Chapter 1The Siege City

Foreword

I spent my working life writing about Russian power from inside the weather of it. At Vedomosti I covered the money; at Novaya Gazeta I covered what the money did to people. In both newsrooms Vladimir Putin was not a subject. He was the climate. You do not profile the climate. You dress for it, you learn its seasons, you notice which of your colleagues it has killed. So when I told other émigrés that I was writing a biography of him, more than one of them gave me the particular Russian laugh that means: what is left to say? Everything about this man is known. Nothing about him is understood.

That gap was the only reason to write the book.

I left Russia in 2015. Emigration is usually described as a loss of access, and it is -- the press pool, the corridor, the official who talks after the second glass. What nobody tells you is what it opens. Distance, first: in Moscow I could report what happened on Tuesday, but I could never see the shape of thirty years, because the shape was the room I was standing in. And then the strange archive of exile -- the leaked files, the court records, the investigations assembled in Riga and London and Vilnius by reporters who could no longer work at home and therefore worked without permission. Some of the most important facts in this book exist in public only because their authors were driven out of the country they were describing. Emigration closes the door to the building. It opens the blueprints.

I expected to write a political biography -- institutions, wars, money, the vertical of power that gives this book its title. I wrote that book. But I kept being pulled somewhere earlier: to a besieged city, a single room shared by three people, a courtyard where a small boy learned that the world respects force and nothing else. I have worked from the public record -- his own authorized interviews, the memoirs of the men who served beside him and against him, the court transcripts, the press archives, the documented findings of investigative journalists, some of whom paid for those findings with their freedom or their lives. Where the record is investigative reconstruction rather than established fact, I say so in the text. A biography of a man whose entire method is the control of information must be honest, above all, about what it does not know.

What I found was not a mastermind, and not an accident. Those are the two lazy verdicts, and the country of my birth has suffered from both of them. What I found was narrower and stranger: a man who learned a small number of lessons very early, in conditions of genuine catastrophe, and who has spent seven decades applying them with a consistency that most of us cannot manage for a week. That consistency is why he is worth a book. Plenty of rulers are more brilliant. None that I have studied is more legible -- and none has succeeded so completely in building a state in the image of a single biography, so that to explain the man is very nearly to explain the country.

I did not write this book to settle accounts. Exile journalism is full of settled accounts, and they read like what they are. I wrote it because I spent twenty years describing the vertical from underneath and then a decade looking at it from outside, and I wanted, once, to trace it from the beginning -- from the courtyard to the Kremlin, from the siege his mother survived to the siege he has never stopped fighting. I left the country in 2015. The subject, I discovered, did not leave me. This book is what I did about that.

— Stepan Yegorov, Riga

Chapter 1 · The Siege City

The city that made Vladimir Putin was a city of the dead.

Leningrad in 1952 -- the year of his birth -- was seven years removed from the end of the Second World War and nine years from the breaking of the Nazi siege that had starved, frozen, and shelled its population for 872 days. The physical reconstruction was underway. The Nevsky Prospekt had been repaired. The Hermitage had reopened. The factories along the Neva were running again. But the reconstruction that mattered most -- the reconstruction of the people who had survived -- was not underway, because the Soviet state did not believe in the reconstruction of people. It believed in the reconstruction of output. The survivors of the Leningrad blockade were expected to resume producing, and they did. What they carried inside them was their own affair.

What they carried was extraordinary. Between September 1941 and January 1944, approximately 800,000 civilians died in Leningrad -- most of them from starvation. The true number may have been higher; Soviet record-keeping during the blockade was itself a casualty of the blockade. People died in their apartments and lay there for weeks because no one had the strength to move them. People died on the streets and were stepped over by other people who would die on the same streets days later. People ate wallpaper paste, boiled leather belts, and -- in documented cases that the Soviet state suppressed for decades -- each other. The daily bread ration for a non-working dependent fell to 125 grams in November 1941: a slice roughly the size of a man's palm, made partly from sawdust and cellulose.

Maria Ivanovna Putina, Vladimir Putin's mother, survived this.

But before the siege, before the war, before the famine -- the Putin family had already established a relationship with the Soviet state that was closer, more personal, and more consequential than anything a factory worker's family would normally possess.

