Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

These were the future president’s parents: a disabled man, a woman who had come very close to dying from starvation and who had lost her children (a second son had died in infancy several years before the war). But by the measure of the postwar Soviet Union, the Putins were lucky: they had each other. Following the war, there were nearly twice as many women of child-bearing age as there were men. Statistics aside, the war had wrought tragedy in virtually every family, separating husbands and wives, destroying homes, and displacing millions. To have lived not only through the war but through the siege, and to still have your spouse—and your home—was, essentially, a miracle.

The younger Vladimir Putin’s birth was another miracle, so unlikely that it has given life to the persistent rumor that the Putins adopted him. On the eve of Putin’s first presidential election, a woman came forward in Georgia, in the Caucasus, claiming she had given him up for adoption when he was nine years old. A number of articles and a book or two advancing this story followed, and indeed even Natalia Gevorkyan was inclined to believe the story: she found his parents strikingly doting, and the fact that the team of biographers found no one who remembered knowing the boy before he reached school age reinforced her suspicions. It is, however, not only impossible to prove or disprove the adoption theory but also unnecessary: the indisputable fact is, whether biological or adopted, Vladimir Putin, by the standards of his time, was a miracle child.

BECAUSE VLADIMIR PUTIN WAS CATAPULTED to power from obscurity, and because he spent his entire adult life within the confines of a secret and secretive institution, he has been able to exercise greater control over what is known about him than almost any other modern politician—certainly more than any modern Western politician. He has created his own mythology. This is a good thing, because, to a far greater extent than is usually possible for any man, Vladimir Putin has communicated to the world directly what he would like to be known about him and how he would like to be seen. What has emerged is very much the mythology of a child of post-siege Leningrad, a mean, hungry, impoverished place that bred mean, hungry, ferocious children. At least, they were the ones who survived.

One entered the building in which Putin grew up through the courtyard. St. Petersburg residents call these formations “well courtyards”: enclosed on all sides by tall apartment buildings, they make a person feel as if he were standing at the bottom of a giant stone well. Like all such courtyards, this one was strewn with trash, potholed, and unlit. So was the building itself: the nineteenth-century stairs were crumbling, and the stairwell rarely had a working lightbulb. Chunks of the handrail were missing, and the rest of the construction wobbled wildly. The Putins lived on the top floor of the five-story building, and the journey up the dark stairs could be risky.

Like most apartments in central Leningrad, this was part of a flat once built with well-off renters in mind, then divided into two or three apartments, only to be split again among several families. The Putins’ apartment did not have a proper kitchen, so a single gas stove and a sink were stationed in the narrow hallway one entered from the stairwell. Three families used the four-burner stove to prepare their meals. A makeshift but permanent toilet had been constructed by annexing part of the stairwell. The small space was unheated. To bathe, the residents would heat water on the gas stove and then wash themselves while perched over the toilet in the tiny cold room.

Vladimir Putin the younger was, naturally, the only child in the apartment. An older married couple lived in a windowless room that was eventually judged uninhabitable. An old observant Jewish couple and their grown daughter occupied a room on the other side of the hallway-cum-kitchen from the Putins. Conflicts flared regularly in the communal kitchen, but the adults apparently cooperated in shielding the boy from their quarrels. Putin often spent time playing in the Jewish family’s room—and, speaking to his biographers, he made a striking assertion, claiming he did not differentiate between his parents and the old Jews.

The Putins had the largest room in the flat: around twenty square meters, or roughly twelve feet by fifteen. By the standards of the time, this was an almost palatial abode for a family of three. Almost incredibly, the Putins also had a television set, a telephone, and a dacha, a cabin outside the city. The elder Vladimir Putin worked as a skilled laborer at a train car factory; Maria took backbreaking unskilled jobs that allowed her to spend time with her son: she worked as a night watchman, a cleaning woman, a loader. But if one examines the fine shades of postwar Soviet poverty, the Putins emerge as practically rich. Given their unceasing doting on their son, this sometimes produced noteworthy results, such as first-grader Vladimir’s sporting a wristwatch, a rare, expensive, and prestigious accessory for any age group in that time and place.

The school was just a few steps from the building where the Putins lived. The education offered was, from what one can gather, unremarkable. The teacher for the first four grades was a very young woman who was finishing her college education by going to night school. Not that education was a priority in 1960, when Vladimir Putin entered first grade at the age of almost eight. His father was, by all accounts, concerned primarily with discipline, not with the quality of schooling his son received. Nor was education part of the younger Putin’s idea of success; he has placed a great emphasis on portraying himself as a thug, and in this he has had the complete cooperation of his childhood friends. By far the largest amount of biographical information available about him—that is, the bulk of the information made available to his biographers—concerns the many fistfights of his childhood and youth.

THE COURTYARD is a central fixture of postwar Soviet life, and Vladimir Putin’s personal mythology is very much rooted in it. With adults working a six-day week and child care generally nonexistent, Soviet children tended to grow up in the communal spaces outside their overcrowded apartment buildings. In Putin’s case, this meant growing up at the bottom of the well—in the well courtyard, that is, strewn with litter and populated by toughs. “Some courtyard this was,” his former classmate and longtime friend Viktor Borisenko told a biographer. “Thugs all. Unwashed, unshaven guys with cigarettes and bottles of cheap wine. Constant drinking, cursing, fistfights. And there was Putin in the middle of all this…. When we were older, we would see the thugs from his courtyard, and they had drunk themselves into the ground, they were hitting bottom. Many of them had been to jail. In other words, they did not manage to get good lives for themselves.”

Putin, younger than the thugs and slight of build, tried to hold his own with them. “If anyone ever insulted him in any way,” his friend recalled, “Volodya would immediately jump on the guy, scratch him, bite him, rip his hair out by the clump—do anything at all never to allow anyone to humiliate him in any way.”

Putin brought his fighting ways to grade school with him. References to fistfights abound in the recollections of his former schoolmates, but the following description gives a telling snapshot of the future president’s temperament: “The labor [shop] teacher dragged Putin by the collar, from his classroom to ours. We had been making dustpans in his class and Vladimir had done something wrong…. It took him a long time to calm down. The process itself was interesting. It would start to look like he was feeling better, like it was all over. And then he would flare up again and start expressing his outrage. He did this several times over.”