First Person

by Vladimir Putin

  Now I had to face picking up Masha and figuring out what to do with the children. I said to Vladimir Vladimirovich, “Let me take the girls out to my mother’s house.” He said, “No, that’s awkward; but if you would agree to spend the night with the girls out at the dacha, I’d be very grateful.” “Okay,” I said.

  On the way to the dacha we passed the second hospital where Lyudmila Aleksandrovna had been taken, and I saw Vladimir Vladimirovich’s car. He was getting ready to leave. I asked the driver to pull over, and I got out of the car. “The girls are in the car,” I told him. He went over to them, and I went into the hospital-they wouldn’t allow the children in.

  Lyudmila Aleksandrovna had just been operated on. She was conscious, and she asked me whether I had taken some warm clothing for the girls. It had gotten very cold that day, and there might not be warm things at the dacha.

  When we were getting ready to leave, Vladimir Vladimirovich said that he would try to come back later but most likely wouldn’t make it because his meetings would probably go late into the night.

  The driver dropped us off at the dacha and left. But he forgot to tell us how to turn the heat on in the house, and it was terribly cold. The girls behaved beautifully. When we got to the house, they became helpful: “Aunt Marina, you have to take the blanket down from there, and the sheets are over here,” they explained. They weren’t in shock, and they didn’t go weeping off into the corner. They tried to help.

  The girls, of course, understood that it was all very serious. When we were on our way to the dacha and passed the hospital, and they saw their papa’s car, they immediately asked “Is this where Mama is?” How did they know she had been taken to a new hospital? We hadn’t told them about taking her to the Academy, so as not to worry them.

  I put the girls in the same bed so they would be warm enough. At about three in the morning, I was startled by a knock on the door. I was frightened because there was no one else at the dacha. But it turned out that it was Vladimir Vladimirovich, who had at last gotten free from Ted Turner. He immediately found the switch and turned on the heater.

  I had never seen him like this. I can’t say that he was thrown for a loop and totally at a loss and didn’t know what to grab on to. That wasn’t the case. I just sensed that he was trying to come up with a plan in his head. Still, I never saw Vladimir Vladimirovich like this.

  He came home at three in the morning, and left again at seven. I stayed with the girls until evening, when Ykaterina Tikhonovna, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna’s mother, came from Kaliningrad.

  How did she know?

  I had sent her a telegram. Lyudmila Aleksandrovna might have been angry when she found out, but I did it anyway. I asked her to come—of course, with Vladimir Vladimirovich’s consent. She stayed with the children until Lyudmila Aleksandrovna was released from the hospital.

  Did she take a long time to recover?

  She spent about a month and a half or even two months in the hospital. They also discovered a fracture at the base of her skull. That worried them much more than the crack in her spine.

  Lyudmila Putina:

  After the spinal operation, I lay in the intensive care unit and I kept telling the doctors that my jawbones were shifting around. And they kept joking, “Don’t worry, we’ll put in new ones.” But then the surgeon who had operated on me decided to check it out, and just in case, to take an X ray. That’s when they found the fracture at the base of my skull. They did another operation and began to treat me. I realize now that the doctors had great doubts about whether I was going to survive. I was lucky to make it out in one piece.

  I only regret that they made incisions on both sides of my neck, front and back. Before the accident, it was a lot prettier.

  Were you frightened at the diagnosis?

  No, not particularly, because I was in intensive care, and delirious. I was just very sorry about my neck. I began to cry. When Valery Yevgenyevich, the surgeon, found out why I was crying, he said, “What a little fool! Her spine and skull are fractured, and she’s crying because of some scars on her neck!”

  I did cry. I was afraid those scars would be visible. In fact they turned out to be hardly noticeable.

  Marina Yentaltseva:

  She was in the hospital ward, in a room with four people, when she discovered the skull fracture herself. Vladimir Vladimirovich and the girls and I visited her all the time.

  Lyudmila Putina:

  When I got out of the hospital, just crawled around my apartment for the first two weeks. Then, gradually, I began to be able to do things. In the end, it took me about two to three years to get back to my normal life.

  Sergei Roldugin:

  Once Volodya came to my dacha with his driver. We sat and talked for a while and then went to bed. And I noticed he put an air gun down next to him. Evidently something was amiss. I said, “Vovka, what are you doing? Do you think an air gun is going to save you?” “It won’t save me,” he said. “But it makes me feel calmer.”

  This happened in the last days of his job at the mayor’s office, when Sobchak’s electoral campaign was just getting off the ground.

  From the outset, it was clear that the mayoral elections in 1996 would be very complicated for us. I warned Anatoly Aleksandrovich Sobchak that these elections were going to be hard.

  In 1992, I had played a definitive role in Sobchak’s election as the first popularly elected mayor of the city. As chair of the Leningrad City Council under the old system, Sobchak could have been removed by the council members at any moment. He needed a more stable position.

