The New Tsar (75 page)

Putin’s obsessions remained work and sport. Ice hockey became a new hobby in 2011 after he attended a youth tournament. It was a sport that also occupied his friends Timchenko and the brothers Rotenberg, Boris and Arkady, who owned professional teams in Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League. Putin spent hours learning to skate and handle a stick, an indication of the same zeal he showed in learning martial arts as a teenager, and soon was playing in games in arenas emptied of all but invited guests. His teammates and tutors were some of hockey’s legends, like Slava Fetisov and Pavel Bure, as well as friends like the Rotenbergs, his own government ministers, and even the Belarusian president, Aleksandr Lukashenko. The bodyguards from his security detail and Medvedev’s—though not Medvedev himself—filled out the squads. In the run-up to the Olympics, Putin decreed the creation of an amateur night league for men over forty, which expanded to include players of all ages. He saw it as part of the revitalization of the country through sports and fitness. The amateur games were soon opened to the public and featured in news reports that breathlessly tracked the president’s growing prowess on the ice. Wearing number 11, he scored with astounding ease—six goals in one game! He was playing hockey, he said dismissively, on the night of the first mass protests in December 2011. On the day he was inaugurated in 2012, he left the Kremlin as the new president to play in an exhibition match against retired hockey legends, with two retired politicians, Silvio Berlusconi and Gerhard Schröder, among the spectators. Putin scored two goals, including the game winner on a penalty shot in overtime.
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—

I
t was on Putin’s inauguration day that May that Lyudmila was last seen with him in public. Before that they had appeared together on election day at a polling station, where Putin pointedly joked at her expense. As a worker pointed out the candidate information posted on the wall, Putin replied that he did not need it but that she might. “She’s not up to speed,” he said.
¹³
Her absence in the new Putin presidency became
striking, fueling new rumors of their separation. She was conspicuously absent at Easter services that year, when Putin appeared with Medvedev and his wife, accompanied by the mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin. Putin also avoided her fifty-fifth birthday on the eve of Orthodox Christmas on January 6, 2013; he was in Sochi, granting Gérard Depardieu a passport (so the actor could avoid paying taxes in France) and skiing at the newly groomed Olympic slopes.
¹⁴

They did not appear together in public again until the following June, when they emerged after the first of three acts of a ballet being performed at the Kremlin,
La Esmeralda
, to answer a question from a journalist so impertinent that it could only have been as orchestrated as the performance they were attending. “How did you like
Esmeralda
?” the waiting correspondent from the all-news channel, Rossiya 24, began. After Putin and his wife made a few banal observations about the “beautiful” music and “airy” movements of the dancers, the correspondent then gently broached a subject that would have under any other circumstance provoked Putin’s fury: “You so rarely appear together, and there are rumors that you do not live together. Is that so?”

Putin inhaled, glanced at Lyudmila, and after a moment answered: “It’s true. All of my activity, my work, is public, absolutely public. Some like it. Others do not. Some are absolutely incompatible with it.” He addressed her formally as Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, the way one would speak to a stranger or an elder. She was “done keeping watch,” he said. “It’s been eight years, or nine, yes, nine. So, to sum it up, it was a mutual decision.” They stood slightly, awkwardly apart. Lyudmila appeared pained, Putin steely. “Our marriage is over because we barely see each other,” she injected. “Vladimir Vladimirovich is engrossed in his work. Our children have grown up. They live their own lives. We all do.” She expressed gratitude that he was “still supporting me and our children” and said they would remain friends. At a time when many Russian politicians and officials were fighting off revelations about their children living or studying abroad, Putin seized the opportunity to emphasize the point that their daughters had remained in Russia.

The correspondent seemed confused. Did this mean they were actually divorcing?

“You can call it a civilized divorce,” Lyudmila said.

