Putin: His Downfall and Russia's Coming Crash

2 THE EDUCATION OF V. V. PUTIN

Any portrait of Putin must necessarily be streaky, ambiguous, elusive. His KGB training made him duplicitous, poker-faced, and his years in power have airbrushed his past. Besides, Russian psychology and behavior always tend to baffle Westerners. America’s experts know Russia, they just don’t know Russians. This is what Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was getting at when, bemoaning deteriorating U.S.-Russia relations, he said of himself and Condoleezza Rice: “For the first time both the United States secretary of state and secretary of defense have doctorates in Russian studies. A fat lot of good that’s done us.”[42]

Putin’s time in the KGB lends him a sinister charisma that also obscures his true face. The way he views the KGB and the way it is seen by outsiders is one of the true impediments to penetrating his psychology and predicting his behavior. For Putin, membership in the KGB is a source of pride and identity; he’s gone so far as to say that there is no such thing as ex-KGB. For him and many in the KGB, the organization was not evil but heroic. It helped win the revolution, beat the Nazis, and steal U.S. atomic secrets, thus preserving a balance of power in the world. Many KGB veterans, though they will in passing acknowledge their organization’s complicity in Stalin’s crimes and the oppression that continued after his death, are also acutely aware of themselves as victims and martyrs. There was no more dangerous job in Stalin’s USSR than head of the KGB, and when a KGB leader fell, immediate purges of his confederates would decimate the ranks. The principal intelligence school that Putin attended during his training had been established by Stalin’s personal order in 1938 to replace the agents killed in Stalin’s own purges.

In KGB eyes the blame for the crimes committed against innocent civilians and against “innocent” KGB personnel lay with the party. The KGB was only the party’s sword and shield—it did what it was told.

So when someone like John McCain says he looks into Putin’s eyes and sees “KGB” he means thug and oppressor, but when Vladimir Putin says the same word, it has associations of victor, victim, and, at worst, inadvertent villain. This is not the best basis for communication and also violates the cardinal principle: Know thy enemy.

Our image of Russia lacks nuance and perversity. A Westerner might be able to understand why Russians would remain faithful to the original image of the KGB man as bold and valiant. It would, however, be considerably more difficult to understand the nostalgia some former prisoners of the Gulag for their time there. In the Gulag everything was more vivid and real. There was no ambiguity—friendship was friendship, betrayal betrayal. Speaking of some music he had by chance overheard and whose beauty sustained him for days, one Zek (prisoner) said to me: “You hold things dearer in there. Hearing music in there in not like hearing music out here. I would not have missed it for the world.”[43]

But Putin eludes even Russians. A politician who worked closely with Putin in St. Petersburg in the 1990s says: “When he became President I threw open my photo album to see us together—I knew he’d be there next to me at one of so many events we were at together. But he wasn’t in a single one. He’d slipped out of every frame. I sometimes wonder if he even has a reflection in the mirror.”[44]

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in Leningrad in 1952. The time and the place are both important. It was only seven years since the end of World War II in a Soviet Union still ruled by Joseph Stalin, with whom Putin’s family had a strong personal connection—Putin’s grandfather cooked for Stalin.

Leningrad and Moscow had very different fates during the war. Moscow withstood Hitler’s blitzkrieg attack of 1941, though it was a close call. German bombs hit Red Square. On the road into Moscow from Sheremetyevo International Airport there is a monument of oversized tank traps, which mark the point of the closest German advance. The Nazis were in Queens.

Moscow displayed heroic resistance, Leningrad heroic endurance. The latter city was besieged by the Nazi army for some nine hundred days. A million people died from hunger, cold, and the unrelenting shelling of the city. At the apex, ten thousand were dying a day. In the winter, dynamite was needed to blast the frozen ground to make mass graves. Putin tells the story of how his mother almost became an inadvertent victim: “Once my mother fainted from hunger. People thought she had died, and they laid her out with the corpses. Luckily, Mama woke up in time and started moaning.”[45]

The most terrifying sight in the world in the Leningrad of those days was that of a well-fed man—it meant he was a cannibal and out hunting for more.

Those were the stories Putin heard at the kitchen table when the grown-ups drank tea. Even Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, has nothing in her biography that comes close.

The year of Putin’s birth was the last year of Stalin’s life and the time of his last purge. The anti-Semitic Doctors’ Plot accused Jewish doctors in Kremlin hospitals of murdering high Soviet officials. It was always dangerous to be too close to the Kremlin or Stalin and his inner circle, though that didn’t affect Putin’s grandfather, who cooked for both Lenin and Stalin. He must have had a very high clearance if he was not actually an official member of the security apparatus. Putin’s father survived hazardous duty performing sabotage behind Nazi lines, fighting in a demolitions battalion of the NKVD, precursor of the KGB. He was seriously wounded—they never got all the shrapnel out of him and he limped for the rest of his life. The only casualty in the immediate family was a baby who died of diphtheria during the Siege, another having died shortly after birth before the war. Putin was thus an only child, “the sun, moon and stars”[46] to his mother, who had him baptized on the sly from her party-member husband. Putin still wears that baptismal cross. There may also be a special sense of significance or destiny instilled in only children whose predecessor siblings all died, opening the way for them, as was the case for Stalin.

In World War II the USSR lost something like twenty-six million people, and innumerable buildings were destroyed. Like many others, Putin grew up in a communal apartment where several families lived together, usually one family per room, and shared a kitchen. There was no hot water, no bathtub. The toilet, out on the landing, was filthy and freezing. A teacher who once visited his home found the bathroom “horrendous.”[47] The stairs were infested with “hordes of rats”[48] that Putin chased with sticks for fun, though it wasn’t so much fun when, cornered, they turned and attacked.

Not all the lessons he learned were harsh. Friendship with a Jewish family that lived in one of the communal apartment’s rooms helped inoculate him against anti-Semitism. He would also have close relations with Jewish teachers and martial arts mates. One of his Jewish teachers, Vera Gurevich, was responsible for Putin’s learning German. Spotting his “potential, energy, and character,”[49] she decided to devote time and attention to him even though he seemed hell-bent for a life of street fights and petty crime. Under her tutelage, he developed a taste for German that would in time play an important part in his KGB career. He continued studying it in high school, where his chemistry teacher also noticed his force and drive, but still remarked, “He was ordinary, there were so many like him.”[50]

Yet not only did that rough and ordinary boy become president of Russia, but when in Israel in 2005 he found time to visit that old teacher and tell her that he remembered her as “honest, fair and kind,”[51] and then he bought her an apartment in Tel Aviv.

