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

by Masha Gessen

  IN 1990, the world was going to hell. Or at least the Soviet Union was. On January 13, 1990, pogroms broke out in the streets of the Azerbaijan capital, Baku, historically the most diverse of all the cities in the Russian empire. Forty-eight ethnic Armenians were killed and nearly thirty thousand—the city’s entire remaining Armenian population—fled the city. World chess champion Garry Kasparov, a Baku Armenian, chartered a plane to evacuate family, friends, and their friends. On January 19, Soviet troops stormed Baku, ostensibly to restore order, and left more than a hundred civilians—mostly ethnic Azeris—dead.

  The Soviet empire was splitting at the seams. The center was helpless to hold it together; its army was brutal and ineffectual.

  The Soviet economy, too, was nearing collapse. Shortages of food and everyday products had reached catastrophic proportions. If Moscow was still able, albeit barely, to mobilize the resources of the entire huge country to get basic goods onto at least some of its store shelves, then Leningrad, the country’s second-largest city, reflected the full extent of the disaster. In June 1989, Leningrad authorities had begun rationing tea and soap. In October 1990, sugar, vodka, and cigarettes joined the list of rationed products. In November 1990 the democratic city council felt compelled to take the terrifyingly unpopular step of introducing actual ration cards—inevitably reminiscent of the ration cards used during the siege of the city in World War II. Every Leningrad resident now had the right to procure three pounds of meat per month, two pounds of processed meats, ten eggs, one pound of butter, half a pound of vegetable oil, one pound of flour, and two pounds of grains or dry pasta. In introducing the ration cards, the city councillors hoped not only to stave off hunger—the word, in all its obscenity, was no longer perceived as belonging to history or to faraway lands—but also to prevent public unrest.

  The city came perilously close to mass violence twice that year: during the tobacco riot of August 1990 and the sugar riot a few weeks later. Cigarettes had been scarce for some time, but the big stores in central Leningrad generally had at least one brand for sale. One day in late August 1990, though, even the stores along Nevsky Prospekt had no smokes. A crowd gathered in front of one of the stores in the morning, in anticipation of a delivery that never came. The store closed for lunch, to reopen an hour later, its shelves still empty. By three in the afternoon, a mob of several thousand enraged smokers had blocked traffic on Nevsky and was getting ready to start crashing store windows. Police leadership called the city council in a panic: if violence broke out, they would be unable to prevent either injury or property damage. Some of the deputies, led by Sobchak, rushed over to Nevsky to try to calm the crowd.

  The politicians arrived just in time. The protesters had already uprooted a huge sidewalk planter and dislodged a long piece of fence from a nearby yard and were constructing barricades across the city’s main avenue. Traffic was at a standstill. Police special forces, formed just a couple of years earlier and already known for their brutality in breaking up rallies—their batons were nicknamed “the democratizers”—had arrived at the scene and were getting ready to storm the protesting smokers and their barricades. Unlike the regular police, these troops in riot gear did not seem at a loss: they were certain there would be blood. Sobchak and several other well-known deputies tried to reason with different groups within the crowd, picking out people who seemed to recognize them and striking up conversations. Former dissident and political prisoner Yuli Rybakov, now also a city council member, walked over to the special forces to assure their brass that a truckload of cigarettes would be arriving any minute and the protest would be resolved peacefully.

  Another city council team, led by Salye, was combing the city’s warehouses, looking for a stash of cigarettes. They found some and delivered them to the protesters on Nevsky well after dark. The smokers lit up and dispersed, leaving the city council members to disassemble their makeshift barricades and consider the prospects of future riots that might not be resolved with such relative ease, because eventually, it seemed, the city would run out of everything.

  A few weeks later, at the height of late-summer preserves-making season, sugar disappeared from store shelves. Fearing a repeat of the tobacco riot, a group of city councillors began investigating. They uncovered what they believed was a Communist Party conspiracy to discredit the city’s new democratic regime. Taking advantage of the fact that no one really knew any longer who held what authority in the city, Communist Party functionaries had apparently pulled some old levers in order to prevent the unloading of freight trains that had transported sugar to Leningrad. Marina Salye called an emergency meeting of some city council members and dispatched them personally to monitor the arrival, unloading, and delivery of sugar to stores. A riot was thus averted.

