Putin bio to year 2000
3-19-2000 by John Lloyd
KGB crimes were never properly examined, and there was no consistent public pressure to do so. Soon after Dzerzhinsky's statue's toppling, a bust of Yuri Andropov, long-serving K.G.B. chief and briefly general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, was prudently removed from its niche in the Lubyanka wall. In December Vladimir Putin who served under Andropov ordered it restored.
K.G.B. men had been heroes of Soviet fiction and journalism since the 1920’s. From the mid-30's to World War II the depiction of the agent as hero became particularly clear-cut, a notable example of the Soviet genius for dissimulation.
It was an image that many millions of Soviet citizens accepted, at least in part. Putin's father, also Vladimir, probably did. According to a recent profile published in Moscow he was a Communist Party member who ''had links'' with the K.G.B.; the family was both patriotic and reserved, ''pure Leningrad working class.’' His mother died of cancer in 1998, his father of a heart condition a year later, soon after Putin became prime minister. Reportedly the old man said on his deathbed ''My son is like a czar!’’…
In an interview in Komsomolskaya Pravda in early February, Sergei Ivanov -- like Putin, a former middle-ranking foreign intelligence officer and a close friend whom Putin made secretary of the Security Council -- said modestly that ''the cream went into the K.G.B. And a word on the human rights defenders. Andrei Sakharov said not long before his death in 1990 that the one organization which expressed respect for him was the K.G.B. Do you believe the opinion of this man?’' I could find no reference or memory of Sakharov's saying such a thing. Late last month though, Sakharov's widow, Elena Bonner, signed a letter with other former dissidents calling Putin's fledgling regime ''the introduction of modernized Stalinism.’’…
Putin's period in the K.G.B. in St. Petersburg and in East Germany has been trawled over, but little has emerged beyond the enormous paradox that this self-confident, articulate and subtle performer was regarded -- when he was noticed at all -- as gray, silent, nondescript. He was posted to Dresden in 1985, where his cover was to run the Soviet-German House of Friendship in Leipzig. His real task was to recruit agents to supply technical and economic information; he may have been involved in setting up a K.G.B. network to prepare for the collapse of East Germany.
When East Germany did indeed collapse Putin headed back to a routine job in St. Petersburg--screening foreign students at his alma mater, Leningrad State. There he was picked up by Anatoly Sobchak, the former St. Petersburg mayor who gave him his start in politics….''I met him again after many years, by chance,'' Sobchak said. ''He said he'd left the K.G.B., and so he became my aide, then in a few months my deputy, then first deputy. For six years we worked together very closely. He was utterly professional. He worked very well with others, knew how to talk to them. He was decisive. When you put something to him, he would think about and, if he could do it, he would say yes, never no. Judge his success--he was in charge of foreign investment, and by 1993 we had 6,000 joint ventures, half the total in Russia.''
Searching for clues to the ''real'' Putin can be frustrating. Those who know him well offer little more than variations on the Sobchak line--admiration, praise, an impression of sober industry and self-sacrificing loyalty. It is confirmed even by the few foreigners who knew him. ''I found him great to deal with, compared with these other Russian bureaucrats who all wanted to fleece you,'' says Graham Humes, an American who set up a charity in St. Petersburg. ''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.''
The people who care most about democracy in Russia do fear him however and say they have cause. They see him as the past returned and say so. I talked one evening in Moscow to Sergei Kovalev, a onetime protege of Andrei Sakharov. In his frowzy office in a crumbling apartment building he remains serene but as uncompromising as ever. For him, as once for Sakharov, liberal democracy is available, so why not have it? ''Putin's priority will be to increase the powers of the state, and in Russia that tradition is a grim one. He will be efficient, but efficient in what cause? I heard that he talked of K.G.B. men being 'dropped into power like paratroopers' under his rule. Yeltsin at least made efforts to overcome the reflexes of the party boss he had been. In this case we see a glorying in the traditions of the K.G.B., and the power they now have.''
Kovalev's hostility is echoed by Amy Knight of George Washington University, the West's foremost scholar of the organization. ''I don't agree with all this modern-man stuff about Putin,'' she said. ''Look what he's doing--he's clamping down.”
Boris Pustintsev felt the sharp end of the K.G.B. stick when in 1956 he and a group of fellow students at Leningrad State wrote a letter of protest against the Soviet intervention in Hungary. He served five years in a prison camp in Mordovia. In 1992 Pustintsev was a central witness in a film on St. Petersburg made for Britain's Channel 4. In the film he is seen referring to the ''K.G.B.-ization'' of Sobchak's administration, with six of the city district's leaders being former K.G.B. officers. Two days after the documentary was shown in a Petersburg cinema Pustintsev was assaulted by a gang of young men. He was left nearly unconscious with a wound that almost cost him the use of his right eye.
