The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (6 page)

Soon after this discovery, Gevorkyan left Moscow for Paris, where she still lives. Andrei Babitsky, as soon as he was able, left for Prague, where he continued to work for Radio Liberty. But in the year 2000, in the days leading up to the election, Gevorkyan said nothing publicly. Putin’s biography was published as he wanted it; even the impassioned and telling passage about Babitsky was cut, though it had made it into an advance newspaper excerpt. With few exceptions, Russians were led to persist in placing their faith in Putin.

ON MARCH 24, two days before the presidential election, NTV, the television network founded and owned by Vladimir Gusinsky—the same oligarch who owned the magazine where I worked—aired an hourlong program, in talk-show format before a live audience, devoted to the incident in the city of Ryazan the previous September when police responding to a call had found three bags of explosives
under the stairway of an apartment building. Vigilant residents thought they had managed to foil a terrorist plan.

Just after nine that evening, September 22, Alexei Kartofelnikov, a bus driver for the local soccer team, was returning home to a twelve-story brick apartment building at Fourteen Novoselov Street. He saw a Russian-made car pull up to the building. A man and a woman got out and went in through a door leading to the cellar, while the driver—another man—stayed in the car. Kartofelnikov watched the man and the woman emerge a few minutes later. Then the car pulled right up to the cellar door, and all three unloaded heavy-looking sacks and carried them into the cellar. They all then returned to the car and left.

By this time, four buildings had been blown up in Moscow and two other cities; in at least one case, eyewitnesses later emerged saying they had seen sacks planted in a stairwell. So it is not surprising that Kartofelnikov tried to take down the license plate number of the car. But the part of the license plate signifying the region where the car was registered was covered with a piece of paper that had the number that stood for Ryazan on it. Kartofelnikov called the police.

The police arrived nearly forty-five minutes later. Two officers entered the cellar, where they found three fifty-kilogram sacks marked SUGAR stacked one atop another. Through a slit in the top sack, they could see wires and a clock. They ran out of the cellar to call for reinforcement and began evacuating residents from the seventy-seven apartments in the building while the bomb squad was on its way. They combed the building, knocking on all doors and ordering residents to exit immediately. People came outside in their pajamas, nightgowns, and bathrobes, not pausing to lock their doors: after weeks of watching news reports of apartment building explosions, everyone took the threat seriously. Several disabled people were wheeled outside in their wheelchairs, but several severely disabled
people stayed inside their apartments, terrified. The rest of the residents would spend most of the night standing in the chilling wind outside their building. After a time, the manager of a nearby movie theater invited the residents to come in and even organized hot tea for them. In the morning, many of the residents went to work, though the police did not allow them to enter the building to wash up or get a change of clothes. At some point, many of the apartments were looted.

Even before all the residents had made it outside, the bomb squad had disabled the timer and analyzed the contents of the sacks. They concluded it was hexogen, a powerful explosive in use since World War II (in English-speaking countries it is more commonly known as RDX). It was also the substance used in at least one of the Moscow explosions, so the entire country had learned the word
hexogen
from an announcement made by the mayor of Moscow. The crudely made detonation mechanism contained a clock set for 5:30 in the morning. The terrorists’ plan was apparently exactly the same as in the Moscow explosions: the amount of explosive would have destroyed the building entirely (and possibly damaged nearby structures), killing all residents in their sleep.

After the bomb squad concluded that the sacks contained explosives, the city’s uniformed brass rushed to Fourteen Novoselov Street. The head of the local branch of the FSB addressed the residents, congratulating them on being born again. Alexei Kartofelnikov, the driver who had phoned in the suspicious people with their sacks, became an instant hero. Local officials praised him and the vigilance of ordinary people in general: “The more alert we are, the better we can fight the evil that has taken up residence in our country,” the first deputy governor told news agencies.

The following day, all of Russia talked only of Ryazan. In the terrifying reality in which Russians had been living for nearly a month, this seemed like the first bit of relatively good news. If the
people mobilized—if they watched out for themselves, it seemed to say—they might be able to save themselves. Not only that, the terrorists might actually be caught: the police knew the make and color of the car, and Kartofelnikov had seen the people who unloaded the sacks. On September 24, Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo, looking gaunt and haunted, spoke at an interagency meeting devoted to the series of explosions. “There have been some positive developments,” said Rushailo. “For example, the fact that an explosion was prevented in Ryazan yesterday.”

But half an hour later, something entirely unexpected and perfectly inexplicable happened. The head of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, a former Leningrad hand whom Putin had brought in as his deputy at the secret police and then chose to replace himself when he became prime minister, spoke to reporters in the same building where the interagency meeting was taking place, and said that Rushailo was wrong. “First, there was no explosion,” he said. “Second, nothing was prevented. And I don’t think it was very well done. It was a training exercise, and the bags contained sugar. There were no explosives.”

In the coming days, FSB officials would explain that the two men and one woman who had planted the sacks were FSB officers from Moscow, that the sacks contained perfectly harmless sugar, that the whole exercise had been intended to test the alertness of the ordinary people of Ryazan and the battle-readiness of Ryazan’s law enforcement. Ryazan officials failed to cooperate at first but then confirmed the FSB story, explaining that the bomb squad had misidentified the sugar as explosives because its testing equipment had been contaminated through extensive use on real explosives in Chechnya. The explanations did little to calm fears or to convince anyone who knew anything about the way the FSB worked. It seemed unconscionable but not unimaginable that a couple of hundred people would be held outside, scared and cold, for an entire night for the sake of a training exercise: after all, the Russian secret police was not known for its considerate ways. What utterly defied explanation, though, was the fact that the local chapter of the FSB had not been informed of the exercise, or that the interior minister was allowed to embarrass himself in public a day and a half after the exercise—and after twelve hundred of his troops had been mobilized to catch the suspects as they fled Ryazan.