  Sobchack finally agreed that we had to introduce the post of mayor. But because he had fairly conflictual relations with the majority of the deputies on the council, he wasn’t sure that the proposition would pass. Meanwhile, his public popularity was very high. The deputies knew that Sobchak would be elected mayor if they voted to introduce the post. And they didn’t want that. They liked the fact that they could always keep him on a hook.

  Still, I was able to convince some of the deputies that it would be best for the city if we had the mayoral post. I also managed to mobilize the heads of the city districts. They didn’t have the right to vote, but they could influence their deputies.

  In the end, the decision to introduce the post of mayor was passed by the Leningrad City Council, by a margin of a single vote.12

  Four years later it was clear that in order to win an election, he would need professional campaign managers and technicians—not just a guy who could finesse the deputies. This was a whole new ball game.

  You gave Sobchak some advice on how he should run the campaign?

  I told him right off, “You know, you’re on a completely different playing field now. You need specialists.” He agreed, but then he decided that he would conduct his own electoral campaign.

  Out of overconfidence?

  It’s hard to say. You know, running a campaign, bringing in specialists—all of this costs money. And we didn’t have any. Sobchak had been under investigation for a year and a half on allegations that he had bought an apartment with city funds. But in fact he didn’t have any money either for an apartment or for an election campaign. We were not extracting funds from the city budget. It never even entered our heads to find the money we needed that way.

  Yakovlev got the funds he needed—at Moscow’s expense. He was supported by the very same people who orchestrated the campaign against Sobchak.

  Korzhakov played an active role against him. . .

  According to the information we had, Soskovets did, as well. The law-enforcement agencies were brought in later. They played very dirty.

  About a year and a half before the elections, a commission came to St. Petersburg from Moscow. The commission had been appointed by the heads of three agencies: the FSB, the Interior Ministry, and the prosecutor’s office. They opened up several criminal cases and made Sobchak a witness in two of them. During the election campaign, someone sent an inquiry to the Prosecutor General
’s office, asking whether Sobchak was involved in any criminal investigations. The very same day the answer came back: Yes, there were two criminal cases under investigation. Naturally, they didn’t explain that he was a witness, not a suspect, in these cases. The reply from the Prosecutor General’s office was duplicated, and flyers were dropped over the city from a helicopter. The law enforcement agencies were interfering directly in a political contest.

  Sobchak decided to run his own campaign office. Lyudmila Borisovna, his wife, got involved, and he pronounced her campaign manager. We tried to talk both of them out of this, because we weren’t convinced that everyone in the campaign office would be willing to take orders from her.

  We lost a lot of time debating about who should run the campaign. Aleksei Kudrin, who was also a deputy of Sobchak’s, got involved. But Sobchak asked me to continue to work in city affairs. Somebody had to manage the economic activity of a city with a population of five million citizens during that period. At the last minute, between the first and second rounds, Kudrin and I tried to jump into the fray, but by then it was hopeless. We really blew it on the election.

  For some time after our defeat in the mayoral elections, I stayed in my office in Smolny. The second round of the presidential elections was underway, and I was working for the St. Petersburg headquarters of Yeltsin’s campaign. Vladimir Yakovlev, former governor of Leningrad oblast, now elected mayor of St. Petersburg, didn’t kick me out of my office right away; but as soon as the presidential elections were over, I was asked rather harshly to free up the space. By that time I had already turned down Yakovlev’s offer to keep my post as deputy mayor. He had made the offer through his people. I thought it would be impossible to work with Yakovlev, and I conveyed that to him.

  Besides, during the campaign, I was the one who had initiated a statement signed by all the officials in the mayor’s office that we would all leave Smolny if Sobchak lost. It was important to express our solidarity, so that all the people who worked with Anatoly Aleksandrovich and his administration would realize that his defeat would be a defeat for them, too. It was a good stimulus to get them all involved in the struggle.

  We called a press conference and made a public statement, which I read. So it was impossible for me to remain behind in the mayor’s office after Sobchak lost.

  Furthermore, I had attacked Yakovlev during the election campaign. I don’t remember the context now, but in a television interview I had called him a Judas. The word seemed to fit, and I used it.

  Although my relations with Yakovlev didn’t improve after that, oddly enough they also didn’t deteriorate. Still, I couldn’t stay behind with him. The same went for many of my colleagues. Misha Manevich came to me and said, “Listen, I want to get your advice. Yakovlev is offering me the job of vice mayor.” I said, “Misha, of course you should take it.” And he said to me, “How can I? We all agreed that we’d leave.” I said to him, “Misha, what are you talking about? It was a campaign; we had to do that. But how can you leave all this? Who will work here? The city needs professionals.” I talked him into staying.

  Misha was an amazing guy. I am so sorry that he was murdered. It was such an injustice. Whose toes did he step on? It’s just shocking. He was so mild, well mannered, and flexible in the best sense of the word. He had principles. He didn’t accommodate everybody, but he never got on his high horse. He always looked for a way out, for an acceptable solution. I still don’t understood how he could have been murdered. I just don’t understand it.