But back in his youth it was street fighting that was his passion and best skill. The lesson that the streets of Leningrad taught was simple, and it stayed with Putin his whole life: The weak get beaten. Weakness is both disgrace and danger.[52] “The greatest criminals in our history,” Putin would say when president, “were those weaklings who threw power on the floor—Nicholas II and Gorbachev—who allowed the power to be picked up by the hysterics and the madmen.”[53]

The streets would shape not only Putin’s worldview but his tactics as well. In discussing preemptive attacks on ISIS in Syria when justifying his support of the Assad regime, he said: “The streets of Leningrad taught me one thing—if a fight is unavoidable, throw the first punch.”

The streets of Leningrad were Putin’s playing fields of Eton. They also taught the value of loyalty. Loyalty is both a useful attribute and a sign of strength, for it is often tested. The cult of strength and loyalty is Putin’s true religion.

What saved Putin from the street was a sport and a dream. The sport was Sambo, a Soviet blend of wrestling and judo that was for Putin a discipline, a philosophy, a way of life. He would eventually attain a black belt and become city champion of Leningrad. This was before he was important and opponents knew better than to beat him.

But it was not a career in sport that became his dream. It was the KGB for him. He was under the spell of KGB exploits lauded in books and films but especially in the black-and-white miniseries The Sword and the Shield, which recounted the adventures of a Soviet agent whose German was so perfect and composure so cool that he could even infiltrate the SS. Putin saw it when he was sixteen. “Books and spy movies like The Sword and the Shield took hold of my imagination. What amazed me most of all was how one man’s effort could achieve what whole armies could not. One spy could decide the fate of thousands of people.”[54]

It all goes back to adolescence and the movies, even the difference between dissidents and KGB agents, as the Polish poet Stanislaw Baranczak observed in “The Restoration of Order”:

Though Putin no doubt fantasized about acts of derring-do, what drew him most was the power to decide the fate of thousands. In an attempt to make his dream a reality, he went to the “Big House,” KGB headquarters in Leningrad, and inquired about the process of becoming a spy. He was rebuffed, but learned two important things. The KGB didn’t accept people who “came on their own initiative.”[56] If the KGB wanted you, they found you. It was the state that decides, not the individual. And the KGB was only interested in people who had served in the army or had some higher education. “But what kind is preferred?” asked Putin. The answer: “Law school.”[57] As he says: “From that moment on, I began to prepare for the law faculty of Leningrad University. And nobody could stop me.”[58]

Even the little he knew about the KGB’s role in the purges could not slow him down. Not that such things were much discussed at home. His father was a “silent man”[59] who said with Soviet wisdom that “only a fool would open up his soul to the world. You have to know who you are talking to.”[60] “I didn’t think about the purges,” said Putin. “My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education.”[61] It wasn’t only the purges he didn’t think about. The Sword and the Shield, the miniseries that so entranced the young Putin, came out in 1968, the same year that Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring that had tried to create “socialism with a human face.” No doubt in Putin’s household the reaction was the same as in many others—ungrateful Czechs, we liberated them from the Nazis and now look what they do. As usual, the intelligentsia summed up their bitter disappointment in a quip: Question: What is the most neutral country in the world? Answer: Czechoslovakia—it does not even interfere in its own internal affairs.

After graduating from Leningrad State University’s Law Department in 1975, Putin was recruited by the KGB. Either they had remembered him or he had been spotted by one of their scouts.

Putin’s romantic image of the Chekist—bold, incorruptible, wearing a long black-leather coat and dispensing revolutionary justice from a Mauser, or later, infiltrating Nazi circles or stealing atomic secrets from the West—was all part of the past. These were the Brezhnevian seventies, the era of stagnation, when dissidents were hounded and ended up in work camps or psychiatric hospitals where, as one former inhabitant described it, “After a breakfast of mush came shock therapy. You’re given a large dose of insulin, the sugar disappears from your blood and you go into shock. You’re tied to your bed with strips of torn sheets, not ropes. When they’re in shock, people go into convulsions. They scream and howl. Their eyes look like they are going to pop out of their head.”[62]

If he was even aware of such things at the time, they would have been easy for Putin to justify. In any case, he was too happy and excited to be a part of the secret elite that really ran the world. A friend of Putin’s, Sergei Roldugin, who went on to become the lead cellist in the Mariinsky Theater Symphony Orchestra, recalls Putin as a young KGB operative: “Once, at Eastertime, Volodya called me to go see a religious procession. He was standing at the rope, maintaining order, and he asked me whether I wanted to go up to the altar and take a look. Of course I agreed. There was such boyishness in this gesture—‘nobody can go there, but we can.’”

On the way home drunken students tried to bum a cigarette from Putin, who refused. One of them then shoved or punched Putin. As his friend remembers: “Suddenly somebody’s socks flashed before my eyes and the kid flew off somewhere. Volodya turned to me calmly and said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ And we left. I loved how he tossed that guy! One move, and the guy’s legs were up in the air.”[63]

Though their paths diverged—the KGB for Putin, classical music for Roldugin—they kept in touch, bound by youth, the streets, a shared sense of loyalty. In early 2016 the Panama Papers would reveal that Roldugin was at least nominally in charge of some $2 billion in offshore capital, pretty good for a cellist.

Putin is only intermittently visible in the ten years between entering the KGB and surfacing in Dresden, East Germany, in 1985. Odd had it been otherwise. He was now a soldier on the “invisible front.” As his friend noticed, this offered the secret satisfactions of knowing what others did not know and being able to do what others could not. He was being initiated into a secret elite. Part of that initiation was a new relationship to oneself that relieved him of the need to be sincere. The difference between the inner and the outer man, which might be called hypocrisy in a common Soviet citizen, was, in the case of a KGB officer, an operational necessity. In KGB training there is also an element of self-mastery that would have been familiar to Putin from martial arts, except that now it was used to manipulate others. Upon entering any training facility an agent would be given a new last name, to break his conditioned response to his own name, to free up his relationship to his own identity, the easier to slip into aliases and disguises.

Another force would begin shaping any new recruit, imperceptibly but implacably. Paranoia was both the strong suit and an occupational hazard of the KGB. Their task was to be suspicious. History had clearly demonstrated that it was always better to err on the side of excess suspicion. The KGB would agree with the Sicilian proverb that says To trust is good, not to trust is better.

