The Spy Who Came In From The Crowd

By Johanna Mcgeary/Moscow

He is so colorless, so ordinary a man you could not pick him out of a crowd. Prying eyes would slide right by the slight, spare figure with the bland, expressionless face. The perfect anonymity of a spy. He built a career on being a nonentity, the man you can't know, operating in the twilight world of cold war espionage, where power lies with the man who is a mystery to all but himself.

Now Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has been catapulted from the shadows into the most public of positions: President of all Russia. He is about to inherit constitutional powers akin to a Czar's in what is called an election but amounts to a coronation. But make no mistake: this was not a fair fight. Putin was handpicked for this handover by a tiny cabal in the Kremlin, little different from the ways of the old Soviet Central Committee. Boris Yeltsin and his cronies needed a successor loyal enough to give them the guarantee they craved of immunity from prosecution and strong enough to make it stick. It could have been anyone. Putin happened to have the right qualities in the right place at the right time.

Putin was lucky, but he also made his luck. Look at his eyes. Blue as steel. Cold as the Siberian ice. They bore into you, but you cannot penetrate them. Sometimes they're a mirror, reflecting what you want to see. Sometimes they're a mask disguising real intentions. Those eyes are Putin's strongest feature--not counting his unflinching will. He has proved a consummate opportunist, riding into office on loyalty to his bosses and then war fervor. President Putin will succeed where predecessors failed, says Chief of Staff and confidant Dmitri Kozak, "because the will is there. Discipline and will."

Should we be afraid? He has done some things (like fighting a bloodbath war in Chechnya) and said some things (like his talk of a strong state) that give pause. He has said other things, about economic reform and democratic liberties, that encourage. He has deliberately left a great deal ambiguous. He has used the brief official campaign not as an occasion for exposure but as a careful exercise in saying the right things to the right people. Putin, say those who have followed his rise, has always been extremely good at that.

Everyone agrees on some other things about Putin. He is polite, meticulous, efficient. He is focused, intense, decisive. He likes systems; he loves order. The universal applied adjective is pragmatic. He is very smart and very, very disciplined. Russian citizens have embraced him as the anti-Yeltsin: tough, sober, sensible. Being an unknown gave him an advantage; he has tailored his appeal to be all things to all people. The Russian longing for a strong hand is perfectly matched by Putin's willingness to wield one.

The main act of his rule so far, the war in Chechnya, has shown that he is a ruthless practitioner of power. That is the self-evident message of the vicious war. Having put his hand to what he calls "my mission, my historic mission... to sort out the situation in the North Caucasus," Putin has not flinched under mounting casualties or criticism. Says a British Foreign Office analyst: "He's a hard-nosed, unsentimental individual who takes very, very tough decisions and pursues them with complete ruthlessness."

So what will this can-do guy do with the near authoritarian power invested in Russia's President by its constitution? He has always been the competent staff officer, the universal soldier supremely faithful to his bosses at the time--whether they were Soviet hard boys at the KGB, reforming zealots in St. Petersburg or the corrupt and failing Yeltsin regime. Now he will be giving the orders. "We do not know enough of him, and he does not know enough of himself," says Dimitri Simes, president of Washington's Nixon Center, "to know how he will evolve on the job." That's what makes some people so hopeful--and others so nervous.

VLADIMIR WHO? THE RISE OF A DISCIPLINED ROMANTIC

Many politicians come to high office relatively unknown: look at the long history of surprising American Presidents in this century alone, from Truman to Clinton. And biography is not necessarily destiny. But bits and pieces of biography are almost all we have to assess Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Born in 1952, toward the end of the cruel Stalin years, to a lower-class family, Putin was the child of a religious mother who survived the siege of Leningrad and a faithful Communist Party father invalided out of the army with multiple shrapnel wounds. He was a late child, born when his mother was 41 years old. His two brothers died young, one shortly after birth, the other of diphtheria during World War II. Although Vladimir Sr. was party secretary at the train-car factory where he worked, Volodya's mother had him secretly baptized in the Russian Orthodox faith. He grew up in one of the Soviet Union's cramped communal apartments, with no hot water, a frigid common toilet, plenty of kitchen quarrels and the occasional rat.

