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

Five A COUP AND A CRUSADE

It took me two years to get Marina Salye to talk to me. And then it took me about twelve hours of tough driving, including half an hour of nearly impossible driving—my instructions were to “drive as far as you can and walk the rest of the way”—to get to Salye’s house. At the end of the road I was to look for the tricolor Russian flag flying high over a wooden house. It would have been hard to miss: Russians are not in the habit of flying the flag over their homes.

Salye was now living in a village, if you can call it that: twenty-six houses and only six people. Like so many Russian villages, this one, hundreds of miles from the nearest big city and about twenty miles from the nearest food shop, was an empty nest, forgotten, futureless. Seventy-five-year-old Salye lived there, with the woman she called her sister, because no one could find them there.

The other woman, who was a few years younger and seemed to be in better health, brought out the boxes of papers Salye had taken with her when she disappeared from view. Here were the results of months of ceaseless digging she had undertaken—after uncovering the story of the missing meat.

IN 1990, the world was going to hell. Or at least the Soviet Union was. On January 13, 1990, pogroms broke out in the streets of the Azerbaijan capital, Baku, historically the most diverse of all the cities in the Russian empire. Forty-eight ethnic Armenians were killed and nearly thirty thousand—the city’s entire remaining Armenian population—fled the city. World chess champion Garry Kasparov, a Baku Armenian, chartered a plane to evacuate family, friends, and their friends. On January 19, Soviet troops stormed Baku, ostensibly to restore order, and left more than a hundred civilians—mostly ethnic Azeris—dead.

The Soviet empire was splitting at the seams. The center was helpless to hold it together; its army was brutal and ineffectual.

The Soviet economy, too, was nearing collapse. Shortages of food and everyday products had reached catastrophic proportions. If Moscow was still able, albeit barely, to mobilize the resources of the entire huge country to get basic goods onto at least some of its store shelves, then Leningrad, the country’s second-largest city, reflected the full extent of the disaster. In June 1989, Leningrad authorities had begun rationing tea and soap. In October 1990, sugar, vodka, and cigarettes joined the list of rationed products. In November 1990 the democratic city council felt compelled to take the terrifyingly unpopular step of introducing actual ration cards—inevitably reminiscent of the ration cards used during the siege of the city in World War II. Every Leningrad resident now had the right to procure three pounds of meat per month, two pounds of processed meats, ten eggs, one pound of butter, half a pound of vegetable oil, one pound of flour, and two pounds of grains or dry pasta. In introducing the ration cards, the city councillors hoped not only to stave off hunger—the word, in all its obscenity, was no longer perceived as belonging to history or to faraway lands—but also to prevent public unrest.

The city came perilously close to mass violence twice that year: during the tobacco riot of August 1990 and the sugar riot a few weeks later. Cigarettes had been scarce for some time, but the big stores in central Leningrad generally had at least one brand for sale. One day in late August 1990, though, even the stores along Nevsky Prospekt had no smokes. A crowd gathered in front of one of the stores in the morning, in anticipation of a delivery that never came. The store closed for lunch, to reopen an hour later, its shelves still empty. By three in the afternoon, a mob of several thousand enraged smokers had blocked traffic on Nevsky and was getting ready to start crashing store windows. Police leadership called the city council in a panic: if violence broke out, they would be unable to prevent either injury or property damage. Some of the deputies, led by Sobchak, rushed over to Nevsky to try to calm the crowd.

The politicians arrived just in time. The protesters had already uprooted a huge sidewalk planter and dislodged a long piece of fence from a nearby yard and were constructing barricades across the city’s main avenue. Traffic was at a standstill. Police special forces, formed just a couple of years earlier and already known for their brutality in breaking up rallies—their batons were nicknamed “the democratizers”—had arrived at the scene and were getting ready to storm the protesting smokers and their barricades. Unlike the regular police, these troops in riot gear did not seem at a loss: they were certain there would be blood. Sobchak and several other well-known deputies tried to reason with different groups within the crowd, picking out people who seemed to recognize them and striking up conversations. Former dissident and political prisoner Yuli Rybakov, now also a city council member, walked over to the special forces to assure their brass that a truckload of cigarettes would be arriving any minute and the protest would be resolved peacefully.

Another city council team, led by Salye, was combing the city’s warehouses, looking for a stash of cigarettes. They found some and delivered them to the protesters on Nevsky well after dark. The smokers lit up and dispersed, leaving the city council members to disassemble their makeshift barricades and consider the prospects of future riots that might not be resolved with such relative ease, because eventually, it seemed, the city would run out of everything.

A few weeks later, at the height of late-summer preserves-making season, sugar disappeared from store shelves. Fearing a repeat of the tobacco riot, a group of city councillors began investigating. They uncovered what they believed was a Communist Party conspiracy to discredit the city’s new democratic regime. Taking advantage of the fact that no one really knew any longer who held what authority in the city, Communist Party functionaries had apparently pulled some old levers in order to prevent the unloading of freight trains that had transported sugar to Leningrad. Marina Salye called an emergency meeting of some city council members and dispatched them personally to monitor the arrival, unloading, and delivery of sugar to stores. A riot was thus averted.

By this time Marina Salye, the geologist, had been elected to chair the city council’s committee on food supplies. Somehow it seemed that a woman who had never had anything to do with food or retail, who had never been much of a professional organizer or anyone’s boss, but who appeared inherently uncorrupted and incorruptible would do the best possible job of preventing hunger in Leningrad. The city’s most trusted politician was logically given the city’s most important and most difficult job.

