The New Tsar (18 page)

With an infusion of cash from his backers in Moscow, Yakovlev turned to professional campaign consultants, who helped him run a far more organized and effective campaign that filled mailboxes with leaflets, the airwaves with advertisements, all with the same simple message of restoring basic governance and services.
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Yakovlev also had political support from a potent new ally, Yuri Luzhkov, the bald-headed, barrel-chested populist mayor of Moscow. Yakovlev fashioned himself as a Luzhkov for Petersburg, and Luzhkov publicly suggested new projects that would make both cities prosper. Sobchak’s campaign, by contrast, ran out of money. Having played little role to this point, Putin now entered the fray, pleading for donations from the businessmen he had been working
with for the past five years, something he viewed with undisguised disgust.
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When he invited a group of them to a fundraiser, however, they refused to help—the very people who, in his view, had profited from the privatizations and investments that he and Sobchak had made possible. A local mobster had better luck, raising $2,000 each from small businessmen who thought better than to refuse a donation to the “Foundation for the Support of the Mayor.”
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Sobchak’s dominance of the city’s politics since 1989, his charisma and prestige, no longer shielded him from withering personal attacks. Aleksandr Belyayev, the former council chairman, told a press conference that Sobchak—and Putin—owned property on the Atlantic coast of France. He said that Sobchak had been detained in 1993 at Heathrow Airport in London carrying a suitcase of $1 million in cash; he vowed that when he became governor, “Sobchak will be sitting in jail.”
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Putin responded to the accusations against him by filing a lawsuit accusing Belyayev of slander, but he filed it in the wrong jurisdiction and was mercilessly mocked in the press: “An Intelligence Agent Should Know Where His Defendant Lives,” said one newspaper headline. Putin tried to defend himself, claiming he did not even know where the Atlantic coast of France was, which only intensified the public mockery.
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The campaign was wild, and it was dirty. It also was more or less free and fair. Elections in Russia could be riotous then, but they were democratic. When the ballots were counted on the night of May 19, Sobchak came out on top of the thirteen other candidates, but he received only 28 percent of the vote to Yakovlev’s 21 percent. Since neither had accumulated 50 percent, a runoff was scheduled for June 2. Sobchak still hoped to prevail, but panic now gripped his campaign team and his staff. Putin “became noticeably more nervous,” and threw himself even more directly into the campaign, “but by then it was hopeless.”
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Sobchak’s vanquished opponents all endorsed Yakovlev. Worse, the investigation circling around Sobchak’s finances and the apartments he distributed spilled into the public, confirmed by one of the local investigators, Leonid Proshkin. The news of the accusations was printed on flyers and distributed all over the city by Yakovlev’s campaign—in one instance, they were dropped from a helicopter. Putin, indignant, wrote a letter to Yeltsin, Chernomyrdin, and the prosecutor general, Yuri Skuratov, whom he accused directly of engaging in a campaign of “persecution and slander.” Proshkin, he fulminated, gave an interview “in violation of all procedural norms” to pro-Communist newspapers and thus
spread “unsubstantiated material.” Putin demanded “decisive action to end the use of the law-enforcement authorities for political purposes.”
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The last two weeks of the election were fraught with tension, as both campaigns slung mud.
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Yakovlev, worried about his own safety, rode around the city with two SUVs full of rifle-toting guards dressed in black. He confronted Putin with rumors that Sobchak had ordered his assassination. “What are you, crazy?” Putin replied. “You had better go look at yourself in the mirror.”
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Sobchak’s last hope was a televised debate in the last week before the vote, but there his eloquence failed him. Yakovlev seemed at ease. He took off his jacket and spoke clearly and forcefully. Sobchak, sitting hunched in his suit, stammered and struggled for words. He had a fever before the debate, he later recounted, and felt his tongue thicken when it started. Spasms wrenched his throat. When asked about the suspicious provenance of a dacha, Sobchak could not answer. Only later, he said, did he learn the truth: Yakovlev’s campaign team had brought a psychic into the audience! “I consulted experts, and they confirmed to me that a strong hypnotic effect often causes spasms in the throat, a heavy tongue, headache and a sharp rise in body temperature owing to the body’s resistance to the influence of alien energy.”
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Sobchak was not just losing the election. He seemed to be losing his mind.