Vladimir Putin's paternal grandfather, Spiridon Ivanovich Putin, was a professional cook. This in itself was unremarkable. What was remarkable was who he cooked for. Spiridon Putin served as a personal cook at the country estates used by the Soviet leadership -- first at Gorki, where Vladimir Lenin lived during his final years, and then, after Lenin's death in 1924, in the household of Joseph Stalin. The grandfather cooked for the two founders of the Soviet state. This is not speculation or family mythology. It is documented in Soviet personnel records, and Putin himself confirmed it in his authorized interviews, mentioning his grandfather's service matter-of-factly, as though cooking for Lenin and Stalin were a detail of modest biographical interest rather than a connection to the innermost circle of Soviet power.

The significance of this connection should not be overstated, but neither should it be dismissed. In the Soviet system, service to the leadership -- even in a domestic capacity -- conferred a degree of proximity to power that was genuinely unusual. Spiridon Putin was not a political figure. He was a cook. But he was a cook who operated inside the most heavily guarded and politically sensitive households in the Soviet Union, which meant he had been vetted, cleared, and trusted at the highest level. The family's relationship to the Soviet state was not merely that of citizens to government. It was, at least in the grandfather's generation, a relationship of personal service -- the kind of bond that, in Russia, has always carried weight disproportionate to its formal rank.

Spiridon Ivanovich Putin was born in 1879 in the village of Pominovo, in the Tver district -- the same region from which the Shelomov family (Maria Ivanovna's people) also came. He was a peasant by origin, trained as a cook, and his path from a Tver village kitchen to the dachas of Lenin and Stalin traces one of the distinctive arcs of early Soviet social mobility: the talented member of the laboring classes elevated into the personal service of the revolutionary elite. After his time in the leadership households, Spiridon worked as a cook at a Communist Party boarding house and then at the Ilyich sanatorium of the Moscow city party committee, in the village of Ilyinskoye outside Moscow, serving until his retirement.

He lived until 1965, when his grandson Vladimir was thirteen years old. The boy knew the old man. They were contemporaries for thirteen years. What stories passed between them -- what understanding of the Soviet system the cook who had served Lenin and Stalin transmitted to the teenager from the kommunalka on Baskov Lane -- is not recorded in any publicly available source. Putin mentioned his grandfather's service briefly in his authorized interviews, and he has not elaborated. But the fact remains: Vladimir Putin grew up in a family whose connection to Soviet power extended not merely to the institutions of the state but to the personal households of its founders. The family was not elite. The family was not powerful. But the family had been inside the rooms where power lived, and that proximity -- even at the level of the kitchen rather than the conference table -- carried its own form of knowledge.

The generation between Spiridon and Vladimir -- the generation of Vladimir Spiridonovich and Maria Ivanovna -- experienced the Soviet state very differently. For them, the state was not a household to serve. It was a force that nearly destroyed them.

Maria Ivanovna was a factory worker. During the worst months of the siege, she collapsed from starvation and was placed among the dead for collection. Her husband, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, who was himself recovering from severe combat wounds sustained while fighting on the Leningrad front, learned that his wife was still alive only when he visited the collection point and noticed she was breathing. He carried her home. She survived. Their second son, Viktor, did not. (The eldest, Albert, born in the mid-1930s, had already died in infancy before the war; the cause has been reported variously as whooping cough or another childhood disease, and the family rarely spoke of him.) Viktor died of diphtheria during the siege -- the exact date is not known, but it was likely in the winter of 1941-42, when disease swept through the weakened population with a thoroughness that the German artillery could not match. Viktor was buried in a mass grave. His parents never learned precisely where.

Viktor was buried in Piskaryovskoye Cemetery -- or so the family believed. Piskaryovskoye was the largest mass burial site in Leningrad, where hundreds of thousands of siege victims were interred in long communal trenches, their individual identities swallowed by the scale of the catastrophe. The parents never knew the precise location. In a city where the dead outnumbered the living's capacity to bury them individually, a child's body was simply one more in the mass of the perished. There was no marked grave to visit, no specific plot of earth to tend. Viktor existed only in the memory of parents who would carry his absence for the rest of their lives.