IN MAY 1991, Salye, in her capacity as chairwoman of the Leningrad City Council’s committee on food supplies, traveled to Berlin to sign contracts for the importing of several trainloads of meat and potatoes to Leningrad. Negotiations had more or less been completed: Salye and a trusted colleague from the city administration were really there just to sign the papers.

“And we get there,” Salye told me years later, still outraged, “and this Frau Rudolf with whom we were supposed to meet, she tells us she can’t see us because she is involved in urgent negotiations with the City of Leningrad on the subject of meat imports. Our eyes are popping out. Because we are the City of Leningrad, and we are there on the subject of meat imports!”

Salye and her colleague rushed to call the food supplies committee of the Leningrad city administration, a counterpart to her own committee: the only explanation they could imagine was that the executive branch had, inexplicably, elbowed in on the contract. But the chairman of the committee knew nothing of the negotiations. “So I call Sobchak,” Salye remembered. “I say, Anatoly Alexandrovich, I have just found out—and by now I have been given figures—that Leningrad is buying sixty tons of meat. Sobchak calls the External Economic Bank while I am hanging on—I can hear him speaking—and he names the firm and the bank confirms that, yes, a credit line for ninety million deutsche marks has been opened for this firm. And he doesn’t tell me anything else: he says, ‘I have no idea what is going on.’”

Salye went home empty-handed, only half hoping that the sixty tons of meat supposedly bought by the city would actually materialize. It did not, which meant she hardly had time to pursue the mystery meat story, which kept nagging at her. Three months later, however, it was subsumed by another event, much more frightening and no less mystifying—and, in Salye’s mind, inextricably connected with her German misadventure.

THE MOST IMPORTANT JUNCTURE in modern Russian history, the country’s most fateful moment, is, strangely, not the subject of any coherent narrative. There is no national consensus on the nature of the events that defined the country, and this very lack of consensus is, arguably, modern Russia’s greatest failing as a nation.

In August 1991, a group of Soviet federal ministers, led by Gorbachev’s vice president, attempted to remove Gorbachev from office, with the ostensible goal of saving the USSR from destruction. The coup failed, the USSR fell apart, and Gorbachev lost power anyway. Twenty years later, there is no universally or even widely believed story of the events. What motivated the ministers? Why did their takeover fail as quickly and miserably as it did? Finally, who won, exactly?

The expectation of a hard-line backlash had been in the air since the beginning of the year. Some people even claimed to know the date of the planned coup ahead of time; I know at least one entrepreneur, one of the very first Russian rich, who left the country because he had been tipped off about the coup. Nor did one need to have an inside track to the KGB or an overactive imagination in order to expect the coup: a sense of dread and of a fatal kind of instability was palpable. Armed ethnic conflicts were flaring up all over the country. The Baltic republics—Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—decided to sever their ties with the Soviet Union, and Boris Yeltsin, chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet, supported them in this. Gorbachev sent tanks into Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, to suppress the uprising there. That was in January. In March, there were tanks in the streets of Moscow when Gorbachev, either driven to despair by the sense that the country was out of control or caving in to hard-liners within his own administration, or both, tried to ban all public demonstrations in Moscow; that was when I first saw Galina Starovoitova leading hundreds of thousands of Muscovites who had defied the decree and the tanks. Also in March, Gorbachev organized a referendum on whether to maintain the Soviet Union as an entity; the people in nine of the fifteen constituent republics voted in favor, but six republics boycotted the vote. At the end of the month, Georgia conducted its own referendum and voted to secede from the USSR.

The republics stopped paying dues to the federal center, exacerbating a budget crisis that was already massive. Shortages of food and basic goods grew worse even when it seemed worse was not possible. In April, the government tried gingerly to loosen price controls; prices went up but supplies did not. In June, Ukraine declared its independence from the USSR, as did Chechnya, which was actually a part of the Russian Republic of the USSR. Russia held presidential elections in June, electing Yeltsin. Moscow and Leningrad both established the office of mayor, which had not existed in Soviet times, and in June, Sobchak was elected mayor of Leningrad. It was a job that suited him better than being chairman of the city council: he had, after all, always acted the executive. Putin became deputy mayor for international relations.

OVER TWO YEARS of constant political change and tumultuous civic debate, Soviet citizens had grown dependent on their television sets. On August 19, 1991, those who rose early woke up to find them silent. Or not quite silent: Swan Lake, the ballet, was being broadcast over and over. Starting at six in the morning, state radio began airing a series of political decrees and addresses. An hour later, the same documents began to be read on the television as well.

“Countrymen! Citizens of the Soviet Union!” began the most eloquent of the documents, all of which were broadcast repeatedly. “We speak to you at a critical juncture for our fatherland and for all of our people! Our great motherland is in grave danger! The politics of reform, launched by M. S. Gorbachev, intended to guarantee the dynamic development of the country and the democratization of our society, has led us to a dead end. What began with enthusiasm and hope has ended in loss of faith, apathy, and despair. The government at all levels has lost the trust of the citizenry. Politicking has taken over public life, forcing out genuine care for the fate of the fatherland and the citizen. An evil mockery has been made of state institutions. The country has, in essence, become ungovernable.”

The junta, which included the chairman of the KGB, the prime minister, the interior minister, the deputy chairman of the security council, the defense minister, the vice president, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, and the heads of the trade and agricultural unions, went on to make promises to the people:

“Pride and honor of the Soviet man shall be restored fully.”

“The country’s growth should not be built on a falling standard of living of its population. In a healthy society, a constant growth of wealth will be the norm.”

