Putin

There was a violent nostalgia for the Soviet past. For the democracy of poverty, cheap goods, brutal certainties. The extreme tensions in Russian society were expressed in the battle waged by the nationalists and Communists in parliament against the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. In mid-1993 the parliament declared itself the supreme power in the country, which now seemed on the verge on civil war. In response Yeltsin suspended parliament to protect, as he put it, “Russia and the whole world against the catastrophic consequences of the disintegration of the Russian state, against anarchy recurring in a country which has an enormous arsenal of nuclear weapons.”

The rebellious deputies seized the White House. Well armed—five hundred submachine guns, six machine guns, two hundred pistols—the rebels’ numbers shifting from 400 to 800. Outside, the building was ringed by supporters bearing the black-and-yellow flags of the nationalists and the red banners of Communism along with signs: “Revive the Communist Party of Russia,” “Let’s reveal the ethnicity of all those who were in the mass media!” (meaning Jews), “Blacks out of Moscow!” (meaning people from the Caucasus mountain region, often referred to as “blacks” or “black asses”).

The sporadic violence came to a head on October 4, 1993, when Yeltsin ordered an attack. There was a fifteen-minute tank barrage followed by a mop-up action inside the building in which twenty soldiers and forty rebels were killed.

The ironies were heavy-handed even by Russian standards. Some two years before, Yeltsin had stood atop a tank in front of that same White House to save Russia from a putsch, and now he had ordered tanks to fire on parliament. The blackened front of that white building became a sort of tragic icon of its own.

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In winter 1992 St. Petersburg was in a panic over a possible famine. The city council put Marina Salye in charge of food supplies, and it was she who introduced rationing and ration cards. Every resident of the city had the right to three pounds of meat per month, two pounds of processed meats, ten eggs, one pound of butter, half a pound of vegetable oil, one pound of flour, and two pounds of grain or dry pasta—if he or she could find any.

Salye, a geologist by profession, had spent much of her adult life far from the tense, polluted cities. Geology was a romantic profession that allowed for travel over all the vast yet still somehow claustrophobic territory of the USSR. Days of hard work in nature, nights of campfires, wine, guitars. Nevertheless, Salye proved totally adept at politics and quickly emerged as one of the leaders of the democratic movement in Leningrad. “With a cigarette dangling from her lips, she could lead a crowd up and down Nevsky, stopping traffic,” as one of her political opponents described her.

Her attempt to feed her starving city would prove the misfortune of her life. She could not help but notice that an agreement to ship Russian raw materials—gas, oil, timber, metals—in exchange for food to a foreign concern had gone totally awry. The nearly $100 million of raw materials had indeed been shipped, but not a ruble’s worth of food had arrived. Looking into the matter further, Salye discovered documents indicating that Vladimir Putin, as head of the Foreign Relations Committee, had entered into contracts with legally dubious companies. Working with a colleague, Yuri Gladkov, she collected more evidence and presented it to the city council, which concluded that the money had been stolen and recommended to Mayor Sobchak that Putin be dismissed.

Sobchak’s response was to dissolve the city council. He wasn’t about to impede Putin, whose achievements were obvious. “Judge his success—he was in charge of foreign investment, and by 1993 we had 6,000 joint ventures, half the total in Russia.” Putin helped attract American firms like Coca-Cola, Wrigley, and Gillette. And foreigners enjoyed working with Putin. Graham Humes, an American who set up a charity in St. Petersburg, said of him: “I found him great to deal with compared with these other Russian bureaucrats who all wanted to fleece you. He was very intense; he controls everything in the room. You felt he wanted to be feared but didn’t want to give you cause to fear him.”

Putin succeeded in completing a project to lay fiber-optic cable to give St. Petersburg world-class international phone service. So what if $100 million disappeared? A thousand tons of gold also disappeared as the USSR was collapsing. Later on, Russia’s chief comptroller at the time called the case “not radically more serious than what was going on in the rest of Russia…. It was just a typical case at the time.” You hardly threw away one of your most gifted and dogged assistants over such a measly sum, such a typical case.