But the trouble with paranoia is that it cannot set limits on itself, and so grotesqueries are committed. For example, when the Soviets wanted to transfer submarines from their southern bases to those in the north, they would not send them out by the short and easy route through the Black Sea, then to the Mediterranean and out to the Atlantic, from where they would pass over Scandinavia to Murmansk in the Arctic Circle. That route would expose the submarines to the spying eyes of NATO. To avoid that unacceptable risk, the subs were placed on floating dry docks, covered with tarps, and hauled on a fifty-one-day journey through the country’s internal river system as detailed in the book Rising Tide: The Untold Story of the Russian Submarines That Fought the Cold War: “Only the nineteenth century Mariinsky Canals presented a true problem. Too shallow and too old, they often required the crew to pull the dock along and at the locks old women and pack animals pitched in to force the old controls to do their job.”[64]

Old women! Pack animals!

But there was nothing new in any of that—a Frenchman who served in the tsar’s armies in the late 1500s said of Russia: “This is the most distrustful and suspicious nation in the world.”[65]

After some on-the-job training in counterintelligence, Putin received his first schooling between February and July 1976 in KGB School 401 in the Okhta region of Leningrad, a school he calls in “no way distinguished,”[66] which is either an accurate characterization or a way of deflecting attention from the subject.

His training there was no doubt largely operational—tradecraft, surveillance and avoiding surveillance, the art of recruitment. One danger KGB agents faced was that the sources they were developing were in fact working for the other side, “dangles” as they were called. For that reason it was recommended that a KGB officer meet with a potential source at least seven times before beginning to work with him, the “first stage of operational development.”[67]

KGB School 401 may also have had something of the boot camp about it. In a description of another such school Major Yuri Shvets, author of Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America, observes: “We parachuted from planes, mastered a variety of weapons, learned to plant mines, negotiated a napalm-drenched obstacle course, captured ‘prisoners’ for interrogation, ‘blew up’ bridges, and ‘destroyed’ enemy supply lines.”[68]

Putin had entered the KGB just as it was undergoing a fundamental change in course in part influenced by, of all things, an American movie, if one is to believe the post-Soviet station chief for foreign intelligence in New York City, Sergei Tretyakov, who writes that the 1975 Robert Redford film Three Days of the Condor “convinced the KGB generals that the CIA was spending more money and putting more effort into analytic work than the KGB was,”[69] and on that basis a shift of emphasis occurred between the operational and the analytical.

Though the KGB was undergoing certain changes in the mid-seventies, the organization bore the clear impress of its leader, Yuri Andropov, who would not only be Putin’s commander in chief but his hero and role model as well. Andropov was the only person before Putin to pass from being chief of the security services to head of state. When Andropov took the helm of the USSR in 1982, the choice was even welcomed by a portion of the dissident intelligentsia who, along with Andrei Sakharov, believed that the KGB was “the least corrupt institution in the country.”[70] Moreover, it was assumed that the KGB possessed the best information and therefore had to realize that the country was in critical need of reform.

Andropov had been traumatized by the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, which he, as Soviet ambassador, would treacherously and viciously suppress. But first, as historian Christopher Andrew put it, “he had watched in horror from the windows of his embassy as officers of the hated Hungarian security service were strung up from lampposts. Andropov remained haunted for the rest of his life by the speed with which an apparently all-powerful Communist one-party state had begun to topple.”[71]

But Andropov would not be given long to show what course he would set for the Soviet ship of state. In fact, his initial actions—raiding movie theaters for people shirking work, enforcing labor discipline—betrayed a petty, fussy cast of mind, not the broad horizons of a reformer. He had served a little more than a year when he suffered renal failure that first debilitated him, then took his life. It is the great paradox of Andropov’s life that his kidney problems had caused him to travel to the south of Russia to take the waters. On his sojourns there he became friendly with the local party boss, who in time became his protégé and whom Andropov introduced to the highest political circles in Moscow. His name was Mikhail Gorbachev.

Putin joined Andropov’s KGB in 1975 as the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft linked up in space. It was the height of the euphoria of détente, a policy of rapprochement and the relaxing of tensions that Nixon and Brezhnev had launched in the early seventies. Like the “reset” under Putin, détente would end in suspicion, recrimination, and invasion—that of Afghanistan in late 1979.

Not that the KGB itself ever took détente all that seriously. In fact, during Putin’s first year at work in the Leningrad KGB, it was involved in a complex, risky, and ultimately highly successful operation directed against the American consulate in Leningrad. “Beginning in 1976, the KGB successfully installed sophisticated electronic eavesdropping equipment and burst transmitters inside 16 IBM Selectric typewriters used by the staffs of the Moscow embassy and Leningrad consulate, which copied everything being typed on the machines, then periodically broadcast their take to KGB engineers manning listening posts just outside…. In the end, the NSA concluded that the Soviet eavesdropping operation had most likely compromised every document typed on these 16 electric typewriters over a period of eight years from 1976 to 1984.”[72]

Putin at this time was a low-level operative, fresh from law school with a quick six months’ training behind him. But he was working in the field of counterintelligence. On both sides, it was assumed that certain embassy, consulate, and mission personnel were spies, but the question always remained, precisely which ones? To determine that was the task of counterintelligence. The material gleaned from the bugging of the electric typewriters would have been valuable in determining which of the Leningrad U.S. consulate’s personnel were intelligence officers. At the least, Putin’s task would have been facilitated by this information, and he would also have shared in the general rise in esprit de corps that a successful operation always brings to an organization.

The KGB was on a roll. On September 7, 1978, on a crowded London street, Georgi Markov, a defector who broadcast for the BBC’s Bulgarian radio service, often ridiculing the Bulgarian Communist regime, was assassinated with a poison (ricin) pellet fired from a miniaturized gun in the tip of an umbrella, a masterstroke of disguise in forever rainy London. Coincidentally, or not coincidentally, the date was also the birthday of the Bulgarian Communist dictator Todor Zhivkov, who must have been gladdened by this gift. Coincidentally, or not coincidentally, the assassination of the gadfly journalist Anna Politkovskaya would take place on Putin’s birthday.

Putin was in his element. The USSR may have been run by an increasingly doddering and sclerotic Leonid Brezhnev, but the KGB was vigorous and flush with success. Penetration of the enemy’s embassies and crafty assassination in the name of the cause—what could be better? Since he was in his element, he thrived and so came to the attention of the people in foreign intelligence, the classiest and most coveted branch of service, since it meant foreign postings, action on the front line, access to goods. He was called in by the foreign-intelligence people for a series of conversations. They liked what they saw and sent him to Moscow for a year’s worth of advanced training at the Dzerzhinsky KGB Higher School. Named for Felix Dzerzhinsky, often called with jocular affection “Iron Felix,” the founder of the first Soviet secret police, the school specialized in “skills enhancement”[73] and had itself suffered greatly in the purges of 1937–38, when practically the entire teaching staff had been shot.