“Our foremost task will be finding solutions to the problems of food and housing shortages. All forces will be mobilized to satisfy these, the most important of the people’s needs.”

To that end, proclaimed a different document, “taking into account the needs of the population, which has demanded that decisive measures be taken to prevent the slipping of the society toward a national catastrophe, that law and order be secured, a state of emergency shall be declared in several locations in the USSR for a period of six months, beginning at four o’clock in the morning Moscow time, 19 August 1991.” The junta, accordingly, called itself the State Committee for the State of Emergency in the USSR (GKChP SSSR). They told the people over and over that Gorbachev was ill, unfit to hold office. In fact, he was under house arrest at a vacation home in the Black Sea resort of Foros.

THE SECOND HALF OF AUGUST is dead season in Russian cities. City councils were out of session; many politicians, activists, and other citizens were out of town. When people who were in town heard the news, they began gathering at their workplaces, hoping to get some direction or some information, or simply to experience grief and dread together with other human beings.

The first three members of the Leningrad City Council arrived at the Mariinsky Palace just after seven in the morning. They decided to convene a session of the council, so they began making phone calls. By ten, they still did not have a quorum. But this was when those present saw General Viktor Samsonov, head of the Leningrad Military District, come on television, identify himself as the regional representative of the GKChP and declare a state of emergency in the city. In the absence of a quorum, Igor Artemyev, a deputy chairman of the city council, decided to call at least a working meeting to order. The bearded, soft-spoken Artemyev, a thirty-year-old Ph.D. in biology, inexperienced in running meetings, was entirely unprepared for what came next. He gave the floor to the first person who asked for it; it happened to be an appointed representative of the GKChP, Rear Admiral Viktor Khramtsov. He had barely begun to speak when Vitaly Skoybeda, a thirty-year-old city council member known for his propensity to get into fights, stormed the floor, shouting that Khramtsov should be arrested—and slugging him.

City Council chairman Alexander Belyaev, who had been out of town, walked in at this key juncture. Calling the proceedings to order, he quickly approached the rear admiral, who was still prone on the hall’s spectacular parquet floor, and asked him whether there was a document establishing a state of emergency in the city. There was not. In that case, Belyaev resolved, there was no state of emergency. Marina Salye called the GKChP a “military coup”—a not yet obvious definition that struck those present as very exact. The councillors began discussing a plan of resistance, forming a coordinating committee, and drafting a statement in opposition to the coup. The question now was how to get the message to the people of Leningrad.

Mayor Sobchak, too, was out of town, and no one knew how to reach him. He called the city council on the phone in the late morning or early afternoon, just when the councillors had completed their discussion. “We told him that we are planning to go to the television station in order to inform the city as soon as possible that this is a military coup,” Salye told me years later. “He said, ‘Don’t do it, it will just cause panic. Wait for me to get there.’” Several of the city councillors, including Salye, tried to get to the television station anyway, but they were not allowed in. The waiting for Sobchak commenced.

Sobchak had spent the morning at Boris Yeltsin’s dacha outside Moscow. The Russian president had summoned all the leading democrats then in Moscow. It was a scared and confused group of men. By any logic anyone could understand, Yeltsin should have been arrested; no one could figure out why he had not been. In fact, a warrant for his arrest had been signed overnight, and he should have been taken when he flew into Moscow that morning. But for some reason no one could explain then or later, the arrest did not take place. KGB agents were then directed to encircle Yeltsin’s dacha. They saw him enter the house and later leave it, but they never received a final order to place him under arrest; as it turned out later, two deputy commanders of the unit in charge of the operation had objected and ultimately blocked the warrant. The KGB agents sat armed and idle outside his house as Yeltsin sped off toward the seat of the Russian government in central Moscow.

Others present, including Sobchak, traveled to the airport to fly to their respective cities to coordinate local resistance efforts. But before leaving Moscow, Sobchak called Leningrad and directed police special forces to block all entrances and exits to the Leningrad television station. Whether he did this before or after placing the call to the city council is not clear. What is clear is that this was why Salye and others were not allowed to enter.

They waited. Sobchak should have landed long ago. He had, but before coming to the city council—as all of Leningrad seemed to expect him to do: a crowd was gathering in front of the Mariinsky, growing larger every hour—Sobchak went to Leningrad district military headquarters to speak with General Samsonov. “Why did I do so?” he wrote later in a memoir. “I still cannot explain my actions. It must have been intuition, because when I arrived at the district headquarters in Palace Square, a GKChP working meeting was just getting under way in Samsonov’s office…. Our conversation ended with Samsonov giving me his word that, barring any extreme or extraordinary events, there would be no troops in the city, and my promising to maintain safety in the city.”

In fact, what Sobchak did was choose a course of action distinctly different from that of his colleagues in Moscow and many other cities: once again, he decided to hedge his bets by creating a situation in which he would be safe if the hard-liners won but get to keep his democrat’s credentials if they lost.

MOSCOW’S CITY COUNCIL also convened at ten in the morning and also resolved to oppose the coup. Unlike their Leningrad colleagues, Moscow city councillors had the unequivocal support of the city’s mayor, Gavriil Popov, who, among other things, ordered city services to cut off water, power, and telephone connections to any buildings from which GKChP supporters were operating, and city banks to stop issuing funds to GKChP and affiliated organizations. The city council and the mayor’s office together formed a task force to coordinate resistance efforts. As troops were entering the city from different directions throughout the day of August 19, so were volunteers gathering around the Moscow “White House,” the high-rise that was home to the Russian government. When GKChP representatives called Moscow’s deputy mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, to try to negotiate, Luzhkov, who had always been more of a bureaucrat than a democrat, cursed them and hung up the phone.

