The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin

Three THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A THUG

The group Berezovsky had assembled to write Putin’s biography had only three weeks to produce a book. Their list of sources was limited: they had Putin himself—six long sit-down interviews—his wife; his best friend; a former teacher; and a former secretary from St. Petersburg’s city hall. They were not there to investigate the man; their job was to write down a legend. It turned out to be the legend of a postwar Leningrad thug.

St. Petersburg is a Russian city of grand history and glorious architecture. But the Soviet city of Leningrad into which Vladimir Putin was born in 1952 was, in the lived experience of its people, a city of hunger, poverty, destruction, aggression, and death. Just eight years had elapsed since the end of the Siege of Leningrad.

The siege had begun when Nazi troops completed their circle around the city, severing all connections to Leningrad, on September 8, 1941, and ended 872 days later. More than a million civilians died, killed by hunger or by artillery fire, which was unceasing for the duration of the blockade. Nearly half of these people died on their way out of the city. The lone route not controlled by the Germans bore the name the Road of Life, and hundreds of thousands of civilians died along this road, killed by bombs and famine. No city in modern times has seen famine and loss of life on this scale—and yet many survivors believed the authorities intentionally underestimated the number of casualties.

No one knows how long it takes a city to recover from violence so profound and grief so pervasive. “Imagine a soldier who is living a life of peacetime routine but is surrounded with the same walls and the same objects as were with him in the trenches,” wrote, some years after the war, the authors of an oral history of the Siege of Leningrad, trying to conjure the extent to which the city was still living the siege. “The ceiling’s antique molding bears the traces of shrapnel. The glossy surface of the piano bears the scratches left by broken glass. The shiny parquet floor has a burned-in stain where the wood-burning stove used to stand.”

Burzhuikas—movable cast-iron wood-burning stoves—were what Leningrad residents used to heat their apartments during the siege. The city’s furniture and books had gone into them. The black potbellied stoves were a symbol of despair and abandonment: the authorities, who had assured Soviet citizens they were well protected against all enemies—and that Germany was friend, not foe—had left the people of the country’s second-largest city to starve and freeze to death. And then—when the siege was over—they had invested in restoring the glorious suburban palaces looted by the Germans but not in restoring the residential buildings in the city itself. Vladimir Putin was raised in an apartment that still had a wood-burning stove in every room.

His parents, Maria and Vladimir Putin, had survived the siege in the city. The elder Vladimir Putin had joined the army in the early days of the Soviet-German war and had been wounded seriously in battle not far from Leningrad. He was taken to a hospital inside the line of the siege, and Maria found him there. After several months in the hospital, he remained severely disabled: both of his legs were disfigured and caused him great physical pain for the rest of his life. The elder Putin was discharged from the military and returned home with Maria. Their only son, who must have been between eight and ten years old at the time, was staying at one of several homes for children organized in the city, apparently in the hope that institutions could provide better care than desperate and starving parents. The boy died there. Maria came close to death herself: by the time the siege was lifted, she was no longer strong enough to walk on her own.

These were the future president’s parents: a disabled man, a woman who had come very close to dying from starvation and who had lost her children (a second son had died in infancy several years before the war). But by the measure of the postwar Soviet Union, the Putins were lucky: they had each other. Following the war, there were nearly twice as many women of child-bearing age as there were men. Statistics aside, the war had wrought tragedy in virtually every family, separating husbands and wives, destroying homes, and displacing millions. To have lived not only through the war but through the siege, and to still have your spouse—and your home—was, essentially, a miracle.

The younger Vladimir Putin’s birth was another miracle, so unlikely that it has given life to the persistent rumor that the Putins adopted him. On the eve of Putin’s first presidential election, a woman came forward in Georgia, in the Caucasus, claiming she had given him up for adoption when he was nine years old. A number of articles and a book or two advancing this story followed, and indeed even Natalia Gevorkyan was inclined to believe the story: she found his parents strikingly doting, and the fact that the team of biographers found no one who remembered knowing the boy before he reached school age reinforced her suspicions. It is, however, not only impossible to prove or disprove the adoption theory but also unnecessary: the indisputable fact is, whether biological or adopted, Vladimir Putin, by the standards of his time, was a miracle child.

BECAUSE VLADIMIR PUTIN WAS CATAPULTED to power from obscurity, and because he spent his entire adult life within the confines of a secret and secretive institution, he has been able to exercise greater control over what is known about him than almost any other modern politician—certainly more than any modern Western politician. He has created his own mythology. This is a good thing, because, to a far greater extent than is usually possible for any man, Vladimir Putin has communicated to the world directly what he would like to be known about him and how he would like to be seen. What has emerged is very much the mythology of a child of post-siege Leningrad, a mean, hungry, impoverished place that bred mean, hungry, ferocious children. At least, they were the ones who survived.

One entered the building in which Putin grew up through the courtyard. St. Petersburg residents call these formations “well courtyards”: enclosed on all sides by tall apartment buildings, they make a person feel as if he were standing at the bottom of a giant stone well. Like all such courtyards, this one was strewn with trash, potholed, and unlit. So was the building itself: the nineteenth-century stairs were crumbling, and the stairwell rarely had a working lightbulb. Chunks of the handrail were missing, and the rest of the construction wobbled wildly. The Putins lived on the top floor of the five-story building, and the journey up the dark stairs could be risky.