Putin was always diminutive--today he is only 5 ft. 9 in.--a small, diligent boy who compensated for his size by learning martial arts. He quickly mastered sambo, a Russian style of self-defense, and later switched to judo, which he practices at black-belt status. "It's not just a sport, you know," he told interviewers in the official biography that appeared in Russia last week. "It's a philosophy. It's respect for your elders, for your opponent; there are no weak ones there." And something else: "You must hit first and hit so hard that your opponent will not rise to his feet."

It was the schoolboy Putin too who first conceived of a career in the KGB. Tamara Stelmakova, now 70, still teaches at School 281, the secondary school specializing in chemistry that Volodya attended at 14. She remembers an ordinary boy who stood out mainly for his "beautiful" reports on "political information" in the mandatory Marxist ideology class. Volodya, she recalls, was "always speaking as if he knew what he was talking about," mesmerizing his audience with his smooth delivery. She recalls him as a well-mannered student with poor grades in chemistry, good grades in history and German, and "always an A in discipline."

Putin chose his direction in life, she says, when studying the heroic days of the Leningrad siege. "Intelligence officers were really glorified," says Stelmakova, "in movies, literature, propaganda." Putin fell for the "romance of intelligence service." Putin says he was so keen to join up that he actually went one day--at age 15--to the local KGB headquarters to volunteer. There, a benevolent spook explained that "we don't take people who come to us on their own initiative." His advice: Go to law school.

Putin duly entered Leningrad State University law school in 1970. Classmate Leonid Polokhov, though five years older, befriended Volodya through their shared love of sports. In those days, he says, even though the school was a training ground for apparatchiks, the law faculty had a reputation for mildly progressive thinking. But Putin, he says, "didn't pick up this freethinking spirit."

Throughout his university years, Putin was ever in pursuit of his KGB dream. Judo had made him determined, resolute, hardworking, and he put those talents to work earning solid grades. "If you told him what he had to do, he learned it," says Polokhov. Putin had little time for social life and never joined the sportsmen's friendly drinking. Recalls Polokhov: "I think he was really born to work for the KGB."

In 1975 the coveted invitation came. Alone of his classmates, Putin was recruited to join the Soviet secret police that had marched into Hungary, crushed the Prague Spring, imprisoned dissidents in the Gulag. The service offered a privileged lifestyle and a chance to see the forbidden world of the West. Putin was trained in the ways of the spy and given the perks reserved for the communist elite. He was eventually placed in the First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence, not dissident surveillance) in Leningrad, and there he seemed stuck for nine years, evidently not the top of his class. Sometime during these years he met his wife Lyudmila--a flight attendant--and they had two daughters, now 14 and 13. He shrouded his work in mystery and loved the secrecy of the job. But finally he complained to Polokhov that his career was going nowhere. "Though I didn't know his exact position," says Polokhov, who was working for the military prosecutor's office, "he let me know he was dissatisfied."

Finally, in 1984, Putin was sent to the KGB Red Banner Academy and Foreign Intelligence School 101 to prepare for service abroad, then posted to East Germany. Few concrete facts have emerged about his career there, and observers disagree about the quality of his service, from brilliant James Bond to third-rate flop. The known outlines--and the way his career ended--suggest something unremarkable. "He was no superspy," admits one of his young Kremlin aides. "His line was political intelligence" aimed at recruiting Western agents. Putin says his work involved ferreting out information on the U.S.S.R.'s political enemies: pressuring East Germans into collecting information in the West, suborning visiting Western scientists and businessmen.

He lived in Dresden, and at least once a camera caught him shopping in West Berlin. But he seems to have spent most of his time as deputy director of the backwater House of German-Soviet Friendship in Leipzig collecting, analyzing and passing on bits of information. He was thought to be close to his counterparts in the East German intelligence service, Stasi, who were notorious for their crude repression, though he claims he "never saw it." He rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, respectable but hardly stellar.

What may have affected his future most was the spectacle of the Soviet Empire's downfall. In excerpts from his book, he recalls the bunker atmosphere in his offices in East Berlin as the Soviet system came tumbling down. Putin called home to find out what to do. But "Moscow was silent," occupied with its own meltdown. "I felt," he recalls, "that the country no longer existed."

Lieut. Colonel Putin came home to a Russia that was radically altered. While he had been tasting the ways of the West, his country had roiled through the reversals of perestroika. Moscow Center's talent spotters took no interest in him, and he was given a low-rent KGB "cover" job assisting the rector at his old Leningrad university, a position normally reserved for a retiring agent. He was unsure how he fit into the new order, says a close aide. Worse, says Polokhov, who met him again in 1990, Putin was "hurt that the state did not want him anymore." Polokhov says Putin told him then that he was "fired without a pension" from the agency he had so lovingly served for 15 years. When Polokhov expressed his own indignation, he recalls, Putin said, "That's all right, Leonid, because sometime later I will show them who Putin is."