Sobchak, meanwhile, completed his negotiations with General Samsonov and finally went to his office at the Mariinsky Palace, where Putin had posted and was personally supervising a heavy guard. By the middle of the day, tens of thousands of people had gathered in front of the Mariinsky Palace, hoping for news—or an opportunity to act. Sobchak eventually appeared in the window of his office and read a statement—not his own, but that of Russian president Boris Yeltsin and other members of his government. “We call on the people of Russia to respond appropriately to the putschists and to demand that the country be allowed to return to its normal course of constitutional development.” After nine in the evening, joined by his deputy the rear admiral, he finally traveled to the Leningrad TV station, where he read his own address—inspired and eloquent as ever. The speech was particularly important because Leningrad television broadcast to many cities all over the country, and though the GKChP apparently tried to stop the broadcast as soon as Sobchak started to speak, Leningrad persisted. Sobchak called on the city’s residents to come to a rally the following day. He sounded defiant, but he was not: he had previously cleared the plan with General Samsonov, promising to keep the demonstrators confined to a clearly circumscribed space. After he finished speaking, Sobchak, and Putin with him, went into hiding: he would spend the next two days in a bunker beneath Leningrad’s largest industrial plant, emerging only once to appear at a press conference. He was terrified.

On the second day of the coup, the strangest thing happened. Marina Salye was manning the phones at the city council’s makeshift resistance headquarters when Yeltsin’s vice president, General Alexander Rutskoy, called and started screaming into the phone: “What the hell did he do? He read a decree? What the hell did he read?” It took a few minutes for Salye to figure out what Rutskoy was talking about, and it took her much longer than that to understand what it meant. Rutskoy had issued a decree removing General Samsonov from his post as the head of the Leningrad Military District and replacing him with Rear Admiral Shcherbakov, Sobchak’s deputy. Replacing a hard-liner loyal to the GKChP with someone loyal to the democratic mayor seemed like a logical step, and one that Sobchak should have welcomed. Except it upset Sobchak’s carefully constructed hedge and would in essence have forced him to take Yeltsin’s side not only in his speeches, which he had done, but also in his actions. So Sobchak, the lawyer, fudged the language in Rutskoy’s decree, which he read at his press conference, rendering the document invalid.

There was a barrage of decrees, statements, addresses, and orders coming from both sides of the barricades. It was a war of nerves rather than a legal battle, for any organization, or any person, obeyed only the decrees issued by the authority he recognized. This was why Yeltsin could not just call Samsonov and order him to clear out of his office: Samsonov reported to the GKChP, not to Yeltsin. So the democratic government in Moscow had hoped that Sobchak, by reading the decree aloud, with all his eloquence and all his authority, would invest the document with enough power that the troops stationed in Leningrad would believe Rear Admiral Shcherbakov to be their new commander. But when Sobchak read the decree, he replaced the job title now assigned to Shcherbakov with something called “top military chief,” a term no one recognized, a fictitious job from some parallel world that cast no doubt on General Samsonov’s authority. This was Sobchak’s way of keeping his own situation undefined and stable.

AND THEN THE COUP CRUMPLED. After a two-day standoff in the center of Moscow, most of the troops failed to move on the White House, and the few armored personnel carriers that did were stopped by a handful of unarmed volunteers and the barricades they had constructed from sidewalk stones and overturned electric buses. Three people died.

Gorbachev returned to Moscow. The incredibly fast process of taking apart the Soviet Union commenced. At the same time, the Russian and Soviet governments launched the process of taking apart the Soviet Union’s most powerful institution, the KGB, although this effort would prove much more complicated and much less efficient.

On August 22, the Russian Supreme Soviet passed a resolution establishing a white, blue, and red flag as the new flag of Russia, replacing the Soviet-era red flag with its hammer and sickle. A group of city council members, led by Vitaly Skoybeda—the one who had slugged the hard-liner three days earlier—set off to replace the flag in Leningrad. “The flag was on a corner of Nevsky Prospekt, over the Party headquarters,” Yelena Zelinskaya, the samizdat publisher, recalled in an interview years later. “It was the most noticeable place in the city. They started taking it down, a group of people including journalists and city council members. An orchestra showed up for some reason; it was the brass band of the military school. And a television crew was there filming. They lowered the red flag carefully. As the orchestra played, they raised the tricolor. The man who took down the flag was standing right there among us, on Nevsky. So there we were, a group of people, standing in the street, with an orchestra playing, and this man with a red flag in his hands, and we were suddenly totally lost as to what to do. Here we had a flag that for eighty years had been the symbol of the state; we had all hated it but we had also all feared it. And then one of our staff members says, ‘I know what to do: we are going to give it back to them.’ The district Party headquarters was across the street. And he grabbed the flag and ran across the Nevsky, without looking left or right. Cars stop. The orchestra is playing a march, and he is running across the very wide Nevsky, and just when the orchestra is playing the last note, he tosses the flag as hard as he can against the Party headquarters doors. There is a pause. And then the door opens slowly just a crack; a hand reaches out and quickly yanks the flag inside. The door closes. This was the highlight of my entire life. I saw the Russian flag raised over Nevsky.”

