Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [83]
“What about his wife?” Boris inquired. “Is she recovering?”
Lyudmila Putina was nearly killed in a car crash in St. Petersburg in 1993. She sustained a serious spine injury, requiring neurosurgery and several years of rehabilitation.
“I found her a little stiff still,” reported Roma.
“Any other women?”
“I checked the past five years,” said Roma with a wicked smile. “None whatsoever.”
Elena Tregubova was one of the attractions of the Kremlin in the 1990s. Young, tall, good-looking, and emancipated, she knew how to make her presence felt, and she had no scruples about using her charms to get scoops. She was the Kremlin correspondent for Kommersant, Russia’s Financial Times. She emanated a certain disdain toward ambitious and politicking Kremlin staffers, labeling them “mutants” in her best-selling tell-all, Tales of a Kremlin Digger, published in November 2003. Perhaps it was this aura of mystifying superiority that loosened the lips of her highly placed interlocutors. Time and again, they sought interviews with her, even though she usually treated them harshly.
Tregubova claims credit for introducing Vladimir Putin to the world. Her first interview with him was in May 1997, when he had just moved from the Real Estate Office to the Audit Unit at the Kremlin. At the time she found him a “barely noticeable, boring little gray man … whose eyes were not merely colorless or disengaged—they were simply absent …; [he] seemed to disappear, artfully merging with the colors of his office.”
Apparently she hid those reactions at the time, because Putin granted her an exclusive interview about the role of the secret services in the fight against corruption.
“The FSB, or rather its parent, the KGB, has not been dealing directly with the criminal world,” he lectured. “It has focused on intelligence … [and] therefore remained relatively clean.” The services, he argued, represented the country’s last hope to rein in corrupt officials. “If need be, we will put them in jail.” Tregubova noted that “the most belligerent words he pronounced with a particularly cool movement of his lower lip, a sort of indulgent half-smile of a juvenile delinquent. Obviously, he imagined himself as someone who could, here and now, without even rising from his desk … zap all of Russia’s corrupted politicians and anyone else who would stand in the way of his beloved ‘services.’”
Seventeen months later, in December 1998, when Putin was the FSB chief, Tregubova again interviewed him, now at his office at Lubyanka. Suddenly he asked her out.
“I managed a casual smile, trying to figure out whether he was recruiting me as an agent or making a pass at me as a woman,” she wrote in Tales. In the end, the reporter in her won out over the woman, who was “horrified at the very thought.” She accepted.
What followed was an intimate meal in a trendy sushi restaurant, cleared of customers by his security detail, where she tried to act like a reporter while he pressed “inept” advances.
“Lenochka,” he said at one point, “why do you keep talking about politics and only politics? Wouldn’t you rather have a drink?”
Noting that there was no one else in the restaurant, and no agents outside, she asked, “Did you clear the whole block?”
“Come on,” protested Putin. “I just booked a table for the two of us, that’s all. After all, do I have a right, as a normal man, to have a lunch with an attractive young woman and a talented reporter to boot? Or do you think that as FSB director, this never happens to me?”
“How often does it happen?” she asked teasingly, and immediately regretted it, sensing that he took the question “too personally.”
“Well, not often … not really.”
At that point she felt that she had gone too far, and after declining a thinly veiled invitation to travel together to celebrate New Year’s Eve in St. Petersburg, she backpedaled away from him.
As she wrote in Tales, she was amazed at Putin’s ability to adjust to the wavelength of his interlocutor.
“He is a phenomenal ‘reflector’; he copies his counterpart like a mirror,