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

Seven THE DAY THE MEDIA DIED

I spent Election Day, March 26, 2000, in Chechnya. I wanted to avoid the entire question of going to the polls in an election I felt was a mockery, following a campaign best described as a travesty. In the course of less than three months since Yeltsin’s resignation, Putin had not made any political pronouncements—and this, he and his spin people seemed to think, was a virtue: he felt that dancing for his votes was beneath him. His campaign had consisted essentially of the book that put forward his vision of himself as a thug, in addition to a turn at piloting a fighter plane amid much press attention, landing it at Grozny airport a week before the election. His entire political message seemed to be: “Don’t mess with me.”

So I accepted an invitation, extended by the military press office, to cover the voting from Chechnya. I knew I would have little opportunity to move around and that I would have Russian officers monitoring my every move, but I figured I would get some idea of the state of a place I had known fairly well; I had last been in Chechnya about three years earlier, soon after the cease-fire agreement had taken hold.

Grozny had been a city of nearly a million people before the first war, at least half a million after it was over. I was reasonably familiar with Grozny’s geography: it was a manageable-size city, with a few hills and identifiable neighborhoods, most with enough high-rise buildings to allow one to get one’s bearings. Soon after the bombing of the city during the first war, some European observers had compared it to Dresden, the German city bombed into oblivion by the British and Americans toward the end of World War II. I had felt it was a fair comparison—and yet, Grozny had retained its basic landscape.

Now it was gone. I could see no high-rise buildings. I could not identify any monuments, though there had been many. Every part of the city looked the same and smelled the same: burning flesh and concrete dust. It was horribly, deafeningly quiet. I obsessively took in the signs, the only reminder of human life and human communication in the city: CAFÉ; INTERNET; AUTO PARTS; PEOPLE LIVE HERE. The last was the wording of signs people had put up as they returned to their homes after the last war, hoping to prevent looting and shooting.

A dozen loudspeakers had been mounted around what used to be a city, as audible markers of polling stations or of soup kitchens set up by the federal Ministry for Emergencies. People, mostly women, walked the streets in twos and threes, silently moving toward the sound coming from the nearest speaker, surely hoping to find a soup kitchen rather than a polling station.

We journalists were escorted by our military guides to one of the nine polling stations. We arrived around noon to find a crowd of people, again mostly women, who had been there since sunrise. They had come in hopes of receiving humanitarian aid: either someone had promised them food and clothing would be distributed at polling stations, or it was simply a rumor that had brought them there. DEMOCRACY IS DICTATORSHIP OF THE LAW, the sign over the entrance to the small building proclaimed, quoting an oxymoronic pronouncement of Putin’s in direct violation of election law. There was no humanitarian aid in sight.

An old woman came up to me and asked me to write that she had been reduced to living in the street.

“Did you vote?” I asked her.

“I voted,” she responded.

“Who did you vote for?”

“I don’t know,” she responded simply. “I can’t read. I had a ballot and I put it in.”

Hours later, at a polling station in a different part of town, I saw some people approaching from a distance. I ran to them before my handlers could stop me, in the hopes of catching some Grozny residents outside the polling station. They turned out to be three people, two of them very old, whom I had seen at the first polling place. All three were dragging empty carts behind them. They told me that after the bus with the journalists left, local officials told them there would be no humanitarian aid; they had spent hours walking back to what had been their homes.

Using my brief moments out of sight of the handlers, I tried to ask these people why they had returned to Grozny. The old couple directed the younger woman to tell me her story. She tried to resist, saying, “What is the point of talking about it?” but in the end did not dare disobey her elders. “We came back to get our relatives’ bodies. They took us to them. They were all tied up with wire. But there is one head they never found.” Eight members of her family had been among the thousands detained and then summarily executed by Russian troops. The woman and her immediate relatives had left Grozny months before, and stayed with relatives in a small village. The eight relatives had not had the money to leave the city: every time one passed through a checkpoint set up by the Russian troops, one had to pay. As we talked, another woman approached us with two of her nieces in tow, a pale eight-year-old and a surly teenager. “Their father was killed in the shelling,” she said. “Their mother couldn’t take it and died, and their grandmother died too. The girls buried them in the yard. We dug the father up yesterday, washed the body, but the men are scared to go outside to bury him, so he is just lying there at home.” She asked the teenager to confirm her story, but the girl started crying and stepped away from our group.

These people told me they had voted for a human-rights activist whose final tally was in such low single digits that most media outlets did not even mention her. But I saw a lot of Putin voters among the Chechens too. “I’m sick of war,” a middle-aged man in Grozny told me. “I am sick of being passed on, like a baton, from one gang of thugs to the next.” I looked around: we were in an area of Grozny that had consisted mostly of private homes; now there were only metal fences separating one ghost property from another. “Wasn’t it Putin who did this?” I asked.

“War has been going on for ten years,” the man responded, exaggerating only slightly: the first armed uprisings in Chechnya dated back to 1991. “What could he have changed? We long for a strong power, power that is united. We are the kind of people who need an arbiter.”

There was a Chechen man among the ten little-known candidates hopelessly competing with Putin in this election. A Moscow millionaire, a real estate developer, he had shipped tons of flour to Chechen refugee camps in advance of the election. “No point in voting for him,” the Chechen deputy manager of one of these camps, in neighboring Ingushetia, told me. “I might vote for him, but nobody in Russia is going to.” He was going to vote for Putin: “He is a good man. He didn’t do this to us for himself: there were many others interested in starting this again.”

