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.”
