The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (5 page)

To cement Putin’s lead, someone in the Family—no one seems able to recall who it was any longer—proposed a brilliant move: Yeltsin should resign early. As prime minister, Putin would, by law, become acting president, turning into an instant incumbent in the upcoming race. His opponents would be caught by surprise, and the lead time to the election would be shortened. In fact, Yeltsin should do it on December 31. It would be a very Yeltsin move: he would upstage the millennium, the Y2K bug, and any other news story that might occur almost anyplace in the world. It would also come on the eve of the traditional two-week New Year’s and Christmas hiatus, making the time available for Putin’s opponents to prepare for the vote that much shorter.

NEW YEAR’S, a secular holiday, had long since superseded all other occasions as Russia’s biggest family holiday. On this night, Russians everywhere would gather with friends and family; just before the end of the year they would assemble in front of their television sets to watch the clock on one of the Kremlin towers strike midnight—to raise their glasses of champagne and only then to sit down to a traditional meal. In the minutes leading up to midnight, the nation’s leader would give a speech; this had been a tradition in the Soviet Union, and it had been picked up by Boris Yeltsin on December 31, 1992 (on December 31, 1991, as the Soviet Union officially ended its existence, the nation was addressed by a comedian).

Yeltsin appeared on television twelve hours ahead of schedule. “My friends,” he said. “My dears. Today is the last time I am going to address you on New Year’s Eve. But that is not all. Today is the last time I address you as the president of Russia. I have made a decision. I spent a long and difficult time thinking about it. Today, on the last day of this century, I am going to resign…. I am leaving…. Russia should enter the new millennium with new politicians, new faces, new, smart, strong, energetic people…. Why should I hold on to my seat for six more months when the country has a strong person who deserves to become president and to whom virtually every Russian has linked his hopes for the future?”

Then Yeltsin apologized. “I am sorry,” he said, “that many of our dreams failed to come true. That things we thought would be easy turned out to be painfully hard. I am sorry that I did not live up to the hopes of people who believed that we could, with a single effort, a single strong push, jump out of our gray, stagnant, totalitarian past and into a bright, wealthy, civilized future. I used to believe that myself…. I have never said this before, but I want you to know. I felt the pain of each of you in my heart. I spent sleepless nights, painful periods thinking about what I could do to make life just a little bit better…. I am leaving. I have done all I could…. A new generation is coming; they can do more, and better.”

Yeltsin spoke for ten minutes. He looked bloated, heavy, barely mobile. He also looked dejected, helpless, like a man who was burying himself alive in plain view of over a hundred million people. His facial expression barely changed throughout the speech, but his voice cracked with emotion as he signed off.

At midnight, it was Vladimir Putin who appeared on television. He looked noticeably nervous at first, and even stuttered at the beginning of his speech, but seemed more confident as he went on. He spoke for three and a half minutes. Remarkably, he did not seem to use the opportunity to give his first stump speech. He made no
promises and said nothing that could be interpreted as being inspiring. He said instead that nothing would change in Russia and assured viewers that their rights were well protected. In closing, he proposed Russians raise a glass to “Russia’s new century”—though he had no glass of his own to raise.

Putin was now acting president, and the election campaign was officially under way. Putin, recalled Berezovsky, was disciplined and even docile: he did as he was told—and he was told not to do much. He was already so popular that this was, in essence, a non-campaign campaign, leading up to a non-election election. All Putin had to do was never seem too different from whatever it was voters wished to see in him.

On January 26, 2000, exactly two months before the election, the moderator of a Russia panel at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, asked, “Who is Mr. Putin?” Chubais—the man who had seven months earlier argued that Putin would make an ideal successor—was holding the microphone when the question sounded. He fidgeted and looked questioningly at a former Russian prime minister sitting to his right. The former minister, too, was clearly unwilling to respond. The panel’s four members started looking back and forth at each other anxiously. After half a minute of this, the room exploded in laughter. The world’s largest landmass, a land of oil, gas, and nuclear arms, had a new leader, and its business and political elites had no idea who he was. Very funny indeed.

