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

by Masha Gessen

  At parent-teacher conferences in the evening, I notice many of the other children’s parents are wearing white ribbons.

  When I put my daughter to bed, she asks if she can go to the protest with me tomorrow.

  “No, I’m sorry, I don’t think it’s a good idea to take kids yet.”

  “But this is a legal protest, right?” She knows that otherwise I could be detained.

  I assure her that it is and that nothing bad is likely to happen to me. “I’ll probably be going to a lot of protests these coming months,” I say, “and I probably won’t be able to take you with me. But I’ll take you to the last one, when we have a celebration.”

  “You mean, when there is no more Putin?” She catches her breath, as if the thought were too much to contemplate. She is ten; she was born after Putin came to power, and she has heard conversations about him her entire life. When my kids were little, they made Putin into a sort of household villain, the bogeyman who would come get you if you did not mind your table manners. I put a stop to that, and as they have grown I have tried to give them a reasonably nuanced picture of politics, but I think I may have neglected to say that no one rules forever.

  Saturday, December 10

  Driving in from our dacha, where the children and Darya will be while I am at the protest, I listen to the radio and fret. So what if thirty-five thousand people have stated on Facebook that they are going to the protest? I have heard of people getting seven hundred Facebook RSVPs for a party—and not a single actual guest. It is the weekend, after all: people will be feeling lazy, they will want to sleep in or stay at their dachas, and they will figure someone else will go to the protest.

  As I get closer to Bolotnaya Square, I see people flowing to it from every direction: in groups, in couples, alone; young, old, middle-aged. People wearing white ribbons, white scarves, white hats, even white trousers, carrying white balloons and white carnations. It still has not snowed, so the white they wear and carry has to compensate.

  I meet up with a group of friends, including Andrei and two of his brothers. At the metal detectors, the police are calm and polite. Inside, we wander the square, scanning for familiar faces. At Monday’s protest, I knew everyone was there because I could see them all; today I know they are all here because I cannot see them for the crowd. Even texting becomes impossible, as the volume exceeds the capacity of Moscow’s cellular networks.

  We gawk at homemade banners people have brought. One features a graph of the official results reported by the Central Election Committee, overlaid with a bell curve that tells a different story: it shows what normal distribution of support for United Russia would look like. “We Don’t Trust You, We Trust Gauss,” says the poster, referring to Carl Friedrich Gauss, the mathematician who gave the world the bell curve.

  “I Did Not Vote for These Assholes,” proclaims another banner, carried by a young man with a reddish beard, “I Voted for the Other Assholes. I Demand a Recount.”

  “There are so many people here!” a very young man shouts into his cell phone. “And they are all normal! I’ve heard like a million jokes, and they were all funny!”

  If you have spent years feeling as if your views were shared by only a few of your closest friends, being surrounded by tens of thousands of like-minded people really does feel like hearing a million funny jokes at once.

  Somewhere in the distance, there is a stage. I cannot see it, and I can hardly hear any of the speakers. One of my friends remembers a trick from the early 1990s, when people would bring portable radios to rallies and use them to listen to the speakers: she turns on the radio on her cell phone (cellular service may be overtaxed, but this public square features free wireless) and gives us the highlights of speeches. We look around, and occasionally join in chants: “New Elections!” “Freedom!” “Russia Without Putin!”

  The speakers include Boris Akunin (he made it from the south of France in time), a well-loved, long-blacklisted television anchor, and assorted activists. Darya’s father speaks about election fraud. None of those who pass for opposition politicians—“the other assholes”—are here. They have not yet gotten the message that power has shifted away from the Kremlin. Navalny is still in jail, so a journalist reads his address to the protesters. And Mikhail Prokhorov, the billionaire who suspended his political career two months ago, is still silent. On Monday he will announce that he is running for president, but by then it will be too late to win cred with the revolutionary crowd: he will immediately be branded a Putin plant.

  I am wearing thermal underwear, two jackets, and moon boots; there is no way to dress for standing still in a Russian winter. After a couple of hours my friends and I decide to leave. Other people are still arriving. Walking away from the protest, I stop on a pedestrian bridge to look back at the crowd. There are a lot more than thirty-five thousand people; later estimates will range as high as a hundred fifty thousand.

