- Do they still call you Mr. No? Many gave you this nickname when you led the Ministry of Finance.

- No, perhaps not any more.

- Aha! You said it again!

- In reality, it’s a myth to presume that finance ministers give everyone the thumbs down indiscriminately, that they are just loaded with cash and never give money to anybody. It is true that requests for help and the problems that need to be addressed always outweigh the funds available in the state coffers. Government ministries and various agencies keep asking, but the resources are rather limited. A choice is made based on analysis, scrutiny by experts and some procedures.

At a certain point, I suggested creating a budget commission led by the prime minister. It incorporated not only government members, but also State Duma MPs and authoritative experts. This panel comprehensively discussed all draft budgets. I called it an institution of expertise. The commission is still there, though I am no longer Russia’s finance minister.

As for Mr. No, it reminds me of one funny moment from my past. In the early 2000s, then US President Bill Clinton visited Russia. Before the talks in the Kremlin, President Vladimir Putin was introducing the members of our delegation. When it was my turn, he told Clinton. “Our Minister of Finance.” The US leader smiled at me and asked: “Where’s the red pen you use to reject budget requests?”

Everybody shares the same typical opinion of public financiers.

I’d like to recall that during my term of office, Russia’s economic growth had averaged 5.3% over a period of 11 years. Even despite the disastrous 2009 crisis, when we plunged 8%. But in all other years, the GDP had been growing by 7-8%. That rate was above the global average. Russia’s share in the world economy was growing.

Now it can be only dreamed about…

- Is there anyone whom the finance minister is unable to refuse?

- There aren’t any. “No” can be said to anyone.

- Even the prime minister and the president?

- You are obliged to explain your stance, but the head of state and the prime minister have the right to make the decision they deem to be right. Such things did happen during my career.

Putin has publicly mentioned several times those instances where I opposed certain steps he supported. He did it his own way, but then, after some time he would agree with me occasionally and say why didn’t you warn me on time? It’s essential to always calculate the risks and foresee the effects of any decision.

- This means it is possible to object only as long as the decision has not taken effect yet, right?

- Certainly. After that you must go and do as you are told.

Putin has never liked being flattered and hearing only “yeses” all the time. He appreciated my unbiased opinion as a specialist. We’d worked together a lot, starting from the municipal administration in St. Petersburg, where we both were first deputies of then Mayor Anatoly Sobchak.

Putin was appointed a bit earlier than I was. Several months later, I became deputy mayor and then first deputy mayor. Putin had been ahead all the time.

When we moved to Moscow, we became closer, because at first we did not have a very large range of contacts. I sincerely hoped that Putin would get a job in the Kremlin administration. Yet, it was our mutual friends, not I, who invited him to the position of deputy chief of the presidential property department.

Later, he replaced me as chief of the presidential staff’s control department, when I was reshuffled to the Ministry of Finance. That’s what connects us in life.

- Do you address each other informally, on a first-name basis when you meet in private?

- Sometimes. If we are not at work and are discussing private affairs.

- Is it true that when he moved to Moscow, Putin resided at your countryside dacha in Arkhangelskoye outside Moscow until housing was found for him?

- Plain gossip. It is true, though, that we lived next door and Putin quite often came to us on a neighborly visit together with his daughters. His girls liked to play with my Labrador. I think this explains why they decided to get one too, and they named the dog, Koni.

- Was Putin your main acquaintance in St. Petersburg?

- It’s hard to tell. I love that city. It was there that I studied at the university, and found everything in my life – knowledge, profession, teachers and friends… We still keep meeting each other, we stay in touch, and it is very important to me.

Lastly, St. Petersburg is a city where my relatives still live today – my mother, my sisters, my nephews, my daughter and my grandchildren…

Quite a few groundbreaking relationships started there. It is hard for me to single out any of them. Although it is true that Putin influenced my life more than anybody else.

- You moved there from Arkhangelsk in 1978, am I right?

- Yes, right after my high school graduation party. I remember our class roamed around the city all night long until the break of dawn. Then we went on a brief yachting trip along the Severnaya Dvina river… Then I came home and without having a minute of sleep and headed to the airport. My ticket had been bought in advance. As soon as I disembarked at Pulkovo, I went to Vasilyevsky Island, where the university is.

My close friends know this part of the story of my life well enough. First, I intended to apply to the economics department of Moscow State University. I had even taken a distance-learning prep course there and sent my tests and other papers there as well. At the very last moment, my father, an army officer, was transferred to Leningrad. We discussed the situation with the family and my plans changed.