Nowadays, in one measure of progress, the KGB Higher School, a sprawl of yellow-brick buildings in southwest Moscow, is so famed for its computer experts that the lampposts outside the institute’s grounds are festooned with posters offering high-paying jobs in IT.

Nineteen seventy-nine, the year Putin spent immersed in his studies and training at the KGB Higher School, was a time of tectonic shifts within the Islamic world, and between the Western and Islamic worlds. The Iranian Revolution ousted the pro-Western shah and replaced him with a theocratic government. Radicals seized the holy places of Mecca, and the Saudis could not expel them without outside, i.e., French, help. In late December the USSR invaded Afghanistan in what would prove a protracted, failed, and fatal war, instrumental in the collapse of the system and, ultimately, in the rise of Vladimir Putin.

After returning to Leningrad from Moscow, his skills enhanced, Putin worked for three and a half years in the First Directorate, intelligence. Or did he? Some observers maintain that Putin also spent time in Directorate 5, which was charged with crushing dissent.

Andropov strove for “the destruction of dissent in all its forms” and, foreshadowing Putin, declared that “the struggle for human rights was a part of a wide-ranging imperialist plot to undermine the foundations of the Soviet state.”[74] He was, no doubt, sincere. Andropov had seen what had happened in Hungary. A small discussion group named after nineteenth-century poet Sandor Petofi begins considering reformist ideas and the next thing you know security officers are hanging from lampposts.

Two figures dominated the opposition landscape: the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, creator of the Soviet H-bomb and leader of the human rights movement. In 1971 an attempt had been made on Solzhenitsyn’s life in a Moscow store, where he was smeared with a gel most likely containing ricin from the KGB’s poison factory. He became violently ill, but Solzhenitsyn, who had survived World War II, the Gulag, and cancer, wasn’t easy to kill. In early 1974 the KGB simply put him on a plane and exiled him to the West.

Sakharov, however, was a trickier business for the party and the KGB, which never acted in important matters without directives from the party. Of course, the KGB had ways of getting the party to do what it wanted, like feeding the leadership false or misleading information, as Andropov is believed to have done during the Prague Spring, which he wanted crushed at once. Sakharov had made the Soviet Union a nuclear power and had three times been awarded the Hero of Socialist Labor, one of the country’s highest civilian awards. In 1968, the year of the Prague Spring, The New York Times had published the complete text of Sakahrov’s long essay “Reflections,” which grappled with coexistence in a hostile nuclear world.

Andropov believed that there was still hope for Sakharov and suggested in a 1968 report to the Central Committee that Sakharov be called in for “an appropriate conversation.”[75] However, Sakharov, a shy but fearless man, was already well beyond persuasion or threat. Two years later Andropov informed the Central Committee that it was “advisable to install secret listening devices in Sakharov’s apartment.”[76] In April 1971 Andropov reported without a trace of irony: “Meeting regularly with anti-Soviet individuals, some of whom are mentally ill, SAKHAROV looks at the world around him mainly through their eyes. It seems to him that he is constantly subjected to provocations, surveillance, eavesdropping, etc.”[77]

The line on Sakharov was that his anti-Soviet stances could only be the result of bad influences upon him, especially that of his firebrand wife, Elena Bonner, who had been born into Communist “royalty” and grown up in luxurious apartments (though everything in them belonged to the state, as indicated by the small copper tag with a number on every piece of furniture). Her father was executed in the purges of 1937 and her mother was in the camps from that same year until 1954. Bonner was half Jewish, more than Jew enough for the KGB. Putin, who would let those close to him know that he took no pleasure in anti-Semitism, had no problem agreeing with those who expressed such opinions on the sound philosophical basis of—why spit against the wind? But, if only from the point of view of professional finesse, he did not like how the affair was handled, especially the “illegal” arrest and internal exile of Sakharov for protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. “The Sakharov affair was crude,” judged Putin.[78]

Putin denies that he did any work for the Fifth Directorate in its task of suppressing ideological subversion. Though his image gained luster from his work in espionage, there was no upside in admitting to helping crush dissent, especially in the years immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, when everyone was scrambling to provide themselves with some sort of democratic credentials. It is of course very much in the interest of Putin’s enemies to prove he worked in the Fifth Directorate. But it’s not only his enemies who hold that view. Putin’s friend and KGB colleague in Dresden, Vladimir Usoltsev, who wrote an entire book, Co-worker, about their relationship, took it for granted that Putin had gotten all his unorthodox ideas from all the dissident literature he had read as part of his job of suppressing it: “Gradually it dawned on me that Volodya had acquired all his fancy dissident ideas back in Leningrad while working in the 5th.”[79] Putin, he says, showed particular esteem for the work of Solzhenitsyn, on whom he would bestow high state honors many years later.

Putin continues to deny having worked in the Fifth or having any dissident ideas, fancy or otherwise. Confiscated dissident literature, samizdat, no doubt circulated among KGB agents, sexy and forbidden as an errant issue of Playboy.

What’s the truth? There was a brief period in the early nineties when Russia was on a spree of liberty and the KGB archives were opened up to scholars and antiseptic sunlight. That didn’t last long, and it’s a safe bet that nothing of the sort will be coming along again any time soon. Given that, probably the truest thing that can be said is that it doesn’t matter greatly if Putin worked in the Fifth or merely collaborated with it from time to time or had in fact nothing to do with it. Though literature and life had already lent him a certain light ironic attitude, he was still defined by the virtue he valued most: loyalty. He was loyal to the KGB and its chief, Andropov. No matter what private sentiments he harbored, Putin would not have deviated an iota from KGB policy. He would have supported Sakharov’s exile, the use of psychiatric incarceration as punishment, and even Andropov’s ban on any public mourning for John Lennon in 1980. He was a company man.

And for that very reason he had to be proud and amazed when in November 1982 his boss became the boss of the whole Soviet Union. Andropov took the helm at a dark time. The invasion of Afghanistan had led to a boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. A civilian airliner, Korean KAL 007, was shot down after having strayed over Soviet territory, a U.S. congressman among the 269 victims. Reagan branded the USSR the “evil empire” and called for implementation of “Star Wars,” a missile defense program that might have had little chance of success but which could bankrupt the Soviets if they tried to match it. Andropov began purging corrupt officials, which gave public morale a bit of a boost, but he mostly seemed interested in nabbing malingerers in bath houses and movie theaters, acting more like a truant officer than a tyrant enlightened with good intel.

