First
Person
Part 6
Part 6
PART 6
THE DEMOCRAT
Disillusioned with the KGB, Putin decides to embark on
an academic career. He returns to Leningrad University intending to write his
doctoral dissertation, but is persuaded to work for Anatoly Sobchak, the chair
of the City Council, instead. He throws himself into politics. As Sobchak's
deputy, he gets involved in the economic and political reconstruction of St.
Petersburg and helps Sobchak in his bid to become mayor. But then things get
rough. Lyudmila has a terrible car accident; their dacha is destroyed by fire;
and Sobchak looses the mayoral elections. Putin resigns from the Council to
plot his next move.
Did you ever think that the KGB had become obsolete?
I was offered a job in
the central office in Moscow, but I turned it down. Why? I knew that there was
no future to the system. The country didn't have a future. And it would have
been very difficult to sit inside the system and wait for it all to collapse
around me.
Sergei Roldugin:
I remember how confused
and upset Volodya felt about the collapse of the whole intelligence network in
Germany. He would say, "You just can't do that! How can you do that? I
know that I can be wrong, but how can the most highly qualified professionals
be mistaken?" He was very disenchanted. I said to him, "You know,
Volodya, don't get me started." Then he said, "I'm going to leave the
KGB!" And I said to him, "There's no such thing as a former
intelligence agent.''
Volodya spoke from the
heart, and I believed him. But how can you escape the knowledge and information
in your mind? You can stop working at this organization, but its worldview and
way of thinking remain stuck in your head.
The work we did was no
longer necessary. What was the point of writing, recruiting, and procuring
information? Nobody at Moscow Center was reading our reports. Didn't we warn
them about what was coming? Didn't we provide them with recommendations on how
to act? There was no reaction. Who wants to work for nothing? To spend years of
your life what for? Just to get paid?
Let's say, for example,
that my friends in scientific and technical intelligence paid several million
dollars for some information about an important scientific discovery. It would
have cost our country billions of dollars to independently develop the same
project. My friends would procure this information and send it to the Center.
People there would look at it and say, "Wonderful. Great information.
Thanks. Kisses. We'll recommend you guys for medals." But then they
wouldn't use the intelligence. They wouldn't even try, because the technical
level of our industry simply didn't allow for it.
In short, when we
returned from Germany in January 1990, I continued to work in the agencies, but
I began to think quietly about a backup plan. I had two children, and I
couldn't afford to throw everything away. What could I do?
Sergei Roldugin:
When Volodya came back
from Germany, he told me that he had been offered a promotion in Moscow or
Peter. We discussed which position would be better, and I said, "In
Moscow, they're all bosses. There are no normal people there. One guy has an
uncle in the ministry, another has a brother, a third has a brother-in-law. And
you don't have anybody. How will you make it there?" Volodya thought for a
while and then said, "But Moscow . . . there are prospects there."
But I could see that he was clearly leaning toward staying in St. Petersburg.
I was happy to go
"undercover" at Leningrad State University (LGU). I wanted to write
my doctoral dissertation, check out the university, and perhaps get a job
there. So in 1990, I became assistant to the president of the university,
responsible for international liaison. I was in the "active
reserves."
Lyudmila Putina:
We followed perestroika
and were aware of everything that went on from 1986 to 1988, but only from
television. We heard people's stories about the happy mood of those years. But
when we returned home, I didn't notice any changes, there were the same
terrible lines, the ration cards, the coupons, the empty shelves. For a while
after we returned home I was even afraid to go to the store. I wasn't able,
like some people, to sniff out all the bargains and to stand in all the lines.
I would just dart into the nearest store, buy whatever was most necessary, and
go home. It was horrible.
Besides, we hadn't
accumulated savings while working in Germany. The car ate up all our money. Our
German neighbors did give us their old washing machine, a 20-year-old model. We
brought it back home, and used it for five more years.
The situation changed for
my husband at work. Despite the fact that, as far as I could tell, his work in
Germany had been successful, he was clearly thinking about what to do next. I
think at a certain point he felt that he had lost touch with his life's real
purpose. And of course it wasn't easy, parting with the past and making the
decision to go into politics.
At that time, the
president of LGU was Stanislav Petrovich Merkuriev. He was a good man and a
brilliant academic. I began to write my dissertation, and chose Valery
Abramovich Musin, one of the top specialists in international law, as my
academic adviser. I chose a topic in the field of international private law and
began to draft an outline for my work.
At the university, I
reestablished contact with my old friends from the law faculty. Several of them
had stayed on there, defended their dissertations, and become instructors and
professors. One of them asked me to help Anatoly Sobchak, the chair of the
Leningrad City Council. Sobchak needed someone good on his team. Apparently he
was surrounded by crooks. Would I go and work for him? "You know, I have
to think about it," I said. "I'm a KGB personnel officer, after all.
And he doesn't know that. I could compromise him." ''Just talk to
him," my friend said.
I should note that by
that time Sobchak was already a famous and popular person. I had followed him
with great interest, followed what he did and said. True, I didn't like
everything I saw, but he had gained my respect.
It was even nicer that
he'd been a teacher in the university where I had studied. Back when I was a
student, I didn't have any personal connections to him. Some people have
written that I was practically his favorite student. That's not true. He was
just one of our lecturers for one or two semesters.
I met Anatoly
Aleksandrovich Sobchak at his office in the Leningrad City Council. I remember
the scene very well. I went in, introduced myself, and told him everything. He
was an impulsive man, and said to me right off: "I'll speak to Stanislav
Petrovich Merkuriev. Come to work starting Monday. That's it. We'll make the
agreement right now, and you'll be transferred." I couldn't help but say,
"Anatoly Aleksandrovich, I would be happy to do this. I am interested. But
there is one circumstance that might be an obstacle to this transfer."
"What?" he asked. I replied, "I must tell you that I am not just
an assistant to the president, I'm also a staff officer of the KGB." He
was silent for a moment. I must have really surprised him. He thought and
thought, and then suddenly he said, "Well, screw it!"
Of course I wasn't
expecting that reaction. This was our very first personal encounter. He was a
professor, a doctor of law, chair of the Leningrad City Council. I didn't
expect such frank talk.
Then he said, "I
need an assistant. Frankly, I'm afraid of going out into the reception area. I
don't know who those people are."
The people in Sobchak's
outer office, his closest cohorts were harsh and rude in the best traditions of
the Komsomol, the Soviet school. This disturbed the city council deputies and
led to a conflict between Sobchak and the city council. Since I understood
this, I told Anatoly Aleksandrovich that I would be happy to come and work for
him, but that I would first have to tell my bosses at the KGB and resign from
my post at the university.
This was a fairly
delicate moment for me. It was difficult to tell my superiors that I intended
to change jobs.
I went to my boss and
said, "Anatoly Aleksandrovich is proposing that I leave the university and
go to work for him. If it's impossible, I'm ready to resign." They
replied: "No. Why? Go and work there. There's no question about it."
