Book review: The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

Let’s imagine that Scotland is going to the polls tomorrow. The only candidate who stands any chance of winning is a man who seems to delight in a reputation for being a political thug. Some people reckon he’s worth $40 billion, of which at least $1 billion has been spent on his holiday home. Already he’s been in power for 12 years, and if he wins again he will most likely rule Scotland for 12 more.

His rise to power was spectacular. Within a year of getting the top job, he brought the three main Scottish media companies under his control. Journalists investigating the murkier dealings of his regime – and the whistleblowers who help them – tend to wind up dead. And there are a lot of murky deals for them to investigate: last year, the watchdog group Transparency International rated Scotland one of the most corrupt countries (154th out of 178) in the world. Human rights groups reckon that a full 15 per cent of the inmates in Scottish jails are entrepreneurs denounced by their better connected rivals.

How did such a man come to power in the first place in a fine country like Scotland – or indeed Russia, where the only unknown element about tomorrow’s presidential election is the margin by which Vladimir Putin will win? That, says Masha Gessen, is the biggest mystery of all. “Possibly the most bizarre fact about Putin’s ascent to power is that the people who lifted him to the throne knew little more about him than you do.”

She blames Boris Yeltsin, the USSR’s last president. He churned his way through all the best candidates, often sacking them on a whim after just a few weeks in charge – so that soon there was hardly anybody who hadn’t been discredited. So when in 1999 Yeltsin’s popularity had plummeted so low that he looked certain to lose the upcoming election, Putin got his big chance. Ironically enough, given what happened between them later on, the man who gave him it was media tycoon Boris Berezovsky. Putin had been a deputy to one of Berezovsky’s allies, a former mayor of St Petersburg. There were two things that impressed Berezovsky about Putin: firstly, that he had not abandoned the mayor when so many others did. Secondly, that Putin didn’t take a bribe when he was offered one. Funny thing, hindsight.

If Yeltsin lost the 2000 election, not only would all of his reforms be put into reverse, but he would most likely be prosecuted for corruption. Yet by the end of 1999, when the barely known medium-grade KGB officer had been his prime minister for five months, Yeltsin resigned from the presidency. The man from nowhere had got the top job in the world’s biggest country. All he had to do was keep it in the March 2000 election.

The one thing everyone knew about Putin was that he was a hard man: “the new Stalin”, his former St Petersburg boss reassured the voters. Being the new Stalin was a clear vote-winner: if Russia was both to get to grips with the abysmal collapse of its economy and prosecute a war against the Chechen rebels, an updated Uncle Joe was urgently needed.

In August 1999, three weeks after Putin became Yeltsin’s prime minister, Chechen terrorists had let off a bomb in a Moscow shopping mall. In September, more bombs exploded in a couple of tower blocks just outside Moscow. In both cases, explosives were planted under the stairwell and detonated in the middle of the night. The death toll was 100 in the first, 124 in the second.

Mercifully, on 22 September, a third atrocity was averted. Under the stairwell of a building in Rayazan, 100 miles away from Moscow, police found three bags of explosives. The bags were marked “Sugar”. Through a slit in the top, they could see wires and a clock. They summoned the bomb squad, who identified the “sugar” as explosives which originated in an FSB (the new-look KGB) depot. The FSB came up with an unconvincing story that it was all a training exercise.

How close to Putin does all of this go? Did the state really conspire to blow up its own citizens? Gessen has few doubts, and given that she still lives in Moscow, she is a brave woman to make the case she does so strongly. Her thesis is that Putin’s worldview is simple enough to discern: it’s that of an unreconstructed KGB officer. Loyalty to one’s colleagues, a profound suspicion of democracy and the media, a need to control the levers of economic and political power and work them in secret: these are, she argues, the guiding principles of the modern post-Marxist Machiavelli.

What, then, was Putin doing at the time of the 1991 coup against Gorbachev? In the West, our understanding of the coup is simple enough: that was the moment Yeltsin climbed onto the tank and single-handedly changed history: we all saw it on the TV news. The truth is, says Gessen, even 20 years on, no-one really knows why that coup was so easily crushed. Why, for example, wasn’t Yeltsin arrested? That, surely, would be Rule No 1 in the KGB coup-planning manual. Is the answer that they wanted Yeltsin to sideline Gorbachev and make him forever in their debt – so much so that, when the time came, he would hand over to one of their own (who would then promise immunity from prosecution)? Or is that just the liberals’ paranoia?

But then there’s a lot for Moscow’s liberals to get paranoid about. Consider the evidence. Here’s Gessen’s friend and mentor Galina Starovoitova, one of the heroines of the 1991 coup. She discovers that the coup planners had set up a deal to swap Russian commodities for German food and that the person who signed it was … OK, you’re ahead of me. Starovoitova was shot dead in 1998.

In Britain, we know all about the polonium poisoning – in London, no less – of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. Or we might think we do. But we probably didn’t read his book about the foiled explosion in Rayazan which discredited the official line still further. Was that the reason he was killed?

And what about Yuri Shchekochikhin? He had been on the independent committee investigating those bombings, but in 2003 that didn’t stop him being poisoned by an unknown toxin. He had just, according to a friend, also come up with evidence that some of the Chechen suicide bombers in the Moscow theatre siege debacle were convicted felons who, on paper at least, should still have been serving their sentences in Russian jails at the time (so who let them out?). And you have only got to remember that Shchekochikhin was the boss of Anna Politkovskaya (who was herself the victim of a failed poisoning two years before her assassination in 2006) to realise that the case for paranoia about Vladimir Putin runs very deep indeed.

To Gessen, who as a war correspondent has routinely faced real danger, writing the story of the KGB’s role in St Petersburg politics was “the most frightening story I ever had to write: never before had I been forced to describe a reality so emotionless and cruel, so clear and so merciless, so corrupt and so utterly void of remose”. Dramatic as her story is, however, it is not clearly told: the narrative thread is all too often lost as stories are put aside in favour of irrelevancies or told completely out of chronological sequence. Too often she takes the lazy reporter’s option of writing about the angle of the story that she herself covered rather than filling in the bigger picture.

And while her portrait of Putin as a cold-hearted street-fighter and hardened former spy may well be true, she isn’t prepared to admit that to Russia at large – as opposed to Moscow’s liberal elite – that combination might actually be rather attractive. After all, after a country has imploded as spectacularly as the USSR did, isn’t the very idea of an authoritarian leader, a man who can’t be pushed around, a man who can restore order and who make Russia be taken seriously again – bound to have widespread political appeal?

Anyone who has watched Norma Percy’s recent excellent documentary series Russia, Putin and the West on BBC2 might well hope that this book is its equivalent for Russia’s domestic politics. It isn’t. Yet if you are trying to understand how the man who will win tomorrow’s election rose to power, it is invaluable all the same. Gessen ends on a note of hope – the white-ribbon demonstrations in December against November’s rigged parliamentary elections herald, she says, a new kind of Russian politics. We’ll find out whether she’s right soon enough.

• The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

By Masha Gessen

Granta, 314pp, £20