When Putin came to Manchester for lunch

By Andy Spinoza

At lunchtime on 8 April 1991, a car carrying emissaries from Leningrad, Russia arrived at the steps of Manchester Town Hall. The party were shown into a cramped, antiquated lift used to deliver VIPs to the lord mayor’s Apartment in the city’s headquarters — a Victorian Gothic masterpiece that is currently under wraps for a £330m refurbishment. 

On Level 4, they entered the Hexagon Room, an elegant, glass-roofed reception area that makes up the mayoral suites alongside two small banqueting and parlour rooms. Over lunch, they enjoyed the impressive views across Albert Square and discussed the building of a friendship between Manchester and Leningrad. The apartment — the bolthole for eminent visitors like Lloyd George and Churchill — had been part of Manchester’s lavish ceremonial lifestyle in 1961, when the civic relationship began. In 1984, the perk was abolished by the new left-wing regime and by 1991, the lord mayor slept in their own bed.

The visitors that day included Anatoly Sobchak, Leningrad’s council chairman and the city’s de facto mayor; his wife Lyudmila Narusova; Foreign Trade Chairman Andrei Nikolaev; and, standing out in a light grey three-piece suit, an unassuming, small man with a tight smile who spoke no English. He was his city’s 39-year-old International Relations Adviser on his first visit to Britain, one Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin — then seen as a reformer, but today the man we know as Russia’s ruthless dictator.

The visit was part of a four-day trip to Britain, arranged through central government at so little notice that the city council’s top trio — leader Graham Stringer, chief executive Arthur Sandford and lord mayor John Gilmore — all had pre-booked engagements. The man asked to represent Manchester in their absence was Bob Scott, the city’s Olympic Games bid chief, and he took the task in his confident stride.

The 6ft 4in tall Scott was not the type of man much found in Manchester in the 1970s. The charismatic son of a Foreign Service diplomat who grew up in Egypt and South Africa, there wasn’t much he didn’t know about being around the important and powerful. As a student at Haileybury public school, he was chosen to give the Queen a guided tour. At Oxford University, he chaperoned movie stars Richard Burton and Liz Taylor through a media blitz they caused when appearing in a student play.

Scott started his working life in Manchester as the administrator of 69 Theatre Company. His prodigious energy drove the creation of the Royal Exchange Theatre, and with backing from arts-loving property developer Raymond Slater, he reopened vacant historic theatres the Palace and Opera House, and then created the contemporary arts centre Cornerhouse, the predecessor of HOME. By the late 1980s, he was a one-man Manchester enterprise zone, winning backing for the city’s audacious bids to stage the 1996 and 2000 Olympic Games (Scott’s own idea) from councils, royals, prime ministers, celebrities and many Mancunians. He could sell a grand vision and, unusually for a persuader, he could run teams and campaigns too.

Scott had met his equal in schmoozeability at the 1991 town hall lunch. Anatoly Sobchak was a leading liberal in the reform wave sweeping through the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev. The Communist Party’s grip was loosening; the USSR would be dissolved on Christmas Day that year, and Russia would stumble towards a chaotic version of a market economy. Sobchak was desperate for bright ideas and big money to save his city’s 4,000 rotting 19th-century architectural beauties, which included magnificent imperial palaces taken back from the Communists. Where better to turn than Manchester, which was gaining a reputation for finding new uses for its historic buildings?

Scott remembers Sobchak as “tremendously cheerful, with a lovely smile and an affectionate two-handed handshake”. We’re meeting in the echoey, high-ceilinged Victorian Gothic splendour of London’s St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel. Now 80 years old, Bob Scott — or, to give his full name and title, Sir Robert David Hillyer Scott (he was knighted in 1994) — may stride with less vigour than the days he dashed down Oxford Street with Nureyev or Topol from their Midland Hotel suites to the Palace. But he still has pin-sharp powers of description, as evidenced by his revelatory 2022 autobiography Win a Few, Lose a Few.