The man’s boss, a fifty-year-old wizened man named Hamzat, told me, “They said to vote for Putin because he is going to be president anyway.” Hamzat had spent twenty-nine days in Russian detention during the first Chechen war; he still bore two scars on his head and a permanent dent over his shoulder blade where he had been hit with the butt of a rifle. He showed me a picture of his son, a puffy-lipped, curly-haired sixteen-year-old who was now in Russian detention himself. Hamzat found the camp where his boy was, but his jailers demanded a thousand dollars ransom—a perfectly common practice on both sides of the conflict. Hamzat did not tell me what happened next, but other residents of the refugee camp did: they took up a collection in the camp but managed to scrape together barely a tenth of the required sum. The boy was still in captivity.

The camp was made up of a field full of surplus military tents and a ten-car train that had been towed there. It was a common enough solution to the lack of intact housing; I myself was staying in a military train a few towns over. Hamzat’s office was in a train car. A sheet of paper was posted on the outside with sixty-one names, written by hand, under the headline “Located in the Naursk Jail, Later Transported to the Pyatigorsk Hospital.” Ages from sixteen to fifty-two were noted next to the names. These appeared to be inmates who had been moved to a hospital before a press visit to Chechnya’s most notorious jail. A fellow inmate had made the list in hopes of helping relatives find their lost ones. Someone had written “killed” in blue ballpoint pen next to one of the names.

In accordance with the military’s regulations, I was spending most of my time in the company of Russians in uniform. I would have much preferred to stay on the Chechen side—not so much because I found their cause more sympathetic, but because I found the atmosphere of constant fear on the Russian side exhausting. With soldiers getting ambushed every day, the young conscripts and their commanding officers could not relax even when they tried to drink themselves into oblivion, as they did every night, to drown out the gunfire that never seemed to stop. There was fire all around us during the day, too, even on Election Day. When I tried to wander into a formerly densely populated neighborhood of Grozny, my two handlers begged me to stop. “There isn’t anybody there anyway,” one of them pleaded. “What do you need to go there for? We’ll all get turned off.” He meant killed. These troops—all of whom voted for Putin, as directed by their brass—were supposed to be in control of Grozny. But Russians would be losing people here every day for years to come.

A new Russian-appointed district head in Grozny sang Putin’s praises on cue. “A golden man has come to power in Russia today,” he said. “A firm man.” Before the election, local organizers had combed the cellars in the neighborhood, making lists of voters. They came up with 3,400 and got as many ballots, but ran out by midday. “I told them there would be additional people,” the district head complained, “and they wouldn’t listen! But where did all these people come from? It’s not like they emerged from under the ground!”

In fact, they had very much emerged from underground, not just in the sense that they had been living in the cellars of their demolished buildings, but in the sense that many of the people who came to vote—most of them older women—came to the polling station bearing two or three passports each, their own and those of their family members who, I presumed they hoped, were still alive. Those who had lost their passports could use a special form to cast their vote, although this also meant their own documents could be used to vote elsewhere. I tested my theory as I moved from precinct to precinct: everywhere I went, I was welcome to cast my vote, using my Moscow documents or nothing at all.

Before the start of the second war, Chechnya had an official population of 380,000. By the time of the election, its voter rolls swelled to 460,000, padded not only by Russian troops but by the dead souls whose real or imaginary passports were used. Just below 30 percent voted for Putin, his worst showing in all of Russia. Overall, however, the man without a face, who did not have a political platform and did not campaign, emerged with over 52 percent of the vote, eliminating the need for a second tour.

ON MAY 7, 2000, Vladimir Putin was inaugurated as president of Russia. Strictly speaking, this was the first such ceremony in history: Yeltsin had been elected to his first term when Russia was still a part of the Soviet Union. So Putin had the opportunity to shape a ritual. At his prompting, the ceremony, originally planned for the Kremlin’s modernist State Palace, where the Communist Party had held its congresses and Yeltsin’s administration had organized conferences, was moved to the Kremlin’s historic Great Palace, where the czars had once lived. Putin walked through the hall, down a long red carpet, swinging his left arm and holding his right arm, slightly bent at the elbow, oddly immobile, a gait that would soon become familiar to Russian TV viewers and would give one American observer cause to speculate Putin had suffered a trauma at birth or perhaps a stroke in utero. I am more inclined to think the gait is just what it looks like: the manner of a person who executes all his public acts mechanically and reluctantly, projecting both extreme guard and extreme aggression with every step. To Russians, his walk also looked like an adolescent affectation, as did the habit of wearing his watch on his right hand though he is right-handed; this fashion immediately caught on among bureaucrats at every level, and the country’s leading watch factory, in Tatarstan, soon launched a new model, called the Kremlin Watch for the Left-handed, and shipped the first watch in the series to Moscow as a gift for Putin. He was never seen in public wearing the inexpensive, domestically manufactured watch, although he was photographed wearing several different timepieces over the next few years, most often a $60,000 white-gold Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar.

There were fifteen hundred invited guests at the inauguration ceremony, an inordinate number of them in uniform. One guest deserved particular note: Vladimir Kryuchkov, the former head of the KGB and an organizer of the 1991 coup. A reporter at the scene described him as “an old man of short stature who had difficulty standing and rose only once, when the national anthem was played.” Kryuchkov was easy to spot because he sat apart from the rest of the guests: he was not exactly a member of the contemporary Russian political elite. Yet no one dared object publicly to the presence of a man who had attempted to use arms to quash Russian democracy. He had spent seventeen months in jail and was pardoned by the parliament in 1994. Most newspaper reports of the inauguration ignored his presence altogether. Kommersant, the leading business daily, gave Kryuchkov paragraph twenty out of thirty-four. Had journalists had the gift of foresight, they probably would have featured him a lot more prominently, for Russia was commemorating not only the change of leader but a change of regime—one that Kryuchkov had come to welcome.

