The New Tsar (12 page)

After Sobchak’s election, Putin ended his work at the university, and in June 1991 he joined the mayor’s staff as the director of the city’s new committee on foreign relations. He made himself indispensable: a quiet, level-headed, but stern presence, working in a sparsely furnished office. He worked so tirelessly and with such efficiency and “brute determination,” as one colleague put it, that he earned the unflattering nickname “Stasi,” only in part because of his tour of duty in East Germany.
³⁵

The KGB had not forgotten its officer in Sobchak’s ranks. Coincidentally or not, Putin’s colleagues showed up in his office one evening after Sobchak had rushed off on a trip and left his aide with three sheets of blank paper, each signed, to complete with assorted mayoral business. The officers who had come to him wanted one of them for some nefarious purpose he either did not know or never told. “Can’t you see that this man trusts me?” Putin later claimed to have replied, showing them a folder with the papers in them.
³⁶
Putin did not refuse outright, but they did not insist either. They simply apologized, and left.

—

O
n August 17, 1991, the Putins went on vacation, driving to Kaliningrad to stay in a resort on the Curonian Spit, a narrow crescent of
beaches, dunes, and forests on the Baltic Sea.
³⁷
Sobchak had spent that weekend in Lithuania to discuss his vision of a free trade agreement and then flown back to Moscow on the night of August 18 to take part two days later in the signing of a new Union Treaty that would effectively dissolve the central Soviet state. Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and the party leader in Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, had secretly negotiated the agreement to transfer functions of the central government to the individual Soviet republics, significantly weakening the central authority of the Kremlin.

The ceremony never took place. That night, inside the Kremlin, a group of hardliners had already set in motion a putsch, placing Gorbachev under house arrest at his vacation home in the Crimea and establishing the State Committee of the State of Emergency. The coup’s leaders included Gorbachev’s vice president, Gennady Yanayev; the prime minister; the ministers of defense and interior; and Vladimir Kryuchkov, the former chief of foreign intelligence and now the chairman of the KGB. Their formal orders to the military and the KGB to take control were issued at four o’clock the morning of August 19.

The Putins heard the news the way most of the country did, first through a series of radio announcements and then in special bulletins on state television that interrupted the broadcast of
Swan Lake
. Sobchak woke in his hotel room in Moscow when a friend telephoned from Kazakhstan to tell him the news. Tanks and paratroopers in armored vehicles had already poured into the streets of Moscow. Sobchak, with guards and a driver, went to Yeltsin’s dacha, joining the leadership of the newly elected Russian parliament to organize the resistance. Sobchak’s name, like Yeltsin’s, was on the KGB’s list of arrest warrants, but the arrests never began. Yeltsin urged Sobchak to return to Leningrad and lead the opposition to the putsch from there. Sobchak, along with a lone guard, made it to Sheremetyevo Airport and booked the next regularly scheduled flight to Leningrad. The putsch plotters, despite the declared state of emergency, allowed life to go on more or less normally, including routine air travel. The three KGB officers who met him in the airport lounge had orders to arrest him, but they simply disobeyed and waited with him until he boarded. “So now I had four guards, three with machine guns,” Sobchak recalled.
³⁸
The putsch that the reformers had long dreaded could happen was turning into a farce.

In Leningrad, the city’s military commander, Colonel General Viktor Samsonov, had also received orders to deploy troops. He went on television
at ten in the morning to announce the state of emergency, outlawing any demonstrations and public gatherings and dissolving all the political parties and social organizations that had sprouted like mushrooms in the previous two years. He also declared the formation of an emergency committee that would replace the city’s newly elected government. The committee included local military and KGB leaders and the new Communist Party leader, Boris Gidaspov. Sobchak’s name was conspicuously absent, but not that of the rear admiral Sobchak had selected as his deputy chairman and later vice mayor, Vyacheslav Shcherbakov. He too was at a seaside resort on the Black Sea, and after flying back to Leningrad, disavowed any involvement in the putsch. By the time Sobchak’s flight from Moscow landed at two o’clock, however, no troops had entered the city. General Samsonov’s order had not been carried out.