Prior to that, I’d never been to St. Petersburg. My father went there ahead of us and arranged for accommodations at an officer’s hostel right on Vasilyevsky Island. My dad was chief of a department at the Logistics and Transport Academy, which is just 300 yards away from the university’s main building. He accompanied me to the exams and spent hours waiting for me to come out. He was terribly upset when I failed to score enough points to get into the daytime department…

- How many points?

- I don’t remember very well now. I failed the math exam. Many others got low or unsatisfactory marks then.

In the end, I tried again and did well enough to qualify for the evening department. Naturally, I had to go and find a job. My father put in a word for me and I was hired as an automotive technician at a motor vehicles experimental department at his Academy.

- Did you have any experience with motor vehicles then?

- At first, none at all. I obtained some in due time. It was a large garage, where the internal combustion engines of all key models of military vehicles were tested on special stands. Various tests were conducted there. For instance, special conditions were created to mirror a desert in the south or the Arctic. The engines kept running at full throttle for several days on end under high and low air temperatures. The work load simulated rides under different road conditions and across different terrain – uphill or through deep snow…

- And what was your task?

- I had to monitor the instruments’ readings and record all the parameters.

A year later, I was experienced enough to prepare demonstration stands for the Academy’s trainees and even helped officers to enhance some measurement instruments. I was promoted to instructor. The laboratory I was in charge of even earned the Socialist Labor award for impeccable operation and for providing crucial assistance to the experiments the career officers were staging.

So, this carried on for two years. After that I managed to transfer to the University’s daytime department. And I kept receiving good marks in mathematics. Thus, I proved that I knew the subject well enough.

I was not called up for military service, but there was a military department for reservists at the university’s history faculty. We were trained to be artillery officers. I can still rattle off the characteristics of a 122 mm howitzer D-30. After university, we went for a three-month-long training course in the field at the Pskov Region’s Strugy Krasnyie firing range. We had a lot of firing practice then. All day long. I’m an artillery platoon commander, according to my official military qualification. And my rank is an artillery reserve colonel.

- And what was your first housing accommodation in St. Petersburg like?

- We were granted one room in a communal apartment on the 19th line (street) on Vasilyevsky Island, it overlooked Lieutenant Schmidt Embankment. Twenty square meters for five. My sisters and I had bunk beds –very ordinary steel ones, like those in army barracks.

There were five families in that apartment. So I’m well familiar with what everyday life and customs in such communal housing in St. Petersburg was like.

After more than a year, my father was granted a separate apartment on Engles Street. Four rooms! What an incredible luxury! Nowadays, next to that house of ours is a subway station. Back then, it was a suburb. I still remember when whole villages were torn down and urban neighborhoods mushroomed in their place. The subway line was laid much later. Each morning, I would hop on a streetcar to ride across the city to my place of work at the Academy. Each time I got off at the easternmost tip of Vasilyevsky Island called Strelka (literally Arrow), I enjoyed the beauty of that place. And I was brimming with pride.

- Any regrets today about not being a Moscow State University student?

- I’ve lived in Moscow for 24 years now, in contrast to the 18 that I had spent in St. Petersburg. But youth is youth. You surely understand what I mean…

St. Petersburg will forever remain my hometown. I have to reiterate that it was there that I attended university, where I worked at the mayor’s office at a defining moment in history when the country was being transformed into a market economy. It’s my flesh and blood.

However, perhaps you know that I was born in Latvia, where my father served in the army at that moment.

- Does your mother have Latvian citizenship?

- She lived in Russia all her adult life. My mother’s family had been victims of the repression. In 1940, she and her brother and my grandmother were exiled to the Krasnoyarsk Region in Siberia.

And her father, my granddad, died in a Gulag in 1943, somewhere in the Kirov Region. We were unaware of that for a long time. When I quit the civil service, I began to study the history of my family and managed to unearth some facts.

My mother had stayed in the Krasnoyarsk Region until she turned 16. Then she returned to Latvia, where she met my father. He served in Dobele then. It’s a small but very old town with an ancient fortress 60 kilometers away from Riga. My father’s division was headquartered there.

- I hear people say your family home has survived to this day. Is that so?

- Yes, now it houses the office of the city’s prosecutor. It’s a two-storey building. Not a very big one by modern standards. In those days, it was quite impressive. My grandfather was a builder. He ran a cooperative association. My mother was born there, and so was I, in the maternity home next door.

- Latvia had a policy of returning real estate to those who had owned it before 1940.

- My mother was against having property there. She preferred to get cash compensation. The money lost value in an instant.

- How come her son, an experienced financier, didn’t advise her to do something better?

- She preferred to keep it secret. She did not tell me what the purpose of her trip to Latvia was then. Some locals advised her against having property there … You live in a different world, some said. That’s the place for you to return to. What will you need this house for?

