MAJOR V.V. PUTIN’S first KGB posting was as senior case officer at Dresden, a city risen phoenix-like from the ashes following its firebombing by Bomber Command in 1944 (at Stalin’s request, incidentally) and now the second most important city in East Germany, even if it was geographically closer to Prague than Berlin. It was an opportune time to be there. East-West tensions ran high over Soviet and NATO missile deployment and nowhere was more central to the ideological struggle than Germany, divided since 1945 into the communist East and the capitalist West.
Putin travelled alone to Dresden in August 1985 to settle into the job and prepare a home for his wife and baby. Lyudmila says he was supposed to go to East Berlin, the most prestigious posting inside the Soviet bloc, but a KGB friend – a Leningrader working in Dresden – recommended him to the station chief there when his own tour of duty was coming to an end. Yuri Shvets, a contemporary of Putin’s at the Red Banner Institute, however, claims his posting to Dresden was a punishment for a drinking spree at the institute at a time when the authorities were clamping down on alcohol. There certainly was a purge on drunkenness at that time – not only in the KGB but throughout Russia – though whether Putin was caught up in it remains unknown.
General Oleg Kalugin, a one-time chief of Soviet counter-intelligence, was dismissive of both Putin and his posting. ‘Any assignment to Eastern Europe, East Germany included, was a sign of someone’s failing or lack of abilities,’ he says. ‘His record in the KGB is zero; he is a non-entity in the KGB.’ Little credence can be granted to Kalugin’s comment, however, since this is a man who in 2002 was found guilty in his absence of state treason, stripped of his military rank and pension and the 22 state awards he had managed to accumulate before fleeing to the US, where he remains to this day. Since counterintelligence is a different department from the intelligence department in which Putin was employed, Putin is generous in his response: ‘He couldn’t remember me [because] I had no contact with him, nor did I meet him. It is I who remember him because he was a big boss and everybody knew him. As to whether he knew me, there were hundreds of us.’
THE FUTURE RUSSIAN president was now 32 years of age, and the relief of having a foreign posting instead of the daily bureaucratic grind at the Big House was palpable. ‘I had already worked in the agencies for 10 years,’ he says. ‘How romantic do you think that was?’ He soon discovered that life in Dresden was considerably more attractive in a material sense than Leningrad. The stores were stocked with goods and there were few Russian-style lines outside them. The food was so good that he started putting on weight. He drove around in a chauffeured government car, a Russian Lada (known in the domestic market as a Zhiguli), and must have gazed in amusement at bulky East Germans crammed into their tiny Trabants, the little East German vehicle with tail-fins and a two-cylinder, two-stroke engine that put-putted around the city streets like a motor mower. When it came to finding a home, he had no choice: KGB agents were housed in an apartment block in Radeberger Strasse, which also contained members of the East German security service, the Stasi.
Putin was one of eight KGB officers working for Colonel Lazar Matveev, in a grey mansion surrounded by high brick walls, This compound at No. 4 Angelikastrasse stood opposite the Stasi’s Dresden headquarters, and overlooked the Elbe River. The new arrival’s specialist field was political intelligence – obtaining information about political figures and the plans of the Soviet Bloc’s enemies, of whom NATO was considered the most dangerous. One of his first moves was to make informal contact with the Stasi. Klaus Zuchold, a young Stasi lieutenant, says that one Thursday morning in the autumn of 1985 Putin turned up with his predecessor at a sports field where Stasi officers often played football. He was introduced simply as ‘Volodya’.
GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL: The man who rarely goes to bed before 2 a.m. when he’s working, takes to a horse and the outback when he needs a break.
At the end of the game the agents agreed to meet again socially and Putin accepted an invitation from Zuchold to be shown the surrounding countryside. ’Putin turned up in a grey Lada, wearing a large fur hat,’ Zuchold recalls. ‘His wife was still in Russia. Together with my wife we drove out of town and spent most of the day together. That was the first time we spoke freely. He cracked a couple of police jokes and one about Jews, which took me and Martina [his wife] a little by surprise. We talked about history, literature and philosophy. He had a great admiration for German culture and discipline. He was clearly proud of belonging to the KGB. That was his life. He showed me his wristwatch, which had an inscription from some KGB bigwig. He loved patriotic stories of Russia’s great past and popular heroes.’
Lyudmila joined her husband in Dresden later in 1985, after graduating in Spanish at Leningrad State University. Unbeknown to her, she had been quietly vetted by the KGB and cleared to travel outside the USSR’s borders. Putin noted that she was generally pleased with the twobedroom flat, despite having to lug baby Masha up and down five flights of stairs. For the sake of security the apartments were located close to a Soviet military base, but that did little to relieve the Putins’ feelings of alienation in a strange city. ‘We sat on our suitcases and dreamed of returning home,’ Lyudmila says. ‘At the beginning, we were really homesick.’