Later it would emerge that Andropov was, like Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the security services, a bit of a poet. It could even be said that he created something of a unique literary genre—the brevity of life as mourned by one of its abbreviators:

There was even some poetic justice in Andropov’s death after less than fifteen months in power. Dying of renal failure, he was like the Soviet system, which could not purge itself of the poisons it secreted. The hagiography machine went into immediate operation after Andropov’s death. He was lent a cloying tragic aura and became the Saint Who Had Not Had Time to Complete His Mission on Earth. Someone else would have to do it.

Though whether or not Putin spent any time in the Fifth Directorate suppressing dissent must remain conjecture, there is no question that he was viewed within the KGB as an intelligence agent who should be trained for the plummiest of assignments, service abroad.

And thus it was that in the Orwellian year of 1984 Major Vladimir Putin, now a married man, traveled again to Moscow, this time to spend a year at the Red Banner Institute, which had just been renamed the Andropov Red Banner Institute. This was the highest and most elite school, accepting only three hundred pupils a year and of such state significance that to even reveal its address was considered treasonous.

One of the odder side effects of Gorbachev’s glasnost and the greedy turbulence of the Yeltsin nineties was that many top KGB officers rushed to cash in by writing tell-all books about their clandestine careers. Remarkably, most of them proved closet liberals just waiting for the chance to breathe free. Since these were top KGB officials, including one general, Oleg Kalugin, they all had studied at the Red Banner Institute. For that reason, we have a pretty fair idea of Putin’s experience there after arriving in July 1984. The course was spartan and severe, with reveille at 6:45 a.m. and lights-out at 11:00 p.m. Classes were held six days a week, with students able to leave the institute grounds only between 3 p.m. on Saturday and 9 a.m. on Monday. Putin’s wife would come to Moscow to visit him once a month, and he got back to Leningrad a couple of times during the year. Though a married man, a major in the KGB, and a student at the highest intelligence school, Putin had not lost any of his street-brawler ways. During one trip home, pestered by a punk in the Leningrad metro, he socked him so hard he broke his own arm. Putin was very worried, telling his friend Roldugin: “They’re not going to understand this in Moscow. I’m afraid there are going to be consequences.”[81]

But there weren’t any consequences for Comrade Putin, or Comrade Platov, as he was known in the school, where everyone’s name was changed. In addition to studying German, he took a class in the structure of the KGB, which was labyrinthine. It consisted of nine chief directorates. The First Chief Directorate, dealing with foreign intelligence, was the one everyone wanted to work in and the one for which Putin was being groomed. That First Chief Directorate had four directorates of its own: “S” (illegal intelligence), “T” (scientific and technical intelligence), “K” (foreign counterintelligence), and “RT” (intelligence work carried out among foreigners on Soviet territory). But that was just the beginning. There were also two services, one for processing information received, the other for processing disinformation. These services were further subdivided principally by geography and importance into sixteen departments (actually fifteen, since the Thirteenth Department, perhaps out of superstition, did not exist). The United States and Canada were Department 1.

The lectures on U.S. and British intelligence were the most riveting because this was the enemy you had to know before you could go up against him. There was some time for the firing range and martial arts during the daily exercise hour. Some recruits would spend time with a Soviet parachute division learning how to jump from planes, hand-to-hand combat, survival in the wilderness. One officer reports shooting a grand total of three cartridges during his training, and for many even that was a waste of time. Of course tradecraft—brush contact, dead drops, eluding surveillance, and the use of espionage high tech—was essential, but in the end espionage was a mind game. It was the art of seducing someone into betrayal.

The person in charge of training and evaluating Putin was Colonel Mikhail Frolov. “I taught the art of intelligence. What does intelligence mean? It’s the ability to come into contact with people, the ability to select the people you need, the ability to raise the questions that are of interest to our country and our leaders, the ability to be a psychologist, if you will.”[82] Putin himself would later, in conversation with a friend, describe himself as a “specialist in human relations.”[83]

Putin had won Colonel Frolov’s interest and respect by appearing at a lecture in a three-piece suit on a ninety-degree day when even Frolov was wearing short sleeves. Frolov pointed him out as an example to the others: “Look at Comrade Platov, now!”[84]

On the basis of that and other incidents Frolov “decided to try him out in the role of division leader. At the Red Banner Institute, division leader was not just some sort of illustrious title. A lot depends on the division leader. You need organizational abilities, a certain degree of tact, and a businesslike manner. Putin had all of that.”[85]

But there was a little more than that to being division leader. The main job of instructors like Frolov was writing the evaluations on which the students’ future depended. But Frolov’s own future depended on how accurate his characterizations proved. For that reason it never hurt to have a little extra inside information; providing it was one key task of the division leader and not one that would make him popular with his fellow students, any more than being held up as an example for wearing a suit on a scorching day.

Yuri Shvets, who would rise to major in the KGB and later author Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America, was also trained at the Andropov Red Banner Institute and says of Putin: “We had ‘uncles’ who wrote our references on graduation. They needed to know as much as possible and used ‘elders’ or the leaders of the groups, who reported to them. Vova [Putin] was a leader—a snitch. Everyone hated the leader.”[86]

Putin’s kind words about collaborators and snitches in First Person—characterizing them as indispensable people working patriotically “for the interests of the state”[87]—may be both inadvertent sincerity and an ex post facto attempt to justify his own “snitching” as a group leader. In any case, though originally published in Russian newspapers, this section was not included in the Russian book version of First Person, because praising Soviet-era stoolies was still too sensitive an issue for many Russians.

Some of the students believed their dorm rooms were bugged, a KGB within the KGB.

Everything was a test and you never knew if you passed or failed. “You would be ordered to prepare a presentation on one topic and then the instructor would change the subject moments before you were supposed to make your presentation…. Would you panic? Would you become depressed? Did you have a sense of humor? If you were too serious, it was not good. If you were too carefree, it was not good. They applied pressure at all possible points and they were always totally critical. There was never any positive reinforcement. None.”[88]

There were also the odd moments of diversion. Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People was one of the most popular books in the institute library. And Vladimir Kuzichkin, author of Inside the KGB: My Life in Soviet Espionage, recalls: “It was from the James Bond films that we first learnt how the West saw Soviet intelligence officers. Bull necks, stupid faces, and solving all their problems with their fists and not their brains. That neither upset nor angered us. We were simply amused by it. ‘The more primitive you imagine us to be,’ we thought, ‘the worse for you.’”[89]

In the end it was time for Frolov to write his evaluation of Putin. It was quite positive but included some negative characteristics as well—“he was somewhat withdrawn and uncommunicative. By the way, that could be considered both a negative and a positive trait. But I recall that I also cited a certain academic tendency among his negative aspects. I don’t mean that he was dry. No, he was sharp-witted and always ready with a quip.”[90] Perhaps most important for the long haul was the notation concerning Putin’s “lowered sense of danger.” It was a criticism Putin took very much to heart, saying: “I had to work on my sense of danger for a long time.”[91]

Despite these criticisms, Frolov recommended Putin for assignment. Putin would thank him fifteen years later by inviting Frolov to his inauguration as president in 2000.