Putin’s decision to lift the veil on his personal life coincided with the socially conservative turn of his policies, trumpeting Russian faith and morality in the struggle to define and defend the idea of the state. For the
most part, Russians reacted with indifference, even sympathy. The only surprise was the timing. The divorce would not become official until the next year. Their separation, meanwhile, prompted a flurry of speculation that Putin was preparing to remarry—perhaps to Alina Kabayeva, who was rumored to have had his son in 2010 (and a daughter in 2012). Kabayeva, who appeared on the cover of the Russian edition of
Vogue
in January 2011, wearing a dazzling Balmain dress, repeatedly denied that she had children. (A boy who had appeared in her life, she said, was her nephew.) Rumors of other affairs emerged involving the sleeper spy Anna Chapman and Putin’s official photographer, Yana Lapikova, a former model and a contestant in a Miss Moscow pageant. There was always something a little hollow about the rumors, all of which Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, denied. Stanislav Belkovsky, the political strategist and occasional columnist, claimed the rumors of a love life were themselves the invention of the Kremlin’s PR machine, floated to enhance Putin’s image. Belkovsky published a book, in Germany, that portrayed him as a lonely, distrustful leader, closer to his pet dogs than to any people, even among his friends. The book, simply titled
Putin
, blended speculation, hearsay, and fact—including accurate details, for example, about the daughters’ lives—so seamlessly that it was impossible to distinguish one from the other, much as it was impossible to know the truth of Putin’s private life. Even Belkovsky was not sure, however, distancing himself from the psychological portrait he had drawn.
¹⁵
Putin seemed no more genuine than any of the political stunts he had perfected. After more than twelve years in the public spotlight, he had become a more distant figure, as remote from the people as the general secretaries or tsars before him, as powerful and unknowable as the elusive authority Klamm in Kafka’s
The Castle
. “You know, it’s not about Putin anymore,” Gleb Pavlovsky said. “We talk about Putin too much. Putin is our zero, a void, a screen where we project our desires, love, hate.”
¹⁶

CHAPTER 24

Putingrad

I
n February 2013, Putin led a large entourage of Russian officials and members of the International Olympic Committee to Sochi for two days of meetings exactly a year ahead of the planned Opening Ceremony. He did not appear pleased.

Five years of construction had transformed the sleepy coastal resort—Putin’s aides said for the better, his critics said ruinously so. The circular site of the main Olympic arenas in the Imeretinskaya Valley had been drained, graded, and cleared of the hundreds of modest homes and dachas nestled among estuaries that had been the nesting grounds of migratory birds. The arenas rose from the plain like alien objects—sleek and modern compared to the neoclassical remnants of Sochi’s glorious Soviet past. Yet the valley remained a scarred, muddied landscape, littered with construction debris, studded with construction cranes that pivoted day and night. The construction was equally intense in the mountains at Krasnaya Polyana, where the Mzymta River churned murkily past the still-incomplete railroad and highway. The scale of the work in the mountains and along Sochi’s narrow coastline was staggering: two hundred miles of new roads; dozens of tunnels and bridges; eight new railroad stations and thirty-one smaller stops; the new power station that Gazprom built and a network of smaller substations; a new airport and a new seaport, built by Oleg Deripaska, the tycoon Putin had dressed down at Pikalevo in 2009; dozens of new hotels, schools, clinics. It was at the time the largest construction project on the planet, an effort that in Russia was compared to the reconstruction of ravaged cities after the Great Patriotic War. Anatoly Pakhomov, Sochi’s mayor, said that one massive project, to tunnel a second bypass highway to relieve the city’s congested traffic, was something that Stalin had proposed more than half a century before, but only now, under Putin, was it being realized.
Vladimir Yakunin, Putin’s old friend, compared the railroad, built at an expense of nearly $10 billion, to an even older project to unify the nation: the Trans-Siberian Railway, built in the twilight of the Russian Empire by Tsar Alexander III and his son, Nicholas II.
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From the start, Putin had been intimately, obsessively, involved in the Olympic project, awarding contracts (often without competitive bidding), approving designs, and policing construction schedules. He visited Sochi repeatedly, on official visits as well as private ones to his dacha at Bocharov Ruchei, or to a new one built by Gazprom in the mountains. Far more than any other megaproject, Sochi was to symbolize the country’s rising wealth, its international prestige, the triumph over terrorism and separatism in the turbulent Northern Caucasus, which was just over the mountain ridge from where the games would take place. For Putin, the Olympics had a purpose deeper than the merely political. He believed them to be a palliative for a country that had suffered so much over the previous decades. “After the collapse of the Soviet Union, after the dark and, let us be honest, bloody events in the Caucasus, the public attitude in Russia became very negative and pessimistic,” Putin once told a group of foreign journalists. “We have to pull ourselves together and realize that we can deliver large-scale projects on time and with high standards, and by projects I mean not only stronger defense potential, but also developments in the humanitarian sphere, including high achievement in sport.” The Olympics, he said, would strengthen “the nation’s morale.”

