The New Tsar (4 page)

He knew little about the KGB then or its inner workings. The father of one of his classmates had served in intelligence, but had already retired.
The film’s release was part of the modernizing efforts of the KGB’s new director, Yuri Andropov, who took over in 1967. Andropov intended to remake the agency’s image, casting it not as a dreaded secret police force responsible for repression and terror, but rather as the defender of the great Soviet nation. In Vladimir’s case at least, the propaganda accomplished its aims; sports may have dragged him off the streets, but the movie inspired his career. The day after he saw the first episode he told a classmate he would be a spy,
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and soon after that, as he recounted the tale, he did an audacious and naïve thing. He walked unannounced into the office of the local KGB headquarters on Liteiny Prospekt, not far from his apartment, and volunteered his service.

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T
he KGB’s headquarters in Leningrad was known as the Big House, not merely because of its size. A sardonic joke circulated about its enormity, one told in variations in many Soviet cities: From St. Isaac’s Cathedral, you can see all of Leningrad. From the Big House, you can see all the way to the Solovetsky Islands—the archipelago in the White Sea hundreds of miles to the north that included a notorious precursor of the Gulag’s labor camps. Vladimir had to try three times before he found the right entrance at the Big House and an officer who would meet him. The officer indulged the boy, but told him flatly that the KGB did not accept volunteers. Instead, it sought out those considered worthy, those already in the army or at the university. Vladimir pressed. He wanted to know what course of study would best serve this new ambition of his. The officer, seemingly eager to get rid of him, suggested law school, and that decided the matter. He would go to university and study law, against the wishes of his parents, who thought his grades and temperament better suited him for a technical school, like the Academy of Civil Aviation, which he initially aspired to attend. Vladimir could be impulsive and unbending, though. His parents and his coaches were puzzled by his new purpose, as he had not told them of his journey to the Big House and thus the real motive for attending law school. One coach at Trud berated him when he learned his choice, presuming it would make him a prosecutor or police officer. A furious Vladimir exhorted, “I’m not going to be a cop!”
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His decision to join the KGB came amid the international tumult of 1968. Only days before he began secondary school in Leningrad, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the reforms of the Prague Spring. Vladimir seemed untroubled by the crackdown on dissent,
either at home or abroad. Like many, he flirted with the forbidden culture of the West, listening to the Beatles on recordings passed between friends like contraband. “The music was like a breath of fresh air,” he would say later, “like a window on the outside world.”
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Vladimir played the accordion for a while, and later, on a guitar his father gave him, he learned the folk songs of Vladimir Vysotsky and other bards of the era. Although the late 1960s in the Soviet Union were viewed as an era of repression and then stagnation, his teenage years were far more carefree than anything his parents’ generation had experienced. The Putins were not part of the cosseted elite, but standards of living had risen after the war, and the family, too, became more comfortable. Vladimir and Maria even had a large black telephone at the apartment, which was still a rarity, and Vladimir and his friends would make calls from it.
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By then, they were affluent enough to buy a three-room dacha in Tosno, a small village outside Leningrad, where he spent many of his teenage years with a core group of friends, outside the claustrophobic environment of the communal apartment. On the wall above a table in the dacha hung a printed portrait that one friend, Viktor Borisenko, did not recognize. When he asked about it, Vladimir explained that it was Jan Karlovich Berzin, a founder of the Bolsheviks’ military intelligence branch. He was arrested in the Great Terror in 1937 and executed a year later, but he had been rehabilitated posthumously.
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Vladimir attended secondary school at School No. 281, a selective, specialized scientific academy intended to prepare students for university. He was not an overly popular student, but rather a brash one, obsessed with sports and almost militantly studious.
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Although studying sciences might have guaranteed him a spot at a prestigious technical university, he pursued the humanities, literature, and history. He also continued lessons in German, which he began studying in the fourth grade with the encouragement of Vera Gurevich. This time his teacher was Mina Yuditskaya, who would describe him as a modest, though serious student. She would have a deep influence on him, and he would remember her decades later with a sentimental fondness.
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School No. 281 tolerated, within limits, intellectual openness and debate. A popular teacher, Mikhail Demenkov, distributed samizdat, the banned literature circulated in carbon copies. A history teacher, Tamara Stelmakhova, held discussions on whether Nikita Khrushchev might ultimately have fulfilled his promise to build a truly communist state within twenty years.
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Although he joined the Komsomol in 1967, he rarely participated
in its activities, devoting himself instead to sports and schoolwork to the exclusion of other teenage preoccupations. Vera Brileva, a girl two years younger, recalled him hunched over his desk, which stood in the communal living room next to a sofa and a buffet. She met him at the dacha in Tosno in 1969 and was smitten. She recalled a brief kiss during a game of “spin the bottle”—“I felt so hot all of a sudden”—but she soon found he had little time for girls, something even his teacher noticed.
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Their youthful courtship ended one day when she interrupted his studies at the apartment by asking whether he remembered something or another. She had not finished the sentence when he cut her off. “I only remember things I need to remember,” he snapped at her.
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Interviewed many years later, she remembered his “small, strong hands” and sounded wistful about the rebuff.

Such assiduousness paid off. In his last two years of secondary school—Soviet education consisted of only ten years—he earned good, though not particularly impressive, grades. He did well in history and German, less so in math and science. In his last year, he devoted himself less to classwork than to cramming for the entrance exams that could earn him a coveted spot at Leningrad State University, one of the most prestigious in the Soviet Union. Vera Gurevich expressed doubts that he could get in and never knew the real reason he wanted to. “I’ll solve that problem myself,” he told her.
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The chances of getting into Leningrad State were so low, with roughly one in forty applicants being accepted, that there has been speculation that he was accepted either because of his working-class roots or even, improbably, because of the silent hand of the KGB stealthily guiding his career without even his knowledge.
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Nonetheless, he scored well enough on his exams and was accepted into the university’s law department in the fall of 1970, just as the KGB officer had suggested two years before.

