For Yeltsin Heir, Challenge Is to Move Out of Shadows

In July of last year, a former intelligence agent named Vladimir V. Putin walked into the central Moscow headquarters of the former KGB.

The building, an imposing red and yellow edifice with no front door, houses the KGB’s main successor, the Federal Security Service. It is a place most people enter with fear and trembling.

Not Putin. He was arriving for his first day of work as the security agency’s director. And his reaction, according to Profil magazine, was to announce: “I’m home at last.”

If all goes as expected, Russia’s lower house of parliament, the Duma, will confirm the 46-year-old Putin today as the nation’s new prime minister. And if all goes as President Boris N. Yeltsin wants, Putin will move on in less than a year to become his successor.

All Putin needs to become prime minister is a majority vote in the Duma. But becoming president will be far trickier--especially for a man who has never run for office and has spent most of his career away from public view and public accountability.

The consensus in Moscow seems to be that, despite Yeltsin’s designation of Putin as heir, the succession is far from assured.

To become president, Putin will have to undergo a metamorphosis, moving in the course of two years from one of the world’s most secretive jobs to one of the most visible.

In the role of a public politician, Putin’s physical appearance alone would give most image consultants pause. His pale face looks as bloodless as alabaster. His features are angular, with his straight eyebrows and lips seemingly etched at precise right angles to his nose.

Smiling seems to pain him. In a TV interview the day Yeltsin nominated him, he sat rigidly and answered questions with military precision. He didn’t crack a smile, even when he appeared to crack a joke.

“Are you going to run for president?” the interviewer asked.

“Well,” Putin replied in a deadpan, “the president says I am, and it would be unseemly to contradict him.”

Despite this want of appeal, parliament is likely to confirm Putin without a fuss. Duma members have tired of battling Yeltsin over his prime ministers, whom he has taken to changing more frequently than some people change their oil. Putin is the fifth in less than a year and a half. And with voting for a new parliament set for December, deputies’ energies are already concentrated on their own reelection.

The presidential ballot is scheduled for six months later, in June--which gives Putin a total of 10 months to lose his KGB taint and make himself presidential.

That might not seem like much time, but politics moves fast in Russia. Two of Putin’s predecessors as prime minister--Sergei V. Stepashin and Yevgeny M. Primakov--were derided as gray and colorless when they were put forward for the job. But in a matter of months, both warmed and brightened in the public spotlight, and they are now two of the country’s most popular political figures.

Alan Rousso, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, says it appears that the Kremlin is counting on something similar happening to Putin.

“That may turn out to be a miscalculation,” Rousso says. “I don’t think Putin can be a real presidential candidate. There is a very, very firm ceiling on how high he can rise.”

A major reason, Rousso says, is Putin’s KGB background. Both Primakov and Stepashin served a stint as head of the security service. But both officially made their careers elsewhere--Primakov in academia, journalism and the diplomatic service and Stepashin in the Interior Ministry.

By contrast, Putin joined the KGB in 1975 as soon as he received his law degree and remained there for 15 largely mysterious years. For most of that time, he served in East Germany, a center of espionage during the Cold War.

In 1990, he moved back to his hometown of Leningrad, soon to be renamed St. Petersburg, and started working as deputy to the mayor, Anatoly A. Sobchak.

Until allegations of corruption forced Sobchak into exile in Paris, he was one of Russia’s most prominent “reformers”--and Putin’s supporters describe the former security chief as someone who, while military in bearing, is a democrat at heart.

“When you see Vladimir Vladimirovich on TV, he appears reserved and maybe even grim,” says Stanislav G. Yeremeyev, a St. Petersburg State University administrator who worked with Putin in the city government. “But when you talk to him yourself, his words quickly convince you that his mentality is very European. His world outlook has been formed under the influence of civilized European ideas of democracy and liberalism. This is very important for understanding Vladimir Putin.”

Nonetheless, Putin earned a fearsome reputation in St. Petersburg. He was dubbed the “gray cardinal” of Sobchak’s administration, the real power behind the city throne, less an enforcer of democratic principles than an enforcer, pure and simple.

“When Sobchak didn’t want to deal with the media, he sent the dour Putin--who would scowl, tell us nothing and frighten the more timid among us away,” recalls Brian Whitmore, a journalist for the English-language St. Petersburg Times.

While working in the city government, Putin met Anatoly B. Chubais, who later became one of Yeltsin’s top deputies. On Chubais’ recommendation, Putin moved to Moscow in 1996 after Yeltsin’s reelection and became deputy director of the sensitive Kremlin department that administers state property.

His subsequent promotions followed in dizzyingly short order. In March 1997, he was named Yeltsin’s deputy chief of staff, responsible for keeping Russia’s wayward regions in line. Sixteen months later, he was appointed director of the Federal Security Service.

According to some media reports, Putin’s return to the security service was resisted by some of its top generals, largely because he held the inferior rank of lieutenant colonel. He also began an unpopular effort to cut the agency’s central administration from 6,000 to 4,000 employees.

Under Putin, the agency made a number of moves that caught public attention. One was to tighten surveillance of the Internet. Another was to establish a constitutional department.

That new office played a strange role in Russia’s impeachment crisis last spring. As the Duma was preparing to vote on whether to impeach Yeltsin, the security service sent it an unprecedented document warning that the articles of impeachment contained “significant mistakes of a legal nature.”

It was the first time the security service was known to have commented on a public legal matter, and it was widely viewed as a veiled warning that the agency was prepared to intervene if deputies were to vote for impeachment.

Some analysts see the impeachment document as part of a sinister thread in Putin’s career, suggesting that Putin’s loyalty to his bosses overpowers any constitutional or legal concerns.

For instance, the Federal Security Service is rumored to have been behind a videotape that surfaced last winter purporting to depict Russia’s prosecutor general having sex with two prostitutes. The official, Yuri I. Skuratov, had begun probing the financial dealings of members of Yeltsin’s inner circle, and the video in effect put him and his investigations out of commission.

Indeed, many observers say Putin’s main qualification to be prime minister is his unqualified loyalty to Yeltsin and his coterie.

In the absence of verifiable information, rumors about Putin are rife. One of the most persistent is that the ongoing rebel incursion into the republic of Dagestan has been engineered by Putin and the security agency to provide a pretext for imposing a state of emergency and canceling elections.

Others speculate that Putin was Yeltsin’s choice because he has expertise in influencing--some might say rigging--elections. He is rumored to have fought fiercely and crudely in 1996 to reelect Sobchak, who lost only narrowly to a candidate with ties to Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov. These days, with the Kremlin worried about Luzhkov’s burgeoning presidential campaign, Putin’s anti-Luzhkov credentials are undoubtedly also attractive to the Kremlin.

In the end, however, for all the speculation, Putin remains a cipher--yet one who may hold the key to his country’s future.

“A Russian leader with the face and psychology of a KGB investigator is no gift,” says Alexander Tsipko, an analyst with the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper. “Perhaps Vladimir Vladimirovich, having come to power, will break down and become a good and charming czar. But the opposite is more likely. After all, power in Russia has never fostered a moral personality.”