  Besides Misha, I talked several other colleagues into staying. Dima Kozak, who was head of the legal department, had already handed in his letter of resignation, and I talked him into coming back. But all told, a lot of people left Smolny.

  Marina Yentaltseva:

  I wrote my letter of resignation on the last day Vladimir Vladimirovich worked at Smolny. I left without having anywhere to go. There was no back up plan for me.

  It had been hard working with Putin, but very interesting. It’s always interesting, working with smart people. And I couldn’t imagine ever working with anyone else. Vladimir Vladimirovich guessed my sentiments even before I handed in my resignation. He began to try to talk me out of it. “Marina, why have you decided to leave? Don’t go,” he said. He said that he didn’t know where he was going to be working, and that he wasn’t sure that he would be able to offer me a job in the future. I replied, “Regardless of whether you can offer me anything in the future or not, I still am not going to work here.”

  When I took my letter of resignation in for his signature, my eyes were wet. He noticed it, and tried to reassure me. “Marinochka, don’t get so upset.” I tried to get hold of myself. “Alright, that’s it, I won’t anymore.” And he said, “Don’t get so upset, please.”

  Of course I really suffered heavily through all this. I was sad to come to the end of such an interesting and quite meaningful period in my life. Still, I was absolutely certain that everything would work out fine for Vladimir Vladimirovich. I knew that such a smart person would not remain on the shelf for long.

  In July, my family and I moved to the dacha that I had built several years earlier. I waited expectantly. Everyone was saying that I was “so needed by everybody” and that someone would definitely call me. Anatoly Sobchak had said he would definitely make me an ambassador. He had talked to Primakov. He told me, “I spoke to the minister. You’ll be an ambassador.” Of course I doubted that anyone would send me anywhere as an envoy, but it was awkward telling Sobchak the truth. I couldn’t say “Anatoly Aleksandrovich, that’s a total fantasy! You and I have no more hope of seeing an ambassadorship than we have of seeing our own ears!” And I was right.

  Anatoly Aleksandrovich Sobchak was an emotional man. He liked to be the center of attention and to be talked about. It seemed to me that it didn’t matter to him whether people were damning or praising him.

  At the start of his job at the Leningrad City Council, Sobchak indulged in several sharp attacks on the army. He called the generals “blockheads,” even though he didn’t mean it, which I know for a fact. Sobchak had a positive attitude toward the army. But once when he was reaching for a snappy phrase in a public speech before a sympathetic audience, he used the word, and it was a mistake.

  The generals really loathed him. Once there was a military meeting that he, as a member of the military council of the Leningrad Military District, was supposed to attend. It was on his calendar. But Alla Borisovna Pugacheva, the popular singer, was supposed to arrive in Leningrad at the same time. He said to me, “Listen, call the generals and tell them that I can’t make it.” He just wanted to meet Pugacheva. The generals had already moved their meeting once to accommodate his schedule. “You have to go,” I told him. “Well, tell them I’m sick!” he said. And he went off to the airport to meet Pugacheva.

  I called the commander, “You know, Anatoly Aleksandrovich is unable to come. He is sick.” “Really? Alright, well, thanks for telling me.” Two weeks later, I met the commander, and he said to me, insulted, “So he was sick, huh?” It turned out he had seen Sobchak meeting Pugacheva at the airport on television and that he had gone to her concert. And then he made an unkind remark about Lyudmila Borisovna, although she had nothing to do with it. “So he has time to meet with those . . . even when he’s sick. And he has no time to be involved with government business?”

  When Sobchak flew off to Paris, where were you?

  In St. Petersburg, although I was already working in Moscow by then.

  Tell us about it.

  What’s to tell?

  Well, there was some convoluted story involving his departure. . . .

  It wasn’t convoluted. I was in Peter, so I went to visit him in the hospital.

  You just went to say goodbye?

  No, I didn’t say goodbye. I just visited him in the hospital, and that was it. He was in the cardiac unit, and then Yura Shevchenko, the head of the Military Medical Academy, transferred him.

  And then on No
vember 7, his friends—I think they were from Finland—sent him a medevac plane, and he was flown to a hospital in France.

  Just like that? Nobody organized anything in advance? Some people just sent an airplane?

  Yes, his friends sent an airplane. Since it was November 7—a national holiday—his absence from St. Petersburg was not noticed until November 10.

  From the outside, it all looked like a special operation organized by a professional.

  What are you talking about? There was nothing special about it. The newspapers wrote that he was whisked out, without even going through customs. That’s not true, he passed through customs and passport control at the border. Everything was as it was supposed to be. They put stamps in his passport. They put him on the airplane. That was that.

  Applause, applause. But they could have arrested him?

  They probably could have. But I don’t know what for.

  To this day you don’t understand?

  No, why are you saying that? In fact, I do understand that they had no grounds to arrest him. He had been implicated in this murky story of the apartment. A case was opened up, but it fell apart in the end. They put the screws to Sobchak for four years and then hounded the poor guy all over Europe.