  We take a large table at a restaurant that, like all the eateries in the neighborhood, is filled with protesters ordering mulled wine in an attempt to warm up. Friends and strangers are shouting the latest news across tables. Andrei is the first to read a couple of lines from a radio station’s website: “The protest is drawing to a close. A police representative has mounted the stage. He says, ‘Today we acted like the police force of a democratic country. Thank you.’ There is applause.” At our table there is a momentary silence. “This is great,” all of us start saying then, looking at one another incredulously. “This is great.” How long has it been since any of us was able to say, unequivocally, “This is great” about something happening in our city?

  I leave my friends at the restaurant to return to my family at the dacha. I drive over the Big Stone Bridge—the largest bridge over the Moscow River—just as the police leave Bolotnaya Square. There are hundreds upon hundreds of them, moving along the sidewalk four and five across, the length of the bridge. For the first time that I can remember, I do not get a knot in my stomach while I look at police in riot gear. I am stuck behind an orange truck with a snowplow. It still has not snowed, so I am not sure what the truck is doing out in the street, but I notice a white balloon tied to the corner of the plow.

  Protests were held today in ninety-nine cities in Russia and in front of Russian consulates and embassies in more than forty cities around the world.

  In the evening, Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, tells journalists that the government has no comment on the protest and promises to let them know if a comment is formulated.

  A few minutes later, NTV, the television channel taken away from Vladimir Gusinsky ten years ago and eviscerated, airs an excellent report on the protest. I watch it online—it’s been years since I had a working television in the house—and I recognize something I have observed in other countries when I covered their revolutions. There comes a day when you turn on the television and the very same goons who were spouting propaganda at you yesterday, sitting in the very same studios against the very same backdrops, start speaking a human language. In this case, though, this moment gives my head an extra spin, because I can still remember these journalists before they became goons, when they last spoke human about a dozen years ago.

  As I approach our dacha, it starts to snow. By morning, the countryside will be covered in white.

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to Cullen Murphy, who first suggested I write a piece about Vladimir Putin for Vanity Fair, and to my agent, Elyse Cheney, who noticed that the resulting piece wanted to become a book. My editor, Rebecca Saletan, made that book immeasurably better than it would have been without her. Many other people helped along the way, and I hope someday soon I will be able to thank them in print without fearing that such recognition might be harmful. You know who you are, and I hope you know how grateful I am. Two people cannot avoid mention, however: my friend and colleague Ilya Kolmanovsky, whose research and insights were crucial in the early stages of this project; and my partner, Darya Oreshkina, who has made me happier
and more productive than I have ever been.

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  Page 3 a draft law on lustratsiya: The full text of the law is available at http://www.shpik.info/statya1.html. Accessed July 14, 2010.

  Page 3 she learned that the KGB: Marina Katys, “Polozhitelny itog: Interview s deputatom Gosudarstvennoy Dumy, sopredsedatelem federalnoy partii Demokraticheskaya Rossiya Galinoy Starovoitovoy,” Professional, July 1, 1998. http://www.starovoitova.ru/rus/main.php?i=5&s=29. Accessed July 14, 2010.

  Page 3 1991 post–failed-coup decree: Constitutional Court decision citing the decree and overturning its most important provisions. http://www.panorama.ru/ks/d9209.shtml. Accessed July 14, 2010.

  Page 4 a decree forbidding protests: In fact, the ban on protests was a one-two punch: the cabinet issued a ban, and Gorbachev followed with a decree creating a special police body to enforce the ban. Both were deemed unconstitutional by the Russian government, whose authority Gorbachev, in turn, did not recognize. http://iv.garant.ru/SESSION/PILOT/main.htm. Accessed July 15, 2010.

  Page 6 she immersed herself in an investigation: Andrei Tsyganov, “Seleznev dobilsya izvineniya za statyu Starovoitovoi,” Kommersant, May 14, 1999. http://www.kommersant.ru/doc-rss.aspx?DocsID=218273. Accessed July 15, 2010.

  ONE. THE ACCIDENTAL PRESIDENT

  Page 14 experienced overall improvement: Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman, “A Normal Country: Russia After Communism,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 19, no. 1 (Winter 2005), pp. 151–74. http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/shleifer/files/normal_jep.pdf. Accessed April 30, 2011.

  Page 15 importing used European cars: David Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2002).

  Page 15 “He was the first bureaucrat”: Author interview with Boris Berezovsky, June 2008.

  Page 17 swindled Russia’s largest carmaker: Hoffman.

  Page 17 acquired part of a large oil company: Whether Berezovsky was an actual owner of 25 percent of Sibneft and 49 percent of ORT, the Channel One company, is in fact unclear: as this book goes to press, a London court is trying to determine just this. What is uncontested is that he was the sole manager of the television company and drew significant income from the oil company.

