Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

Even before the protesters had chased the Stasi out of their buildings, East Germany began the grueling and painful process of purging the Stasi from its society. All of the Putins’ neighbors not only lost their jobs but were banned from working in law enforcement, the government, or teaching. “My neighbor with whom I had become friends spent a week crying,” Ludmila Putina told her husband’s biographers. “She cried for the dream she had lost, for the collapse of everything she had ever believed. Everything had been crushed: their lives, their careers…. Katya [Ekaterina, the Putins’ younger daughter] had a teacher at her preschool, a wonderful teacher—and she was now banned from working with children. All because she had worked for the Ministry of State Security.” Twelve years later, the incoming first lady of post-Soviet Russia still found the logic of lustration incomprehensible and inhumane.

The Putins returned to Leningrad. They carried a twenty-year-old washing machine given to them by their former neighbors—who, even having lost their jobs, enjoyed a higher standard of living than the Putins could hope to attain back in the USSR—and a sum of money in U.S. dollars, sufficient to buy the best Soviet-made car available. This was all they had to show for four and a half years of living abroad—and for Vladimir Putin’s unconsummated spy career. The four of them would be returning to the smaller of the two rooms in the elder Putins’ apartment. Ludmila Putina would be reduced to spending most of her time scouring empty store shelves or standing in line to buy basic necessities: this was how most Soviet women spent their time, but after four and a half years of a relatively comfortable life in Germany, it was not only humiliating but frightening. “I was scared to go into stores,” she told interviewers later. “I would try to spend as little time as possible inside, just enough to get the bare necessities—and then I would run home. It was terrible.”

Could there have been a worse way to return to the Soviet Union? Sergei Roldugin, Putin’s cellist friend, remembered him saying, “They cannot do this. How could they? I see that I can make mistakes, but how can these people, whom we think of as the best professionals, make mistakes?” He said he would leave the KGB. “Once a spy, always a spy,” his friend responded; this was a common Soviet saying. Vladimir Putin felt betrayed by his country and his corporation—the only important affiliation he had ever known, outside his judo club—but the corporation was filled with people who increasingly felt betrayed, misled, and abandoned; it would be fair to say this was the KGB’s corporate spirit in 1990.

All of Russian history happens in St. Petersburg. The city was the capital of a prosperous empire depleted by World War I, at the start of which it lost its name: Germanic St. Petersburg became the more Russian-sounding Petrograd. The empire was destroyed by the one-two punch of the revolutions of 1917, for both of which Petrograd provided the stage. Soon the city lost its capital status, as the seat of power was moved to Moscow. Petrograd, with its poets and artists, remained the capital of Russian culture—even as the city lost its name yet again, becoming Leningrad the day the first of the Soviet tyrants died. The literary, artistic, academic, political, and business elites of the city would be gradually decimated by purges, arrests, and executions throughout the 1930s. That miserable decade closed with the Soviet-Finnish War, a disastrously ill-conceived act of Soviet aggression that segued into World War II. During the siege and after World War II, Leningrad, to which Putin’s parents had returned, was the city of ghosts. Its buildings, once majestic, stood ravaged: the window glass had been blown out by the bombing and shelling; the window frames had been used for firewood, as had the furniture. Processions of rats, hundreds and thousands strong, would march past the buildings’ pockmarked walls, taking up the entire width of the sidewalk, pushing aside the shadowy human survivors.

In the postwar decades, the city swelled with new people and their work. Leningrad became the military-industrial capital of the Soviet Union; hundreds of thousands of people from other parts of the empire settled in identical gray building blocks, which could not be erected fast enough to keep up with the influx. By the mid-1980s, the city’s population was pushing five million—far exceeding capacity even by the modest living standards set in the Soviet Union. The heart of the city, its historic center, had meanwhile been all but abandoned by the city’s builders; those families, like Putin’s, who had survived the hell of the first half of the twentieth century were living in huge, rambling communal apartments in buildings that had once been grand but now, after decades of disrepair, had entered the stage of irreversible decay.

Yet the city to which Putin returned in 1990 had changed more in the four years he had been absent than it had changed in the forty years before that. The very people Putin and his colleagues had kept in check and in fear—the dissidents, the almost-dissidents, and the friends of friends of dissidents—now acted as if they owned the city.

ON MARCH 16, 1987, a massive explosion occurred in St. Isaac’s Square in Leningrad. The blast brought down the Angleterre Hotel, whose grand façade had framed part of the city’s most beautiful square for more than a hundred fifty years and whose history was the stuff of legend and St. Petersburg’s cultural legacy. The great poet Sergei Yesenin had committed suicide in Room 5, which got the hotel mentioned in the work of at least half a dozen other poets. In a country and a city where the facts of history were most often whispered and the sites of history were frequently concealed, destroyed, or faked, the Angleterre was a rare instance of an actual artifact—which is probably why many citizens of Peter the Great’s city, much of which was literally crumbling, experienced the loss of this particular hotel as almost a personal injury.

The demolition of the hotel was planned; what was not planned was the birth, at the site of the destruction, of a movement that would play a key role in bringing down the Soviet regime.

Mikhail Gorbachev had become the leader of the Soviet state in March 1985. He had spent the first year of his reign solidifying his base in the Politburo. In his second year in office, he floated the term perestroika —restructuring—though no one, not even Gorbachev himself, quite knew what he meant. In December 1986, Gorbachev allowed the Soviet Union’s best-known dissident, Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, to return to his home in Moscow from the city of Gorky, where he had lived in internal exile for almost seven years. In January 1987, Gorbachev advanced another new term, glasnost , or openness—which did not, for the then foreseeable future, mean that censorship would be abolished, but it seemed to mean that censorship would change: for example, libraries across the country began loosening access to materials that had been kept under lock and key. In February 1987, Gorbachev commuted the sentences of 140 dissidents who had been serving time in Soviet prisons and labor colonies.

To be sure, Gorbachev did not intend to dissolve the Soviet Union, or to end the Communist Party’s rule, or, really, to change the regime in a radical way—though he himself was fond of using the word radical . Rather, he dreamed of modernizing the Soviet economy and Soviet society in discreet ways, without undermining their basic structures. But the processes he set in motion led inevitably—and, in retrospect, very rapidly—to the total collapse of the Soviet system.