Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

Ten days after the disaster, relatives of the crew were finally gathered in Vidyayevo’s assembly hall, expecting to see Putin. While they waited—and they waited for hours—military fleet commander Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov addressed the audience. The admiral, a big man with a rough, leathery face, used his finely honed skills to deflect all questions. Here is how one of the very few journalists allowed to witness the event, one of the coauthors of Putin’s official biography, described the scene:

“Do you believe that the guys are alive?” he was asked.

And you know what he said?

“That’s a good question! I am going to respond to it as directly as you asked it. I still believe that my father, who died in 1991, is alive.”

Then he was asked another question—probably also a good one.

“Why didn’t you ask for foreign help right away?”

“I see,” he said, “that you watch Channel 4 more than you watch Channel 2.”

“When did you inform the authorities that you did not have the necessary equipment to save them?”

“Three years ago,” he said.

I thought someone would hit him. But instead, they all just kind of wilted and lost interest in the conversation.

Kuroyedov left a frustrated audience. Vice Premier Ilya Klebanov, who had been placed in charge of the rescue efforts, was present; a woman jumped up onstage, grabbed Klebanov by the lapels, shook him, and screamed, “You bastard, you go there and save them!” When Putin finally arrived, four hours after the appointed time, wearing a black suit with a black shirt to signify mourning but looking, as a result, vaguely like a mafioso, the crowd attacked him too. Now his biographer was the only journalist allowed to remain in the room, and here is part of how he described the meeting in his article the next day:

“Cancel the mourning immediately!” someone interrupted him from the other end of the hall. [A national day of mourning had been declared for the following day.]

“Mourning?” Putin asked. “I was, like you, full of hope to the last, I still am, at least for a miracle. But there is a fact we know for certain: People have died.”

“Shut up!” someone screamed.

“I am speaking of people who have definitely died. There are people like that in the submarine, for certain. That’s who the mourning is for. That’s all.”

Someone tried to object, but he would not let them.

“Listen to me, listen to what I’m about to say. Just listen to me! There have always been tragedies at sea, including the time when we thought we were living in a very successful country. There have always been tragedies. But I never thought that things were in this kind of condition.”…

“Why did you take so long in attracting foreign help?” a young woman asked.

She had a brother aboard the submarine. Putin took a long time explaining. He said that the construction of the submarine dated back to the end of the 1970s, and so did all the rescue equipment that the Northern Fleet had. He said that [defense minister] Sergeev called him on the 13th at seven in the morning, and until then Putin had known nothing…. He said that foreign aid had been offered on the 15th and had been accepted right away….

“Don’t we have those kinds of divers ourselves?” someone shouted out in despair.

“We don’t have crap in this country!” the president answered furiously.

The article reported that Putin spent two hours and forty minutes with the families of the crew and managed, in the end, to bring them around—in large part because he devoted an hour to detailing compensation packages for them. He also agreed to cancel the day of mourning, which was in the end, in a twist of macabre irony, observed everywhere in Russia except Vidyayevo. But Putin emerged from the meeting battered and bitter, and unwilling ever again to expose himself to such an audience. After no other disaster—and there would be many in his tenure as president—would Putin allow himself to be pitted publicly against the suffering.

IN SHORT ORDER, two things happened to cement Putin’s view of his visit to Vidyayevo as a disaster. On September 2—three weeks after the Kursk sank—Sergei Dorenko, the Channel One anchorman who had done most of the legwork in Berezovsky’s television campaign to create Putin a year earlier, did a show criticizing Putin’s handling of the submarine disaster. Dorenko obtained audiotapes of the meeting with relatives and aired excerpts that made the biographer’s newspaper report seem laudatory in comparison. In one of the excerpts, Putin could be heard descending into a rant. “You saw it on television?” he screamed. “That means they are lying. They are lying! They are lying! There are people on television who have been working to destroy the army and the navy for ten years. They are talking now as though they are the biggest defenders of the military. All they really want to do is finish it off! They’ve stolen all this money and now they are buying everyone off and making whatever laws they want to make!” Putin ended with a high-pitched shout.

Dorenko, a charismatic, macho character with a deep baritone, spent nearly an hour dissecting Putin’s behavior, replaying some of the president’s least appropriate remarks, focusing on showing him still on vacation, tanned and relaxed in light-colored resort clothing, smiling and laughing with his holiday companions, most of them highly placed officials. Again and again, he showed Putin to have lied. The president claimed that the sea had been stormy for eight days, hampering rescue efforts. In fact, said Dorenko, the weather had been bad only during the first few days, but even that had no effect at the depth at which the Kursk was situated. Dorenko compared Putin to a schoolboy who is late for class. “We don’t know what kind of teacher Putin’s fibs are intended for, but we know what a teacher says in these kinds of cases: ‘I don’t care what you thought was right—I only care that you get here on time.’”

Dorenko cut to footage of a state television interview Putin had given the day after the Vidyayevo visit. Looking official and collected, the president said that it had barely been a hundred days since he accepted the burden of running the country. In fact, Dorenko pointed out, it had been 390 days since Putin was appointed prime minister and anointed Yeltsin’s successor, and prior to that he had run the FSB, “which is supposed to keep an eye on the admirals.”

“The regime does not respect us, and this is why it lies to us,” Dorenko concluded.

I think it was then, a year after the beginning of his miraculous ascent, a hundred days after becoming president, that Putin realized that he now bore responsibility for the entire crumbling edifice of a former superpower. He was no longer entitled to seethe at the people who had destroyed Soviet military might and imperial pride: by dint of becoming president, to a great number of his compatriots he had now become one of those people. His transformation was not unlike that of a longtime opposition politician who suddenly assumes power—except Putin had never been a politician at all, so his anger had been private but his humiliation was now public. He may have felt that he had been tricked: the people against whom he had ranted when he lost his temper in Vidyayevo—the ones who had disgraced the military on television and had passed “whatever laws they wanted”—had brought him to power to make him the fall guy. And then they used their television networks to humiliate him further.

Six days after the Dorenko show, Putin appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live . When King asked, “What happened?” Putin shrugged, smiled—impishly, it seemed—and said, “It sank.” The line became infamous: it played as cynical, dismissive, and deeply offensive to all who were affected by the tragedy. Only reviewing the transcript of the show ten years later did I realize what Putin was trying to communicate. He was indicating that he would not press the line some hapless Russian spin doctor had invented—that the Kursk had collided with an American submarine. Never mind that crazy conspiracy theory, his shrug was intended to say. It just sank .