Yuri Kobaladze, a onetime KGB general turned businessman, says Putin's life changed when he bumped into former Leningrad law lecturer Anatoli Sobchak in a corridor early in 1990. Sobchak asked what he was doing. "I'm doing nothing," Putin replied. "My career's not a success because they told me to come back here. I have nothing to do here." "Join me," said Sobchak. Sobchak was dazzling the city with his promises of democracy and reform. Putin was ready to make a "real break," says a close Putin aide. "People had the feeling Sobchak was someone they could peg their destiny to." Some say Putin was planted on Sobchak by the KGB; this aide says Putin informed his KGB bosses of the job offer, and they gave their approval because the service was disintegrating too.

In the turbulent years of radical capitalism, Putin by Sobchak's side metamorphosed into an efficient back-room operator and master of office politics. Putin plunged into his new market-economy milieu with the same zeal he had brought to spying. At first he couldn't make it all out, says a colleague who worked in the same government, "but he worked hard and learned fast." Sobchak loved the limelight and spreading the reform gospel, but he was a managerial incompetent. Efficient, loyal Putin stepped into the vacuum. Soon he was the city's "gray cardinal," quietly working the pulleys and levers of power. "He understood the mechanisms of decision making, both hidden and overt," says Alexei Kudrin, who worked with him then and is now First Deputy Finance Minister in his Cabinet. "A thorough professional," says Vladimir Yakovlev, who worked beside Putin for Sobchak before defeating him in the 1996 mayoral race. "If he said it would be done, it was done." In effect, Putin was the day-to-day manager when corruption enveloped the city, rules were bent, shortcuts taken. But while Sobchak had to flee abroad to escape corruption charges, nothing was ever proved against Putin, despite one very public accusation of abuse of power leveled by a city parliamentary inquiry. For all Putin's diligent management, St. Petersburg's economic renaissance never quite materialized, and Sobchak lost a re-election bid in 1996.

Out of work once again, Putin got his next boost from St. Petersburg colleagues gathering in Moscow around Anatoli Chubais. The brilliant but reviled architect of Russia's radical--and radically corrupt--privatization program was ensconced at the Kremlin, where he helped put a Western face on Boris Yeltsin's increasingly erratic regime. Chubais likes to take the credit for elevating the obscure Putin, once bragging aloud at a party that he had "privatized" the former KGB agent too. Chubais did not know Putin personally, says Kudrin, another of Sobchak's bright young men brought to Moscow, until others in Sobchak's circle told him of Putin's reputation for effective administration and loyalty--and his need for "an honorable position." Just the man, it turned out, to suit Pavel Borodin, who needed sharp legal talent in his office managing all the Kremlin's sprawling property. Borodin was later accused of being an active player in the web of corruption that has allegedly enriched the Yeltsin Family, that circle of relatives and business cronies who are said to have profited so handsomely from their closeness to power.

Whatever Putin did there, it impressed Yeltsin. "He showed himself a person willing to play by the old rules in the name of new politics," says Russian analyst Simes. If he had ambition, he never showed it in a way that might be seen as threatening. A military colonel who met him on business then saw him as "a little clerk out of a box to serve his master."

In short order the clerk was put in charge of the department overseeing implementation of presidential decrees, where he proved a stern enforcer. "He can be harsh when necessary," says Lilia Shevtsova, senior associate at the Carnegie Moscow Center. "But he can also stretch out his hand and say, 'Let's do this the civilized way.'" He proved no man to trifle with.

By 1998 he was elevated to head of the FSB, the Yeltsin-era successor to the KGB. On the day he walked into the headquarters on Dzerzinsky Square, he said, "I'm home at last." But Moscow's top boys regarded the mere lieutenant colonel with disdain, says a former agent: "We considered Putin a little bit too short in stature." He went to work replacing top echelons with St. Petersburg friends and launching an unpopular campaign to cut jobs. Meantime, citizens were troubled by the way Putin's FSB continued to persecute environmental activists and initiated official monitoring of the Internet.

