beautiful dress and some sort of wraparound turbanlike hat. Sobchak had a bodyguard who would go on to be Putin’s chief bodyguard. He had this stupid habit: he would go up to me and just about curse me out, saying, ‘You are getting to me! Get out of here! Disappear, I am sick of you!’ So I said to Sobchak, ‘Why is your bodyguard always threatening me?’ And Ludmila Borisovna [Narusova] said to me, ‘Why are you always making a fool of yourself?’ And Sobchak was all relaxed, all important, getting into his limousine, and he said to me, ‘Shut up, the people elected me!’ I remembered that for the rest of my life. That’s the kind of snob he was.”
As Sobchak’s deputy mayor, Putin performed the jobs that Soviet tradition had reserved for KGB men in the “active reserve”: in addition to being responsible for foreign trade, he also aimed to control the flow of information in and out of the government. Yuri Boldyrev, Yeltsin’s chief comptroller who had unsuccessfully tried to follow up on Salye’s allegations, served as a senator from St. Petersburg in 1994–1995. “Not once during this time was I allowed to go live on air on St. Petersburg television,” he recalled later. “Only after I had stopped being a senator was I allowed to speak live—and even then the anchors kept interrupting me, so in the end I said nothing.”
Whenever I went to St. Petersburg on a story, the first person I would go see was Anna Sharogradskaya: her office was on Nevsky Prospekt, just down the street from the railroad station, and she knew everything. She ran the Independent Press Center, which provided space for press conferences for anybody who wanted to hold one— including those who would be turned down by every other space in town. She knew everyone, and she feared no one. She was in her late fifties by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, and she remembered a time when things had been a lot more scary. One time Sharogradskaya organized a press conference that exposed the Sobchak administration’s practice of bugging the offices of journalists and politicians, including his own employees. Many people had known or suspected this was the case, but only the local English-language newspaper, run and staffed by expats, dared run the story. Sharogradskaya was always convinced that Putin, who was largely responsible for the mayor’s relationship with the media, organized the bugging.
In keeping with KGB practices, the information that Sobchak was allowed to receive was heavily edited. This was certainly part of the reason he never suspected how unpopular he had become. Some of St. Petersburg’s television-viewing audience saw Sobchak making this unpleasant discovery. “There was a show called
When Sharogradskaya told me stories like these in the 1990s, I heard them as tales from a different land. Russia was a messy, often illogical place in those years, but never had I felt unsafe working as a journalist—not until I started writing from and about St. Petersburg, that is. At Sharogradskaya’s invitation, I taught a reporting course at the Independent Press Center, taking the train in on weekends to work with a group of university journalism majors. (I was teaching the same course at Moscow University, but St. Petersburg University wanted no part of it—which is why Sharogradskaya’s organization ended up hosting it.) On election weekend, I sent the students out to take notes at polling stations in the center of town. The students returned with bloodied noses and black eyes; two young people needed medical attention. They had presented themselves as journalism students at two polling stations; the guards had radioed for instructions and had then roughed them up. This was how St. Petersburg politicians treated St. Petersburg journalists.
Realizing too late that he was about to lose the election, Sobchak made desperate attempts to fix the situation. He asked Alexander Yuriev, a political psychologist at St. Petersburg University who had tried to warn Sobchak he was desperately unpopular, to run his campaign. A few days after Yuriev agreed, he faced a brutal attempt on his life: someone rang his doorbell and then tossed sulfuric acid through the open door. Because the door opened inward, some of the acid settled on the door itself and some even ricocheted back at whoever had thrown it; this was probably why Yuriev did not get a lethal dose. He was then also shot—and survived that as well. It took him long months, and two skin transplants, to recover.
In the run-up to the election, Sobchak also tried to buy the loyalty of the city’s press corps, giving out loans and grants, driving the city’s budget ever deeper into debt. It was too late. The press hated him, other politicians hated him, and ordinary people hated him. Sobchak lost the election. His campaign manager in the end was Vladimir Putin.
FOR ITS NEXT MAYOR, St. Petersburg elected Sobchak’s own public works deputy, a man in every way his opposite: plain-looking, poorly turned-out, Vladimir Yakovlev could barely put two words together. But in a city where public transportation was at a standstill, buildings were crumbling, and electricity was flickering on and off, he somehow inspired hope that he would try to fix the right things. Or, at the very least, he would not lie about them. Yakovlev would not, in fact, be successful at fixing what ailed St. Petersburg—the city continued to get poorer, dirtier, and more dangerous—but four years later, Yakovlev easily won reelection because St. Petersburg was still battling the hated ghost of Mayor Sobchak.
In losing the election, Sobchak lost not only power and influence but also immunity from prosecution—which, at this point, was probably what he feared most. For almost a year, a special prosecutor’s team of nearly forty investigators dispatched by the prosecutor general’s office in Moscow had been looking into allegations of corruption in the mayor’s office. One person, a real estate developer, had already been arrested and was testifying against city officials. This part of the investigation concerned an apartment building in the center of St. Petersburg that had allegedly undergone illegal reconstruction, and city funds had allegedly been used in the process. Almost all the building’s residents, including Sobchak’s own niece, were either highly placed city employees or their close relatives.
Now Sobchak, too, was likely to join the list of suspects. Most of his allies had abandoned him, some before the election, like the deputy who replaced him in the mayor’s office; others joined the new regime after Sobchak lost the vote. Putin turned down a job offer in the new administration—the display of loyalty that had placed him so high in Berezovsky’s esteem—and soon decamped for Moscow, as though airlifted by an invisible hand. The way he told the story to his biographers, an old Leningrad apparatchik now working in the Kremlin remembered Putin and arranged a good post for him in the capital. Putin was now deputy head of the presidential property management office, which sounds very much like another “active reserve” posting. Whether this was the product of secret-police design, providence, or habit is probably unimportant: Putin once again had a job with little public responsibility but a lot of access.
Putin’s new job and his old connections were clearly a boon to Sobchak, who was now living with the daily threat of arrest. The prosecutor’s office was chasing Sobchak, trying to deliver a summons so he could be interrogated. Not until October 3, 1997, did Sobchak finally arrive at the prosecutor’s office; he was accompanied by his wife, who was a parliament member. During the interrogation, Sobchak said he felt ill and Narusova demanded an ambulance. With television cameras looking on, Sobchak was taken straight from the prosecutor’s office to the hospital, where he was reportedly diagnosed with a heart attack. Exactly a month later, Narusova informed the press that Sobchak was now well enough to be transferred to a different clinic, at the Military Academy Hospital, where he would be in the care of Yuri Shevchenko, a family friend of the Putins, who had personally treated Ludmila Putina following a serious car accident a few years earlier.
Around the time Sobchak was transferred into Shevchenko’s care, Putin flew to St. Petersburg from Moscow. He visited his old boss at the hospital. Four days later, during a national holiday—November 7 was no longer called Revolution Day, but the country still got a day off—Sobchak was taken by ambulance to the airport, where a Finnish medevac plane was waiting to take him to Paris. The planning was brilliant: no one noticed that Sobchak was gone until the holiday weekend ended three days later. Russian correspondents immediately stormed the American Hospital in Paris, where Shevchenko said Sobchak was being treated—but hospital officials said they had no such patient. The same day, Narusova told the media that Sobchak had undergone an operation and was feeling better. Airport officials, meanwhile, told journalists that the former mayor had seemed perfectly well boarding the plane: the ambulance had driven straight onto the tarmac, and, contrary to their expectations, he had emerged on foot, all but running to the plane.