My superiors, who were
fairly subtle people and understood the situation, did not try to impose any
conditions on me. Therefore, although I
was formally listed in the security agencies, I hardly ever set foot in the
directorate building.
What's interesting is
that the bosses never once tried to use me for any operations. I think they
understood that it would have been pointless. Moreover, at that moment,
everything, including the law-enforcement agencies, was falling apart.
Vladimir Churov (deputy chair of the Committee for Foreign Liaison of
the St. Petersburg mayor's office):
Before 1991, the offices
in Smolny were clearly divided. The big bosses had two portraits hanging in
their offices of Lenin and Kirov and those who were a rank below them had only
Lenin's portrait. After they took the portraits down, empty hooks were left on
the walls and everyone could pick what he wanted to hang in his office. Most
guys selected a portrait of Yeltsin. Putin ordered himself a portrait of Peter
the Great. Two portraits were brought to him for selection. One was a romantic
painting of a young, curly-headed Peter wearing epaulettes; and the other,the
one Putin chose was an engraving. It was one of the last portraits of Peter the
Great when his reforms were at their most active; right after the failed
Prussian campaign and the Northern war, when Peter laid the foundations of the
Russian Empire.
I think that Vladimir
Vladimirovich chose that portrait of Peter on purpose. It was a rare and
little-known picture. Peter looked rather mournful and preoccupied.
On one occasion my
colleagues from the agencies tried to exploit my proximity to Sobchak. Sobchak
used to go on business trips and was frequently out of town. He would leave me
to run the office. One day he was in a big rush before a trip, and his
signature was needed on a document. The document wasn't quite finished, but
Sobchak couldn't wait for it. So he took three clean sheets of paper, put his
signature at the bottom, and gave them to me, saying "Finish it up,"
and left.
That same evening my
colleagues from the KGB came to see me. We spoke about this and that, and then
they mentioned how great it would be to have Sobchak's signature on a certain
document. Couldn't we discuss it? But I was a seasoned person, I had survived
so many years without one slip-up and I sized up the situation right away. I
took out the folder and showed them the blank sheets of paper with Sobchak's
signature. And they and I understood that this was testimony to the great
degree of trust that Sobchak had in me.
"Can't you see that
this man trusts me?" I said. "What do you want from me?" They
immediately backed off. ''No more questions," they said.
"Sorry." And everything was nipped in the bud.
Still, it was an abnormal
situation because, after all, I continued to get a salary from them, which, by
the way, was more than I was getting at the city council. But soon
circumstances arose that forced me to think about writing a letter of
resignation.
Relations with the
deputies in the city council were not always smooth, mostly because they
lobbied someone's interests. Once a deputy came up to me and said, "You
know, we have to help so-and-so. Could you do such and such?" I had
already put him off several times. One day he said to me, "There are bad
people here, all sorts of enemies, and they've sniffed out that you're a KGB
agent. You have to foil them. I'm prepared to help you, but you have to do me a
favor." I realized that they wouldn't leave me alone. They would blackmail
me, pure and simple. So I made a difficult decision and wrote my letter of
resignation. I was just sick and tired of that brazen blackmail. It was a very
difficult decision for me. Although I had done virtually no work for the
agencies in almost a year, my whole life was still tied up in them. Besides, it
was 1990. The USSR hadn't collapsed yet. The August coup hadn't taken place. No
one was sure about where the country was going. Sobchak was a prominent
politician, but it was risky to tie my future to his. Everything might unravel
at a moment's notice. And I also had a hard time imagining what I'd do if I
lost my job at the mayor's office. I thought that if worse came to worst, I
would go back to the university and finish my dissertation and earn some money
somewhere part-time.
I had a stable spot in
the agencies, and people treated me well. My life in the system had been full
of successes. And still I wanted to leave. Why? I couldn't quite put my finger
on it. It was the hardest decision of my life. I thought for a long time,
collected myself, sat down, and in one quick draft, wrote my resignation
letter.
After I turned in my
resignation, I decided to announce publicly that I had worked in the security
agencies. I turned to my friend Igor Abramovich Shadkhan, the film director,
for help. He was a talented man. His most famous film was Test for Adults, and
he worked in the television studio in Leningrad at that time. I came to him and
said, "Igor, I want to speak openly about my professional past so that it
stops being a secret and so that no one can blackmail me with it."
He taped an interview in
which he asked me in detail about my work at the KGB, what I had done, when I
had served in intelligence, and so on. The tape was shown on Leningrad
television, and the next time someone came along hinting about my past, I
immediately said, "That's enough. It's not interesting. Everyone already
knows about that."
But my letter of
resignation had gotten stalled somewhere. Somebody, somewhere, apparently just
couldn't make a decision. So when the coup happened, I was still an active KGB
officer.
Where were you on the night of August 18-19, 1991?*
* August
18-19, 1991, was the date of Russian president Boris Yeltsin's resistance to
the attempted coup by Soviet hard-liners, which led to the breakup of the USSR
in December 1991.
I was on vacation. When
it all started, I was really worried because I was way out in the sticks. I got
back to Leningrad on the 20th. Sobchak and I practically moved into the city
council. Well, not just us two, a whole bunch of people were camped out there,
and we were there with them.
It was dangerous to drive
out of the city council compound, but we wanted to take some active measures.
We drove to the Kirov Factory and to other plants to speak to the workers. But
we were nervous. We even passed out pistols, although I left my service
revolver in the safe. People everywhere supported us. It was clear that if
someone tried to disrupt the situation, there would be a huge number of
casualties. But then that was it, the coup was over, and they chased away the
coup-plotters.
What did you yourself think of them?
It was clear that they
were destroying the country. In principle, their goal preserving the Soviet
Union from collapse was noble, and they probably saw it that way. But the means
and methods they chose only pushed the country further toward collapse. Once I
saw the faces of the coup-plotters on TV, I knew right away that it was all
over.
But let's say the coup had ended the way the plotters
had planned. You're an officer of the KGB. You and Sobchak probably would have
been tried.
But I was no longer a KGB
officer. As soon as the coup began, I immediately decided whose side I was on.
I knew for sure that I would never follow the coup-plotters' orders. I would
never be on their side. I knew perfectly well that my behavior could be
considered a crime of office. That's why, on August 20, I wrote a second
statement resigning from the KGB.
But what if it had been blocked like your first
letter?
I immediately warned
Sobchak of that possibility. "Anatoly Aleksandrovich," I said.
"I already wrote one letter, and it died somewhere. Now I have to write
again." Sobchak immediately called Vladimir Kryuchkov [then KGB chief],
and then he called the head of my KGB division. The next day, they informed me
that my resignation memo had been signed. Kryuchkov was a true believer in
Communism, who sided with the coup-plotters. But he was also a very decent man.
To this day I have the greatest respect for him.
