov. Once in parliament, the former dissident made it his goal to end the rule of the Communist Party, repealing the constitutional provision that guaranteed its primacy in Soviet politics. Other prominent members of the interregional group included rogue apparatchik Boris Yeltsin and Anatoly Sobchak, an extremely handsome and well-spoken law professor from Leningrad.

  During the head-spinningly brief election campaign—less than four months passed between the passage of the revolutionary law on elections and the actual vote—Sobchak had made a name for himself as an outstanding public speaker. During one of his first appearances before potential voters, sensing that the audience was tired and bored, he set aside his prepared talk on city and national issues and made a conscious decision to dazzle the listeners with oratory. “I have a dream,” he actually said, “that the next election will be organized not by the Communist Party but by voters themselves, and that these voters will be free to unite and form organizations. That campaign rallies will be open to all who want to listen, with no special passes required to enter. That any citizen will have the right to nominate himself or another person for office, and that the candidacy will not have to go through a multistep approval process but simply will be placed on the ballot provided there are sufficient signatures collected in support of the candidate.” It was a decidedly utopian vision.

  THE PEOPLE’S DEPUTIES, as members of the Soviet quasi-parliament were officially called, gathered for their first congress at the end of May 1989. The country’s streets emptied out for two weeks: every family sat immobile in front of a television set, watching political debate out in the open for the first time in their lives, watching history being made. The huge, unwieldy gathering quickly turned into a standoff between two people: Gorbachev, the head of state, and Sakharov, the ultimate moral authority of his time. Youthful, energetic, and now certain of his position and his popularity, Gorbachev projected confidence. Sakharov—stooped, soft-spoken, prone to stumble when he talked as well as when he walked—looked out of place and ineffective. He seemed to be making his greatest mistake when, on the last day of the congress, he took the floor and launched into a long and complicated speech. He was calling for the repeal of Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution, which granted the Communist Party rule over the Soviet state. He was speaking of the impending collapse of the empire—both the Soviet Union proper and the Eastern Bloc—and imploring the congress to adopt a resolution on the need for reform. The huge hall was growing restless and increasingly rude: the people’s deputies began stomping their feet and trying to shout Sakharov down. The old dissident at the microphone, straining to make himself heard, exclaimed: “I am addressing the world!”

  Mikhail Gorbachev, sitting up on stage a few steps from where Sakharov was trying to give his speech, looked furious—both, it seemed, at the substance of Sakharov’s words and at the pandemonium that broke out in the hall in response. Suddenly the old man went silent: Gorbachev had turned off his microphone. Sakh
arov gathered the pages of his talk from the lectern, took the few steps toward the secretary general, and extended his shaking hand with the sheets of paper. Gorbachev looked disgusted. “Get that away from me,” he sputtered.

  By humiliating Sakharov on television, Gorbachev went too far. Six months later, when the dissident died of a heart attack on the second day of the next Congress of People’s Deputies—having, in the interim, seen the Berlin Wall come down and the Eastern Bloc come apart, just as he had predicted—Sakharov was widely perceived as a martyr, and Gorbachev as his tormentor. Tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands turned out for his funeral in Moscow. City authorities tried, habitually and ineffectually, to prevent a mass gathering by shutting down subway stations near the graveyard and posting police cordons around the perimeter; people walked for miles in the freezing cold and then proceeded coolly to break through the cordons.

  In Leningrad, about twenty thousand people gathered for a memorial rally in the afternoon of the day Sakharov was buried. The organizers’ bid to hold the event in the center of the city was rejected, so the rally began in one of those vast deserted areas that crop up around Socialist cities; this one was an amorphous space in front of the Lenin Concert Hall. A succession of speakers took the podium to speak about Sakharov. Despite the freezing cold, the crowd kept growing even as the brief winter sun disappeared. At dusk, the crowd made what seemed to be a spontaneous decision to march to the center of the city. Thousands of people fell into formation, as though directed by an invisible hand, and began a long, difficult walk.

  People took turns walking in front, carrying a portrait of Sakharov and a lit candle. The entire way, Marina Salye marched behind the portrait, signifying, on the one hand, her willingness to follow in the great dissident’s footsteps, and on the other to take responsibility for leading an illegal march. Less than six weeks earlier, Salye and her supporters had attended a different march, the annual November 7 celebration commemorating an anniversary of the October Revolution. Roughly thirty thousand people had joined the pro-democracy contingent during that parade. The police had tried to push the pro-democracy column away from the television cameras, but once it was level with the podium on which the first secretary of the Leningrad Regional Party Committee stood, waving to the crowd, the pro-democracy contingent stopped, and started chanting, “The People’s Front! The People’s Front!” Marchers in the official Communist contingent attempted to silence the chanters without breaking their own step. The Party secretary kept smiling and waving as though nothing out of the ordinary were going on. It was his last time up on the podium, greeting a November 7 crowd.

  On November 7, the pro-democracy marchers had confronted the orderly, officially sanctioned Communist marchers; now they were simply claiming the city as their own. The march would take several hours. The crowd would overcome police efforts to break it up. They would stop to hold rallies at several symbolic locations along their route. Candles would appear in their hands. Thousands more would join them as they walked. For Salye, fifty-five and overweight, the march was grueling exercise. She had come out that day wearing a heavy fur coat that was a bit too small, so she marched with it open in front, feeling exposed and inappropriate. At one point she slipped and fell, and though she did not hurt herself, she felt ashamed. Over the many hours of the march, she kept getting news from the back of the column that the police were once again trying to break up the procession.

