Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

Putin told his friend the cellist that he was thinking of moving to Moscow to join the vast KGB bureaucracy in the capital. But then he decided to stay in Leningrad and, perhaps because he was always drawn to the familiar, turned to the only institution outside the KGB with which he had ever been linked: Leningrad State University. Putin’s new job title was assistant chancellor for foreign relations. Like all organizations in the USSR, Leningrad State University was just beginning to recognize that the possibility of foreign relations existed. Its instructors and graduate students were starting to travel abroad to study and take part in conferences: they still had to overcome major bureaucratic hurdles, but the option of foreign travel, which had been reserved for a very select few, was now accessible to many. Students and instructors were also starting to come in from abroad: once again, an option that had been open only to students from Socialist bloc countries and a few handpicked graduate students from the West was now accessible to pretty much anyone. Like thousands of other Soviet organizations, Leningrad State University saw its state funding drastically cut and hoped that foreign relations, whatever form they might take, would bring in much-needed hard currency. It was a perfect job for a member of the active reserve: not only had such postings been traditionally reserved for KGB appointees, but everyone generally believed they really were better than anyone else at seeking and shoring up relations with foreigners; they were, after all, the only ones with experience.

Putin has said he planned to start writing a dissertation and perhaps stay at the university indefinitely. But in fact, like so many other things in the Soviet Union at the time, this job had an air of transition about it. He stayed at Leningrad State University less than three months.

THE STORY of how Putin came to work for Anatoly Sobchak during his tenure as chairman of the Leningrad City Council is well-known, often recounted, and most certainly untrue in many or all of its best-publicized details.

In the apocryphal version, Sobchak, the law professor and celebrity politician, was walking down the hall at the university, saw Putin, and asked him to come to work for him at the city council. In Putin’s own version, a former classmate at the law faculty arranged a meeting in Sobchak’s office. In Putin’s version, he had attended Sobchak’s lectures at the law faculty in the 1970s but had no personal relationship with him.

“I remember the scene well,” Putin told his biographers. “I entered, introduced myself, and told him everything. He was an impulsive person, so he immediately said, ‘I’ll speak with the chancellor. You start work on Monday. That’s it. I’ll make all the arrangements and you’ll be transferred.’” In the Soviet system of job assignments, office workers were indeed often transferred like serfs, by agreement of their owners. “I couldn’t not say, ‘Anatoly Alexandrovich, it would be my pleasure to come to work for you. I am interested. I even want the job. But there is a fact that will probably be an obstacle to this transfer.’ He asks, ‘What’s that?’ I say, ‘I have to tell you that I am not just an assistant to the chancellor. I am a staff officer at the KGB.’ He got to thinking, since this was a truly unexpected turn for him. He thought for a bit and then said, ‘Well, screw it!’”

The dialogue is certainly fiction, and mediocre fiction at that. Why does Putin claim to have “told him everything” if he did not tell Sobchak about his KGB affiliation until after Sobchak extended the job offer? Why does Putin make Sobchak out to be both an ignorant fool—everyone at Leningrad State University knew Putin was a KGB officer—and a vulgarian? Probably because this was not a well-rehearsed lie when he told it to his biographers, whom he had likely expected to sidestep the delicate and too-obvious question of how a career KGB officer came to work for one of Russia’s most prominent pro-democracy politicians.

Sobchak himself told a different fiction. “Putin was most certainly not assigned to me by the KGB,” he said in a newspaper interview the same week that Putin was speaking to his own biographers—and this explains the discrepancy. “I found Putin myself and asked him to come and work for me because I had known him before. I remembered him very well as a student for his work at the law faculty. Why did he become my deputy? I ran into him, entirely by accident, in the hallway of the university. I recognized him, said hello, and started asking him what he had been up to. It turned out he had worked in Germany for a long time and was now working as an assistant to the chancellor. He had been a very good student, though he has this trait: he does not like to stand out. In this sense he is a person devoid of vanity, of any external ambition, but inside he is a leader.”

Anatoly Sobchak certainly knew that Putin was a KGB officer. Moreover, that is exactly why he sought him out. This was the sort of politician Sobchak was: he talked a colorful pro-democracy line, but he liked to have a solid conservative base from which to do it. This was also why he chose a Communist and a rear admiral to be his deputy on the city council. Not only did Sobchak feel more secure surrounded by men who had emerged from various armed services, he felt more much more comfortable with these men than with the overeducated, excessively talkative, process-oriented pro-democracy activists like Salye and her ilk. He had taught law at the police academy in Leningrad; he had taught men who were just like what he perceived Putin to be: dependable but not brilliant, not outwardly ambitious, and ever mindful of the chain of command. In addition, he needed Putin for the exact same reason the university had needed him: he was one of the very few people in the city who had ever worked abroad—and the city needed foreign help and foreign money. Finally, Sobchak—who had risen through the ranks both at the university, where he was now a full professor, and in the Communist Party—knew that it was wiser to pick your KGB handler yourself than to have one picked for you.

Whether Sobchak was right in believing he was picking his own handler, however, is an open question. A former colleague of Putin’s in East Germany told me that in February 1990, Putin had a meeting with Major General Yuri Drozdov, head of the KGB illegal-intelligence directorate, when the major general visited Berlin. “The only possible purpose of the meeting could have been giving Putin his next assignment,” Sergei Bezrukov, who defected to Germany in 1991, told me. “Why else would the head of the directorate be meeting with an agent who was scheduled to be going home? That sort of thing just did not happen.” Bezrukov and other officers wondered what Putin’s new job would be and what made it important enough for the top brass to be involved. When Putin went to work for Sobchak, Bezrukov believed he had his answer: his old friend had been called back in order to infiltrate the inner circle of one of the country’s leading pro-democracy politicians. The university job had been a stepping-stone.

Putin informed the Leningrad KGB that he was about to change jobs. “I told them, ‘I have received an offer from Anatoly Alexandrovich [Sobchak] to transfer from the university and work for him. If this is impossible, I am willing to resign.’ They responded, ‘No, why should you? Go work at the new job, no problem.’” The dialogue seems to be another absurd fiction, even in the very unlikely event that he had not been steered to Sobchak by the KGB itself. Putin would have had no reason to suspect that the opportunity to plant him alongside the city’s most prominent democrat would be greeted with anything but enthusiasm in the KGB.