Practical in all matters, Lyudmila solved the problem by socialising with her German neighbours. She was soon involved in a daily routine with other young mothers and marvelled at their orderliness. They washed their windows once a week and in the morning, before going to work, went into the backyard, stretched a rope between two metal poles and hung their laundry on the line in neat rows with clothes pegs, a ritual that the new arrival found fascinating.
East Germany was a police state run by ‘the two Erichs’: Erich Honecker, chairman of the Council of State and thus de facto head of state, and Erich Mielke, the Minister for State Security. Honecker had been in charge of building the Berlin Wall which had ringed the Western sectors of Berlin since 1961, while Mielke, head of the Stasi, was credited with creating ‘the most perfected surveillance state of all time’. The Stasi employed 97,000 staff in a country of 17 million people, and used the services of a further 173,000 informers. There was one Stasi officer or informant for every 63 people. Mielke, described as a small man with no neck, close-set eyes and puffy cheeks, controlled intelligence and counterintelligence from inside Stasi headquarters at Normannen Strasse in the East Berlin suburb of Lichtenberg.
Putin did not discuss his work at home, so whatever Lyudmila learned about the Stasi she got from her German neighbours. ‘There was always a principle at the KGB: Do not share things with your wife,’ she says. ‘They always proceeded from the premise that the less the wife knew, the better she’d sleep.’ It soon became clear that Putin was checking up on her new friends, because he would suddenly suggest she drop one of them from her circle as being ‘undesirable’. The information most probably came from the Stasi’s files, based largely on the snitching of inofizielle Mitarbeiter or IMs, the Stasi’s most hated informers against their own family and friends.
At weekends there were drives in the Saxony countryside with friends for sausages and beer. Putin’s weight continued to balloon – up almost two stone to 165 pounds. He took up fishing and became something of an expert with rod and reel. He also developed a taste for German beer; his favourite weekend jaunt was to Radeberg, which boasted one of the best breweries in East Germany. Lyudmila fell pregnant again and their second daughter, Katerina – named after Lyudmila’s mother, Katerina Tikhonovna, and known as Katya – was born in Dresden on 31 August 1986.
Looking back, Putin describes East Germany as a ‘harshly totalitarian country, similar to the Soviet Union 30 years earlier. And the tragedy is that many people sincerely believed in all those Communist ideals’. He was judging the society around him from the point of view of a man whose own country was undergoing a social and economic upheaval, whereas the East Germans were stuck in a Stalinist time-warp. While Lyudmila followed the progress of Gorbachev’s perestroika on television and picked up snippets about the new mood in Russia from visiting Russians, Putin had far more advanced sources of information through his KGB network. ‘We had begun to suspect that the regime would not last long,’ he says.
Myths abound about his work in Dresden. Certainly he recruited informants, obtained information from them, analysed it and sent it to Moscow Centre via the KGB headquarters at Karlshorst, outside East Berlin. It was routine spook work and hardly glamorous. He insists it was ‘political intelligence’ as opposed to ‘technical intelligence’. Allegations that he set up a network of agents across the world to indulge in industrial espionage remain unproven. The Stasi, he explains, had copies of everything produced by the KGB’s Dresden office and therefore it was impossible for him to have been involved in operations that were unknown to the local GDR security agencies. He further claims that ‘a large part of our work was done through citizens of the GDR. They are all on the roster. Everything is transparent and understandable and German counterintelligence knows about all of this.’ That may be so, but the question remains as to whether those particular files remained intact in the heavily shredded Stasi archives.
The Prague-based businessman Vladimir Usoltsev, who claims to have been a colleague of Putin’s during his Dresden years, rates him as a fairly average spy. According to Usoltsev in his book Comrade in Arms, Putin’s German was good but not flawless; he hummed pop music in the office and spent a great deal of time browsing West German mailorder catalogues. Indeed, Klaus Zuchold says that Putin once showed off a new stereo system bought during a trip to KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des Westens), an upmarket department store in West Berlin, although Putin categorically denies ever visiting West Germany during his time in Dresden.
