Kwenye kitabu Cha New Tsar ambayo ni Maisha ya Putin, Mkewe Putin, Lyudmila anaseama Putin alikuwa ni mtu wa kazi na aliyejitoa sana kwa nchi kiasi cha kutumia muda mchache na familia. Mfano, mkewe alipata ajali, lakini Putin ni muda mchache sana alioonana naye.
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On the morning of October 23, 2003, Putin drove his daughter Masha to school and then headed to the Astoria Hotel, where Sobchak had a special assignment for him. Lyudmila stayed at home with a feverish Katya, then seven. Katya pestered her mother to let her go to school anyway to rehearse her part in a play.
She was going to be Cinderella, and though Lyudmila thought better of it, the girl insisted.3 She drove a new Zhiguli, which, though modest, was the family’s second car and a sign of rising prosperity. Just before noon, as Lyudmila neared a bridge that crosses the Neva, another car sped through a red light and smashed into the Zhiguli.
The impact knocked Lyudmila unconscious; when she woke, she thought she could keep driving but found she could not. Katya, who had been asleep in the back, was bruised, though not badly hurt. Then for a long time, nothing happened.
The police arrived and bystanders gathered, but it took an ambulance forty-five minutes to arrive. Such was the decrepit state of basic services. A woman whose name and number Lyudmila later lost called the ambulance and a number that Lyudmila dictated to her. Putin’s secretary, Marina Yentaltseva, answered but was unsure what to do. Putin’s trusted aide, Igor Sechin, went to the crash site and brought Katya to the office at Smolny. Yentaltseva went to find Putin.
The ambulance finally arrived and took Lyudmila to the October 25th Hospital, still named in honor of the first day (on the old calendar) of the Bolshevik revolution.
“The hospital was horrible,” she recalled later.
“It was full of people who were dying. There were gurneys in the hallway with dead bodies on them.” Worse, the doctors who treated her did not notice that she had broken three vertebrae in her spine and fractured the base of her skull.
The surgeons sutured her torn ear and left her “naked on the table in freezing operating rooms in a terrible state of half consciousness.”4During all this, Putin was meeting at the Astoria with the American cable television executive Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, then his wife. They were in Petersburg to arrange the staging of the third Goodwill Games, the international sporting competition Turner dreamed up after the 1980 Olympics in Moscow were boycotted by the United States and other countries following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the 1984 Olympics were boycotted in retaliation by the Soviet Union and most of its satellites.
The first games had been held in Moscow in 1986, the second in Seattle in 1990. Turner wanted to return them to the new Russia in 1994, and Sobchak was eager to showcase the city, even if it could ill afford the necessary investments. Putin was shepherding the couple to a series of meetings when his secretary finally reached him at the hotel. He slipped out to go to the emergency room.
“Don’t worry, she’s not in any danger,” the chief surgeon there told him. “We’re just going to put a splint on, and everything will be fine.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” the surgeon replied, and without seeing his wife, Putin returned to his meetings.
Meanwhile, Yentaltseva took Katya to a hospital and picked up Masha from school. Putin asked that Yentaltseva spend the night with them at the family’s dacha. He also asked her to call Yuri Shevchenko, one of the city’s most prominent physicians at the Military Medical Academy (who would later be a minister of health). It was evening before she finally reached Shevchenko, and he immediately sent a doctor from the academy’s clinic. Lyudmila remembered waking in the operating room and feeling his warm hand holding hers. “It warmed me up and I knew that I had been saved.”
The doctor arranged her transfer to the military hospital, and an X-ray discovered spinal injuries that required emergency surgery. That night, between meetings, Putin visited her for the first time, meeting Yentaltseva and his children in the parking lot. He told her it was unlikely he would make it home because his discussions with Ted Turner were scheduled to continue into the night. She took the girls to the dacha and, unable to find the switch for the heat, huddled them in one bed with extra blankets. She was startled awake when Putin arrived home at three in the morning. By seven, he had already left again