In the end, Yakovlev won with 47.5 percent of the vote; Sobchak received 45.8 percent. He was less than gracious in defeat. Never known for modesty, he compared his fate to Winston Churchill’s, the “savior of the country, the symbol of victory,” who was ousted at the ballot box in 1945.
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He petulantly refused to attend Yakovlev’s inauguration, held at Smolny ten days later, and yet Sobchak, for all his authoritarian tendencies, did what no other elected official of such prominence had done in Russia. He did not contest the results or otherwise try to block Yakovlev’s victory; he accepted defeat and stepped down.

“I was not an addict to power, like Lenin or Yeltsin, and had I lost the election to a worthy opponent, the defeat would have been easier to accept,” he wrote in a memoir he titled tellingly
A Dozen Knives in the Back
. “But in this case, it preoccupied me that I could lose to this obviously grey and primitive man, Yakovlev. I cursed myself that I failed to see it—the stealing from the government for private engineering offices—but what hurt the most was the apostasy or direct betrayal on the part of many of those who surrounded me.”
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He noted one exception: Vladimir Putin.

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S
obchak’s unexpected loss left Putin without a job, without a patron, and without a purpose. It was like his return from East Germany all over again. Despite the letter he and others had signed, he did not immediately resign, even though now he served at the pleasure of a new governor he had called a Judas. Yakovlev persuaded other Sobchak aides to stay on, including Dmitri Kozak, a former prosecutor and friend, and Mikhail Manevich, a young economist, who became a deputy governor. Kozak would remain close to Putin for years, but Manevich was assassinated a year later by a sniper who fired eight bullets into his car as it turned onto Nevsky Prospekt. Putin remained in his office at Smolny through Yeltsin’s unexpected reelection in the summer of 1996, but then was asked “rather harshly” to clear out by the end of June.
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The new governor had not forgotten Putin’s coldness and his comments during the campaign. When an aide told him Putin was still waiting for word on his fate, Yakovlev’s face reddened. “I don’t want to hear anything more about that asshole,” he said.
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Sobchak tried to help his loyal deputy land a new job, even appealing to Yevgeny Primakov, an old spymaster who had headed the successor of the KGB’s foreign intelligence branch until he was appointed Yeltsin’s foreign minister in January 1996. “You’ll be an ambassador,” his former boss told Putin. It was too ridiculous to contemplate, and Putin knew it, though he could not bring himself to tell Sobchak. Others promised him he would be needed somewhere, but nothing materialized immediately. In July, he moved his family to a dacha he had built on the shore of Lake Komsomolskoye, seventy miles north of the city on the Karelian Isthmus, a part of Finland until the Soviet Union incorporated it after the Great Patriotic War. A small village was nearby. There Putin joined a handful of the businessmen he had befriended since 1991 in carving out what would become a gated community on the lake’s shore, incorporated later that year under the name Ozero, or Lake. The shareholders included Vladimir Yankunin, Yuri Kovalchuk, and the brothers Fursenko, Andrei and Sergei. All had met through their work at the highly regarded Ioffee Physical Technical Institute in Petersburg. They founded an enterprise to turn their scientific work into commercially viable products, with the help of Putin’s committee for foreign economic affairs. Yakunin and Kovalchuk became shareholders in a financial institution, Bank Rossiya, which had been created in 1990 to handle the accounts of the Communist Party and, as was widely rumored, the KGB. The bank had become
a shell by the time Kovalchuk and his colleagues took it over, and it only survived because Putin steered the government’s accounts to it. Another of Bank Rossiya’s shareholders and executives, Viktor Myachin, also joined the dacha community, as did Nikolai Shamalov, who had been one of Putin’s deputies on the committee for foreign economic affairs until he became the representative in northeastern Russia for the German manufacturer Siemens. Putin was the lone government official among these new businessmen, and it was never exactly clear how his meager salary covered the costs, though evidence would later surface that it came from Twentieth Trust, an organization Putin’s committee had registered in 1992.
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The company’s activities, including numerous contracts from the city that bore Putin’s signature, were among those that had drawn the attention of the investigators dispatched from Moscow to look into Sobchak’s administration.

