The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (38 page)

I Could Not Sit Still

Why does everything in this country have to be like this? Even civil society has to wake up when it’s most inconvenient for the writer.

I went away to the French countryside for some time in peace, to write my next novel. But now I can’t concentrate.

I guess I’m going home. That’s 500 kilometers behind the wheel—and then wish me luck getting on a flight.

I hope I do make it and get to see the historic occasion with my own eyes and not via YouTube.

But the reason I am writing this post is that I have been asked to warn all those who don’t yet have this information:

THE PROTEST WILL TAKE PLACE IN BOLOTNAYA SQUARE (not in Revolution Square).

At parent-teacher conferences in the evening, I notice many of the other children’s parents are wearing white ribbons.

When I put my daughter to bed, she asks if she can go to the protest with me tomorrow.

“No, I’m sorry, I don’t think it’s a good idea to take kids yet.”

“But this is a legal protest, right?” She knows that otherwise I could be detained.

I assure her that it is and that nothing bad is likely to happen to me. “I’ll probably be going to a lot of protests these coming months,” I say, “and I probably won’t be able to take you with me. But I’ll take you to the last one, when we have a celebration.”

“You mean, when there is no more Putin?” She catches her breath, as if the thought were too much to contemplate. She is ten; she was born after Putin came to power, and she has heard conversations about him her entire life. When my kids were little, they made Putin into a sort of household villain, the bogeyman who would come get you if you did not mind your table manners. I put a stop to that, and as they have grown I have tried to give them a reasonably nuanced picture of politics, but I think I may have neglected to say that no one rules forever.

Saturday, December 10

Driving in from our dacha, where the children and Darya will be while I am at the protest, I listen to the radio and fret. So what if thirty-five thousand people have stated on Facebook that they are going to the protest? I have heard of people getting seven hundred Facebook RSVPs for a party—and not a single actual guest. It is the weekend, after all: people will be feeling lazy, they will want to sleep in or stay at their dachas, and they will figure someone else will go to the protest.

As I get closer to Bolotnaya Square, I see people flowing to it from every direction: in groups, in couples, alone; young, old, middle-aged. People wearing white ribbons, white scarves, white hats, even white trousers, carrying white balloons and white carnations. It still has not snowed, so the white they wear and carry has to compensate.

I meet up with a group of friends, including Andrei and two of his brothers. At the metal detectors, the police are calm and polite. Inside, we wander the square, scanning for familiar faces. At Monday’s protest, I knew everyone was there because I could see them all; today I know they are all here because I cannot see them for the crowd. Even texting becomes impossible, as the volume exceeds the capacity of Moscow’s cellular networks.

We gawk at homemade banners people have brought. One features a graph of the official results reported by the Central Election Committee, overlaid with a bell curve that tells a different story: it shows what normal distribution of support for United Russia would look like. “We Don’t Trust You, We Trust Gauss,” says the poster, referring to Carl Friedrich Gauss, the mathematician who gave the world the bell curve.

“I Did Not Vote for These Assholes,” proclaims another banner, carried by a young man with a reddish beard, “I Voted for the Other Assholes. I Demand a Recount.”

“There are so many people here!” a very young man shouts into his cell phone. “And they are all normal! I’ve heard like a million jokes, and they were all funny!”

If you have spent years feeling as if your views were shared by only a few of your closest friends, being surrounded by tens of thousands of like-minded people really does feel like hearing a million funny jokes at once.

Somewhere in the distance, there is a stage. I cannot see it, and I can hardly hear any of the speakers. One of my friends remembers a trick from the early 1990s, when people would bring portable radios to rallies and use them to listen to the speakers: she turns on the radio on her cell phone (cellular service may be overtaxed, but this public square features free wireless) and gives us the highlights of speeches. We look around, and occasionally join in chants: “New Elections!” “Freedom!” “Russia Without Putin!”

The speakers include Boris Akunin (he made it from the south of France in time), a well-loved, long-blacklisted television anchor, and assorted activists. Darya’s father speaks about election fraud. None of those who pass for opposition politicians—“the other assholes”—are here. They have not yet gotten the message that power has shifted away from the Kremlin. Navalny is still in jail, so a journalist reads his address to the protesters. And Mikhail Prokhorov, the billionaire who suspended his political career two months ago, is still silent. On Monday he will announce that he is running for president, but by then it will be too late to win cred with the revolutionary crowd: he will immediately be branded a Putin plant.

I am wearing thermal underwear, two jackets, and moon boots; there is no way to dress for standing still in a Russian winter. After a couple of hours my friends and I decide to leave. Other people are still arriving. Walking away from the protest, I stop on a pedestrian bridge to look back at the crowd. There are a lot more than
thirty-five thousand people; later estimates will range as high as a hundred fifty thousand.

We take a large table at a restaurant that, like all the eateries in the neighborhood, is filled with protesters ordering mulled wine in an attempt to warm up. Friends and strangers are shouting the latest news across tables. Andrei is the first to read a couple of lines from a radio station’s website: “The protest is drawing to a close. A police representative has mounted the stage. He says, ‘Today we acted like the police force of a democratic country. Thank you.’ There is applause.” At our table there is a momentary silence. “This is great,” all of us start saying then, looking at one another incredulously. “This is great.” How long has it been since any of us was able to say, unequivocally, “This is great” about something happening in our city?