  By this time Marina Salye, the geologist, had been elected to chair the city council’s committee on food supplies. Somehow it seemed that a woman who had never had anything to do with food or retail, who had never been much of a professional organizer or anyone’s boss, but who appeared inherently uncorrupted and incorruptible would do the best possible job of preventing hunger in Leningrad. The city’s most trusted politician was logically given the city’s most important and most difficult job.

  IN MAY 1991, Salye, in her capacity as chairwoman of the Leningrad City Council’s committee on food supplies, traveled to Berlin to sign contracts for the importing of several trainloads of meat and potatoes to Leningrad. Negotiations had more or less been completed: Salye and a trusted colleague from the city administration were really there just to sign the papers.

  “And we get there,” Salye told me years later, still outraged, “and this Frau Rudolf with whom we were supposed to meet, she tells us she can’t see us because she is involved in urgent negotiations with the City of Leningrad on the subject of meat imports. Our eyes are popping out. Because we are the City of Leningrad, and we are there on the subject of meat imports!”

  Salye and her colleague rushed to call the food supplies committee of the Leningrad city administration, a counterpart to her own committee: the only explanation they could imagine was that the executive branch had, inexplicably, elbowed in on the contract. But the chairman of the committee knew nothing of the negotiations. “So I call Sobchak,” Salye remembered. “I say, Anatoly Alexandrovich, I have just found out—and by now I have been given figures—that Leningrad is buying sixty tons of meat. Sobchak calls the External Economic Bank while I am hanging on—I can hear him speaking—and he names the firm and the bank confirms that, yes, a credit line for ninety million deutsche marks has been opened for this firm. And he doesn’t tell me anything else: he says, ‘I have no idea what is going on.’”

  Salye went home empty-handed, only half hoping that the sixty tons of meat supposedly bought by the city would actually materialize. It did not, which meant she hardly had time to pursue the mystery meat story, which kept nagging at her. Three months later, however, it was subsumed by another event, much more frightening and no less mystifying—and, in Salye’s mind, inextricably connected with her German misadventure.

  THE MOST IMPORTANT JUNCTURE in modern Russian history, the country’s most fateful moment, is, strangely, not the subject of any coherent narrative. There is no national consensus on the nature of the events that defined the country, and this very lack of consensus is, arguably, modern Russia’s greatest failing as a nation.

  In August 1991, a group of Soviet federal ministers, led by Gorbachev’s vice president, attempted to remove Gorbachev from office, with the ostensible goal of saving the USSR from destruction. The coup failed, the USSR fell apart, and Gorbachev lost power anyway. Twenty years later, there is no universally or even widely believed story of the events. What motivated the ministers? Why did their takeover fail as quickly and miserably as it did? Finally, who won, exactly?

  The expectation of a hard-line backlash had been in the air since the beginning of the year. Some people even claimed to know the date of the planned coup ahead of time; I know
at least one entrepreneur, one of the very first Russian rich, who left the country because he had been tipped off about the coup. Nor did one need to have an inside track to the KGB or an overactive imagination in order to expect the coup: a sense of dread and of a fatal kind of instability was palpable. Armed ethnic conflicts were flaring up all over the country. The Baltic republics—Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—decided to sever their ties with the Soviet Union, and Boris Yeltsin, chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet, supported them in this. Gorbachev sent tanks into Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, to suppress the uprising there. That was in January. In March, there were tanks in the streets of Moscow when Gorbachev, either driven to despair by the sense that the country was out of control or caving in to hard-liners within his own administration, or both, tried to ban all public demonstrations in Moscow; that was when I first saw Galina Starovoitova leading hundreds of thousands of Muscovites who had defied the decree and the tanks. Also in March, Gorbachev organized a referendum on whether to maintain the Soviet Union as an entity; the people in nine of the fifteen constituent republics voted in favor, but six republics boycotted the vote. At the end of the month, Georgia conducted its own referendum and voted to secede from the USSR.

