Who is Putin? In the early 1990s he was an obscure bureaucrat, but somehow he managed to become the president of one of the largest nations on earth. How did he do it? Russian journalist Masha Gessen was following the post-Soviet democratic developments closely, and tracked down key players who were near to Putin during his unexpected and meteoric ascent to power. In The Man Without a Face, she tells that story.

Russia’s first post-Soviet president, Boris Yeltsin, rose to prominence riding a populist tsunami in the early 1990s. Eventually, Yeltsin’s early charisma turned into something more closed-off and self-protective. He became more erratic and mistrustful, hiring and firing until the list of political enemies was much longer than the tight inner circle that crusted around him—a half dozen who became known as “The Family.” These were Yeltsin’s closest (and eventually only) associates and family members.

Pain and uncertainty increasingly swelled in the hearts of Russians after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Who are we as a people? Is this the best democracy can do for us? What does the future hold? Yeltsin failed to address the nation’s pain and fears. On the whole, standards of living rose during the 1990s, and there was much to celebrate. Proportions of homes with washing machines, microwaves, and televisions rose. The number of vehicle owners doubled. But when people are in pain and their pain is overlooked, even the good in their world is on the verge of being lost or spoiled like everything else. This became the headspace for the majority of the Russian people.

The general trajectory had been roughly upward, but even that had its share of tumult. The fledgling democracy had brought cycles of hyperinflation that ruined the life savings of the older generation, and the very young grew up in the shadow of their elders' lingering fears over Communism. Only a small sliver of young working professionals had done exceedingly well for themselves. By the late 1990s, Russians were ready for change. They didn’t miss Communism, but they did miss the blossoming solidarity of the 1980s and Russia’s superpower status.

It was in this context of angst and tumult and hunger for change—any change—that an obscure bureaucrat named Vladimir Putin was dropped into the Russian political limelight.

The Pour Over provides concise, politically neutral, and entertaining summaries of the world’s biggest news paired with reminders to stay focused on eternity, and delivers it straight to your inbox. It's free, too.

Check it out.

Putin’s rise to the presidency was as unlikely as it was meteoric. He was a lowly deputy mayor in St. Petersburg in the early 1990s, and eventually became the head of the Russian secret police (FSB) in the Kremlin at Moscow, where he recruited many of his old KGB buddies from his Leningrad days.

Even as the head of the FSB, Putin was hardly within striking distance of the presidency. The key player who bridged the gap was the oligarch Berezovsky, one of the privileged few remaining in President Yeltsin’s inner circle (“the Family,” as it was called). Berezovsky took notice of Putin on a number of occasions throughout the decade following the USSR’s collapse. The first time was when Berezovsky saw Putin refuse a bribe in the early 1990s. As Berezovsky marveled years later in an interview, "He was the first bureaucrat who did not take bribes. It made a huge impression on me." 

Whenever Berezovsky was in St. Petersburg, he made a point of stopping by Putin’s office, the loquacious Berezovsky dominating the conversation, the stoic Putin listening. Another moment that impressed Berezovsky was Putin’s decision to decline an offer to stay on as deputy mayor when the mayor he originally ran with was not reelected. A third moment was when Putin showed up uninvited at the birthday party for Berezovsky’s wife and gave her flowers. Berezovsky questioned him over the gesture, asking if he was making a show of rubbing shoulders with an inner oligarch who was increasingly persona non grata in Moscow society. According to Berezovsky, Putin coolly replied, "Yes, I am making a show of it."

In an interview at his flat outside London, the exiled Berezovsky called Putin his protégé. Whether that is some revisionism or the truth, Putin could not have seized the presidency without him.

By the late 1990s, the inescapable truth concerning Yeltsin was that he needed a successor. There was no way he could win reelection. But the Family was unsure  whom they could put forward as a replacement. Berezovsky pitched the lowly head of secret police, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. While the half-dozen inner circle advisors surrounding Yeltsin debated the proposal, Borezovsky commuted to FSB headquarters daily to talk with Putin about the possibility of presidency. The pair talked about it secretly in an old elevator no longer in use, the only place Putin was confident was not bugged.

The Family was in dire straits, and despite reservations about Putin, from concerns the parliament would reject him to the matter of his height ("too small"), they decided to roll the dice on him.

Putin was not even the Family’s most promising, prominent candidate they could have put forward. It’s a mystery why the Family went with a depressingly under-qualified Putin. The decision becomes even more flummoxing when we consider how little the inner circle knew about Putin. He was not just underqualified, but virtually unknown. A United Nations delegation in Davos, Switzerland, convened shortly after Putin was announced as the successor, and the representatives from Russia had no idea what to say when asked about Yeltsin’s replacement. The United Nations committee watched the Russians exchange confused glances. Who was this man Putin? Even the delegates representing Mother Russia had little idea, to the amusement of the rest of the delegation.

Interestingly, Berezovsky never viewed Putin as a friend. Berezovsky’s an extremely charismatic personality capable of drawing in a crowd, so it might have been this seemingly stoic lack of personality or ambition that convinced the oligarch Putin was a good fit for the office of president. As it turned out, Berezovsky read Putin wrong.

Putin seemed a bland man in a gray suit on whom the masses could project their hopes and desires for the future of Russia. On August 9, 1999, Boris Yeltsin put Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin forward as prime minister of Russia, and the State Duma (the lower house of the Federal Assembly of Russia) confirmed the appointment. In the Russian political system, the president is head of state, and the prime minister oversees the government. As prime minister, Putin would still need to run for election to become president, but the masses were ready for a change.

In August and September of 1999, Russia was rife with fear.

