Although many books have been written about Vladimir Putin, including an autobiographical interview in book format, entitled First Person, researchers are still divided on his life story before the presidency, considering that no reliable data is available. Also, there are no unbiased authors anywhere in the world to broach the subject. I decided to write this feature relying on the good old benefit-of-the-doubt principle.
His father, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, was a foreman at the Ivan Yegorov Vagonmash Passenger Car Works in Leningrad (other sources have it that he served as a security guard there). In 2013, Vagonmash went bankrupt. Interestingly, one of the commissions before the bankruptcy was making Metro cars for the Kyiv network. His mother, Maria Ivanovna Shelomova, lived with Putin’s father in a neighboring village. She was 41 when Vladimir Putin was born. The late childbirth gave rise to rumors that Vladimir was actually an adopted son (two of his younger brothers had died in their early years and one during the Siege of Leningrad). This also caused allegations about Vladimir Putin’s mysterious ancestors.
There are no facts to confirm or refute them. The current president’s parental and maternal ancestors were peasants in what is now Tver oblast in Russia. Putin’s parental grandfather, Spiridon Ivanovich, merits a special mention. He was a cook at the Kremlin’s resorts of Gorky and Ilyinskoye. He did not cook for Lenin or Stalin, although there is a family legend to that effect. Vladimir Putin says he lived with his parents in a communal apartment even when he was a KGB officer. Again, no reliable data available. His father had the official status of “Invalid of the Great Patriotic War” and was entitled to have a better housing accommodation, so it is hard to believe that he never used the privilege during the 30 years after the war, considering that he was secretary [head] of the workshop’s partburo party cell.
In 1970, Vladimir Putin graduated from a 10-grade school specializing in chemistry and enrolled in the International Department, Faculty of Law, Leningrad State University. It is quite possible that he was then already a KGB man, otherwise such enrolment for a son of an ordinary foreman is hard to explain. Dmitry Gantserov, the KGB officer tasked with recruiting LSU students at the time, recalls: “I started meeting with Putin sometime in January 1974. I liked the man… he could quickly establish the required contact…”
Another possibility is that what helped Vladimir Putin enroll in the International Department was his athletic record rather than KGB. Vladimir was a good Sambo fighter even in high school. He had taken up the martial art to cope with the local street gangs. Aleksandr Bastrykin, the current head of the Investigative Committee of Russia, was a fellow student and headman at the Leningrad University.
After graduation in 1975, Vladimir Putin was assigned to the Secretariat of the Leningrad KGB Directorate. He worked there for five months, took a field work refresher course in Okhta, then worked for the counterintelligence division of the Leningrad Regional KGB Directorate. In his own words, he dealt with “foreign elements.” Other sources have it that he worked for the Fifth Directorate that specialized in combating dissidents; that it was there the First Chief Directorate (Intelligence) took an interest in him and got him transferred, whereupon he had to take a year’s advanced training course in Moscow.
In 1984, having been promoted to Major of Justice [a rank in the Soviet version of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. – Ed.], Vladimir Putin was enrolled in a special one-year faculty of the Andropov Red Banner KGB Institute of the USSR where he majored in German. In 1985, he was sent to Dresden as director [manager] of the Soviet-German Friendship Home. The posting was a sinecure. He was, in fact, a liaison officer, constantly in touch with the formidable East German Stasi secret police. He was also tasked with filing secret reports on the conduct of Soviet students and Stasi was always there to lend a hand.
A no-sweat job, so the biggest problem was having time to kill. There was, of course, Radeberger. It tasted great... There is no data about any espionage missions Vladimir Putin carried out in Dresden, the more so that he was not the chief KGB resident – there was Colonel Lazar Matveyev, but Vladimir was his favorite. Interestingly, his Stasi contact at the time was Matthias Warnig, currently the Managing Director of the Nord Stream AG, the commissioned to build and operate the Nord Stream sub-sea gas pipeline from Russia to Germany.