Even Putin’s critics acknowledged the scale of the endeavor, though not always so favorably. Konstantin Remchukov, the publisher and editor in chief of the independent newspaper
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
, compared the reconstruction of Sochi to Peter the Great’s creation of a new tsarist St. Petersburg in the eighteenth century not simply to replace Moscow as the nation’s capital, but to haul the country out of backwardness. “We learned in school how it was built on bones, how many mumbled under their breath, how many had to cut off their beards, how unhappy Moscow was that Petersburg was created in some rotten and swampy place,” he said. “Here, for Putin, it’s his Petersburg. Look how he built Sochi, in Krasnodar! Fifty, sixty years will pass—I don’t know—and those there will name it Putingrad.”
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As with the nation’s strategic industries, Putin had steered the biggest projects to people he trusted or controlled, making them even richer. He would brook no dissent, no delays. “After the journalists leave,” he
chided his assembled subordinates during an unhappy inspection tour photo op in 2012, “I will tell what failures to meet the deadlines will amount to. I do not want to frighten anyone, but I will speak with you as people I have known for many years now.”

And still the construction suffered from delay, disaster, and scandal: cost overruns, accidents, theft, corruption, abuse. In 2009 a powerful winter storm had destroyed the cargo port built to unload construction materials, along with thousands of meters of barrier walls that would surround the site. Putin had had to fire three successive directors of the main contractor, Olympstroi, before the fourth hung on to the job. Tens of thousands of poorly paid guest workers poured in—from Moldova, Ukraine, and Central Asia, fueling resentment among Russians in the region—and many were horribly mistreated, poorly paid, cheated out of wages, and deported home. Dozens died in accidents.
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Putin wanted the Olympics to be a symbol of Russia, and they were. Corruption plagued every project, driving costs up so high that they became difficult to ignore, or hide. Early in 2013, Dmitri Kozak, his close aide and now the deputy prime minister he had put in charge of Sochi, let it slip in public remarks that the cost of preparing Sochi had ballooned from the $12 billion that Putin had promised the International Olympic Committee to a staggering $51 billion. It was the most expensive Olympics ever—more than seven times the amount Vancouver spent to host the Winter Games in 2010, more than Beijing spent to host the much larger Summer Games in 2008. In a country with an economy that was still struggling, the figure was so politically sensitive that Kozak and other ministers were ordered never to mention the figure again. The profligacy was ridiculed. The Russian edition of
Esquire
estimated that for the amount spent on the combined highway and railroad to the mountains engineers could have paved the route with a centimeter of black caviar, six centimeters of black truffles, and twenty-two centimeters of foie gras, among other luxuries.
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The officials involved blamed the soaring expenses on difficult geological conditions or the demands of the International Olympic Committee, but virtually every project cost far more than comparable projects built elsewhere. There were widespread reports that contractors inflated their prices at every level in order to pay kickbacks to officials, as Valery Morozov had claimed in 2010. The pipeline that Arkady Rotenberg’s company constructed under the Black Sea to power the games cost more than $5 million per kilometer, compared to $4 million for the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea (which was
itself several times more expensive than the European average).
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Boris Nemtsov called Sochi “a festival of corruption,” estimating in June 2013 in his newest report on corruption in the Putin era that as much as half of the $51 billion total was squandered or stolen. Even Russian officials acknowledged that enormous sums of money were lost. The Auditing Chamber estimated at least $500 million in spending was unaccounted for—and then promptly classified its quarterly reports as state secrets. Criminal charges never materialized, though, certainly not against any of Putin’s allies, whom the Olympics made very, very wealthy.