Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

Against this backdrop, Sobchak insisted on maintaining the persona of a worldly, sophisticated politician: always meticulously turned out, with his blond wife on his elbow, shuttled around in limousines, surrounded by bodyguards. Alexander Bogdanov, a young pro-democracy activist, remembered being snubbed by Sobchak in 1991, just two months after the failed coup, on the first Revolution Day in post-Communist Russia: “There was a concert in Palace Square. No one quite knew whether we should be celebrating or commemorating this day as a day of tragedy. So there was a rally in the afternoon and a dance at night. While Sobchak and [his wife Ludmila] Narusova were holding a banquet in the Tavrichesky Palace, with an entrance fee of five hundred rubles! That was before hyperinflation hit, this was a huge sum of money…. So there we were, walking around the dance carrying banners with the words ‘A Day of National Tragedy,’ looking and feeling like idiots. And I said, ‘You know what? Why are we wasting our time here? Let’s go to the Tavrichesky Palace, where they are having a feast.’ We arrived at the Tavrichesky just as they were all getting into their cars. Sobchak came out in tails, with Narusova wearing a beautiful dress and some sort of wraparound turbanlike hat. Sobchak had a bodyguard who would go on to be Putin’s chief bodyguard. He had this stupid habit: he would go up to me and just about curse me out, saying, ‘You are getting to me! Get out of here! Disappear, I am sick of you!’ So I said to Sobchak, ‘Why is your bodyguard always threatening me?’ And Ludmila Borisovna [Narusova] said to me, ‘Why are you always making a fool of yourself?’ And Sobchak was all relaxed, all important, getting into his limousine, and he said to me, ‘Shut up, the people elected me!’ I remembered that for the rest of my life. That’s the kind of snob he was.”

As Sobchak’s deputy mayor, Putin performed the jobs that Soviet tradition had reserved for KGB men in the “active reserve”: in addition to being responsible for foreign trade, he also aimed to control the flow of information in and out of the government. Yuri Boldyrev, Yeltsin’s chief comptroller who had unsuccessfully tried to follow up on Salye’s allegations, served as a senator from St. Petersburg in 1994–1995. “Not once during this time was I allowed to go live on air on St. Petersburg television,” he recalled later. “Only after I had stopped being a senator was I allowed to speak live—and even then the anchors kept interrupting me, so in the end I said nothing.”

Whenever I went to St. Petersburg on a story, the first person I would go see was Anna Sharogradskaya: her office was on Nevsky Prospekt, just down the street from the railroad station, and she knew everything. She ran the Independent Press Center, which provided space for press conferences for anybody who wanted to hold one—including those who would be turned down by every other space in town. She knew everyone, and she feared no one. She was in her late fifties by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, and she remembered a time when things had been a lot more scary. One time Sharogradskaya organized a press conference that exposed the Sobchak administration’s practice of bugging the offices of journalists and politicians, including his own employees. Many people had known or suspected this was the case, but only the local English-language newspaper, run and staffed by expats, dared run the story. Sharogradskaya was always convinced that Putin, who was largely responsible for the mayor’s relationship with the media, organized the bugging.

In keeping with KGB practices, the information that Sobchak was allowed to receive was heavily edited. This was certainly part of the reason he never suspected how unpopular he had become. Some of St. Petersburg’s television-viewing audience saw Sobchak making this unpleasant discovery. “There was a show called Public Opinion ,” recalled Sharogradskaya. “It was a popular show during the 1996 election. When Sobchak saw that his popularity rating was six percent, he shouted, ‘That’s impossible!,’ jumped up, and left the studio. The show was shut down. The host, Tamara Maksimova, was fired. Her husband, Vladimir, who was the director of the show, called me and said he wanted to hold a press conference. I said, ‘No problem,’ and scheduled it for noon the next day. Vladimir called the following morning, three or four hours before the scheduled press conference, and said it had to be canceled: ‘We cannot do this, because we are being threatened: something might happen to our daughter.’ I said, ‘Please tell that to the journalists. I cannot not explain the reason for the cancellation.’ They came and told everyone that they were being threatened and they were scared. Journalists tried to ask them questions, but they would not respond.”

When Sharogradskaya told me stories like these in the 1990s, I heard them as tales from a different land. Russia was a messy, often illogical place in those years, but never had I felt unsafe working as a journalist—not until I started writing from and about St. Petersburg, that is. At Sharogradskaya’s invitation, I taught a reporting course at the Independent Press Center, taking the train in on weekends to work with a group of university journalism majors. (I was teaching the same course at Moscow University, but St. Petersburg University wanted no part of it—which is why Sharogradskaya’s organization ended up hosting it.) On election weekend, I sent the students out to take notes at polling stations in the center of town. The students returned with bloodied noses and black eyes; two young people needed medical attention. They had presented themselves as journalism students at two polling stations; the guards had radioed for instructions and had then roughed them up. This was how St. Petersburg politicians treated St. Petersburg journalists.

Realizing too late that he was about to lose the election, Sobchak made desperate attempts to fix the situation. He asked Alexander Yuriev, a political psychologist at St. Petersburg University who had tried to warn Sobchak he was desperately unpopular, to run his campaign. A few days after Yuriev agreed, he faced a brutal attempt on his life: someone rang his doorbell and then tossed sulfuric acid through the open door. Because the door opened inward, some of the acid settled on the door itself and some even ricocheted back at whoever had thrown it; this was probably why Yuriev did not get a lethal dose. He was then also shot—and survived that as well. It took him long months, and two skin transplants, to recover.

In the run-up to the election, Sobchak also tried to buy the loyalty of the city’s press corps, giving out loans and grants, driving the city’s budget ever deeper into debt. It was too late. The press hated him, other politicians hated him, and ordinary people hated him. Sobchak lost the election. His campaign manager in the end was Vladimir Putin.

FOR ITS NEXT MAYOR, St. Petersburg elected Sobchak’s own public works deputy, a man in every way his opposite: plain-looking, poorly turned-out, Vladimir Yakovlev could barely put two words together. But in a city where public transportation was at a standstill, buildings were crumbling, and electricity was flickering on and off, he somehow inspired hope that he would try to fix the right things. Or, at the very least, he would not lie about them. Yakovlev would not, in fact, be successful at fixing what ailed St. Petersburg—the city continued to get poorer, dirtier, and more dangerous—but four years later, Yakovlev easily won reelection because St. Petersburg was still battling the hated ghost of Mayor Sobchak.

In losing the election, Sobchak lost not only power and influence but also immunity from prosecution—which, at this point, was probably what he feared most. For almost a year, a special prosecutor’s team of nearly forty investigators dispatched by the prosecutor general’s office in Moscow had been looking into allegations of corruption in the mayor’s office. One person, a real estate developer, had already been arrested and was testifying against city officials. This part of the investigation concerned an apartment building in the center of St. Petersburg that had allegedly undergone illegal reconstruction, and city funds had allegedly been used in the process. Almost all the building’s residents, including Sobchak’s own niece, were either highly placed city employees or their close relatives.