Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

Later, Putin made no secret of his work for the KGB. He told a cellist named Sergei Roldugin, who would become his best friend, almost as soon as the two met. Roldugin, who had traveled abroad with his orchestra and had seen KGB handlers at work, says he was apprehensive and curious at once. “Once I tried to get him to talk about some operation that had gone down, and I failed,” he told Putin’s biographers. “Another time I said to him, ‘I am a cellist, and that means I play the cello. I’ll never be a surgeon. What’s your job? I mean, I know you are an intelligence officer. But what does that mean? Who are you? What can you do?’ And he said, ‘I am an expert in human relations.’ That was the end of the conversation. He really thought he knew something about people…. And I was impressed. I was proud and very much treasured the fact that he was an expert in human relations.” (The skeptical note in Roldugin’s “He really thought he knew something…” is as clear and unmistakable in the original Russian as it is in the English translation, but it seems that both Roldugin and Putin, who certainly vetted the quote, missed it.)

Putin’s own descriptions of his relationships paint him as a strikingly inept communicator. He had one significant relationship with a woman before meeting his future wife; he left her at the altar. “That’s how it happened,” he told his biographers, explaining nothing. “It was really hard.” He was no more articulate on the subject of the woman he actually married—nor, it seems, was he successful at communicating his feelings to her during their courtship. They dated for more than three years—an extraordinarily long time by Soviet or Russian standards, and at a very advanced age: Putin was almost thirty-one when they married, which made him a member of a tiny minority—less than ten percent—of Russians who remained unmarried past the age of thirty. The future Mrs. Putin was a domestic flight attendant from the Baltic Sea city of Kaliningrad; they had met through an acquaintance. She has gone on record saying it was by no means love at first sight, for at first sight Putin seemed unremarkable and poorly dressed; he has never said anything publicly about his love for her. In their courtship, it seems, she was both the more emotional and the more insistent one. Her description of the day he finally proposed paints a picture of a failure to communicate so profound that it is surprising these people actually managed to get married and have two children.

“One evening we were sitting in his apartment, and he says, ‘Little friend, by now you know what I’m like. I am basically not a very convenient person.’ And then he went on to describe himself: not a talker, can be pretty harsh, can hurt your feelings, and so on. Not a good person to spend your life with. And he goes on. ‘Over the course of three and a half years you’ve probably made up your mind.’ I realized we were probably breaking up. So I said, ‘Well, yes, I’ve made up my mind.’ And he said, with doubt in his voice, ‘Really?’ That’s when I knew we were definitely breaking up. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I love you and I propose we get married on such and such a day.’ And that was completely unexpected.”

They were married three months later. Ludmila quit her job and moved to Leningrad to live with Putin in the smaller of two rooms in an apartment he now shared with his parents. The apartment, in a new concrete-block monstrosity about forty minutes by subway from the center of town, had been the Putins’ since 1977: the younger Vladimir Putin had a room of his own for the first time at the age of twenty-five. It was about 130 square feet, and it had a single window placed so oddly high that one had to be standing to be able to look out of it. The newlyweds’ living conditions, in other words, were roughly similar to those of millions of other Soviet couples.

Ludmila enrolled at Leningrad University, where she studied philology. She became pregnant with their first child about a year after the wedding. While she was pregnant, and for a few months after she had Maria, her husband was in Moscow, enrolled in a yearlong course that would prepare him for service in the foreign intelligence corps. She had known he worked for the KGB long before the wedding, even though initially he told her he was a police detective: such was his cover.

THAT PUTIN SEEMS not to have been conscientious about using his cover is probably an indication that he was not sure what exactly he was covering up. His ambition—or, more accurately, his dream—had been to have secret powers of sorts. “I was most amazed by how a small force, a single person, really, can accomplish something an entire army cannot,” he told his biographers. “A single intelligence officer could rule over the fates of thousands of people. At least, that’s how I saw it.”

Putin wanted to rule the world, or a part of it, from the shadows. That is very much the role he ultimately achieved, but when he first joined the KGB, his prospects of ever having anything significant or remotely interesting to do seemed far from certain.

In the middle to late 1970s, when Putin joined the KGB, the secret police, like all Soviet institutions, was undergoing a phase of extreme bloating. Its growing number of directorates and departments were producing mountains of information that had no clear purpose, application, or meaning. An entire army of men and a few women spent their lives compiling newspaper clippings, transcripts of tapped telephone conversations, reports of people followed and trivia learned, and all of this made its way to the top of the KGB pyramid, and then to the leadership of the Communist Party, largely unprocessed and virtually unanalyzed. “Only the Central Committee of the Communist Party had the right to think in broad political categories,” wrote the last chairman of the KGB, whose task it was to dismantle the institution. “The KGB was relegated to collecting primary information and carrying out decisions made elsewhere. This structure excluded the possibility of developing a tradition of strategic political thinking within the KGB itself. But it was unparalleled in its ability to supply information of the sort and in the amount in which it was ordered.” In other words, the KGB took the concept of carrying out orders to its logical extreme: its agents saw what they were told to see, heard what they were told to hear, and reported back exactly what was expected of them.

The internal ideology of the KGB, as of any police organization, rested on a clear concept of the enemy. The institution thrived on a siege mentality, which had driven the massive manhunts and purges of the Stalin era. But Putin entered the service not only in the post-Stalin era but also during one of the very few, very brief periods of peace in Soviet history: after Vietnam and before Afghanistan, the country was involved in no ongoing armed conflict, covertly or openly. The only active enemies were the dissidents, a handful of brave souls who drew a disproportionate amount of KGB force. A new law, Article 190 of the Penal Code, made it a crime to “spread rumors or information detrimental to the Soviet societal and governmental structure,” giving the KGB virtually unlimited power in hunting down and fighting those who dared to think differently. Dissidents, suspected dissidents, and those leaning toward activity that might be considered dissident were the objects of constant surveillance and harassment. Putin claims not to have taken part in anti-dissident work but has shown in interviews that he was thoroughly familiar with the way it was organized, probably because he was lying about not having done it. A perfectly laudatory memoir of Putin written by a former colleague who defected to the West in the late 1980s mentions matter-of-factly that in Leningrad, Putin worked for the Fifth Directorate, created to fight the dissidents.