The New Tsar (17 page)

In that way, the Goodwill Games symbolized Sobchak’s mayoralty: an improbable project to boost the city’s prestige, undercut by the harsh realities of the country’s halting transition. Having failed to turn Petersburg into a world banking capital or a thriving free-economic zone, Sobchak believed that playing host to an international sporting event would by itself attract investors who were increasingly shying away. The city, though, was ill prepared, short on cash, hotels, and sporting facilities. After draining money from the city’s subway repair budget and pleading for more money from Moscow, Sobchak’s office rushed to renovate the venues, pave roads, and polish up the facades of many of the city’s palaces, churches, and monuments. By the time they began, the games were plagued by poor planning, logistical problems, and shoddy work. The indoor arena for ice skating—Turner’s games mixed winter and summer sports—failed to ice over, and the swimming events had to be postponed for a day because the water in the pool turned brackish when a filter failed. Even then a greenish hue caused some swimmers to pull out.
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Ticket prices were beyond the means of ordinary Russians, leaving many events sparsely attended, even when tickets were given away. The city and state invested $70 million in the games, and for most residents, the expense paid for little more than a Potemkin village, impressive to look at, perhaps, but really a facade concealing the city’s woeful decay.

Sobchak’s ambitions nevertheless emerged unchecked. He considered the games a rehearsal for the city’s improbable bid to host the Summer Olympics of 2004. In the new Russia, as in the Soviet Union, the
desire to hold the Olympics became an obsession directly proportional to the longing for international recognition, for legitimacy at home and abroad. The boycott of the Summer Games in 1980 had left an enduring bitterness that could only be forgotten when a great leader of the nation could once again bring the Olympics back. Sobchak would not be that leader. He was no longer even mayor when in 1997 the International Olympic Committee selected Athens as the 2004 host, having dropped St. Petersburg’s bid, hastily prepared with Putin’s help, before it reached the final round of consideration. Sobchak’s hubris had blinded him to the most fundamental feature of the democracy he so eloquently promoted: the people have a vote. In 1996, Sobchak was up for reelection, and for Putin, the result represented a profound, personal betrayal.

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obchak thought his reelection campaign would be simple: he would remind voters of his heroic leadership during the crises of 1991 and 1993, of the Goodwill Games and the bid for the Olympic Games for 2004, of the new businesses, the banks, the foreign investment, and his own meetings with foreign leaders, including, at the height of the campaign, President Bill Clinton. Sobchak proclaimed himself a democrat and statesman who stood in the way of the revanchists who would turn Petersburg back into Leningrad. In fact, the Communists were the least of his worries. His election was not a test of competing ideologies, but rather a referendum on his mayoralty, and he failed to see that the gravest threat came from within.

To coincide with the national presidential election, the city’s Legislative Assembly set the date of the election for June 16, and changed the name of the position from mayor to governor, as it had been when the city’s leader served at the pleasure of the tsars. Sobchak’s campaign posters showed him sitting behind a desk, with the simple slogan “From Mayor to Governor,” as if it were an inevitable transition. Even he thought the poster was insipid. “My campaign headquarters, unfortunately, was much less effective and efficient.”
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By now Sobchak had less faith in his deputy’s political guile and left him to run the city’s affairs, but even Putin sensed that Sobchak’s political instincts and oratorical flair would no longer be enough to ensure victory. In the national parliamentary elections in December 1995, the party that Sobchak backed had fared poorly, even in Petersburg. Sobchak also underestimated his loss of support in Moscow, where his political ambitions were viewed as a threat among those conspiring to keep Boris Yeltsin in power as
the presidential election of 1996 loomed. With the support of Yeltsin’s influential chief of security, Russia’s prosecutor general, Yuri Skuratov, had even launched an investigation into Sobchak’s affairs at the end of 1995 that appeared intended to curb his political aspirations. It was a reversal of fortune as sudden and arbitrary as a Stalin purge, and it succeeded in sullying Sobchak’s image. Skuratov formed an investigative committee that soon began to leak compromising details—known in Russian as
kompromat
—about the murky privatization of apartments by a company called Renaissance, including ones that went to Putin and other deputies. Putin saw the investigation as a raw use of prosecutorial power against the man he served, and the experience left him with a thirst for revenge.