In the end, a high-ranking commission would both examine the reports on a candidate and summon the candidate himself for an interview and, on that basis, decide what use the KGB would make of him. In Putin’s case that decision was: FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE. EAST GERMANY, DRESDEN.

3 DRESDEN

Once known as the Florence of the Elba, rococo Dresden was firebombed by British and American planes in February 1945 even though the city presented very little value as a military target. The real motivations were revenge for the German bombing of civilian populations in England and also to hasten the end of the war, which in the event was less than three months away. Statistics on casualties vary wildly, from 150,000 (higher than the death toll of Hiroshima) to revisionist lows of around 35,000, based on the contention that the Nazis themselves had inflated the original figures to demonstrate that they were not the only ones to inflict savageries on the innocent. Some of those victims had an odd afterlife, as noted by the legendary chief of Stasi foreign intelligence, Markus Wolf: “We had the advantage of being able, for example, to use the identities of people killed in the Dresden bombings as covers for the agents we settled in the West.”[93] In any case, it is not statistics or posthumous exploitation that gives the true feel of the carnage but a line from Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, who was there during the firestorm and wrote that there “must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.”[94]

A bit of a backwater, Dresden was not one of the most coveted foreign postings, but plummy enough considering that by 1984 KGB salaries there were supplemented by $100 a month in hard currency and East German stores offered such exotic luxuries as bananas. Western European cities might be more attractive, but Dresden was East Germany’s third-largest city, and any German city was important. “As the Soviet Union’s westernmost satellite, East Germany was the front line in the battle against capitalism. The protection of Soviet security and military forces stationed in East Germany against defection and Western espionage was as vital as the suppression of any anticommunist stirrings among the populace,” writes John O. Koehler in Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police.[95]

Dresden’s out-of-the-wayness offered other advantages to Markus Wolf, who said that intelligence work was “very boring … a banal trade of sifting through huge amounts of random information in a search for a single, enlightening gem or illuminating link, so I varied my routine by insisting on running ten or twelve agents personally. As far as I know I was the only chief of any of the world’s principal intelligence agencies to do so. This gave me the opportunity to get out and meet them from time to time in safe houses in the Berlin suburbs or—what I preferred—in Dresden and other places where there were fewer Westerners.”[96]

Dresden was also the home base of the twentieth century’s greatest atomic spy, Klaus Fuchs, who settled there in 1959 after serving nine years in a British prison for passing secrets to the Soviets. For many years Fuchs was deputy director of the Institute for Nuclear Research just outside Dresden, and Wolf would confer with him on scientific and technical questions.

“Blond, athletic, simpatico,”[97] as one colleague described him, Putin arrived in Dresden in late summer 1985 just as the USSR’s new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was launching his brilliant, doomed career. Putin would be in Dresden for nearly all the Gorbachev years; for him glasnost and perestroika would always be more echo than experience.

Putin was not only assigned to Dresden, he was requested by Dresden. A section chief about to be rotated home who knew Putin from Leningrad had seen his name on a list of recent Red Banner Institute graduates and politicked for his assignment to Dresden.

Putin worked out of a two-story building at 4 Angelikastrasse directly across the street from Stasi headquarters. The KGB and the Stasi worked very closely together, too closely sometimes for the young, ambitious General Horst Böhm, head of the Dresden Stasi, who jockeyed for more leeway from their ally and conqueror, who had full rights to act as they would in the USSR with the one exception of not being able to arrest East German citizens. General Böhm would become especially incensed when KGB officers like Putin would poach ex-Stasi who were still being used by the Stasi.

Putin, for his part, was a bit shocked by East Germany, which he called “a harshly totalitarian country, similar to the Soviet Union, only 30 years earlier.”[98]

Simon Wiesenthal, renowned Nazi hunter, said that when it came to their own citizens, the Stasi were “worse than the Gestapo.”[99] The entire society was infested with agents and informers. According to very rough estimates, the USSR had 1 agent per 6,000 people, the Gestapo, 1 per 2,000, and the Stasi 1 per 166, which, if informers and part-time informers were included, came to something like 1 per 6.5, meaning it was statistically impossible to have a dinner party without at least one person being an informer.[100]

Wiesenthal goes on to say of the Stasi: “They not only terrorized their own people worse than the Gestapo, but the government was the most anti-Semitic and anti-Israel of the entire Eastern Bloc. They did nothing to help the West in tracking down Nazi criminals, they ignored all requests from West German judicial authorities for assistance. We have just discovered shelves of files on Nazis stretching over four miles. Now we also know how the Stasi used those files. They blackmailed Nazi criminals who fled abroad after the war into spying for them.”[101]

Unlike in Leningrad, where he may have been involved in suppressing dissent in addition to counterintelligence, there is little question what Putin’s assignment was in Dresden. He was in Directorate S, illegal intelligence, which, among its many tasks, prepared agents to penetrate the enemy with forged documents. According to Major Vladimir Kuzichkin, author of Inside the KGB, who worked in Directorate S himself, an illegal was “a Soviet citizen, a KGB officer holding military rank, who has undergone special training and who has been documented as a citizen of a foreign country.” By contrast an illegal agent “can either be a Soviet citizen or a foreigner. He is not a KGB officer, he does not hold illegal rank, and has been brought into intelligence to do a onetime operation.”[102] Illegals could remain undercover for decades.

One of Putin’s tasks was to find and screen candidates to be illegal agents, knowing it unlikely that many of them would qualify. Putin describes his work in the bland and general terms designed to reveal nothing: “The work was political intelligence—obtaining information about political figures and the plans of the potential opponent…. We were interested in any information about the ‘main opponent, NATO.’ … So recruitment of sources, procurement of information, and assessment and analysis were big parts of the job. It was very routine work.”[103]

Though Putin himself put a bland gloss on it, he was working in the part of foreign intelligence, Directorate S, that was the place where there might be a touch of action and danger, the only place that was even remotely Bondish, as one of Putin’s colleagues would put it.

