Furthermore, with the Committee’s encouragement, the city’s infrastructure began to be modernized to create the conditions necessary for successful business. The first major deal that Putin supported was the completion of a fiber-optic cable to Copenhagen. This project had been initiated back in the Soviet era but never completed. Now the efforts were successful, providing St. Petersburg with world-class international telephone connections.
Finally, there was the problem of personnel. There were few specialists who spoke foreign languages. With Sobchak’s support, Putin created a faculty of international relations at LGU. The first class was announced in 1994. Graduates of the program are now working in our Committee and in other organizations.
Much has been written in the St. Petersburg press about the food delivery scandal. What was that?
In 1992, there was a food crisis in the country, and Leningrad experienced big problems. Our businessmen presented us with a scheme: If they were allowed to sell goods—mainly raw materials—abroad, they would deliver food to Russia. We had no other options. So the Committee for Foreign Liaison, which I headed, agreed to their offer.
We obtained permission from the head of the government and signed the relevant contracts. The firms filled out all the necessary paperwork, obtained export licenses, and began exporting raw materials. The customs agency would not have let anything out of the country without the correct paperwork and accompanying documents. At the time, a lot of people were saying that they were exporting certain rare earth metals. Not a single gram of any metal was exported. Anything that needed special permission was not passed through customs.
The scheme began to work. However, some of the firms did not uphold the main condition of the contract—they didn’t deliver food from abroad, or at least they didn’t import full loads. They reneged on their commitments to the city.
A deputies’ commission was created, headed by Marina Salye, who conducted a special investigation.
No, there wasn’t any real investigation. How could there be? There was no criminal offense.
Then where does this whole corruption story come from?
I think that some of the deputies exploited this story in order to pressure Sobchak into firing me.
Why?
For being a former KGB agent. Although they probably had other motives too. Some of the deputies wanted to make money off those deals, and they wound up with nothing but a meddlesome KGB agent. They wanted to put their own man in the job.
I think the city didn’t do everything it could have done. They should have worked more closely with law enforcement agencies. But it would have been pointless to take the exploiters to court—they would have dissolved immediately and stopped exporting goods. There was essentially nothing to charge them with. Do you remember those days? Front offices appeared all over the place. There were pyramid schemes. Remember the MMM company? We just hadn’t expected things to get so far out of hand.
You have to understand: We weren’t involved in trade. The Committee for Foreign Liaison did not trade in anything itself. It did not make purchases or sales. It was not a foreign trade organization.
But the granting of licenses?
We did not have the right to grant licenses. That’s just it: A division of the Ministry for Foreign Economic Relations issued the licenses. They were a federal structure and had nothing to do with the municipal administration.
Sergei Roldugin:
Volodya changed a lot when he went to work at the mayorʹs office. We began to see less and less of each other. He was very busy. He would leave the house early and come back at night. And of course he was tired. Even when we grilled shish kebabs out at the dacha, he paced along the fence, lost in thought, in another place. He became wholeheartedly involved in St. Petersburgʹs affairs and then his emotions were drained. He had become a pragmatist.
Marina Yentaltseva:
The Putins had a dog, a Caucasian sheepdog called Malysh. The dog lived at the dacha and used to dig under the fence all the time and try to get outside. One day she did finally dig her way out, and she got hit by a car. Lyudmila Aleksandrovna scooped her up and took her to a veterinary clinic. She called from the vetʹs office and asked me to tell her husband that they weren’t able to save the dog.
I went into Vladimir Vladimirovich’s office and said, “You know . . . we have a situation . . . Malysh was killed.” I looked at him, and there was zero emotion on his face. I was so surprised at the lack of any kind of reaction that I couldn’t contain myself and said, “Did someone already tell you about it?” And he said calmly, “No, you’re the first to tell me.” And I knew I had made a blunder.
In fact, he is a very emotional man. But when he has to, he can hide his feelings. Although he also knows how to relax.
One night my friends and I went to an erotic show in Hamburg. Actually, it was hardly erotic. It was crude. And we were there with our wives! They were traveling abroad for the first time, and they had talked me into it. “Maybe it’s better not to go?” I said. “No, no, we have to. We’re grown-ups.” “Well, alright,” I said. “Remember that you’re the ones who wanted to.”
We went in, sat down at a table, and the show began. Some black performers came out on the stage—a huge black man, about two meters tall, and a black woman, who was just a little girl. Slowly they began to strip to some good music. Suddenly, without taking her eyes off the pair, my friend’s wife got up from the table, stood, and then—bang!—fainted. It was a good thing her husband caught her, or she would have hit her head.
We revived her and took her into the bathroom, where we rinsed her face. We went up to the second floor and were walking around when the performers, who had just finished their number and come off the stage, passed by—stark naked. My friend’s wife saw them and—bang!—she fainted again.
We sat down at the table. “How are you feeling?” I asked my friend’s wife. Lowering her eyes, she replied, “I think it’s something I ate. Everything’s fine. It will pass.” I said, “No, let’s go. We’ve seen everything. We’ve gotten in touch with the sublime. Now let’s scram.”
