The New Tsar (74 page)

The hagiography continued on Putin’s birthday itself. While he celebrated privately with close friends and family at the official residence in Petersburg all the state television channels organized special programming. On Rossiya’s weekly news program, Dmitri Kiselyov compared him to Stalin and meant it as a compliment. “In terms of the scope of his activities, Putin as a politician is among his predecessors in the twentieth century comparable only to Stalin,” he said in a thirteen-minute encomium that managed to mention rising salaries and pensions, the revival of the army, and the restoration of nuclear parity with the United States.
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NTV broadcast a fifty-minute documentary that attempted to reintroduce a man who almost alone had been at the center of public attention for twelve years. Called
Visiting Putin
, it breathlessly claimed to show Putin as only “his closest circle” knew him, though it offered
little at all that was new. The presenter, Vadim Takmenev, followed the president through a week at work, from his office at Novo-Ogaryovo to the Kremlin, to a presidential visit to Tajikistan. In a series of interviews conducted over the week, Putin simply restated his views on his election, his critics, corruption, and foreign policy, dismissing criticisms as mere annoyances.
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The leaders of the protest movement—people like Nalavny, whose name Putin never seemed able to utter—were the “chaff” that would fall away, he said, and make room for “truly charismatic and interesting people” to emerge in public life and politics. Corruption was overstated, and anyway, the average annual income for Russians had risen from less than $1,000 a year when he took office to nearly $10,000 now. “It is extremely important for the self-perception of any person living in this territory that he should realize that he is not just living in this territory but that he is a citizen of a strong powerful state which enjoys the respect of the world.” The most important thing, he too said, was that only Russia had strategic nuclear parity with the United States.

Putin’s answer ignored the daily humiliation and anger of Russians forced to pay bribes for virtually any public service, the high graft that Navalny made a specialty of exposing, the dismal rankings of Transparency International that placed Russia 133rd out of 176 countries. Only two days before, NTV had aired a documentary accusing the protesters who took to the streets of conspiring to overthrow the government, this time with the assistance of oligarchs in Georgia and their patrons in the West. The paired documentaries portrayed Putin as a simple, honest patriot at work, tirelessly, exclusively devoted to the affairs of state, while his critics were aliens who wanted anarchy. Amid the compounding evidence of corruption and cronyism that had enriched his friends and allies, Putin was shown living a modest, almost ascetic life in a residence that, for all its comfort and amenities, was spare, with few ostentatious displays of wealth. The latest white paper by Boris Nemtsov and his allies on the corruption and wealth of Putin’s inner circle had detailed the twenty state residences the president had at his disposal, nine of them built during his time in power, as well as dozens of yachts and aircraft. Yet even these critics acknowledged that Putin cared less about the trappings of wealth than about those of power.

Although reverential,
Visiting Putin
did provide a sketch of the official presidential routine that in the twelve years since Yeltsin’s resignation had by design remained something of a mystery to ordinary Russians. Putin’s days were scripted into what seemed a passionless series of meetings
and ceremonies. He began his morning late—waking at 8:30 on the second day of Takmenev’s project—with his briefing folders, the daily compilations by the FSB and the foreign intelligence service, the SVR. Then, as on most days, he had a prolonged workout: first on the weight machines in the residence’s gymnasium, watching television news programs, and then a kilometer swim in its indoor pool. It was noon before Putin ate breakfast, a simple meal of porridge, raw quail eggs, and cottage cheese, sent to him, he noted, by Patriarch Kirill from the church’s own farms, and a juice from beets and horseradish. His working day therefore began late and lasted into the deepest night. His meetings with ministers often occurred when most people were already preparing for bed. It was nearly midnight one evening when he dismissed Takmenev in order to meet his anti-drug chief, Viktor Ivanov, and the minister of defense, Anatoly Serdyukov, who, like Takmenev, had to wait in the antechamber. Putin said his ministers were always on call, but he would only disturb them when he had to. When asked, he said he distrusted the mass media as biased, a curious admission given the Kremlin’s obsessive control of virtually all channels. He claimed to prefer the information he received from his meetings with his men, like Serdyukov and Ivanov, which he considered “much more complete and much more accurate.” The desk in his office had no computer linking him to the Internet where, were he so inclined, he might find information that would challenge what had become a circumscribed worldview, reinforced by the courtiers who rarely dared to challenge him.

