Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

THE END OF A REFORMER

Once Putin’s biography was published in February 2000, he ceased being the young democratic reformer of Berezovsky’s invention; he was now the hoodlum turned iron-handed ruler. I do not think his image-makers were even conscious of the shift.

One person who could not have imagined Putin’s public transformation from democrat to strong hand was Sobchak. The two were united in their antipathy to democratic processes, but in the early 1990s, a public allegiance to democratic principles was the price of admission to public life—and to the good life.

In the early 1990s, members of the new business and political elites were hacking apart the old system all over Russia. They were, without a doubt—and, apparently, without pangs of conscience—appropriating and redistributing chunks of the system; at the same time, the most enterprising of them were also conjuring up a new system—and changing with it. People like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Komsomol functionary turned banker turned oilman, and Mikhail Prokhorov, a clothing reseller turned metals mogul turned international investor, and Vladimir Gusinsky, an importer turned banker and media magnate, were self-invented entrepreneurs who started with shady moneymaking schemes but, as their worldview expanded and their ambitions grew accordingly, began to position themselves as not only businessmen but philanthropists, civic leaders, and visionaries. As their views evolved, they invested money and energy in constructing a new political system.

Sobchak abhorred this new system and so did Putin, and this is why he, unlike many of Sobchak’s early allies, remained with the mayor after the 1991 failed coup and the 1992 corruption scandal and the 1993 dissolution of the city council. I am not sure why Sobchak, who had had a brief but intense love affair with democratic politics, developed such a hatred for the ways of democracy; I think, as a megalomaniac, he was deeply wounded every time he did not get his way—and by political competition itself, by the very possibility of dissent. In addition, he had Putin at his side at all times, always trying to get him to see the disadvantages of the democratic system. It was Putin, for example, who convinced Sobchak—and manipulated a number of city council members—to institute the office of mayor in the city: otherwise, Putin told his biographers years later, Sobchak “could be removed by those very same city council members anytime.” Putin’s own opposition to democratic reform was no less personal than Sobchak’s, but ran much deeper.

Like most Soviet citizens of his generation, Putin was never a political idealist. His parents may or may not have believed in a Communist future for all the world, in the ultimate triumph of justice for the proletariat, or in any of the other ideological clichés that had been worn thin by the time Putin was growing up; he never even considered his relationship to these ideals. The way he has talked about the Young Pioneers, from which he was kept as a child, or the Komsomol, or the Communist Party, in which his membership simply expired along with the organization itself, makes it clear that he never saw any substantive meaning in his belonging to these organizations. Like other members of his generation, Putin replaced belief in communism, which no longer seemed plausible or even possible, with faith in institutions. His loyalty was to the KGB and to the empire it served and protected: the USSR.

In March 1994, Putin attended a European Union event in Hamburg that included a speech by Estonian president Lennart Meri. Estonia, like the two other Baltic republics, was annexed by the Soviet Union at the start of World War II, then lost to the Germans, to be retaken by the Soviets in 1944. The three Baltic states were the last to be included in the Soviet empire and the first to emerge from it—in no small part because they had a population that still remembered a time before the Soviets. Meri, Estonia’s first democratically elected leader in half a century, had been active in the anti-Soviet liberation movement. Now, speaking in Hamburg, he referred to the Soviet Union as “occupiers.” At this point Putin, who had been sitting in the audience among Russian diplomats, rose and left the room. “It looked very impressive,” recalled a St. Petersburg colleague who would go on to run the Russian federal election commission under President Putin. “The meeting was held in Knights’ Hall, which has ten-meter-tall ceilings and a marble floor, and as he walked, in total silence, each step of his echoed under the ceiling. To top it all off, the huge cast-iron door slammed shut behind him with deafening thunder.”

That Putin felt the need to break diplomatic protocol—to literally turn his back on the president of a neighboring country and a very important trade partner for the city of St. Petersburg—shows just how personally he took the matter: what he perceived as an attack on the Soviet Union hurt him as deeply as personal insults that had sent him into a rage when he was younger. The breathless manner in which his colleague recounted the story for Putin’s biographers shows how deep a vein of Soviet nostalgia Putin was tapping.

Putin loved the Soviet Union, and he loved its KGB, and when he had power of his own, effectively running the financial system of the country’s second-largest city, he wanted to build a system just like them. It would be a closed system, a system built on total control—especially control over the flow of information and the flow of money. It would be a system that aimed to exclude dissent and would crush it if it appeared. But in one way, the system would be better than the KGB and the USSR had been: this one would not betray Putin. It would be too smart and too strong for that. So Putin worked diligently to centralize control not only over all foreign trade but also over business that was springing up domestically—hence his effort to take over casinos, which had appeared suddenly and grew extremely fast. He also eventually moved to manage the city’s relationship with the media, both print and electronic, which he alternately isolated from city hall and strong-armed into covering particular stories in particular ways.

Sobchak had picked the right right-hand man: Putin hated the wishy-washy democrats even more than he did, and he was even better than Sobchak at working the politics of fear and greed.

POLITICIANS LIKE SOBCHAK are usually the last to learn their luster is gone. When Sobchak ran for reelection in 1996, the city hated him. Under his rule, St. Petersburg had been transformed in ways both tragic and farcical—though much of this was hardly Sobchak’s fault. The city’s economy was in shambles: more than a million of its five million residents had been employed by the military-industrial plants, which had slowed down or stopped altogether. As was the case elsewhere in Russia, a few people were getting very rich very fast, first by buying and selling anything and everything (for example, exporting Russian timber and importing Chinese umbrellas), then, gradually, by privatizing Soviet industrial plants and creating new institutions. Many Russians, however, got poorer—or at least felt a lot poorer: there were so many more goods in the stores now, but they could afford so little. Nearly everyone lost the one thing that had been in abundant supply during the Era of Stagnation: the unshakable belief that tomorrow will not be different from today. Uncertainty made people feel even poorer.

St. Petersburg’s economic problems made much of the rest of Russia seem well-off in comparison. Three-quarters of the city’s population lived below the poverty line. Its infrastructure, already weak in the late 1980s—which provided part of the impetus for the informal preservation movement—was now in ruins. Streets had not been repaved in so long that, whenever it rained or snowed—which in this northern seaside city was often—the streets turned into rivers of mud. Public transport was at a standstill: the city was not replacing buses that had to be retired. In a city composed entirely of large apartment buildings, working elevators were becoming extinct. Electricity in the center of town was flickering off and on. In studies of relative levels of standard of living, the country’s second-largest city regularly ranked in the twenties among Russian cities.