Vladimir Usoltsev further claims that a dislike of old-style Soviet bureaucracy led Putin, along with five other agents, to celebrate with two bottles of Russian ‘Krim’ champagne when the hardline Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko died. ‘We emptied the bottles with great joy and appreciation for Konstantin Chernenko’s demise,’ Usoltsev writes. ‘At least he hadn’t tortured us by dying endlessly, as his predecessors [Leonid Ilyich] Brezhnev and [Yuri Vladimirovich] Andropov had done.’ The problem with this story is that Chernenko died in March 1985 and Putin did not arrive in Dresden until August of that year. Putin also revered the former KGB leader Andropov, so Usoltsev’s claims should be treated with caution.
Usoltsev – whose book casts doubt on Putin’s past life as a ruthless secret policeman – is on firmer ground when he likens the existence of KGB officers in Dresden to living in a spaceship on a long-term expedition ‘in which recent graduates of the secret service school met with dogged old Chekists. [This was] a world full of stupid work with files, instructive Party circles and human intrigues.’ Usoltsev also describes comrade Putin as ‘a pragmatist’ and ‘someone who thinks one thing and says another’. He adds that Putin’s intellectual abilities were no more than average, and that since the future president ‘was not a great speaker’ he was amazed that Putin rose to the highest position in his country.
Even though unofficial contacts with the KGB were strictly forbidden, Stasi officer Klaus Zuchold visited Putin’s flat in Radeberger Strasse several times. ’I went to his house, met his wife Lyudmila, and Putin also came to visit me,’ he says. ‘To my children he was known simply as ‘Uncle Volodya’. During those meetings, Putin questioned his German friend on the workings of the Stasi and expressed a particular interest in Werner Naumann, the local head of the Stasi’s foreign intelligence department. Zuchold found Putin to be a man of few words. ‘He is impenetrable and he mostly lets other people speak,’ he says. ‘He gives very little away 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.’
Putin makes no great claims about his time in East Germany. He sought potential KGB informants, principally among foreign students at Dresden Technical University, whom he sometimes picked up in his car and drove to the surrounding moors for a quiet chat. His favourite book at the time was Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 classic about the absurdity of what we like to think of as ‘reality’.
Eschewing his KGB uniform, Putin on the other hand had come to dress in blue jeans, open-necked shirt and leather jacket, in order to blend, chameleon-like, into student circles. In the evening he dressed smartly to wine and dine foreign visitors to Dresden in the hope of recruiting them. Klaus Zuchold says both the Stasi and the KGB targeted Western businessmen, supplying them with prostitutes, secretly filming them having sex in their hotel rooms and then attempting to blackmail them. He could not recall Putin ever having taken part in such operations.
According to former KGB colleague Vladimir Usoltsev, Putin concealed both his ambition and his tough treatment of others under an image of politeness and obedience that was to serve him well in later years. He presented himself as a member of the Communist Party who had no wish to change the Soviet system. One critical colleague was apparently warned that he’d better keep his complaints to himself and think of his family. Yet in the privacy of a sauna, Putin supposedly told Usoltsev that he had a high regard for the civil rights activist Andrei Sakharov. When Usoltsev raised the question of Stalin’s atrocities, he refused to admit what everyone else knew to be true: that Stalin had ordered KGB agents to shoot suspects whether they were proven guilty or not.
PUTIN HAD GROWN into a family man who took his responsibilities seriously. Most mornings he took Masha to a daycare centre adjacent to their apartment block and Katya to her nursery, then brought them both home for lunch with their mother. He was paid in marks and dollars and, by cutting out luxuries and living mainly on government-issued food, was able to put together a little nest egg.
During this time rumours began to circulate that Putin, like many of his KGB comrades, who saw the hand of Zionism in every anti-Soviet activity, was anti-Semitic. A German agent supposedly declared at one of their social gatherings that Putin’s mother’s maiden name, Shelomova, was Jewish and therefore he was a Jew. Putin, clearly angry, is said to have stormed out of the party. The story is apocryphal – for a start, no German agent would have had access to his personal details. According to Vladimir Usoltsev, Putin was unusually tolerant of Jews and he was known to admire the East German spymaster Markus Wolf, the son of a Jewish writer and physician.
Like many of his contemporaries, Putin was in awe of Markus Wolf, the man on whom John Le Carré modelled ‘Karla’ in his Cold War novels. As head of the Stasi’s foreign intelligence service, the Hauptverwaltung Aufklarung (HVA), he operated a global network of 4,000 agents and was the bane of the CIA, MI6 and the West German agency BND. Wolf excelled in the ‘honey trap’. ‘If I go down in espionage history,’ he writes in his memoirs, ‘it may be for perfecting the use of sex in spying.’ On discovering there was a shortage of available young men in West Berlin and Bonn, he sent handsome East German agents across the border to romance military secrets out of love-lorn NATO and government secretaries. His most spectacular coup was to place an agent, Gunter Guillaume, in the office of Chancellor Willy Brandt. When Guillaume was unmasked as a spy in 1974, Brandt was forced to resign.
