The year before Putin had returned to the USSR, the country had come to a standstill, stunned by the spectacle of its first free elections for people’s deputies to parliament. Andrei Sakharov was elected a deputy only three years after Gorbachev released him from internal exile in the closed city of Gorky. Another deputy of note was the dashing, charismatic law professor Anatoly Sobchak, who would work closely with Sakharov and future Russian president Boris Yeltsin on such previously unthinkable projects as investigating, and condemning, the use of military force against civilian demonstrators.
In May 1990 Sobchak became the chairman of the Leningrad City Council, essentially the mayor, a title that would become official the following year. It was clear to him that Leningrad would soon go hungry without some foreign trade. That meant he needed a motivated, effective person, one with a mastery of a foreign language and experience of living abroad, to advise him on foreign relations. Leningrad State University, where Sobchak taught law, had just such a person heading its own Foreign Relations Department: Vladimir Putin, who had attended Sobchak’s lectures in the early seventies when he was a student, though there was no personal relationship at the time.
As a rule in Russia things move with either glacial slowness or lightning speed, and the latter predominated in those final months of the Soviet Union. Sobchak had Putin in for an interview and made up his mind in a matter of minutes, telling him he should start the following Monday. Putin was more than happy to accept the offer, but felt obliged to reveal that he was a KGB staff officer. After a long moment’s thought, Sobchak said: “Screw it!”[132]
This is Putin’s version of events. There are others. Some would have it that Putin was dispatched there as his next assignment as an officer in the active reserves. Or, as Masha Gessen thought, Sobchak himself might have chosen Putin because he “knew that it was wiser to pick your KGB handler yourself than to have one picked for you.”[133]
In any case, Putin took the position and began working in Smolny, an elegant building that had been a school for young ladies of the nobility before the revolution and Lenin’s headquarters during the revolution itself. He chose a picture of Peter the Great, emperor and reformer, to decorate his office.
Putin, however, remained worried that his KGB connections could be used against him or against Sobchak. The only foolproof means against being outed was to out yourself.
Putin contacted the well-known filmmaker Igor Shadkhan, telling him: “Igor, I want to speak openly about my professional past so that it stops being a secret and so that no one can blackmail me with it.”[134] Shadkhan had just returned from grueling fieldwork filming in the Gulags of the far north and was more interested in resting than in working, but apparently Putin’s ability to charm older men worked again, and it wasn’t long before the interview was broadcast on Leningrad TV.
Looking beefy and deeply tired with dark, raccoonish circles under his eyes, confident but unpolished, Putin not only revealed the crucial information about himself, but also demonstrated that he had mastered the new vocabulary of the time. He called Communism “a beautiful but dangerous fairy tale” and said of the USSR: “As soon as the barbed wire was removed, the country began falling apart.”[135]
Sobchak did not regret his choice of Putin. “He was utterly professional. He worked very well with others, knew how to talk to them. He was decisive.”[136] Putin was on his way up.
It had been a smart choice to turn down Moscow for Leningrad. Putin knew how to operate there and was a Leningrader by temperament—aloof, cerebral, acerbic.
In a referendum in the spring of 1991 the people of Leningrad chose to restore the city’s original name, St. Petersburg. To lead that newly named city into a very uncertain future they elected Anatoly Sobchak as mayor. As a sign that their political careers were now linked and in tandem, Sobchak immediately promoted Putin from adviser on international relations to head of that department. He went from an intellectual resource to an active player.
But Putin was not a month on the job before he and his country faced a crisis of the first order. In August 1991 the lurch and drift of the Soviet Union reached critical mass. A small group of high officials—among them the chairman of the KGB, the prime minister, the interior minister, and the vice president—attempted a putsch, placing Gorbachev under house arrest in the south of the country, where he was vacationing. It was the USSR’s last attempt to save itself and it lasted barely three days. The whole affair was a very Russian mix of the sublime, the ridiculous, and the tragic.
The iconic moment for Russia came when Boris Yeltsin stood on top of a tank that was threatening the White House, as the Russian parliament building in Moscow was known. He called on the army and the people to stand up for freedom and to defy the putschists. Moscow’s patriotic tarts lowered themselves down the tank turrets to distract any soldiers who weren’t yet on the side of the people and freedom.
The mood of Moscow was one of elation, bordering on exaltation. Referring to the three young men, one of them Jewish, who had lost their lives in the struggle for Moscow, one Russian woman said to me in conversation: “There can never be anti-Semitism in Russia again now that a Jew has given his life for Russia’s freedom!”
For Putin these were not days of exaltation but, he says, ones of agonized choice and self-definition. He was torn. The goal of the coup—“preserving the Soviet Union from collapse—was noble.” That, however, was not enough. “As soon as the coup began, I immediately decided whose side I was on. I knew for sure that I would never follow the coup-plotters’ orders. I would never be on their side. I knew perfectly well that my behavior could be considered a crime of office. That’s why, on August 20, I wrote a second statement resigning from the KGB…. All the ideals, all the goals that I had had when I went to work for the KGB, collapsed.”[137]
The bond with Sobchak grew tighter in those tense days when people in Russia were making the choice that would decide their own future and the country’s. In St. Petersburg, Sobchak played a role similar to Yeltsin’s. “Speaking from the steps of the Winter Palace, he gave heart to the thousands who did not want to see the clock turned back,” wrote the Economist in his obituary. “Deploying weapons no more violent than his personality and his command of language, he persuaded the commander of the armored troops moving on the city to withdraw.”[138]
But in the midst of trauma there was a certain grotesque levity. “Once I saw the faces of the coup-plotters on TV,” says Putin, “I knew right away that it was all over.”[139] At the junta’s one and only press conference, the “leader,” drab Soviet vice president Gennady Yanayev, kept sneezing into a handkerchief. Dictators should not make their debut blowing their noses.
In an iconoclastic rampage Russians began tearing down the images of Soviet rule. The immense statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the secret police, was torn from its pedestal in front of KGB headquarters on Lubyanka Square. Though heavy, it proved hollow. Some, but not all, of the statues of Lenin were toppled. One of Stalin was struck in the face with a sledgehammer. All of them were taken to a park near an art museum, the New Tretyakov Gallery, and strewn on the grass in a random fury.