Honestly speaking, I haven’t studied my family roots on my mother’s side. I’m still digging into the subject. I know that my grandmother was a translator and spoke several languages – German, English, Lithuanian, Estonian, Polish and Russian…

- Is the Siberian exile a sensitive topic in your family?

- No, we never talk about it or recollect anything. My grandmother was a wise woman. She did her utmost to ensure that my mother had no feeling of discomfort or antagonism or grudge against the authorities.

- Do you speak Latvian?

- When we left Dobele, I was seven. Naturally, I’ve forgotten everything since. I may recall some short song, if I try really hard.

- When was the last time you visited your place of birth?

- Last July. There was a good reason for me to go there.

- And what was the reason?

- When I visited Dobele eight years ago, my relatives took me to a local music school, where they had taught for many generations. I was shown the choir, the orchestra and the students. The building had not undergone any repairs since the breakup of the Soviet Union, it was dilapidated. I even asked: “How can children study in conditions like these? Absolutely unacceptable.” I saw fungi on the walls and sensed the smell of rotting wood. I was told: “That’s all we can afford.” Then raising money for repairs there crossed my mind.

In Russia, I tried to do everything I can to help educational and research institutions that need support. Charities and sponsors are very helpful. Naturally, I started doing all that when I quit the civil service.

Now, back to Latvia. I shared my idea with Pyotr Aven, who has Latvian roots, too. In the end, we raised enough money to repair the school and to build a concert hall. The project was finished last July.

I went there for the inauguration. Aven was too busy to attend. He delegated the chief of his charity instead. It was a very joyous and memorable event. It was in Riga’s newspapers and on Latvia’s TV news.

- It turns out that you provided humanitarian aid to a member of the European Union.

- That’s an exaggeration, of course, but it was a pleasure to participate in repairing a school at a place that played a role in my family’s past.

- And what about your father’s side of the family?

- Just recently I found out that I’m a distant relative of Peter Struve, a Russian politician, economist, essayist and public figure.

The family name of my father’s grandmother is Kalistova. She was from the Kostroma Gubernia. Her great grand-uncle was married to Peter Struve’s niece, the daughter of his brother. Our family has a large St. Petersburg branch. As is known, Peter Struve’s grandfather had been chief of the Derpt (Tartu) Observatory. At the tsar’s invitation, he resettled to St. Petersburg where he founded the Pulkovo Observatory.

- Genetically, it looks like your economic talents were inherited from Peter Struve.

- I’d rather say that Anatoly Chubais was the one who woke me up in this sense. At the end of 1990, he was a deputy chief of Leningrad’s Executive Committee. He invited me to be his deputy on the committee of economic reform. In June 1991, Anatoly Sobchak was elected mayor and he picked Chubais as his chief economic adviser. Chubais and I created a free trade zone in St. Petersburg. It was one of the first in Russia. In the autumn of the same year, Boris Yeltsin threw his weight behind Yegor Gaidar’s team and the reform policy commenced on a national scale. I became a deputy chairman of the Georgy Khizha-led economic development committee at the St. Petersburg mayor’s office.

In the summer of 1992, he was appointed deputy prime minister in the federal government. Before stepping down he told me: “There’s one thing I haven’t done yet. I haven’t appointed the chief of the department of finance. Alexei, you are the one who’ll take over.” Then he went to Sobchak and settled it right then and there. In August 1992, I became in charge of a department that had two command centers – Russia’s Ministry of Finance and the office of the city’s Mayor.

In 1993, Sobchak promoted me to his deputy and in 1994, to his first deputy…

- In 1996, you could’ve run in the mayoral race as a candidate?

- No, but a rumor like this was launched, which made Sobchak very nervous. At a certain point, I was pretty close to losing my seat, because Sobchak was really eyeing me with great suspicion. This was absolutely baseless, because I had no intention of standing in his way. It is true that I often met with people and often appeared at various public events, but I invariably supported Sobchak’s candidacy and helped his election team in various ways.

Sobchak’s opponents were political heavyweights, but, regrettably, he refused to earnestly weigh that the risks of a loss were serious enough and he eventually lost by a 1.5% margin. Sobchak was defeated by Vladimir Yakovlev in the debates. His rival systematically pushed forward with his set of arguments, while Sobchak thought he would overpower his opponent in one fine swoop, using his dynamic skills as an orator to his advantage. In the end, everything ended up in a loud quarrel over economic issues. These were certainly not Sobchak’s weapon of choice.

Several years after that, when Sobchak returned to Russia after emigrating to Paris, he came to my room at the presidential control department at Moscow’s Staraya Square and told me: “Alas, back in 1996 I was unaware who my real friends and my real enemies were…”