According to Vladimir Putin’s former colleague, Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Usoltsev (aka Gortanov/Kartamonov), currently in the Czech Republic, “Vladimir knew how to be polite, friendly, helpful, and unobtrusive. He was able to win over anyone, but men old enough to be his father were his forte. He had learned the dissident-confidence-winning trick in Leningrad, when working for the Fifth Directorate that specialized in combating ‘ideological subversion.’ During our conversations he would mention many dissidents with respect, especially Solzhenitsyn. I never encountered such moods among the Fifth Directorate operatives in Krasnoyarsk and Minsk.”
In 1989, Vladimir Putin was awarded East Germany’s prestigious Verdienstmedaille der Nationalen Volksarmee Bronze Medal of Merit of the People’s Army and promoted to lieutenant colonel on a long service basis. In the spring of 1990, he left Dresden, most likely not because it was the end of his posting but because the German Democratic Republic was aflame with revolution and the Stasi secret police, Putin’s main objective, had vanished.
Putin says he refused a position at the central KGB headquarters and chose to work as an assistant for international affairs to LSU Rector Stanislav Merkuryev. That was a KGB-established post. Putin was supposed to spy on foreign students and possibly recruit them. I don’t think that he had to recruit any because this was done by special KGB recruiting agents. Besides, most students spoke English and Putin didn’t know the language at the time. In fact, his KGB service record does not show any accomplishments at the period. His was mostly desk rather than field duty, but he met with many people. He established contacts that would prove helpful in the political domain, and he spoke fluent German.
Alexander Litvinenko and other Putin’s opponents would later allege that, while on a mission in East Germany, he was suspected of pedophilia and ordered to return home where he received a markedly unimportant job. Later, this allegation would be seen as a reason behind Litvinenko’s assassination. The pedophilia story, however, sounds absolutely unrealistic. The KGB would have fired him right then and there. Vladimir Putin left Dresden simply because the GDR had ceased to exist. There are also simple pragmatic reasons behind his decision to occupy an unimportant post in his native Leningrad instead of a more important one on Lubyanka St. in Moscow. Doubtlessly a good analyst, what with the Velvet Revolution and its impact on East Germany, he must have figured out that in the spring of 1990 the Soviet communist regime was in its last throes, that he had to distance himself from it as best he could.
Not coincidentally, Putin, on Merkuryev’s recommendation, became an aide to Anatoly Sobchak, Chairman of the Leningrad City Council of People’s Deputies in May 1990. Sobchak was a noted “superintendent” of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika campaign. Putin and Sobchak had met at the Leningrad University where Sobchak taught them the Soviet version of business law. In June 1991, Sobchak became Leningrad’s first democratically elected mayor. Putin found himself at the head of the Mayor’s External Affairs Committee. He says he twice tendered his resignation. Probably he did. The fact remains that he resigned from the KGB on August 20, 1991, at the peak of the putsch. Vladimir Putin was banking on the democrats and KGB was ballast rather than payload under the circumstances. Besides, the Leningrad Mayor’s Office had by then a solid like-minded team as its External Affairs Committee, chaired by the future President of the Russian Federation, with Viktor Zubkov, the future chief of the financial intelligence service, prime minister, currently Gazprom’s chairman of the board, as his first deputy. The legal advisor was Dmitry Medvedev who would be elected as Russia’s third president, currently the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation.
Zubkov spent almost 20 years as an apparatchik in charge of the Soviet sovkhoz state farms. My uncle, God rest his soul, was also born in Leningrad and headed a sovkhoz for several years at the time. He told me that being a teetotaler under that political system was as bad as showing one’s professional incompetence. No economic issue was broached, let alone raised, other than over a bottle of vodka, followed by others. And so I have little doubt that Viktor Zubkov had to have a little hair of the dog on some mornings, and that the future third president of Russia would fetch beer.
Vladimir Putin chose his future presidential personnel not only from among the external affairs committee members. In March 1994, he was appointed as first deputy “chairman of the government” of St. Petersburg. He would usually sit in for Sobchak when the man was away on a business trip. Putin also supervised the local law-enforcement agencies. Among the future presidential team members were Deputy Mayor Aleksey Kudrin; Igor Sechin, head of the Office of the First Deputy Mayor (i.e., Vladimir Putin); Aleksey Miller, head of the Department of the Mayor Office’s Committee for External Affairs, to mention but a few.
