The New Tsar (16 page)

The protests in Moscow turned violent. On October 2, supporters of the parliament overwhelmed the police cordon around the White House, and this time they were armed. Rutskoy, from a balcony, called for an uprising. Yeltsin declared a state of emergency. The next night groups armed with rifles, grenades, and Molotov cocktails seized the mayor’s office and stormed the Ostankino television tower, knocking state television off the air for several hours. There they were met by battalions of interior police officers, who fought them off, though at great cost of life. The violence there killed dozens, far more than the number that had died during the August 1991 putsch. Blood had not flowed in the streets of Moscow like that since the 1917 revolution. The Russian army equivocated—its commanders at one point complaining that their soldiers were too busy with the fall potato harvest to muster in force—but ultimately obeyed Yeltsin’s orders after the minister of defense, Pavel Grachev, insisted that Yeltsin put them in writing.
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By dawn Russian tanks had encircled the White House, crushing the makeshift barricades. At ten, in full view of television cameras, four tanks on the Novoarbatsky Bridge began firing shells into the upper floors of the building where Yeltsin had led the resistance to the putsch barely two years earlier. Soldiers occupied the building floor by floor, arresting Rutskoy and Ruslan Khasbulatov, the speaker of the Supreme Soviet, both former allies of Yeltsin, along with dozens of others. At least a hundred people died at the White House.

Putin’s loyalties were never in doubt during the crisis: he followed Sobchak. On the night of October 3, he met the mayor at the airport with a detachment of guards that turned out to be unnecessary.
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The next day, while the fighting raged in Moscow, a few hundred protesters
reached Petersburg’s television center, but did not confront the cordon of special police that surrounded the building. Seventy-two members of the city council adopted a statement condemning those who instigated the bloodshed in Moscow, without explicitly saying whom they blamed more for it. Sobchak managed to avoid violence in the city without military intervention, in part because the rebellion was limited to the capital, but also because his office took few chances with Yeltsin’s opponents in Petersburg. The city’s Ministry of Security—the descendant of the KGB that would ultimately become the Federal Security Service, or FSB—“introduced a number of measures advocating the arrests of extremists who were plotting provocations, planning to blow up things, or trying to destabilize the situation.”

This was how Putin would later describe the events of October 1993. There may or may not have been provocateurs prepared to act in Petersburg. What mattered to Putin was that “there wasn’t the same division between the law-enforcement agencies that there had been in 1991.”
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The security service’s chief in St. Petersburg was Putin’s old friend Viktor Cherkesov, who pledged his loyalty to Sobchak from the start of the crisis and ensured that at least in their city presidential authority would remain unimpeded. Sobchak later acknowledged that he had dispatched “a squad of special forces” to Moscow to help Yeltsin crush the rebellion when the loyalty of the army seemed uncertain.
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The troops arrived at the end of September, and while they did not fight at the White House, they took part in clearing rebels from the Moscow mayor’s office and the Hotel Mir.
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The events affirmed Sobchak’s early decisions to nurture ties with the security services; and they reinforced Putin’s conviction that even in a democracy, law and order depended on the quiet, effective work of the secret services.

CHAPTER 6

Mismanaged Democracy

T
he turmoil of 1993 deepened Sobchak’s dependence on Putin, and his trust in him. The newspaper
Kommersant
described Putin as “a man as close to Sobchak as Prince Menshikov was to Peter the Great,” referring to the man who was the tsar’s commander and confidant in the eighteenth century until he was exiled to Siberia after Peter’s death.
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Putin, Sobchak said, was a “courageous and decisive person,”
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without designs on Sobchak’s authority, or even on his position. As a result, he drew his deputy deeper into the city’s management, not just in the field of foreign investment, but also into his fights against critics and prosecutors who began inquiries into Sobchak’s financial affairs. In the fall of 1993, Sobchak asked Putin to manage the parliamentary campaign of Russia’s Choice, a party created by Yeltsin’s on-again-off-again prime minister, Yegor Gaidar. It was a puzzling order since Sobchak had created his own bloc, the Russian Movement for Democratic Reform—which failed spectacularly to win any seats when the vote was held in December—but Putin never questioned orders. He stood resolutely behind Sobchak, as loyal to his boss as he had been to his superiors in the KGB, even when it blinded him to their shortcomings. Putin worked tirelessly, with an obsession that seemed at times to inure him to hardship and tragedy, even those close to home.