Just a few months earlier, on December 18, 1999—two weeks before becoming acting president—Putin had spoken at a banquet celebrating the day the Soviet secret police was founded, an obscure professional holiday that was destined to gain prominence in the coming years, with congratulatory banners adorning the streets, and television reports of the celebrations. “I would like to report,” Putin said at the banquet, “that the group of FSB officers dispatched to work undercover in the federal government has been successful in fulfilling the first set of assignments.” The roomful of secret police brass roared with laughter. Putin later tried to downplay it as a joke, but on the same day he had restored a memorial board on the FSB building, reminding the world that Yuri Andropov, the only secret police chief to have become general secretary of the Communist Party, had worked there.

Since the campaign to elect Putin and the man himself had seemed to exist parallel to each other, Putin had taken few other public actions between December and the inauguration. He had chosen his prime minister, a man whose imposing stature, booming bass voice, and Hollywood-actor good looks and white-toothed smile belied his lack of political ambition. Mikhail Kasyanov seemed to have bureaucracy in his bones: he had come up through the ranks of Soviet ministries, made a smooth transition to working for ministers in a series of Yeltsin’s cabinets, and recently become finance minister.

“He called me in on January 2,” just three days after Yeltsin had tendered his resignation, Kasyanov told me. “He laid out his conditions for my appointment. He said, ‘As long as you don’t butt in on my turf, we’ll be fine.’” Kasyanov, entirely unaccustomed to street language, was struck by Putin’s wording much more than by the substance of what he was saying. The constitution gave the prime minister extensive authority over the uniformed services; Putin was telling him he would have to forfeit these powers if he wanted to be prime minister. Kasyanov assented easily, asking in return that Putin allow him to press forward with planned economic reforms. Putin agreed and appointed him his first deputy prime minister, promising to make him the premier right after the inauguration.

Kasyanov essentially took over running the government. Putin set about preparing what he had called his “turf.” His first decree as acting president granted immunity from prosecution to Boris Yeltsin. His second established a new Russian military doctrine, abandoning the old no-first-strike policy regarding nuclear weapons and emphasizing a right to use them against aggressors “if other means of conflict resolution have been exhausted or deemed ineffective.” Soon another decree reestablished mandatory training exercises for reservists (all Russian able-bodied men were considered reservists)—something that had been abolished, to the relief of Russian wives and mothers, after the country withdrew from Afghanistan. Two of the decree’s six paragraphs were classified as secret, suggesting they might shed light on whether reservists should expect to be sent to Chechnya. A few days later, Putin issued an order granting forty government ministers and other officials the right to classify information as secret, in direct violation of the constitution. He also reestablished mandatory military training in secondary schools, both public and private: this subject, which for boys involved taking apart, cleaning, and putting back together a Kalashnikov, had been abolished during perestroika. In all, six of the eleven decrees Putin issued in his first two months as acting president concerned the military. On January 27, Kasyanov announced that defense spending would be increased by 50 percent—this in a country that was still failing to meet its international debt obligations and was seeing most of its population sink further and further into poverty.

If anyone in Russia or outside had cared to pay attention, all the clues to the nature of the new regime were there within weeks of Putin’s ascent to his temporary throne. But the country was busy electing an imaginary president, and the rest of the Western world would not begin to doubt its choice for years to come.

WHEN PUTIN WAS INAUGURATED, I was in Chechnya again: in the face of what now passed for politics and political journalism, I badly needed to feel I was doing something meaningful. With the country’s political system crumbling before my eyes, I felt particularly lucky to be able to research and publish the stories I felt were important. This time I had been traveling with military officers and self-organized volunteers who were looking for Russian soldiers missing in action in Chechnya; they numbered about a thousand at the time, half of them missing since the last war.

I returned from Chechnya the weekend of the inauguration. My second day back in the office, which also happened to be Vladimir Putin’s second day officially in the office of the president, police special forces descended on the corporate headquarters of Vladimir Gusinsky’s Media-Most, the company to which my magazine belonged. Scores of men in camouflage, wearing black knit masks with slits for their eyes and armed with short-barrel automatic rifles, pushed their way into offices of the newly renovated building in the very center of Moscow, about a mile from the Kremlin, roughed up some of the staff, and threw piles of paper into cardboard boxes that they then loaded onto small trucks. The prosecutor’s office, the presidential administration, and the tax police later made confused and confusing public statements explaining the raid: they said they suspected tax irregularities; they said they suspected misconduct on the part of Media-Most’s internal security service; they even said they suspected the media company was spying on its own journalists. The nature of the raid was in fact familiar to anyone who had been involved in business or had even observed business in Russia in the 1990s: the raid was a threat. These kinds of raids were usually staged by organized-crime groups to show who was boss—and who had greater influence with the police. This raid was unusual, though, in several respects: its scale (scores of officers, several truckloads full of documents); its location (central Moscow); its timing (broad daylight); and its target (one of the country’s seven most influential entrepreneurs). It was also unusual in its alleged initiator, whom Media-Most’s outlets identified as Vladimir Putin. He himself claimed no knowledge of the event; during the raid he was in the Kremlin, meeting with Ted Turner, reminiscing about the Goodwill Games held in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, and discussing the future of media.

The months that followed the raid on the Media-Most headquarters are the sort of period that is always difficult to recall and describe: the time between the diagnosis and the inevitable outcome, between the day when you learn how the story will end and the day it actually ends. I think it is fair to say that the roughly seventy people who worked at my magazine and the hundreds of people who worked at Gusinsky’s daily newspaper and his television channel, NTV—the same channel that had aired the investigative piece on the apartment-block explosions—all knew on the day of the raid that this was the beginning of the end of Russia’s largest private media company. Yet we continued to work almost as though nothing had happened, as though the story of the company’s troubles were yet another story to cover.