  The republics stopped paying dues to the federal center, exacerbating a budget crisis that was already massive. Shortages of food and basic goods grew worse even when it seemed worse was not possible. In April, the government tried gingerly to loosen price controls; prices went up but supplies did not. In June, Ukraine declared its independence from the USSR, as did Chechnya, which was actually a part of the Russian Republic of the USSR. Russia held presidential elections in June, electing Yeltsin. Moscow and Leningrad both established the office of mayor, which had not existed in Soviet times, and in June, Sobchak was elected mayor of Leningrad. It was a job that suited him better than being chairman of the city council: he had, after all, always acted the executive. Putin became deputy mayor for international relations.

  OVER TWO YEARS of constant political change and tumultuous civic debate, Soviet citizens had grown dependent on their television sets. On August 19, 1991, those who rose early woke up to find them silent. Or not quite silent: Swan Lake, the ballet, was being broadcast over and over. Starting at six in the morning, state radio began airing a series of political decrees and addresses. An hour later, the same documents began to be read on the television as well.

  “Countrymen! Citizens of the Soviet Union!” began the most eloquent of the documents, all of which were broadcast repeatedly. “We speak to you at a critical juncture for our fatherland and for all of our people! Our great motherland is in grave danger! The politics of reform, launched by M. S. Gorbachev, intended to guarantee the dynamic development of the country and the democratization of our society, has led us to a dead end. What began with enthusiasm and hope has ended in loss of faith, apathy, and despair. The government at all levels has lost the trust of the citizenry. Politicking has taken over public life, forcing out genuine care for the fate of the fatherland and the citizen. An evil mockery has been made of state institutions. The country has, in essence, become ungovernable.”

  The junta, which included the chairman of the KGB, the prime minister, the interior minister, the deputy chairman of the security council, the defense minister, the vice president, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, and the heads of the trade and agricultural unions, went on to make promises to the people:

  “Pride and honor of the Soviet man shall be restored fully.”

  “The country’s growth should not be built on a falling standard of living of its population. In a healthy society, a constant growth of wealth will be the norm.”

  “Our foremost task will be finding solutions to the problems of food and housing shortages. All forces will be mobilized to satisfy these, the most important of the people’s needs.”

  To that end, proclaimed a different document, “taking into account the needs of the population, which has demanded that decisive measures be taken to prevent the slipping of the society toward a national catastrophe, that law and order be secured, a state of emergency shall be declared in several locations in the USSR for a period of six months, beginning at four o’clock in the morning Moscow time, 19 August 1991.” The junta, accordingly, called itself the State Committee for the State of Emergency in the USSR (GKChP SSSR). They told the people over and over that Gorbachev was ill, unfit to hold office. In fact, he was under house arrest at a vacation home in the Black Sea resort of Foros.

  THE SECOND HALF OF AUGUST is dead season in Russian cities. City councils were out of session; many politicians, activists, and other citizens were out of town. When people who were in town heard the news, they began gathering at their workplaces, hoping to get some direction or some information, or simply to experience grief and dread together with other human beings.

  The first three members of the Leningrad City Council arrived at the Mariinsky Palace just after seven in the morning. They decided to convene a session of the council, so they began making phone calls. By ten, they still did not have a quorum. But this was when those present saw General Viktor Samsonov, head of the Leningrad Military District, come on television, identify himself as the regional representative of the GKChP and declare a state of emergency in the city. In the absence of a quorum, Igor Artemyev, a deputy chairman of the city council, decided to call at least a working meeting to order. The bearded, soft-spoken Artemyev, a thirty-year-old Ph.D. in biology, inexperienced in running meetings, was entirely unprepared for what came next. He gave the floor to the first person who asked for it; it happened to be an appointed representative of the GKChP, Rear Admiral Viktor Khramtsov. He had barely begun to speak when Vitaly Skoybeda, a thirty-year-old city council member known for his propensity to get into fights, stormed the floor, shouting that Khramtsov should be arrested—and slugging him.

