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

In other words, I was one of those young people who had gained everything in the 1990s. Many people older and younger than I was had paid dearly for the transition. The older generation had lost its savings to hyperinflation and its identities to the apparent destruction of all Soviet institutions. The younger generation was growing up in the shadow of its parents’ fear and, often, failure. But I had been twenty-four years old the year the Soviet Union collapsed, and my peers and I had spent the 1990s inventing our careers and what we thought were the ways and institutions of a new society. Even as violent crime seemed to become epidemic in Russia, we felt peculiarly secure: we observed and occasionally described the criminal underworld without ever feeling that it might affect our existence. Plus, I was certain that things would only get better: I had recently bought a dilapidated former communal apartment in the very heart of Moscow, and I was now renovating it before moving out of the flat I rented with Kate, a British editor working for an oil trade publication. I envisioned myself starting a family in that new apartment. And this particular Saturday, I had an appointment with the contractor to go shopping for bathroom fixtures.

KATE GESTURED AT THE BOOM BOX as though it were a source of toxins, and looked at me questioningly. Galina Starovoitova, whose name the newscaster was repeating over and over, was a member of the lower house of parliament, one of Russia’s best-known politicians, and a friend. In the late 1980s, when the empire teetered on the brink of collapse, Starovoitova, an ethnographer, became a pro-democracy activist and the most prominent spokesperson for the people of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian exclave in Azerbaijan that was then engulfed in the first of many armed ethnic conflicts that would mark the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc. Like several other academics turned politicians, she had seemed to emerge in the spotlight instantly. Though she had lived in Leningrad since she was an infant, the people of Armenia nominated her as their representative to the first quasi-democratically elected Supreme Soviet, and in 1989 she was voted into office by an overwhelming majority. In the Supreme Soviet, she became a leader of the Interregional Group, a minority pro-democracy faction whose leadership also included Andrei Sakharov and Boris Yeltsin. As soon as Yeltsin was elected president of Russia in 1990—at that point largely a ceremonial and even aspirational post—Galina became his closest adviser, counseling him officially on ethnic issues and unofficially on everything else, including government appointments. In 1992, Yeltsin was considering Galina for the post of minister of defense; such an appointment, of a civilian and a woman whose views bordered on the pacifist, would have been a grand gesture in classic early-1990s Yeltsin style, a message that nothing would ever be the same in Russia and perhaps in the world.

That nothing should ever be the same was the crux of Galina’s agenda, radical even by early-nineties pro-democracy activist standards. As part of a small group of lawyers and politicians, she tried unsuccessfully to put the Communist Party of the USSR on trial. She authored a draft law on lustratsiya (lustration), the word deriving from the ancient Greek for “purification,” a concept that was now coming into use in former Eastern Bloc countries to denote the process of banning former Party and secret police operatives from holding public office. In 1992, she learned that the KGB had reconstituted an internal Party organization—a direct violation of Yeltsin’s August 1991 post–failed-coup decree outlawing the Russian Communist Party. At a public meeting in July 1992, she tried to confront Yeltsin with this fact, and he had rudely dismissed her, signaling both the end of Galina’s career in his administration and his own increasingly conciliatory stance toward the security services and the many die-hard Communists who remained in power or close to it. Dismissed from the administration, Galina made a push for the lustration law, which failed, and then left Russian politics altogether and decamped to the United States, first to the U.S. Institute for Peace in Washington, and then to teach at Brown University.