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

Eleven BACK TO THE USSR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The system’s greatest vulnerability stemmed from Putin’s and his inner circle’s pleonexia, the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belonged to others, that was exerting ever greater pressure on the regime from