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

I had asked her why she had decided to return to politics, when she knew full well she would never again have the kind of influence that had once been hers. She had tried to answer me several times, always stumbling over her own motivation. Finally, she called me from a hospital where she was going to have surgery; about to go under anesthesia, she had been trying to fix her view of her life and had finally found an image she liked. “There is an ancient Greek legend about harpies,” she told me. “They are shadows that can come to life only if they drink human blood. The life of a scholar is the life of a shadow. When one participates in making the future happen, even a small part of the future—and this is what politics is about—that is when one who was a shadow can come to life. But for that, one has to drink blood, including one’s own.”

I FOLLOWED KATE’S STARE to the boom box, which crackled slightly, as though the words emerging from its speakers were causing it strain. The newscaster was saying Galina had been shot dead several hours earlier, in the stairway of her apartment building in St. Petersburg. She had flown in from Moscow in the evening. She and her legislative aide, Ruslan Linkov, had stopped by Galina’s parents’ house for a short visit before continuing to her apartment building on the Griboyedov Embankment, one of the city’s most beautiful streets. When they entered the building, the stairway was dark: the gunmen waiting on the stairs had removed the lightbulbs. They continued up the steps nonetheless, speaking about a court case recently filed against Galina by a nationalist political party. Then there was a clapping sound, and a flash of light; Galina’s speech halted. Ruslan screamed, “What are you doing?” and ran at the source of light and sound. He took the next two bullets.

Ruslan had apparently lost consciousness briefly and then regained it long enough to call a journalist from his cell phone. It was the journalist who called the police. And now, the voice from the boom box was telling me, Galina was dead and Ruslan, whom I also knew and liked, was in the hospital, in critical condition.

IF THIS BOOK WERE A NOVEL, my character probably would have dropped everything upon hearing the news of her friend’s death and, already knowing that life had changed forever, would have rushed off to do something—anything to give the moment its due. In real life, we rarely know when our lives are changed irrevocably or how to act when tragedy strikes. I went shopping for bathroom fixtures for my new apartment. It was when the construction crew leader who went with me said, “Have you heard about Starovoitova?” that I stopped in my tracks. I remember staring down at my boots and the snow, gray and packed hard under the feet of thousands of aspiring homeowners. “We were under contract to build a garage for her,” he said. Somehow, it was then, when I thought how my friend would never need that garage, that I knew just how helpless, scared, and angry I felt. I hopped in my car, drove to the train station, and went to St. Petersburg to try to write the story of what happened to Galina Starovoitova.

Over the following couple of years, I would spend weeks on end in St. Petersburg. Here was another story no one had told before—but it was a much bigger story than any I had written, a much bigger story even than that of the murder, in cold blood, of one of the country’s best-known politicians. What I found in St. Petersburg was a city—Russia’s second-largest city—that was a state within a state. It was a place where the KGB—the organization against which Starovoitova had waged her most important and most hopeless battle—was all-powerful. Local politicians and journalists believed their phones and offices were tapped, and it seemed they were right. It was a place where the murder of major political and business players was a regular occurrence. And it was a place where business deals gone sour could easily land someone behind bars. In other words, it was very much like what Russia itself would become in a few years, once it came to be ruled by the people who ruled St. Petersburg in the 1990s.