The blue-eyed and slight Vantanyar Yaiga saw Putin almost every day in the town hall. Whilst Putin was Sobchak’s chief deputy he was also his chief advisor. ‘You see we felt besieged,’ says Yaiga. ‘We were frightened that if we split, that if we broke up, the communists could come back, and it would all be ruined.’ Yaiga stammers and forgets his words with age. ‘This besieged feeling gave both Sobchak and Putin a high degree of commitment and loyalty to the people they employed. It would take them a very, very long time to throw out a bad person. You can still see this in the way Putin behaves.’ This mild-mannered man wears a badge of the ruling United Russia party on his lapel. He was a friend of Putin. Twenty years later he has an unclear job as a ‘foreign affairs advisor’, quite something for such an elderly man who cannot speak English, in the tsarist glory of the Mariinsky Palace in St Petersburg. We met in a hall of suitably tsarist grandeur – which only exacerbated his slightness and his vaguest of roles:
‘Oh, Putin had such a wicked sense of humour. During the time we were working together and meeting almost every day – and one day I said to him, “Vladimir Vladimirovich, I have a problem, I’m being harassed by these businessmen for a good deal but I’m only an advisor and have no administrative functions.” He said, “Tell them you eat with us.”’
Even today, Yaiga still finds this ‘joke’ extremely funny, but nationally escalating impunity and embezzlement left Andrei Sinyavsky, the former dissident, full of fear: ‘In the eyes of the people, democracy has become synonymous with poverty, the embezzlement of public funds, and theft. This disappointment with democracy is extremely dangerous for a country without a stable democratic tradition.’25
One possible incident of embezzlement and abuse of power pointed straight at the young Putin. As the official responsible for trade and investment, he had hatched a scheme in 1991 to ship raw materials abroad to ‘save St Petersburg from famine’, signing $122 million worth of deals with nineteen foreign companies, with him as the middleman, in exchange for food. The food never arrived and members of the local legislature campaigned for his resignation.
Alexander Belyaev was then the head of city assembly. He was so disturbed by the food scandal that he called for Putin’s head. Twenty years later this white-haired man with strangely long legs and eyes that never stop moving tries to choose his words carefully. He remembers Putin’s faltering first speech – fending off food accusations – with stumbling pauses. Putin was then nervously speaking in his own defence, as Belyaev was trying to have him fired. We talk as Belyaev smokes Marlboro Reds one after another, with unconscious drags, in a gloomy corridor – not in his office, I presume, for fear of bugs. He whispers hoarsely:
‘When the assembly discussed these Putin matters we decided that it was either corruption or unprofessionalism. This is why we called on Mr Sobchak to dismiss Mr Putin. He didn’t. He stood by him and we didn’t have the power to get rid of him. But all these facts gave us the impression that corruption could have been involved.’
He remembers Putin as no unprofessional fool. ‘You see this man had good qualities too. He was an expert at making friends, of being loyal to those friends. He is a brilliant observer of human nature, and he is very good at tactics.’ Embezzler or not, he saw Putin behaving no differently from the other officials:
‘You need to understand that there were no anticorruption laws, there were no clear rules how anything should be done, no code of conduct for any of these state officials. They were flying abroad on the expense accounts of banks, taking huge ‘gifts’, on which there was no limit in monetary value, they were going on vacations on other’s expenses. This was the time of “privatization”. Putin was enjoying all this too.’
Sobchak protected Putin from the assembly. The deputy mayor claimed he was being persecuted ‘for being a KGB agent’.26 Incidents like this explain the extent to which the Sobchak–Putin team discredited themselves. They ended up being despised, like the Yeltsin cabal, and lost the mayoral race in 1996 to a group of politicians who were even more brazenly corrupt and in hock with the mafia. More importantly, Sobchak had fallen out with Yeltsin’s then blood brother and moonshine drinking partner Alexander Korzhakov, his KGB chief bodyguard, who wielded enormous power in court. He threw his weight against them. Anti-Sobchak leaflets were dropped from helicopters. This election was Putin’s only real, traumatic, experience of running a competitive vote as the losing side’s campaign manager. He refused to serve the new mayor and withdrew dejected to his dacha, to train dogs. A personal failure.
Operation Successor
The year that Sobchak lost his election was the year that Boris Yeltsin, unsteady on his feet after five heart attacks, but desperate not to lose power, began to turn Russia into a ‘managed democracy’. He had grabbed a conductor’s baton next to Chancellor Helmut Kohl on live TV, uncontrollably drunk, and waved it wildly at the brass band playing as Russian forces withdrew from Germany. At home his bodyguard’s wife was watching and burst into tears of shame. He then sent over 7,500 soldiers to die in a botched war against Chechen rebels, which he lost, humiliating the remains of the army that had trained to defeat NATO by dashing through the Fulda Gap. His ratings were in single figures and, had the 1996 election been free and fair, he would never have won.
Yeltsin forgot his promise to serve only one term, but knowing full well how loathed he was, he dithered in his decision, mired in depression. Then he woke up one morning and, in a barely audible voice, told bodyguard Korzahkov: ‘I’ve decided to run.’27 To win the Kremlin he made a pact with the new tycoons, known as the oligarchs. These coarse, half-bandit multi-millionaires were epitomized by Boris Berezovsky, who would boast (inaccurately) how he and seven bankers controlled over 50 per cent of Russian GDP.28 They called him ‘the comet’, because he thought so fast, a man who had been festering in late socialism as a mathematician dreaming of winning the Nobel prize. But by the time I met him, in summer 2012, Berezovsky had lost the will to defend his past. His mind was back in the nineties. ‘At first,’ he said, ‘nobody understood what was business.’ He barely made eye contact; the bombast was gone. Eight months later he was found dead on his bathroom floor.
In his glory days, he radiated power and menace. He and the other oligarchs had made every right call in a country falling to bits. These men had just started going to Davos, the annual gathering of the world’s super-elite in the Alps, when they realized that Yeltsin might actually lose the election. They saw the Western elites rushing to shake hands with Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the opposition Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), which seemed poised to return to power, like its rebranded ex-siblings had already done in parts of Eastern Europe.
‘We were shocked at Davos,’ remembered Berezovsky in the gloom of his London office, decorated with portraits of Lenin, Gorbachev and Khrushchev. There was also one of himself, poking his grinning face round a column, as Yeltsin spoke at a podium. ‘We had a very short psychological experience of the West and we were shocked. We had expected the West to help us. We thought they were now scared of new competition.’ His eyes were fixed on a repulsive silver statuette of Picasso in his meeting room, which he seemed particularly proud of. Its stomach opened up to reveal a miniature silver woman bathing in gold coins. He spoke almost comically fast:
‘We didn’t think about others. About those who were not ready for the transition, or who couldn’t make it at all. We didn’t recognize at the time how dangerous it was to split society – how much jealousy and violence that would engender. Those left behind were not as sophisticated or as creative as us, but they were not bad. We, the class that was more advanced in feelings, creativity and understanding of the future, did not take responsibility. We just focused on making more and more money.’