Following a series of terrorist attacks in Russian streets and apartment buildings that killed hundreds (planned by the FSB, some speculate), the nation was in a panic. In some cities, people started sleeping in the streets for fear that their apartments would be bombed next. As scared people often do, the Russians looked for a scapegoat. They found it in the neighboring territory of Chechnya. 

The Soviet Union attacked and annexed Chechnya in 1921, but Chechnya declared independence after the Soviet Union collapsed, despite Russian protestations. The majority of Russians believed the Chechens were responsible for the attacks. Hundreds of men from the Chechen region were arrested across Russia. The country was on edge. Yeltsin ordered troops to begin bombing Chechnya. As the freshly selected prime minister, Putin issued his own orders—even though the Russian prime minister technically has no military powers. In a televised address—one of his first ever—Putin told Russia that the government would be hunting down these terrorists, that these men would be destroyed. “Even if we have to find them in the outhouse, we will rub them out,” he told the nation.

In a manner that came to be known as characteristically Putin, he showed himself blunt and remorseless. His address did not mention the victims of the bombings or bringing terrorists to justice—it was just cold destruction foretold in a vulgar vernacular. And the people of Russia loved it. The same day he gave his speech, a fourth of Russian governors issued a joint request that Yeltsin step down and instate Putin as president.

To firm up a growing lead and rising popularity, the Family suggested Yeltsin step down half a year early and give Putin the mantle of president. That way Putin would run as an incumbent, and enter the race with some momentum.

Within months of Putin’s official election, the government culture had noticeably shifted. People around the government began speaking more bluntly, more detached, in a manner reminiscent of Soviet days. Maybe they were just waiting for the freedom to speak as they had. Putin’s idea of patriotism was cold: a fear-induced servility to the Russian cause, which the media was to unswervingly uphold.

There remains debate over whether the FSB was behind the series of bombings in 1999. At first, Berezovsky blamed the Chechens like the rest of Russia, but he eventually concluded along with many others that the Russian secret police was behind the terrorist attacks, and had covered their tracks whenever the police and media came close to exposing it. Berezovsky said it was a strategy to unify the Russian people against a common enemy and support a more blunt, resolute, pugnacious leader who could replace a flailing Yeltsin. In this scenario, Putin was a perfect fit. It was also the perfect pretext for reacquiring a former Soviet territory.

March 26, 2000 was Election Day for Russia.

In the war-torn, recently annexed Chechnya, less than a third voted for Putin. The low turnout for Putin was understandable, given how Russian forces had smeared the tiny territory. Everywhere else in Russia, however, support for Putin was high, even though he stayed out of the limelight for the most part.

Putin’s campaign strategy in 2000 was not campaigning. Other than a three-minute New Year’s Eve speech following Yeltsin’s announcement of his resignation to make way for a successor, Putin made no speeches. To be out with the people pandering for votes would have been undignified and desperate. He kept to the shadows, emerging only to fly and land a plane amidst media fanfare. Other than a hastily written biography released during the election, no one really knew about him.

On May 7, 2000, Putin was inaugurated, and he began making some interesting decisions. He changed the inauguration location from the palace where congresses were held to the Great Palace where the czars had ruled. One of the guests of note—though few commented on his presence—was Kryochkov—the former head of the KGB. He was in attendance along with over a thousand guests, and few took notice. Putin went on to make him his deputy prime minister.

As Kryochkov recalled in an interview with Gessen, Putin called the former head of KGB just a few days after Yeltsin announced his resignation. Putin wanted him as deputy prime minister on the condition that he give up some military powers conventionally given to the PM. Putin communicated that the arrangement would work so long as Kryochkov stayed out of his way.

This was one of many signs that the KGB/Communist presence had never been purged from the government, despite attempts to ensure that members of the old Soviet guard were barred from political life.

Within just a few weeks of his inauguration, Putin passed a series of fiats that expanded military spending, reinstated mandatory compliance of military conscription for any able-bodied Russian man, and nixed the no-first-strike policy instituted during the peace talks at the end of the Soviet Union, maintaining instead that Russia could resort to violence against belligerent nations when other forms of peaceful negotiations failed. Putin also made military training compulsory for boys in secondary school, which includes learning how to take apart and reassemble firearms. What is more, he gave 40 ministers the right to classify decisions and documents at their discretion—in direct violation of Russia’s constitution.

In a matter of months, Putin found pretext to tear down two of Russia’s most powerful oligarchs and drive them from the country. One was a media magnate running Russia’s largest news outlet. The second day Putin was in office, men in camo and ski masks stormed the headquarters of Media Most with automatic weapons and hauled off truckloads of documents. The official reports and rationales were numerous and contradictory. Were they there because of reports of the company spying on its own journalists? Because of tax evasion? Or were they there to display their power over the voice of the people?

The signs of a tyrant were pretty evident, but Russians and Westerners alike saw what they wanted to in the early years of Putin, and did not discover how misplaced their approval was till much later.

Putin went on to dismantle the media and any institutions that were remotely democratic. Over the early 2000s, there have been waves of resistance that crested and fell, but nothing that could threaten an autocrat who holds all the keys. The chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov had the intelligence, popularity, and gumption to challenge Putin with a bid for the presidency, which he did in 2005, but Putin’s stranglehold on media and any attempts at productive campaigning slowly relegated Kasparov’s presence to that of an isolated irrelevance.

Whether future waves of resistance prove strong enough to reinstitute sustained democratic reform and new leadership in Russia remains to be seen.

These insights are just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of The Man Without a Face here. And since we get a commission on every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.