I do not remember learning of Vladimir Gusinsky’s arrest on June 13. I may have heard about it on the car radio, though this seems unlikely: the summer of 2000 was my second summer of bicycling in Moscow, which was then a novel form of transport in the city; I was even working on a story on city biking that June. I may have heard about the arrest from a colleague. I may have gotten a phone call from a friend telling me about it. However I got the news, the most important thing I heard was not even that one of the country’s most influential men, who happened to pay my salary, had been arrested, but that he was arrested on charges stemming from the privatization of a company called Russkoye Video. This was my story to write.

RUSSKOYE VIDEO was a television production company that had belonged to Dmitry Rozhdestvensky, the St. Petersburg man who had been in prison for two years by now. His was a story I had followed for some time without understanding it, starting back when I went to St. Petersburg to write about Galina Starovoitova’s murder.

My sources there—including Starovoitova’s aide, who had survived the shooting—insisted on taking me to see an elderly couple living in a spacious, well-appointed apartment on the Griboyedov Channel. Over the course of several meetings spread over a few months, they told me the story of their son, Dmitry Rozhdestvensky, a well-educated forty-four-year-old television producer who had done fairly well for himself under Sobchak (whose reelection campaign he had helped run) and who was now in prison.

It seemed someone had set out to get Rozhdestvensky. First, in March 1997, he had been subjected to a tax audit. Then in May he received a letter from the local secret-police office informing him that the transmitter used by the television station of which he was part owner represented a threat to state security. Then Rozhdestvensky was interrogated repeatedly in connection with Sobchak’s case. “They suspected Dmitry of laundering Sobchak’s money,” his mother told me. “But Dmitry was lucky: Sobchak never paid his company even the money they were owed for producing and airing his election ads.” In March 1998, Dmitry Rozhdestvensky was finally charged with tax evasion. One night that month, the special prosecutor’s team searched the apartments of forty-one people connected with Rozhdestvensky’s company, including freelancers.

“That’s when they really started in on him,” the old woman told me. Her son was called in for questioning almost every day; his apartment, office, and dacha were searched repeatedly. In August 1998, Dmitry’s wife had a stroke. “We were at the dacha then,” said his mother. “He was going in for questioning daily and we were never sure whether he was coming back. I could handle that sort of thing—my own father was imprisoned three times under Stalin—but [Dmitry’s wife] Natasha turned out to be the weaker one.”

In September 1998, Dmitry Rozhdestvensky was charged with embezzlement and placed under arrest. I first met his parents two months later. Over the following twenty months, I visited the Rozhdestvenskys several times and they updated me on their son’s case. Dmitry was being moved from jail to jail, landing in Moscow and, later, at a secret-police prison outside St. Petersburg. Charges against him were shuffled: first he was accused of embezzling a car, then of embezzling advertising contract money, then of misappropriating funds to build a retreat. From what I could tell, his business and family affairs were so tightly and messily intertwined that the prosecutors could probably keep finding ways to keep him behind bars as long as they wanted. What I could not figure out was why someone wanted Rozhdestvensky in jail.

His parents told me it was Vladimir Yakovlev, the man who had replaced Sobchak, exacting his revenge for Rozhdestvensky’s involvement in Sobchak’s reelection campaign. But other people had supported Sobchak too. Was Rozhdestvensky being made the scapegoat because others, like Putin, were now too powerful to reach? Possibly. Or was it not Yakovlev at all who was after revenge, but one of Rozhdestvensky’s former business partners, who included Putin and several other influential St. Petersburg men who had apparently founded a television production company linked to the city’s casinos? Also possible. Or was it, as Starovoitova’s aide thought, a macabre case of blackmail on the part of an entrepreneur who had unsuccessfully tried to pressure Rozhdestvensky into selling his company? Possible, too.

I kept going back to see the Rozhdestvenskys because I could not figure out how to write the story of their son. The more it developed, the less I understood. The entrepreneur who had been said to blackmail Rozhdestvensky was eventually arrested and charged with a number of contract killings, including one of a deputy mayor in charge of real estate development: he had been gunned down on Nevsky Prospekt in broad daylight in 1997. One thing was clear: Whatever was going on with Rozhdestvensky had little or nothing to do with the legal case against him and everything to do with the way business and politics were done in St. Petersburg.

Now this case and this company most Russians had never heard of had somehow landed Vladimir Gusinsky in prison. I sat down and started sorting through the half a file drawer’s worth of papers I had collected on the case—mostly legal complaints and supporting documents—as I had done several times over the preceding two years. For the first time they started to make sense to me, even though I still could see no case there—just as the high-powered lawyers at Media-Most could not. “There are no charges,” a smart middle-aged female corporate lawyer was telling me, genuinely confused. “I can’t even understand what the crime is supposed to be. I can’t figure out where they got the figures they cite here. Here they say the very company was created illegally, but they reference a law that contains nothing pertinent. And even if the company was created in violation of the law, Media-Most had nothing to do with it.” The bigger company had bought Russkoye Video, along with dozens of other regional production and broadcasting companies, when it was forming a nationwide entertainment network. The St. Petersburg company was not even one of the larger advertising vehicles in the network: it was bought primarily for its huge library of B movies that the network could use to fill the airways while it worked to set up its own production.

“This would be funny if it weren’t so sad,” the lawyer said. “I wish Russian crime were really like this,” meaning made up of borderline illegalities.

Russian crime did not look like that, but many Russian legal cases would come to look just like this one: slapped together, full of contradictions. I realized that my original theory about Dmitry Rozhdestvensky’s case was correct: this was indeed someone’s personal vendetta. But the culprit was neither the current governor of St. Petersburg, as some people maintained, nor a jailed mafia boss, as others believed.

