‘If the criminals have attacked authority there must be an appropriate punishment. It’s a policemen’s duty to be severe and cruel if necessary. It is the only way to reduce criminality – the only way. We hope to eliminate ten criminals for each officer killed… within the law, of course.’22
Kramarev, the police chief, is certain that Sobchak thought this was good politics: ‘He thought having a KGB number two would be good for ratings, give him support from their system and be a strong sign he was willing to work with them.’ This is when he started working closely with Putin. Kramarev recalls:
‘I thought he was just an insignificant official at the time who always stood up when I went into his office to tell him frankly – “is Sobchak crazy? What the hell is this? Can you just stop that?” – but the young Putin really knew what was going on. Unlike Sobchak, he had his feet on the ground. He saw the collapsing economy, the crime wave. He saw that the country was at death’s door. He grasped that… The essential fact.’
Kramarev and all the other people who were working with Putin, from hostile democratic deputies in the St Petersburg assembly to rival mayoral candidates, remember a quiet, efficient man, who in the words of one ‘meant no when he meant no, meant yes when he meant yes, and always explained that no. Unlike the other incoherent officials.’23 He came across as a cut above the other officials. Well-spoken, loyal and a man who meant what he said. Kramarev remembers countless moments when Putin defused rows he was having with Sobchak – including dissuading him from banning politically damaging books. He remembers a good negotiator who knew how to make friends. But of course making friends – and winning men’s trust – are the skills of a spy. ‘I’m a specialist in human relations,’ is how Putin would hint to friends that he was in the KGB.24
‘There were rumours from the start that Putin was a KGB insertion to keep an eye on Sobchak.’ This is the commanding voice of Igor Kucherenko, who was the deputy chairman of St Petersburg assembly of which Sobchak was the chairman, before becoming mayor. Kucherenko is the kind of man whose hopes have been disappointed the most by the 1990s: a real revolutionary, anti-Soviet liberal. A portrait of the neoliberal former prime minister Yegor Gaidar, the zealous grandson of a savage Bolshevik general, is pinned to the side of his cramped office, the three-volume History of the New Russia, with Gaidar emblazoned on it, sits ostentatiously in his display cabinet. He first met Putin in the heady 1989 days after he was hired by Sobchak as an assistant. ‘But those are only rumours,’ says Kucherenko:
‘You have to remember the KGB itself was in a state of collapse at that time – like everything else – it was divided between groups of young agents that knew better than anyone else that the country needed reform, needed to change, groups of older conservatives that wanted nothing to change, and groups of people that knew that privatization was inevitable and wanted to manage, to control this process. When I met Putin he was in the first category and he ended up in the third.’
Kucherenko pauses to point to a 15cm framed photo of himself to the right side of his cluttered desk. ‘That’s Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin and I.’ You get the impression he looks at it quite often during the working day. They are in front of a train station; an almost unrecognizably healthy Yeltsin is smiling and slightly blurred. He looks fiercely into and beyond the lens. ‘But the very fact Putin was in the KGB was one of the reasons Sobchak chose him. He knew the KGB would oppose him and he thought Putin would make them easier to deal with.’
He smokes heavily, trying to remember the young man in his peripheral vision who became omniscient. ‘Putin would disappear out of photographs. When he became President I threw open my photo album to see us together – I knew he’d be there next to me at one of so many events we were at together. But he wasn’t in a single one. He’d slipped out of every frame. I sometimes wonder if he even has a reflection in the mirror.’
Quite a few of the regular democratic deputies – enthused pioneers of perestroika – found it very strange that such an ‘impeccable democrat’ as Sobchak should have employed a KGB agent as deputy mayor. At a cocktail party thrown by the German Embassy to celebrate the first anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, Yury Vdovin, an outspoken democratic deputy from St Petersburg assembly, found himself at the corner of a table next to the young Putin. They took some shots, Putin only raising the glass to his lips. Vdovin is open about the fact that he’d had a few more than that. ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit strange, Vladimir Vladimirovich, that you as a KGB agent should be working in democratic St Petersburg town hall?’ He looked back, then retorted:
‘Yury Innokentevich, first of all I worked in foreign intelligence and I never spied on or persecuted any dissident, I never watched them. And you must know us officers in foreign intelligence, we had all the information on the real situation in our country and in the world, and it was the ones in East Germany who were the most progressive and liberal of them all. And I was one of them! That’s why I’m fighting for democracy and liberal economics.’
But at the time Vdovin, a human rights activist, did not see anything particularly wrong with Putin: ‘He knew how to get along with people. He got things done.’
But whatever Putin said were his intentions, whatever he came across as – was he passing on information to the KGB about Sobchak? Had Sobchak not just made a gesture to the KGB but picked his own handler in appointing him? Kramarev is suddenly coy: ‘It is possible. I do not have this information. But you have to remember a KGB officer always stays a KGB officer. I cannot exclude that Putin was also… always spying on me.’ But the former police chief has no respect for such agents: ‘They were never fighting real crime, they were just wasting their time following some person who’d said a joke about Brezhnev. The whole KGB was sent to stop those Solzhenitsyn books circulating… and they failed even at that.’
Putin probably was a ‘handler’ – but one double-timing his loyalties, like so many others in an entire KGB system that was so infested with closet democrats it was paralyzed and spasmodic when it was most needed, failing to impose martial law during the 1991 coup. Yet he did really grow close to Sobchak. He cried at his funeral. This explains why, over the years, Sobchak’s daughter Ksenia found it so easy to prance around first as Russia’s answer to Paris Hilton, despite her plain looks in country with no shortage of supermodels, before hatching into an anti-Putin glamour-activist. She has never been harmed. ‘I never understood why Putin looked up to that man as a leader’, groaned Kramarev. ‘When my guys were following around some bandit oligarchs taking pictures, Sobchak’s wife would often turn up in the pictures too – you see… she got around socially.’
Sobchak’s regime operated in a similar manner to the one Putin would one day run. It was outrageously corrupt and incredibly clannish. For most of the Soviet period, officials had privileges – a holiday on the Black Sea at a special resort or a good car – but not astounding levels of wealth. To now watch a ‘new Russian elite’ acquire fortunes during the 1990s only served to embitter the nation. Locally it was clear that the transition had not worked out as expected. ‘Sobchak’s town hall always had this odour of corruption, he was not controlling what any of his deputies were doing,’ recalled one 1990s local committee chief.