Directorate S had a special status both because of the successes it could achieve and the dangers it posed to Soviet foreign policy. As Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhnin write in The Sword and the Shield: “The records of Directorate S revealed some remarkable individual achievements. KGB illegals successfully established bogus identities as foreign nationals in a great variety of professions ranging from Costa Rican ambassador to piano tuner to the governor of New York.”[104]

But it was a high-risk game Putin was playing. KGB major Kuzichkin writes of the difference between espionage performed by members of the diplomatic staff and that carried out by illegals using forged passports of the host nation. The former have diplomatic immunity, whereas “if a KGB mission abroad should misfire and a political scandal ensue, intelligence officers can expect no mercy from the Politburo…. At best, a culprit may be thrown out of the KGB without a pension. At worst, criminal proceedings may be instituted against him.”[105]

Though Putin was adept at covering his own tracks and though most of the Dresden KGB’s records were burned in the final days of East Germany, a bit is known about one major operation in which Putin was involved. If NATO was the “main enemy,” the “main worry” was a Sudden Nuclear Missile Attack (SNMA) that would begin with Green Berets operating behind Soviet lines to thwart a Soviet response. It turns out that this at least was hardly extravagant Soviet paranoia. A May 2, 2015, New York Times article, “A Secret Warrior Leaves the Pentagon as Quietly as He Entered,” on the retirement of Michael G. Vickers, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, states: “During the Cold War, Mr. Vickers was a member of the Green Berets assigned to infiltrate Warsaw Pact borders should World War III break out. His mission: Detonate a portable nuclear bomb to blunt an attack by the overwhelming numbers of Soviet tanks.”[106]

There were three Green Beret bases in West Germany, and it was the ambition of Directorate S to penetrate those bases. Putin was involved in searching through “mountains” of invitations from Dresdeners to relatives in West Germany to find any to people who lived near those bases. In any case, it all came to naught, not a single nibble worth mentioning. But success was always rare in any such operation. As one of Putin’s coworkers put it, to recruit a single Western agent was success enough for a career.

One agent Putin ran did not turn out too well. Klaus Zuchold was a Stasi officer recruited by Putin over a five-year period, only formally joining the KGB after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when KGB penetration of Germany became more important than ever. Just after the two Germanys were reunited, Zuchold, fearing exposure, surrendered himself to German intelligence, revealing that he had been run by Putin, who was also personally running a senior police inspector in Dresden.

Zuchold had immediately been charmed by Putin’s jokes about police, Jews, and the crude Russian soldiers who stole vegetables from Zuchold’s garden. “Putin is a man of few words. He is impenetrable and he mostly lets other people speak. He gives away very little but is clearly very driven and determined to get what he wants: friendly and seemingly very open, luring people into opening up but always in control. Whenever we drank together he always made sure he was at least three glasses behind everyone else.”[107]

False modesty and professional ambiguity aside, Putin’s downplaying of his work was also quite sincere. The KGB was increasingly becoming an organization that processed paperwork. One agent quipped that Soviet intelligence runs on paperwork alone and [its] “main advantage … resides in its newly acquired ability to exist without undercover agents.”[108] And, as one of Putin’s own colleagues put it: “Our work was seventy percent paperwork and sometimes was unbearably boring.”[109]

KGB generals and liberal intellectuals rarely agree on anything, but such is Putin’s power to unite people that he has even brought these disparate groups together in their derision of his abilities as a spy. In her biography of Putin, The Man Without a Face, Masha Gessen writes: “Putin’s biggest success in his stay in Dresden appears to have been in drafting a Colombian university student, who in turn connected the Soviet agents with a Colombian student at a school in West Berlin, who in turn introduced them to a Colombian-born U.S. Army sergeant, who sold them an unclassified Army manual for 800 marks.”[110]

KGB colonel Sergei Tretyakov, who ran Russian intelligence operations in the United States from New York after the fall of the USSR and who attended the Red Banner Institute at the same time as Putin did, was aghast at the very suggestion that he might have had anything to do with Putin afterward: “Of course I did not. Not only because we worked in different regions of the world, but first of all because I was a successful officer working in the Center and Putin was never successful in intelligence and never had a chance to work in headquarters. He was always kept in a provincial KGB station in a low and unimportant position.”[111]

Putin is further belittled for receiving only one award, a bronze medal awarded him by the Stasi in 1988, and for only advancing one rank, from major to lieutenant colonel, in his more than four years of service abroad.

Putin, of course, doesn’t quite agree with these characterizations of himself. Responding to the charge that Dresden was a provincial posting, he said: “Probably. Actually, from that perspective, Leningrad is also a province. But I was always quite successful in those provinces.”[112]

The bronze medal Putin was awarded was pooh-poohed by Markus Wolf, the Stasi intelligence chief, who said it was awarded to every secretary provided she didn’t have any gross violations on her record. Bristling, Putin said Wolf was “entirely correct…. He just confirmed that I didn’t have any gross violations in my record”[113] and pointed out where Wolf was incorrect—in saying that Putin was awarded the medal simply for “services” when it had in fact been awarded for “outstanding services.” Spies can be as vain as ballerinas.

Those who denigrate his rising only to the rank of lieutenant colonel neglect to mention that the KGB has two hierarchies—a military-style one rising from private to general, and a parallel one among case officers and administrators. For example, a senior case officer like Putin would have authority over someone with a higher rank if that person was working for Putin on a given operation.

Putin’s promotions came more on the administrative side than on that of the more formal ranks. As he says: “I was a senior case officer. My next job was assistant to the head of the department. That was considered quite a good advance. And then I was promoted to senior assistant. There was nothing higher. Above me was the top managerial level, and we only had one boss.”[114]

The KGB in the late 1980s was ruled, as one officer put it, by “Lord Paperwork.”[115] There was no time for either spectacular successes or catastrophic failures—agents were too busy filling out forms and filing reports.

And if Putin had had any significant successes in Dresden they would have by their very nature remained secret. In espionage a known success is half a failure.

In those increasingly dreary years, Putin had three consolations: family, beer, and Gogol. He adored his daughters and every day would take Masha to the day-care center and Katya to the nursery. Things were a bit more complicated with his wife, Lyudmila, a good-looking blonde and former Aeroflot stewardess. Lyudmila is on record as saying that their first years together were “lived in total harmony … a continuous sense of joy, as though we were on holiday.”[116] In fact, there had been some problems right from the start—she found him even more reserved than most Leningraders, and he could be insultingly, infuriatingly late for their dates, an hour and a half being more or less the norm. Already in the KGB, he never told her that, saying he worked with the police. Lyudmila frequently had the feeling she was being probed and tested by Putin. It was the wife of one of Putin’s friends who told her he was KGB, and a young man who appeared out of nowhere on the street declaring his love for Lyudmila may have been set up by Putin to check her reactions and her loyalty. He considered any housework beneath him and always imposed his will, to which, she says, she “always submitted.”[117] She wanted their second daughter, born in East Germany, to be called Natasha, but Putin said, “No, it will be Masha,” and despite all Lyudmila’s tears and pleas, Masha it was.