Something, it seems, had gone terribly wrong between Dmitry Rozhdestvensky and Vladimir Putin, with whom he had worked on Sobchak’s failed reelection campaign. This explained why, after I had followed the case for nearly two years, the prosecutor in the case threatened me the last time I called him, on February 29, 2000. “Leave it alone,” he said. “Believe me, Masha, you don’t want to get any deeper into this. Or you’ll be sorry.” I had been writing about court cases in Russia for years, and no one—not even accused criminals and their often unsavory associates—had ever spoken to me in this manner. What was so important and frightening about this case? Only the fact that it was being pursued on behalf of the man who was now acting president of Russia. The prosecutor, Yuri Vanyushin, was a classmate of Putin’s from the law faculty. He had gone to work for the prosecutor’s office right out of university, just as Putin had gone to the KGB, but when Putin returned to Leningrad and went to work for Sobchak, Vanyushin joined him in city hall. When Putin left for Moscow six years later, Vanyushin returned to the prosecutor’s office, becoming an investigator who specialized in “very important cases,” an actual legal category. Rozhdestvensky’s case did not meet the formal criteria for being a “very important case,” but it was clearly very important to a very important person.

Another close associate of Putin’s, Viktor Cherkesov, who had been appointed head of the St. Petersburg chapter of the FSB after much lobbying by Putin and much protest from former dissidents, had stepped in when the case against Rozhdestvensky seemed to be slow getting off the ground. After a tax audit failed to provide grounds for a criminal case, Cherkesov sent Rozhdestvensky a letter informing him that the transmitter Russkoye Video was using was a threat to national security. After Russkoye Video stopped using it, another television company took it over: it had apparently stopped being a threat. A year later, Cherkesov joined Putin in Moscow, becoming his first deputy at the FSB.

Rozhdestvensky’s parents hoped their son would be released from prison once his old friend Vladimir Putin became head of the secret police, then head of government, and, finally, head of state. Instead, Vanyushin kept the case alive even as charges kept falling apart and away; he just kept raking in other, similarly shaky premises for keeping him in jail. At the end of the summer of 2000, a court would finally take Rozhdestvensky’s failing health into account and release him pending trial. Rozhdestvensky died in June 2002 at the age of forty-eight.

What I was now learning, as I went through the documents that I had kept for nearly two years, was the same thing Natalya Gevorkyan learned when she confronted Putin about the journalist Andrei Babitsky: “He is a small, vengeful man,” was how she put it. The case against Gusinsky was, just like the case against Rozhdestvensky, a case of personal vendetta. Gusinsky had not supported Putin in the election. He was friendly and had significant business dealings with Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who was a leader of the anti-Family opposition coalition. It was Gusinsky’s television channel that had aired the program about apartment building explosions two days before the election.

Gusinsky’s arrest had no real connection to Russkoye Video; it just so happened that the man behind the arrest had detailed knowledge of the Russkoye Video case—which was as good as any other when all that was required was to get one of Russia’s most powerful men behind bars. If there were any irregularities in the company’s founding documents, Putin knew of those too: sifting through my files, I found a document authorizing the formation of the company, signed by Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Gusinsky spent just three days in jail. As soon as he was released on his own recognizance, he left the country, becoming the first political refugee from Putin’s regime—only five weeks after the inauguration.

UNLIKE THE OWNER of my company, I was still in Moscow. And, it seemed, I was in a lot of trouble, just as prosecutor Vanyushin had warned me I would be. I had written an article about the Russkoye Video case; it was published a few days after Gusinsky left the country, and it was illustrated with the document I had found—the one signed by Putin. Next thing I knew, there was a man on a ladder parked outside my apartment door—twenty-four hours a day. “What are you doing here?” I would ask every time I opened the door to find him there. “Fixing,” he would growl.

A few days later, my home phone was turned off. The telephone company claimed to have had nothing to do with it, but it took days to get it turned back on. These were classic KGB tactics, intended to make me understand I was never safe and never alone: this approach had not changed since the 1970s, when the same sorts of goons would take up residence in people’s stairways to let them know they were being watched. This knowledge did not make things any easier for me. The intrusion tactics worked just as well now as they had thirty years earlier: within a few days of this, I was going crazy with unidentifiable worry.

I used a reporting opportunity to leave the country for a couple of weeks. And I decided to look for another job. Mine had been the best job in the world, and while I worked it, I risked my life many times over, going to Chechnya, the former Yugoslavia, and other post-Soviet war zones. But I was not prepared to live under constant threat, no matter how unspecific it was. There was an opening for Moscow bureau chief at the American weekly magazine U.S. News & World Report, and I jumped at the opportunity.

Meanwhile, Gusinsky, shuttling between England and Spain, where he owned a home, was negotiating with the Russian state the fate of his media empire. Gusinsky personally owned 60 percent of his company; another 30 percent was held by the state gas monopoly, Gazprom, and 10 percent more belonged to private individuals, mostly top managers within the company. Gusinsky had borrowed heavily from a state-held bank to finance the setup of his satellite network. Less than a year earlier, he had still entertained well-founded hope that his debts would be forgiven: his once cozy relationship with Yeltsin and his role in his 1996 reelection campaign made this seem a reasonable expectation, at least to Gusinsky himself. Now some of the credits were overdue and the state was calling in the rest early, demanding stock instead of cash—aiming to enable the state gas monopoly to take control of the companies. Gusinsky was trying to restructure the debt in such a way that none of the stockholders would own a controlling share, which would guarantee the media outlets’ editorial independence.

As negotiations grew more adversarial, someone—each side said it was the other—leaked to the press a document Gusinsky had signed before leaving the country. He seemed to have agreed, in writing, to cede a majority share of his company to Gazprom in exchange for his personal freedom. Most damningly, the document was signed not only by Gusinsky and the head of Gazprom’s media arm—reconstituted especially for the occasion—but also by the press minister, Mikhail Lesin. In other words, this was a classic organized-crime contract, formalizing the exchange of one’s business for one’s personal safety, and the state was a party to it. Once the document was leaked, Gusinsky said publicly that the minister had personally threatened him, forcing him to sign over his business under duress, “virtually at gunpoint.” He termed the entire process “state racketeering.”