This is the foundational story of the Putin family, and it is worth pausing over, because everything that follows -- every decision Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin would make across the next seven decades, from the alleys of Leningrad to the Kremlin to the battlefields of Ukraine -- would be made by a man who grew up in the aftermath of this story, told and retold in a household where it was the central text.

The story contained several lessons, and the lessons were not subtle.

First: the world is a place where your child can die of disease in a besieged city and be thrown into an unmarked pit, and no one will tell you where.

Second: the state can fail you. The Soviet state had failed to prevent the siege. The Soviet state had failed to supply the city adequately. The Soviet state had failed to evacuate the children in time. The Soviet state had, however, eventually broken the siege -- at a cost of over a million military casualties on the Leningrad front alone. The lesson was not that the state was useless. The lesson was that the state was the only thing between you and annihilation, and that it worked only when it was strong enough and ruthless enough to function under conditions of total war.

Third: survival is not guaranteed. It is earned through endurance, through the refusal to surrender, and through a certain amount of luck that can never be acknowledged as luck because to acknowledge it would be to admit that everything could have gone the other way.

Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin had his own war. Born in 1911 -- the same year as his wife -- he had been conscripted into the Soviet Navy, then transferred to an NKVD demolition detachment -- one of the sabotage units sent behind German lines to destroy infrastructure and create chaos. These were among the most dangerous assignments in the Soviet military: small teams operating in occupied territory, planting explosives, cutting communications, and engaging in guerrilla operations against an enemy that shot saboteurs on sight when it caught them. The casualty rates in NKVD demolition detachments were staggeringly high. The men who served in them were not volunteers in any meaningful sense; they were selected, assigned, and sent, and their survival was not a priority of the institution that employed them.

Vladimir Spiridonovich survived, but not intact. He was wounded severely in the legs by a German grenade during a mission. The injuries were serious enough to end his combat career. It was winter, and the wounded man had to be gotten across the river to reach medical care; a fellow soldier -- by chance a neighbor from Leningrad -- dragged him over the frozen, fire-swept Neva and carried him on his back to the hospital. He spent months recovering. He walked with a limp for the rest of his life. He never spoke about the war in detail. His son would later say that his father had told him almost nothing about his combat experience, and that what he knew he had learned from his mother.

The father returned from the war to find that his wife had nearly died of starvation and that his son Viktor was dead. The marriage endured. It would have to endure a decade more before another child arrived. Vladimir Spiridonovich worked in a factory -- the exact nature of his postwar employment has been described variously as a foreman, a skilled worker, and a Party organizer at the factory level -- and he lived the life that the Soviet state prescribed for men of his generation: steady work, modest consumption, no public complaints, and the war remembered only in the annual rituals of Victory Day and the private silences of a household where the dead were always present.

This silence was typical of the siege generation. The people who survived the blockade did not, as a rule, talk about it extensively. The Soviet state had its own narrative of the siege -- heroic endurance, collective sacrifice, the unbreakable spirit of the Leningrad proletariat -- and individual stories of desperation, cannibalism, and the near-total collapse of social order did not fit that narrative. But the silence was also personal. What the survivors had experienced was, in many cases, beyond the capacity of language to process, and the Soviet Union provided no framework for processing it. There were no therapists. There was no public reckoning. There was work, there was vodka, and there was the absolute determination to ensure that one's children would never experience what one had experienced.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born on October 7, 1952, into this silence. He was the third son of Vladimir Spiridonovich and Maria Ivanovna -- and the only one to survive. Albert, the eldest, had died in infancy in the late 1930s; Viktor, born in 1940, had died of diphtheria during the siege in 1942. What is not in dispute is that Vladimir was, in the most literal sense, the replacement child -- the son born into a family that had already buried two children, in a city that had already buried hundreds of thousands.

Maria Ivanovna was forty-one years old when Vladimir was born. In the Soviet Union of 1952, this was unusually late for childbirth. The decision to have another child -- if it was a decision rather than an accident, and the family has never addressed this question -- came a full decade after Viktor's death in the siege. Ten years of childlessness after the loss of both sons. Ten years during which the Putins lived as a couple without children, in a society that valorized the family as the basic unit of socialist construction, surrounded in their communal apartment by families whose children were alive.