  “The following day,” Salye recalled many years later, “we were at my house working on the People’s Front platform because we were planning a congress, when a police colonel showed up to serve me a warrant for organizing an illegal march. He was amazing, the policeman: he said, ‘You know, I could have come and not found you at home.’ He was lovely. But I said, ‘No, go right ahead.’ And I accepted the warrant and we started calling lawyers and the media. The next morning I reported to the police station…. They kept trying to get me to say who had organized the march. I kept saying, ‘How should I know? I don’t remember. There were so many people there.’” In fact, one of Salye’s People’s Front comrades had been the mastermind behind the march.

  “They kept demanding an answer,” she continued. “A telegram was delivered while I was there: some well-known democratic leaders from Moscow were speaking up in my defense. Then I was told I’d be taken to court. I grabbed on to the desk with my bare hands as hard as I could and said, ‘You’ll have to carry me to court. I’m not going anywhere until my lawyer gets here.’ I spent all day there at the police station. They kept making phone calls, trying to get instructions on what to do with me. In the end they took away all my documents, took me to a room with barred windows, and locked me there. And then it was all over, and I was allowed to leave the station to the joyous screams of my friends, who had gathered there.”

  The following day, Leningrad newspapers came out with front-page headlines reading “Arrested for Mourning Sakharov,” and Marina Salye, already one of the most popular people in the city, became its indisputable political leader. In two months, Leningrad would hold a city council election and Salye would sail in. Years later she claimed she had had no intention of running for office—she had planned to coordinate the campaign for the People’s Front candidates without running herself—but after her arrest for the Sakharov memorial march, she needed immunity from prosecution.

  THIS WOULD BE the first elected city council in Leningrad history and, really, the first popularly elected governing body in the Soviet Union. Like all cities, Leningrad had been run by the local chapter of the Communist Party. New politicians, and new rules, proposed to relegate the Communist Party to the status of—well, a political party—and to rule the city through representative democracy. The transition was fast, painful, and sometimes hilarious. In the March election, pro-democracy candidates trounced the Communist Party, taking about two-thirds of the four hundred seats; 120 seats went to the People’s Front. Following the vote, an organizing committee of sixty deputies-elect convened to discuss the future workings of the city council. Leningrad’s Party boss, Boris Gidaspov, invited the committee to see him at the Smolny Institute, a historic college building that housed the regional Party headquarters. The deputies-elect politely suggested Gidaspov come see them himself, at the Mariinsky Palace, the grand building facing St. Isaac’s Square, where the old Communist-run city council had held its sessions—where the activists of the Battle of the Angleterre had gone to try to negotiate with city officials—and where the new democratic council would be housed.

  Gidaspov, the old guard personified, had spent his entire professional life in Leningrad’s military-industrial complex, rising through the ranks fast and running vast institutes before being appointed to run the city Party organization in 1989. He walked into the conference room in the Mariinsky and headed straight for the head of the table. No sooner had he sat down than one of the deputies-elect said, “That is not your seat.” This was the changing of the guard.

  A similarly symbolic scene took place in the Mariinsky’s main hall days later, when the new city council convened for its first session. The four hundred newly elected deputies took their seats in the grand amphitheater, looking down on a small walnut desk at which two men were already seated. Both were old-time Party bureaucrats, cast in the same mold as Gidaspov: heavyset, square-shouldered, gray-suited, with layered faces that never looked clean-shaven. One of them rose and began reading a standard speech, which opened with words of congratulations to the deputies on their election. One of those being congratulated approached the desk to ask, “Who told you you were running the meeting?” The bureaucrat trailed off, confused, and Alexei Kovalev, the preservationist known as “the hero of the Battle of the Angleterre,” appeared at the front of the hall and suggested the two visitors stop getting in the way of the session. The men got up, and Kovalev and Salye took the two seats at the desk in order to run the first meeting of the first democratically elected governing body in the Soviet Union.

  The session b
egan, as planned by the coordinating committee, with three of its members making procedural announcements. When they came to the front, the hall erupted with laughter, because all three sported the standard-issue intelligentsia look—turtleneck sweaters and beards. “It was fantastical,” recalled a sociologist who was present at the session. “It was a total change of atmosphere: the suits with their mugs were out, and the informals were in.”

  Keeping with what one of them later termed “an acute sense of democracy” that brought them to the Mariinsky, the new deputies, in one of their first rulings, decided to remove all guards from the palace so that any citizen could gain access to any office or meeting hall. “The Mariinsky took on the look of a railroad station during the [Russian] Civil War,” one of the city council members wrote later. “Dozens of homeless men would stand at the entrance to the main assembly hall, grabbing deputies and trying to push typed papers into their hands. I remember a bearded man who kept trying to get the deputies to consider some brilliant invention of his. We had voted to remove the guards from the palace—and it was literally the next day that we were forced to calculate the cost of bronze details of the building’s interior that had gone missing.”

  The guard was soon reestablished, but the people kept coming. “People had so longed to be heard,” another city council member recalled later. “When voters came to see us, we felt somewhat like priests administering confession. We would say, ‘I cannot provide you with a new apartment; that would extend beyond the scope of my authority,’ and they would respond, ‘Just hear me out.’ And we would listen, attentively and patiently. And people would leave satisfied.”