Five days after the coup began, Moscow held a funeral for the three young men who died trying to stop the troops. Three Leningrad politicians, including Salye, flew in for the ceremony. They joined Nikolai Gonchar, chairman of the Moscow City Council and a prominent democrat, at the head of the funeral procession. “The procession kept starting and stopping,” Salye told me later. “And every time we stopped, Gonchar turned to me and said, ‘Marina Yevgeniyevna, what was it?’ He said it about ten times.” By the end of the day, Gonchar had Salye convinced that the coup was not what it had seemed.

So what was it? Why did the coup, so many months in the making, fall apart so easily? Indeed, why did it never really take off? Why were the democratic politicians, with the exception of Gorbachev, allowed to move around the country freely and have telephone contact? Why were none of them arrested? Why, in the three days that they ostensibly held power in the Soviet Union, did the hard-liners fail to capture the main communication or transportation hubs? And why did they fold without a fight? Was the coup simply a mediocre attempt by a group of disorganized failures? Or was there something more complicated and more sinister going on? Was there, as Salye ultimately came to believe, a carefully engineered arrangement that allowed Yeltsin to remove Gorbachev and broker the peaceful demise of the Soviet Union but also placed him forever in debt to the KGB?

I happen to think it was neither—and both. Even while it was going on, on either side of the barricades, different people were telling themselves different stories about the coup. When it ended, the nominal winners—the people who fought for democracy in Russia—failed to shape or advance a story that would have become the common truth of the new Russia. Everyone was thus left with his or her individual narrative. In the end, for some people those three days in August 1991 remained a story of heroism and the victory of democracy. For others, they remained—or became—the story of a cynical conspiracy. Which story is right depends on which of them belongs to the people who hold power in Russia. So the question becomes: What is the story that Vladimir Putin tells himself about the coup?

OVER THOSE THREE DAYS IN AUGUST, Putin was even less visible than usual. He stayed by Sobchak’s side at all times. It was Sobchak’s other deputy, Shcherbakov, who had the visible role, who acted as both spokesman and point man: he stayed behind in the mayor’s office, night and day and night again, as Sobchak, accompanied by Putin, hid in the bunker. We know that Sobchak was playing both sides of the barricades; in fact, the barricades may have bisected his inner circle. Early in the crisis, Shcherbakov discovered that someone had placed a tiny tracking device on his lapel. On the morning of August 21, Shcherbakov remembered, “I had pushed five chairs together in my office and lain down to sleep on them. I woke up because I sensed someone looking at me. Anatoly Alexandrovich [Sobchak] had returned. ‘Go back to sleep, Vyacheslav Nikolayevich,’ he said. ‘Everything is fine and good. Congratulations.’ I immediately reached for my lapel to feel for the bug—and it was no longer there. So someone in my immediate circle had placed it and then removed it so it would not be found. Someone who was working for the other side.”

Nine years later, Putin answered his biographers’ questions about the coup. “It was dangerous to leave the city council building in those days,” he reminisced. “But we did many things, we were active: we went to the Kirov industrial plant, spoke to the workers there, and went to other factories, even though we did not feel particularly safe doing so.” This is mostly a lie: many independent eyewitnesses describe Sobchak, and Putin with him, going into hiding in the bunker at the Kirov industrial plant, where Sobchak may or may not have given a speech before literally going underground. There is no indication they went to any other factories or did anything during the last two days of the crisis but emerge for that single press conference.

“What if the hard-liners had won?” the biographers asked. “You were a KGB officer. You and Sobchak would certainly have been put on trial.”

“But I was not a KGB officer anymore,” Putin responded. “As soon as the coup began, I made up my mind as to which side I’m on. I knew for a fact that I would never do anything as directed by the coup organizers and would never be on their side. And I knew full well that this would be considered at least a violation. So on August 20 I wrote my second letter of resignation from the KGB.”

This makes no sense. If Putin knew that his first letter of resignation, supposedly written a year earlier, was lost, why did he not write a second one immediately—especially if, as he claimed, he had initially decided to resign under threat of blackmail? In addition, how would he have known that the letter was lost? Presumably, there was only one way: he continued to draw a salary from the KGB, meaning he was very much a KGB officer when the coup began.

But now, he claimed, he mobilized all efforts to break with the organization. “I told Sobchak, ‘Anatoly Alexandrovich, I wrote a letter of resignation once but it “died” somewhere along the way.’ So Sobchak immediately called [KGB chief and one of the coup leaders Vladimir] Kryuchkov and then the head of my district. And the following day, I was told that my letter of resignation had been signed.”

This part of the story seems to be pure fiction. “I do not think the phone call he describes could have taken place on August 20,” said Arseniy Roginsky, a Moscow human-rights activist and historian who spent about a year after the coup combing through KGB archives and studying that institution. “Kryuchkov simply would not have handled a personnel question, especially one that concerned a not particularly senior officer, that day.” Nor is it easy to imagine Sobchak, who was so busy playing both sides, acting essentially to sever his own ties to the KGB. In addition, it is not clear how Putin managed to deliver a physical letter—the one that was supposedly signed the next day—to KGB headquarters that day, especially if he never left Sobchak’s side. Finally, even if some of what Putin said were true, it would mean that his resignation was accepted on the last day of the coup, when it was all but clear that the hard-liners had failed.

Most likely, Putin, like his boss, spent the days of the coup on the fence and, if he resigned from the KGB at all, did so only once the coup was over. Unlike Sobchak and many other people, he had not even taken Yeltsin’s lead a few months earlier and resigned from the Communist Party: Putin’s membership expired two weeks after the failed coup, when Yeltsin issued a decree dissolving the Party. So the question is still: What is the story that Putin told himself during the coup? Is there a chance he was the person or one of the people in Sobchak’s inner circle who actively supported the hard-liners? The answer is yes.