Not a natural cook and homemaker, she trembled inwardly awaiting his reaction to dinner. He’d never say anything. Finally, once unable to restrain herself, she asked: “How’s the meat?”

“On the dry side.”

His second consolation was the excellent and easily available German beer. He was buying his beloved Radeberg by the keg, and since it was only a five-minute walk from house to office he put on twenty-five pounds in no time.

And reading Gogol’s novel Dead Souls was particularly piquant because the hero, Chichikov, goes about provincial nineteenth-century Russia buying up serfs who have died but are still on the census rolls and thus can be used as collateral until the next count is made. A good deal of the paperwork done by the KGB in the late 1980s was based on the reports of invented agents and was actually information gleaned from local newspapers. Gogol would have loved it.

As mentioned earlier, one of Putin’s comrades in Directorate S has written a book about those Dresden years under the title Co-worker. Its author, Vladimir Usoltsev, was something of an oddball among KGB officers, for he had a Ph.D. in physics, a fondness for classical music, and a bent for literature. His book, though of some value as the only close-up of Putin from those years, must be taken with several grains of salt, since KGB agents are trained to have a utilitarian attitude toward the truth, or, to put it more bluntly, they are liars by trade. The author stresses that Putin was, as a type, completely ordinary but had a persona that could be quite charming, especially with older men, which later may have helped win Yeltsin’s approval to replace him as president. Like everyone else he was a “conformist” who thought one thing, said another, and did yet a third. He was reserved but good-humored, and would easily pass the American political test of being a guy you’d like to go out for a beer with. He was hardworking, very focused, with a tendency to tardiness and untidiness with papers, of which there were so many. Later, as president, he would keep the pope waiting.

Directorate S was small, just six officers and their leader. As luck would have it, three of the six were Vladimirs, nickname Volodya. To keep things straight, Putin became Little Volodya because he was small compared to Big Volodya, the author of Co-worker. The third was, for obvious reasons, Volodya Mustache. In his memoirs Big Volodya compares their world to the cramped quarters of a spacecraft with an intimacy that could be cordial or “hellish.”[118]

Big Volodya and Putin became friends, drinking buddies, confidants. From time to time Putin would surprise his friend by displaying a “dissident” point of view. He disliked the anti-Semitism that in the KGB was as customary as a slice of herring with a shot of vodka. Putin spoke warmly of Jewish neighbors, teachers, trainers, fellow athletes. He was also very pro-Sakharov, who had just been released from six years of internal exile by Gorbachev in 1986. In this account Putin even supported Sakharov’s position that the West should have military superiority over the Soviet Union, saying with ironic humor: “Don’t forget that we don’t have to be afraid of the West, but they have every reason to be afraid of us, and only the West’s clear military superiority can make the totally unbridled leaders in the Kremlin see reason.”[119] He spoke that way only with Big Volodya—when others were around he took the standard anti-Semitic line that Sakharov was controlled by his Jewish wife, Elena Bonner. Still, even in those conversations Big Volodya thought he could detect a light irony in Putin’s voice and expression.

Trained in jurisprudence, Putin was a staunch defender of Law. He also stood up for the market, the right of inheritance, and private property, which he called a “natural element of the human personality.”[120] Without coming out in favor of religion, Putin expressed the belief that science could never explain everything, which irked Big Volodya, a physicist by training, who noticed that Putin’s secret childhood baptism seemed to mean a lot to him. Both Volodyas found Germans more civilized than Russians because they knew how to genuinely enjoy themselves, unlike Russians, who, as Putin put it, “if there’s a holiday have to get dead drunk and punch someone in the face.”[121]

That wasn’t always the case. One night, General Horst Böhm, the young, ambitious head of the Dresden Stasi, had too much to drink and suddenly opened up. He complained bitterly of the direction the USSR was taking under Gorbachev. Stalin, he said, was the incarnation of Communism, and his path should have been followed. Brezhnev tried but was too weak. Böhm himself did not long survive the collapse of East Germany. In early 1990, about to be called to testify in hearings about the future of the country, he was found dead of a bullet wound in his office. His death was ruled a suicide.

Putin’s time in Dresden coincided almost exactly with the period of perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union. His experience of those powerful forces would have been quite different if he had been in Russia, but he might have been more hostile to them there. That doesn’t mean the great changes passed him by in Dresden. In fact, developments were followed closely in Dresden both through West German magazines like Der Spiegel and Stern and in Soviet periodicals, which grew bolder by the week. A few of the Stasi were jealous—they might have bananas in East Germany, but Russians were getting something more valuable: real information and the chance to change.

What also quickly became clear was what Andropov had seen from his window in Budapest in 1956 when gazing at the security officers hung from lampposts: free discussion leads directly to sedition.

Forces too mighty to control had been set loose. The Berlin Wall would soon be breached. The Center, as the KGB called their Moscow headquarters, was not holding. Soon enough the acrid smell of defeat was in Putin’s nostrils—the smell of documents burned in frantic haste: “We destroyed everything—all our communications, our lists of contacts and our agents’ networks,” says Putin. “I personally burned a huge amount of material. We burned so much stuff that the furnaces burst.”[122]

The unthinkable became commonplace. One day the East Germans are ransacking the Ministry of Security, the next they’re surrounding Soviet KGB headquarters on Angelikastrasse. As Putin put it: “We were forced to demonstrate our readiness to defend our building.” Putin went out and addressed the raging mob. Usoltsev says that Putin grabbed a Kalashnikov; Putin mentions only that he was accompanied by bodyguards. In either case, the defenders’ “determination certainly made an impression on them, at least for a while.”[123]

But only a while. The crowd started becoming aggressive again. Putin called for military backup and was told: “We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.”[124]

A few hours later Soviet troops did arrive and disperse the crowd. But the incident was profoundly disturbing to Putin. “That business of ‘Moscow is silent’—I got the feeling then that the country no longer existed. That it had disappeared … and had a terminal disease without a cure—a paralysis of power.”[125]

With a beer gut, two kids, and a used car, Putin returned to the USSR in January 1990. His prospects were few and bleak. Perhaps he could get into some sort of law collective. Or maybe drive a cab.