On the morning of October 23, 2003, Putin drove his daughter Masha to school and then headed to the Astoria Hotel, where Sobchak had a special assignment for him. Lyudmila stayed at home with a feverish Katya, then seven. Katya pestered her mother to let her go to school anyway to rehearse her part in a play. She was going to be Cinderella, and though Lyudmila thought better of it, the girl insisted.
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She drove a new Zhiguli, which, though modest, was the family’s second car and a sign of rising prosperity. Just before noon, as Lyudmila neared a bridge
that crosses the Neva, another car sped through a red light and smashed into the Zhiguli. The impact knocked Lyudmila unconscious; when she woke, she thought she could keep driving but found she could not. Katya, who had been asleep in the back, was bruised, though not badly hurt. Then for a long time, nothing happened.

The police arrived and bystanders gathered, but it took an ambulance forty-five minutes to arrive. Such was the decrepit state of basic services. A woman whose name and number Lyudmila later lost called the ambulance and a number that Lyudmila dictated to her. Putin’s secretary, Marina Yentaltseva, answered but was unsure what to do. Putin’s trusted aide, Igor Sechin, went to the crash site and brought Katya to the office at Smolny. Yentaltseva went to find Putin. The ambulance finally arrived and took Lyudmila to the October 25th Hospital, still named in honor of the first day (on the old calendar) of the Bolshevik revolution. “The hospital was horrible,” she recalled later. “It was full of people who were dying. There were gurneys in the hallway with dead bodies on them.” Worse, the doctors who treated her did not notice that she had broken three vertebrae in her spine and fractured the base of her skull. The surgeons sutured her torn ear and left her “naked on the table in freezing operating rooms in a terrible state of half consciousness.”
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During all this, Putin was meeting at the Astoria with the American cable television executive Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, then his wife. They were in Petersburg to arrange the staging of the third Goodwill Games, the international sporting competition Turner dreamed up after the 1980 Olympics in Moscow were boycotted by the United States and other countries following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the 1984 Olympics were boycotted in retaliation by the Soviet Union and most of its satellites. The first games had been held in Moscow in 1986, the second in Seattle in 1990. Turner wanted to return them to the new Russia in 1994, and Sobchak was eager to showcase the city, even if it could ill afford the necessary investments. Putin was shepherding the couple to a series of meetings when his secretary finally reached him at the hotel. He slipped out to go to the emergency room.

“Don’t worry, she’s not in any danger,” the chief surgeon there told him. “We’re just going to put a splint on, and everything will be fine.”

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” the surgeon replied, and without seeing his wife, Putin returned to his meetings.

Meanwhile, Yentaltseva took Katya to a hospital and picked up Masha
from school. Putin asked that Yentaltseva spend the night with them at the family’s dacha. He also asked her to call Yuri Shevchenko, one of the city’s most prominent physicians at the Military Medical Academy (who would later be a minister of health). It was evening before she finally reached Shevchenko, and he immediately sent a doctor from the academy’s clinic. Lyudmila remembered waking in the operating room and feeling his warm hand holding hers. “It warmed me up and I knew that I had been saved.” The doctor arranged her transfer to the military hospital, and an X-ray discovered spinal injuries that required emergency surgery. That night, between meetings, Putin visited her for the first time, meeting Yentaltseva and his children in the parking lot. He told her it was unlikely he would make it home because his discussions with Ted Turner were scheduled to continue into the night. She took the girls to the dacha and, unable to find the switch for the heat, huddled them in one bed with extra blankets. She was startled awake when Putin arrived home at three in the morning. By seven, he had already left again.
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Yentaltseva had grown close to the family, and she stayed with the girls until Lyudmila’s mother arrived from Kaliningrad. She had become accustomed to Putin’s stern, dispassionate demeanor, his reserved precision in dealing with the city’s business, and his emotionless response when his dog was killed, but now he seemed rattled. “I can’t say that he was thrown for a loop and totally at a loss and didn’t know what to grab on to,” she said. “That wasn’t the case. I just sensed that he was trying to come up with a plan in his head.” Lyudmila spent a month at the Military Medical Academy, where they later discovered the fracture at the base of her skull. After she was released, she had to wear a brace for months.