Did you suffer?
Terribly. In fact, it
tore my life apart. Up until that time I didn't really understand the
transformation that was going on in Russia. When I had come home from the GDR,
it was clear to me that something was happening. But during the days of the
coup, all the ideals, all the goals that I had had when I went to work for the
KGB, collapsed.
Of course it was
incredibly difficult to go through this. After all, most of my life had been
devoted to work in the agencies. But I had made my choice.
Have you read the things that were published in
Moskovskiye Novosti and Ogonyok in those days? For instance, General Kalugin's
exposures?*
*Oleg Kalugin served the KGB for 30 years, but eventually broke with the
world of KGB secrecy, and, during the perestroika years under Mikhail
Gorbachev, campaigned for public accountability among the security services.
Kalugin was stripped of his many KGB decorations by KGB hard-liners in 1990.
They were restored the following year.
Kalugin is a traitor. I
saw Kalugin during my time in Leningrad when he was deputy head of the
Directorate. He was an absolute loafer. A loafer, perhaps, but he remembers
you.
He doesn't remember
anything. He does remember, and he says that from the point of view of the
intelligence service, you worked in a province and had nothing to show for your
performance.
Oh, he doesn't remember a
thing. He couldn't remember me. I had no contact with him, nor did I meet him.
It is I who remembers him, because he was a big boss and everybody knew him. As
to whether he knew me, there were hundreds of us.
Vladimir Churov:
A few months after the
coup, the House of Political Enlightenment, which had belonged to the
Communists, was given to the city. Fairly soon afterward an international
business center was opened there. But the new leaders treated the Communists
generously and left them part of the building. The Communist Party of the
Russian Federation occupied almost a whole wing of the building, along with
other Communist organizations. There was a flagpole on the roof of the
building. The Communists decided to use it to hang a red flag. And each time
the new city leaders drove out of Smolny, they would see that red flag. It was
perfectly visible from the windows in Sobchak's and Putin's offices.
Putin gave the order to
have the flag removed. But the next day it appeared again. Putin gave the order
againand again the flag was taken down. Back and forth it went. The Communists
began to run out of flags and started using all sorts of things. One of their
last versions wasn't even red but more of a dark brown. That put Putin over the
edge. He found a crane, and under his personal supervision, had the flagpole
cut down with a blowtorch.
When did you leave the Party?
I didn't. The CPSU ceased
to exist. I took my Party card and put it away in a drawer.
How did St. Petersburg get through 1993?
It was just like Moscow, only people didn't
shoot each other. The mayor's office was in the Smolny building by then, and
the deputies were in the Leningrad City Council building.
So there was basically the same kind of conflict in
Peter as Yeltsin had with the Supreme Soviet [parliament]?
Yes. But it is important
to note that there wasn't the same division between the law-enforcement
agencies that there had been in 1991. The *FSB leadershipViktor Cherkesov was
the head announced their support for the mayor from the start. The FSB
introduced a number of measures advocating the arrest of extremists who were
plotting provocations, planning to blow things up, or trying to destabilize the
situation. And that was the end of it.
*The FSB (Federalnaya sluzbha bezopasnosti) is
Russia's Federal Security Service. It replaced the KGB. Putin was named
director of the FSB in 1998.
Marina Yentaltseva (Putin's secretary from 1991 to 1996): The first time
I saw Vladimir Vladimirovich was from behind the glass door of an office. I was
sitting across from the door and putting on my lipstick. Suddenly I saw the new
director of the Committee for Foreign Liaison walking down the hall, and I
thought, "Uh-oh, now he definitely won't hire me for the job." But
everything was fine. He pretended that he hadn't noticed a thing, and I never
put my lipstick on at work again.
I wouldn't say that he
was a strict boss. Only people's stupidity would make him lose his temper. But
he never raised his voice. He could be strict and demanding and yet never raise
his voice. If he gave an assignment, he didn't really care how it was done or
who did it or what problems they had. It just had to get done, and that was
that.
Vladimir Churov:
In 1991, Sobchak decided to create the Committee for
Foreign Liaison at the Leningrad City Council. It was headed by Vladimir Putin.
At that time, the city's
foreign trade was in the same shape as the whole country. It was dominated by
state monopolies and monstrous, government authorized firms such as Lenfintorg
or Lenvneshtorg. Customs, banking, investment, the stock market, and other such
structures simply didn't exist.
The Committee had to
quickly create the preconditions for cooperation with Western market economies.
They began by opening the first branches of Western banks. With Putin's active
involvement, they opened branches of Dresdner Bank and Banque Nationale de
Paris.
The city administration
concentrated on attracting foreign investors. The Committee created investment
zones, such as the Parnas zone and the Pulkovo Heights zone, that still exist
to this day. They also developed an original scheme: They invited a large
investor, Coca-Cola, to take over a plot of land in Pulkovo Heights and install
high-capacity power and communications cables, hoping that other companies
would follow suit. It worked. After Coca-Cola developed their piece of land,
Gillette came, then Wrigley, and then some pharmaceutical companies. An
economic zone thus took shape within the city, where total investment now
exceeds half a billion dollars.
Furthermore, with the
Committee's encouragement, the city's infrastructure began to be modernized to
create the conditions necessary for successful business. The first major deal
that Putin supported was the completion
of a fiber-optic cable to Copenhagen. This project had been initiated back in
the Soviet era but never completed. Now the efforts were successful, providing
St. Petersburg with world-class international telephone connections.
Finally, there was the
problem of personnel. There were few specialists who spoke foreign languages.
With Sobchak's support, Putin created a faculty of international relations at
LGU. The first class was announced in 1994. Graduates of the program are now
working in our Committee and in other organizations.
Much has been written in
the St. Petersburg press about the food delivery scandal.
What was that?
In 1992, there was a food
crisis in the country, and Leningrad experienced big problems. Our businessmen
presented us with a scheme: If they were allowed to sell goods mainly raw
materials abroad, they would deliver food to Russia. We had no other options.
So the Committee for Foreign Liaison, which I headed, agreed to their offer.
We obtained permission
from the head of the government and signed relevant contracts. The firms filled
out all the necessary paperwork, obtained export licenses, and began exporting
raw materials. The customs agency would not have let anything out of the
country without the correct paperwork and accompanying documents. At the time,
a lot of people were saying that they were exporting certain rare earth metals.
Not a single gram of any
metal was exported. Anything that needed special permission was not passed
through customs.
The scheme began to work.
However, some of the firms did not uphold the main condition of the contract they
didn't deliver food from abroad, or at least they didn't import full loads.
They reneged on their commitments to the city.
A deputies' commission was created, headed by Marina
Salye, who conducted a special investigation.
No, there wasn't any real
investigation. How could there be? There was no criminal offense.
Then where does this whole corruption story come from?
I think that some of the
deputies exploited this story in order to pressure Sobchak into firing me.