The city’s police commander, Arkady Kramarev, sent a car that took Sobchak straight to the military headquarters on Palace Square, opposite the Hermitage, where the Leningrad emergency committee had convened. Kramarev was there already, openly resisting Samsonov’s orders to clear the streets of the protesters who had begun to gather outside the city council’s headquarters at the Mariinsky Palace.

Sobchak burst in and blusteringly accused them of an illegal conspiracy that would result in “a Nuremberg of their own.” Sobchak ignored Gidaspov, the party boss who was to replace him as the city’s leader, and focused his fury instead on General Samsonov. He cited specific instances of military commanders being used by corrupt or criminal party leaders, including the killings in Georgia he had investigated. Ever the lawyer, he challenged the legality of the general’s orders on the technicality that they did not explicitly authorize a state of emergency in Leningrad. Kramarev later said that Sobchak berated the general in a tone he had almost certainly never heard in his years as an officer.
³⁹
“If you take a fateful step now, everybody will remember you as a traitor, an executioner,” Sobchak told him.
⁴⁰
Whether because of Sobchak’s anger or his logic, the general promised to reconsider the deployment of troops and dithered for crucial hours.

Sobchak then sped to the city’s television station and spoke live on the air that evening, appearing with Shcherbakov and the provincial legislative leader, Yuri Yarov. Both of them had been announced as local leaders of the emergency committee, but now it became clear to the public that they had not supported the putsch. The national television channels in Moscow had been seized, but Leningrad’s channels had not,
and they still broadcast across much of the Soviet Union. The station manager let the broadcast proceed since Shcherbakov was there, assuming he was now in charge.
⁴¹
Millions heard Sobchak’s remarks and could see that the putsch faced resistance. “Once again there is an attempt to block our people’s path to freedom, democracy, and true independence,” Sobchak began. He urged the population to gather the next morning in Palace Square. He referred to the putsch’s leaders as “former” ministers and then simply as “citizens,” as defendants in court were called.
⁴²

Throughout that first crucial day, Vladimir Putin remained at the beach resort more than five hundred miles away. He reached Sobchak by telephone the night of August 19 but did not return immediately, though he presumably could have. Instead he waited until the next day, when he caught a regularly scheduled flight from Kaliningrad.
⁴³
He was, by all accounts, deeply ambivalent. A year and a half before, he returned from the crumbling Soviet empire in Eastern Europe dismayed by what he considered the abandonment of its comrade nations, the humiliating retreat of its troops and intelligence officers, and the triumph of NATO, the West, and capitalism. Now the Soviet Union itself was coming apart at the seams, its republics, including Russia, moving entropically toward independence. It meant the dismemberment of his country, and the putsch’s leaders, he would later say, simply aimed to stop that. He considered theirs a noble purpose. The KGB chairman, Kryuchkov, widely considered a pompous, conniving bore, was in his mind “a very decent man.”
⁴⁴
Although Kryuchkov’s intentions were clear, the KGB’s loyalties were not. Many officers loyal to the new Russian government aided Boris Yeltsin and the putsch’s opponents with intelligence and even a printing press. Some younger officers even drafted a statement denouncing the coup.
⁴⁵
Lieutenant Colonel Putin, now working for one of the country’s leading democrats, had to choose a side.

Shortly after dawn on August 20, Sobchak went to the sprawling Kirov factory, which produced tanks, tractors, and the turbines used in the Soviet Union’s nuclear submarines and ice-breakers. The factory, the city’s largest, was legendary in Soviet mythology because of its part in the Great Patriotic War, remaining open throughout the siege despite being only miles from the front. Sobchak wanted to arrive before the morning shift to rally the factory’s thirty thousand workers. He spoke in front of a car with a loudspeaker, after which the factory’s managers offered to allow workers to join the rally he had called for in Palace Square. The factory, the police, and most of the city’s elected officials were now
openly defying the putsch. Thousands of Kirov workers marched in columns up Stachek Prospekt to the center of the city. “They knew to what this might lead,” a machinist among them said. “They felt that they were people, human beings. They had stopped being afraid.”
⁴⁶

