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

BEREZOVSKY THE PH.D. and his small propaganda army formed of highly educated men seemed to see no contradiction between their stated goal of securing Russia’s democratic future and the man in whom they had chosen to vest their hopes for this future. They worked tirelessly on their campaign, using the might of Berezovsky’s Channel One to smear former prime minister Primakov and his governor allies. One memorable program explained Primakov’s recent hip surgery in repulsive anatomical detail. Another focused on Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov’s ostensible resemblance to Mussolini. But in addition to discrediting his opponents, Putin’s allies—who thought of themselves more as his authors than his supporters—had to create and put forth an image of their own candidate.

Strictly speaking, Putin was not running a campaign—the presidential election was not expected for nearly a year, and Russia did not have a political culture of protracted campaigns—but the people who wanted to see him become president were very much campaigning. An influential political consulting firm called the Foundation for Effective Politics, located in one of the city’s most beautiful historic buildings, just across the river from the Kremlin, was tasked with creating the image of Putin as a young, energetic politician who would advance much-needed reform. “Everyone was so tired of Yeltsin, it was an easy job to do,” a woman who had been instrumental in the campaign told me.

Her name was Marina Litvinovich, and like many people who worked at the Foundation for Effective Politics, she was very young, very smart (she had just graduated from one of the best universities), and very inexperienced in politics, even naive. She had come to work at the foundation part-time when she was still a student, and three years later she was a key person on the presidential campaign team. She believed herself to be entirely devoted to democratic ideals, and yet she saw nothing wrong with the way the future president was being invented and sold to the public: she simply trusted the people who had thought the whole thing up. “There were some articles coming out saying he was from the KGB,” she told me years later, “but the headquarters was staffed with liberals and we were convinced these were the people who would make up his inner circle.”

Nor did one have to be young and naive to believe that. In the late summer of 1999, I had a memorable dinner with Alexander Goldfarb, an old acquaintance who had been a dissident in the 1970s; he had played the role of Andrei Sakharov’s translator, become an émigré, spending the 1980s in New York, and turned into a highly effective social activist in the 1990s. He had served as billionaire philanthropist George Soros’s adviser on Russia; he had then launched a campaign to publicize and fight Russia’s epidemic of drug-resistant tuberculosis, bringing it to the world’s attention almost single-handedly. Now Alex and I were having dinner and talking about Putin. “He is the KGB’s flesh and blood,” I said to him, then still testing a theory more than making an argument. “But I hear from Chubais that he is smart, effective, and worldly,” Alex countered. Even a former dissident was nearly convinced that Putin was the modern young politician the Foundation for Effective Politics was inventing.

The more the military campaign in Chechnya escalated, the more the entire country seemed to be in thrall. Berezovsky, meanwhile, came up with the idea of a new political party, one that would be entirely devoid of ideology. “Nobody would hear the words if we said them,” he told me nine years later, still apparently convinced this had been a stellar invention. “I decided we would replace ideology with faces.” Berezovsky’s people cast about for faces and came up with a couple of celebrities and one cabinet minister. But the face that mattered most belonged to the man who had been faceless just weeks earlier: as Putin’s popularity soared, so did the new political party’s. In the parliamentary election on December 19, 1999, nearly a quarter of the voters chose the two-month-old bloc called Yedinstvo (Unity) or Medved (The Bear), making it the largest faction in the lower house of parliament.

To cement Putin’s lead, someone in the Family—no one seems able to recall who it was any longer—proposed a brilliant move: Yeltsin should resign early. As prime minister, Putin would, by law, become acting president, turning into an instant incumbent in the upcoming race. His opponents would be caught by surprise, and the lead time to the election would be shortened. In fact, Yeltsin should do it on December 31. It would be a very Yeltsin move: he would upstage the millennium, the Y2K bug, and any other news story that might occur almost anyplace in the world. It would also come on the eve of the traditional two-week New Year’s and Christmas hiatus, making the time available for Putin’s opponents to prepare for the vote that much shorter.