Why?
For being a former KGB
agent. Although they probably had other motives too. Some of the deputies
wanted to make money off those deals, and they wound up with nothing but a
meddlesome KGB agent. They wanted to put their own man in the job.
I think the city didn't
do everything it could have done. They should have worked more closely with law
enforcement agencies. But it would have been pointless to take the exploiters
to court they would have dissolved immediately and stopped exporting goods.
There was essentially nothing to charge them with. Do you remember those days?
Front offices appeared all over the place. There were pyramid schemes. Remember
the MMM company? We just hadn't expected things to get so far out of hand.
You have to understand:
We weren't involved in trade. The Committee for Foreign Liaison did not trade
in anything itself. It did not make purchases or sales. It was not a foreign
trade organization.
But the granting of licenses?
We did not have the right
to grant licenses. That's just it: A division of the Ministry for Foreign
Economic Relations issued the licenses. They were a federal structure and had
nothing to do with the municipal administration.
Sergei Roldugin:
Volodya changed a lot
when he went to work at the mayor's office. We began to see less and less of
each other. He was very busy. He would leave the house early and come back at
night. And of course he was tired. Even when we grilled shish kebabs out at the
dacha, he paced along the fence, lost in thought, in another place. He became
wholeheartedly involved in St. Petersburg's affairs and then his emotions were
drained. He had become a pragmatist.
Marina Yentaltseva:
The Putins had a dog, a
Caucasian sheepdog called Malysh. The dog lived at the dacha and used to dig
under the fence all the time and try to get out-side. One day she did finally
dig her way out, and she got hit by a car. Lyudmila Aleksandrovna scooped her up
and took her to a veterinary clinic. She called from the vet's office and asked
me to tell her husband that they weren't able to save the dog.
I went into Vladimir
Vladimirovich's office and said, "You know . . . we have a situation . . .
Malysh was killed." I looked at him, and there was zero emotion on his
face. I was so surprised at the lack of any kind of reaction that I couldn't
contain myself and said, "Did someone already tell you about it?" And
he said calmly, "No, you're the first to tell me." And I knew I had
made a blunder.
In fact, he is a very
emotional man. But when he has to, he can hide his feelings. Although he also
knows how to relax.
One night my friends and
I went to an erotic show in Hamburg. Actually, it was hardly erotic. It was
crude. And we were there with our wives! They were traveling abroad for the
first time, and they had talked me into it. "Maybe it's better not to
go?" I said. "No, no, we have to. We're grown-ups." "Well,
alright," I said. ''Remember that you're the ones who wanted to."
We went in, sat down at a
table, and the show began. Some black performers came out on the stage a huge
black man, about two meters tall, and a black woman, who was just a little
girl. Slowly they began to strip to some good music. Suddenly, without taking her
eyes off the pair, my friend's wife got up from the table, stood, and then bang!
fainted. It was a good thing her husband caught her, or she would have hit her
head.
We revived her and took
her into the bathroom, where we rinsed her face. We went up to the second floor
and were walking around when the performers, who had just finished their number
and come off the stage, passed bystark naked. My friend's wife saw them and bang!
she fainted again.
We sat down at the table.
"How are you feeling?" I asked my friend's wife. Lowering her eyes,
she replied, "I think it's something I ate. Everything's fine. It will
pass." I said, "No, let's go. We've seen everything. We've gotten in
touch with the sublime. Now let's scram."
Whenever there was a
problem, I was there as a scout who knew the German language. It wasn't my
first trip to Hamburg. You won't believe me, but I was assigned to study their
red-light district as part of my job. At that time we were trying to bring
order to the gambling business in St. Petersburg.
I don't know whether I
was right, but I thought that the government should have a monopoly over the
gambling business. My position contradicted the new Law on Anti-Monopoly
Activity, but I still tried to do everything in my power so that the government
could established strict control over the gaming industry.
We created a municipal
enterprise that did not own any casinos but controlled 51 percent of the stock
of the gaming businesses in the city. Various representatives of the basic
oversight organizations the FSB, the tax police, and the tax inspectorate were
assigned to supervise this enterprise. The idea was that the state, as a
stockholder, would receive dividends from its 51 percent of the stock.
In fact, this was a
mistake, because you can own tons of stock and still not really control
something. All the money coming from the tables was cash and could be diverted.
The casino owners showed
us only losses on the books. While we were counting up the profits and deciding
where to allocate the funds to develop the city's businesses or support the
social sector, they were laughing at us and showing us their losses. Ours was a
classic mistake made by people encountering the free market for the first time.
Later, particularly
during Anatoly Sobchak's 1996 election campaign, our political opponents tried
to find something criminal in our actions and accuse us of corruption. They
said the mayor's office was in the gambling business. It was almost comical to
read this. Everything that we did was so absolutely transparent.
You can only argue about
whether our actions were correct from an economic point of view. Obviously, the
scheme was ineffective and we didn't achieve what we had planned. We hadn't
thought things through sufficiently. But if I had remained in Peter, I would
have squeezed those casinos to the end and forced them to work for the
betterment of society and to share their profits with the city. That money would
have gone to pensioners, teachers, and doctors.
Vladimir Churov:
We had an unpleasant
incident when Vice President Al Gore visited our city. When the vice president
was being met at the airport, an official of the U.S. Consulate General in St.
Petersburg was rude to one of our city leaders. I don't remember exactly what
happened, but I think the U.S. official pushed the district commander. After
that incident, Vladimir Putin issued an official statement that we would refuse
to deal with this U.S. official in the city administration.
The U.S. ambassador to
Russia came to resolve the conflict. He eventually recalled not only that
official but the consul general as well. As a result, Putin had the greatest
respect for the entire U.S. diplomatic corps.
Yet another international
political clash took place, in Hamburg in March 1994. The president of Estonia,
Lennart Meri, who incidentally was well acquainted with Putin and Sobchak,
indulged in some crude attacks against Russia in a public speech at a seminar
of the European Union. Putin and some other Russian diplomats were in the hall.
After Meri made yet another derogatory remark, referring to Russians as
"occupiers," Putin got up and walked out of the room. This was a
brave act; the meeting took place in the Knights' Hall, with its 30-foot-high
ceilings and smooth marble floor. As Putin exited, his footfalls echoed across
the floor. To top it all off, the huge steel door slammed behind him with a
resounding crash. As Putin later told it, he had tried to hold the door open,
but it was too heavy. Our Foreign Ministry commended his action after the fact.
Marina Yentaltseva:
Vladimir Vladimirovich
always seemed so calm when dealing with foreign delegations and people of very
high rank. Usually when you talk to big bosses, you feel shy or uncomfortable.
But Vladimir Vladimirovich was always at ease. I envied him and wondered how I
could learn to be that way. So I was surprised when his wife told me that he
was fairly shy by nature and that he had to work hard to seem at ease with
people.
