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

‘There were rumours from the start that Putin was a KGB insertion to keep an eye on Sobchak.’ This is the commanding voice of Igor Kucherenko, who was the deputy chairman of St Petersburg assembly of which Sobchak was the chairman, before becoming mayor. Kucherenko is the kind of man whose hopes have been disappointed the most by the 1990s: a real revolutionary, anti-Soviet liberal. A portrait of the neoliberal former prime minister Yegor Gaidar, the zealous grandson of a savage Bolshevik general, is pinned to the side of his cramped office, the three-volume History of the New Russia , with Gaidar emblazoned on it, sits ostentatiously in his display cabinet. He first met Putin in the heady 1989 days after he was hired by Sobchak as an assistant. ‘But those are only rumours,’ says Kucherenko:

‘You have to remember the KGB itself was in a state of collapse at that time – like everything else – it was divided between groups of young agents that knew better than anyone else that the country needed reform, needed to change, groups of older conservatives that wanted nothing to change, and groups of people that knew that privatization was inevitable and wanted to manage, to control this process. When I met Putin he was in the first category and he ended up in the third.’

Kucherenko pauses to point to a 15cm framed photo of himself to the right side of his cluttered desk. ‘That’s Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin and I.’ You get the impression he looks at it quite often during the working day. They are in front of a train station; an almost unrecognizably healthy Yeltsin is smiling and slightly blurred. He looks fiercely into and beyond the lens. ‘But the very fact Putin was in the KGB was one of the reasons Sobchak chose him. He knew the KGB would oppose him and he thought Putin would make them easier to deal with.’

He smokes heavily, trying to remember the young man in his peripheral vision who became omniscient. ‘Putin would disappear out of photographs. When he became President I threw open my photo album to see us together – I knew he’d be there next to me at one of so many events we were at together. But he wasn’t in a single one. He’d slipped out of every frame. I sometimes wonder if he even has a reflection in the mirror.’

Quite a few of the regular democratic deputies – enthused pioneers of perestroika – found it very strange that such an ‘impeccable democrat’ as Sobchak should have employed a KGB agent as deputy mayor. At a cocktail party thrown by the German Embassy to celebrate the first anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, Yury Vdovin, an outspoken democratic deputy from St Petersburg assembly, found himself at the corner of a table next to the young Putin. They took some shots, Putin only raising the glass to his lips. Vdovin is open about the fact that he’d had a few more than that. ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit strange, Vladimir Vladimirovich, that you as a KGB agent should be working in democratic St Petersburg town hall?’ He looked back, then retorted:

‘Yury Innokentevich, first of all I worked in foreign intelligence and I never spied on or persecuted any dissident, I never watched them. And you must know us officers in foreign intelligence, we had all the information on the real situation in our country and in the world, and it was the ones in East Germany who were the most progressive and liberal of them all. And I was one of them! That’s why I’m fighting for democracy and liberal economics.’

But at the time Vdovin, a human rights activist, did not see anything particularly wrong with Putin: ‘He knew how to get along with people. He got things done.’

But whatever Putin said were his intentions, whatever he came across as – was he passing on information to the KGB about Sobchak? Had Sobchak not just made a gesture to the KGB but picked his own handler in appointing him? Kramarev is suddenly coy: ‘It is possible. I do not have this information. But you have to remember a KGB officer always stays a KGB officer. I cannot exclude that Putin was also… always spying on me .’ But the former police chief has no respect for such agents: ‘They were never fighting real crime, they were just wasting their time following some person who’d said a joke about Brezhnev. The whole KGB was sent to stop those Solzhenitsyn books circulating… and they failed even at that.’

Putin probably was a ‘handler’ – but one double-timing his loyalties, like so many others in an entire KGB system that was so infested with closet democrats it was paralyzed and spasmodic when it was most needed, failing to impose martial law during the 1991 coup. Yet he did really grow close to Sobchak. He cried at his funeral. This explains why, over the years, Sobchak’s daughter Ksenia found it so easy to prance around first as Russia’s answer to Paris Hilton, despite her plain looks in country with no shortage of supermodels, before hatching into an anti-Putin glamour-activist. She has never been harmed. ‘I never understood why Putin looked up to that man as a leader’, groaned Kramarev. ‘When my guys were following around some bandit oligarchs taking pictures, Sobchak’s wife would often turn up in the pictures too – you see… she got around socially.’

Sobchak’s regime operated in a similar manner to the one Putin would one day run. It was outrageously corrupt and incredibly clannish. For most of the Soviet period, officials had privileges – a holiday on the Black Sea at a special resort or a good car – but not astounding levels of wealth. To now watch a ‘new Russian elite’ acquire fortunes during the 1990s only served to embitter the nation. Locally it was clear that the transition had not worked out as expected. ‘Sobchak’s town hall always had this odour of corruption, he was not controlling what any of his deputies were doing,’ recalled one 1990s local committee chief.

The blue-eyed and slight Vantanyar Yaiga saw Putin almost every day in the town hall. Whilst Putin was Sobchak’s chief deputy he was also his chief advisor. ‘You see we felt besieged,’ says Yaiga. ‘We were frightened that if we split, that if we broke up, the communists could come back, and it would all be ruined.’ Yaiga stammers and forgets his words with age. ‘This besieged feeling gave both Sobchak and Putin a high degree of commitment and loyalty to the people they employed. It would take them a very, very long time to throw out a bad person. You can still see this in the way Putin behaves.’ This mild-mannered man wears a badge of the ruling United Russia party on his lapel. He was a friend of Putin. Twenty years later he has an unclear job as a ‘foreign affairs advisor’, quite something for such an elderly man who cannot speak English, in the tsarist glory of the Mariinsky Palace in St Petersburg. We met in a hall of suitably tsarist grandeur – which only exacerbated his slightness and his vaguest of roles:

‘Oh, Putin had such a wicked sense of humour. During the time we were working together and meeting almost every day – and one day I said to him, “Vladimir Vladimirovich, I have a problem, I’m being harassed by these businessmen for a good deal but I’m only an advisor and have no administrative functions.” He said, “Tell them you eat with us.”’

Even today, Yaiga still finds this ‘joke’ extremely funny, but nationally escalating impunity and embezzlement left Andrei Sinyavsky, the former dissident, full of fear: ‘In the eyes of the people, democracy has become synonymous with poverty, the embezzlement of public funds, and theft. This disappointment with democracy is extremely dangerous for a country without a stable democratic tradition.’ 25

One possible incident of embezzlement and abuse of power pointed straight at the young Putin. As the official responsible for trade and investment, he had hatched a scheme in 1991 to ship raw materials abroad to ‘save St Petersburg from famine’, signing $122 million worth of deals with nineteen foreign companies, with him as the middleman, in exchange for food. The food never arrived and members of the local legislature campaigned for his resignation.