Like most apartments in central Leningrad, this was part of a flat once built with well-off renters in mind, then divided into two or three apartments, only to be split again among several families. The Putins’ apartment did not have a proper kitchen, so a single gas stove and a sink were stationed in the narrow hallway one entered from the stairwell. Three families used the four-burner stove to prepare their meals. A makeshift but permanent toilet had been constructed by annexing part of the stairwell. The small space was unheated. To bathe, the residents would heat water on the gas stove and then wash themselves while perched over the toilet in the tiny cold room.

Vladimir Putin the younger was, naturally, the only child in the apartment. An older married couple lived in a windowless room that was eventually judged uninhabitable. An old observant Jewish couple and their grown daughter occupied a room on the other side of the hallway-cum-kitchen from the Putins. Conflicts flared regularly in the communal kitchen, but the adults apparently cooperated in shielding the boy from their quarrels. Putin often spent time playing in the Jewish family’s room—and, speaking to his biographers, he made a striking assertion, claiming he did not differentiate between his parents and the old Jews.

The Putins had the largest room in the flat: around twenty square meters, or roughly twelve feet by fifteen. By the standards of the time, this was an almost palatial abode for a family of three. Almost incredibly, the Putins also had a television set, a telephone, and a dacha, a cabin outside the city. The elder Vladimir Putin worked as a skilled laborer at a train car factory; Maria took backbreaking unskilled jobs that allowed her to spend time with her son: she worked as a night watchman, a cleaning woman, a loader. But if one examines the fine shades of postwar Soviet poverty, the Putins emerge as practically rich. Given their unceasing doting on their son, this sometimes produced noteworthy results, such as first-grader Vladimir’s sporting a wristwatch, a rare, expensive, and prestigious accessory for any age group in that time and place.

The school was just a few steps from the building where the Putins lived. The education offered was, from what one can gather, unremarkable. The teacher for the first four grades was a very young woman who was finishing her college education by going to night school. Not that education was a priority in 1960, when Vladimir Putin entered first grade at the age of almost eight. His father was, by all accounts, concerned primarily with discipline, not with the quality of schooling his son received. Nor was education part of the younger Putin’s idea of success; he has placed a great emphasis on portraying himself as a thug, and in this he has had the complete cooperation of his childhood friends. By far the largest amount of biographical information available about him—that is, the bulk of the information made available to his biographers—concerns the many fistfights of his childhood and youth.

THE COURTYARD is a central fixture of postwar Soviet life, and Vladimir Putin’s personal mythology is very much rooted in it. With adults working a six-day week and child care generally nonexistent, Soviet children tended to grow up in the communal spaces outside their overcrowded apartment buildings. In Putin’s case, this meant growing up at the bottom of the well—in the well courtyard, that is, strewn with litter and populated by toughs. “Some courtyard this was,” his former classmate and longtime friend Viktor Borisenko told a biographer. “Thugs all. Unwashed, unshaven guys with cigarettes and bottles of cheap wine. Constant drinking, cursing, fistfights. And there was Putin in the middle of all this…. When we were older, we would see the thugs from his courtyard, and they had drunk themselves into the ground, they were hitting bottom. Many of them had been to jail. In other words, they did not manage to get good lives for themselves.”

Putin, younger than the thugs and slight of build, tried to hold his own with them. “If anyone ever insulted him in any way,” his friend recalled, “Volodya would immediately jump on the guy, scratch him, bite him, rip his hair out by the clump—do anything at all never to allow anyone to humiliate him in any way.”

Putin brought his fighting ways to grade school with him. References to fistfights abound in the recollections of his former schoolmates, but the following description gives a telling snapshot of the future president’s temperament: “The labor [shop] teacher dragged Putin by the collar, from his classroom to ours. We had been making dustpans in his class and Vladimir had done something wrong…. It took him a long time to calm down. The process itself was interesting. It would start to look like he was feeling better, like it was all over. And then he would flare up again and start expressing his outrage. He did this several times over.”

The school punished Putin by excluding him from the Young Pioneers organization—a rare, almost exotic form of punishment, generally reserved for children who were held back repeatedly and essentially deemed hopeless. Putin was a marked boy: for three years, he was the only child in the school who did not wear a red kerchief around his neck, symbolizing membership in the Communist organization for ten-to-fourteen-year-olds. Putin’s outcast status was all the more peculiar considering how well-off he was compared with the other children at his school, most of whom were statistically unlikely to be living with two parents.

But to Putin, his thug credentials represented true status, flaunted in his responses to his biographers in 2000:

“Why did you not get inducted into the Young Pioneers until sixth grade? Were things really so bad?”

“Of course. I was no Pioneer; I was a hooligan.”

“Are you putting on airs?”

“You are trying to insult me. I was a real thug.”

Putin’s social, political, and academic standing changed when he was thirteen: as a sixth-grader, he began to apply himself academically and was rewarded not only with induction into the Young Pioneers but, immediately after, by election to the post of class chairman. The fighting continued unabated, however: Putin’s friends told his biographers a series of fighting stories, the same plot repeating itself year after year.

“We were playing a game of chase out in the street,” a grade school classmate recalled. “Volodya was passing by, and he saw that a boy much older and bigger than me is chasing me and I am running as hard as I can. He jumped in, trying to protect me. A fight ensued. Then we sorted it out, of course.”

