The New Tsar (3 page)

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T
his third son, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin,
²²
was born on October 7, 1952, in a city still scarred by the siege, still suffering from deprivation, still consumed by fear. Stalin’s megalomania, even in victory, had descended into paranoia and retribution. In the late 1940s, the city’s wartime elite, both civilian and military, succumbed to a purge known as the Leningrad Affair. Dozens of party officials and their relatives were arrested, jailed, exiled, or shot.
²³
Loyal citizens of the state refrained from speaking, out of either fear or complicity in the crimes that were committed, even descendants of a man trusted enough to cook on occasion for Stalin. Few people whose lives intersected with Stalin’s, even briefly, “came through unscathed,” Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin would later recall, “but my grandfather was one of them.”
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Not that he talked about it much. “My grandfather kept pretty quiet about his past life. My parents
didn’t talk much about the past, either. People generally didn’t, back then.” Vladimir’s father was taciturn and severe, frightening even to people who knew him well.
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The father’s wartime experience—the limp he carried through his life, which always seemed worse when the weather turned cold—clearly made a great impression on his son. After the war, the elder Vladimir continued to work at the Yegorov Factory on Moskovsky Prospekt, which built the passenger carriages for the country’s railways and subways. A member of the Communist Party, he became the factory’s party representative, a blue-collar apparatchik ensuring rigor, loyalty, discipline, and, most of all, caution.

The job entitled him to a single room—180 square feet—in a decrepit communal apartment on the fifth floor of what had once been an elegant nineteenth-century apartment building at 12 Baskov Lane, not far from Leningrad’s central avenue, Nevsky Prospekt, and the Griboyedov Canal. The Putins moved in in 1944 and after the war had to share the confined space with two other families. They would live there for more than two decades. The apartment had no hot water, no bathtub. A windowless hallway served as a communal kitchen, with a single gas burner opposite a sink. The toilet was in a closet jammed against a stairwell. The apartment was heated with a wood-burning stove.

Maria, like her husband, had limited education. She was ten days shy of forty-one when Vladimir was born. After so much suffering and loss, she treated her son like the miracle he seemed to be.
²⁶
She toiled in various menial jobs, cleaning buildings, washing test tubes in a laboratory, and delivering bread, all jobs that left her more time to tend to him. An elderly couple shared one room in the apartment; an observant Jewish family, with an older daughter, Hava, shared the other. The younger Vladimir, the only child in the communal home, remembered the elderly couple fondly, and spent as much time with them as with his parents. They became surrogate grandparents, and he knew her as Baba Anya. She, like his mother, possessed deep religious faith. The Russian Orthodox Church, repressed by the Soviet regime, was allowed to function openly during the war to help rally the nation, though it would be severely repressed again when the guns fell silent. As Vladimir would later tell the story, on November 21, when he was seven weeks old, Baba Anya and Maria walked three blocks through the winter chill to the Transfiguration Cathedral, a yellow, eighteenth-century monument built in the neoclassical style of many of the city’s churches, and there they secretly baptized the boy.
²⁷