Today Scott lives in Greenwich, London, having moved there after bringing the Millennium Dome (now the O2 Arena) to the area, but his 27 years in Manchester form the biggest section of his memoir. It’s in this book that Scott describes the Russian visit to the city, at a time where he was running the biggest theatres in the city and keen to get hold of the Kirov Opera and Ballet companies, while also acting dreaming of landing the 2000 Olympic Games.

“The Manchester top brass was out that day, no Leader, no chief executive, a lord mayor who finally arrived with the coffee in time for a photograph. ‘Scott,’ I was informed, ‘You are good at bullshit. You will have to be Mr. Manchester today and look after them,’” he tells me. “I was delighted to appear so grand. I had eyes only for the mayor — surely he could heap praise on the glories of Manchester? — and I was given a note saying the foreign affairs man’s name was Putin. ‘He’s the little one in the ghastly crimplene suit.’”

Scott was a Russophile from his teenage years — though for artistic rather than political reasons. He was smitten by Russian folk songs, the Red Army choir and the liturgical music of the Orthodox Church. “I not only loved the voices, I loved the sadness and the richness of the music,” he says. “They put me on the edge of tears.” There was a family link — a Victorian ancestor, James Easton, was an engineer who created St. Petersburg’s water fountains. He swooned over Julie Christie in the movie Doctor Zhivago. Scott fell deeply in love with the epic, stark romance of Mother Russia.

When Sobchak came to town, Scott had already been to Russia twice, in 1985 and 1987, in search of world-class ballet and opera to bring to Manchester. Sobchak was intensely focused on civic renewal. “I said I had a very tentative, possible introduction to Prince Charles, and Peter Ustinov had just been playing in my theatre,” Scott says. “I was sure they shared a love of his beautiful city and its famous buildings, and I threw out the idea of replicating a ‘Venice in Peril concept’ with the rich and famous chipping in. He thought it was a wonderful idea.” 

At the town hall lunch, in his patchy English, Sobchak insisted that Scott come to Leningrad. Putin, who spoke German (from his stint as a KGB agent in East Germany) but no English, would be his contact. Scott returned to see Sobchak in August 1991, who by this point had won both a mayoral election and a vote to re-christen the city ‘St. Petersburg’. “The meeting was in a magnificent room around a fantastic table,” Scott recalls with dry mirth. “Along half the length of the table was a line of Pepsi-Cola bottles.”

In St. Petersburg, a tour of the city’s Hermitage Museum treasures flushed out dark undercurrents. As he writes in his book, his female guide “thinks anarchy may be approaching…old Party members like her are truly in despair.” He tries to jolly her along, telling her that Sobchak understands economics. “Yes, but he’s no politician,” comes the gloomy reply. Today, Scott says: “Someone told me that Putin was not the mayor’s adviser at all, but his KGB minder. Who knew? They seemed very close.”

Scott’s book is good on the dismal squalor of life in Russia, for proletariat and apparatchiks alike. Even the Czar’s Box at the Kirov Ballet stinks of body odour. “Russians, one to one, are lovely,” he records in his diaries. “But it is rotting…It is so vast, so crumbling. I love being there and I thank God when the plane takes off. Poor Russia.”

In 1993, Prince Charles made an unofficial, Scott-arranged visit to St. Petersburg and in 1994 the Queen herself visited, the first British monarch in a century — something that had once seemed improbable, given the delicate matter of the 1918 liquidation of the Romanov royals. On a second, more official visit by Charles, photos show Putin and Sobchak on either side of the future king.

In 2000, Scott switched on the TV news and could not believe his eyes. “Suddenly I saw Putin on TV. I said ‘I know that man. This is ridiculous.’” The “short man with blonde hair, a puffed-out chest,” that he knew as Sobchak’s wingman, was now Russia’s president. 