I leave my friends at the restaurant to return to my family at the dacha. I drive over the Big Stone Bridge—the largest bridge over the Moscow River—just as the police leave Bolotnaya Square. There are hundreds upon hundreds of them, moving along the sidewalk four and five across, the length of the bridge. For the first time that I can remember, I do not get a knot in my stomach while I look at police in riot gear. I am stuck behind an orange truck with a snowplow. It still has not snowed, so I am not sure what the truck is doing out in the street, but I notice a white balloon tied to the corner of the plow.

Protests were held today in ninety-nine cities in Russia and in front of Russian consulates and embassies in more than forty cities around the world.

In the evening, Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, tells journalists that the government has no comment on the protest and promises to let them know if a comment is formulated.

A few minutes later, NTV, the television channel taken away from Vladimir Gusinsky ten years ago and eviscerated, airs an excellent report on the protest. I watch it online—it’s been years since I had a working television in the house—and I recognize something I have observed in other countries when I covered their revolutions. There comes a day when you turn on the television and the very same goons who were spouting propaganda at you yesterday, sitting in the very same studios against the very same backdrops, start speaking a human language. In this case, though, this moment gives my head an extra spin, because I can still remember these journalists before they became goons, when they last spoke human about a dozen years ago.

As I approach our dacha, it starts to snow. By morning, the countryside will be covered in white.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Cullen Murphy, who first suggested I write a piece about Vladimir Putin for
Vanity Fair,
and to my agent, Elyse Cheney, who noticed that the resulting piece wanted to become a book. My editor, Rebecca Saletan, made that book immeasurably better than it would have been without her. Many other people helped along the way, and I hope someday soon I will be able to thank them in print without fearing that such recognition might be harmful. You know who you are, and I hope you know how grateful I am. Two people cannot avoid mention, however: my friend and colleague Ilya Kolmanovsky, whose research and insights were crucial in the early stages of this project; and my partner, Darya Oreshkina, who has made me happier and more productive than I have ever been.

Notes

PROLOGUE

Page 3
a draft law on
lustratsiya
:
The full text of the law is available at
http://www.shpik.info/statya1.html
. Accessed July 14, 2010.

Page 3
she learned that the KGB:
Marina Katys, “Polozhitelny itog: Interview s deputatom Gosudarstvennoy Dumy, sopredsedatelem federalnoy partii Demokraticheskaya Rossiya Galinoy Starovoitovoy,”
Professional
, July 1, 1998.
http://www.starovoitova.ru/rus/main.php?i=5&s=29
. Accessed July 14, 2010.

Page 3
1991 post–failed-coup decree:
Constitutional Court decision citing the decree and overturning its most important provisions.
http://www.panorama.ru/ks/d9209.shtml
. Accessed July 14, 2010.

Page 4
a decree forbidding protests:
In fact, the ban on protests was a one-two punch: the cabinet issued a ban, and Gorbachev followed with a decree creating a special police body to enforce the ban. Both were deemed unconstitutional by the Russian government, whose authority Gorbachev, in turn, did not recognize.
http://iv.garant.ru/SESSION/PILOT/main.htm
. Accessed July 15, 2010.

Page 6
she immersed herself in an investigation:
Andrei Tsyganov, “Seleznev dobilsya izvineniya za statyu Starovoitovoi,”
Kommersant
, May 14, 1999.
http://www.kommersant.ru/doc-rss.aspx?DocsID=218273
. Accessed July 15, 2010.

ONE. THE ACCIDENTAL PRESIDENT

Page 14
experienced overall improvement:
Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman, “A Normal Country: Russia After Communism,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives
, vol. 19, no. 1 (Winter 2005), pp. 151–74.
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/shleifer/files/normal_jep.pdf
. Accessed April 30, 2011.

Page 15
importing used European cars:
David Hoffman,
The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia
(New York: PublicAffairs, 2002).

Page 15
“He was the first bureaucrat”:
Author interview with Boris Berezovsky, June 2008.

Page 17
swindled Russia’s largest carmaker:
Hoffman.

Page 17
acquired part of a large oil company:
Whether Berezovsky was an actual owner of 25 percent of Sibneft and 49 percent of ORT, the Channel One company, is in fact unclear: as this book goes to press, a London court is trying to determine just this. What is uncontested is that he was the sole manager of the television company and drew significant income from the oil company.

Page 18
“someone
who is capable of doing it”:
Natalia Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Kolesnikov,
Ot pervogo litsa: Razgovory s Vladimirom Putinym
.
http://archive.kremlin.ru/articles/bookchapter1.shtml
. Accessed Feb. 7, 2011.

Page 20
“Chubais believed”:
Tatyana Yumasheva (Dyachenko)’s blog, entry dated Feb. 6, 2010.
http://t-yumasheva.livejournal.com/13320.html#cutid1
. Accessed April 23, 2011.

TWO. THE ELECTION WAR

Page 24
one hundred people died:
Number of victims cited according to the Moscow City Court’s sentence in the case of A. O. Dekushev and Y. I. Krymshahalov.
http://terror1999.narod.ru/sud/delokd/prigovor.html
. Accessed May 5, 2011.

Page 26
the decree was also illegal:
Speech by Duma member Sergei Yushenkov, Kennan Institute, Washington, D.C., April 24, 2002.
http://terror99.ru/commission/kennan.htm
. Accessed May 5, 2011.

Page 26
“We will hunt them down”:
Putin’s Sept. 24, 1999, TV appearance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_PdYRZSW-I
. Accessed May 5, 2011.