Aditya Sinha: Stalin reincarnated

Book: The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin
Author: Masha Gessen
Publisher: Granta/Penguin
Pages: 314
Price: Rs550

Vladimir Putin is a terrifying man. Earlier, he seemed merely vain, showing off on TV his bare chest or wrestling with wild animals. Then I read Masha Gessen’s book, The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin, and coming the same week that 49 headless bodies were found in Mexico Gessen’s book’s all-pervading sense of the sinister reminded me of Roberto Bolano’s 2666 with its north Mexico serial killings and the late Carlos Fuentes, whose main character in The Death Of Artemio Cruz in a way parallels Putin.

Thus, your first thought while reading of the Putin-ordered murders of prominent Russians is that Gessen has taken a mighty risk, even if the book is not in Russian and even if she is a dual citizen of both Russia and America, for she lives in Moscow; the journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in the elevator of her apartment building in central Moscow, because of her reportage on the genocide in Chechnya.

But then, as she and other Russians recognise by the end of the book, last winter’s anti-Putin protests mark the start of the endgame, and no matter what this thief, murderer and plagiarist now does. Thus, the courage.

This isn’t a real biography, unlike Gessen’s previous book, Perfect Rigor, about the eccentric mathematician genius Grigori Perelman, who in 2002 figured out the 100-year-old unsolved Poincare’s conjecture. Rather, it is a portrait of a man of humble beginnings — it was rumoured that he was adopted — who grew up a rough and nasty boy and sought out a job in the Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB (later incarnated as the FSB).

It is the portrait of a man so greedy that despite having amassed, through corruption, personal wealth of around $40 billion (a 2007 estimate), he asked a visiting American businessman for his 124-carat diamond ring, put it in his pocket, and promptly walked out the room.

This is a man so vulgar that he offered to castrate a French reporter of Le Monde who, in 2002, had the temerity to ask him about the use of heavy artillery against civilians in Chechnya.

Gessen says Putin is the face of one of the forces that was dismayed by the mess that democracy was proving to be after the end of the USSR in 1991.

An oligarchy was looting Russian resources with impunity. There was a coup attempt in August 1991 against the then premier, Mikhail Gorbachev; it was a public failure. Yet the very coup-makers regrouped with Putin as its public face (he even deliberately kept vague his official status in the KGB during the 1990s). Boris Yeltsin could not handle hyperinflation and a debt default, which so discredited democracy that Russians actually yearned for a “strong” leader to return order to their former superpower.

Enter Putin, as a deputy to the St Petersburg mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, who was hedging his bets by talking publicly of democracy and privately planning his each move with the KGB operative (and later FSB head) Putin. When Yeltsin gave way, Putin was put forward as a perhaps temporary face to ward off Yeltsin’s opponents; Putin, with the state apparatus fully behind him, took full control. He took charge of the corrupt oligarchy; anyone who disagreed with him, like the oil giant Yukos head, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was thrown in jail and his property snatched from him; the media was taken over by the State, so that any political opposition (like chess genius Gary Kasparov, who retired in 2005 to take on Putin and found himself pelted by eggs and stones by kids who took refuge in police cars) got no airtime or space; he murdered rivals like former mentor Sobchak, who was poisoned KGB-style by a substance on a bulb of a bedside table-lamp that vaporised and lethally spread when the lamp was switched on; he murdered FSB whistleblower Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 in London by polonium, a highly radioactive substance which is not naturally found but was produced in the Soviet Union; and so on.

Litvinenko had blown the whistle on a 1999 series of apartment bombings that had produced an atmosphere of fear in Moscow and an electoral environment conducive to Putin’s tough talk. It turned out that the FSB had planned the bombings. (It seems intelligence agencies habitually take collateral damage in their stride, as noted last week about The Meadow.) Similarly, the 2002 Moscow theatre siege and the 2004 Beslan school siege, in which hundreds of innocents died, were handled in an unnecessarily strong-arm manner — merely to show Putin’s efficacy as a leader. Indeed, the terrorists who took over the theatre were later found not to have explosives, and one of them who survived was an FSB-linked Chechen.

All of Putin’s actions give evidence of a petty, petulant man whose sole vision for his nation was it needed a reincarnated Stalin. Russia existed for the State, and its abundant resources existed for a few to plunder. (Putin is building a billion-dollar hi-tech home on the shore of the Black Sea.) This brings us to the title of Gessen’s book.

At a time when Russians were groping for an identity in the post-Soviet era, having been let down by democrats like Yeltsin, the former State apparatus, with Putin as its face, offered an alternative; and having seized it, never let go. Russia has still not been rebuilt, its identity not allowed a rebirth. And what Putin, representing a faceless state apparatus, has done is subvert that process of the nation regaining an identity. In that sense, The Man Without A Face has made faceless the proud nation that gave us, among others, Perelman, Kasparov and Tolstoy.