Putin refused to comment on the situation. Yet no one seemed to doubt that the order to wrestle the media company away from Gusinsky had come directly from him. His prime minister, the white-toothed Mikhail Kasyanov, appeared genuinely surprised and even shocked by the revelations and reprimanded Lesin publicly, before television cameras. Three days later, Mikhail Gorbachev emerged from nine years of de facto political retirement to meet with Putin and ask him to set the Gusinsky situation right. The older man left the meeting dejected, telling the media Putin refused to interfere. The next day Prime Minister Kasyanov opened the cabinet meeting by once again reprimanding his press minister, Lesin. Russian journalists and political analysts took this as a clear sign that the prime minister felt helpless in a situation orchestrated by the president himself.

Soon enough, this kind of takeover of private businesses large and small would become commonplace. But the system Boris Yeltsin had left behind was not quite ready to accommodate “state racketeering.” Yeltsin’s successive governments had not succeeded in turning the Russian courts into a functioning justice system, but they had succeeded in planting the seeds of ambition in them. Now these courts, mostly at the lower levels, would refuse some of Gazprom’s claims, with one city court even throwing out the case against Gusinsky altogether. In the end, it took the state monopoly almost a year to gain control of Gusinsky’s media empire. In April 2001, after a nearly weeklong standoff when NTV staff maintained a live broadcast of the takeover, the old editorial staff was forced out. A week later, my former colleagues at the magazine Itogi came to work to find the doors locked and every last staff member fired.

I WAS ALREADY GONE, having taken the job at U.S. News & World Report the previous summer. Before I started, I had flown to the Black Sea for a short vacation. But after just a couple of days in the sun, I had to fly back up north: a nuclear submarine was sinking in the Barents Sea, taking 118 seamen with it.

Of all the heartbreaking stories I had ever had to cover and the people of Russia had ever had to witness, the Kursk disaster was possibly the most devastating. For nine days, the mothers, wives, and children of the sailors aboard the submarine—and the entire country along with them—maintained hope that some of them were still alive. The country kept vigil while the navy and the government flailed in their rescue efforts. Norwegian and British teams offered to help but were turned away, supposedly because of security concerns. Worst of all, the new president was silent: he was on vacation on the Black Sea coast.

The Kursk makes an easy metaphor for the post-Soviet condition. Its construction began in 1990 as the Soviet Union neared collapse; it was commissioned in 1994, easily the lowest point in Russian military history, but just as the Russians’ superpower ambitions, temporarily set aside while the empire was being dismantled, began to reassert themselves. The nuclear submarine was huge, as those ambitions had once been—and would be again, with Putin in power, promising to rub the enemy out in the outhouse. The Kursk, which had barely been maintained since it was launched, served its first mission in the summer of 1999, when Putin came to power, and was to undertake its first significant training exercise in August 2000.

It would become clear later that neither the submarine nor its crew nor, really, the entire Russian Northern Fleet had been ready for the exercise. In fact, the training exercise was not officially called one, at least in part because the participating ships and their men would have been unable to fulfill all the legal and technical requirements of a full-fledged exercise. Instead, the submarine and other battleships going out to sea on August 12 were called to an “assembly march,” a term that was nonexistent and therefore carried no clear requirements. The submarine went to sea with an unpracticed and undertrained crew that had been pulled together from several different vessels, so the men had no experience as a team. The submarine was equipped with training torpedoes, some of which were past their expiration dates, while the rest had not been properly serviced. Some torpedoes had visible rust holes; others had rubber connector rings that had been used more than once, in violation of safety regulations. “Death is on board with us,” one of the crew told his mother six days before the accident, referring to the torpedoes.

It was one of these torpedoes that, evidently, caught fire and exploded. There were two blasts aboard the submarine, and most of the crew died instantly. Twenty-three survivors moved to an unaffected section of the vessel to await rescue. They had the equipment necessary to survive in the submarine for some time; they could reasonably expect to be saved—after all, they were engaged in a training exercise, there were several battleships in the near vicinity, and the accident should have been discovered almost instantly.

But while the tremors caused by the explosion were picked up by a Norwegian seismic station, Russian ships located much nearer to the submarine seemed to take no notice of its fate. It was nine hours before the fleet acknowledged there had been an accident; it was about this long again before the vacationing president was informed. Rescue efforts commenced, but the rescue crews apparently lacked the training necessary to do their jobs. They never even succeeded in docking to the sub.

Most of the twenty-three survivors could conceivably have climbed out themselves—the accident had occurred in relatively shallow waters—but this section of the submarine was, contrary to regulations, not equipped with a hose necessary to evacuate the crew. The twenty-three seamen sat in the dark until one of their air-regeneration plates caught fire, filling the compartment with noxious fumes that killed the men.

For the more than two days they survived underwater, the twenty-three men beat out their SOS, attempting to aid in rescue efforts that were first nonexistent, then useless. At the very end, their knocking grew haphazard and desperate. They never heard a response to their message: obeying an unwritten rule of the fleet, the rescuers kept silent, ostensibly to prevent enemy vessels from identifying their location. It was for the same essential reason that early offers from British and Norwegian divers to help with the rescue effort were turned down. When a Norwegian crew was finally allowed to enter Russian waters and descend to the Kursk, eight days after the accident, they easily managed to dock to the submarine on their first try. When they did not succeed in opening the hatch, they fashioned a suitable tool for the job and, nine days after the accident, were able to enter the submarine and confirm there were no survivors.

For ten days, the country stayed glued to its television sets, waiting for news from the Kursk. Or from the new president, the one who had promised to restore Russian military might. First he said nothing. Then, still on vacation, he made a vague comment that seemed to indicate that he considered salvaging the equipment on board the Kursk more important than rescuing the crew. On the seventh day of the disaster, he finally agreed to fly back to Moscow—and was duly cornered by a television crew in the Black Sea resort city of Yalta. “I did the right thing,” Putin said, “because the arrival of nonspecialists from any field, the presence of high-placed officials in the disaster area, would not help and more often would hamper work. Everyone should keep to his place.”