  Page 18 “someone who is capable of doing it”: Natalia Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Kolesnikov, Ot pervogo litsa: Razgovory s Vladimirom Putinym. http://archive.kremlin.ru/articles/bookchapter1.shtml. Accessed Feb. 7, 2011.

  Page 20 “Chubais believed”: Tatyana Yumasheva (Dyachenko)’s blog, entry dated Feb. 6, 2010. http://t-yumasheva.livejournal.com/13320.html#cutid1. Accessed April 23, 2011.

  TWO. THE ELECTION WAR

  Page 24 one hundred people died: Number of victims cited according to the Moscow City Court’s sentence in the case of A. O. Dekushev and Y. I. Krymshahalov. http://terror1999.narod.ru/sud/delokd/prigovor.html. Accessed May 5, 2011.

  Page 26 the decree was also illegal: Speech by Duma member Sergei Yushenkov, Kennan Institute, Washington, D.C., April 24, 2002. http://terror99.ru/commission/kennan.htm. Accessed May 5, 2011.

  Page 26 “We will hunt them down”: Putin’s Sept. 24, 1999, TV appearance. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_PdYRZSW-I. Accessed May 5, 2011.

  Page 27 resemblance to Mussolini: Unpublished memo leaked to me by Berezovsky’s team in November 1999.

  Page 27 “Everyone was so tired of Yeltsin”: Author interview with Marina Litvinovich, July 1, 2008.

  Page 30 “My friends… My dears”: Boris Yeltsin’s address, Dec. 31, 1999. Text: http://stra.teg.ru/library/national/16/0. Accessed May 6, 2011. Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvSpiFvPUP4&feature=related. Accessed May 6, 2011.

  Page 31 “Russia’s new century”: Vladimir Putin’s address, Dec. 31, 1999. Text: http://stra.teg.ru/library/national/16/2/print. Accessed May 6, 2011. Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4LLxY4RPwk. Accessed May 6, 2011.

  Page 32 “Berezovsky would keep calling me”: Author interview with Natalya Gevorkyan, June 2008.

  Page 33 “He was working directly for the enemy”: Pavel Gutiontov, “Zauryadnoye delo.” http://www.ruj.ru/authors/gut/100303_4.htm. Accessed May 8, 2011.

  Page 34 “This is February 6, 2000”: Transcript of a Feb. 9, 2000, NTV newscast. http://www.library.cjes.ru/online/?a=con&b_id=426&c_id=4539. Accessed May 7, 2011.

  Page 35 attempt to break free: Andrei Babitsky, Na voine, transcripts of Russian-language recordings of a book manuscript prepared for a French publisher. http://somnenie.narod.ru/ab/ab6.html. Accessed May 7, 2011.

  Page 35 face charges of forgery: Transcript of Andrei Babitsky’s press conference on March 1, 2000. http://archive.svoboda.org/archive/hr/2000/ll.030100-3.asp. Accessed May 8, 2011.

  Page 35 probably been no exchange: Oleg Panfilov, Istoriya Andreia Babitskogo, chapter 3. http://www.library.cjes.ru/online/?a=con&b_id=426&c_id=4539. Accessed May 8, 2011.

  Page 35 “the information he transmitted”: Panfilov, Istoriya Andreia Babitskogo.

  Page 35 funded by an act of Congress: Broadcasting Board of Governors FAQ. http://www.bbg.gov/about/faq/#q6. Accessed May 8, 2011.

  Page 35 issued a statement condemning: Congressional Research Service report, “Chechnya Conflict: Recent Developments,” updated May 3, 2000. http://www.fas.org/man/crs/RL30389.pdf. Accessed May 8, 2011.

  Page 36 “The Babitsky story”: Author interview with Natalya Gevorkyan, June 2008.

  Page 37 returned to the car and left: For the chronology of events in Ryazan, I have relied primarily on Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky, FSB vzryvayet Rossiyu, 2nd ed. (New York: Liberty Publishing, 2004), pp. 65–108, which combines many press reports with original reporting, and on Ryazanski sahar: Nezavisimoye rassledovaniye s Nikolayem Nikolayevym, the NTV television program that aired on March 24, 2000. http://video.yandex.ru/users/provorot1/view/54/. Accessed May 8, 2011.