One week later, Berezovsky commissioned three journalists from a newspaper he owned to write Putin’s life story. One of them was a young blonde who had spent a couple of years in the Kremlin pool but had managed to remain unnoticed next to more colorful colleagues. Another was a young reporter who had won acclaim for his humorous reports but had never written about politics. The third member of the team was a star, a veteran political reporter who had spent the early eighties covering wars all over the world, and the late
eighties writing about politics and, especially, about the KGB for
Moscow News
, perestroika’s flagship publication. Natalia Gevorkyan was a reporter’s reporter, the undisputed leader of the team, and the journalist Berezovsky knew best.

“Berezovsky would keep calling me and asking, ‘Isn’t he fucking amazing?’” she told me years later. “I would say, ‘Borya, your problem is, you have never known a KGB colonel. He is not fucking amazing. He is perfectly ordinary.’”

“I was curious, of course, to know who this guy was who was now going to run the country,” she told me. “So I got the sense he liked to talk and he liked to talk about himself. I’ve certainly spoken to many people who were more interesting. I had spent five years writing about the KGB: he was no better or worse than the rest of them; he was smarter than some and more cunning than some.”

In addition to the forbidding task of putting together a book in a matter of days, Natalia Gevorkyan wanted to use her time with the acting president to help a friend. Andrei Babitsky, a reporter for the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, had disappeared in Chechnya in January. He had apparently been detained by Russian troops for violating their strict embedding policy: during the first war in Chechnya the media had been sharply and consistently critical of Moscow’s actions, so this time around, the military banned journalists from traveling in the war zone unaccompanied by uniformed personnel. This policy not only hindered access to combatants on both sides but exposed journalists to danger: it is almost always safer, in a war zone, not to have a uniform on you or near you. The more enterprising reporters tried to circumvent the policy—and few were better at this than Babitsky, who had for years been reporting specifically on the North Caucasus.

For two weeks following his detention, Babitsky’s family and friends heard nothing from him. Rumor soon spread in Moscow’s journalist circles, however, that Babitsky had been seen in the
infamous Russian prison of Chernokozovo in Chechnya. On February 3, the day after Gevorkyan and her colleagues began interviewing Putin for his biography, Russian officials announced that Babitsky had been exchanged for three Russian soldiers who had been held captive by Chechen combatants. The Russian officials claimed Babitsky had consented to the exchange, but this could hardly conceal the fact that Russian troops had treated a journalist—a Russian journalist—as an enemy combatant.

When Gevorkyan asked Putin about Babitsky, her question elicited what she later described as “undisguised hatred.” The acting president’s flattened affect momentarily broke, and he launched into a diatribe: “He was working directly for the enemy. He was not a neutral source of information. He worked for the outlaws…. He worked for the outlaws. So when the rebels said, ‘We are willing to free a few of your soldiers in exchange for this correspondent,’ our people asked him, ‘Do you want to be exchanged?’ He said, ‘I do.’ He does…. These were our soldiers. They were fighting for Russia. If we had not taken them back, they would have been executed. And they aren’t going to do anything to Babitsky there, because he is one of them…. What Babitsky did is much more dangerous than firing a machine gun…. He had a map of getting around our checkpoints. Who asked him to stick his nose in there if he wasn’t authorized by the official authorities? … So he was arrested and he became the object of an investigation. And he says, ‘I don’t trust you, I trust the Chechens, if they want to take me, you should give me to them….’ He got a response: ‘Then go, get out of here!’ … So you say he is a Russian citizen. Then he should have acted in accordance with the laws of your country, if you want to be protected by these laws.”

Listening to this monologue, Gevorkyan grew convinced that the acting president had direct knowledge of Babitsky’s case. So she decided to be direct too. “He’s got a family, he has children,” she said to Putin. “You have to stop this operation.”

