The New Tsar (33 page)

The evidence for either version was ultimately never decisive, in large part because the FSB under Putin reverted to Soviet-like secrecy and almost certainly covered up aspects of the bombings and the events in Ryazan. Only days before the election, the Communist and Yabloko blocs in the Duma drafted a resolution requesting an official investigation into what had happened in Ryazan, but only 197 deputies voted in favor, short of the 226 needed. All of Putin’s supporters voted against. Strangling a parliamentary inquiry to untangle the conflicting theories only sowed deeper and darker doubts. At the inception of Putin’s presidency lay an enduring mystery that would shadow Russia for years, one that did not stop claiming lives. Independent lawmakers and journalists who pursued the question died with such disturbing regularity that it was difficult to consider their deaths mere coincidence.

Even some close to Putin struggled to understand the facts of the horrendous bombings. “I don’t know,” Mikhail Kasyanov, a Finance Ministry official through the end of the Yeltsin years, said more than a decade later. On January 3, two days after becoming acting president, Putin had offered Kasyanov the job as prime minister, though it was not made official until after his election. Putin made the ground rules very clear: Kasyanov would tend to the government, the budget, and the economy, but the security services would remain in Putin’s purview. The idea that bombings that killed some three hundred innocent civilians could have been the work of the government that he had joined under the new president, or even of rogue elements inside it, was simply an inconceivable evil to Kasyanov. “I don’t know, and I don’t want to believe that it could be true,” he said.
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P
utin built a political team out of a circle of people he could trust—that is, his friends, which he admitted were few. “I have friends, of course. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, they are not so many,” he told the journalist Mikhail Leontyev during an interview for the biographical documentary that state television ran before the election. “Because then, you value the friends you have more. These are the people with whom I have been friends for many years, with some of them from my schooldays, with some from university days. The character of our relations is not changing. I haven’t been able to meet them often recently, but the meetings still take place regularly.”

During the election campaign, he lost one of those few. Anatoly Sobchak had returned to Petersburg in the summer of 1999 after his exile in France; he was greeted like a prodigal son. Now that Putin had reached the heights of power, the criminal cases that had chased Sobchak abroad suddenly evaporated. Sobchak tried to regain the glory of 1991, running for a seat in the Duma in December, but his political star had faded and he lost. He nonetheless threw himself into Putin’s presidential race, campaigning actively for his former aide. He was in Kaliningrad when he died suddenly in his hotel room on the night of February 18, apparently of a heart attack, though rumors darkly swirled of other causes, perhaps even poisoning.
²⁷
Putin himself fueled the speculation with his rage and sorrow over Sobchak’s death. “Anatoly Sobchak did not just die,” Putin told Baltika radio in Petersburg. “He perished because he was hounded.” Putin’s severity in ensuring Yuri Skuratov’s defenestration now seemed understandable, since it was Skuratov who had launched the first investigations into Sobchak’s affairs. Putin’s role in the prosecutor’s fall might have had a political purpose, but it was also deeply personal. At Sobchak’s funeral, Putin delivered the eulogy. He called him “our master” and “one of the last romantics.” For the first time, Russia saw its new leader shed tears.

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I
n May 2000 the Kremlin’s protocol chiefs faced a logistical problem as they considered the inauguration of a new president of Russia. Since the 1960s, the Soviet Union’s new general secretaries had taken the oath of office in the modern glass-and-concrete Palace of Congresses, an architectural anachronism that marred the historical integrity of the Kremlin. The tsars had been crowned in the fifteenth-century Cathedral of the Assumption. Boris Yeltsin, when he won reelection, considered abandoning both and erecting an outdoor stage, only to have to move it into the old Soviet palace because of his frail health. Yeltsin was so ill, walking stiffly and speaking shakily, that he did not deliver an inaugural address and read his oath from a teleprompter.
²⁸
Putin decided to hold his inauguration in St. Andrew’s Hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace, the former imperial residence built on the orders of Nicholas I. The Kremlin’s planners knew precisely how many spectators could fill the Palace of Congresses but had no idea how many would fit into the Grand Palace. To find out, they bussed in soldiers to line up at attention and counted them.
²⁹
They could not afford to overlook any detail.