Whether she kept the baptism secret out of fear of her stern husband or fear of official censure is not clear, though her son later suggested it might not have been as secret as she hoped. Little was ever secret in the Soviet Union. She took the boy with her to services occasionally but kept the apartment, with its lack of privacy, free of icons or other outward signs of practice.
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Nor did she evidently discuss her beliefs with him then, certainly not in depth. It was only forty years later that Maria gave him his baptismal cross and asked him to bless it at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem when he visited Israel for the first time. Faith nonetheless hovered in the background of the boy’s life, along with his father’s commitment to Communism’s secular orthodoxy. He evinced little preference for either, though some who knew him would assert years later that his relationship with the Jewish neighbors instilled an unusual ecumenical tolerance and a disdain for the anti-Semitism that has long afflicted Russian culture.
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The building on Baskov Lane was Vladimir Putin’s youthful universe. The gilded landmarks of tsarist Russia—the Hermitage, the Admiralty, the Peter and Paul Cathedral—were nearby but little more than distant monuments in the cityscape. He was a scion of the proletariat, not the Soviet intelligentsia or the political elite; only later, in hindsight, would he become conscious of the deprivation of his childhood. The stairs to the fifth floor were pocked with holes, fetid, and dimly lit; they smelled of sweat and boiling cabbage. The building was infested with rats, which he and his friends would chase with sticks. It was what passed for a game—until the time he cornered one at the end of a hallway. “Suddenly it lashed around and threw itself at me,” he recalled. “I was surprised and frightened.”
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He was always a slight boy. One of his earliest memories of venturing out of this cloistered childhood occurred on May Day in 1959, perhaps, or 1960. He found himself terrified of the bustle on “the big corner” at Mayakovskaya Street. A few years later, he and friends rode a commuter train to an unknown part of the city in search of adventure. It was cold and they had nothing to eat, and though they built a fire to warm themselves, they returned dejected, whereupon the elder Putin beat him with a belt as punishment.

The apartment building wrapped around an inner courtyard that linked with the neighboring building’s courtyard to form an unkempt, treeless space, little better than the bottom of an airshaft. The courtyard attracted drunks and thugs, smoking, drinking, and otherwise whiling
away their lives. By his own accounts and those of his friends, life in the courtyard and later in school made him rough, a brawler quick to defend against slights and threats, but it is more likely, given his size, that he was bullied. His parents doted on him, and when he was young, they refused to let him leave the courtyard without permission. He grew up in the overly protective, if not outwardly loving, embrace of parents who had miraculously survived and would do everything to ensure that their son did too. “There were no kisses,” Vera Gurevich, a schoolteacher who became close to the family, remembered. “There was none of that love-dovey stuff in their house.”
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O
n September 1, 1960, Vladimir began attending School No. 193, located a short walk away on the same street where he lived. He was nearly eight, Maria having kept him out of kindergarten, perhaps out of an overabundance of caution. He lacked the social adeptness he might have developed had he grown up around more children. He showed up on the first day carrying not flowers for his teacher, as tradition dictated, but a potted plant.
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In school, he was an indifferent student, petulant and impulsive, probably a little bit spoiled. Vera Gurevich called him a whirligig because he would walk into class and spin in circles. He was highly disruptive in and out of class,
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more inclined to hang out with boys she considered a bad influence, including two older brothers named Kovshov. He was caught in school carrying a knife, and was once rebuked for delinquency by a neighborhood party committee, which threatened to send him to an orphanage.
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His behavior initially kept him out of the Pioneers, the Communist Party youth organization whose membership was a rite of passage; by the third grade, he was one of only a few among his forty-five classmates who had not joined. His father, as a party steward, could only have been dismayed at so conspicuous a failure, one that Vladimir later described as a rebellion against his father and the system around him. “I was a hooligan, not a Pioneer,” he said.
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Vera Gurevich, who met him in the fourth grade, eventually complained to his father that the boy was intelligent, but disorganized and uninterested.

“He’s not working to his full potential,” she told the senior Vladimir at the apartment on Baskov Lane, which she described as horrid, “so cold, just awful.”

