AS VLADIMIR PUTIN drove into London on a warm June day in 2003, he was acutely aware that he was making history. Not since Queen Victoria welcomed Tsar Alexander II to Windsor Castle in 1874 had a Russian leader been accorded a state visit, the highest honour Britain can bestow on a foreign power. Mikhail Gorbachev had visited London in his capacity as general secretary of the Communist Party, whereas Putin – 50 years old at the time – had been the democratically elected President of the Russian Federation for less than three years.
Putin and his wife Lyudmila were greeted at Heathrow Airport by the heir to the throne, Prince Charles, who escorted them to Horse Guards Parade for a display of pomp and pageantry to mark the official arrival of the second President of the Russian Federation. From there the newly arrived guests rode with the Queen and Prince Philip in horsedrawn carriages along a brilliantly sunny Mall, festooned with British and Russian flags, to Buckingham Palace, where they would be staying in the Belgian Room.
The Bolsheviks had executed the Queen’s cousin, Alexander’s son Tsar Nicholas II. Indeed, her first meeting with a visiting Soviet leader had been a frosty encounter with Nikita Khrushchev; but this occasion passed extremely well, with Putin describing Her Majesty in a speech at a state banquet that evening as ‘a noble example of faithful and selfless service’.
Now, escorted by police outriders, he was on his way to the Guildhall in the City of London to be honoured by the Lord Mayor of London. The previous Tsar had arrived at Windsor with an entourage of 70 – including four food tasters (or cooks as they were diplomatically named in the official list); and, although only 10 people were listed in Putin’s official party, he was accompanied by a force of no fewer than 150, including his security detail (to prevent potential attack by a Chechnyan death squad since many Chechens live in the capital) and a complete medical team (to swing into action should his bodyguards fail in their duty). There were no food tasters on this occasion, but because of fears for the President’s safety over Chechnya, the kitchens at the Palace and the Guildhall – and the people working in them – were subjected to a rigorous security check. And whereas the Tsar had demanded – and ploughed his way through – 22 courses, including seven desserts, Putin had been happy to settle for a simpler menu of chilled melon, lobster thermidor, breast of Norfolk duckling and fruit crème brûlée, finishing off with a digestif of iced vodka. No expense had been spared to make Russia’s strongman feel welcome – a portrait of Nicholas II with his cousin King George V and a startling colour photograph of Leo Tolstoy, dressed in his favoured peasant’s tunic and long boots, had been borrowed for the occasion.
There was just one oversight.
From the very first glance, Putin was aware that the throne he had to ascend was so high that his feet wouldn’t touch the floor. ‘He was visibly uncomfortable,’ says Sergei Kolushev, the head of Russia’s London-based Economic Forum. ‘I saw the apprehension in his eyes as he approached it. But he adapted very quickly and, as the proceedings kicked off, he displayed no outward signs of anxiety about it, whatever he might have been thinking or feeling. He managed to adjust very smoothly and in the end he charmed many people in the hall. In fact, he even looked quite at home up there on that throne!’
THE LONDON organisers may have gone to great lengths to research their visitor’s needs (including, according to one Royal source, his and PUTIN Lyudmila’s preference for the mattress on their bed in the Belgian Room) but no one had thought to provide him with a footstool, and in this they had missed a vital point – the President’s sensitivity about his diminutive stature.
Putin’s height – he is 1.65 metres or five feet five inches tall, two inches taller than Mahatma Gandhi – had already been seized on by the merciless British press at Horse Guards. Vladimir Putin, however, measured up to the British Queen just fine, at 1.60 metres she was still five centimetres shorter than him. But after the band had played the Russian national anthem, Major Martin David of the Grenadier Guards invited Putin to inspect the guard of honour. ‘Major David plus bearskin towered far above him,’ wrote a reporter for The Times. ‘Like a block of Moscow flats over a dacha.’
Such cracks have been a constant feature of Putin’s life ever since he stepped out from the shadows to become a potent force in Russian politics. As a small boy, he was often bullied about his height, and learned to handle the bullies by taking up judo. As an adult, he is said to have solved the problem by wearing built-up heels, just like Tom Cruise, Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy, with the latter allegedly using secret insoles, adding an extra seven centimetres.
SO WHO IS the man occupying the Royal bed in the Belgian Room at Buckingham Palace? In public life – often parodied as the bare-chested Judoka with a glare of cold steel – Vladimir Putin presents an image of toughness that neither Bush nor Chirac nor Blair nor any of their successors could ever dream of matching, while the apparently spontaneous gesture of kissing a young boy on the stomach suggests a tenderness that is the exact opposite. The contradiction is typical of the man, but is either image true? ‘He rarely talks about himself unless it is part of a PR operation,’ says one of his closest friends, ‘and he is more PR-conscious than most people would believe. Indeed, he once told us that the only difference between a rat and a hamster was: “The hamster has better PR”.’