On May 7, fifteen hundred people witnessed a new president swearing an oath amid the gilded, neo-imperial splendor that Putin’s first boss in Moscow, Pavel Borodin, had renovated in the 1990s, bringing scandal onto Yeltsin and his entourage. Borodin could hardly have imagined that the suspicious, dour deputy sent to his office less than four years before would someday be the man with his hand on the new Constitution in that hall. At every turn, the contrast between Yeltsin and Putin was seared into the consciousness of the millions watching either in the hall or on state television. Putin remained a political novice; he seemed like an actor in his stage debut. He arrived at the side entrance to the Grand Palace in a midnight-blue Mercedes, emerged alone, saluted a ceremonial guard at the door, and then strode up the fifty-seven steps of the palace’s monumental staircase. He moved deliberately, but not hurriedly, along a red carpet through the palace’s grand hallways. The cameras tracked him in an elaborately crafted pageant that passed applauding guests crowded behind red ropes, as the soldiers had been. Putin seemed tiny in the enormous halls. He wore a dark suit and gray tie. His left arm swung confidently, but his right—possibly because of the fracture he had suffered during the fight in 1984 that clouded his KGB career—hung at his side. It gave his gait a distinctive swagger as he covered hundreds of yards, something that Yeltsin in his heartiest days would not have dared to attempt under the scrutiny of live television cameras.

The official guests included the members of parliament, governors, senior judges, and the clergy of Russia’s four official religions—Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism. Mikhail Gorbachev, whom Yeltsin had conspicuously snubbed for his inauguration in 1996, attended like an apparition of another era. So did Vladimir Kryuchkov, the KGB chairman who had led the abortive coup to overthrow Gorbachev. The symbolism of their joint attendance signaled Putin’s desire to project unity after the tumult of the previous decade. Yeltsin, looking pale and puffy, appeared with him on the dais to witness the oath, which was administered exactly at noon. During the elder man’s short address, the lights of his teleprompter flickered, forcing him to pause long enough that the audience applauded, thinking he was done.
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Putin, two decades younger, spoke crisply and sweepingly, focusing on the history of the moment, which he called the first peaceful, democratic transfer of ultimate authority in the country in its eleven hundred years (failing even to hint at the orchestration that Yeltsin had devised).

The ceremony blended the conflicted history of a country divided over the meaning of its past and thus its future. Putin, in his remarks, glossed over “both tragic chapters and great chapters,” leaving it to the listeners to decide which was which. As the ceremony ended, cannons fired a salute from the bank of the Moscow River. Inside, a choir sang the finale from Mikhail Glinka’s
A Life for the Tsar
, written in 1836 to celebrate a soldier’s death in the war against Poland and rewritten in Soviet times as
Ivan Susanin
to remove the homage to the tsar. For Putin, the choir sang the Soviet verses.

After leaving the Grand Palace, Putin watched a military parade inside the Kremlin grounds. He met Aleksy II, Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus, the head of the Orthodox Church. He then laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers, located just outside the Kremlin walls. It felt like a coronation as much as a democratic transfer of power. Russia had a new leader, consecrated by the ballot, and yet little idea of where he intended to lead it.