More important to his rise, though, was Putin's unprecedented display of support for his Kremlin boss. When Prosecutor General Yuri Skuratov began investigating alleged Yeltsin-administration corruption, a videotape showing the investigator cavorting in bed with two prostitutes aired on TV. FSB Director Putin declared it to be authentic. Skuratov was suspended and his investigation shelved. Later on, when Yeltsin was facing impeachment, Putin issued an FSB warning that the articles of impeachment contained "significant mistakes of a legal nature."

The world was astonished last Aug. 9 when Yeltsin abruptly fired his fourth Prime Minister in 17 months and named Putin to the job. And, Yeltsin added, Putin was his chosen successor as the man best equipped "to renew the great country, Russia, in the 21st century." Vladimir who? the public laughed.

VLAD THE BLOODY: FULL FORCE IN CHECHNYA

Russians initially regarded the heir apparent with a mixture of derision and dismay, rating his popularity at a measly 2%. Most considered Yeltsin's blessing the kiss of death for any would-be President. But Putin coolly exploited the greatest opportunity he was ever handed. He says he expected his decision to go to war in Chechnya, made virtually that August day, would ruin his political career. But his cold-blooded prosecution of the war to stamp out Chechen "terrorism" and bring the recalcitrant republic back under Russian control struck a chord among the country's dispirited electorate.

Chechnya had come to symbolize all that troubled the nation--all the failures and humiliations, real and imagined, of the past decade. "A leader must feel the pain of the country," says Sergei Stepashin, the Prime Minister dismissed in Putin's favor when he looked too soft to satisfy Yeltsin's demands. "Putin knew we had no alternative. Otherwise we'd have lost all authority in the country." Suddenly the gray-suited bureaucrat wore tough-guy garb, displaying the iron hand that Russians craved. When Putin coarsely proclaimed that his army would "wipe the terrorists out wherever we find them, even if they are sitting on the toilet," Russians loved it, and his popularity shot up to 60%.

As Acting President since New Year's Eve, when Yeltsin's resignation effectively handed him election victory, Putin has not quailed or faltered in pursuit of victory in Chechnya. When Western officials complain about human-rights abuses, he politely but firmly explains that they do not understand the problem. "Chechnya," says Robert Service, a lecturer at Oxford University and author of an upcoming biography of Lenin, "is the military tip of a general political campaign against the license enjoyed by non-Russian republics to produce a firmly unified political system again."

Intellectual Russians, among the few citizens who oppose the war, see it as the ominous sign of an authoritarian temperament prepared to enforce "order" at the expense of "law." Some even charge him with completely inhumane cynicism, allegedly plotting the bombings that provided the outraged casus belli. No one so far has been able to prove it.

LOYAL HABITS: LEARNING TO RULE

What does a man embrace from so varied a set of masters? In the KGB, says Stepashin, who also served a stint running its successor agency, you learn some useful presidential habits. Speak less, listen more. Don't form hasty conclusions. If you decide, decide. Calculate your responses. Don't betray your own. Putin, he says, "applies these principles to life in general." But a dedicated ex-agent admits that the system drills in some less positive unwritten rules. Don't say anything you don't need to say. Be underestimated. Putin, says this former spy, "will apply the same code of behavior to representing his country."

Those 15 years in the KGB did give Putin rare exposure to the outside world. "Compared to the boneheads in internal repression, he had to be relatively open minded," says a British diplomat. But many Russians still fear the way such a sinister organization twists minds. Putin rehung the plaque of Yuri Andropov at KGB headquarters, and always stoutly defends the organization and his service in it. "Their system of education is so strong that there is no such thing as a former KGB agent," says former army Colonel Viktor Baranets. Today, Putin has surrounded himself with many old spy mates. Says a senior U.S. diplomat who has met Putin: "There is a real danger his software is heavily programmed with a reliance on power. He may be deep rooted in traditions that represent the worst of the Russian past."

Optimists pin their hopes on Putin's experiences in St. Petersburg. He became intimate with Russia's leading reformers and has also gathered many of them around him in Moscow. He learned the rudiments of free-market economics. He witnessed the dimensions of Russia's failure, understanding that the country needed a strong economy if it hoped to be a strong nation again--and that joining global capitalism would be the only solution. "I know," emphasizes First Deputy Finance Minister Kudrin, "that he is a proponent of continued reform."

Putin has made no secret that while Russia needs a functioning market economy, the state must play a role in initiating the reforms that will make that happen. His is a very paternalistic brand of capitalism. "He knows he needs Western mechanisms," says Keith Bush, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at CSIS in Washington. "But he wants to make sure these mechanisms are thoroughly supervised."