THE NINETY MILLION DEUTSCHE MARKS’ worth of meat that Marina Salye had caught wind of in May had never materialized in Leningrad, but she did not forget about it in the dramatic events that followed. Insulted and mystified by what had happened in Germany, Salye continued to try to get to the bottom of the story. After the failed coup, when access to records of all sorts briefly got easier, she was finally able to get her hands on some documents, and by March 1992 she had pieced together the story.

In May 1991, Soviet prime minister Valentin Pavlov granted a Leningrad company called Kontinent the right to negotiate trade contracts on behalf of the Soviet government. Within weeks, Kontinent had signed the meat contract with the German firm. The meat was delivered—but to Moscow rather than Leningrad. The reason was plain: The future GKChP, of which Pavlov was a leader, was trying to stock Moscow food warehouses in order to flood store shelves once they seized power.

The name of the man who had negotiated with the Germans on behalf of Kontinent? Vladimir Putin.

Once Salye thought she knew what had happened, she tried to take action. In March 1992 she traveled to Moscow to see an old acquaintance from the Leningrad pro-democracy movement. Yuri Boldyrev, a handsome, moustachioed young economist, had been elected to the Supreme Soviet alongside Sobchak; now he was working as the chief comptroller in the Yeltsin administration. Salye hand-delivered a letter describing the initial results of her investigation: the peculiar story of the meat that had apparently traveled from Germany to Moscow. Within days, Boldyrev had written a letter to another Leningrad economist, who was now the foreign trade minister, asking him to curtail Putin’s powers. The letter was ignored. Putin had presumably created a base of wealth and influence from which he could not easily be shaken.

What exactly was Putin’s role in the government of Russia’s second-largest city? A woman who worked at the mayor’s office at the same time recalls Putin as a man with an empty office save for a desk with a lone glass ashtray sitting atop it, and with similarly colorless glassy eyes looking out from behind the desk. In his early months in city government, Putin had struck some of his colleagues as eager, curious, and intellectually engaged. Now he cultivated an impervious, emotionless exterior. The woman who worked as his secretary later recalled having to deliver a piece of upsetting personal news to her boss: “The Putins had a dog, a Caucasian shepherd named Malysh [Baby]. He lived at their dacha and was always digging holes under the fence, trying to get out. One time he did get out, and got run over by a car. Ludmila Alexandrovna grabbed the dog and drove him to the veterinary clinic. She called his office from there and asked me to tell her husband that the veterinarian had been unable to save the dog. I went into Vladimir Vladimirovich’s office and said, ‘You know, there is a situation. Malysh is dead.’ I looked—and there was no emotion in his face, none. I was so surprised at his lack of reaction that I could not keep from asking, ‘Did someone already tell you?’ And he said calmly, ‘No, you are the first person to tell me.’ That’s when I knew I had said the wrong thing.”

The “wrong thing” in the story presumably refers to the question about whether Putin had already been informed of his dog’s death. But the scene as a whole is remarkable for the palpable sense of uncertainty and even fear that it conveys.

When his biographers asked him about the nature of his work in St. Petersburg, Putin responded with the lack of subtlety that had come to characterize his answers to sensitive questions. He had tried to take over the casinos, he said. “I believed at the time that the casino business is an area where the state should have a monopoly,” he said. “My position ran opposite to the law on monopolies, which had already been passed, but still I tried to make sure that the state, as embodied by the city, established control over the entire casino industry.” To that end, he said, the city formed a holding company that acquired 51 percent of the stock of all the casinos in the city, in the hopes of collecting dividends. “But it was a mistake: the casinos funneled the money out in cash and reported losses every time,” Putin complained. “Later, our political opponents tried to accuse us of corruption because we owned stock in the casinos. That was just ridiculous…. Sure, it may not have been the best idea from an economic standpoint. Judging from the fact that the setup turned out to be inefficient and we did not attain our goals, I have to admit it was not sufficiently thought through. But if I had stayed in Petersburg, I would have finished choking those casinos. I would have made them share. I would have given that money to elderly people, teachers, and doctors.” In other words, said the incoming president of Russia, if the law got in the way of his ideas of how things should be done, that would be too bad for the law. He had little else to say about his years as Sobchak’s deputy.

In early 1992, Marina Salye had set out to learn exactly what the little man with the empty office was actually doing. The city council launched a full-fledged investigation, the results of which—twenty-two single-spaced typed pages plus dozens of pages of appendices—Salye presented to her colleagues less than two months following her visit to Boldyrev. She discovered that Putin had entered into dozens of contracts on behalf of the city, many if not all of them of questionable legality.

Putin’s department in the mayor’s office was now called the Committee for Foreign Relations. Most of its activities ostensibly centered on providing for foodstuffs to be brought into the city from other countries. The city had no cash with which to buy the food: the ruble was not a convertible currency; Russia’s monetary system, inherited from the Soviet Union, was out of balance, and efforts to right it immediately led to hyperinflation. But Russia had plenty of natural resources, which it could trade, directly or indirectly, for food. To that end, the government in Moscow allowed subjects of the federation to export natural resources.