It was easy talking to
him. Although at first glance he seems very serious, in fact it is easy to joke
with him. For example, he would say,"Call Moscow and set up an appointment
for a meeting at a specific time so that I don't have to sit in the waiting
room and waste a hell of a lot of hours." And I would reply, "Yes,
just like the people waiting in your front office." He would give me a
mock-scolding look. "Marina!"
I had a good relationship
with his wife, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna. She and I would talk just like good
acquaintances. I remember one time when I was a guest in their home and we were
sitting in the kitchen drinking tea. Vladimir Vladimirovich telephoned. She
told him, "Marina and I are drinking tea." And he probably said,
"Which Marina?" because his wife answered, "What do you mean,
which Marina? Your
Marina!"
We grew especially close
after Lyudmila Aleksandrovna had the car accident.
In 1994, I was involved
in negotiations with Ted Turner and Jane Fonda about holding the Goodwill Games
in St. Petersburg. They had come in person, and I was accompanying them to all
their meetings. They had a very tight schedule.
Suddenly I got a call
from my secretary, telling me that Lyudmila had been in an accident. "Is
it serious?" I asked. "No, apparently not. But the ambulance took her
to the hospital just in case." "Let me try to get out of this meeting
and go to the hospital," I said.
When I arrived at the
emergency room, I spoke with the chief physician, who assured me, "Don't
worry, she's not in any danger. We're just going to put a splint on, and
everything will be fine." "Are you sure?"
"Absolutely," he said. So I left.
Lyudmila Putina:
I was driving our Zhiguli
and was going through a green light. Katya was asleep in the back seat. And
suddenly another automobile came crashing into the side of our car. It was
going about 80 kilometers an hour. I didn't even see it. I had the green light
and didn't even look to the right. The other car had run a red light, swerving
around another car that had stopped for the light.
We were fortunate that
the driver crashed into the right front side of the car. If he had hit the
front or back door, one of us would probably have been killed.
I lost consciousness for
about half an hour, and when I woke up, I wanted to keep driving but I realized
I couldn't. I hurt a little, and I was exhausted
When the ambulance picked
me up and gave me a sedative, I remember thinking, "Lord, now I'll catch
up on my sleep!" I had not gotten enough sleep for several weeks.
My first thought, of
course, was about my daughter. "What's happened to my child? My child was
sitting in the back seat," I said immediately. And I gave one of the
bystanders the telephone number of Volodya's assistant, Igor Ivanovich Sechin,
so that he could come and pick Katya up, since the accident had taken place
about three minutes away from Smolny. There was one bystander who was very
concerned and helped me the most. She called the ambulance, she called Sechin,
she took care of Katya, and she stayed nearby through the whole thing. Then she
left her telephone number and it got lost somewhere in the car. That was too
bad. I have wanted to thank her ever since.
The ambulance was
summoned right away, but it took 45 minutes to get there. The doctors examined
me and thought that my spine was broken. I was too timid to tell them to take
me to the Military Medical Academy, to Yuri Leonidovich Shevchenko, so I was
taken to another hospital, a place where people with traumas are always taken.
The hospital was horrible. It was full of people who were dying. There were
gurneys in the hallway with dead bodies on them. I'll remember it for the rest
of my life. It was called the October 25th Hospital. If I had stayed there, I
probably would have died, since they had no intention of operating on my spine.
I don't think they even knew how.
Furthermore, they didn't
even notice the fracture at the base of my skull. I would have suffered
post-traumatic meningitis with a fatal outcome.
Marina Yentaltseva:
A woman called our office
and said "Lyudmila Aleksandrovna asked me to call you. She's been in an
accident. She asked me to telephone." What should I do in a situation like
this? Vladimir Vladimirovich wasn't in his office. He was in the meeting with the
foreigners. One of his deputies took a car, went to pick up Katya, and brought
her right to the office in Smolny. I kept asking, "Katya, what
happened?" And she said "I don't know. I was sleeping." She had
been lying on the back seat. When the car crashed, she was probably thrown and
knocked out.
At first I thought that
Lyudmila Aleksandrovna was okay because she was in the doctors' care. And I
needed to take the little girl to a doctor because she was bruised and seemed
subdued. We went to a doctor right at Smolny, and he advised me to take her to
a pediatrician.
We went to a children's
neurologist at the pediatric institute to see if Katya had suffered a
concussion. The doctor couldn't really tell us, but said that the child needed
some peace and quiet. The doctor asked her what had happened, but Katya wasn't
in any condition to explain anything. She was probably in shock.
The driver who had
brought Katya to Smolny said that Lyudmila Aleksandrovna had been conscious
when the ambulance came for her. I thought to myself, "Well, that's
alright, then, it can't be too bad." Later I called the hospital to find
out what the diagnosis was. Nobody told me anything about a skull fracture or a
cracked vertebra.
Still, we were wondering.
Vladimir Vladimirovich asked me to phone Yuri Leonidovich Shevchenko at the
Military Medical Academy. He wasn't there. I phoned a second time, a third, a
fourth, a fifth time, and he still wasn't there. Finally, late in the evening,
I got a hold of him. And he immediately sent his surgeons over to remove
Lyudmila Aleksandrovna from the hospital and bring her to his clinic.
So Dr. Shevchenko, the current Minister of Health, is
someone you know well?
No, we didn't have a
close relationship, even after my wife's accident. It's just that he's a real
doctor. About four years ago, in 1996, during the first Chechen war, he removed
a bullet from a soldier's heart. The bullet had plunged into the soldier's
heart muscle, and the guy managed to stay alive. He flies to Peter on the
weekends and does operations. He's a real doctor.
Lyudmila Putina:
Valery Yevgenevich
Parfyonov brought me to the clinic. He saved my life by taking me out of the
operating room. My ear was torn and they had decided to sew it up. They had
left me naked on the table in a freezing operating room, in a terrible state of
half-consciousness, and had gone away. When Valery Yevgenevich came, they told
him, "She doesn't need anything. We just did an operation. Everything's
fine.
He came into the
operating room. I opened my eyes, and found an officer standing in front of me,
holding my hand. He had a very warm palm. It warmed me up, and I knew that I
had been saved. They did an X ray at the Military Medical Academy and told me
that I needed an emergency operation on my spine.
Marina Yentaltseva:
Lyudmila Aleksandrovna
was staying with the children at the government dacha outside of town. Masha
was still in school. When the accident happened, Lyudmila and Katya were on
their way to pick her up. Katya was sick that morning and had not wanted to go
anywhere, but she had asked to come along to pick up Masha. Now I had to face
picking up Masha and figuring out what to do with the children. I said to
Vladimir Vladimirovich, "Let me take the girls out to my mother's house."
He said, "No, that's awkward; but if you would agree to spend the night
with the girls out at the dacha, I'd be very grateful." "Okay,"
I said.
