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

him, rip his hair out by the clump—do anything at all never to allow anyone to humiliate him in any way.”
    Putin brought his fighting ways to grade school with him. References to fistfights abound in the recollections of his former schoolmates, but the following description gives a telling snapshot of the future president’s temperament: “The labor [shop] teacher dragged Putin by the collar, from his classroom to ours. We had been making dustpans in his class and Vladimir had done something wrong…. It took him a long time to calm down. The process itself was interesting. It would start to look like he was feeling better, like it was all over. And then he would flare up again and start expressing his outrage. He did this several times over.”
    The school punished Putin by excluding him from the Young Pioneers organization—a rare, almost exotic form of punishment, generally reserved for children who were held back repeatedly and essentially deemed hopeless. Putin was a marked boy: for three years, he was the only child in the school who did not wear a red kerchief around his neck, symbolizing membership in the Communist organization for ten-to-fourteen-year-olds. Putin’s outcast status was all the more peculiar considering how well-off he was compared with the other children at his school, most of whom were statistically unlikely to be living with two parents.
    But to Putin, his thug credentials represented true status, flaunted in his responses to his biographers in 2000:
“Why did you not get inducted into the Young Pioneers until sixth grade? Were things really so bad?”
“Of course. I was no Pioneer; I was a hooligan.”
“Are you putting on airs?”
“You are trying to insult me. I was a real thug.”
     
    Putin’s social, political, and academic standing changed when he was thirteen: as a sixth-grader, he began to apply himself academically and was rewarded not only with induction into the Young Pioneers but, immediately after, by election to the post of class chairman. The fighting continued unabated, however: Putin’s friends told his biographers a series of fighting stories, the same plot repeating itself year after year.
    “We were playing a game of chase out in the street,” a grade school classmate recalled. “Volodya was passing by, and he saw that a boy much older and bigger than me is chasing me and I am running as hard as I can. He jumped in, trying to protect me. A fight ensued. Then we sorted it out, of course.”
    “We were in eighth grade when we were standing at a tram stop, waiting,” recounted another friend. “A tram pulled up, but it was not going where we needed to go. Two huge drunken men got off and started trying to pick a fight with somebody. They were cursing and pushing people around. Vovka calmly handed his bag over to me, and then I saw that he has just sent one of the men flying into a snowbank, face-first. The second one turned around and started at Volodya, screaming, ‘What was that?’ A couple of seconds later he knew exactly what it was, because he was lying there next to his buddy. That was just when our tram pulled up. If there is anything I can say about Vovka, it’s that he never let bastards and rascals who insult people and bug them get away with it.”
    As a young KGB officer, Putin reenacted his earlier fights.
    “He once invited me to witness the Procession of the Cross at Easter,” recalls still another friend. “He was on duty, helping cordon off the procession. And he asked me if I wanted to come see the altar in the church. I said yes, of course: it was such a boyish thing to do—no one was allowed there, but we could just go in. So after the Procession of the Cross we were on our way home. And we were standing at a bus stop. Some people came up to us. They didn’t looklike criminals, more like college students who had had a bit to drink. They say, ‘You got a smoke?’ Vovka says, ‘No.’ And they say, ‘What are you doing, answering