The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

Eleven BACK TO THE USSR

On October 2, 2011, Boris Berezovsky was jumping around his office excitedly. I was in London to cover a trial he had initiated in an attempt to recover some of his assets more than ten years after he became an exile, and he had asked me to come to his office the Sunday before hearings started, to reveal to me what he was thinking about the Russian political situation.

“You understand?” he began. “The Russian regime has no ideology, no party, no politics—it is nothing but the power of a single man.” He was painting a picture of a Wizard of Oz figure, clearly feeling no need to acknowledge that he had invented the man. “All someone has to do is discredit him—him personally.” Berezovsky even had a plan, or a couple of plans—but here I was sworn to secrecy.

I went away amused at the man who would not give up being kingmaker, yet I had to admit Berezovsky’s analysis was correct. The whole edifice of the Russian regime—which, in the eyes of the world, had long since graduated from showing “authoritarian tendencies” to full-fledged authoritarianism bordering on tyranny—rested on this one man, the one Berezovsky thought he had chosen for the country a dozen years earlier. This meant the current Russian regime was essentially vulnerable: the person or persons to topple it would not have to overcome the force of an ingrained ideology—they would merely have to show that the tyrant had feet of clay. It also meant the tipping point in Russia was as unpredictable as in any tyranny—it could come about in months, years, or decades, triggered perhaps by a small event, most likely the regime’s own mistake that would suddenly make its vulnerability evident.

I had seen something like this happen in Yugoslavia eleven years earlier: Slobodan Miloševic´, who had held on to power using terror on the one hand and exploiting nationalist fervor on the other, called an early election, mistakenly certain that he would win—and lost, and understood that he was losing too late to quash the rising wave of protest. And in 2011, we had seen Arab dictators drop like dominoes, toppled by crowds made suddenly fearless by the power of the word and the example of others. The problem with Russia, however, was that the huge country was as atomized as it had ever been. Putin’s policies had effectively destroyed public space. The Internet had developed in Russia over the last ten years, as it had in other countries, but it took on the peculiar shape of a series of information bubbles. American researchers who “mapped” the world’s blogospheres found that unlike the American blogosphere—or, for that matter, the Iranian one—which formed a series of interlocking circles, the Russian blogosphere consisted of discrete circles, each unconnected to any other. It was an anti-utopia of the information age: an infinite number of echo chambers. Nor was this true just of the Internet. The Kremlin was watching its own TV; big business was reading its own newspapers; the intelligentsia was reading its own blogs. None of these groups was aware of the others’ realities, and this made mass protest of any sort seem unlikely.

IN THE 2000 ELECTION, Putin got almost 53 percent of the vote, while his ten opponents each garnered between 1 and 29 percent. When he ran for reelection in 2004, he had 71 percent—a typical authoritarian-regime result—and his five opponents received between 0.75 and 14 percent apiece. As Putin’s second term was drawing to a close in 2007, the politicized classes in Russia wondered what would happen. Would Putin change the constitution to allow himself more than two consecutive terms? Would he go the Yeltsin route and direct the country to vote for a handpicked successor? For a time, Putin seemed to be favoring Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, a former KGB colleague. But in December of that year, Putin held a televised meeting with the leaders of four puppet parties, who together declared they wanted to nominate First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev for president. Medvedev just happened to be present for this well-scripted watershed event. In the election that followed, in March 2008, he garnered more than 70 percent of the vote, while his three opponents each received between zero and 17 percent. Once inaugurated, Medvedev appointed Putin his prime minister.

Forty-two-year-old Medvedev made Putin look charismatic. At just over five feet (his exact height was a carefully guarded secret, but rumors abounded, as did pictures of Medvedev sitting on a pillow or standing on a step stool to reach a microphone), he also made Putin look tall. He was a lawyer by education, he had worked in city hall in St. Petersburg, and he had never held a job leading a team or running anything, much less a country. He mimicked Putin’s robotic way of enunciating his words, except where Putin made every syllable sound menacing, Medvedev sounded like a voice synthesizer. And unlike Putin, Medvedev did not make vulgar jokes. That—and perhaps a desperate need to vest someone with hope—was enough to endear Medvedev to Russia’s intellectuals.

For the first time since Putin destroyed the media and shut down Russian politics, the man in the Kremlin addressed the thinking public of Russia. Medvedev talked of what his speechwriters thought to call “The Four I’s”: institutions, infrastructure, investment, and innovation. Flashing an iPhone and, once it had been introduced, an iPad, Medvedev seemed to be trying to imbue his own dense vocabulary with a modern, Western spirit. The intelligentsia ate it up. When Medvedev called on human-rights activists, liberal political analysts, and assorted thinking others to join a newly formed presidential council, they all came, willingly sacrificing their time to write white papers that evidently were never read. When journalists at opposition media dared criticize not only Putin but also Medvedev, editors pulled their stories. When Medvedev told a group of activist historians he would finally approve a long-stalled plan for a national museum honoring the memory of victims of Stalinist terror, the historians dropped everything to draw up plans, draft documents, and do the work federal bureaucrats should have been doing, all to enable Medvedev to sign the decree—which he never did. What he did was keep giving speeches, promising to fight corruption and modernize the country, while nothing changed. Mikhail Khodorkovsky stood trial for the second time. Sergei Magnitsky died in prison. And Vladimir Putin not only built his palace on the Black Sea but continued to run the country.