First impressions on the world stage were favourable when Putin, replaced an ailing Boris Yeltsin, his Kremlin mentor, as Russia’s head of state in March 2000. Even before that date Tony Blair had developed a ‘special relationship’ with the acting president and became his strongest advocate in the international arena. His wife Cherie sounded a note of caution: ‘This is not a man you want to cross,’ she warned her husband after spending a few days with Putin in St Petersburg.
PUTIN PRESIDENT Putin and his wife Lyudmila welcomed the Queen and Prince Philip to Spencer House in London, where they hosted a reception for the royal couple during Putin’s state visit to Britain in 2003 – the first time a Russian leader had been accorded such an honour since Queen Victoria had welcomed Tsar Alexander to Windsor Castle 129 years earlier.
At the first meeting between the new Russian leader and the American president – in Slovenia in 2001 – George W. Bush peered into Putin’s blue-green eyes and thought he could see into his soul. Putin duly infuriated both Bush and Blair by crossing them over the invasion of Iraq. Before his departure, Putin’s preferred Western leader was Italy’s mercurial Silvio Berlusconi.
Putin’s eyes continue to attract attention. Irene Pietsch, a German banker’s wife who befriended Lyudmila Putina in the 1990s, joked that his eyes resembled ‘two hungry, lurking predators’ and claimed that Lyudmila had jokingly described him as ‘an energy vampire’. Alastair Campbell too paid note, stating in his diary that ‘Vlad’ – he was on firstname terms with all the important people during his years as Blair’s communications supremo at 10 Downing Street – might look thoroughly modern but would suddenly turn into ‘the old KGB man’. ‘Vlad’s eyes were real killers,’ he recounts, ‘piercing blue and able to move from sensitive soul to hard nut in one blink.’ A leading British businessman drew his own conclusions, confessing that when he looked into them he saw nothing at all.
Indeed, Russian liberals and Western conservatives alike have demonised Putin as an anti-democratic KGB automaton; and he makes no secret of his links to the security services, or of his pride in being the KGB’s most famous ‘old boy’. Western tycoons eager to do business with Russia have embraced him. ‘Regardless of what this man stands for,’ declares Lord Browne, ex-chief executive of BP – one of the petroleum super-majors that were prepared to turn a blind eye to such matters if it meant getting a share of the country’s immense oil deposits – ‘he is exceedingly competent.’ Browne’s comments could well have been endorsed by Putin’s school-teachers, who agreed he had an ability to absorb knowledge at an exceptionally high speed.
Ask any twelve people who have met Vladimir Putin what he is like and you are likely to get a dozen different answers. Although the truth is that very few people really know him at all. To his family he is loving, to his adversaries he is foul-mouthed and dangerous, to his religious friends he is a devout Christian, to the Russian public (or around 73 per cent of them, according to one count) he is their saviour – the man who restored their nation’s pride. Although even some of his most loyal citizens have reservations: ‘I feel empathy towards him but that is now tinged with a little bitterness,’ said one man who voted for Putin in the most recent elections. ‘He has not improved the lot of the average Russian in the way he could have. Alaska shares its wealth with the people – they each receive $1,000 a month from the profits of natural resources. Russians do not enjoy similar benefits.’
Vladimir Putin is first and foremost a Russian patriot. Although he professes to believe in democracy, he could hardly be described as a democrat. Boris Yeltsin publicly vouched for him: ‘As Putin’s Godfather, I can tell you democracy is safe in his hands,’ he said – a dubious testimonial as Yeltsin himself had changed from democratic saviour to autocratic despot during his years in the Kremlin. Putin’s political enemies say he has followed a similar path. Putin does not quarrel with them. His view is that after Gandhi died, ‘there was nobody left to talk to’ – another of Putin’s asides which would later be quoted ad nauseum.
In fact, Putin believes in ‘sovereign democracy’ or ‘managed democracy’ rather than the Western variety; his democracy is one that operates through a rational, hierarchic system that he calls ‘the vertical of power’; in other words, power flows naturally downwards from the presidential office in the Kremlin to the various echelons of officials, including the siloviki (the security men, soldiers and spies who joined the state bureaucratic apparatus on his coat-tails), and only then down to the masses.