As a college student, he continued to study rigorously and devote much of his time to judo competitions, forswearing smoking and drinking in order to stay fit. He refused offers to join the Leningrad University judo team, remaining loyal to his coaches at Trud. He became a master in the sport in 1973 and competed in several city and regional championships. He still lived in the communal apartment, but he traveled more widely inside the Soviet Union. He attended judo competitions as far away as Moldova, cut timber one summer in Komi in the north, and spent two weeks in a student construction camp in Abkhazia, then a region of the Soviet republic of Georgia. He earned 800 rubles, or nearly
$600 at the time, buying a coat that he would wear for the next fifteen years and squandering the rest in Gagra, a resort on the lushly wooded coast of the Black Sea.
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He and his friends managed to sneak onto a ferry headed to Odessa, with little money and only tinned meat to eat. For two nights he slept in a lifeboat, envying the passengers with cabins but also captivated by the night sky. “The stars seemed to just hang there,” he recalled. “Sailors might be used to that, but for me it was a wondrous discovery.”
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In 1972, his mother won a car after buying a thirty-kopek lottery ticket. She could have sold the car for 3,500 rubles, but indulgently gave it to her son. It only was a small, boxy Zaporozhets, but relatively few adults, let alone college students, had their own cars in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. For Vladimir, it was a status symbol, and a new diversion. He drove everywhere, going to his matches and giving friends lifts just for the sake of driving. He was also a wild and reckless driver. Once he hit a man who lurched into the road, though he claimed the man was trying to commit suicide. In some accounts, he chased the man as he stumbled away, but Vladimir denied it. “I’m not a beast,” he insisted.
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He spent four years at the university before he was approached by a mysterious man, who, he later learned, served in the KGB division that oversaw universities. By then, he had all but given up on his teenage ambitions. He interned one summer with the criminal division of the local Transportation Ministry, taking part in the investigation of an airplane crash, and seemed destined to become an officer with the local prosecutor, as his coach had warned him would happen. The law appealed to Vladimir as martial arts did. It imposed rules and order, which he came to respect more than any ideology. He claimed he never worked for—or even heard from—the KGB as a student, though collaboration with the secret services was common among university students. Thus when the recruitment he had long coveted finally came in 1974, during his fourth year, it came, he would say, as a surprise. The man never really introduced himself. “I need to talk to you about your career assignment,” he told Vladimir on the telephone, refusing to speak in detail. Vladimir sensed the significance of the encounter though and agreed to meet later in the university’s faculty lounge. After arriving on time, he waited twenty minutes, angrily assuming he might be the victim of a prank. The man showed up and, breathlessly, apologized, something that impressed the young man deeply.
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Vladimir underwent a thorough background check. A last step involved
an interview with his father, and in January 1975, a middle-aged officer named Dmitri Gantserov visited Vladimir Spiridonovich. The senior Putin was not very tall, Gantserov thought, a simple, honest, hardworking man who was proud that his son had gone to university and was now being considered for the security services. He understood the responsibility and difficulty of the tasks ahead of his son. He then spoke earnestly, almost pleadingly, to this stranger. “Volodya is everything for us,” he told him, using the diminutive form of his son’s name. “And all our hopes are tied only to him. After all, you know, two sons of ours died. After the war we decided to have a child. Now we live only Volodya’s life. We already lived ours.”
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Although his Volodya must have been aware of what the KGB did, the young man was untroubled by its history, by its role policing the enemies of the state, whether at home or abroad. On the contrary, he considered it the duty of a proper Soviet citizen to cooperate with the KGB—not for money, but for the security of the state. “The cooperation of normal citizens was an important tool for the state’s viable activity,” he said.
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There might have been excesses, he understood, but the cult of personality around Stalin had been dismantled shortly after his birth, the victims of his terror gradually released from the Gulag. He did not give it much thought otherwise. As far as he was concerned, the crimes of the past that killed or ruined millions were old history, and he was not unusual in that. For many Russians, even those who suffered under his tyranny, Stalin remained the revered father of the nation who led the country to victory over the Nazis; the darker recesses of his rule were suppressed, either by fear, complicity, or guilt, leaving a conflicted legacy that would dominate Soviet society for decades. As he later recalled, he himself was “an utterly successful product of the patriotic education of a Soviet man.”
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CHAPTER 2

A Warm Heart, a Cool Head, and Clean Hands

V
ladimir Putin fulfilled his dream of joining the KGB in the summer of 1975, but he never became the secret agent of his childhood imagination. His induction was routine, aside from a comic miscommunication that occurred when he appeared that spring before the university employment commission that assigned graduates their careers in the Soviet system. An official from the university’s law department announced that he would be joining the Leningrad bar after all. Only then did a KGB officer monitoring the assignments stir in the corner of the room. “Oh, no,” the officer said. “That question has already been decided.”
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Vladimir did not even know his assignment, but he was delighted. “Let’s go,” he told his childhood friend, Viktor Borisenko, after picking him up in his car. It was clear to Borisenko that something important had happened, but Vladimir would not so much as hint at what it was. They went to a Georgian restaurant near the Kazan Cathedral, the colonnaded landmark on Nevsky Prospekt, eating chicken in walnut sauce and, to Borisenko’s surprise, for his friend had never before allowed the indulgence, drinking shots of sweet liqueur.
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Only much later did he learn that they had been celebrating his friend’s acceptance into the KGB.