Scott has two files of faded faxes from Putin. One fax, reproduced in his book, is from ‘Putin V. V. Chairman of the Committee for External Relations.’ Every time Putin faxed, he had a new title: after the fall of the Berlin Wall ended his KGB tour in East Germany, Putin became the assistant rector of Leningrad University’s law school; when Sobchak was elected mayor and his devoted protégé followed him into the civic machine, his final fax was signed off ‘Deputy Director’ of St. Petersburg.

One of Putin’s faxes, dated November 1991, states that a second Sobchak visit to the UK was “not possible now due to the very difficult situation in the city”. Putin was referring to the political turmoil in the wake of August 1991’s attempted coup by Soviet hardliners to seize power from Gorbachev. It was fought off by his allies Boris Yeltsin in Moscow and Sobchak in St. Petersburg, where the mayor rallied opposition to the army units mustering on the city’s outskirts and talked their commander down. The coup failed. Sobchak was hailed for his courageous defence of democracy. “Sobchak is a first rate troubleshooter with sound democratic reflexes,” the Observer reported.

In the mid-90s, St. Petersburg was again thrown into chaos. Yeltsin ran the nation shambolically through a haze of vodka and paranoia. He deemed Sobchak an enemy and after Kremlin-inspired allegations, the city’s former saviour lost the 1996 mayoral election. Fearing arrest over corrupt municipal property deals, he fled to Paris in a private jet arranged by Putin.

Putin, however, moved to Moscow and into Yeltsin’s Kremlin. Then in 2000, his old mentor Sobchak died suddenly at 62 of a cardiac arrest in a hotel room in Kaliningrad. His death carried the brutal irony of a Russian tragic novel: he had returned to the mother country to campaign for Putin in the presidential election. Many speculated that the dark arts of Putin’s KGB past were at play. 

In 2015 the BBC’s Gabriel Gatehouse studied the film of the funeral in his long read “The Day Putin Cried”. “Putin really is distraught,” writes Gatehouse. “His eyes are red, he seems to struggle to swallow as he embraces Lyudmila Narusova. Putin is not an actor. Nor is he prone to public displays of emotion. So it's reasonable to assume that he is struggling with some genuine grief. Or is it something else. Guilt?” 

Gatehouse suspected he knew what was going on. “Putin was a vehicle to power for various factions inside the Kremlin,” he writes. “If Sobchak was murdered, was it by one of those factions who feared his mentor's hold over him?”

Today, Putin — the man with the polite smile in the lord mayor’s parlour observing everything and saying nothing — is the cynical autocrat who crushes opponents like a mob boss, stages sham elections and wages a war that imperils global food and energy security. Is it too strong to say that Russian history turned on the death of Bob Scott’s would-be friend Sobchak? An obituary in the Guardian called him “a central figure in Russia's revolution of the past decade, and once seen as a possible president of Russia.”

Scott agrees. “Putin was not the man in anyone’s sights. Sobchak was the man of the future, the man likely to succeed,” he says. “It is hard to convey the confusion at that time. Remember the fiascos of the Olympics in Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984?” (Both were marred by superpower boycotts.) “But Putin had the wit and the cunning to keep his head down, keeping all his lines to Moscow open. Sobchak was a gentle academic, not a ruthless politico.”

Today, Manchester and Russia’s civic friendship is on ice, suspended by council leader Bev Craig after Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Sobchak’s widow says she has stashed away an independent autopsy about her husband’s death as “insurance.” 

When I read about the Russian visit in Scott’s book, it made me think about the little-studied geopolitics of cities; how they can come together at certain moments and diverge; how their cooperation can be predicated on personal relationships and can be blown apart by events. 

For a moment in the early 1990s, it seemed as if Manchester and St Petersburg might be entering a relationship based on a common civic approach and a shared idea of using old buildings to reignite the flickering embers of civic self-belief. That’s what Scott’s Mancunian legacy is all about. But I doubt such a thought will cross the minds of the punters at the Palace or the Opera House tonight, nor the patrons at the Mikhailovsky Theatre. Two great cities have found their own ways forward, unassisted by the man in the ghastly crimplene suit.