In November 1996, Putin and seven team members founded the Co-Operative Society Ozero [Lake] on the eastern shore of Lake Komsomol (Komsomolskoye ozero), on the Karelian Isthmus. Each of the stockholders was noteworthy in his own way, including Vladimir Yakunin, Russian businessman, who would be president of Russian Railways, then chairman of the International Union of Railways (UIC) in 2012, and Yury Kovalchuk, chairman of the board, Russia Bank, co-owner of the National Media Group, including Channel One and Channel Five. After Putin became President, all the stockholders found themselves among the wealthiest citizens of Russia. I might as well point out that Zubkov, who had held important administrative posts in Priozerny District, Leningrad Region (where Lake Komsomol is located), helped them with the land plots for their plush dachas.
While working for the Mayor of Leningrad, Vladimir Putin had to live through a series of scandals, with the biggest one erupting in 1992 when a task force of St. Petersburg’s City Council members, led by Marina Salie and Yury Gladkov, accused Putin and his team of fraud in conjunction with the program of food supplies to the city in exchange for raw materials. Putin thought it was Sobchak’s attempt to fire him. He said there were no causes for criminal prosecution against anyone. Salie’s task force, however, collected evidence to the effect that the food-raw-materials barter deal had substantially damaged the city budget, but there was no direct evidence of corruption on the part of Putin, Sobchak, and other mayoral officials.
While in St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin had to deal with individuals whose reputation was best described as dubious. This was especially true of Roman Tsepov (born Belinson) and Vladimir Barsukov (Kumarin) who were generally regarded as members of the Tambov OPG [Russ. acronym of organized crime group. – Ed.], with Kumarin as gang leader. According to Dmitry Zapolsky, a noted St. Petersburg journalist, currently having to live away from Russia, in Thailand, Tsepov was zampolit [Russ. army slang, short for “political deputy” or “deputy commander for political affairs,” generally referred to in the West as “political commissar,” a notion and then military position borrowed by the Red and Soviet Army from the French Revolution’s commissaire politique (political commissary), when one was supposed to guard the revolution against any counterrevolutionary thought and action, and thus ensure the Republican victory (1789-99). – Ed.] of a prison guards unit. He founded St. Petersburg’s first private security company (ChOP), Baltic Escort, that supplied bodyguards for Sobchak and other Mayor’s Office functionaries. Zapolsky knew Roman Tsepov well enough to add that he “jointly with Viktor Zolotov (head of Boris Yeltsin’s secret service, currently commander of Russia’s National Guard), built a system that allowed them to act as intermediaries between those in power and the underworld, between the law-enforcement agencies and the Mafia, between the gangsters and those who were supposed to fight them. It was then the idea of ‘monetizing’ these agencies, receiving hard cash in return for the closing of criminal cases, releasing men under arrest, opening criminal cases in return for hard cash, was conceived. Roman did this well… I know of several cases when hard cash was brought to the Mayor’s Office and handed directly to the Vice Mayor (i.e., Vladimir Putin). I wasn’t witness to the money changing hands, but I saw the money. I believe that Roman didn’t lie to me when he said that ‘this is for Smolny’ [the popular name of the Leningrad/St. Petersburg City Council; before Lenin’s coup d’etat in October 1917 (Old Style) the seat of the City Governor’s Office. – Ed.].”
Whether what Zapolsky says is true is hard to corroborate. Tsepov attended Putin’s inauguration and died on September 24, 2004. Cause of death: radiation poisoning. One is instantly reminded of Alexander Litvinenko’s death. The perpetrators and initiators of Tsepov’s murder will never be found. Kumarin/Barsukov was arrested in 2007, stood trial and received a term in prison on a number of charges. Experts agree that he will stay behind bars for as long as Putin remains in office. In the absence of additional condemning evidence, he will be released in 2027.
Remarkably, Kumarin’s ChOP bodyguards secured the Co-Operative Society Ozero’s premises. He was vice president of St. Petersburg’s fuel company and actively collaborated with its CEO Vladimir Smirnov who was also Ozero’s chairman of the board, and who is currently a member of the board of the National Space Bank.