Whenever there was a problem, I was there as a scout who knew the German language. It wasn’t my first trip to Hamburg. You won’t believe me, but I was assigned to study their red-light district as part of my job. At that time we were trying to bring order to the gambling business in St. Petersburg.
I don’t know whether I was right, but I thought that the government should have a monopoly over the gambling business. My position contradicted the new Law on Anti-Monopoly Activity, but I still tried to do everything in my power so that the government could established strict control over the gaming industry.
We created a municipal enterprise that did not own any casinos but controlled 51 percent of the stock of the gaming businesses in the city. Various representatives of the basic oversight organizations—the FSB, the tax police, and the tax inspectorate—were assigned to supervise this enterprise. The idea was that the state, as a stockholder, would receive dividends from its 51 percent of the stock.
In fact, this was a mistake, because you can own tons of stock and still not really control something. All the money coming from the tables was cash and could be diverted.
The casino owners showed us only losses on the books. While we were counting up the profits and deciding where to allocate the funds—to develop the city’s businesses or support the social sector—they were laughing at us and showing us their losses. Ours was a classic mistake made by people encountering the free market for the first time.
Later, particularly during Anatoly Sobchak’s 1996 election campaign, our political opponents tried to find something criminal in our actions and accuse us of corruption. They said the mayor’s office was in the gambling business. It was almost comical to read this. Everything that we did was so absolutely transparent.
You can only argue about whether our actions were correct from an economic point of view. Obviously, the scheme was ineffective and we
didn’t achieve what we had planned. We hadn’t thought things through sufficiently. But if I had remained in Peter, I would have squeezed those casinos to the end and forced them to work for the betterment of society and to share their profits with the city. That money would have gone to pensioners, teachers, and doctors.
Vladimir Churov:
We had an unpleasant incident when Vice President Al Gore visited our city. When the vice president was being met at the airport, an official of the U.S. Consulate General in St. Petersburg was rude to one of our city leaders. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I think the U.S. official pushed the district commander. After that incident, Vladimir Putin issued an official statement that we would refuse to deal with this U.S. official in the city administration. The U.S. ambassador to Russia came to resolve the conflict. He eventually recalled not only that official but the consul general as well. As a result, Putin had the greatest respect for the entire U.S. diplomatic corps.
Yet another international political clash took place, in Hamburg in March 1994. The president of Estonia, Lennart Meri, who incidentally was well acquainted with Putin and Sobchak, indulged in some crude attacks against Russia in a public speech at a seminar of the European Union. Putin and some other Russian diplomats were in the hall. After Meri made yet another derogatory remark, referring to Russians as “occupiers,” Putin got up and walked out of the room. This was a brave act; the meeting took place in the Knights’ Hall, with its 30-foot-high ceilings and smooth marble floor. As Putin exited, his footfalls echoed across the floor. To top it all off, the huge steel door slammed behind him with a resounding crash. As Putin later told it, he had tried to hold the door open, but it was too heavy. Our Foreign Ministry commended his action after the fact.
Marina Yentaltseva:
Vladimir Vladimirovich always seemed so calm when dealing with foreign delegations and people of very high rank. Usually when you talk to big bosses, you feel shy or uncomfortable. But Vladimir Vladimirovich was always at ease. I envied him and wondered how I could learn to be that way. So I was surprised when his wife told me that he was fairly shy by nature and that he had to work hard to seem at ease with people.
It was easy talking to him. Although at first glance he seems very serious, in fact it is easy to joke with him. For example, he would say,“Call Moscow and set up an appointment for a meeting at a specific time so that I don’t have to sit in the waiting room and waste a hell of a lot of hours.” And I would reply, “Yes, just like the people waiting in your front office.” He would give me a mock-scolding look. “Marina!”
I had a good relationship with his wife, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna. She and I would talk just like good acquaintances. I remember one time when I was a guest in their home and we were sitting in the kitchen drinking tea. Vladimir Vladimirovich telephoned. She told him, “Marina and I are drinking tea.” And he probably said, “Which Marina?” because his wife answered, “What do you mean, which Marina? Your Marina!”
We grew especially close after Lyudmila Aleksandrovna had the car accident.
In 1994, I was involved in negotiations with Ted Turner and Jane Fonda about holding the Goodwill Games in St. Petersburg. They had come in person, and I was accompanying them to all their meetings. They had a very tight schedule.
Suddenly I got a call from my secretary, telling me that Lyudmila had been in an accident. “Is it serious?” I asked. “No, apparently not. But the ambulance took her to the hospital just in case.” “Let me try to get out of this meeting and go to the hospital,” I said.
When I arrived at the emergency room, I spoke with the chief physician, who assured me, “Don’t worry, she’s not in any danger. We’re just going to put a splint on, and everything will be fine.” “Are you sure?” “Absolutely,” he said. So I left.