The remark made it clear Putin viewed himself as a bureaucrat—a very important and powerful bureaucrat, but a bureaucrat still. “I’d always thought if you became president, even if you were merely appointed to this role, you had to change,” Marina Litvinovich, the smart young woman who had worked on Putin’s preelection image, told me. “If the nation is crying, you have to cry along with it.”

By the time of the Kursk disaster, Litvinovich, who was still in her twenties, had become a permanent member of what had become a permanent media directorate at the Kremlin. Once a week, the heads of the three major television networks and Litvinovich would meet with Putin’s chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, to discuss current affairs and plan their coverage. In August 2000, only three members of the group were present: Litvinovich, Voloshin, and the head of the state television and radio company; everyone else was on vacation, as Muscovites usually are in August. “I was screaming at Voloshin,” Litvinovich remembered. “I screamed that he [Putin] had to go there. And finally Voloshin picked up the phone and called Putin and said, ‘Some people here think you should go there.’ And I was thinking, Putin should be the one calling and screaming, ‘Where is my plane?’ And I realized that if I had not gone to that meeting, he would not have gone to the Arctic.’”

THE CLUSTER of military towns that make up the home of Russia’s Northern Fleet is a world unto itself, closed to outsiders and hostile to them, but generally resigned to and trusting of the authorities. Journalists were not allowed to enter Vidyayevo, the town that served as the Kursk’s home port. Families of crew members were loaded onto chartered buses that took them through checkpoints at breakneck speed. A few times, some of the relatives braved the three-mile trek (no transportation was available to them once they had been brought in) from their accommodations in Vidyayevo to the checkpoint, where journalists kept vigil. One group of women who came out of Vidyayevo wanted to record a video address demanding that rescue efforts continue. A woman asked journalists to drive a separate group to the local big city of Murmansk to buy memorial wreaths to deposit at sea.

Locals looked on these anxious women with a mixture of pity and fear. Here, in towns full of dilapidated five-story concrete buildings with missing windowpanes and, often, no central heating, everyone was used to danger and decay. “Accidents happen,” seamen and their women told me over and over again. Meanwhile, women armed with brooms and buckets washed the sidewalks and public squares with soap and water, hoping to protect against radiation that might be leaking from the Kursk—even though the authorities posted bills assuring the public there was no radiation danger.

Ten days after the disaster, relatives of the crew were finally gathered in Vidyayevo’s assembly hall, expecting to see Putin. While they waited—and they waited for hours—military fleet commander Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov addressed the audience. The admiral, a big man with a rough, leathery face, used his finely honed skills to deflect all questions. Here is how one of the very few journalists allowed to witness the event, one of the coauthors of Putin’s official biography, described the scene:

“Do you believe that the guys are alive?” he was asked.

And you know what he said?

“That’s a good question! I am going to respond to it as directly as you asked it. I still believe that my father, who died in 1991, is alive.”

Then he was asked another question—probably also a good one.

“Why didn’t you ask for foreign help right away?”

“I see,” he said, “that you watch Channel 4 more than you watch Channel 2.”

“When did you inform the authorities that you did not have the necessary equipment to save them?”

“Three years ago,” he said.

I thought someone would hit him. But instead, they all just kind of wilted and lost interest in the conversation.

Kuroyedov left a frustrated audience. Vice Premier Ilya Klebanov, who had been placed in charge of the rescue efforts, was present; a woman jumped up onstage, grabbed Klebanov by the lapels, shook him, and screamed, “You bastard, you go there and save them!” When Putin finally arrived, four hours after the appointed time, wearing a black suit with a black shirt to signify mourning but looking, as a result, vaguely like a mafioso, the crowd attacked him too. Now his biographer was the only journalist allowed to remain in the room, and here is part of how he described the meeting in his article the next day:

“Cancel the mourning immediately!” someone interrupted him from the other end of the hall. [A national day of mourning had been declared for the following day.]

“Mourning?” Putin asked. “I was, like you, full of hope to the last, I still am, at least for a miracle. But there is a fact we know for certain: People have died.”

“Shut up!” someone screamed.

“I am speaking of people who have definitely died. There are people like that in the submarine, for certain. That’s who the mourning is for. That’s all.”

Someone tried to object, but he would not let them.

“Listen to me, listen to what I’m about to say. Just listen to me! There have always been tragedies at sea, including the time when we thought we were living in a very successful country. There have always been tragedies. But I never thought that things were in this kind of condition.”…

“Why did you take so long in attracting foreign help?” a young woman asked.

She had a brother aboard the submarine. Putin took a long time explaining. He said that the construction of the submarine dated back to the end of the 1970s, and so did all the rescue equipment that the Northern Fleet had. He said that [defense minister] Sergeev called him on the 13th at seven in the morning, and until then Putin had known nothing…. He said that foreign aid had been offered on the 15th and had been accepted right away….

“Don’t we have those kinds of divers ourselves?” someone shouted out in despair.

“We don’t have crap in this country!” the president answered furiously.

The article reported that Putin spent two hours and forty minutes with the families of the crew and managed, in the end, to bring them around—in large part because he devoted an hour to detailing compensation packages for them. He also agreed to cancel the day of mourning, which was in the end, in a twist of macabre irony, observed everywhere in Russia except Vidyayevo. But Putin emerged from the meeting battered and bitter, and unwilling ever again to expose himself to such an audience. After no other disaster—and there would be many in his tenure as president—would Putin allow himself to be pitted publicly against the suffering.

