In 1996, Vladimir Putin was lonely and homesick after moving to Moscow to work in the Kremlin and planned to return to St Petersburg within a year, said his friend Igor Shadkhan.
“But then things began to happen very fast and suddenly Putin became president,” Shadkhan said. The documentary filmmaker has been dubbed “court director” by the Russian media for his series of films about Putin and his former classmates over two decades.
Now, after 14 years as president and premier, Putin, 60, ended his 30-year marriage in June and his judo mentor died last month. He is again lonely — and too scared of what will happen to himself and the country to relax his grip on power, Shadkhan said.
“Many of the people in his entourage will want revenge as soon as he steps down because many of them are humiliatingly dependent on him,” Shadkhan, 73, said in a day-long interview in his St Petersburg studio last month. “He trusts no one, not even his own people.”
Putin, whose grandfather cooked for Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, rose from deputy head of the Kremlin’s property department to acting president in less than three years when Boris Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999. Three months later, Putin was elected with 53 per cent of the vote and re-elected in 2004 with 72 percent. After serving as premier due to term limits, Putin overcame the largest protests of his rule to win again in 2012 with 64 per cent of the poll. With the term extended to six years from four, he may stay in power until 2024.
Shadkhan said he had never heard of Putin until 1992. St Petersburg’s new government decided to make a documentary series called “Power” about its first democratically elected mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, and his team of “young reformers”. Putin, the mayor’s head of external relations, insisted on hiring Shadkhan, whose award-winning shows were popular on Soviet television.
When approached, Shadkhan agreed to meet with Putin but made it clear he had no appetite for bureaucrats, having just returned from the Arctic to shoot a ten-part program on Stalin’s forced-labour camps.
“Stories about gulag prisoners tear your heart out,” said Shadkhan, whose Jewish grandparents were victims of Soviet repression. “You can’t help weeping.”
When they sat down, Shadkhan told Putin to “pick another director. After the gulag series, I’m unable to work on anything else.”
Then he got a taste of the skills Putin honed running a spy ring in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall three years earlier, Shadkhan said.
“I want you because I’ve seen ‘Test for Adults’,” Shadkhan said Putin told him, referring to his most famous work, in which he interviews people both as children and adults. “He recruited me.”
Shadkhan agreed to make the first, and, as it turned out last, “Power” episode about Putin. The 45-minute show portrays the ambitious 39-year-old as a smart, savvy and trustworthy politician with a KGB pedigree.
Shadkhan said his film was funded by Bank Rossiya, a local lender that employed some of Putin’s friends including Yury Kovalchuk, now the bank’s billionaire majority owner. It ends with Putin staring pensively out the window of his parked sedan over “Seventeen Moments of Spring”, the classic Soviet mini-series about a James Bond-like Russian spy in Nazi Germany, which was popular across the former eastern bloc.
Later, in “First Person: Conversations With Vladimir Putin”, a book published two weeks before the 2000 election, Putin said he used his “friend” Shadkhan’s documentary to reveal his KGB past to thwart would-be blackmailers.
“The tape was shown on Leningrad television, and the next time someone came along hinting about my past, I immediately said, ‘That’s enough,’” Putin said in the book. “It’s not interesting. Everyone already knows about that.”
Shadkhan stands by his first take on Putin and still considers him a friend, he said, but worries about what he says are Putin’s increasing authoritarianism and failure to enact meaningful social, political and economic reforms.
“Putin is the child of the Soviet Union and that’s the problem”, the director said. “He’s nurtured a horrible Russian phenomenon in which every functionary follows his example. His moves are often driven by mistrust and others simply imitate his style. Authorities don’t help, they attack you.”
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that while the president has a “deep respect” for Shadkhan’s opinions and work, not everything he says is “indisputable”.
Shadkhan said the loneliness and distrust he first sensed in Putin seem only to have deepened over time.
One night a few years after they met, Putin asked the filmmaker to meet him at the Grand Hotel Europe. “I said yes because it seemed he didn’t feel well at all,” said Shadkhan, who found Putin, then deputy mayor, alone at a small table in the back of the hotel’s restaurant, “looking sad, even doomed”.
When Shadkhan asked what had happened, Putin said, “Nothing; sit with me.” They sat in near silence for about 90 minutes before saying goodbye. “I guess Putin just wanted company and he chose me because I’d never asked anything of him,” Shadkhan said.
Putin isn’t always melancholy, Shadkhan said. Putin once urged him to make a film about Germans who donated food to families of Soviet soldiers who died in the Second World War. They flew to Hamburg, which Putin knew well from his KGB days. He insisted on strolling through St Pauli, the city’s red-light district, and roared with laughter at his visible shock, Shadkhan recalled.
Shadkhan, who last saw Putin two years ago, said he still sympathises with him and follows his career.
“I trust Putin,” he said. “He’s not an advocate of totalitarianism. I can’t believe I made a mistake portraying him as worthy of his authority in my films.”
Shadkhan used a 2002 invitation to breakfast in the Kremlin to discuss his latest documentary, about a mother of three who was convicted of murdering her husband and sentenced to prison despite “a complete lack of evidence”, he said.
“What will happen to the children if their mother is sent to jail?” Shadkhan asked. Putin later pardoned her.
Six years later, Shadkhan asked Putin to pardon another mother: Svetlana Bakhmina, a lawyer for Yukos Oil who was convicted of tax evasion and embezzlement and sentenced to seven years in a penal colony. By then, Putin’s government had dismantled Yukos and jailed several of its executives, including Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Putin critic who had become Russia’s richest man.
This time, Putin didn’t respond, Shadkhan said.
In 2003, Khodorkovsky was arrested at gunpoint on the tarmac of a Siberian airport. The subsequent dismantling and re-nationalising of what was once Russia’s largest private company showed a darker side of Putin that Shadkhan said he hadn’t anticipated.
“That was when I realised how intolerant Putin is towards those who oppose him,” Shadkhan said. “And now several people are in jail for participating in anti-government protests in Moscow! Why?”
Like many Russians, Putin has a complicated opinion of Stalin, the dictator who ruled from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953, the year after Putin was born, Shadkhan said. While Stalin defeated the Nazis in the global conflict Russia calls The Great Patriotic War, he also sent millions to die in prison camps.
In the 1992 film, Putin calls the Soviet collapse a tragedy, though he admits that only “barbed wire” had held it together. In Shadkhan’s 2002 film about Putin, “Evening Conversation”, the Russian leader ducks questions about the dictator with a joke: “I don’t remember him.” But Shadkhan said, “There are things Putin respects in Stalin.”
While Putin doesn’t share Stalin’s totalitarian impulses, he does have a similar understanding and sense of fear, Shadkhan said.
“Stalin exterminated people out of fear because he was afraid of being betrayed if he eased his grip on power,” he said. “Putin is also scared. He’s a human being and has many reasons to be scared.”
But Putin must overcome that fear and realise he must step down, Shadkhan said.
“Russia needs a new leader to move on,” Shadkhan said. “Putin’s gotten terribly tired. He’s stopped evolving. That’s the main problem. The country is changing, while Putin is not.”
–Washington Post