“We were in eighth grade when we were standing at a tram stop, waiting,” recounted another friend. “A tram pulled up, but it was not going where we needed to go. Two huge drunken men got off and started trying to pick a fight with somebody. They were cursing and pushing people around. Vovka calmly handed his bag over to me, and then I saw that he has just sent one of the men flying into a snowbank, face-first. The second one turned around and started at Volodya, screaming, ‘What was that?’ A couple of seconds later he knew exactly what it was, because he was lying there next to his buddy. That was just when our tram pulled up. If there is anything I can say about Vovka, it’s that he never let bastards and rascals who insult people and bug them get away with it.”

As a young KGB officer, Putin reenacted his earlier fights.

“He once invited me to witness the Procession of the Cross at Easter,” recalls still another friend. “He was on duty, helping cordon off the procession. And he asked me if I wanted to come see the altar in the church. I said yes, of course: it was such a boyish thing to do—no one was allowed there, but we could just go in. So after the Procession of the Cross we were on our way home. And we were standing at a bus stop. Some people came up to us. They didn’t look like criminals, more like college students who had had a bit to drink. They say, ‘You got a smoke?’ Vovka says, ‘No.’ And they say, ‘What are you doing, answering like that?’ And he says, ‘Nothing.’ And I didn’t even have time to see what happened after. One of them must have hit him or pushed him. I just saw someone’s stocking feet slide past me. The guy went flying somewhere. And Volod’ka says to me, all calm, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ And we left. I really liked the way he threw that guy who tried to pick on him. One second—and his feet were up in the air.”

The same friend recalled that a few years later, when Putin was attending spy school in Moscow, he came home to Leningrad for a few days, only to get into a fight on the subway. “Someone picked on him and he took care of the thug,” the friend told Putin’s biographers. “Volodya was very upset. ‘They are not going to be understanding about this in Moscow,’ he said. ‘There will be consequences.’ And I guess he did get into some kind of trouble, though he never told me any details. It all worked out in the end.”

Putin, it would appear, reacted to the barest provocation by getting into a street brawl—risking his KGB career, which would have been derailed had he been detained for the fight or even so much as noticed by the police. Whether or not the stories are exactly true, it is notable that Putin has painted himself—and allowed himself to be painted by others—as a consistently rash, physically violent man with a barely containable temper. The image he has chosen to present is all the more remarkable because it seems inconsistent with a discipline to which Putin devoted his teenage years.

At the age of ten or eleven, Putin went shopping for a place where he could learn skills to supplement his sheer will to fight. Boxing proved too painful: he had his nose broken during one of his first training sessions. Then he found Sambo. Sambo, an acronym for the Russian phrase that translates as “self-defense without weapons,” is a Soviet martial art, a hodgepodge of judo, karate, and folk wrestling moves. His parents were opposed to the boy’s new hobby. Maria called it “foolishness” and seemed to fear for her child’s safety, and the elder Vladimir forbade the lessons. The coach had to pay several visits to the Putins’ room before the boy was allowed consistently to attend the daily training sessions.

Sambo, with its discipline, became part of Putin’s transformation from a grade school thug into a goal-directed and hardworking adolescent. It was also linked to what had become an overriding ambition: Putin had apparently heard that the KGB expected new recruits to be skilled in hand-to-hand combat.

“IMAGINE A BOY who dreams of being a KGB officer when everyone else wants to be a cosmonaut,” Gevorkyan said to me, trying to explain how odd Putin’s passion seemed to her. I did not find it quite so far-fetched: in the 1960s, Soviet cultural authorities invested heavily in creating a romantic, even glamorous image of the secret police. When Vladimir Putin was twelve, a novel called The Shield and the Sword became a bestseller. Its protagonist was a Soviet intelligence officer working in Germany. When Putin was fifteen, the novel was made into a wildly popular miniseries. Forty-three years later, as prime minister, Putin would meet with eleven Russian spies deported from the United States—and together, in a show of camaraderie and nostalgia, they would sing the theme song from the miniseries.

“When I was in ninth grade, I was influenced by films and books, and I developed a desire to work for the KGB,” Putin told his biographer. “There is nothing special about that.” The protestation begs the question: Was there something else, besides books and movies, that formed what became Putin’s single-minded passion? It seems there was, and Putin hid it in plain sight, as the best spies do.

We all want our children to grow up to be a better, more successful version of ourselves. Vladimir Putin, the miraculous late son of two people maimed and crippled by World War II, was born to be a Soviet spy; in fact, he was born to be a Soviet spy in Germany. During World War II, the senior Vladimir Putin had been assigned to so-called subversive troops, small detachments formed to act behind enemy lines. These troops reported to the NKVD, as the Soviet secret police was then called, and were formed largely from the ranks of the NKVD. They were on a suicide mission: no more than 15 percent of them survived the first six months of the war. Vladimir Putin’s detachment was typical: twenty-eight soldiers were air-dropped into a forest behind enemy lines about a hundred miles from Leningrad. They had had about enough time to get their bearings and blow up one train when they ran out of food supplies. They asked the locals for food; the villagers fed them and then turned them in to the Germans. Several of the men managed to break out. The Germans gave chase, and Vladimir Putin hid in a swamp, submerging his head and breathing through a reed until the search party had given up. He was one of only four survivors of that mission.

