Ben Judah - Fragile Empire - How Russia Fell in and Out of Love With Vladimir Putin

Late one afternoon we sat and talked on a bench in Victory Park in beautiful summery weather. Not inside, of course not inside, anyone could be listening inside. We were in St Petersburg, surrounded by ugly brutalist architecture. These avenues are where the recent history of the place really is, where the front line was – no piecrust architecture or tour groups of elderly Germans in sight, only the concrete conformism of Soviet blocks, or bullying Stalinist baroque that renders it indistinguishable from anywhere else in Russia.

Vera was Putin’s teacher and she thinks about him every day. Devoted to him, she talks about ‘Putka’, in a disorganized, aged way, as if he was her own son. We sat on a bench and talked. A bruised alcoholic dozed on another bench nearby. She says, ‘The government is something that should have nothing to do with you… it should be almost invisible. This government, it stays out of my way, it doesn’t ask anything of me… you could say it was the best of governments.’

She tells me everything she remembers. When we started to walk towards the metro, the interview over, I ask her if she had voted for the governing party, United Russia in the rigged 2011 parliamentary elections that detonated mass protests. ‘Pah! I did not vote for United Russia. I voted for Just Russia… because I believe in justice.’

The conversation is confused. She is suspicious, her thoughts twist and turn back on themselves, but she clings to her memories of the little Putin she taught as his form teacher from age nine to seventeen. ‘I am so proud of him, I am proud of him like a son.’ Then she jerks her hand. How she wishes he was her son. ‘You have to understand what it was really like.’ But you can somehow tell that her thin memories of the boy fifty years ago have become mixed up with the man she has seen on television.

Her eyes suspect me of something, and as she put back on her baseball cap with ‘CHESS’ emblazoned on it, we turned back towards the noise of the main road. And Putin? Did she still see that little boy in him? Vera had voted for him, not for his party, but there was something she no longer recognized. For a second, she paused. ‘Now there is a sadness in his eyes… It is the harshness of it all. It wasn’t always there.’

She met him when he was almost ten years old. It was 1962 and it seemed the Soviet Union might beat the Americans to the moon. She was a young schoolteacher and in the staff meeting Vera Gurevich was handed over the role of form teacher to Putin’s class. She was warned that it was full of rough, ill-disciplined little boys. One of them she was told to watch out for was the one called ‘Putka’ by classmates. This was the Soviet 1960s and teachers were being told to pay more attention to individual pupils and not ‘the mass of the class’. With this in mind, she saw this disruptive boy as a child who needed special attention. ‘He was so stubborn. He was trouble.’ The boy tore in and out of the classroom shouting ‘coo-coo it’s me’ and seemed never to do his homework. Or even realize that he should:

‘He did nothing. He didn’t care about the results. He just scribbled something down on the paper during the test and then… ran away! He didn’t care. He just ran away. He didn’t care about the consequences.’

There were also fights – and he fought back: ‘But if people hurt him he reacted immediately, like a cat… He would fight like a cat – suddenly – with his arms and legs and teeth.’

Her concerns reached the point that she was visiting the boy’s apartment regularly, to implore his parents to put him on the straight and narrow. She found ‘Putka’ had a weak mother:

‘She was not a very literate person. She didn’t have a secondary school education. She’d only been to primary school. She was from the village. So I had to go and check on his homework, sometimes two or three times a week, to see they were paying attention. Putin’s mother always said, “This is a topic for his father. He is a boy and this is a man’s job.” She didn’t see this as a woman’s role… She was from the village you see. And Russia has always been a patriarchy.’

This boy had been born in 1952 and grown up in a hungry, crumbling post-war Leningrad: the ‘hero city’ of the blockade, where almost every adult he knew had lived through it. His childhood, even his physique, was shaped by the siege – he shares his slight frame with those whose mothers were also malnourished. Putin is the grandson of a chef who served Stalin, Lenin and even Rasputin, the mad monk who wielded enormous influence in the court of Nicholas II. This grandfather was not just a cook, but almost certainly a spy. The chef’s job in the state dachas he worked in was reserved for NKVD agents, the political police later known as the KGB, to snoop on the guests. As a child Putin was taken to visit him, still cooking in his old age at a guesthouse of the Moscow party elite. Putin’s father worked as a factory foreman, but fought in the war in an NKVD unit behind enemy lines. The war never left him. He suffered extensive wounds at the front but likely remained in the NKVD ‘active reserves’ throughout his career. This was the opposite of a family of dissidents. The Putins were conformists.

In Soviet Leningrad, a city of communal apartments, gossip travelled at lightning speed and personal privacy was near impossible. Families had a quasi-rural existence in tenement buildings, putting out their washing together, knowing all of each other’s business and, on summer evenings, sitting out in the sun in a line of cheap deckchairs. The apartment that the Putins lived in was cramped, shared accommodation, with a communal kitchen and bathroom. By Western standards Putin grew up in poverty – but not by Soviet ones. ‘Out of my students,’ remembers Gurevich, ‘the apartment was far from the worst. He had a little desk to do his work. Many didn’t even have that. He had everything he needed.’ It was a typical working-class childhood. This world of komunalka apartments was one without urban anonymity. ‘Putin’s mother didn’t want a child,’ smirks Gurevich. ‘He was born when she was forty-two. The others had died. She told her husband she didn’t want another, and he replied, “But who will be there, who will look after us when we are old, we must have a child.” She indulged him. She fed him for two years on breast milk.’

As Putin’s teacher, Gurevich fretted that his father was not disciplining him properly. She respected Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin (‘He was such an intelligent man’), but she found him odd and disturbingly introvert. ‘I once asked his father, “Why are you such a closed person?”, to which he replied: “In the ways we need to be we are open. But only a fool would open his soul to the world. You have to know who you are talking to.” ‘These were wise words, from a man who knew the NKVD well and had grown up during Stalin’s terror. Yet his son was growing up in a rough city. Leningrad was overrun with street kids, hungry, violent gangs of near illiterate children brawling and skirting the edge of crime. Gurevich became increasingly worried that Putin was on the verge of joining them:

‘No one ever beat him. I know this because I once grabbed Putin by the scruff of his neck and he stammered: ‘How dare you, this is not your role, my father has never beaten me.’ He was in the courtyard, I saw him and said ‘go and do your homework’. He stayed there playing with these boys that had made a ball out of some cloth. He was the youngest – about eleven – and the rest were already fifteen or seventeen. They were street boys. Already drinking beer and smoking. It was dangerous to be with street boys. They were doing things like spitting to see who could spit the furthest. I asked him why he was hanging around with street boys and he replied, “In life you have to know everything.” ’