IN SHORT ORDER, two things happened to cement Putin’s view of his visit to Vidyayevo as a disaster. On September 2—three weeks after the Kursk sank—Sergei Dorenko, the Channel One anchorman who had done most of the legwork in Berezovsky’s television campaign to create Putin a year earlier, did a show criticizing Putin’s handling of the submarine disaster. Dorenko obtained audiotapes of the meeting with relatives and aired excerpts that made the biographer’s newspaper report seem laudatory in comparison. In one of the excerpts, Putin could be heard descending into a rant. “You saw it on television?” he screamed. “That means they are lying. They are lying! They are lying! There are people on television who have been working to destroy the army and the navy for ten years. They are talking now as though they are the biggest defenders of the military. All they really want to do is finish it off! They’ve stolen all this money and now they are buying everyone off and making whatever laws they want to make!” Putin ended with a high-pitched shout.

Dorenko, a charismatic, macho character with a deep baritone, spent nearly an hour dissecting Putin’s behavior, replaying some of the president’s least appropriate remarks, focusing on showing him still on vacation, tanned and relaxed in light-colored resort clothing, smiling and laughing with his holiday companions, most of them highly placed officials. Again and again, he showed Putin to have lied. The president claimed that the sea had been stormy for eight days, hampering rescue efforts. In fact, said Dorenko, the weather had been bad only during the first few days, but even that had no effect at the depth at which the Kursk was situated. Dorenko compared Putin to a schoolboy who is late for class. “We don’t know what kind of teacher Putin’s fibs are intended for, but we know what a teacher says in these kinds of cases: ‘I don’t care what you thought was right—I only care that you get here on time.’”

Dorenko cut to footage of a state television interview Putin had given the day after the Vidyayevo visit. Looking official and collected, the president said that it had barely been a hundred days since he accepted the burden of running the country. In fact, Dorenko pointed out, it had been 390 days since Putin was appointed prime minister and anointed Yeltsin’s successor, and prior to that he had run the FSB, “which is supposed to keep an eye on the admirals.”

“The regime does not respect us, and this is why it lies to us,” Dorenko concluded.

I think it was then, a year after the beginning of his miraculous ascent, a hundred days after becoming president, that Putin realized that he now bore responsibility for the entire crumbling edifice of a former superpower. He was no longer entitled to seethe at the people who had destroyed Soviet military might and imperial pride: by dint of becoming president, to a great number of his compatriots he had now become one of those people. His transformation was not unlike that of a longtime opposition politician who suddenly assumes power—except Putin had never been a politician at all, so his anger had been private but his humiliation was now public. He may have felt that he had been tricked: the people against whom he had ranted when he lost his temper in Vidyayevo—the ones who had disgraced the military on television and had passed “whatever laws they wanted”—had brought him to power to make him the fall guy. And then they used their television networks to humiliate him further.

Six days after the Dorenko show, Putin appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live. When King asked, “What happened?” Putin shrugged, smiled—impishly, it seemed—and said, “It sank.” The line became infamous: it played as cynical, dismissive, and deeply offensive to all who were affected by the tragedy. Only reviewing the transcript of the show ten years later did I realize what Putin was trying to communicate. He was indicating that he would not press the line some hapless Russian spin doctor had invented—that the Kursk had collided with an American submarine. Never mind that crazy conspiracy theory, his shrug was intended to say. It just sank.

The world saw something entirely different, and Putin learned a key lesson. Television—the very same television that had created him, a president plucked out of thin air—could turn on him and destroy him just as fast and with the same evident ease.

So Putin summoned Berezovsky, the former kingmaker and the man still in charge of Channel One, and demanded that the oligarch hand over his shares in the television company. “I said no, in the presence of [chief of staff] Voloshin,” Berezovsky told me. “So Putin changed his tone of voice then and said, ‘See you later, then, Boris Abramovich,’ and got up to leave. And I said, ‘Volodya, this is good-bye.’ We ended on this note, full of pathos. When he left the room, I turned to Voloshin and said, ‘So, Sasha, what have we done? Have we brought the black colonels to power?’ Voloshin scratched his head and said, ‘I don’t think so.’” Testifying in a London court years later, Voloshin could not recall the meeting in detail, saying only that its purpose had been to inform Berezovsky that “the concert is over, the show is over.”

Berezovsky says he sat down and immediately wrote a letter to his old protégé, then asked the chief of staff to pass it on. “I wrote about an American journalist who said once that every complicated problem always has one simple solution and that solution is always wrong. And I wrote that Russia is a colossally complex problem and it is his colossal mistake to think that he can use simple methods to solve it.” Berezovsky never received a response to this letter. Within days he had left for France, then moved on to Great Britain, joining his former rival Gusinsky in political exile. Soon enough, there was a warrant out for his arrest in Russia and he had surrendered his shares in Channel One.

Three months after the inauguration, two of the country’s wealthiest men had been stripped of their influence and effectively kicked out of the country. Less than a year after Putin came to power, all three federal television networks were controlled by the state.

“I’VE ALWAYS TOLD PEOPLE there is no point in going to jail voluntarily,” Andrei Sakharov’s widow, Yelena Bonner, told a small group of journalists in Moscow in November 2000. Berezovsky, she said, had called her in the summer to ask for advice and she had counseled him to stay out of the country. “Back in dissident times, I always advocated emigration for those under threat,” she explained. She had called us in for a press conference announcing Berezovsky’s grant to the Sakharov Museum and Human Rights Center in Moscow, which was on the verge of closing.

“What a shitty time we’ve lived to see,” said the museum’s director, former dissident Yuri Samodurov, “when we have to stand up in defense of people we don’t like at all, like Gusinsky and Berezovsky. We once lived in a totalitarian state that had two main features: totalizing terror and a totalizing lie. I hope that totalizing terror is no longer possible in our country, but we have now entered a new era of a totalizing lie.”