Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

Keeping with what one of them later termed “an acute sense of democracy” that brought them to the Mariinsky, the new deputies, in one of their first rulings, decided to remove all guards from the palace so that any citizen could gain access to any office or meeting hall. “The Mariinsky took on the look of a railroad station during the [Russian] Civil War,” one of the city council members wrote later. “Dozens of homeless men would stand at the entrance to the main assembly hall, grabbing deputies and trying to push typed papers into their hands. I remember a bearded man who kept trying to get the deputies to consider some brilliant invention of his. We had voted to remove the guards from the palace—and it was literally the next day that we were forced to calculate the cost of bronze details of the building’s interior that had gone missing.”

The guard was soon reestablished, but the people kept coming. “People had so longed to be heard,” another city council member recalled later. “When voters came to see us, we felt somewhat like priests administering confession. We would say, ‘I cannot provide you with a new apartment; that would extend beyond the scope of my authority,’ and they would respond, ‘Just hear me out.’ And we would listen, attentively and patiently. And people would leave satisfied.”

The realization that voters expected not only to be heard but also to be protected and fed would come a few months later.

IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PRINCIPLES of radical democracy, the city council had no formal leader. This, however, proved impractical and even impolitic: as members of the new city council struggled to invent parliamentary procedure more or less from scratch, testing and reasserting rules of order in real time—and often on the air of the local television channel—Leningrad voters began to grow impatient. The city, the country, and life itself seemed to be falling apart all around them while the democrats practiced democracy without getting anything done.

Marina Salye, still the city’s most popular politician, decided not to run for chairman of the council. Twenty years later, she was hard-pressed to explain that decision: “I wish someone could tell me the answer,” she said. “Was it my stupidity, my inexperience, my shyness, or my naiveté? I don’t know, but the fact is, I didn’t do it. And it was a mistake.”

With Salye recusing herself, city council activists decided to reach out to one of the city’s other two perestroika heroes: Anatoly Sobchak, the law professor who had earned a reputation in Moscow as the democrat from Leningrad. Sobchak was different from the bearded, sweater-wearing informals: in contrast to their contemplative, usually unassuming air, he was an ostentatiously sharp dresser—the Communists liked to criticize him for his “bourgeois” outfits, and his trademark checkered blazer still comes up in political reminiscences over twenty years later—and a forceful speaker. He seemed to love the sound of his own voice. As one of his former colleagues recalled, Sobchak “could derail a working meeting by delivering an impromptu forty-minute speech on the benefits of building an imaginary bridge” and mesmerize listeners while saying nothing of substance.

Though Sobchak belonged to Sakharov’s Interregional Group in the Supreme Soviet, he was actually far more conservative than the informals who were calling him back to Leningrad. A law professor who had taught at the police academy, he was in many ways part of the outgoing Soviet establishment. He had recently joined the Communist Party, clearly believing that, with all of Gorbachev’s reforms, the Party would continue to run the country. And in a divided city whose new democratic politicians were increasingly using its historic designation, St. Petersburg, he opposed changing the name of the city, arguing that the name Leningrad better reflected its military valor.

Sobchak was also much more of a politician than any of the informals knew how to be. He had far-reaching ambition: it would not be long before he started telling everyone he would be the next president of Russia. Meanwhile, at the city level, he apparently wanted to preside over the entire city council without being beholden to the democrats who had called him to the throne. To that end, he did some advance—and highly secretive—lobbying among the minority Communist Party faction of the council, and the Communists surprised everyone by voting in favor of Sobchak. A few minutes later Sobchak, in turn, upset expectations by not nominating Salye or one of the other prominent democrats to be his deputy. Instead, he named Vyacheslav Shcherbakov, a Communist Party member and a rear admiral. The democrats, taken aback, nonetheless honored their agreement with Sobchak and voted to confirm Shcherbakov as his deputy.

Sobchak then addressed the city council. He spelled out how he saw his mission: he was there to be the boss, not the leader. He viewed the city council as being bogged down in “democratic procedure for the sake of democratic procedure,” as he put it, and he wanted to get on with the business of actually running the city. His voice growing more confident with every passing minute, Sobchak informed the city council that things were about to change.

“We realized our mistake as soon as we had voted for him,” recalled one of the city council members later. Sobchak was intent on destroying what a majority of city council members saw as the greatest accomplishment of the two months that had passed since their own election: the invention of a non-Soviet way of doing business. The informals went home shocked and dejected.

Sobchak went to the airport to fly to a legal conference in the United States.

“HIS ST. PETERSBURG PERIOD WAS MURKIEST,” Gevorkyan said of the campaign biography she and her colleagues wrote. “I never did figure out how he hooked up with Sobchak.”

Back in Leningrad, Putin’s KGB colleagues seemed to be seeking ways not to fight the new political reality but to adapt to it, and initially it seemed that this was what Putin would have to do as well: rather than leave the KGB in a huff, stay with it in a sulk and look around for new friends, new mentors, and perhaps new ways of wielding influence from the shadows.

The saying “Once a spy, always a spy” was factually correct: the KGB never let its officers off the leash. But where did all those used-up spies go? The KGB actually had a name and a structure of sorts for its bloat—“active reserve.” These were the nearly uncountable and possibly uncounted numbers of KGB officers planted throughout the civilian institutions of the USSR.

Just over a year later, when a liberal Gorbachev appointee named Vadim Bakatin took over the KGB with the goal of dismantling the institution, it was the active reserve that he found most puzzling and intractable. “These were officers of the KGB who were officially employed by all state and civic organizations of any significance,” he wrote. “Most often, many if not all staff within the organization were aware that these people worked for the KGB. Active reserve officers performed a variety of functions: some of them managed the systems of security clearances while others concentrated on monitoring the moods and conversations within the organizations and taking what they considered to be appropriate actions in regards to any dissidents…. Certainly, there exist situations when a secret police organization needs to have a person planted within some organization or another, but one would expect this kind of arrangement to be secret. What kind of a secret service has staff that everyone can identify?”

Bakatin answered his own question: “The KGB, as it existed, could not be termed a secret service. It was an organization formed to control and suppress everything and anything. It seemed to be created especially for organizing conspiracies and coups, and it possessed everything necessary to carry them out: its own specially trained armed forces, the capacity to track and control communications, its own people inside all essential organizations, a monopoly on information, and many other things.” It was a monster that had its tentacles everywhere in Soviet society. Vladimir Putin decided to take his place at the end of one of those tentacles.