Wars give birth to bizarre stories, and the legend with which the younger Vladimir Putin grew up is as likely to have been true as any other tale of miraculous survival and spontaneous heroism. It may also very well explain why he signed up for a German-language elective in fourth grade, when he was still a notoriously poor student. It certainly explains why, as a schoolboy, Putin had a portrait of the founding father of Soviet spyhood propped up on his desk at the dacha. His closest childhood friend recalled it was “some intelligence officer for sure, because Volod’ka told me it was,” and Putin supplied his biographers with the name of his idol. Yan Berzin, hero of the Revolution, founder of Soviet military intelligence, creator of spy outposts in all European countries, was, like many early Bolsheviks, arrested and shot in the late 1930s for an imagined anti-Stalin plot. His name was restored to honor in 1956 but has remained obscure ever since. You would have had to be a true KGB geek not only to know the name but to have secured the portrait.

It is not clear whether the elder Vladimir Putin had worked for the secret police before the war or continued to work for the NKVD after. It seems probable enough that he remained part of the so-called active reserve, a giant group of secret police officers who held regular jobs while also informing for—and drawing a salary from—the KGB. This may explain why the Putins lived so comparatively well: the dacha, the television set, and the telephone—especially the telephone.

At the age of sixteen, a year before finishing secondary school, Vladimir Putin went to the KGB headquarters in Leningrad to try to sign up. “A man came out,” he recalled for a biographer. “He did not know who I was. And I never saw him again after that. I told him I go to school and in the future I would like to work for the state security services. I asked if it was possible and what I would have to do to achieve it. The man said they don’t usually sign up volunteers, but the best way for me would be to go to college or serve in the military. I asked him which college. He said a law college or the law department of the university would be best.”

“He surprised everyone by saying he would be applying to the university,” his class teacher—the equivalent of a homeroom teacher in the United States—told his biographers. “I asked, ‘How?’ He said, ‘I’ll handle it myself.’”Leningrad University was one of the two or three most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the Soviet Union, certainly by far the most competitive in the city. How a mediocre student from a family that could by no means be considered well connected—even if I am correct in assuming that the elder Putin worked for the secret police—planned to gain admission was a mystery. His parents apparently protested, as did his coach: all of them favored a college to which Putin would be more likely to be accepted, which, in turn, would keep him out of mandatory military service and close to home.

Putin graduated from secondary school with the grades of “excellent” in history, German, and gym; “good” in geography, Russian, and literature; and “satisfactory” (the equivalent of a C) in physics, chemistry, algebra, and geometry. Leningrad University reportedly had forty people applying for a single spot. How did Putin get in? It is just possible that his determination was great enough that he could prepare himself for the grueling exams, at the expense of his high school work—a strategy that would have taken advantage of the fact that the university based admissions decisions solely on a series of written and oral exams, not on transcripts. It is also possible that the KGB ensured he would get in.

AT UNIVERSITY Putin kept to himself—as he had in the last couple of years of secondary school—staying out of community and Komsomol activities. He kept his grades up and spent his free time training in judo (his coach and teammates had traded in Sambo for an Olympic martial art) and driving around in his car. Putin was, more than likely, the only student at Leningrad University who owned a car. In the early 1970s a car in the Soviet Union was a rarity: mass car production was in gestation—even twenty years later, the number of cars per thousand people in the USSR barely reached sixty (compared with 781 in the United States). A car cost roughly as much as a dacha. The Putins won the car, a late-model two-door with a motorcycle engine, in a lottery, and rather than take the money—which would have been enough to get them out of the communal apartment and into a separate flat in a newly constructed building on the outskirts—gave the car to their son. That they gave the younger Putin this lavish gift, and that he accepted it, are further examples of the Putins’ extraordinarily doting relationship with their son, or their incongruous riches—or both.

Whatever the reason, Putin’s relationship to money—extravagant and strikingly selfish for his social context—appears to have taken shape during his university years. Like other students, he spent his summers working on far-flung construction sites, where the pay was very good: the state compensated laborers well for the danger and hardship of working in the Far North. Putin made a thousand rubles one summer and five hundred the following year—enough to, say, put a new roof on the dacha. Any other young Soviet man in his position—an only son, living with and entirely financially dependent on his parents, both of them past retirement age—would have been expected to give all or most of that money to his family. But the first summer Putin joined two classmates in traveling straight from the Far North to the Soviet south, the town of Gagry on the Black Sea in Georgia, where he managed to spend all his money in a few days. The following year, he returned to Leningrad after working on a construction site, and spent the money he had made on an overcoat for himself—and a frosted cake for his mother.

“ALL THROUGH my university years I kept waiting for that man I spoke to at KGB headquarters to remember me,” Putin told his biographers. “But they had forgotten all about me, because I had been a schoolboy when I came…. But I remembered they do not sign up volunteers, so I made no moves myself. Four years went by. Silence. I decided the issue was closed and started looking around for other possible job assignments…. But when I was in my fourth year, I was contacted by a man who said he wanted to meet with me. He did not say who he was, but somehow I knew right away. Because he said, ‘We will be talking about your future job assignment, that is what I would like to discuss with you. I am not going to be any more specific for now.’ That’s when I figured it out. If he does not want to say where he works, that means he works there.”

The KGB officer met with Putin four or five times and concluded that he was “not particularly outgoing but energetic, flexible, and brave. Most important, he was good at connecting with people fast—a key quality for a KGB officer, especially if he plans to work in intelligence.”