Medvedev’s role was almost exclusively ceremonial, but in their addresses to the public, the two leaders divided and conquered the country. Medvedev, with his refined diction, his talk of innovation, and his promises to fight corruption, played to the once vocal minority of activists and intellectuals, and succeeded in pacifying them. For the majority, Putin produced ever more of his memorable vulgarisms. After two deadly explosions on the Moscow subway in March 2010, he reprised his 1999 “Rub them out in the outhouse” pledge regarding terrorists: “We know they are now lying low,” he said. “But it is up to law enforcement to scrape them up off the bottom of the gutter.” In July 2009, responding to President Barack Obama’s observation that the prime minister had “one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new,” Putin said, “We don’t spread our legs.” In July 2008, when the majority owner of a metals and coal factory failed to attend a meeting at which Putin planned to dress him down, Putin said, “I understand that an illness is an illness, but I would recommend that Igor Vladimirovich [Zyuzin] get better as soon as possible. Or I’ll just have to send a doctor to see him and take care of the problem altogether.” In August 2010, Putin told a newspaper reporter that opposition activists who engaged in unsanctioned demonstrations (by this time, most opposition demonstrations were unsanctioned) should expect “to be hit over the head with a stick.” These thuggish one-liners were his way of still campaigning for popularity, as were a stream of topless photographs of him vacationing in the northern region of Tyva and, later, coverage of his diving in the Black Sea and emerging with two sixth-century vases planted there in advance by archaeologists. This was a dictator’s campaign, one that tolerated neither opposition nor scrutiny, but allowed for careful orchestration.

Putin was campaigning to remain the undisputed leader of the country—a surprisingly easy goal to accomplish in the presence of a sitting president—and, as a natural consequence of his obvious ongoing leadership, to become president again once Medvedev’s term ran out in 2012. Indeed, within six months of becoming president, Medvedev introduced—and the parliament passed—a measure changing the constitution to increase the presidential term to six years. The plan, ostensibly, was for Medvedev to sit out his four years doing nothing but talking pretty, and then to cede the throne to Putin, this time for two consecutive six-year terms. But transparent as that plan was, hope persisted that Medvedev was sincere in his intentions or that, after being called president for a few years, he might develop actual presidential ambitions—or simply that the system Putin had created might crack, as all closed systems eventually do.

The system’s greatest vulnerability stemmed from Putin’s and his inner circle’s pleonexia, the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belonged to others, that was exerting ever greater pressure on the regime from inside. Every year, Russia slid lower on the Corruption Perceptions Index of the watchdog group Transparency International, reaching 154th out of 178 by 2011 (for the year 2010). By 2011, human-rights activists estimated that fully 15 percent of the Russian prison population was made up of entrepreneurs who had been thrown behind bars by well-connected competitors who used the court system to take over other people’s businesses. By mid-2010, a thirty-four-year-old attorney named Alexey Navalny was drawing tens of thousands of daily hits on his blog, where, by combing government websites to find evidence of excess hidden in plain sight, he monitored the many outrages of an unaccountable bureaucracy. Here was the Voronezh region holding a tender to purchase five gold wristwatches at a cost of $15,000. Here was the city of Krasnodar in southern Russia offering to pay about $400 million for technical documentation on a planned railroad crossing. Here were two beds and two bedside tables plated with 24-karat gold, which the Ministry of the Interior was purchasing. Navalny dubbed the people in charge of Russia “The Party of Crooks and Thieves”—a name that caught on immediately. In the fall of 2010, the magazine I was editing published a long and detailed interview with Navalny, and in the lead I wrote, “An actual politician has suddenly been discovered in Russia.” Other magazines followed, putting the handsome blond Navalny on the cover, the attention culminating in a New Yorker profile in April 2011.

On February 2, 2011, Navalny announced that he was taking his one-man anticorruption campaign public, and called for contributions to his newly formed organization. Within three hours he had his first $5,000, in donations ranging from five kopecks (less than a cent) to the equivalent of $500. Within twenty-four hours, he had his first million rubles (roughly $30,000)—an all-time speed record for online donations to any cause in Russia. This was as clear a sign as there could be that Russians were fed up with being had—and were willing to pay for change. But it was also clear that a lone fighter like Navalny could not bring about change. As chess champion Garry Kasparov had already learned, having money, being popular, and being right did not enable an outsider to put a dent in the system. Only someone who was already on the inside could crack the monolith.

THAT MAN APPEARED to come on the scene in May 2011. Surprising everyone, including himself, Mikhail Prokhorov, now the second-richest man in Russia, announced that he was entering politics. Forty-six-year-old Prokhorov’s life story resembled that of other Russian superrich: he had entered business as a college senior, made his first money in the late 1980s by buying and selling anything he could get his hands on, amassed a fortune in the 1990s by privatizing wisely, and by shrewdly investing and reshaping what he had privatized. Unlike Gusinsky, Berezovsky, and Khodorkovsky, he had kept a distance from the Kremlin for most of his career, preferring to remain a hands-on manager and leave politics to his business partner.