Andrey Konstantinov, another reputed St. Petersburg journalist, says: “Putin, as first deputy mayor, knew many persons [involved in dubious matters] in this city, and well he should, what with his recent KGB career. In fact, he was supposed to familiarize himself with the key players in the field, so he could figure out who was who and who could do what. Let alone the fact that any member of the Tambov Famiglia, after receiving a seat in the State Duma (Russian parliament), would be a guest of honor at the local police headquarters, for his status would now be equal to that of a federal minister, and he would receive VIP treatment, gangster or not. He would be the one to make an appointment and the local law would oblige.”
I still can’t figure out the reason for the Ozero stockholders choosing Kumarin’s bodyguards, knowing his reputation.
As it was, Sobchak lost the St. Petersburg mayoral race to his deputy Vladimir Yakovlev on June 16, 1996. There are eyewitness accounts to the effect that Vladimir Putin was not actively involved in his boss’s campaign, although he was chief of campaign HQ. He may have received orders from the Kremlin to keep a low profile because it had been decided “upstairs” to replace Sobchak. The new governor offered Putin to remain in office, but he declined and tendered his resignation. The Co-Operative Society Ozero was founded several months after his resignation, most likely in order to buy real estate and save it for a rainy day. Another possibility is that the future President of the Russian Federation had business plans of his own. Vladimir Putin did not stay jobless for long. In August 1998, he was appointed as deputy executive manager at the Presidential Property Management Department and tasked with supervising Russia’s property abroad. The head of the department was Pavel Borodin. Before long he found himself in the media limelight, in conjunction with a series of scandals involving the Kremlin’s renovation project, the Swiss company Mabetex, and himself being accused of having received bribes from that company. Borodin must have been the one to introduce Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin’s inner circle. From then on Putin’s political career was on a quick upward curve – perhaps because he was the second ex-KGB career officer, after Aleksandr Korzhakov, in Boris Yeltsin’s milieu.
On March 26, 1997, Vladimir Putin was appointed as deputy head of the Presidential Administration, and as head of the Chief Oversight Directorate of the President of the Russian Federation, replacing his former subordinate Aleksey Kudrin. The next rung up the Kremlin ladder was being appointed as first deputy head of the Presidential Administration in charge of the regions (May 25, 1998). He occupied the post for only two months. On July 25, Putin became chief of the FSB [successor to the KGB. – Ed.], being promoted to colonel (Boris Yeltsin wanted to promote him to major general, but Putin declined). While in this post, Putin helped retire Prosecutor General Yury Skuratov after the sex scandal and the closure of the Mabetex case. Then he found himself to be Yeltsin’s designate successor, but I won’t dwell on this. I will just say that two oligarchs, the late Boris Berezovsky and Sergey Pugachev, currently in the bad books with the Kremlin, used to argue who was the one to have let Vladimir Putin into Yeltsin’s inner circle.
When it came time to vote for Putin after Yeltsin stepped down, the man’s reputation had to be ascertained, mildly speaking, especially his tenure in St. Petersburg. The Russian electorate knew next to nothing about the man, so the Kremlin had to keep the key media practically under total control during the campaign, to prevent any stories involving the Co-Operative Society Ozero from reaching the audience (Putin had quit the Society after finally settling in Moscow).
A few words about Putin’s private life. In 1983, he married Lyudmila A. Shkrebneva, then a Romance and Germanic Philology student at the Moscow State University, six years his junior. It could have been a marriage of convenience, considering that KGB officer Vladimir Putin was expecting a posting abroad [it was a strict KGB rule to have officers posted abroad married and separated from their families, so their families could be held hostage in case of defection. – Ed.]. His ex-wife recalls that Vladimir never helped her with house chores, even when she was pregnant, because “Vladimir said it was a matter of principle that the wife take care of these chores.”
Their divorce in 2013 surprised few if any. They had long been estranged from each other. Olympic rhythmic gymnastics champion Alina Kabayeva (ex-member of the Duma Russian parliament, currently chairman of the board, National Media Group) was being frequently mentioned as Putin’s lover. There is no way to confirm or refute this allegation. According to businessman Sergey Kolesnikov who was “talked into” funding and building the Putin Palace at Gelendzhik, Kabayeva visited the estate more than once and her visits could hardly be explained by the need to discuss sports issues with the head of state.