  City Council chairman Alexander Belyaev, who had been out of town, walked in at this key juncture. Calling the proceedings to order, he quickly approached the rear admiral, who was still prone on the hall’s spectacular parquet floor, and asked him whether there was a document establishing a state of emergency in the city. There was not. In that case, Belyaev resolved, there was no state of emergency. Marina Salye called the GKChP a “military coup”—a not yet obvious definition that struck those present as very exact. The councillors began discussing a plan of resistance, forming a coordinating committee, and drafting a statement in opposition to the coup. The question now was how to get the message to the people of Leningrad.

  Mayor Sobchak, too, was out of town, and no one knew how to reach him. He called the city council on the phone in the late morning or early afternoon, just when the councillors had completed their discussion. “We told him that we are planning to go to the television station in order to inform the city as soon as possible that this is a military coup,” Salye told me years later. “He said, ‘Don’t do it, it will just cause panic. Wait for me to get there.’” Several of the city councillors, including Salye, tried to get to the television station anyway, but they were not allowed in. The waiting for Sobchak commenced.

  Sobchak had spent the morning at Boris Yeltsin’s dacha outside Moscow. The Russian president had summoned all the leading democrats then in Moscow. It was a scared and confused group of men. By any logic anyone could understand, Yeltsin should have been arrested; no one could figure out why he had not been. In fact, a warrant for his arrest had been signed overnight, and he should have been taken when he flew into Moscow that morning. But for some reason no one could explain then or later, the arrest did not take place. KGB agents were then directed to encircle Yeltsin’s dacha. They saw him enter the house and later leave it, but they never received a final order to place him under arrest; as it turned out later, two deputy commanders of the unit in charge of the operation had objected and ultimately blocked the warrant. The KGB agents sat armed and idle outside his house as Yeltsin sped off toward the seat of the Russian government in central Moscow.


  Others present, including Sobchak, traveled to the airport to fly to their respective cities to coordinate local resistance efforts. But before leaving Moscow, Sobchak called Leningrad and directed police special forces to block all entrances and exits to the Leningrad television station. Whether he did this before or after placing the call to the city council is not clear. What is clear is that this was why Salye and others were not allowed to enter.

  They waited. Sobchak should have landed long ago. He had, but before coming to the city council—as all of Leningrad seemed to expect him to do: a crowd was gathering in front of the Mariinsky, growing larger every hour—Sobchak went to Leningrad district military headquarters to speak with General Samsonov. “Why did I do so?” he wrote later in a memoir. “I still cannot explain my actions. It must have been intuition, because when I arrived at the district headquarters in Palace Square, a GKChP working meeting was just getting under way in Samsonov’s office…. Our conversation ended with Samsonov giving me his word that, barring any extreme or extraordinary events, there would be no troops in the city, and my promising to maintain safety in the city.”

  In fact, what Sobchak did was choose a course of action distinctly different from that of his colleagues in Moscow and many other cities: once again, he decided to hedge his bets by creating a situation in which he would be safe if the hard-liners won but get to keep his democrat’s credentials if they lost.

  MOSCOW’S CITY COUNCIL also convened at ten in the morning and also resolved to oppose the coup. Unlike their Leningrad colleagues, Moscow city councillors had the unequivocal support of the city’s mayor, Gavriil Popov, who, among other things, ordered city services to cut off water, power, and telephone connections to any buildings from which GKChP supporters were operating, and city banks to stop issuing funds to GKChP and affiliated organizations. The city council and the mayor’s office together formed a task force to coordinate resistance efforts. As troops were entering the city from different directions throughout the day of August 19, so were volunteers gathering around the Moscow “White House,” the high-rise that was home to the Russian government. When GKChP representatives called Moscow’s deputy mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, to try to negotiate, Luzhkov, who had always been more of a bureaucrat than a democrat, cursed them and hung up the phone.