On the way to the dacha
we passed the second hospital where Lyudmila Aleksandrovna had been taken, and
I saw Vladimir Vladimirovich's car. He was getting ready to leave. I asked the
driver to pull over, and I got out of the car. "The girls are in the
car," I told him. He went over to them, and I went into the hospital they
wouldn't allow the children in.
Lyudmila Aleksandrovna
had just been operated on. She was conscious, and she asked me whether I had
taken some warm clothing for the girls. It had gotten very cold that day, and
there might not be warm things at the dacha.
When we were getting
ready to leave, Vladimir Vladimirovich said that he would try to come back
later but most likely wouldn't make it because his meetings would probably go
late into the night.
The driver dropped us off
at the dacha and left. But he forgot to tell us how to turn the heat on in the
house, and it was terribly cold. The girls behaved beautifully. When we got to
the house, they became helpful: "Aunt Marina, you have to take the blanket
down from there, and the sheets are over here," they explained. They
weren't in shock, and they didn't go weeping off into the corner. They tried to
help.
The girls, of course,
understood that it was all very serious. When we were on our way to the dacha
and passed the hospital, and they saw their papa's car, they immediately asked
"Is this where Mama is?" How did they know she had been taken to a
new hospital? We hadn't told them about taking her to the Academy, so as not to
worry them.
I put the girls in the
same bed so they would be warm enough. At about three in the morning, I was
startled by a knock on the door. I was frightened because there was no one else
at the dacha. But it turned out that it was Vladimir Vladimirovich, who had at
last gotten free from Ted Turner. He immediately found the switch and turned on
the heater.
I had never seen him like
this. I can't say that he was thrown for a loop and totally at a loss and
didn't know what to grab on to. That wasn't the case. I just sensed that he was
trying to come up with a plan in his head. Still, I never saw Vladimir
Vladimirovich like this.
He came home at three in
the morning, and left again at seven. I stayed with the girls until evening,
when Ykaterina Tikhonovna, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna's mother, came from
Kaliningrad.
How did she know?
I had sent her a
telegram. Lyudmila Aleksandrovna might have been angry when she found out, but
I did it anyway. I asked her to come of course, with Vladimir Vladimirovich's
consent. She stayed with the children until Lyudmila Aleksandrovna was released
from the hospital.
Did she take a long time to recover?
She spent about a month
and a half or even two months in the hospital. They also discovered a fracture
at the base of her skull. That worried them much more than the crack in her
spine.
Lyudmila Putina: After the spinal operation, I lay in the intensive
care unit and I kept telling the doctors that my jaw bones were shifting
around. And they kept joking, "Don't worry, we'll put in new ones."
But then the surgeon who had operated on me decided to check it out, and just
in case, to take an X ray. That's sited her all the time.
Lyudmila Putina:
When I got out of the
hospital, I just crawled around my apartment for the first two weeks. Then,
gradually, I began to be able to do things. In the end, it took me about two to
three years to get back to my normal life.
Sergei Roldugin: Once Volodya came to my dacha with his driver. We sat
and talked for a while and then went to bed. And I noticed he put an air gun
down next to him. Evidently something was amiss. I said, ''Vovka, what are you
doing? Do you think an air gun is going to save you?" "It won't save
me," he said. "But it makes me feel calmer." This happened in
the last days of his job at the mayor's office, when Sobchak's electoral campaign
was just getting off the ground.
From the outset, it was
clear that the mayoral elections in 1996 would be very complicated for us. I
warned Anatoly Aleksandrovich Sobchak
that these elections were going to be hard. In 1992, I had played a definitive
role in Sobchak's election as the first popularly elected mayor of the city. As
chair of the Leningrad City Council under the old system, Sobchak could have
been removed by the council members at any moment. He needed a more stable
position.
Sobchack finally agreed
that we had to introduce the post of mayor. But because he had fairly
conflictual relations with the majority of the deputies on the council, he wasn't
sure that the proposition would pass. Meanwhile, his public popularity was very
high. The deputies knew that Sobchak would be elected mayor if they voted to introduce
the post. And they didn't want that. They liked the fact that they could always
keep him on a hook.
Still, I was able to
convince some of the deputies that it would be best for the city if we had the
mayoral post. I also managed to mobilize the heads of the city districts. They
didn't have the right to vote, but they could influence their deputies.
In the end, the decision
to introduce the post of mayor was passed by the Leningrad City Council, by a
margin of a single vote.*
Four years later it was clear that in order to win
an election, he would need professional campaign managers and technicians not
just a guy who could finesse the deputies. This was a whole new ball game.
You gave Sobchak some advice on how he should run the
campaign?
I told him right off,
"You know, you're on a completely different playing field now. You need
specialists." He agreed, but then he decided that he would conduct his own
electoral campaign.
Out of overconfidence?
It's hard to say. You
know, running a campaign, bringing in specialists all of this costs money. And
we didn't have any. Sobchak had been under investigation for a year and a half
on allegations that he had bought an apartment with city funds. But in fact he didn't
have any money either for an apartment or for an election campaign. We were not
extracting funds from the city budget. It never even entered our heads to find
the money we needed that way.
Yakovlev got the funds he
needed at Moscow's expense. He was supported by the very same people who
orchestrated the campaign against Sobchak. *
The title for Sobchak was
mayor, a new title introduced for the democratically elected chair of the city
council in the democratic reform period of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The
name of the top leadership post in St. Petersburg was restored to governor in
1996 when Governor Yakolev was elected. Korzhakov played an active role against
him . . .
According to the
information we had, Soskovets did, as well. The law-enforcement agencies were
brought in later. They played very dirty.
About a year and a half
before the elections, a commission came to St. Petersburg from Moscow. The
commission had been appointed by the heads of three agencies: the FSB, the
Interior Ministry, and the prosecutor's office. They opened up several criminal
cases and made Sobchak a witness in two of them. During the election campaign,
someone sent an inquiry to the Prosecutor General's office, asking whether Sobchak
was involved in any criminal investigations. The very same day the answer came
back: Yes, there were two criminal cases under investigation. Naturally, they didn't
explain that he was a witness, not a suspect, in these cases. The reply from
the Prosecutor General's office was duplicated, and flyers were dropped over
the city from a helicopter. The law enforcement agencies were interfering
directly in a political contest.
Sobchak decided to run
his own campaign office. Lyudmila Borisovna, his wife, got involved, and he
pronounced her campaign manager. We tried to talk both of them out of this,
because we weren't convinced that everyone in the campaign office would be willing
to take orders from her.
We lost a lot of time
debating about who should run the campaign. Aleksei Kudrin, who was also a
deputy of Sobchak's, got involved. But Sobchak asked me to continue to work in
city affairs. Somebody had to manage the economic activity of a city with a population
of five million citizens during that period. At the last minute, between the first
and second rounds, Kudrin and I tried to jump into the fray, but by then it was
hopeless. We really blew it on the election.
