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

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