One evening in his flat Pustintsev showed me both the Channel 4 documentary and an interview he did with Petersburg TV after the assault -- his face still bruised and his eye heavily bandaged. In a voice shaking with anger he says that ''if people like that, people of the type of Putin, ever get real power, then we are all finished!’' It was a little eerie, watching the eight-year old interview in a country that was preparing to give a great deal of real power to Vladimir Putin.
Pustintsev is convinced that the ''K.G.B.-ization'' he warned against is now coming to pass. He points to the three men who stand behind Putin at the summit of Russian state security, all of whom are drawn from the Leningrad/Petersburg K.G.B.: Sergei Ivanov, head of the Security Council; Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Federal Security Service (F.S.B.), the domestic intelligence arm; and most notably Viktor Cherkesov, the F.S.B.'s first deputy director. ''This man was known as a democrat- hater when he was head of the Petersburg F.S.B.,'' says Pustintsev. ''He led an attack on the democratic organizations when they began to emerge in the last part of the 1980's.'' The clear signs are that both Patrushev and Cherkesov enjoy Putin's closest trust.
Putin was taken to Moscow in June 1996 by two Petersburgers -- Anatoly Chubais, the former privatization minister and deputy prime minister, then at the height of his powers, and Aleksei Kudrin, who had been head of St. Petersburg's privatization committee and is now acting finance minister. Putin moved up the ranks like a destroyer steaming unscathed through broadsides. In July 1998 he left the Kremlin to become the head of the F.S.B. By the following March he was in charge of the Security Council and in August was made prime minister. In these posts he avoided scandal and took pains to stress his loyalty to Yeltsin.
When Putin was head of the F.S.B. Yevgeny Primakov was prime minister-- placed there with great reluctance by Yeltsin, as the opposition surged after the economic crash of August 1998. Primakov, himself a former spy master (in foreign intelligence), began to move against businesspeople and politicians he thought corrupt. Putin was ordered to investigate Boris Berezovsky, the billionaire financier and patron of the Yeltsin ''family''--the extended circle of relatives and trusted associates that helped make key decisions, agreed on key appointments and drew a tight protective ring around the former president. Putin refused.
It was a shrewd choice--to defend an ailing and politically weakened Yeltsin against Primakov, then the most popular politician in Russia, with the Communist and nationalist opposition forces in ascendancy. But Yeltsin rallied, eventually dismissing Primakov, and Putin had earned the trust of the ''family'' which took him in as one of its own.
In a memorandum prepared in January for a leading Russian financial conglomerate by an analyst with close knowledge of the Kremlin court the argument is made that Putin remains a partial prisoner of the "family” because of his inexperience. ''Putin,'' the analyst writes, ''was in the last 10 years a man who fulfilled another's orders; he lacks experience of carrying through political decisions solely on his own. He is still under the spell of Yeltsin's greatness. He has a subordinate type of mentality and feels dependent on Berezovsky's clan.''
Upon assuming office after Yeltsin's resignation at the New Year, Putin signed a decree exempting the president from any criminal or civil suit--an act widely believed to be part of the reason he was chosen as Yeltsin's heir. But the decree may also have broken the spell. For while Putin--who certainly lacks experience in the corridors of absolute power--remains dependent on the dark skills of the Kremlin fixers he is also putting together his own circle.
Besides the three top people in security, other senior appointments include Viktor Ivanov (no relation to Sergei) from the St. Petersburg K.G.B.; Igor Sechin, Putin's main aide in St. Petersburg; Dmitry Kozak, a former head of the St. Petersburg legal department; and Vladimir Kozhin, former head of the St. Petersburg regional center of Currency and Export Control--a body reputedly run by the security services….
Putin also has his own party, Unity, which won more than 25 percent of the votes in last December's Parliament elections, almost as many votes as the Communists. It did so on one policy: vote for Putin, the savior of the country. It acts as the Kremlin's anchor, uniting with the Communists to manufacture a complaisant parliamentary leadership.…Putin has been catlike in his relations with Anatoly Chubais--publicly criticizing Unified's financial performance while making no pretense of consulting Chubais or his colleagues on economic policy issues….
Putin has been clear in the central things: his desire for power and his effectiveness in wielding it. He is also a master of the sine qua non of modern, or perhaps postmodern, politicians: he can manipulate symbols. Among the most potent of those in post-Soviet Russia is that of the Orthodox Church. Putin is the first Russian leader since Czar Nicholas II who can plausibly proclaim himself a believer, having been baptized soon after birth and remaining faithful to the creed….the former K.G.B. colonel kissing the hands of one (Alexei II) who -- according to a dossier published in the early 90's--was more than usually helpful to the K.G.B. while rising through a hierarchy that was routinely vetted and controlled by the security services. ''Vladimir Vladimirovich,'' said the master of ceremonies as he rose, ''what is your message for the new millennium?'' ''Love,'' said the president-to-be.
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/19/magazine/the-logic-of-vladimir-putin.html
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