For some time after our
defeat in the mayoral elections, I stayed in my office in Smolny. The second
round of the presidential elections was underway, and I was working for the St.
Petersburg headquarters of Yeltsin's campaign. Vladimir Yakovlev, former
governor of Leningrad oblast, now elected mayor of St. Petersburg, didn't kick
me out of my office right away; but as soon as the presidential elections were
over, I was asked rather harshly to free up the space. By that time I had
already turned down Yakovlev's offer to keep my post as deputy mayor. He had
made the offer through his people. I thought it would be impossible to work
with Yakovlev, and I conveyed that to him.
Besides, during the
campaign, I was the one who had initiated a statement signed by all the
officials in the mayor's office that we would all leave Smolny if Sobchak lost.
It was important to express our solidarity, so that all the people who worked
with Anatoly Aleksandrovich and his administration would realize that his defeat
would be a defeat for them, too. It was a good stimulus to get them all
involved in the struggle. We called a press conference and made a public
statement, which I read. So it was impossible for me to remain behind in the
mayor's office after Sobchak lost.
Furthermore, I had
attacked Yakovlev during the election campaign. I don't remember the context
now, but in a television interview I had
called him a Judas. The word seemed to fit, and I used it.
Although my relations
with Yakovlev didn't improve after that, oddly enough they also didn't
deteriorate. Still, I couldn't stay behind with him. The same went for many of
my colleagues. Misha Manevich came to me and said, "Listen, I want to get
your advice. Yakovlev is offering me the job of vice mayor." I said, "Misha,
of course you should take it." And he said to me, "How can I? We all
agreed that we'd leave." I said to him, ''Misha, what are you talking
about? It was a campaign; we had to do that. But how can you leave all this?
Who will work here? The city needs professionals." I talked him into staying.
Misha was an amazing guy.
I am so sorry that he was murdered. It was such an injustice. Whose toes did he
step on? It's just shocking. He was so mild, well mannered, and flexible in the
best sense of the word. He had principles. He didn't accommodate everybody, but
he never got on his high horse. He always looked for a way out, for an
acceptable solution. I still don't understood how he could have been murdered.
I just don't understand it.
Besides Misha, I talked
several other colleagues into staying. Dima Kozak, who was head of the legal
department, had already handed in his letter of resignation, and I talked him
into coming back. But all told, a lot of people left Smolny.
Marina Yentaltseva:
I wrote my letter of
resignation on the last day Vladimir Vladimirovich worked at Smolny. I left
without having anywhere to go. There was no back up plan for me.
It had been hard working
with Putin, but very interesting. It's always interesting, working with smart
people. And I couldn't imagine ever working with anyone else. Vladimir
Vladimirovich guessed my sentiments even before I handed in my resignation. He
began to try to talk me out of it. "Marina, why have you decided to leave?
Don't go," he said. He said that he didn't know where he was going to be working,
and that he wasn't sure that he would be able to offer me a job in the future.
I replied, "Regardless of whether you can offer me anything in the future
or not, I still am not going to work here."
When I took my letter of
resignation in for his signature, my eyes were wet. He noticed it, and tried to
reassure me. "Marinochka, don't get so upset." I tried to get hold of
myself. "Alright, that's it, I won't anymore." And he said,
"Don't get so upset, please."
Of course I really suffered
heavily through all this. I was sad to come to the end of such an interesting
and quite meaningful period in my life. Still, I was absolutely certain that
everything would work out fine for Vladimir Vladimirovich. I knew that such a
smart person would not remain on the shelf for long.
In July, my family and I
moved to the dacha that I had built several years earlier. I waited
expectantly. Everyone was saying that I was "so needed by everybody"
and that someone would definitely call me. Anatoly Sobchak had said he would
definitely make me an ambassador. He had talked to Primakov. He told me,
"I spoke to the minister. You'll be an ambassador." Of course I
doubted that anyone would send me anywhere as an envoy, but it was awkward
telling Sobchak the truth. I couldn't say "Anatoly Aleksandrovich, that's
a total fantasy! You and I have no more hope of seeing an ambassadorship than
we have of seeing our own ears!" And I was right.
Anatoly Aleksandrovich
Sobchak was an emotional man. He liked to be the center of attention and to be
talked about. It seemed to me that it didn't matter to him whether people were
damning or praising him.
At the start of his job
at the Leningrad City Council, Sobchak indulged in several sharp attacks on the
army. He called the generals "blockheads," even though he didn't mean
it, which I know for a fact. Sobchak had a positive attitude toward the army.
But once when he was reaching for a snappy phrase in a public speech before a sympathetic
audience, he used the word, and it was a mistake.
The generals really loathed
him. Once there was a military meeting that he, as a member of the military
council of the Leningrad Military District, was supposed to attend. It was on
his calendar. But Alla Borisovna Pugacheva, the popular singer, was supposed to
arrive in Leningrad at the same time. He said to me, "Listen, call the generals
and tell them that I can't make it." He just wanted to meet Pugacheva. The
generals had already moved their meeting once to accommodate his schedule.
"You have to go," I told him. "Well, tell them I'm sick!"
he said. And he went off to the airport to meet Pugacheva.
I called the commander,
"You know, Anatoly Aleksandrovich is unable to come. He is sick."
"Really? Alright, well, thanks for telling me." Two weeks later, I
met the commander, and he said to me, insulted, "So he was sick,
huh?" It turned out he had seen Sobchak meeting Pugacheva at the airport
on television and that he had gone to her concert. And then he made an unkind
remark about Lyudmila Borisovna, although she had nothing to do with it. ''So
he has time to meet with those . . . even when he's sick. And he has no time to
be involved with government business?"
When Sobchak flew off to Paris, where were you?
In St. Petersburg,
although I was already working in Moscow by then.
Tell us about it.
What's to tell? Well,
there was some convoluted story involving his departure. . . . It wasn't convoluted. I was in Peter, so I
went to visit him in the hospital.
You just went to say goodbye?
No, I didn't say goodbye.
I just visited him in the hospital, and that was it. He was in the cardiac
unit, and then Yura Shevchenko, the head of the Military Medical
Academy, transferred him.
And then on November 7, his friends, I think they were from Finland sent him a
medevac plane, and he was flown to a hospital in France.
Just like that? Nobody organized anything in advance? Some
people just sent an airplane?
Yes, his friends sent an
airplane. Since it was November 7, a national holiday his absence from St.
Petersburg was not noticed until November 10. From the outside, it all looked
like a special operation organized by a professional.
What are
you talking about?
There was nothing special
about it. The newspapers wrote that he was whisked out, without even going
through customs. That's not true, he passed through customs and passport
control at the border. Everything was as it was supposed to be. They put stamps
in his passport. They put him on the airplane. That was that.
Applause, applause. But they could have arrested him?
They probably could have.
But I don't know what for.
To this day you don't understand?