Putin is not a man who bows to international political convention: he became prime minister and then acting president of Russia without ever having to stand for elected office. Certainly his views on democracy do not endear him to others. ‘Elections are fine as long as they vote for me,’ he reportedly said on one occasion. Putin also claims to support a law-governed state – as distinct from the old party-governed Soviets – which he calls the ‘dictatorship of the law’. The degree of democratic freedom here depends, of course, on who is making the laws. Indeed, ‘Putinism’ has flourished because the usual sources of opposition, such as the Russian intelligentsia, who led dissent against the Communists, have lost their power. Some regard Putin as being too close to this faction to fear any real challenge.
According to the billionaire oil tycoon Gordon Getty, Putin is ‘the most dangerous man in the world’ and indeed, he does hold a terrifying trump card in terms of world power. ‘He could close down China tomorrow,’ notes one of the his closest confidants. ‘If he cut off Russian oil and gas, there would be no smoke coming from many of China’s chimneys. The same goes for India. And what a chill Italy, Germany, France and Britain would feel if he did the same to Western Europe. He could shake America’s fragile economy to the core because America could not supply all of those other countries – it doesn’t have enough oil and gas for its own needs.
‘So of course he’s the most dangerous man in the world. The difference between him and his predecessors is he doesn’t need nuclear weapons. He could bring the world to its knees without firing a shell or a bullet.’
And what might induce him to use his energy weapon? ‘He would only do it if he thought Russia was threatened by an outside power. He is watching the expansion of NATO very carefully, as it pushes ever closer to Russia’s borders. He would not have taken kindly to it going into Ukraine – that would have been his Cuba; then you would have seen some serious action.’
Alleged readiness to ‘bring the world to its knees’, however, should not be mistaken for willingness to do it, Putin’s close friend insists. ‘He’s a realist. He knows the power of his position and for him Russia comes first, second and third; that does make him potentially dangerous. As Putin himself once said in an open letter to all Russians published in the newspaper Izvestiya on 25 February 2000: “One insults us at one’s own peril”.’
‘His role model is Catherine the Great and he rules by her principles: there is no compromise,’ his friend continued. And, like Catherine with her lovers, Putin is inclined to use businessmen and then discard them. ‘It’s all in keeping with his aspiration to unravel the mess that Yeltsin left behind and restore Russia’s political greatness.’
There was a lot of unravelling to do. One of Putin’s main targets had been the oligarchs, the Russian tycoons who became fabulously wealthy when Yeltsin sold them valuable state assets at very low prices in the notorious ‘loans for shares’ auctions. Putin assessed the oil, gas and metal industries and quickly realised many of the oligarchs were making considerable profits from them, and so the President set out to make their lives intolerable. His public mantra was (and is): ‘We have to share! With whom? With the State!’
Roman Abramovich, one of the few oligarchs still in favour, did not collect the $13 billion he was reported to have received when he sold his controlling interest in Sibneft to the state-owned Gazprom in September 2003 – at least not for his own purse. Putin persuaded Abramovich – who owns four yachts and Chelsea Football Club – that $13 billion would be an obscene amount of money with which to walk away from a company which had already made him and his former partner Berezovsky rich beyond all dreams of avarice since taking it over barely a decade earlier. Knowing full well that while he might have the billions, Putin owns the prisons, Abramovich did not resist presidential pressure to hand over a huge chunk of the Gazprom money.
ANOTHER IMPORTANT aspect of Putin’s personality is his highly suspicious nature. Putin trusts no one. It may be his KGB training, or perhaps it goes back further. His former teacher Vera Dmitrievna Gurevich warned that even as a child he ‘never forgave people who betrayed him’. He is deeply suspicious of everyone, and perhaps with good reason: he is, after all, well aware that plots against him have been made deep within the Kremlin and the State Duma (which replaced the Supreme Soviet as the Russian parliament in 1994). Some of his own ministers have had it in their minds from time to time to overthrow him. He has not relied solely on the FSB – successor to the KGB as Russia’s domestic security service – to keep him informed of such manoeuvres. Such a body is not above infiltration and, indeed, is not always capable of penetrating the highest echelons of government.
One of my most surprising discoveries is that a group of businessmen and borderline politicians who call themselves the VVP men regularly send him missives based on their own research and opinions. Whether or not he takes their home-spun advice seriously is debatable, but he is certainly acquainted with several of their number.