The day Putin learned he would be working for the KGB, he came to see Viktor Borisenko, who had remained his best friend since grade school. “He says, ‘Let’s go.’ I say, ‘Where are we going, why?’ He doesn’t answer. We get in his car and go,” Borisenko told an interviewer. “We pull up at a Caucasian food place. I’m intrigued. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on. But I never did. It was just clear that something extremely important had happened. But Putin isn’t telling me what. He is not even giving any hints. But he was all very celebratory. Something very important had happened in his life. Only later did I understand that this was how my friend was celebrating, with me, his going to work for the KGB.”

Later, Putin made no secret of his work for the KGB. He told a cellist named Sergei Roldugin, who would become his best friend, almost as soon as the two met. Roldugin, who had traveled abroad with his orchestra and had seen KGB handlers at work, says he was apprehensive and curious at once. “Once I tried to get him to talk about some operation that had gone down, and I failed,” he told Putin’s biographers. “Another time I said to him, ‘I am a cellist, and that means I play the cello. I’ll never be a surgeon. What’s your job? I mean, I know you are an intelligence officer. But what does that mean? Who are you? What can you do?’ And he said, ‘I am an expert in human relations.’ That was the end of the conversation. He really thought he knew something about people…. And I was impressed. I was proud and very much treasured the fact that he was an expert in human relations.” (The skeptical note in Roldugin’s “He really thought he knew something…” is as clear and unmistakable in the original Russian as it is in the English translation, but it seems that both Roldugin and Putin, who certainly vetted the quote, missed it.)

Putin’s own descriptions of his relationships paint him as a strikingly inept communicator. He had one significant relationship with a woman before meeting his future wife; he left her at the altar. “That’s how it happened,” he told his biographers, explaining nothing. “It was really hard.” He was no more articulate on the subject of the woman he actually married—nor, it seems, was he successful at communicating his feelings to her during their courtship. They dated for more than three years—an extraordinarily long time by Soviet or Russian standards, and at a very advanced age: Putin was almost thirty-one when they married, which made him a member of a tiny minority—less than ten percent—of Russians who remained unmarried past the age of thirty. The future Mrs. Putin was a domestic flight attendant from the Baltic Sea city of Kaliningrad; they had met through an acquaintance. She has gone on record saying it was by no means love at first sight, for at first sight Putin seemed unremarkable and poorly dressed; he has never said anything publicly about his love for her. In their courtship, it seems, she was both the more emotional and the more insistent one. Her description of the day he finally proposed paints a picture of a failure to communicate so profound that it is surprising these people actually managed to get married and have two children.

“One evening we were sitting in his apartment, and he says, ‘Little friend, by now you know what I’m like. I am basically not a very convenient person.’ And then he went on to describe himself: not a talker, can be pretty harsh, can hurt your feelings, and so on. Not a good person to spend your life with. And he goes on. ‘Over the course of three and a half years you’ve probably made up your mind.’ I realized we were probably breaking up. So I said, ‘Well, yes, I’ve made up my mind.’ And he said, with doubt in his voice, ‘Really?’ That’s when I knew we were definitely breaking up. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I love you and I propose we get married on such and such a day.’ And that was completely unexpected.”

They were married three months later. Ludmila quit her job and moved to Leningrad to live with Putin in the smaller of two rooms in an apartment he now shared with his parents. The apartment, in a new concrete-block monstrosity about forty minutes by subway from the center of town, had been the Putins’ since 1977: the younger Vladimir Putin had a room of his own for the first time at the age of twenty-five. It was about 130 square feet, and it had a single window placed so oddly high that one had to be standing to be able to look out of it. The newlyweds’ living conditions, in other words, were roughly similar to those of millions of other Soviet couples.

Ludmila enrolled at Leningrad University, where she studied philology. She became pregnant with their first child about a year after the wedding. While she was pregnant, and for a few months after she had Maria, her husband was in Moscow, enrolled in a yearlong course that would prepare him for service in the foreign intelligence corps. She had known he worked for the KGB long before the wedding, even though initially he told her he was a police detective: such was his cover.

THAT PUTIN SEEMS not to have been conscientious about using his cover is probably an indication that he was not sure what exactly he was covering up. His ambition—or, more accurately, his dream—had been to have secret powers of sorts. “I was most amazed by how a small force, a single person, really, can accomplish something an entire army cannot,” he told his biographers. “A single intelligence officer could rule over the fates of thousands of people. At least, that’s how I saw it.”

Putin wanted to rule the world, or a part of it, from the shadows. That is very much the role he ultimately achieved, but when he first joined the KGB, his prospects of ever having anything significant or remotely interesting to do seemed far from certain.

In the middle to late 1970s, when Putin joined the KGB, the secret police, like all Soviet institutions, was undergoing a phase of extreme bloating. Its growing number of directorates and departments were producing mountains of information that had no clear purpose, application, or meaning. An entire army of men and a few women spent their lives compiling newspaper clippings, transcripts of tapped telephone conversations, reports of people followed and trivia learned, and all of this made its way to the top of the KGB pyramid, and then to the leadership of the Communist Party, largely unprocessed and virtually unanalyzed. “Only the Central Committee of the Communist Party had the right to think in broad political categories,” wrote the last chairman of the KGB, whose task it was to dismantle the institution. “The KGB was relegated to collecting primary information and carrying out decisions made elsewhere. This structure excluded the possibility of developing a tradition of strategic political thinking within the KGB itself. But it was unparalleled in its ability to supply information of the sort and in the amount in which it was ordered.” In other words, the KGB took the concept of carrying out orders to its logical extreme: its agents saw what they were told to see, heard what they were told to hear, and reported back exactly what was expected of them.