Lyudmila Putina:
I was driving our Zhiguli and was going through a green light. Katya was asleep in the back seat. And suddenly another automobile came crashing into the side of our car. It was going about 80 kilometers an hour. I didn’t even see it. I had the green light and didn’t even look to the right. The other car had run a red light, swerving around another car that had stopped for the light.
We were fortunate that the driver crashed into the right front side of the car. If he had hit the front or back door, one of us would probably have been killed.
I lost consciousness for about half an hour, and when i woke up, I wanted to keep driving but I realized I couldn’t. I hurt a little, and I was exhausted. When the ambulance picked me up and gave me a sedative, I remember thinking, “Lord, now I’ll catch up on my sleep!” I had not gotten enough sleep for several weeks.
My first thought, of course, was about my daughter. “What’s happened to my child? My child was sitting in the back seat,” I said immediately. And I gave one of the bystanders the telephone number of Volodya’s assistant, Igor Ivanovich Sechin, so that he could come and pick Katya up, since the accident had taken place about three minutes away from Smolny. There was one bystander who was very concerned and helped me the most. She called the ambulance, she called Sechin, she took care of Katya, and she stayed nearby through the whole thing. Then she left her telephone number and it got lost somewhere in the car. That was too bad. I have wanted to thank her ever since.
The ambulance was summoned right away, but it took 45 minutes to get there. The doctors examined me and thought that my spine was broken. I was too timid to tell them to take me to the Military Medical Academy, to Yuri Leonidovich Shevchenko, so I was taken to another hospital, a place where people with traumas are always taken. The hospital was horrible. It was full of people who were dying. There were gurneys in the hallway with dead bodies on them. I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. It was called the October 25th Hospital. If I had stayed there, I probably would have died, since they had no intention of operating on my spine. I don’t think they even knew how.
Furthermore, they didn’t even notice the fracture at the base of my skull. I would have suffered post-traumatic meningitis with a fatal outcome.
Marina Yentaltseva:
A woman called our office and said “Lyudmila Aleksandrovna asked me to call you. She’s been in an accident. She asked me to telephone.” What should I do in a situation like this? Vladimir Vladimirovich wasn’t in his office. He was in the meeting with the foreigners. One of his deputies took a car, went to pick up Katya, and brought her right to the office in Smolny. I kept asking, “Katya, what happened?” And she said “I don’t know. I was sleeping.” She had been lying on the back seat. When the car crashed, she was probably thrown and knocked out.
At first I thought that Lyudmila Aleksandrovna was okay because she was in the doctors’ care. And I needed to take the little girl to a doctor because she was bruised and seemed subdued. We went to a doctor right at Smolny, and he advised me to take her to a pediatrician.
We went to a children’s neurologist at the pediatric institute to see if Katya had suffered a concussion. The doctor couldn’t really tell us, but said that the child needed some peace and quiet. The doctor asked her what had happened, but Katya wasn’t in any condition to explain anything. She was probably in shock.
The driver who had brought Katya to Smolny said that Lyudmila Aleksandrovna had been conscious when the ambulance came for her. I thought to myself, “Well, that’s alright, then, it can’t be too bad.” Later I called the hospital to find out what the diagnosis was. Nobody told me anything about a skull fracture or a cracked vertebra.
Still, we were wondering. Vladimir Vladimirovich asked me to phone Yuri Leonidovich Shevchenko at the Military Medical Academy. He wasn’t there. I phoned a second time, a third, a fourth, a fifth time, and he still wasn’t there. Finally, late in the evening, I got a hold of him. And he immediately sent his surgeons over to remove Lyudmila Aleksandrovna from the hospital and bring her to his clinic.
So Dr. Shevchenko, the current Minister of Health, is someone you know well?
No, we didn’t have a
close relationship, even after my wife’s accident. It’s just that he’s a real doctor. About four years ago, in 1996, during the first Chechen war, he removed a bullet from a soldier’s heart. The bullet had plunged into the soldier’s heart muscle, and the guy managed to stay alive. He flies to Peter on the weekends and does operations. He’s a real doctor.
Lyudmila Putina:
Valery Yevgenevich Parfyonov brought me to the clinic. He saved my life by taking me out of the operating room. My ear was torn and they had decided to sew it up. They had left me naked on the table in a freezing operating room, in a terrible state of half-consciousness, and had gone away. When Valery Yevgenevich came, they told him, “She doesn’t need anything. We just did an operation. Everything’s fine.”
He came into the operating room. I opened my eyes, and found an officer standing in front of me, holding my hand. He had a very warm palm. It warmed me up, and I knew that I had been saved.
They did an X ray at the Military Medical Academy and told me that I needed an emergency operation on my spine.
Marina Yentaltseva:
Lyudmila Aleksandrovna was staying with the children at the government dacha outside of town. Masha was still in school. When the accident happened, Lyudmila and Katya were on their way to pick her up. Katya was sick that morning and had not wanted to go anywhere, but she had asked to come along to pick up Masha.
First Person Page 9