ONE OF THE VVP men’s more outlandish claims is that it was they who planned and executed Operation Yukos, to capture then oil boss Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Khodorkovsky was one of the few who dared to defy the uncompromising demand made by Putin after he became President: ‘You can keep your ill-gotten gains and your freedom providing you stop meddling in politics’. According to Andrey Karaulov (a famously controversial TV host), Khodorkovsky – Russia’s wealthiest man when he was first arrested in 2003 on charges of fraud – was allegedly responsible for a number of murders. But at the trial where he received an eight-year sentence, he was never actually accused of such crimes. Environmentalists have suggested that those at the head of a number of companies – including Yukos – that turned part of the Komsomol youth movement into oilmen overnight are guilty of destroying hundreds of thousands of acres of tundra in Russia’s far north.
IT WAS smiles all round when Putin visited an American school with President Bush – the man who said he looked into Putin’s eyes and saw his soul.
Another interesting aspect of Putin’s personality is his way of dealing with any politician he suspects of plotting against him. He does nothing to remove such men and women but subscribes to the much-quoted line in Godfather II: ‘Keep your friends close… and your enemies even closer.’
Putin has been unfairly blamed for many catastrophes, including the crashing of the Estonian Internet. The Russian affairs expert Orlando Figes suggested, ‘They blamed the Kremlin [for that], so you begin to think, “Well perhaps they believe they can put the clock back ideologically to the point where criticism of Putin becomes a hostile act against Russia”.’ Another well-placed source put it like this: ‘The Estonian Internet crashed after the Estonian authorities removed the monument to the memory of Red Army soldiers who had died fighting fascist Germany. Either way, it is incorrect to think that Putin himself is orchestrating this. He is a part of the system which, for lack of a better expression, we call the secret service.’
Putin’s powers of persuasion should never be underestimated. At one of his regular meetings in the Kremlin with the president, Rabbi Beryl Lazar, a leading member of the Jewish community, told him about a young Moscow woman who had been badly burned when she triggered a rigged explosive as she moved an anti-Semitic sign from the roadside. She lived in dreadful conditions, Rabbi Lazar explained, with neighbours who made her life unbearable, and yet the authorities refused to provide any help. Lazar was not convinced that Putin was even listening until, as he was leaving the building, a guard told him he was wanted back in the president’s office. Putin had already telephoned Mayor Luzhkov, drawn the woman’s plight to his attention and been assured that remedial action would be taken. The delighted rabbi said later: ‘He gets extremely frustrated with the incompetence of the state’.
It was more than frustration with bureaucracy which spurred the president into action. The 58-year-old – who has announced his intention to seek a third non-consecutive term in the 2012 presidential elections – has never forgotten his humble roots, nor has he tried to hide them. Indeed in his autobiography, First Person, he is at pains to point out that he grew up in a loving atmosphere. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, known in his family as Vovka or Volodya, was brought up by his mother Maria Ivanovna Putina and his father Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin in the kind of grinding poverty that most Russians endured during the arms race of the 1950s – and many still do today despite the country’s newfound prosperity. He was born in St Petersburg’s Snegiryov maternity hospital on 7 October 1952, when his mother was 41 years old. He is her only surviving child.
Putin’s neighbours during his childhood days in St Petersburg describe him as ‘delicate’ and ‘precious’, with one recalling a ‘shy but generous boy who always shared his sweets with other kids’. Having lost her first two sons – one died shortly after birth, the other of diphtheria during Hitler’s infamous siege of their home city, in which more than one million people perished – Maria Ivanovna took special care of her little Volodya. Fearing for his safety, she refused to send him to kindergarten, as most working mothers did, but instead took jobs close to home to help put food on the table while her young son stayed indoors playing on his own. He did not attend school until he was almost eight years old. The preference he developed for isolation in childhood was to mould his character into one of self-reliance and independence. To this day, he likes his own company and prefers to eat alone. When a Time magazine journalist asked him what he did in his spare time, he retorted: ‘I do not have any spare time’. The truth is, he doesn’t want any – these days, the man lives to work.
IN THE EARLY days, the Putin family occupied a single room with no bathroom, no running hot water and a shared lavatory and kitchen, in a kommunalka, or communal flat, at No.12 Baskov Lane – just a short tramride from Nevsky Prospect in the historical centre of Russia’s imperial capital. In those earlier days, Vladimir Spiridonovich worked as a foreman at the Yegorov engineering works, where they made railway carriages. At night, he entertained his first wife and their young son on a battered accordion. He was an accomplished player; there is certainly no record of neighbours ever complaining about the noise. Maria must have been exhausted most of the time from her several part-time jobs as a concierge, taking deliveries at a bakery and as a technical assistant in a laboratory. Against her husband’s wishes, she had their son secretly christened at the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Transfiguration: to this day, Putin wears his little aluminium baptismal crucifix on a chain around his neck. His father, Vladimir Spiridonovich – a devout atheist – turned a blind eye to the christening, which Maria made sure was performed in secret. Like their neighbours, the Putins owed the little they had to the antireligious authorities – and it could easily be taken away.