Entering politics now was not exactly his own idea—although he would protest that it was. He had been solicited on behalf of the president and the prime minister to take the reins of a foundering right-liberal political party. It was a familiar pattern by this point: every election year, the Kremlin would anoint one rightist party and one leftist party that would be allowed on the ballot, to take part, alongside Putin’s United Russia, in what amounted to a mock election. Real political parties with actual leaders and agendas, meanwhile, would be denied registration on the basis of the convoluted laws and regulations adopted in the early 2000s. So Prokhorov had been chosen to serve as the figurehead of a dormant rightist party that would be briefly resuscitated in time for the December 2011 parliamentary election: he would be expected to play a scripted role, perhaps make a few careless rich-guy statements that would help drum up support for regular-guy Putin, and then retire to the sidelines when so instructed.

But I thought that this time the Kremlin puppeteers might have grown overconfident and made a fateful mistake. I knew Prokhorov a little: for the last three years I had been editing a magazine in which he was the principal investor. He seemed constitutionally incapable of being a figurehead. Moreover, he was actively looking for an arena in which he could apply himself fully. He had accomplished all he had set out to do in business in Russia, he was profoundly depressed about the state of the country, and he had been considering the disheartening option of selling off his assets and moving to New York, where he had bought the NBA team that would become the Brooklyn Nets. Now the alternative had presented itself: instead of leaving the country, he could fix it. He would get down to work, master this new undertaking just as he had set out to master metallurgy and the intricacies of management on the factory-floor level when he came into possession of the metals giant Norilsk Nickel, which he prided himself on having reformed from the bottom up, securing the workers’ support for the many changes he had instituted. Prokhorov was brilliant; at six-foot-eight he was, literally, a giant, and I believed he just might topple the system.

Over the next few months, I watched Prokhorov undergo a remarkable transformation. He received expert coaching: he got out of baggy navy Brioni suits and into tailored beige and gray ones. He unlearned his Aspergian way of answering questions in complete, grammatically correct paragraphs, sounding completely certain, and learned to leaven his speech with qualifiers and misplaced modifiers. Most important, he gathered dozens of experts in politics, economics, and media to help him develop nuanced positions on Russian politics and started to form a power base. He blanketed the country’s largest cities with billboards featuring his face and slogans such as “Plan for your future.” He had the money not only to buy all the advertising space in the land but also to replace his ads immediately after local authorities in more than a few places, taken aback by his audacity, took them down.

Whoever came up with the idea of using Prokhorov as a stand-in for the opposition obviously had not expected him to take the job so seriously. Vladislav Surkov, an assistant to Putin who had over the years built a reputation as the Kremlin’s chief puppet master—effectively taking the place vacated by Berezovsky—began calling Prokhorov in for almost daily talks. Prokhorov, unaccustomed to reporting to anyone, nonetheless submitted to a ritual he found odd and distinctly humiliating: giving Surkov a complete accounting of his political activities. Surkov in turn made suggestions, on at least one occasion advising Prokhorov to drop someone from the party’s rolls. Prokhorov ignored the suggestions and pressed on with what he thought was right—until September 14, 2011, when he found himself locked out of his own party’s scheduled congress. Many of the activists Prokhorov had recruited over the previous three months were not allowed to take part in the congress either, and an entirely different group of people elected an entirely different leadership. Whoever had given Prokhorov the party had now decided to take it away.

Watching one of the richest and tallest men in Russia feeling utterly lost, confused, and betrayed was painful. Prokhorov called a press conference to announce that the lockout was illegal. He convened an alternative congress the following day and spoke there. He promised to see to it that Surkov would lose his job. He promised to fight. He promised to come back in ten days and lay out his detailed plans for a political battle.

Of course, Surkov—if it was indeed Surkov—was not the only one to have miscalculated badly. Prokhorov, living in the information bubble shaped by his experience in business, at a safe distance from the Kremlin, had overreached catastrophically. In the days after the congresses, he received enough messages about what would happen to him and his business to force him to give up on the idea of being a politician. Prokhorov never did come out with his battle plan; he all but disappeared from the public eye.

It seemed that whoever had chosen Prokhorov to oppose Putin had made a classic mistake of overconfidence—but had caught it in plenty of time.

ON SEPTEMBER 24, 2011, United Russia held its own party congress. Dmitry Medvedev addressed the throngs.

“I believe it would be right to support the candidacy of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin for president,” he declared. The hall erupted in a standing ovation. When it finally quieted, Medvedev unself-consciously told the crowd that he and Putin had made the arrangement back when Medvedev first became president. And now, when Putin returned to the post of president, Medvedev would be his prime minister.

Within hours, the Russian blogosphere filled with pictures of Putin doctored to look older and conspicuously like Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader who died after eighteen years in office, virtually immobile and completely incoherent. Putin, the bloggers reminded one another, would be seventy-one by the time his second six-year term was over.

And with this, the transformation of Russia back into the USSR was, for all Putin’s intents and purposes, complete.