The crowd that gathered that day was the largest seen in Leningrad in decades. More than 130,000 people thronged Palace Square and adjoining streets for blocks around. Outside the Hermitage Museum a banner declared “No to the military putsch!” In contrast to the tense atmosphere in Moscow, where protesters braced for movements by the armored units in the city, the rally was orderly and hopeful, supervised by the police officers and KGB agents who were supposed to have prevented it from happening. According to one newspaper report, Sobchak had even discussed plans for the rally with the local KGB boss, Kurkov, agreeing that it would be conducted calmly.
⁴⁷
Sobchak spoke briefly, followed by Dmitri Likhachev, a revered linguist, preservationist, and historian who had survived the Gulag and exile, who told the crowd that the people “can no longer be forced to their knees.” That evening Sobchak appeared at a special session of the city council in the Mariinsky Palace. “The situation in Leningrad is fully under control of the bodies of lawful power,” he declared. The putsch collapsed in Leningrad before it did anywhere else.

Putin arrived from Kaliningrad that afternoon but did not attend the rally in Palace Square. He joined Sobchak at the Mariinsky Palace and remained there. He had watched the new “acting president” of the Soviet Union, Gennady Yanayev, hold the news conference the night before—watched as Yanayev repeated the emergency committee’s lies about Gorbachev’s health and vowed to put an end to the “present Time of Troubles,” alluding to the occupation, war, and famine that had followed the death of Boris Godunov at the turn of the seventeenth century. “Having embarked on the path of profound reforms and having gone a considerable way in this direction, the Soviet Union has now reached a point at which it finds itself faced with a deep crisis, the further development of which could both place in question the course of reforms itself as well as lead to serious cataclysms in international life,” Yanayev said, but as he did his voice trembled and his hands shook. The journalists present began asking probing questions; they even laughed at his improbable answers.

Putin said he knew then that the putsch was doomed. No matter how deep his loyalty to the KGB, he would not follow the orders of this emergency
committee, even if he supported their underlying intention of preserving the union. Their effort to reassert Soviet power meant the end of it. “Up until that time I didn’t really understand the transformation that was going on in Russia,” he recalled of his return from East Germany. “All the ideals, all the goals that I had had when I went to work for the KGB, collapsed.” And yet siding with Sobchak would amount to a violation of his oath of office. And so, after sixteen years of service to the KGB, he wrote his resignation.

It was, he claimed, his second resignation. He said he had sent a similar letter a year before, though in far less dire circumstances. In the political turmoil surrounding the city council and later the mayor’s office, Putin had confronted innuendo about his intelligence background; some people hoped for help from it, others threatened to expose it. Either way they wanted something from Putin, and he was “just sick and tired of that brazen blackmail.”
⁴⁸
He wanted to protect Sobchak and his reputation, as he had warned him when he first became his adviser. It was the hardest decision of his life, he said, but he drafted and sent his resignation. And then nothing happened. He never heard any more about his letter, which disappeared in the bureaucracy, if it ever reached it. Nor did he make any effort to follow up, a discrepancy he never would explain fully.

This time in the middle of the confused putsch, he told Sobchak of his decision to quit, making it clear to his boss and mentor that he had sided with him. Despite the huge public protest against the putsch, the situation in Leningrad remained unsettled. Yeltsin, acting as president of Russia, issued a decree naming Shcherbakov the military commander of the Leningrad district, effectively replacing General Samsonov, who was in fact quietly heeding Sobchak’s warnings and staying on the sidelines. Putin organized the defenses at the Mariinsky, passing out pistols to Sobchak’s advisers, though he later claimed he had left his KGB revolver in his safe, as he had in Dresden. A few thousand protesters remained in the square outside, keeping a nervous vigil behind makeshift barricades that would have served little purpose against a determined military assault. He once again found himself inside a building surrounded by a tense mob demanding freedom, only this time he was on their side of the barricade.