TONY BLAIR may look as though he has the upper hand, but Putin wrong-footed him when he invited the Prime Minister to Russia even before he was elected President.
VLADIMIR PUTIN’S grandfather, Spiridon Ivanovich Putin, worked hard for what he’d achieved, training as a chef in his home town of St Petersburg, as Leningrad was then known (before it became Petrograd in 1914). He had a great talent for cooking and before he was 20 years old he was preparing meals for the aristocracy in the Astoria, a five-star hotel on St Isaac’s Square in the Tsarist capital. His patrons included the Tsar’s Romanov relatives and the notorious monk Grigory Rasputin. The Astoria was said to pay Spiridon the princely sum of 100 roubles a month in gold. He married a country girl, Olga Ivanovna, and between 1907 and 1915 they had three sons – Alexei, Mikhail and Vladimir Spiridonovich (born on 23 February 1911) – and a daughter, Anna.
When the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 deposed the Provisional Government (which had recently replaced the abdicated Tsar) and the ruling caste either fled or faced execution or imprisonment, the Putins’ world came crashing down. There were no more aristocrats demanding caviar and foie gras, in fact, there was precious little food of any description to be had in the capital (by this time renamed Petrograd as ‘Petersburg’ was considered too Germanic during the First World War). As the Russian civil war brought chaos to the length and breadth of the vast empire, Spiridon moved his family to a relative’s house in the village of Pominovo in the Tver region (Putin likes to remind anyone who will listen that the house is still standing and relatives travel there to spend their holidays).
The legend goes that many years later, when Vladimir Spiridonovich sat his son on his knee in their grim room on Baskov Lane and told him Spiridon’s story, the boy shuddered more at the thought of the humiliation his grandparents had suffered than at their hunger. But like so many stories about Putin’s background, this is apocryphal: ‘My grandfather kept pretty quiet about his past life,’ he says. ‘My parents didn’t talk much about the past either. People generally didn’t back then. My parents never told me anything about themselves, especially my father. He was a taciturn man.’
After World War I, Spiridon was offered a job in the Gorky district on the outskirts of Moscow, where Lenin and his family lived. He was employed at Lenin’s country house and, following the revolutionary leader’s death in January 1924, continued working for his widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya. Three days after Lenin’s death, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honour. Olga wanted to move back there, but Spiridon knew that the Communist administration regarded the city as vulnerable to attack from Finland. Spiridon calculated that the future for skilled people like him lay in the new capital, Moscow. He was right. His culinary skills were soon in demand among the new Communist elite. Stalin took a liking to him and he was transferred to one of his dachas.
Perhaps it was his loyalty to Stalin as much as his cooking that landed him a plum job at ‘Ilichovsky’, the country guesthouse of the Moscow City Communist Party. As head chef, he was given a two-room flat – almost unheard of for a man of his background – and Olga could pick fruit, vegetables and flowers from their very own allotment, another rare privilege. Few people who spent much time around Stalin came out alive, but Spiridon survived. Putin’s memories of his grandfather come from this period when he visited Ilinskoye on school holidays with his parents.
Chain-smoking but teetotal, Spiridon died in 1965 at the age of 86, having retired just six years earlier. He was buried in the cemetery at Ilinskoye. Still mentally alert in his twilight years, he enjoyed fishing trips with his grandson, even if he failed to impart any great wisdom to the boy. Olga lived to be 90. Putin recalls that he learned most things about his family by picking up ‘snatches and fragments’ from his parents’ conversation whenever relatives visited the Putin home on Baskov Lane. This was the only time they would open up and talk about themselves. For good reason: the past was an emotional minefield.
VLADIMIR SPIRIDONOVICH PUTIN met Maria Ivanovna Shelomova in Pominovo, where he had spent his childhood. She had been born in the neighbouring village of Zarechie on 17 October 1911. They became sweethearts at an early age and were both just seventeen when they took their wedding vows in 1928 (asked by a reporter looking for a skeleton in the Putin cupboard if there was a reason why they had married so young, Putin huffed before replying: ‘Why should there be a reason? Love is the main reason, but my father was also due to be conscripted. Maybe they were looking for some sort of commitment from each other.’)
