Strongman, The

January 1990 he returned from Germany to his home city, which would soon be renamed St Petersburg. While remaining at first on the KGB’s payroll, he found work in the foreign relations department of Leningrad University, and then as assistant to the chairman of Leningrad City Council, a former economics professor named Anatoly Sobchak. One of the leading free thinkers of the perestroika period, Sobchak was soon elected mayor of St Petersburg, and in June 1991 he put Putin in charge of the city’s foreign relations at a time when it had pretensions of becoming a major financial and investment centre. Sobchak later appointed Putin his deputy.
    The former perfect ‘product of a Soviet patriotic upbringing’ thus became exposed not only to the democratic views of Sobchak but was also plunged into the alien world of Western trade and finance. When communist hardliners (including Putin’s KGB chief, General Kryuchkov) staged a coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, Putin says he was at Sobchak’s side, drumming up resistance in support of democracy. He said later he believed the plotters’ intention, of preventing the disintegration of the USSR, was ‘noble’, but they in fact achieved the exact opposite. By the end of the year the Communist Party had been swept from power and the Soviet Union broke up. It was a watershed for Putin: ‘All the ideals and goals I had when I joined the KGB collapsed.’
    Putin’s tenure as deputy mayor was not without controversy. Deputies at the city council tried to have him dismissed for corruption following a scandal concerning food imports. He survived, but when Sobchak was voted out of office in 1996 Putin too found himself without a job.
    Through a combination of luck and acquaintances, Putin soon found himself in Moscow, quickly working his way up through the ranks of the Kremlin bureaucracy. 7 He became deputy chief of staff to President Yeltsin in March 1997, director of the KGB’s successor organisation, the FSB, in July 1998 and (simultaneously) head of the National Security Council in March 1999.
    His patrons were the group of people known as the Family – President Yeltsin’s inner circle of advisers, which included his daughter Tatiana, his former chief of staff (and later Tatiana’s husband) Valentin Yumashev, Yeltsin’s current chief of staff Alexander Voloshin, and the influential business tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who owned 49 per cent of Russia’s main state television channel, ORT, and effectively controlled it.
    Just as the Family had arranged Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996, so they would soon secure Putin’s appointment as prime minister – with the intention of moving him into the presidency as Yeltsin’s successor. They had been impressed by Putin’s loyalty. As head of the FSB he effectively stymied criminal investigations into large-scale corruption and money laundering, in which members of Yeltsin’s family and senior Kremlin officials were allegedly implicated. (One of the officials, Pavel Borodin, was accused of embezzling fabulous sums during the refurbishment of Kremlin buildings. He happened to be the man who had brought Putin from St Petersburg and given him his first job in the administration.) Putin also helped his former mentor Sobchak evade prosecution on corruption charges. Loyalty would later turn out to be a striking feature of Putin’s make-up. Just as he found his own loyalty to the Family repaid, so he as president would richly reward those most loyal to him – and punish those who opposed him. The Family were not let down: Putin’s first move on becoming acting president in 2000 would be to sign the decree granting Yeltsin and his family immunity from prosecution.
    In the summer of 1999 Yeltsin’s coterie dispatched Berezovsky to talk with Putin, who was on holiday with his family in the French resort of Biarritz, and offer him the job of prime minister. Putin demurred, apparently unsure of his abilities, but when he returned to Moscow President Yeltsin would not take no for an answer. 8
    During this dizzy year of his career, Putin found himself dealing with events that would leave a deep impression on his thinking. In March 1999 three former members of the Soviet bloc, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, joined NATO. Whatever the truth about the alleged guarantees given to Gorbachev that NATO would not move eastwards (and American officials firmly deny that such a promise was made), this was the first stage of what