Salye found that Putin’s department had entered into a dozen export contracts, together worth $92 million. The city agreed to provide oil, timber, metals, cotton, and other natural resources granted to it by the Russian state; the companies named in the contracts undertook to export the natural resources and import foodstuffs. But Salye’s investigation found that every single contract contained a flaw that made it legally invalid: all were missing seals or signatures, or contained major discrepancies. “Putin is a lawyer by training,” she wrote later. “He had to know that these contracts could not be used in court.” In addition, Putin had violated the rules of these import-export barter operations, set by the Russian government, by picking the exporting companies unilaterally rather than by holding an open competition.

The food that by contract was supposed to be brought into Leningrad never made it to the city. But the commodities mentioned in these dozen contracts apparently had been transported abroad; in fact, another irregularity to which Salye’s investigation drew attention was the inordinate nature of the commissions written into the contracts: between 25 and 50 percent of the sum of each contract, for a total of $34 million in commissions. All evidence seemed to point to a simple kickback scheme: handpicked companies received lucrative contracts—and they did not even have to hold up their end.

Asked about the investigation by his biographers, Putin acknowledged that many of the firms with which he had signed contracts had failed to bring any food to the city. “I think the city did not do all it could, of course,” he said. “We should have worked more closely with law enforcement, we should have beaten it out of their firms. But it made no sense to try to go to court: the firms would just disappear instantly, stop functioning, remove their goods. In essence, we had no claim against them. Remember that time: it was full of shady businesses, financial pyramids, that sort of thing.” This was the same man who, just a day or two earlier, had emphasized to his biographers how vicious he could be if someone so much as seemed to cross him, the same man who flared up instantly and had a hard time winding down, the same man whom his friends remember all but scratching out his opponents’ eyes when he was angered. Why would this man sit idly while one private company after another violated the terms of the contracts he had signed with them, leaving his city without the food supplies it so badly needed?

Because it was rigged to end that way from the beginning, Salye believes. “The point of the whole operation,” she wrote later, “was this: to create a legally flawed contract with someone who could be trusted, to issue an export license to him, to make the customs office open the border on the basis of this license, to ship the goods abroad, sell them, and pocket the money. And that is what happened.”

But that, Salye believed, was not all that happened. Moscow had actually given St. Petersburg permission to export a billion dollars’ worth of commodities, so the twelve rigged contracts she found represented only a tenth of the wealth that should have traveled through Putin’s office. What was the rest of the story? She eventually found evidence that all, or nearly all, of the commodities, including aluminum, oil, and cotton, had been exported, or, as she put it, “had vanished”: there was simply no documentation. But her report to the city council focused only on the twelve contracts for which there was documentation; nearly a hundred million dollars’ worth of commodities ostensibly bartered for food that never arrived.

The city council reviewed Salye’s report and resolved to forward it to Mayor Sobchak with the recommendations that the report be submitted to the prosecutor’s office and that Sobchak dismiss Putin and Putin’s own deputy, whose signature was on many of the contracts. Sobchak ignored the recommendations and the report itself. The prosecutor’s office would not launch an investigation without Sobchak’s permission. Salye had already hand-delivered a three-page letter to Yeltsin outlining some of the biggest violations and asking that they be investigated. There had been no reaction. Only Boldyrev, Russia’s chief comptroller, had reacted with understanding, immediately sending a letter to the foreign trade minister and pursuing the case.

Boldyrev reviewed the documents Salye had brought him. His findings were essentially the same as Salye’s: someone had been stealing from the people of St. Petersburg. He summoned Sobchak to Moscow to respond. “Sobchak came and brought all of his deputies with him,” Boldyrev recalled in an interview later. Putin came. “They wrote down their versions of the events…. I then reported the findings to Yeltsin.”

And then nothing happened. The Russian president’s office in Moscow forwarded some documents to the Russian president’s representative office in St. Petersburg—and the story died.

“IT WAS JUST AN ORDINARY INVESTIGATION,” Boldyrev explained many years later. “It uncovered significant violations, but they were not radically more serious than what was going on in the rest of Russia. They were standard-issue violations having to do with obtaining the right to export strategically important resources in exchange for foodstuffs that never materialized. It was just a typical case at the time.”

Russia’s new elite was busy redistributing wealth. This is not to say that all of them behaved like Putin—the scale and the brazen nature of the embezzlement uncovered by Salye is shocking even by early-1990s Russia standards, especially if we take into account how fast he acted—but all of the country’s new rulers treated Russia like their personal property. Less than a year earlier, it had all belonged to other people: the Communist Party of the USSR and its leaders. Now the USSR no longer existed, and the Russian Communist Party was a handful of stubborn retirees. All that had been theirs was now nobody’s. While economists tried to figure out how to turn state property into private property—a process that still is not completed twenty years later—the new bureaucrats were simply taking the old state edifice apart.

Sobchak was handing out apartments in the center of St. Petersburg. They went to friends, relatives, and valued colleagues. In a country where property rights had not really existed and where the Communist ruling elite had long enjoyed the status of royalty, Sobchak, who basked in his early popularity, saw nothing wrong with what he was doing.

“And here are the papers on an entire city complex Sobchak tried to give away to some development company,” Salye told me all these years later, fishing several more sheets of paper from her pile. “This was a rare situation where we managed to get it reversed, but what a fight it was.”

“But wasn’t he acting just like some regional party boss?” I asked. “They were always giving away apartments.”

“This was different,” said Salye. “It was different because he talked a good line. He knew he had to present a different exterior, and he succeeded in doing this. He played the democrat when he was really a demagogue.”