“You know, you’re on a completely different playing field,” Putin recalled telling Sobchak. “You need specialists.”
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Sobchak agreed and turned to Aleksandr Yuriev, a political scientist at St. Petersburg State University, who warned him that his accomplishments, however great, no longer resonated with a weary electorate disillusioned with the crime and chaos that roiled the city.
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In January, only a few days after agreeing to work for the campaign, Yuriev answered a knock at the door of his apartment. A pretty young woman stood there, and assuming she was a student delivering an assignment, he opened the door. Only then did he see a man in a mask, who hurled a vial of acid in his face. As Yuriev staggered back, the man fired a pistol, though he missed. When Sobchak visited him in the hospital, Yuriev’s head was covered in white bandages. The police never found the attackers, or established a motive, but Sobchak had no doubt the attempt was part of a vast unfolding conspiracy to keep him from office.
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The attack heightened tension so much that Putin began to carry an air pistol, which his old friend Sergei Roldugin noticed when he visited his dacha around the beginning of the campaign.

“Do you think an air gun is going to save you?” Roldugin asked him.

“It won’t save me,” he replied, “but it makes me feel calmer.”
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ourteen candidates ultimately qualified to challenge Sobchak, and they included some of his bitter personal enemies: the vice mayor, Vyacheslav Shcherbakov, whose dismissal after the 1993 events was still being contested in court; Yuri Shutov, a former aide turned unauthorized Sobchak biographer; and Aleksandr Belyayev, the former chairman of the city council Sobchak had disbanded. The man Sobchak worried about
most, though, was Yuri Boldyrev, a prominent liberal who served as the head of the auditing authority in Moscow. It was Boldyrev who had investigated the first corruption accusations against Putin in 1992, and he had developed a reputation as a reasonably honest investigator at a time of staggering criminality.
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Sobchak was already under investigation, and Boldyrev’s election would almost certainly compound Sobchak’s legal troubles, and possibly Putin’s as well. Sobchak tried to use lawyerly maneuvers to manipulate the race to his own advantage. In March, he amended the election law to include a residency requirement that would have excluded Boldyrev, a native of the city, on the grounds that he had been living and working in Moscow. It was a transparently desperate and undemocratic ploy, which Boldyrev successfully fought in court. Sobchak’s next gambit proved to have more serious consequences. Although the date of the election was already set for June, Sobchak changed it. He claimed he did so at the insistence of Yeltsin, who had decreed that no other election except the mayor’s race in Moscow should be held on the same day as the presidential election.
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He initially suggested postponing the election until December, but his opponents fiercely denounced this as a naked attempt to extend his term. Instead he sent Putin to the Legislative Assembly in March to cajole the deputies. Promising jobs and threatening retaliation, Putin eventually pushed through legislation to hold the election on May 19, but only after mustering a highly suspect quorum.
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Sobchak’s challengers howled in protest. Not only was it a waste of city resources to hold separate elections, but the move cut short the time for them to make their cases with voters. The television networks controlled by Sobchak’s office did not help either, lavishing attention on Sobchak while limiting his opponents each to a fifteen-minute program on air. The risk that Sobchak and Putin failed to consider was that holding the election before the presidential vote would almost certainly lower turnout and hurt his chances, as Yuriev had warned him.