The internal ideology of the KGB, as of any police organization, rested on a clear concept of the enemy. The institution thrived on a siege mentality, which had driven the massive manhunts and purges of the Stalin era. But Putin entered the service not only in the post-Stalin era but also during one of the very few, very brief periods of peace in Soviet history: after Vietnam and before Afghanistan, the country was involved in no ongoing armed conflict, covertly or openly. The only active enemies were the dissidents, a handful of brave souls who drew a disproportionate amount of KGB force. A new law, Article 190 of the Penal Code, made it a crime to “spread rumors or information detrimental to the Soviet societal and governmental structure,” giving the KGB virtually unlimited power in hunting down and fighting those who dared to think differently. Dissidents, suspected dissidents, and those leaning toward activity that might be considered dissident were the objects of constant surveillance and harassment. Putin claims not to have taken part in anti-dissident work but has shown in interviews that he was thoroughly familiar with the way it was organized, probably because he was lying about not having done it. A perfectly laudatory memoir of Putin written by a former colleague who defected to the West in the late 1980s mentions matter-of-factly that in Leningrad, Putin worked for the Fifth Directorate, created to fight the dissidents.

After university, Putin spent half a year pushing papers at the KGB offices in Leningrad. Then he spent six months going to KGB officer school. “It was an entirely unremarkable school in Leningrad,” he told his biographers—one of dozens across the country where university graduates got their secret-police qualifications. After graduation, Putin was assigned to the counterintelligence unit in Leningrad. It was a backwater of backwater assignments. Counterintelligence officers in Moscow spent their time trailing suspected or known foreign intelligence agents, almost all of whom worked at foreign embassies in the city. There were no embassies in Leningrad, and no one, really, to trail.

After six months in the counterintelligence unit, Putin was sent to Moscow for a one-year training course, and then returned to Leningrad, now assigned to the intelligence unit. It was another dreary assignment, and Putin was stuck in it, like hundreds, possibly thousands, of unremarkable young men who had once dreamed of being spies and who now waited for someone to notice them. But they had been drafted by the bloated KGB for no particular reason and no particular purpose, so their waiting could be long and even endless. Putin waited for four and a half years.

His break came in 1984, when he was finally sent to spy school in Moscow for a year. There the thirty-two-year-old KGB major seems to have done everything possible to show just how much he needed this job. He wore a three-piece suit in sweltering heat, for example, to demonstrate respect and discipline. It was a wise strategy: spy school was, in essence, a very long, involved, and labor-intensive placement service—the students were studied carefully by the faculty, who would be making recommendations on their future.

One of Putin’s instructors criticized Putin for his “lowered sense of danger”—a serious flaw for a potential spy. His Mastery of Intelligence instructor—in essence, the communication coach—said Putin was a closed, not very social person. Overall, however, he was a good student, entirely devoted to his work at the school. He was even appointed class foreman—his first leadership position since he was elected class chairman in sixth grade—and apparently did his job well.

Barring an unexpected disaster, Putin knew he would be assigned to work in Germany: much of his work at spy school had focused on improving his language skills. (He would eventually become fluent in German, but he never managed to lose his thick Russian accent.) The big question at graduation, then, was whether he would be going to East or West Germany. The former, while unquestionably appealing because it was a foreign assignment, was not at all what Putin had been dreaming of for nearly twenty years by now: it would not be espionage work. For that, he would have to be assigned to West Germany.

WHAT ULTIMATELY happened fell just short of failure. Following a year at spy school, Putin would be going to Germany, but not to West Germany, and not even to Berlin: he was assigned to the industrial city of Dresden. At the age of thirty-three, Putin, with Ludmila—who was once again pregnant—and one-year-old Maria, traveled to another backwater assignment. This was the job for which he had worked and waited for twenty years, and he would not even be undercover. The Putins, like five other Russian families, were given an apartment in a large apartment block in a little Stasi world: secret-police staff lived here, worked in a building a five-minute walk away, and sent their children to nursery school in the same compound. They walked home for lunch and spent evenings at home or visiting colleagues in the same building. Their job was to collect information about “the enemy,” which was the West, meaning West Germany and, especially, United States military bases in West Germany, which were hardly more accessible from Dresden than they would have been from Leningrad. Putin and his colleagues were reduced mainly to collecting press clippings, thus contributing to the growing mountains of useless information produced by the KGB.

Ludmila Putina liked Germany and the Germans. Compared with the Soviet Union, East Germany was a land of plenty. It was also a land of cleanliness and orderliness: she liked the way her German neighbors hung their identical-looking laundry on parallel clothes-lines at the same time every morning. Their neighbors, it seemed to her, lived better than the Putins were used to. So the Putins saved, buying nothing for their temporary apartment, hoping to go home with enough money to buy a car.

The Putins had a second daughter and named her Ekaterina. Putin drank beer and got fat. He stopped training, or exercising at all, and he gained over twenty pounds—a disastrous addition to his short and fairly narrow frame. From all appearances, he was seriously depressed. His wife, who has described their early years together as harmonious and joyful, has pointedly refrained from saying anything about their family life after spy school. She has said only that her husband never talked to her about work.