Putin’s house on the property was made of red brick, paneled with wood inside. It had two stories, with an expansive view of the lake. Its size, only 1,600 square feet in all, was relatively modest, but it was on the lake’s shore, isolated by the woods, a place where he could contemplate his suddenly uncertain future. Had Sobchak won the election, Putin certainly would have stayed at his side, but he had nurtured ties to no other politicians. He considered becoming a lawyer. He talked to an old judo partner, Vasily Shestakov, about working as a trainer at his club. Shestakov told him it was beneath him now, but if nothing else materialized, he could come.
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It was a hard fall. He brooded, refusing to discuss his uncertain fate with Lyudmila. Whenever he sank into a funk, she knew it was best to leave him alone. Her husband was one of those “who does not love to lose,” and the campaign gave him a bitter taste of the risk inherent in true democracy. “True, he never talked about it or even let on,” Lyudmila said, “but I understood everything, felt it, saw it.”
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August is a leisurely month in Russia, a season of late-summer languor, when most of the country retreats to their dachas. Having failed to find a new job immediately, Putin would have to wait until official business resumed in earnest at the end of August before he could seriously look again. On August 12, the Putins invited his former secretary, Marina Yentaltseva, her husband, and their daughter to visit the dacha. In the evening, the men retreated to the
banya
on the first floor, just inside the door. Putin called it “a wake for my former job.”
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He had just returned from a cooling plunge in the lake when he saw smoke. A heater inside the banya sparked a fire that soon spread through the house. Katya
bolted out from the kitchen. Putin found his older daughter, Masha, and Marina on the second floor, and as flames climbed the stairs, he lowered them from a balcony using sheets as a rope. He suddenly remembered that he had a briefcase in his bedroom with his money—some $5,000. With the lights out and smoke choking the house, he felt around for the briefcase. Wrapped only in a thin sheet, he climbed from the balcony and, with his family and neighbors, watched the house burn like “a candle.” Firefighters arrived, but they could do nothing because the truck had no water. “There’s a whole lake right here!” Putin shouted. True, one told him, but they had no hose either.
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Vasily Shestakov marveled when he heard the news of the fire and the rescue of Putin’s cash. Not only had Putin not built some opulent “stone mansion” but in five years as the “second man” in the city he had not amassed a fortune greater than $5,000. Such was the presumption of corruption among Russia’s apparatchiks that Putin could have “stolen recklessly” without much fear of being singled out.
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The fire inspectors determined that the builders had improperly installed the banya’s heater, and Putin forced them to rebuild it as it was—minus the banya. When workers cleared the debris, they found in the ashes the aluminum cross his mother had given him when he and Sobchak traveled to Jerusalem three years before. He had taken it off while they steamed in the banya and in the confusion of the fire forgotten about it. He considered it a revelation and later sometimes claimed that he never removed it.
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CHAPTER 7

An Unexpected Path to Power

P
utin’s salvation was not long in coming, and it came from an unlikely source: his boss’s former ally turned foe, Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin had fared better with the voters than Sobchak had; his winning the presidency a second time in the summer of 1996 seemed no less miraculous than the discovery of Putin’s cross in the ashes of his dacha. Yeltsin’s public approval rating at the end of 1995 had dropped to 3 percent. The war he launched to defeat the independence movement in Chechnya in 1994, which had promised to be short and glorious, had become a bloody, humiliating stalemate. The economy had continued its remorseless collapse, and so had Yeltsin’s health. Late in 1995 he had the first of what would be a series of heart attacks, the severity of which was kept from the public. Yeltsin’s closest aides—those who orchestrated Yakovlev’s victory over Sobchak—conspired to either cancel the election in 1996 or back an alternative to Yeltsin: the deputy prime minister, Oleg Soskovets. Even Yeltsin’s wife, Naina, urged him not to run. “Like wolves that gradually turn to a new leader of the pack, my closest friends had already found themselves a replacement,” Yeltsin later reflected. “Even those upon whom I had always depended, who were my last resort, my resource, the spiritual leaders of the nation, even they had abandoned me.”
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