Sobchak became uneasy. He suspected that his enemies in Moscow were conspiring against him. He even flew to Moscow in March to appeal to Yeltsin for support but instead found their friendship had dissipated. Yeltsin’s own prospects for reelection that year were abysmal, and he and his aides feared challenges from all sides, real and imagined. It seems one of Yeltsin’s deputy prime ministers, Oleg Soskovets, had told him that Sobchak, during a meeting with the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, had expressed a preference for replacing Yeltsin with
Viktor Chernomyrdin.
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Sobchak’s paranoia was not misplaced. Within days of Sobchak’s meeting in the Kremlin, the extent of the political intrigue against him became clear. Soskovets and Yeltsin’s powerful chief of security, Lieutenant General Aleksandr Korzhakov, did have their own candidate in mind to challenge Sobchak in Petersburg. It was not one of the many already in the race, but Sobchak’s own deputy, Vladimir Yakovlev. They had been secretly cultivating him for months, even as the prosecutors sharpened their investigations against Sobchak and his staff. On March 27, Yakovlev unexpectedly announced he was entering the campaign against his own boss.

Yakovlev, who at fifty-two was seven years younger than Sobchak, was a construction engineer, a former party apparatchik who had made the transition to the new democracy, like Vladimir Putin, under Sobchak’s tutelage. He had remained a loyal Communist until the party was banned in 1991, even though in 1982 he had been fired from a regional executive committee for using his post to buy a car for his personal use.
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He was working as chief engineer for a housing construction company when Sobchak hired him in October 1993. A year later he joined Putin and Aleksei Kudrin as first deputy mayors. Yakovlev had no more of a public profile than Putin, but he had more ambition and less loyalty, and he accepted the support Korzhakov and Soskovets promised to oust his own boss.

The announcement shocked Sobchak, who promptly fired Yakovlev. If Yakovlev had been man enough, he said, he would have resigned before announcing his challenge. Yakovlev’s candidacy also infuriated Putin. He publicly called Yakovlev a Judas
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and circulated a letter for all of Sobchak’s employees to sign, declaring that they would resign in protest if Sobchak lost the election. With the bitterness of hindsight, Sobchak described Yakovlev’s accomplishments as modest. He was not as intelligent as the “more educated, cultural and skilled people” on his team, like Putin. The staff disparaged him with the nickname “the plumber,”
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a telling contrast to Putin’s “Stasi.”

Sobchak ignored Yakovlev along with the rest of his challengers and carried on with his official duties, as if that alone would prove his electoral worthiness. He campaigned more intently for Yeltsin before the presidential election, as well, hoping to prove his loyalty and restore the political alliance they had once had. On April 19, Bill Clinton arrived in Petersburg on his way to meetings in Moscow that the Americans, too, hoped would help Yeltsin beat back a challenge from the resurgent Communist
Party. Sobchak met him at the airport and rode with him in the limousine to Tsarskoye Selo, the imperial estate south of the city. Perhaps mindful that his private conversations had a way of getting back to Yeltsin, Sobchak went out of his way to explain how Yeltsin would triumph over his main challenger, the Communist Gennady Zyuganov. Sobchak shadowed Clinton everywhere, relishing his appearance on television as a statesman in the company of a world leader. Clinton though complained that he had been “kept in a goddamn cocoon” during his trip. A meeting with students at the Hermitage had been canceled, his requests to stop the motorcade to shake hands in the street rebuffed. Clinton’s aide, Strobe Talbott, blamed the overzealousness of the official who oversaw the details of the visit, Vladimir Putin, though he added that at the time the name “meant nothing to any of us.”
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Y
akovlev was not the natural politician Sobchak was, but he was charismatic in his own way and far more attuned to voters’ desires. Tall and thin, he had a cherubic face with wide cheekbones prone to split into a goofy grin. He offered no real ideological alternative—he had no intention of reversing privatization of apartments or factories, for example—but promised that he would try to fix the city’s myriad problems: undrinkable tap water, potholed streets, crumbling subways. He promised jobs, not the Olympics. Sobchak belittled his campaign promises as “bewitching fantasies for a gullible public,” but he grossly underestimated his aide’s appeal. In a city where people still lived in communal apartments, where basic services like ambulances were meager, the water was tainted with giardia, and sewage flowed untreated into the Baltic Sea, where for a month in September 1995 the city could not even heat its hospitals,
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perhaps “a plumber” was just what voters wanted.