"Strong state" is the ambiguous phrase that reverberates most troublingly around Putin. The vast majority of Russians, sick and tired of the way things are, are perfectly ready to put their faith in the state as their salvation. They clamor for a good Czar. "They believe Russia needs order, and autocracy is necessary for that," says Izvestiya editor in chief Mikhail Kozhokin. Putin's Minister of Information, Mikhail Lesin, waves off the issue. "I can't understand why this creates concerns," he says. "It's very simple, very normal." Besides, says Stepashin, "I know him well enough to know he would never harm the main democratic achievements of Yeltsin."

But for many intellectuals, the words strong state conjure up Russia's long, sordid history of repression. "I believe he has all the qualities to become an efficient dictator," says liberal politician Yuli Rybakov. His deep patriotism isn't questioned, but the way he pursues it is. "He believes people are a mass to be shaped and formed for their own best interests," says Leonid Keselman, a St. Petersburg sociologist. The real issue, says Izvestiya editor Kozhokin, is, "We need a strong state, but not too much. Unfortunately, we don't know if Putin knows where to draw that line."

Part of the problem is that Russia does require strong government to clean up what is, by any standards, an awful mess. And though the country's oligarchs are counting on Putin to let them continue to run their shady businesses with little interference, they may be in for a surprise.

Except for Chechnya, Putin the President exists mainly as a collection of words. No orator, he has trained himself to speak in terse, clipped phrases. They can sound refreshingly candid: when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright pressed him in February on U.S. desires to amend the ABM treaty, she detected a new openness in his response. But the accommodating words he used also left the way open for Putin to object to any changes. His crisp phrasing can also sound quite menacing, as when he promised to "crush corrupt officials like rats." When he meets with Western leaders, he speaks in the urbane, cosmopolitan voice of an equal who recognizes he needs good relations with the West. When he's at home, he talks like an earthy nationalist, who would just as soon rule Mother Russia with the iron fist he thinks his countrymen want.

But Putin is at least someone you can talk to. Businessmen who worked with him in St. Petersburg say he listens, then responds to the point. A U.S. diplomat with long experience talking to Moscow's leaders, including Putin, calls it "co-opt and disarm." The old way was to start with "no" even if you meant "maybe," then to negotiate to "yes." Putin's way is to start with "Yes, I agree with you; thank you for your advice," but to mean, at best, "maybe" and sometimes "no." The trick, says this official, "is to figure out when he means yes and then how to make good on it." On subjects like Chechnya, he neither co-opts nor disarms. Says this official: "He gets thin lipped, hard eyed and says, 'Don't screw with me.'"

Putin does not promise to be an easy proposition for the West. He noted President Clinton's "charm" to an aide and regretted he did not possess any. But, he added, foreign relations must be state to state, not personal. He will pursue a hard-nosed Russia-first foreign policy, though he operates from a position of weakness. Russians advise the West to wait and see what he does before putting too much credence in his words. Western leaders have apparently decided, though, to take Putin at face value--his best face. Albright called him "a leading reformer" even before she met him. British Prime Minister Tony Blair went to the opera with Putin in St. Petersburg earlier this month and, in order to strike a friendly note, soft-pedaled Western concerns over Chechnya. Even though nothing substantive was accomplished, London declared that Putin was "a man we can do business with," an echo of what Margaret Thatcher famously said about Mikhail Gorbachev after she met the then rising Soviet star in 1984.

That seems a premature judgment about Putin, who is still very much a secret self. "He's a blank sheet of paper," says Duma Deputy Yuri Shchekochikhin. Deliberately maintaining the mystery gives him maximum maneuvering room. Putin knows he wants to be powerful; he wants Russia to be strong, and he wants to preside over its comeback. But he does not know how to do that. Maybe he is too small a man for the job. Maybe even his galvanic will cannot deliver in the face of Russia's enormous failures: his paper powers are vast, but the necessary institutions to implement reform barely exist. The West probably has little to be afraid of. But what Russians fear is that as long as he pursues just enough economic reforms to keep the West moderately happy, the West will not really care what he does to them.

--With reporting by Douglas Waller/Washington and Yuri Zarakhovich/St. Petersburg

With reporting by Douglas Waller/Washington and Yuri Zarakhovich/St. Petersburg