Four years later, the onset of collectivisation forced them to move to Leningrad. Maria spent some time as a street sweeper and later worked in a factory, while Vladimir Spiridonovich was drafted into the fledgling submarine division of the Soviet navy. Within a year of him completing his term of service, the Putins had two sons. The first, Oleg, died a few months after birth, but Maria became pregnant almost immediately and they were overjoyed when she gave birth to a healthy boy named Viktor. The Putins were living in an apartment at Peterhof – home of the fabled Summer Palace – when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Leningrad was one of the Wehrmacht’s primary objectives. Peter the Great had raised the city from the swampy banks of the Neva River; Hitler ordered his troops to bury it.
Vladimir Spiridonovich joined a demolition battalion of the NKVD – the grandly-named People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs; in fact this unit of the Soviet secret police was a combat squadron engaged in sabotage behind German lines. His team of 28 men was sent to Kingisepp near the Estonian border, where they blew up a munitions depot. While they were withdrawing towards the Russian lines, they ran out of rations and approached some Estonians who brought them food but then tipped off the Germans. The Russians’ camp was surrounded. Vladimir Spiridonovich was in a small group who fought their way out and headed east, pursued by German soldiers with a pack of dogs. Apparently he jumped into a swamp and performed the time-honoured trick of breathing through a hollow reed until the search party had passed. Only four out of the 28 men in his unit made it back home.
As the Germans completed the encirclement of Leningrad in early 1942, Vladimir Spiridonovich was sent back into action as one of the defenders of the so-called Neva pocket, a tiny redoubt on the left bank of the river which the Germans were never able to capture, despite saturation bombing and repeated assaults. Maria, meanwhile, had opted to stay in Peterhof, which was being pulverised by German bombing and shellfire. When the Summer Palace was overrun, looted and destroyed, her elder brother Ivan Shelomov came for her and Viktor. Ivan was a naval officer serving at fleet headquarters in Smolny, once a private girls’ school on the banks of the Neva, now covered in camouflage netting that was painted by the thespians of the Mariinsky Theatre to change colour with the seasons. He gave his sister some of his rations and then took her and Viktor to one of the shelters in Leningrad, which had been set up in an effort to save children’s lives. It was there that the five-year-old boy contracted diphtheria. Maria not only lost her child, her mother had been killed by a stray German bullet and her older brothers, including Ivan, would later disappear without trace at the front.
Then, in the winter of 1942, Vladimir Spiridonovich was seriously wounded in both legs by a German grenade. He would have died from loss of blood if a former neighbour hadn’t recognised him at the dressing station and carried him on his back across the frozen Neva to a hospital in Leningrad. Maria visited him every day. Seeing her pitiful condition, her husband secretly saved his hospital rations for her until the nurses realised from his sickly state what he was doing and banned her from the ward. Once she fainted from starvation in the street and was laid out with other corpses. It was only when someone heard her moan that her life was saved.
When Vladimir Spiridonovich had recovered sufficiently to leave hospital, he was demobilised from the army as an invalid. His wounds had left him with a permanent limp, so he drove a horse and cart at a collective farm until he was able to walk again. By 1944 he was well enough to work as a toolmaker in the Yegerov Carriage Building Works, an engineering plant which at that time was making shells for Russian guns. He and Maria were reunited – this remarkable woman had stayed in Leningrad through the entire siege. As the German army was driven back, the Putins picked up the pieces of their lives in one of the rooms at the factory’s kommunalka in Baskov Lane. They had both turned forty by the time their third son – the president-to-be – was born eight years later.
CONSIDERING HER wartime experiences, Maria’s desire to protect her little Volodya from harm was entirely understandable. It wasn’t until 1 September 1960 that she enrolled him at School No. 193 across the road from their home, and he still keeps a photograph taken on his first day, of him clutching a flower pot for the teacher. The experience came as something of a shock. He stood out, not only because he looked small and frail but because, unused to communicating with others of his age, he arrived at school late and left early. His classmates concluded that he was avoiding their company and judged him a snob. He was bullied at every turn, but Volodya struck back in the only way he knew how: ‘He fought as hard as he could,’ says a former classmate. ‘He scratched, bit, pulled hair and screeched. It wasn’t nice to watch.’
A WELCOME VISITOR: While some other oligarchs rebelled, Roman Abramovich promised Putin he would not interfere in politics.