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P
utin’s rise to power constrained his family life. He allowed his daughters, Masha and Katya, then sixteen and fifteen, to grant interviews for the campaign biography, but afterward they disappeared from public life, their privacy fiercely guarded by the Kremlin. Photographs of them rarely appeared, not even with their parents; there was never an official portrait of Russia’s new first family. The girls studied at home with tutors, learning not only German but also French and English. In the interviews, they came across as ordinary teenagers who enjoyed foreign movies like
The Matrix
, but only ventured out in the presence of bodyguards. Their parents bought them a white toy poodle, named Toska, the family’s first dog since the car accident had killed their Caucasian sheep dog in Petersburg. Lyudmila said her husband spoiled the girls lovingly but acknowledged that “they see him more often on television than at home.” They had servants and a cook, which saved Lyudmila the frustrations she had felt when she first cooked for him as a newlywed. Their life together, however, was no longer anything she could control. “I don’t make plans anymore,” she said. “I used to make them, and when they fell apart, I would get very upset and offended. But now I understand it’s easier not to make plans for shared vacations or holidays or time off, so as not to be disappointed.”
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Russia, like the Soviet Union, had little experience with the leader’s wife assuming a public role as first lady. Gorbachev’s stylish wife, Raisa,
had accompanied him often on his travels and took up public causes, but this was still a novelty that was not universally welcomed. Yeltsin’s wife disdained publicity and largely avoided it, and so did Lyudmila. In 1998 and 1999, she had briefly worked as Moscow representative for a communications company, Telekominvest, that had roots in Petersburg and links to a family friend, Leonid Reiman, who would serve as Putin’s telecommunications minister. She earned the equivalent of $1,500 a month but gave up the job when her husband became prime minister, though some said she continued to be involved in business deals.
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Now as first lady, she joined her husband at official events, especially with visiting dignitaries, like Tony Blair, the first Western leader who met with Putin after his unexpected ascent. The Putins took the Blairs to the Mariinsky Theatre in Petersburg to see a performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s opera
War and Peace
. It seemed at first that she would play a more public role. After the inauguration, she embraced the issue of literacy, promoting reading and languages, and she founded the Center for the Development of the Russian Language, which organized projects with the aim of “enhancing the prestige” of Russian culture around the world.
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Except for the humanizing interviews, however, Lyudmila had no role in her husband’s campaign and none in his governing. Putin himself bristled at even the most benign questions about their life together. When Mikhail Leontyev asked gently if he had time to see his family, Putin replied curtly, “I see them,” and the remark was followed by a noticeable cut in the interview. At the time, Leontyev was struck by the state of the Putins’ home, which had been used by prime ministers for the previous decade. After six months in office, boxes remained unpacked, and he noted that it had the air of a temporary residence. “We have been living in temporary dwellings since 1985,” Putin replied. “And so we constantly move from place to place and we think of our dwellings as if they were barracks—admittedly, very nice barracks. You can live quite comfortably here, but it is temporary. A temporary abode. We live as if we were sitting on our packed suitcases.”

In his financial declaration, required by law, Putin reported that he owned three properties, including the dacha outside Petersburg that had been rebuilt after the fire and incorporated in the cooperative with the other businessmen from Petersburg, including the two who were involved in the early food scandal, Vladimir Yakunin and Yuri Kovalchuk. The cooperative faced a legal challenge from villagers in the area,
³⁴
but the eight succeeded in securing title to the lakeside expanse
and turned it into a gated community—reportedly with a shared bank account that any of the owners could use to deposit or withdraw cash.
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Putin declared a little more than $13,000 in various savings accounts, which by Russian standards made him a reasonably wealthy man, but hardly a high-flying tycoon. (Like the savings of most Russians, his had lost a lot of value when the ruble was devalued in 1998.) He may have omitted some assets in his disclosure, as many politicians habitually did since so much of Russia’s wealth remained in the shadows of the unofficial economy, but before his presidency at least, the Putins had lived seemingly modest lives. Until then, they seemed to have no more guarantee of the future than most Russians, who feared that one day everything could simply become worthless again. Putin saw in his personal experience the fate of all Russia. “Over the past 10 years the whole country has been living like that,” Putin said in the television interview with Leontyev. “And that brings us back to the problem we started with, the problem with stability.”
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It was stability he promised and had now found for himself. Indeed, the family’s circumstances had now changed irreversibly. In May, the Putins moved to a new residence in a wooded compound abutting a winding river called Novo-Ogaryovo. The estate, built in the 1950s, had served as a government guesthouse until it became Putin’s official residence. The area around it was called Rublyovka, and soon other mansions sprouted nearby. With buyers attracted by the proximity to power, it became one of the most expensive places in the world to live. The Putins remained there for years to come.