Perhaps because Sobchak was so good at projecting the image of a new kind of a politician, Salye and her colleagues seem to have believed he would take action when presented with evidence of Putin’s wrongdoing. But why should he have? Why would he have drawn a line between his own habits of handing out city property and Putin’s ways of pocketing profits from the sale of public resources? Why should he have listened to the democrats in the city council at all? He could not stand them—and what irked him most was precisely their militant idealism, their absurd insistence on doing things as they should be done rather than as they had always been done. This adherence to an imaginary ethical code invariably got in the way of doing things at all.

So Sobchak did not get rid of Putin. Instead, he got rid of the city council.

BY FALL 1993, Boris Yeltsin was fed up with the Russian legislature. It was an oddly constituted body: over a thousand representatives who had been elected, in a convoluted quasi-democratic procedure, to the Congress of People’s Deputies, of whom 252 belonged to the Supreme Soviet, a two-chamber body that attempted to perform the functions of a representative branch of government in the effective absence of relevant law. The Russian Federation did not yet have a new, post-Soviet constitution, and it would be years before its civic and penal codes would be rewritten. Among other things, the law still criminalized possession of hard currency and a variety of acts that involved the possession and sale of property. In this situation, the Congress of People’s Deputies granted Yeltsin the right to issue decrees on economic reform that violated the laws that were on the books—but the Supreme Soviet was charged with the job of reviewing these decrees, and granted veto power. In addition, the Supreme Soviet had a presidium constituted of more than thirty people who, in the Soviet system of government, functioned as a collective head of state; in the post-Soviet system, once the position of president had been established, the function of the presidium was unclear. In effect, though, the Supreme Soviet had the power to stall or block any action of the president. As Yeltsin’s economic reforms drove prices higher and higher—even as food shortages stopped, as though by magic—his government grew less and less popular and the Supreme Soviet moved to oppose almost all of his initiatives.

On September 21, 1993, Yeltsin issued a decree dissolving the Supreme Soviet and calling for the election of a proper legislative body. The Supreme Soviet refused to disband, barricading itself inside the White House—the very same building where Yeltsin’s people had set up camp during the coup two years earlier. This time troops did open fire and shelled the White House, forcing Supreme Soviet members out on October 4.

Leading democratic politicians, including former dissidents, supported what became known as “the execution of the Supreme Soviet,” so exasperated were they with seeing the president stonewalled. The idealistic St. Petersburg City Council was more or less alone in taking a stand against Yeltsin’s actions. A few weeks after the “execution,” just days before a new Russian constitution was published, heralding an era of relative legal stability, Sobchak traveled to Moscow and convinced Yeltsin to sign a decree dissolving the St. Petersburg City Council. A new election would not be held until the following December, leaving Russia’s second-largest city in the hands of one man for an entire year.

Marina Salye decided to leave city politics. She became a professional political organizer, later moving to Moscow to work there.

SIX YEARS LATER, in the period leading up to Putin’s election as president of Russia, perhaps the only critical voice belonged to Marina Salye. She published an article, “Putin Is the President of a Corrupt Oligarchy,” in which she detailed and updated the findings of her St. Petersburg investigation. She tried in vain to talk her liberal colleagues out of supporting Putin in the election. She found herself increasingly marginalized: she recalled that, during a meeting of the right-liberal political coalition, she and Yeltsin’s first prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, were the only two people—out of over a hundred—who did not vote in favor of supporting Putin.

A few months after the election, Salye went to see one of the few politicians whom she still believed to be an ally. They had talked of forming a new organization. Sergei Yushenkov was a career military man who had become a strong convert to liberalism during perestroika and held fast to his beliefs throughout the 1990s. The visit to Yushenkov scared Salye so much that even ten years later she refused to divulge the details.

“I got there, and there was a certain person in his office,” she told me.

“What kind of person?”

“A certain person. We had a conversation that I wouldn’t call constructive. I went home and told Natasha that I’m going to the country.”

“Did he threaten you?”

“No one threatened me directly.”

“So, why did you decide to leave?”

“Because I knew this person.”

“And what did seeing him mean?”

“It meant that I should get as far away as possible.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I persisted, feeling I was on the verge of being thrown out of Salye’s hideout.

“I knew what this person was capable of. Is that clearer?”

“Yes, thank you. But what was he doing in Yushenkov’s office? Did they have something in common?”

“No. I did not know what he was doing there, and most of all I did not know why Yushenkov did not get him out of there when I came. It means he was unable to get rid of him, even though the conversation Yushenkov and I were about to have was not meant for anyone else’s ears.”

“I see.”

“That is all I am going to say.”

Salye gathered her things and moved to that house, a twelve-hour impossible drive from Moscow, where I found her ten years later. For years, rumors circulated that she was living abroad, perhaps in France (I assume it was her French surname that gave rise to that fantasy), and that she had received a threatening New Year’s Eve postcard from Putin. I heard several people quote the imaginary postcard using exactly the same wording: “I wish you a Happy New Year and the health to enjoy it.” Salye told me there was never any postcard; as I had suspected, the persistent rumor told me more about the image Putin had created for himself than about Salye’s fate. But postcard or no postcard, Salye was terrified.

Sergei Yushenkov continued his political career. In 2002, he left the liberal faction of parliament in protest against his colleagues’ persistent support for Putin’s policies and what he called “a bureaucratic police regime.” On the afternoon of April 17, 2003, while walking from his car to his apartment building in northern Moscow, Yushenkov was shot in the chest four times. Writing his obituary for the political analysis website I was then editing, I said, “Sometimes, when we journalists are afraid to say something under our own byline, we call people like Yushenkov, who, without looking over his shoulder, will say something clear and definitive, and all the more necessary for being predictable. There are very few people like that left.”