No, why are you saying
that? In fact, I do understand that they had no grounds to arrest him. He had
been implicated in this murky story of the apartment. A case was opened up, but
it fell apart in the end. They put the screws to Sobchak for four years and
then hounded the poor guy all over Europe.
Did you yourself get to the bottom of this story?
No. Frankly, I didn't even
know the details. Later, I looked into it for myself.
And did you find it interesting to dig into the
details of this case because you wanted to know the kind of person you were
working with? Or did you never have doubts at all?
You know, I was absolutely
convinced that he was a decent person100 percent decent because I had dealt
with him for many years. I know how he thinks, what he values, what he doesn't
value, what he is capable of, and what he is incapable of. Remember the episode
in the film The Sword and the Shield,
when the Germans are trying to recruit the Soviet officer? They say, "You
think we'll let you die a hero? Here's a photo showing you in a German uniform.
That's it, you're a traitor." The Soviet officer grabs a chair and tries
to hit the recruiter. Then the recruiter shoots him and says, "It was the
wrong idea from the start. There was no sense in blackmailing him. Obviously,
that officer's reputation in his homeland is flawless."
The same is true of Sobchak.
He is a decent man with a flawless reputation. Furthermore, he is very bright,
open, and talented. Even though we are very different, I really like Anatoly
Aleksandrovich. I really like people like him. He's real.
Few people know that
Anatoly Aleksandrovich and I had very close, friendly, confidential
conversations. We used to talk a lot, especially on our trips abroad, when we
were left virtually alone for several days. He was a friend and mentor to me.*
*This conversation took place two days before the tragic
death of Anatoly Sobchak. On February 19, 2000, Sobchak died of a heart attack
in the city of Svetlogorsk
Lyudmila Putina:
That summer of 1996,
right after the elections, we moved out of the city to the house that we had
been building for six years, about 100 kilometers out-side of Petersburg.We
lived there about six weeks. We sewed curtains, cleaned, settled in, and
arranged the furniture. As soon as we had finished all this, the house burned
down. It is a sad story. It burned to the ground.
Marina Yentaltseva:
We drove out to the
Putins' dacha. They had just finished building it. We got there quite late,
toward evening. My husband and I had wanted to go back the same day, but Vladimir
Vladimirovich and Lyudmila Aleksandrovna started in: "What are you saying?
Let's heat up the banya and have a steam bath!" And their daughters chimed
in, "Let Svetulya stay!" Svetulya is our daughter.
Our house was made of
brick, but finished with wood inside. On that day I was out at the dacha with
my wife and kids. We had just moved in. Marina Yentaltseva, my secretary, had
just arrived with her husband and daughter. We men went into the sauna, which
is right inside the house on the first floor. We steamed ourselves for a while,
then had a dip in the river and came back to the sauna rest room. Suddenly, I heard
a crack. I saw some smoke, and then a flame came shooting out. In my loudest and
most commanding voice, I yelled for everybody to get out of the house. The
sauna was on fire.
Katya was in the kitchen,
eating something. She turned out to be the most disciplined. When I shouted
"Everybody get out of the house!" she dropped her spoon on the table and
leapt out of the house without asking any questions. Then she stood outside the
house and watched. I ran upstairs.
My older daughter, Masha,
was another story. She was floundering around on the second floor.... I took Masha
by the hand and brought her out to the balcony. Then I tore the sheets off the
bed, knotted them together, tied them to the balcony railing, and said to
Masha: "Climb down!" She got scared: "I'm not going, I'm
afraid!" I threatened her: ''I'm going to pick you up right away and throw
you off here like a puppy! What's with you? Don't you understand that the house
is about to burn down?!" I took her by the scruff of the neck and tossed
her over the railing, and they caught her at the bottom.
Then I suddenly
remembered there was a briefcase in our room with cash in it all our savings.
What would we do without that money? I went back and started looking, feeling
around with my hand. I thought, well, I've got a few more seconds of this and then
I won't be able to . . . I stopped looking for the stash. I ran out to the
balcony.
Flames were shooting
upward. I clambered over the railing, grabbing the sheets, and began to lower
myself down. And here's an interesting detail: I was stark naked from the
banya. I had only just managed to wrap a sheet around myself. So you can
imagine the scene: the house is burning, there's a naked man wrapped in a
sheet, crawling down from the balcony, and the wind is blowing the sheet out
like a sail. A crowd had gathered on the hill, and they were watching with
enormous interest. The two cars were parked next to the house, and they were
heating up pretty rapidly. But the keys to them were inside the house, and the
doors were locked.
Marina Yentaltseva:
We were left without
keys. Everything was inside the house. Lyudmila Aleksandrovna said, "Let's
push this one." We had a Model 9 Zhiguli. I shouted in hysterics, "To
hell with the car! The house is on fire!" She looked at me with great
surprise and said,"That's okay, we can still use it.'' She took a stone
and threw it at the car window. Then she moved the gearshift out of
"park," and we somehow managed to push the first car and then the
other one. Then I stood silently staring as the house burned. It was a total
shock for me.
Lyudmila Aleksandrovna
was the first one to say, "Thank God, everyone is alive and well!"
The house burned like a
candle. The firemen arrived, but they ran out of water right away. There was a
lake right there. "What do you mean, you're out of water? There's a whole
lake right here!" I said. "There's a lake," they agreed,
"but no hose." The firemen came and went three times. Our dacha burned
to the ground.
The girls suffered the
most from this incident. They had brought all their treasures from home to the
dacha, all their toys and Barbie dolls, which they had been accumulating their
whole lives. Masha told me later that she couldn't sleep for several months
after that. They had lost everything that was familiar to them.
When the firemen later
analyzed the fire, they concluded that the sauna builders were to blame for
everything they hadn't put the stove in the banya properly. And if they were to
blame, then they had to compensate us for the damage.
The first way they could
compensate us would be to pay us money. But it wasn't clear how much the dacha
was worth. The house burned down in 1996. We had been building it for five
years. I remembered clearly that back in 1991, I had bought bricks for three
rubles a piece. Later I realized that I didn't have enough and had to buy some
more, but by then they cost seven rubles a piece. The prices since that time
had risen further, and we had no idea how to index them. So I liked the second
option for compensation better to force them to restore everything as it had
been. And that's what they did. They erected the exact same frame, then hired a
Polish firm to put on the finishing touches. They completed the job after a
year and a half of work. Everything was as it had been before the fire, and
even better. We only asked that the sauna be taken out completely.
Lyudmila Putina:
I was philosophical about
the loss of the house. After that experience, I realized that houses, money,
and things shouldn't add stress to your life. They aren't worth it. You know
why? Because at any minute, they could all just burn up.
It's a national custom
that all important matters are decided in the banya: What will you do now,
without one?
Banyas are really just
for bathing. Even that last time, we weren't trying to resolve any questions.
We were just holding a wake for my former job.
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