The psychological literature on replacement children -- children born after the death of a sibling, specifically conceived or experienced as substitutes for the dead -- is extensive, and it describes a pattern that is remarkably consistent across cultures and historical periods. The replacement child carries a burden that is unique in family dynamics: the burden of being both themselves and the ghost of someone else. They are loved, but they are loved in part as proxies for the child who is gone. They are invested with expectations that derive not only from their own potential but from the unfulfilled potential of the dead sibling. They grow up in the shadow of a loss they did not cause and cannot remedy, and the result, documented in study after study from the mid-twentieth century onward, is a distinctive psychological profile: intense drive, an acute need to justify their existence, a deep sensitivity to failure, and a tendency to view their own survival as something that must be earned rather than assumed.

The concept of the replacement child was first described systematically by the psychiatrist Albert Cain and his colleague Barbara Cain in 1964, and subsequent research by psychologists including Elva Poznanski and Jean-Pierre Relier has expanded the literature considerably. The pattern they describe is not pathological in all cases -- many replacement children lead entirely ordinary lives -- but the dynamics are distinctive enough to constitute a recognized category in developmental psychology. The replacement child often displays what clinicians describe as "survivor's guilt in reverse" -- guilt not for having survived something that others did not, but for existing at all as a substitute for someone who was loved and lost.

None of this can be clinically applied to Vladimir Putin. He has never submitted to psychological examination, and amateur psychoanalysis of political leaders is a genre with a poor record of accuracy. But the structural facts are not in dispute. He was born to parents who had lost two children. He was born a decade after the second death, to a mother well past the typical childbearing age. He was raised in a household saturated with grief that was never articulated, in a culture that did not provide the language or the institutional framework for articulating it. Whatever the specific psychological consequences of these facts, the general pattern is clear: Vladimir Putin entered the world as a child whose existence was already freighted with meaning before he drew his first breath. He was not simply a new life. He was an answer to a loss -- and the question of whether any life can adequately answer such a loss would follow him, silently and perhaps unconsciously, through everything that came after.

There is one more dimension to the replacement child dynamic that is specific to the Putin family. Maria Ivanovna's near-death during the siege -- her collapse from starvation, her placement among the bodies awaiting collection, her rescue by her husband -- meant that Vladimir's mother was a woman who had literally returned from the dead. She had been sorted among the corpses and pulled back. The son she bore a decade later was the child of a resurrected woman -- a woman who had survived something that should have killed her, who had lost a son in the midst of that survival, and who then, at an age when childbearing was statistically unlikely, produced another son to replace the one she had lost. The theological resonances are obvious, and in a family where religious faith would later become a significant element of Putin's public identity, they may not be entirely coincidental. But even without the theology, the psychological weight is immense. The mother who had been dead and lived again. The son born to fill the space left by the dead. The father who had rescued the mother from among the corpses. These are not ordinary family stories. These are the stories of people who have passed through the abyss and emerged on the other side, and the child raised in the shadow of such stories carries a burden of significance that no ordinary childhood can prepare him to bear.

The family lived in a communal apartment at Baskov pereulok 12, in the center of Leningrad -- a five-story prerevolutionary building on a narrow lane between Liteiny Prospekt and Suvorovsky Prospekt. Russian journalists who later traced Putin's childhood geography -- Kommersant published a detailed excursion to his childhood addresses, Argumenty i Fakty St. Petersburg mapped five key locations -- confirmed the specifics. The apartment was a three-room kommunalka on the third floor. The Putins occupied one room. The other two rooms housed other families. The shared kitchen, the shared bathroom, the shared hallway -- the standard apparatus of Soviet communal living.

A kommunalka -- a kommunalka -- was the standard Soviet housing arrangement for working-class families: multiple families sharing a single apartment, with private rooms but communal kitchens, bathrooms, and hallways. The Putins' room measured approximately twenty square meters. Twenty square meters for three people -- roughly the size of a modest hotel room, and this was home for the entirety of Putin's childhood and youth. The building had survived the siege but had not been significantly repaired since. The stairwell had no hot water. Rats were a persistent problem -- Putin himself has described chasing them with sticks on the staircase, an image that his biographers have used with varying degrees of subtlety. The building's courtyard -- the dvor -- was the social world of the children who lived there.