Over the course of six months, NTV journalists had pieced together the story, riddled as it was with inconsistencies, and now they presented it to the viewers. They tried to tread carefully. Nikolai Nikolayev, the host, began with the premise that what had happened in Ryazan had indeed been a training exercise. When a member of the audience suggested that it was time to put together the entire chain of events and ask whether the FSB had been involved in the August and September explosions, Nikolayev practically shouted, “No, we are not going to do that, we are not going to go there. We are talking only about Ryazan.” Still, the picture that emerged from the show was chilling.

Nikolayev had invited many of the residents of Fourteen Novoselov Street, including Kartofelnikov, to be in the studio audience. None of them believed the training exercise story. Then an audience member identified himself as a resident of the Ryazan building and began saying he believed it was an exercise. The other residents turned to him incredulously and, within seconds, began shouting in unison that they did not know the man and he certainly did not live in their building. The rest of the FSB’s case was as unconvincing and as shoddily executed as the act of planting a fake resident in the audience. The FSB representatives could not explain why the initial tests showed the substance was hexogen, or why the local chapter of the FSB was unaware of the supposed exercise.

Watching the program, I thought back to the conversation I had had with my editor half a year earlier. In just six months, the limits of the possible had shifted in my mind. I could now believe the FSB had most likely been behind the deadly bombings that shook Russia and helped make Putin its leader. When the agency suddenly found itself on the verge of being exposed—when twelve hundred Ryazan policemen had set out on a manhunt, armed with detailed descriptions of the FSB agents who had planted explosives—the FSB quickly came up with the training exercise story: unconvincing, but sufficient to prevent the arrest of secret police agents by regular police. The deadly chain of explosions halted at the same time.

IT TOOK Boris Berezovsky much longer to acknowledge that the unthinkable was possible and even likely. I asked him about it almost ten years later. By this time he had personally funded investigations, books, and a film that built on and extended Nikolayev’s investigation, and had come to believe that it had been the FSB that terrorized Russia in September 1999. But he still had a very difficult time reconciling what he had thought was happening in 1999 with his later view of those events.

“I can tell you with absolute sincerity that at the time I was sure it was the Chechens,” he told me. “It was when I came here [to London] and started looking back that I eventually came to the conclusion that the explosions were organized by the FSB. And this conclusion was based not only on logic—not even so much on logic as on facts. But at the time I did not see those facts, plus I did not trust NTV, which belonged to Gusinsky, who supported Primakov. So I did not even pay attention. And it never even occurred to me that there was a parallel game to ours—that someone else was doing what they thought was right to get Putin elected. Now I am convinced that was exactly what was going on.” The “someone else” would have been the FSB, and the “parallel game” would have been the explosions, intended to unite Russians in fear and in a desperate desire for a new, decisive, even aggressive leader who would spare no enemy.

“But I am certain the idea itself was not Putin’s,” he suddenly said.

This made no sense to me. The explosions began just three weeks after Putin was appointed prime minister. That would suggest that preparations began while he was still head of the FSB. Berezovsky objected that this was not necessarily the case: “It was all organized in a very short time, and this was why there were so many obvious mistakes made.” Even if Berezovsky was correct, however, Putin was succeeded at the FSB by his right-hand man, Patrushev, who would hardly have hidden the plan from Putin. And if Putin had firsthand knowledge of such a relatively minor operation as the detention of Andrei Babitsky, then it seemed absurd to imagine he had not known of the planned bombing spree.

Berezovsky agreed, although he still would not lay the entire enterprise at Putin’s feet. He said he had come to believe that the idea had originated in Putin’s inner circle but had not been intended to support Putin himself: it was designed to boost any successor of Yeltsin’s choosing. I thought Berezovsky might have devised this theory to allow himself to go on believing he had been the kingmaker and not just a pawn in 1999. On the other hand, I had to admit he was probably right that the explosions could have been used to elect anyone: if enough blood was shed, any previously unknown, faceless, and unqualified candidate could become president. Even if he was chosen practically at random.

Official Moscow’s position remains that all of the explosions were organized by an Islamic terrorist group based in the Caucasus.

Three

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF A THUG

T
he group Berezovsky had assembled to write Putin’s biography had only three weeks to produce a book. Their list of sources was limited: they had Putin himself—six long sit-down interviews—his wife; his best friend; a former teacher; and a former secretary from St. Petersburg’s city hall. They were not there to investigate the man; their job was to write down a legend. It turned out to be the legend of a postwar Leningrad thug.

St. Petersburg is a Russian city of grand history and glorious architecture. But the Soviet city of Leningrad into which Vladimir Putin was born in 1952 was, in the lived experience of its people, a city of hunger, poverty, destruction, aggression, and death. Just eight years had elapsed since the end of the Siege of Leningrad.

The siege had begun when Nazi troops completed their circle around the city, severing all connections to Leningrad, on September 8, 1941, and ended 872 days later. More than a million civilians died, killed by hunger or by artillery fire, which was unceasing for the
duration of the blockade. Nearly half of these people died on their way out of the city. The lone route not controlled by the Germans bore the name the Road of Life, and hundreds of thousands of civilians died along this road, killed by bombs and famine. No city in modern times has seen famine and loss of life on this scale—and yet many survivors believed the authorities intentionally underestimated the number of casualties.