Despite the adulatory tone, the documentary, like another one in German timed to coincide with his inauguration five months before, managed to be revealing nevertheless. They both showed him surrounded constantly by his aides and guards, but no one else. He worked out alone. He swam alone. He ate breakfast alone. No one from his family appeared in either film—neither his wife nor his daughters, Maria, who was then twenty-seven, and Katya, who was twenty-six—nor did any of his friends. His closest companion seemed to be his black Labrador, Koni, who waited poolside as he completed his laps. In NTV’s film, the only sign of Medvedev, once his closest aide and still his prime minister, came when Putin pointed out a red tandem bicycle parked forlornly outside the gym. It had been a gift from Medvedev, Putin explained, while working out on the weights, “obviously as a joke.” It did not seem to be used. One television critic thought the loneliness of the leader was an improbable invention, intended to convince viewers that he was not
the corrupt, insensitive figure that the protesters made him out to be, but rather the dedicated public servant sacrificing himself for the nation.

—

P
utin’s personal life still remained a closely guarded secret to all but those who knew him best, a small and discreet circle, one that had been remarkably consistent over the years but also one that was increasingly insular. Everything Russians learned about Putin’s life they learned like this, in small, measured glimpses that the Kremlin arranged or allowed to appear, always circumscribed, occasionally insightful. Putin’s penchant for working late at night and keeping visitors waiting for hours had become notorious. Even his friends would wait to meet him in the wee hours. Igor Shadkhan, the filmmaker who had interviewed him two decades before, recalled meeting Putin the last time, at one o’clock in the morning, after waiting for hours as a line of officials and executives filed one at a time into Putin’s office.
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Putin no longer had the easy banter that had won Shadkhan over in 1991. He tried to tell a joke, but Putin did not laugh. “By the way,” he said in an interview in 2013, “Stalin was also a night person.” Echoing Solzhenitsyn’s dramatization of Stalin’s interior monologues in
The First Circle
, Shadkhan now described Putin as “terribly tired” and lonely, rigid in his dogma, distrusting and afraid even of those in his entourage who would “want revenge as soon as he steps down because many of them are humiliatingly dependent on him.”

Those who had once occupied the outer orbits of Putin’s life—ministers, businessmen, acquaintances—now met him less frequently. He seemed to have changed. German Gref, one of his liberal advisers since their days working together in Petersburg, had watched his old colleague for so long but nevertheless struggled to explain the evolution of his character. Asked once if Putin had changed, he paused uncomfortably, searching for an answer that would not offend. All he would say was “Power changes people.”
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Others who had been close found themselves excluded. Anatoly Sobchak’s widow, Lyudmila Narusova, described Putin as a man who had changed from the time when her husband could jokingly call him Stirlitz, the double agent in the spy serial
Seventeen Moments in Spring
. “He has a good sense of humor—at least he used to,” she told a newspaper after being ousted from the Federation Council in the fall of 2012. Her political exile was the price she paid for being a rare voice of opposition to the flurry of laws cracking down on protesters, her daughter Ksenia among them.
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“The destruction
of illusions that I have does not involve Vladimir Vladimirovich, whom I know to be an absolutely honest, decent, and devoted person, but to his entourage,” Narusova said. “I have a feeling of disgust towards those he surrounds himself with.” He had grown blind to the “very low moral standards” of the political leaders he relied on. “Is it possible they do not understand—small, fussy, and greedy as they are—that once they lie, they can never restore confidence again? They lie to each other, they lie to him, but nevertheless he relies on them.” She said that in power a “certain
bronzoveniye
happens,” using the word for “bronzing” that suggests an inflated sense of self-importance, hardening like a monument into something less than human. She recalled Sobchak’s last meeting with Putin, when he headed to Kaliningrad to campaign for his election in 2000. “Volodya,” he warned Putin, “don’t become bronzed.” And yet bronzed he seemed to have become.