  Page 38 in at least one of the Moscow explosions: “13 sentyabrya v Rossii—den’ traura po pogibshim ot vzryvov,” an unsigned news story on Gazeta.ru, Sept. 10, 1999. http://gazeta.lenta.ru/daynews/10-09-1999/10mourn.htm. Accessed May 8, 2011.

  Page 38 “The more alert we are”: ITAR-TASS, as cited by Litvinenko and Felshtinsky, FSB vzryvayet Rossiyu.

  Page 39 “First, there was no explosion”: Ryazanski sahar.

  THREE. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A THUG

  Page 43 the Siege of Leningrad: Michael Jones, Leningrad: State of Siege (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

  Page 44 “Imagine a soldier”: Ales’ Adamovich and Daniil Granin, Blokadnaya kniga. http://lib.rus.ec/b/212340/read. Accessed Feb. 7, 2011.

  Page 44 Burzhuikas : Harrison Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (New York: Da Capo Press, 2003), pp. vii–viii.

  Page 44 a wood-burning stove in every room: Oleg Blotsky, Vladimir Putin: Istoriya zhizni (Moscow: Mezhdunarodniye Otnosheniya), p. 24.

  Page 44 His parents… had survived the siege: Gevorkyan et al.

  Page 45 twice as many women: Yuri Polyakov, Valentina Zhitomirskaya, and Natalya Aralovets, “‘Demograficheskoye ekho’ voyny,” published in the online journal Skepsis. http://scepsis.ru/library/id_1260.html. Accessed Feb. 7, 2011.

  Page 45 given him up for adoption: Irina Bobrova, “Kto pridumal Putinu gruzinskiye korni?” Moskovski komsomolets, June 13, 2006. http://www.compromat.ru/page_18786.htm. Accessed Feb. 7, 2011.

  Page 45 inclined to believe the story: Author interview with Natalia Gevorkyan, June 2008.

  Page 46 the Putins’ apartment: Childhood friend Viktor Borisenko, quoted in Blotsky, Vladimir Putin: Istoriya zhizni, pp. 72, 89.

  Page 47 a striking assertion: Gevorkyan et al.

  Page 47 the Putins emerge as practically rich: Yevgeniy Putin, quoted in Blotsky, p. 46.

  Page 48 “Some courtyard this was”: Viktor Borisenko, quoted in Blotsky, pp. 68–69.

  Page 48 “If anyone ever insulted him”: Viktor Borisenko, quoted in Blotsky, p. 68.

  Page 49 “The
labor [shop] teacher”: Viktor Borisenko, quoted in Blotsky, p. 67.

  Page 49 “Why did you not get inducted”: Gevorkyan et al.

  Page 50 as a sixth-grader: Teacher Vera Gurevich, quoted ibid.

  Page 50 “We were playing”: Grigory Geilikman, quoted in Blotsky, p. 160.

  Page 50 “We were in eighth grade”: Nikolai Alekhov, quoted in Blotsky, p. 161.

  Page 50 “He once invited me”: Sergei Roldugin, quoted in Gevorkyan et al.

  Page 51 “Someone picked on him”: Ibid.

  Page 52 hand-to-hand combat: Blotsky, p. 259.

  Page 52 theme song from the miniseries: “S vyslannymi iz SshA razvedchikami vstretilsya Vladimir Putin,” July 25, 2010. http://lenta.ru/news/2010/07/25/spies/. Accessed Feb. 25, 2011.

  Page 52 “When I was in ninth grade”: Blotsky, p. 199.

  Page 53 subversive troops: Y. Popov, “Diversanty Stalina.” http://militera.lib.ru/h/popov_au2/01.html. Accessed Feb. 25, 2011.

  Page 53 one of only four survivors: Gevorkyan et al.

  Page 53 “some intelligence officer for sure”: Ibid.

  Page 54 “A man came out”: Blotsky, pp. 199–200.

  Page 54 “He surprised everyone”: Gevorkyan et al.

  Page 55 Putin graduated from secondary school: Blotsky, p. 155.

  Page 55 number of cars: http://www.ref.by/refs/1/31164/1.html. Mikhail Blinkin, “Avtomobil’ v gorode: Osobennosti natsionalnogo puti,” http://www.intelros.ru/pdf/arc/02_2010/42-45%20Blinkin.pdf. Accessed Oct. 27, 2011.

  Page 55 gave the car to their son: Gevorkyan et al.

  Page 56 Putin made a thousand rubles: Ibid.

  Page 56 an overcoat for himself: Gevorkyan et al.; Blotsky, pp. 226–27.

  Page 56 “All through my university years”: Gevorkyan et al.