In 1976 a young KGB officer told two old classmates that he had just won a car in a government lottery and worked at the local prosecutor’s office. Sergei and Yelena Kudrov remembered it later. When they pressed him about the job, he joked: “Before lunch, we’re busy catching criminals. After lunch, we’re busy shooting them.”
The man was Vladimir Putin. Twenty-four years later he was the favorite to win the Russian presidency, and much of his past was still a puzzle to the people who would vote for him.
A communal flat in Leningrad
Putin was born in Leningrad in October 1952. His family shared one small room in a communal apartment with several other families, with no hot water and no proper kitchen. He recalled chasing rats in the stairwell as a child. His father worked at a train-car factory and ran a Communist Party cell. His mother swept streets and washed test tubes at a laboratory.
By Putin’s own telling, his grandfather had cooked for Lenin and then Stalin, and his father had served in the NKVD during the war. His mother survived the siege of Leningrad. He said two older brothers died young.
Teachers picked him for Leningrad School No. 281, for the city’s brightest pupils. He was smaller than most classmates and studied judo and sambo. Kudrov recalled a ninth-grade fight in which an older boy kicked Putin and Putin kicked back, then calmly put the bigger boy down after school. He never bragged about it.
It was also in ninth grade that he decided on the KGB, after reading a spy novel. He went to the Leningrad office uninvited. An agent told him the service never took volunteers, but suggested law school. Putin enrolled at Leningrad State University, and the KGB offered him a job in his last year. He graduated in 1975.
Spy, then city official
He was one of a few chosen for the KGB’s foreign intelligence institute in Moscow, where he learned German. In 1985 he was sent to Dresden in East Germany under a cover job running a German-Russian house of friendship. His task, he said, was recruiting agents and gathering information on NATO members. He earned two promotions and a two-year extension.
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Putin burned so many secret documents that his stove “burst”. He came home in 1990.
Back in Russia, he met Anatoly Sobchak, a former law professor and one of the country’s leading democrats. Putin told him he was still a KGB agent, and Sobchak hired him anyway. Putin helped Sobchak win the St. Petersburg mayor’s race in 1991. When hard-line Communists staged a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev that year, Putin said he quit the KGB as a lieutenant colonel. He had spent 16 years as a spy.
He became deputy mayor and ran the city day to day, including its foreign economic ties. Friends said his biggest achievement was opening St. Petersburg to foreign investment. Others point out that the early 1990s also set the stage for the city’s reputation for corruption. Sobchak was later charged with corruption. Putin was accused of a role in shipping metals abroad in exchange for food that never arrived, but no charges were filed.
Moscow and the Yeltsin circle
After Sobchak lost his 1996 re-election bid, Pavel Borodin, who ran the Kremlin property department, offered Putin a job in Moscow. In 1998 he was named head of the FSB, the KGB’s successor. Putin said he was more surprised than anyone.
Wikipedia’s account of the period describes a Kremlin worried about what would come after Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin, in poor health and barred from a third term, had cycled through six prime ministers since 1998. His inner circle, which the account calls “the family”, wanted a loyal successor who could shield them from reprisals. Sergei Stepashin was tried and dropped. In August 1999 Yeltsin named Putin prime minister in his place.
Putin had shown his usefulness as FSB chief, the account says, by helping remove Prosecutor General Yuri Skuratov, a Yeltsin critic, with compromising material. It also says he had not expected to last. In December 1998 he described his government work as “an interesting chapter in his life” that would soon end, and the leading successor then seemed to be Yevgeny Primakov.
Then the numbers moved. With strong backing from state and oligarch-controlled media, Putin went from 2 percent support in August 1999 to 51 percent by year’s end. On 31 December 1999 Yeltsin resigned and Putin became acting president. He was elected to a full term in March 2000.
The man nobody knew
At 47, he was the youngest Kremlin leader since Stalin took over the Communist Party in 1922. A Moscow Times poll released days before the vote had him at 53 percent, with Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov at 22 percent and 11 challengers behind them. He refused to debate and declined to run campaign commercials. “I will not be trying to find out in the course of my election campaign which is more important, Tampax or Snickers,” he said.
The Los Angeles Times described him as a blank screen. Nationalists saw a patriot, Communists a pragmatist, and Western-minded business people a reformer. Russia’s tycoons expected him to protect the privatization deals that made them rich.
The war in Chechnya was already his. It had killed thousands of people and driven a quarter of a million from their homes, and he had ordered the destruction of Grozny, once a city of 400,000. “You must hit first and hit so hard that your opponent will not rise to his feet,” he said of it.
Sergei Kudrov, the classmate, planned to vote for him. “I think he is a decent person,” he said. “But our experience tells us there are no decent people in the Kremlin. So my question is: If there are no decent people in the Kremlin, what is he doing there?”