The dimensions matter because they shaped the human being who emerged from them. Twenty square meters means that the boy slept, studied, and existed within arm's reach of both parents for the first twenty-five years of his life. There was no separate bedroom. There was no desk in a quiet corner. There was a room, and in that room were three people whose moods, tensions, silences, and rare expressions of emotion were as inescapable as the walls themselves.

The building at Baskov pereulok 12 was typical of central Leningrad's prerevolutionary housing stock -- a five-story structure originally designed for the bourgeoisie of the tsarist era, subsequently divided and subdivided by the Soviet state to accommodate as many families as possible. The courtyards of such buildings were enclosed spaces -- rectangular plots of cracked asphalt or packed earth, surrounded on all sides by the backs of apartment blocks whose windows looked down on everything below. The geography was simultaneously public and intimate. Everyone could see the courtyard. Everyone who spent time in the courtyard was observed. The old women on the benches. The children at play. The drunks. The fights. Nothing happened in the courtyard that was truly private, and nothing happened in the rooms above that was entirely inaudible to the neighbors.

For the Putin family, the kommunalka at Baskov pereulok 12 was home from the postwar years through the mid-1970s -- roughly three decades in the same room, the same building, the same courtyard. The permanence was typical. Soviet citizens did not move frequently. Housing was allocated by the state, and the allocation was, in most cases, for life. You did not choose your neighbors. You did not choose your room. You lived where you were placed, and you adapted to the conditions, or you did not adapt, but either way you stayed.

Putin shared this single room with both parents until he was twenty-five years old. There was no privacy in the literal sense. There was also no privacy in the social sense: the kommunalka was a system of enforced mutual surveillance, in which every family knew the habits, schedules, and conflicts of every other family. You learned, in a kommunalka, to control what you revealed. You learned to listen. You learned that the walls were thin and the neighbors were always present. These were skills that would serve an intelligence officer well.

But the kommunalka was not what shaped the child most powerfully. What shaped him was the courtyard.

The courtyards of Leningrad's communal apartment buildings in the 1950s and 1960s were hierarchical, physical, and unforgiving. They were the domain of children and adolescents, and the social order within them was established through fighting. Putin was small for his age -- he would remain small throughout his life, reaching a height of approximately five feet seven inches -- and in the courtyard of Baskov Lane, being small meant being tested constantly. The bigger boys took what they wanted. The smaller boys either submitted, found protectors, or learned to fight.

Putin learned to fight.

This is not metaphor. This is the foundational experience that he himself has identified, repeatedly, as the moment his character was formed. In his authorized interviews with Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Kolesnikov -- published in 2000 as First Person, the closest thing to an autobiography he has produced -- Putin described his childhood self with unusual candor: "I was a hooligan, not a Pioneer." He was aggressive, quick-tempered, and combative. He picked fights with boys larger than himself. He lost many of them. He did not stop fighting.

What changed him, by his own account, was the discovery of martial arts. He began training in sambo -- a Soviet combat sport that combines elements of judo, wrestling, and striking -- at the age of twelve, and soon added judo. The discipline of martial arts gave structure to his aggression. It also gave him something more important: a framework for understanding conflict. In judo, the central principle is the efficient use of force -- using the opponent's momentum against him, finding the point of maximum leverage, and applying precisely enough energy to achieve the throw. Waste is the enemy. Emotion is the enemy. The judoka who loses his temper loses the match.

Putin became very good at judo. By his late teens he was competing at the city level and would eventually earn a black belt. But the significance of judo in his biography is not athletic. It is cognitive. Judo provided him with a mental model for the exercise of power that he would apply for the rest of his life: identify the opponent's weakness, use it against him, apply force at the precise point of maximum effect, and never -- never -- let them see you lose control.

The other formative institution of his childhood was Soviet patriotic education, and specifically the mythology of Soviet intelligence. The KGB was not, in the Soviet Union of the 1960s, the object of fear that Western accounts sometimes suggest it was universally perceived to be. It was also an object of fascination, even glamour. Soviet cinema and literature celebrated the intelligence officer -- the razvedchik -- as the ultimate patriot: the man who operated alone behind enemy lines, who lived by his wits, who served the state not through the crude application of force but through the subtler and more admirable exercise of intelligence, deception, and self-control.