PUTIN’S OWN recollection of himself in those early days is of a boy who was not eager to go to school: ‘I liked to hang out in our courtyard. There were two courtyards joined like a well and it was there that we spent most of our time. Mother would look out of the window occasionally and shout “Are you in the courtyard?” I was in the courtyard and she was happy that I had not run away – I was not supposed to leave the courtyard without permission.’ On one occasion, however, he disobeyed and was left fearful by the experience: ‘When I was five or six I walked up to the big street corner for the first time. Without permission, of course. It was on a May Day. I looked around. The people were all swirling around, brouhaha was everywhere, life was boiling over, and yes, I was scared.’
Staring up from his bed at the peeling ceiling of their room, young Volodya ached to give his parents a better life. Each day he saw his mother struggle up five flights of stairs to their room at the top of the dreary, yellow five-storey building. These were momentous times for Russia. Stalin had been replaced as First Secretary of the Communist Party by the complex – though oft-noted humane – political commissar Nikita Khrushchev, who stunned the world with his denunciation of his predecessor in a well-leaked ‘secret’ speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956. Khrushchev divided regional committees in two: agriculture and industry – an unfortunate split in Soviet times for what lay ahead. There were hopes that under Khrushchev the Soviet system might be capable of reforming itself into a more democratic form of socialism, although most of Khrushchev’s domestic policies aimed at improving the lot of the ordinary Soviet citizen proved ineffective.
Volodya was perceptive enough to learn lessons from the squalid environment around him. The Putins shared the kitchen – nothing more than a sink and gas cooker in a corridor – with an elderly Jewish tailor, his wife and grown-up spinster daughter, Khava. In that confined space, arguments were inevitable. Although Volodya was fond of the Jewish couple, he made the mistake of intervening on his parents’ side in one of their disputes. His parents were furious. ‘Mind your own business,’ they told him. He was nonplussed. It took him some time to realise that his parents considered his rapport with the old couple to be much more important than those petty kitchen squabbles. ‘After that incident, I never got involved in the kitchen quarrels again,’ he says. ‘As soon as they started fighting, I simply went back to our room or to the old folks’ room.’
TO COUNTERACT the bullying her son was experiencing at school, Maria, a sensible woman, encouraged him to go out by himself in the hope that he would make new friends. In his new-found freedom, Volodya chose bad company and found himself doing what he now describes as ‘wrong things’ to impress his peers. He spent a lot of time in the courtyard at the bottom of the building’s stairwell. This was the ‘turf ’ of the local gangs. ‘Growing up in the yard was like living in the jungle,’ he says. ‘Very much so. Oh yes!’ One of the gangs’ favourite pastimes, he explains, was chasing rats up the stone stairs with sticks, a pursuit he enjoyed until he made ‘the interesting discovery that if you corner a rat it turns on you and attacks you, attacks you aggressively. A rat will even chase its adversary when it tries to run away’ – a tactic he doubtless remembers even today when dealing with his judo opponents. The gang was ruled over by a couple of young tearaways called the Kovshov Brothers. Although he was a lot younger, Volodya tried to keep up with them – with everything that they got up to. He started carrying a hunting knife for self-protection. Despite his puny frame and pale complexion, the little boy with a lick of blonde hair over his right eye got into trouble with the police and was branded a hooligan. ‘I really was a bad boy,’ he says. When it was discovered that he took a knife to school, his teachers threatened him with being sent to a borstal. Indeed, he was one of a handful of boys in a class of 45 pupils who were not permitted to join the Young Pioneers because of their rowdy behaviour. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, ‘I’ve always got the Kovshovs.’
Vladimir Spiridonovich ordered his son to take up boxing. But after his nose was broken in an early bout his ring career came to an abrupt and undignified end. His life might well have gone into a downward spiral, but around this time Vera Dmitrievna Gurevich, who taught him from grades five to eight – age 11 to 14 – noticed a dramatic change in his attitude. In April 1964, he expressed an interest in learning German, which he took as an extra subject in after-school classes with Ms Gurevich, who realised that he had a fantastic memory. She found him a strong-willed, energetic, kind and even loving pupil, with an aptitude for languages, history and literature.
In the autumn of 1965, Volodya joined the Trud (Labour) Club – an athletic club which was part of the Russian Republic’s Voluntary Sports Society – for which good marks were a prerequisite. It was here he fell under the influence of Anatoly Semyonovich Rakhlin, a neighbour of the Putins in Baskov Lane and an expert in the art of self-defence known as sambo. The sport, a combination of wrestling and ju-jitsu, appealed enormously to the 13-year-old boy. Rakhlin taught him that while he might not be able to out-punch his foes he could out-think them. Under Rakhlin’s tutelage, he became fanatical about sambo and then judo. He also made some good friends at the club – particularly Arkady Rotenberg and his brother Boris. ‘They were probably the first close friends Volodya ever had,’ according to one person who remembers them training together. ‘Like most of the others who used the club, the Rotenberg brothers were from as poor a background as Putin himself.’ They were, however, to go on to achieve incredible success and to accrue great riches, as we shall see.
