Read Online The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen - Free Book Online

gasstove and a sink were stationed in the narrow hallway one entered from the stairwell. Three families used the four-burner stove to prepare their meals. A makeshift but permanent toilet had been constructed by annexing part of the stairwell. The small space was unheated. To bathe, the residents would heat water on the gas stove and then wash themselves while perched over the toilet in the tiny cold room.
    Vladimir Putin the younger was, naturally, the only child in the apartment. An older married couple lived in a windowless room that was eventually judged uninhabitable. An old observant Jewish couple and their grown daughter occupied a room on the other side of the hallway-cum-kitchen from the Putins. Conflicts flared regularly in the communal kitchen, but the adults apparently cooperated in shielding the boy from their quarrels. Putin often spent time playing in the Jewish family’s room—and, speaking to his biographers, he made a striking assertion, claiming he did not differentiate between his parents and the old Jews.
    The Putins had the largest room in the flat: around twenty square meters, or roughly twelve feet by fifteen. By the standards of the time, this was an almost palatial abode for a family of three. Almost incredibly, the Putins also had a television set, a telephone, and a dacha, a cabin outside the city. The elder Vladimir Putin worked as a skilled laborer at a train car factory; Maria took backbreaking unskilled jobs that allowed her to spend time with her son: she worked as a night watchman, a cleaning woman, a loader. But if one examines the fine shades of postwar Soviet poverty, the Putins emerge as practically rich. Given their unceasing doting on their son, this sometimes produced noteworthy results, such as first-grader Vladimir’s sporting a wristwatch, a rare, expensive, and prestigious accessory for any age group in that time and place.
    The school was just a few steps from the building where the Putins lived. The education offered was, from what one can gather,unremarkable. The teacher for the first four grades was a very young woman who was finishing her college education by going to night school. Not that education was a priority in 1960, when Vladimir Putin entered first grade at the age of almost eight. His father was, by all accounts, concerned primarily with discipline, not with the quality of schooling his son received. Nor was education part of the younger Putin’s idea of success; he has placed a great emphasis on portraying himself as a thug, and in this he has had the complete cooperation of his childhood friends. By far the largest amount of biographical information available about him—that is, the bulk of the information made available to his biographers—concerns the many fistfights of his childhood and youth.
    THE COURTYARD is a central fixture of postwar Soviet life, and Vladimir Putin’s personal mythology is very much rooted in it. With adults working a six-day week and child care generally nonexistent, Soviet children tended to grow up in the communal spaces outside their overcrowded apartment buildings. In Putin’s case, this meant growing up at the bottom of the well—in the well courtyard, that is, strewn with litter and populated by toughs. “Some courtyard this was,” his former classmate and longtime friend Viktor Borisenko told a biographer. “Thugs all. Unwashed, unshaven guys with cigarettes and bottles of cheap wine. Constant drinking, cursing, fistfights. And there was Putin in the middle of all this…. When we were older, we would see the thugs from his courtyard, and they had drunk themselves into the ground, they were hitting bottom. Many of them had been to jail. In other words, they did not manage to get good lives for themselves.”
    Putin, younger than the thugs and slight of build, tried to hold his own with them. “If anyone ever insulted him in any way,” hisfriend recalled, “Volodya would immediately jump on the guy, scratch him, bite