Putin was captivated by this mythology. He has said that he decided to join the KGB while still in school -- an aspiration that he pursued with a directness that was unusual even by Soviet standards. As a teenager, he went to the Leningrad KGB headquarters and asked how to join. He was told to get a university degree, preferably in law, and to wait to be recruited rather than volunteering. He followed these instructions precisely. He enrolled in the law faculty of Leningrad State University in 1970 and waited.

This anecdote has been told so many times, by Putin and by his biographers, that it has acquired the smooth surface of a founding myth. But it is worth examining what it actually reveals. A teenager walks into the headquarters of the most powerful security service in the Soviet Union and asks how to join. He is not turned away. He is given instructions. He follows them. The story is presented as evidence of youthful idealism and determination. What it actually demonstrates is something more interesting: a precocious understanding of how institutions work, and a willingness to subordinate personal impulse to institutional requirements. He did not try to force his way in. He did not rebel when told to wait. He adapted his behavior to the requirements of the institution he wanted to enter, and he waited years to be admitted on its terms.

This is a pattern that would define his career. Putin is not a revolutionary. He has never been a revolutionary. He is an institutionalist -- but an institutionalist of a very specific kind. He does not believe in institutions as ends in themselves. He believes in institutions as instruments of power. The KGB was not, for him, a bureaucracy to be served. It was a system to be mastered. The difference is everything.

At Leningrad State University, he studied law and kept his head down. He was not a distinguished student. His professors would later describe him as competent but unremarkable -- diligent, quiet, and difficult to read. He did not participate in the university's social life in any memorable way. He did not drink heavily, which was unusual. He did not express strong political opinions, which was not unusual but was noted. He graduated in 1975 and was recruited into the KGB, exactly as he had been told he would be.

He was twenty-three years old. He had spent his entire conscious life in a city haunted by a siege he had not experienced but whose consequences had shaped every relationship, every silence, and every lesson of his childhood. He had learned, from the courtyard of Baskov Lane, that the world respects force and nothing else. He had learned, from judo, that force is most effective when it is precisely applied and emotionally controlled. He had learned, from the kommunalka, that information is power and that the person who listens and reveals nothing has the advantage. And he had learned, from the mythology of Soviet intelligence, that the highest form of service to the state is the ability to operate in the shadows, to deceive, and to control outcomes without being seen to control them.

He had not yet learned what power actually was. He had not yet held it. But he had spent twenty-three years studying its absence -- studying what happens to people and cities and families when power fails, when the state collapses, when the siege closes in and no one comes to help.

The boy from the courtyard of Baskov Lane was about to enter the institution that would teach him the rest.

The Leningrad that Putin left behind when he entered the KGB was a city that had rebuilt itself physically but had never resolved its central trauma. The siege was everywhere and nowhere. It was in the plaques on the buildings marking the spots where shells had fallen. It was in the Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery, where nearly half a million siege victims were buried in mass graves beneath identical stone markers. It was in the faces of the old women who sat on benches in the summer and said nothing. And it was in the absolute, unshakeable conviction -- shared by virtually every Leningrader of that generation -- that the world outside was hostile, that encirclement was always possible, and that the only guarantee of survival was strength.

This conviction was not paranoia. It was, in the context of the city's history, entirely rational. Leningrad had been besieged. Leningrad had been starved. Leningrad had been shelled. The people who died were not soldiers -- they were civilians, old people, children, babies. The conviction was absolute: when the enemy comes, he does not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. He does not respect boundaries. He does not negotiate in good faith. He comes to destroy, and the only thing that stops him is force sufficient to break his will.

Vladimir Putin absorbed this lesson not as history but as lived family experience, and he would carry it forward into a career and a presidency that would be defined, above all else, by the conviction that Russia was permanently besieged -- that the West was the enemy, that encirclement was the strategy, and that the only response was to make Russia so strong, so ruthless, and so willing to absorb punishment that no adversary would dare to close the ring.

The siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days. The siege that Vladimir Putin would construct in his own mind -- the siege that would justify every decision from Chechnya to Georgia to Crimea to Ukraine -- would last the rest of his life.

It is still ongoing.