Not that there was much to tell. The staff of the KGB outpost in Dresden were divided among various KGB directorates; Putin was assigned to Directorate S, the illegal intelligence-gathering unit (this was the KGB’s own terminology, denoting agents using assumed identities and falsified documents—as opposed to “legal intelligence gathering,” carried out by people who did not hide their affiliation with the Soviet state). This might have been his dream posting—except that it was in Dresden. The job Putin had once coveted, working to draft future undercover agents, turned out to be not only tedious but fruitless. Putin and his two colleagues from the illegal-intelligence unit, aided by a retired Dresden policeman who also drew a salary from the unit, tracked down foreign students enrolled at Dresden University of Technology—there were a number of students from Latin America who, the KGB hoped, would eventually be able to go undercover in the United States—and spent months gaining their confidence, often only to find that they did not have enough money to entice the young people to work for them.

Money was a source of constant worry, hurt, and envy. Soviet citizens viewed long-term foreign postings as an incomparable source of income, often enough to lay the foundation for a lifetime of good living back home. East Germany, however, was viewed as not quite foreign enough, by ordinary people as well as by Soviet authorities: salaries and perks there could hardly be compared with those in a “real” foreign land, which is to say, a capitalist country. Shortly before the Putins arrived in Dresden, the government finally authorized small monthly hard-currency payments (the equivalent of about a hundred dollars) as part of the salaries of Soviet citizens working in Socialist bloc countries. Still, KGB staff in Dresden had to scrimp and save to ensure that at the end of their posting they would have something to show for it. Over the years, certain conventions of frugality had set in—using newspapers instead of curtains to cover the windows, for example. But while all the Soviet agents lived in the same sort of squalor, Stasi agents who had apartments in the same building enjoyed a much higher standard of living: they made a lot more money.

Still, it was in the West—so close and so unreachable for someone like Putin (some other Soviet citizens posted in Germany had the right to go to West Berlin)—that people had the things Putin really coveted. He made his wishes known to the very few Westerners with whom he came in contact—members of the radical group Red Army Faction, who took some of their orders from the KGB and occasionally came to Dresden for training sessions. “He always wanted to have things,” a former RAF member told me of Putin. “He mentioned to several people wishes that he wanted from the West.” This particular man claims to have personally presented Putin with a Grundig Satellit, a state-of-the-art shortwave radio, and a Blaupunkt stereo for his car; he bought the former and pilfered the latter from one of the many cars the RAF had stolen for its purposes. The West German radicals always came bearing gifts when they went east, the former radical told me, but there was a difference between the way Stasi agents received the goods and the way Putin approached it: “The East Germans did not expect us to pay for it, so they would at least make an effort to say, ‘What do I owe you?’And we would say, ‘Nothing.’ And Vova never even started asking, ‘What do I owe you?’”

Handing out assignments to RAF radicals, who were responsible for more than two dozen assassinations and terrorist attacks between 1970 and 1998, is exactly the sort of work Putin had once dreamed of, but there is no evidence he was directly connected to it. Instead, he spent most of his days sitting at his desk, in a room he shared with one other agent (every other officer in the Dresden building had his own office). His day began with a morning staff meeting, continued with a meeting with his local agent, the retired police officer, and finished with writing: every agent had to give a complete accounting of his activities, including Russian translations of any information he had obtained. Former agents estimate they spent three-quarters of their time writing reports. 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. Putin and his colleagues had high hopes for the sergeant, but by the time they obtained the manual, Putin’s time in Germany was coming to an end.

JUST WHEN THE PUTINS LEFT the Soviet Union, that country began to change drastically and irrevocably. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in March 1985. Two years later, he had released all Soviet dissidents from prison and was beginning to loosen the reins on Soviet bloc countries. The KGB leadership as well as its rank and file perceived Gorbachev’s actions as disastrous. Over the next few years, a chasm would open up between the Party and the KGB, culminating with the failed coup in August 1991.

Watching the changes from afar, surrounded by other secret police officers—and no one else—Putin must have felt a hopeless, helpless fury. Back home, KGB leadership was pledging loyalty to the secretary general and his planned reforms. In June 1989, the head of the KGB in Leningrad issued a public statement condemning secret-police crimes committed under Stalin. In East Germany, as in the Soviet Union, people were beginning to come out into the streets to protest, and the unthinkable was quickly beginning to look probable: the two Germanys might be reunited—the land Vladimir Putin had been sent here to guard would just be handed over to the enemy. Everything Putin had worked for was now in doubt; everything he had believed was being mocked. This is the sort of insult that would have prompted the agile little boy and young man that Putin had been to jump the offender and pound him until his fury had subsided. Middle-aged, out-of-shape Putin sat idle and silent as his dreams and hopes for the future were destroyed.

In the late spring and early summer of 1989, Dresden faced its first unsanctioned gatherings: handfuls of people collecting in public squares, first protesting the rigging of local elections in May and then, like the rest of Germany, demanding the right to emigrate to the West. In August, tens of thousands of East Germans actually traveled east—taking advantage of the lifting of travel restrictions within the Soviet bloc—only to descend on West German embassies in Prague, Budapest, and Warsaw. A series of Monday-night protests began across the cities of East Germany, growing bigger every week. East Germany shut its borders, but it was too late to stem the tide of both emigrants and protesters, and an agreement was ultimately brokered to transport the Germans from east to west. They would travel by train, and the trains would pass through Dresden, the East German city closest to Prague. Indeed, first the empty trains would travel through Dresden on their way to pick up the nearly eight thousand East Germans who were occupying the West German embassy in Prague. In the early days of October, thousands of people began to gather at the train station in Dresden—some of them carrying heavy luggage, hoping somehow to hitch a ride to the West, others simply there to witness the most astonishing event in the city’s postwar history.