“Well, what can I do?” Vladimir Spiridonovich replied. “Kill him or what?”
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Vladimir and Maria nevertheless promised Gurevich that they would
rein their son in. The father pressed him to take up boxing, though the slight boy quickly gave it up when, he said, a punch broke his nose. Instead, he turned to martial arts, apparently against the wishes of his parents, practing sambo, a Soviet style that mixed judo and wrestling and was more suited to his diminutive stature and “pugnacious nature.”
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One of his coaches became a decisive influence in his life. Anatoly Rakhlin worked at the Trud (or Labor) Club, not far from Baskov Lane, and in 1965 Putin, now in the fifth grade, joined it. Rakhlin had to reassure Vladimir’s parents that “we do not teach anything bad to the kids.”
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The discipline and rigor of sambo, and later judo, intrigued the boy in a way nothing else had. The martial arts transformed his life, giving him the means of asserting himself against larger, tougher boys. “It was a tool to assert myself in the pack,” he would say.
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It also brought him a new circle of friends, especially two brothers, Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, who would stick by him throughout his life. The martial arts gave him an orthodoxy he found neither in religion nor in politics. It was more than mere sport, he believed; it was a philosophy. “It was sports that dragged me off the streets,” he once recalled. “To be honest, the courtyard wasn’t a very good environment for a kid.”
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This made perhaps too much of his transformation. His claims to have lived the life of the jungle sounded more like bravado. The courtyard’s squalor and abased occupants might have once intrigued him, but they also instilled a disdain for drinking and smoking, for sloth and disorder. Nevertheless, once he found his passion for the martial arts, he exhibited a steely determination to succeed. Since Trud required decent grades for membership, he made more effort in school, and by the sixth grade, his grades had improved. Vera Gurevich and his classmates resolved to get him into the Pioneers, belatedly appealing to the school’s representative to make an exception for his previous lapses. His induction ceremony was held at Ulyanovka, a rustic village formerly known as Sablino, where Lenin’s sister once lived.
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Within weeks, he became the leader of his school’s Pioneer branch, his first leadership position. By the eighth grade, he was among the first chosen to join the Komsomol, the Communist Party’s youth organization. It was a necessary stepping stone to what he soon discovered was his life’s calling.

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I
n 1965, the twentieth anniversary of the victory over the Nazis arrived on a new wave of nostalgia and official celebration. One of the most popular novels of the decade was an espionage tale,
The Shield and the
Sword
. It first appeared as a serial in the literary magazine
Znamya
, or
Banner
, the organ of the Union of Writers. Its author, Vadim Kozhevnikov, served as a war correspondent for
Pravda
, and his experience gave the story a realistic skein, though it conformed dutifully to the narrative of Soviet propaganda. (Kozhevnikov, as head of the writers’ union, was involved in the banning of a far more realistic account of the war, Vasily Grossman’s
Life and Fate
.) The novel’s hero, Major Aleksandr Belov, was a Soviet secret agent passing as a German in Nazi Germany just before the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. Using the alias Johann Weiss, he rises through the ranks of the Abwehr, the Nazi military intelligence organization, and later the Schutzstaffel, or SS. Weiss is courageous in battle, stoic and unyielding, even when tortured. He is disgusted by the Nazis he has to outwardly serve, disgusted by the Nazi he has to appear to become, but obliged to endure the experience in order to sabotage the German war effort. “He had never supposed that the most difficult and torturing part of his chosen mission would be in this splitting of his own conscious self,” Kozhevnikov wrote. “To begin with he had even been attracted by this game of putting on somebody else’s skin and creating his thoughts and being glad when these coincided with what other people expected of this created personality.”
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It was not Tolstoy, certainly. It was, to an impressionable teenage boy, much, much better. Three years after its publication, the book became a five-plus-hour film, with Kozhevnikov credited for the screenplay. It was the most popular movie in the Soviet Union in 1968, a black-and-white homage to the secret service—to what had by then become the KGB. Vladimir Putin, then almost sixteen, was enchanted. He and his friends watched the movie repeatedly. More than four decades later he could still remember the lyrics to the film’s sentimental theme song, “Whence Does the Motherland Begin,” redolent of birds and birches in the Russian heartland.
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Vladimir promptly gave up his childhood dreams to become a sailor, as his father had, or maybe a pilot. He would become a spy, imagining himself as a future Major Belov cum Johann Weiss: handsome, fit, and empowered single-handedly to change history. “What amazed me most of all was how one man’s efforts could achieve what whole armies could not,” he recalled years later with the same romantic appreciation he had had in his youth. “One spy could decide the fate of thousands of people.”
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