The head of state took the bait. “There will be a car arriving soon,” he said. “It will deliver a cassette tape, and you will see that he is alive and well.” Gevorkyan, who had maintained decorum throughout her many meetings with Putin, was momentarily shocked into rudeness. “Hello?” she almost screamed. “You handed him over to the outlaws. Is this what they told you?”

She excused herself to step outside the room to call a friend at Radio Liberty’s Moscow bureau. “Tell his wife he is alive,” she said.

“How do you know?” asked the friend.

“From the horse’s mouth,” Gevorkyan responded.

“Do you trust him?” the friend asked.

“Not really,” Gevorkyan admitted.

But a few hours later the friend called her back. “You are not going to believe this,” she said. “A car came, its license plate so dirty we couldn’t make out the numbers. They offered to sell us a videocassette tape and we paid two hundred dollars for it.”

The video, which Radio Liberty immediately released to all media, was a grainy recording of Babitsky, looking pale, exhausted, and sleep-deprived, saying, “This is February 6, 2000. I am relatively all right. My only problem is time, since circumstances are stacking up in such a way that, unfortunately, I cannot make it home right away. Here my life is as normal as it can be in conditions of war. People who are near me try to help me in some way. The only problem is, I would really like to go home, I would really like all of this to end finally. Please don’t worry about me. I hope to be home soon.”

In fact, Babitsky was being held under lock and key in a residential house in a Chechen village. He was indeed sleep-deprived, exhausted, and, most of all, terrified. He did not know who was holding him prisoner; he knew only that they were armed Chechen men who had every reason to hate Russians and no clear reason to trust him. He was unable to sleep, fearing as he went to bed every night that he would be awakened to be taken to his execution, and he
greeted every morning hating himself for not yet having devised a way to escape or gathered the courage to attempt to break free. Finally, on February 23, he was placed in the trunk of a car, driven to the neighboring republic of Dagestan, given crudely forged documents, and released there—only to be arrested a few hours later by Russian police, who transported him to Moscow, where he would face charges of forgery for the documents he was carrying.

It soon emerged that there had probably been no exchange: there was no documented trace of it, or of the soldiers who had supposedly been handed over by the Chechens. Babitsky’s arrest, his televised handover to the enemy, and subsequent disappearance had all, it seems, been an effort to send a message to journalists. Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev told the media as much: Babitsky had been singled out, he said, because “the information he transmitted was not objective, to put it mildly.” He added, “I would happily have given ten Babitskys for a single soldier.” Putin had been in office for one month and already ministers were talking just like him—just as, it seems, they had been longing to talk for a while.

What Putin apparently did not expect was that what he viewed as meting out perfectly fair punishment would inspire outrage internationally. During his first month as acting president, Western leaders had acted much like the Russian people: they seemed so relieved that unpredictable, embarrassing Yeltsin was gone that they were willing to project their sweetest dreams onto Putin. The Americans and the British acted as though the outcome of the March election were a foregone conclusion. But now the Americans had no choice but to react: Babitsky was not simply a Russian journalist—he was a Russian journalist employed by a media outlet funded by an act of Congress. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright raised the issue in a meeting with Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov on February 4, and five days later the State Department issued a statement condemning the “treatment of a noncombatant as a hostage or prisoner of war.”
The unexpected scrutiny and outrage probably saved Babitsky’s life. They also made Putin bitter and angry. He knew that what he was doing was just and that a man like Babitsky—someone who seemed not at all concerned about the Russian war effort and not at all ashamed to feel compassion for the enemy—did not deserve to live, or at least to live among Russian citizens. A conspiracy of bleeding-heart democrats had forced Putin to compromise. He had successfully beaten these kinds of people back in Leningrad, and he would do it again now.

“The Babitsky story made my life easier,” Gevorkyan later told me. “I realized that this was how [Putin] was going to rule. That this is how his fucking brain works. So I had no illusions. I knew this was how he understood the word
patriotism
—just the way he had been taught in all those KGB schools: the country is as great as the fear it inspires, and the media should be loyal.”