Putin’s trust rested with those he knew best, many of them from the “power organs.” These friends would become known as
siloviki
, from the word for “force,” because of their backgrounds in the military or security services. In moments of crisis, these were the men who he knew would serve him selflessly. Putin distrusted almost everyone else. In the case of Lyudmila’s injuries, Putin had relied on Igor Sechin, then Shevchenko, and then his new friend at Dresdner Bank, the former Stasi man, Matthias Warnig. It was Dresdner that arranged—and paid for—Lyudmila to receive at a clinic in Bad Homburg, Germany, the necessary medical treatment that Russia’s deteriorating health-care system could not provide.
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That Putin himself could not afford the cost of treatment abroad seemed to refute the claims of his critics that he, too, was personally
enriching himself in Sobchak’s administration. Still, he had a quintessentially Russian understanding that assistance, in crisis or not, came through connections, the exchange of favors. He always remembered acts of loyalty like Warnig’s, just as he never forgave betrayals.

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A
fter Yeltsin’s dissolution of the city council following the 1993 crisis, Sobchak’s power in Petersburg seemed unassailable. A decree he authored—and Yeltsin signed—dramatically shifted authority from the council to the mayor’s office as the city prepared to hold elections in March 1994. The decree created a new, smaller legislative body; instead of four hundred members, a new legislative assembly would have only fifty. In theory it was a democratic restructuring of the branches of power, but in reality Sobchak consolidated his control of almost all of the city’s affairs. On March 16, four days before the elections, he restructured the city government, making himself the chairman of the government and eliminating committees that had once reported to the vice mayor, while consolidating others. The chairmen of the three most powerful committees—those overseeing finance, international relations, and operations—were promoted, and Vladimir Putin became one of three first deputies of Sobchak’s new government, still in charge of foreign economic affairs.
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The legislative elections were a farce. Sobchak’s office wrote the rules without any input or consent from the council members whose body was being restructured. When the polls opened on March 20, an overwhelming majority of people simply did not bother voting, risking the invalidation of the results since the law required a minimum turnout of 25 percent; in only half of the fifty districts did turnout meet the threshold. Twenty-five new deputies joined the assembly, but they lacked a quorum and could not function legally. As it was, Sobchak did not seem troubled by the turn of events. He did not schedule a new round of elections to fill the remaining seats until October; until then, he and his deputies would govern as they saw fit, without legislative oversight.

In the five years since the city council was first formed, the euphoric expression of popular will through the ballot box had devolved into disgust with the democratic process. Democracy in Russia had taken root in barren soil, and its growth was already stunted. Much of the blame lay with the catastrophic state of the new Russian economy, with the hardships of privatization, the corrupt amassing of wealth, and the surge in criminality that made Petersburg notorious as a swamp of violence and
organized crime. The irony was that the man who had led the fight for democracy in Petersburg bore much of the blame. He had so assiduously belittled the council’s work that voters no longer cared who served on it. A brilliant orator and terrible manager, Sobchak in his preoccupation with power and international prestige had ignored the workaday problems of his city. His instinct to strengthen democracy meant, in his mind, strengthening his own mercurial rule. Not long after the election, blaming the city’s increasing crime, he forced the resignation of the city’s police chief, Arkady Kramarev, who had defied the coup’s leaders in 1991 and saved Sobchak from arrest. Having consolidated control of the city’s television network, Sobchak made sure his coverage was adoring and that of his opponents nonexistent. After winning the right to host the Goodwill Games, he used a Soviet-era residency requirement, which the Constitutional Court had overturned, to drive unwanted migrant workers out of the city just before the games opened in July 1994.
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