—

A
s prime minister, Putin had continued to live in his official residence at Novo-Ogaryovo, but by the time he returned to the presidency, he was living alone. The oldest daughter, Maria, had married a Dutchman, Jorrit Faassen, who joined the executive ranks of Gazprom. His connection to the Putin family filtered into the public consciousness only after he was involved in a road-rage incident in November 2010 while driving his BMW on the traffic-clogged highway coursing through Rublyovka, the billionaire-studded suburb of Moscow’s elite. After a near collision with a Mercedes carrying a young banker, Matvei Urin, several bodyguards piled out of a trailing Volkswagen van and beat Faassen badly. The attack was investigated not by the traffic police, but by the Presidential Security Service, and within weeks, not only were the bodyguards arrested, but so too was Urin. He was convicted of battery and sentenced to four and a half years in prison, compounded by subsequent convictions for embezzlement and fraud that dismantled his banking empire. Jorrit and Maria married in secrecy—it was never exactly clear when or where, though there were rumors of a ceremony on a Greek island—and in 2012, not long before Putin’s sixtieth birthday, they had a son. Putin became a grandfather, a fact that was never reported in the Russian press.
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Even less was known about Putin’s younger daughter, Katya, who was said to have majored in Asian studies at university. She was long rumored to be dating the son of a South Korean admiral—even to have married him, though that turned out not to be true. She took up competitive
dancing, becoming vice president of the World Rock’n’Roll Confederation under the name Katerina Vladimirovna Tikhonova, the family name evidently taken from the patronymic of Lyudmila’s mother. At the end of 2012, at the age of twenty-six, she became the director of the National Intellectual Development Fund, an organization building a $1.6 billion high-tech research center on the grounds of Moscow State University.
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The fund’s trustees included several of Putin’s closest allies, now wealthy executives of state enterprises, including Igor Sechin and Sergei Chemezov. It was said she had married Kirill Shamalov, the son of Nikolai Shamalov, who had been a member of Putin’s Ozero dacha cooperative. Kirill, too, had joined the executive ranks of Gazprom after graduating from the same university as Katerina. He then became an executive and ultimately a shareholder at Sibur, the country’s largest petrochemical company, then owned in part by Gennady Timchenko. The interlocking, nepotistic ties of Putin’s circle of friends and allies seemed to be trickling down to a new generation.

In the absence of official or even reliable information about the Putins’ private lives, rumors festered, mostly in the more gossipy or conspiratorial quarters of the Internet. There was speculation about Lyudmila’s health, including bouts of depression or addiction; a favorite tale had her living in a monastery near Pskov, banished as the wives of tsars had been throughout history. The truth was more pedestrian. Sergei Roldugin, one of Putin’s oldest friends, said that the Putins had remained cordial, but had grown increasingly distant. Putin instead spent more time with the same circle of friends he had kept from his childhood, from the KGB, and from the businesses that took root in the 1990s. It was among these friends that Putin would relax, hosting late-night parties at his residence in Moscow or the official retreats that Boris Nemtsov detailed in his report on the presidential holdings. In these gatherings, Roldugin said, he never discussed business openly—those talks happened personally, one on one—and rarely politics. The discussions increasingly ranged through history and literature. Putin’s interest could wane. He had little patience for tired subjects, but a thirst for new information. Roldugin revealed how after reading Pasternak’s translation of
King Lear
, Putin quizzed his friends on whether they knew, as Pasternak wrote in his comments on the translation, that the historical inspiration for the tale dated to the ninth century. He would invite singers, preferring crooners like Grigory Leps and Philippe Kirkorov, for private concerts; the guests, even the host, would arrive at all hours by car or helicopter.
He once asked Roldugin to bring musicians from the House of Music in Petersburg, where his old friend now served as artistic director. The three musicians—a violinist, a pianist, and a clarinetist—played Mozart, Weber, and Tchaikovsky. Putin was moved and, with the grace of a tsar, invited them to play again the next night for the same small group of friends. These gatherings included the likes of Yuri Kovalchuk and Gennady Timchenko, but less and less often, Putin’s wife.