HE MAY have upset George Bush with his opposition to the invasion of Iraq, but Putin’s love of dogs endeared him to the President’s father, former President George Bush Snr, when he went to stay at the family home, Walker’s Point, near Kennebunkport in the state of Maine in 2007.
Explaining today how martial arts changed him, Putin says that judo is not just a sport, but a philosophy: ‘Sport teaches us about relationships between people and to respect your partner. It also teaches us that a seemingly weak partner can not only resist you but also beat you. It’s not only strength that can change the result of a match. It’s the ability to think and use the right stance. This is very important. What is also very important is to have a strong character and a strong desire for victory.’ Enormously grateful to Rakhlin, he still sees him occasionally when he visits the city of his birth.
Indicative of the change in young Volodya, he was permitted to join the Young Pioneers, an essential move in any young person’s life in the Soviet Union. Failure to do so would have barred him from the Komsomol (the Communist Youth League) and without Komsomol membership, he would have been denied a university education and access to the professions. His father, a life-long Communist who had been educated along strict Party lines, was delighted when Volodya was elected chair of his Pioneer council. He was also proud of his son’s sporting prowess. He and his wife never missed one of his contests if they could help it. Volodya went on to win many trophies in the Leningrad sambo championships and became a master in both sambo and judo.
SKIING PRESIDENTS, past and present: Putin and Dmitri Medvedev both enjoy the delights of Russia’s favoured ski resort, Sochi – the venue chosen for the 2014 Winter Olympics.
By now the family were able to afford a small three-room dacha at Tosno, a small town to the south-east of Leningrad. Maria happily observed the growing closeness between father and son as they chopped wood together, went fishing and generally shared whatever work was necessary during the summer holidays.
Although Volodya hadn’t inherited his father’s musical abilities, he was very keen on learning to play the accordion. Perhaps he did not sing exactly in time, but he also happily joined in with his father singing folk songs. In turn, the father would listen tolerantly to his teenage son’s much-loved collection of Beatles records – his favourite song was Paul McCartney’s Yesterday – and eventually bought him a cheap guitar, which he strummed all day long. He was not much of a dancer either, but in those days that was no handicap: his main interest in the opposite sex was seeing if they admired him. By all accounts, he had plenty of admirers.
Putin – and many would say most of Russia – has a lot to thank Anatoly Rakhlin for. The martial arts expert still lives close to Baskov Street and, when asked, will take the curious to visit the apartment where the Putins shared that room with a peeling ceiling. Its present occupants, Police Captain Anton Matveev and his wife Nina, are reluctant to show visitors around and are clearly grateful that there is no plaque on the building to draw attention to the fact that one of the most powerful men in the world once lived there. Thanks to Yeltsin’s course towards a market economy – a course that Putin inherited – the rent has soared on the modest abode the Matveevs share with their daughter Zhenia.
There is little demand for bus tours of the district offered by a firm called Falkon and conducted by a man known only as Kirill, although business does pick up around the time of Putin’s birthday in October. The tour starts at the maternity hospital where he was born and takes in the cathedral where he was baptised and the banya, or bathhouse, where the Putins went for their weekly ablutions. Kirill takes pride in pointing out to anyone who is interested that Putin is the first native of the city to head the country since the last Tsar almost a century ago. Then he shows them the restaurants, Russkaya Rybalka and Podvoriye, where Putin entertained two other presidents, George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac.
Putin himself has felt no inclination to return to the room in which he lived for many years or to walk through his old neighbourhood. He would not enjoy the experience: School No. 193 has been converted into a technical college, the gym in which Anatoly Rakhlin trained him lies derelict and the streets he once roamed with his gang are now filled with the debris left by the alcoholics and drug addicts who inhabit the district. It would never occur to him that he might have joined their ranks. He was too smart for that, too disciplined. He still abhors disorder and lack of discipline.
It is almost five decades since Putin was accepted into the Komsomol, in a ceremony before the Party district committee, in the autumn of 1967. To the country’s leader it must feel like a lifetime ago. In 1968, without consulting either his parents or his teachers, 16-yearold Putin suddenly changed tack. Forsaking the humanities, he opted to spend the final two years of schooling at Grammar School No. 281, which specialised in chemistry. It was still some time before the strongminded Russian would make his explosive entrance on the world stage.