The other week, when I interviewed the environmental activist Yevgeniya Chirikova just outside Moscow, she kept stumbling over a phrase in English. Vladimir Putin and his associates, she said, couldn’t be compared to the toweringly evil figures of the past, like Stalin, because they were too petty.
The other week, when I interviewed the environmental activist Yevgeniya Chirikova just outside Moscow, she kept stumbling over a phrase in English. Vladimir Putin and his associates, she said, couldn’t be compared to the toweringly evil figures of the past, like Stalin, because they were too petty.
They were – and this is where her English began to fail her – “teefs and cooks”. It took a while to understand that the phrase she was reaching for was “thieves and crooks”.
It was a phrase that came up time and again. “People steal a lot of money from everywhere,” said a young man I met at a bowling alley in Naberezhnye Chelney, a bleak industrial town east of Moscow. “They steal from banks, from factories, and they don’t construct new factories. Putin is the head of the government so he should do something.”
Marina Salye used to work with Putin when he was deputy mayor of St Petersburg in the early 1990s. It was a time of great hardship, when food was rationed and many went hungry. Salye headed a committee trying to address the problem, but she found that Putin had taken charge of the matter. She says that contracts were signed to barter commodities such as timber and aluminium for potatoes and meat – but while the goods were exported, the food never arrived.
When she tried to mount an investigation, she was blocked. Eventually, she retreated to a dacha six hours from St Petersburg, which is where my colleague Nick Sturdee interviewed her last week. Now aged 77, she has hoarded her documents, hoping that one day someone will listen.
Speaking to his biographers, Putin said that he was a target of false allegations because of his links with the KGB. In other words, he was a victim of a smear. “There was hardly any investigation. And there could not have been one. There was nothing and no-one criminal to be investigated,” he said.
Masha Gessen’s new book The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (Granta, 2012) outlines the allegations and more besides. For the last decade, Putin has been the strongman, retaining popularity by persuading Russians that only he can keep Russia stable, calm things down after the crazy years of oligarchs and organised crime, and use oil wealth to expand the middle class.
Few Russians wanted to know about his past, or investigate his friends. But now more Russians are questioning the man who has been president or prime minister for 13 years, and who says he’d like to stay in power for another 12. Maybe there will be more interest in Marina Salye and the stash of documents she keeps in her dacha.
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