The crowds met with all the law enforcement Dresden could gather: regular police were joined by various auxiliary security forces, and together they threatened, beat, and detained as many people as they could. Unrest continued for several days. On October 7, Vladimir Putin’s thirty-seventh birthday, East Germany celebrated the official fortieth anniversary of its formation, and riots broke out in Berlin; more than a thousand people were arrested. Two days later, hundreds of thousands came out across the country for another Monday-night demonstration, and their numbers more than doubled two weeks later. On November 9, the Berlin Wall fell, but demonstrations in East Germany continued until the first free elections in March.

On January 15, 1990, a crowd formed outside the Stasi headquarters in Berlin to protest the reported destruction of documents by the secret police. The protesters managed to overcome the security forces and enter the building. Elsewhere in East Germany, protesters began storming Ministry of State Security buildings even earlier.

Putin told his biographers that he had been in the crowd and watched people storm the Stasi building in Dresden. “One of the women was screaming, ‘Look for the entrance to the tunnel under the Elbe River! They have inmates there, standing up to their knees in water.’ What inmates was she talking about? Why did she think they were under the Elbe? There were some detention cells there, but, of course, they were not under the Elbe.” Putin generally found the protesters’ rage excessive and bewildering. It was his friends and neighbors under attack, the very people with whom he had lived and socialized—exclusively—for the last four years, and he could not imagine any of them were as evil as the crowd claimed: they were just ordinary paper-pushers, like Putin himself.

When the protesters descended on the building where he worked, he was outraged. “I accept the Germans’ crashing their own Ministry of State Security headquarters,” he told his biographers a dozen years later. “That’s their internal affair. But we were not their internal affair. It was a serious threat. And we had documents in our building. And no one seemed to care enough to protect us.” The guards at the KGB building must have fired warning shots—Putin said only that they demonstrated their will to do whatever was necessary to protect the building—and the protesters quieted down for a time. When they grew riotous again, Putin claimed, he himself stepped outside. “I asked them what they wanted. I explained that this was a Soviet organization. And someone in the crowd asks, ‘Why do you have cars with German license plates? What are you doing here, anyway?’ Like they knew exactly what we were doing there. I said that our contract allowed us to use German license plates. ‘And who are you? Your German is too good,’ they started screaming. I told them I was an interpreter. These people were very aggressive. I phoned our military representatives and told them what was going on. And they said, ‘We cannot do anything until we have orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.’ A few hours later, our military did come and the crowd dispersed. But I remembered that: ‘Moscow is silent.’ I realized that the Soviet Union was ill. It was a fatal illness called paralysis. A paralysis of power.”

His country, which he had served as well as he could, patiently accepting whatever role it saw fit to assign him, had abandoned Putin. He had been scared and powerless to protect himself, and Moscow had been silent. He spent the several hours before the military arrived inside the besieged building, shoving papers into a wood-burning stove until the stove split from the excessive heat. He destroyed everything he and his colleagues had worked to collect: all the contacts, personnel files, surveillance reports, and, probably, endless press clippings.

Even before the protesters had chased the Stasi out of their buildings, East Germany began the grueling and painful process of purging the Stasi from its society. All of the Putins’ neighbors not only lost their jobs but were banned from working in law enforcement, the government, or teaching. “My neighbor with whom I had become friends spent a week crying,” Ludmila Putina told her husband’s biographers. “She cried for the dream she had lost, for the collapse of everything she had ever believed. Everything had been crushed: their lives, their careers…. Katya [Ekaterina, the Putins’ younger daughter] had a teacher at her preschool, a wonderful teacher—and she was now banned from working with children. All because she had worked for the Ministry of State Security.” Twelve years later, the incoming first lady of post-Soviet Russia still found the logic of lustration incomprehensible and inhumane.

The Putins returned to Leningrad. They carried a twenty-year-old washing machine given to them by their former neighbors—who, even having lost their jobs, enjoyed a higher standard of living than the Putins could hope to attain back in the USSR—and a sum of money in U.S. dollars, sufficient to buy the best Soviet-made car available. This was all they had to show for four and a half years of living abroad—and for Vladimir Putin’s unconsummated spy career. The four of them would be returning to the smaller of the two rooms in the elder Putins’ apartment. Ludmila Putina would be reduced to spending most of her time scouring empty store shelves or standing in line to buy basic necessities: this was how most Soviet women spent their time, but after four and a half years of a relatively comfortable life in Germany, it was not only humiliating but frightening. “I was scared to go into stores,” she told interviewers later. “I would try to spend as little time as possible inside, just enough to get the bare necessities—and then I would run home. It was terrible.”

Could there have been a worse way to return to the Soviet Union? Sergei Roldugin, Putin’s cellist friend, remembered him saying, “They cannot do this. How could they? I see that I can make mistakes, but how can these people, whom we think of as the best professionals, make mistakes?” He said he would leave the KGB. “Once a spy, always a spy,” his friend responded; this was a common Soviet saying. Vladimir Putin felt betrayed by his country and his corporation—the only important affiliation he had ever known, outside his judo club—but the corporation was filled with people who increasingly felt betrayed, misled, and abandoned; it would be fair to say this was the KGB’s corporate spirit in 1990.