Markus Wolf was later accused by reporters of insulting Putin by suggesting that the bronze medal he had been awarded for his services in East Germany was handed out to practically any secretary who had no gross violations in her record. Putin replied testily: ‘Markus Wolf is entirely correct. And there is nothing offensive in what he said. Just the opposite. He just confirmed that I didn’t have any gross violations in my record.’
Speaking officially today, Putin acknowledges there is still anti-Semitism in Russia and describes it as ‘shameful’. Friends point out that Vera Dmitrievna Gurevich, his favourite teacher, was Jewish; but then, as Klaus Zuchold relates – and Tony Blair discovered during a visit to Moscow – that doesn’t stop him from telling the occasional Jewish joke. Though that’s not entirely surprising, since Jewish ‘Odessan’ anecdotes are an accepted part of Russia’s popular culture.
It was normal for KGB officers to be promoted while working in a foreign posting. Putin was promoted twice, firstly from senior case officer to assistant head of department, and then to senior assistant head. ‘There was nothing higher,’ he says. ‘Above me was the top managerial level and we only had one boss. So as an incentive I was made a member of the Party committee of the KGB representation in the GDR.’ Moscow also showed its appreciation by promoting him to the rank of lieutenantcolonel.
One area of controversy during Putin’s time in Dresden was his close friendship with a rising member of the Stasi, Matthias Warnig. Warnig had an enviable reputation among his contemporaries as a top recruiter of spies in the West – men and women who were in a position to steal rocket secrets and aircraft technology. According to investigators on the Wall Street Journal, he was prepared to share this information with Putin, whom he’d met in Dresden in the 1980s. The newspaper alleged that the episode ‘underscores the shadowy interplay between businessmen and former intelligence operatives in today’s Russia’.
THEY RARELY POSE together for the photographers, but Vladimir and Lyudmila made an exception during the then-Prime Minister’s visit to India on political business in 2010.
Warnig was later appointed head of the Russian division of Germany’s Dresdner Bank and now runs Gazprom’s Nord Stream project, which is building a new gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany. The two men remain close friends, although Warnig still denies he knew Putin in Dresden. Representatives at Dresdner, while acknowledging that Putin and Warnig are friends, deny any prior association. Bernard Walter, who headed the bank’s East European operations in the early 1990s, says, ‘Mr Warnig told me clearly that he met Mr Putin for the first time in his life in 1991, when I sent him to St Petersburg.’ The bank also says that close examination of Warnig’s past turned up no hint of any association with the Stasi. However, Warnig’s declassified 128-page Stasi file discloses that his codename was ‘Arthur’ and that he began working for the Stasi in 1974, as a member of the brigade named after Putin’s former pin-up, Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet state security organisation, the Cheka.
Warnig’s file also reveals that he rose rapidly in the ranks of East German intelligence and was awarded a number of medals for his services. In Order No. K 5447/84, ‘Leutnant Warnig, Matthias’ was awarded the medal For Meritorious Service to the People and the Fatherland. In Order No. K 109/88, ‘Oberleutnant Warnig, Matthias’ was awarded a number of medals For Meritorious Service in the NVA (National People’s Army), the border guards of the DDR, as an activist of socialist labour and for other activities. On 7 October 1989 Hauptmann (Captain) Matthias Warnig was awarded no fewer than nine gold medals by the dreaded Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi.
‘Arthur’ submitted reports on the energy business in West Germany, the policies of enterprise management, biotech research, computer technology and dozens of other subjects, mainly to deal with industrial espionage. It was claimed that his career was helped by his alleged relationship with KGB Lieutenant-Colonel Vladimir Putin in Dresden. According to German press reports, the two men collaborated on recruiting West German citizens to work for the KGB, an allegation denied by Warnig.
If further proof of the association between the two men during their murky spying days was needed, it is provided by Lyudmila’s friend Irene Pietsch. According to Pietsch, Lyudmila told her some years later that it was much easier to get on with East Germans than West Germans and that especially applied to her husband’s friend Matthias Warnig. ‘She said that we all grew up in the same system and that Volodya and Warnig worked for the same firm,’ Pietsch recalls. ‘I asked her what she meant. She said Matthias was in the Stasi and Volodya the KGB. I was quite surprised by her candour.’
EVEN SEEN THROUGH the distorting mirror of the East German media, the Soviet empire was clearly in danger of imploding. On his first official visit to West Germany, in May 1989, Gorbachev informed Chancellor Helmut Kohl that Moscow was no longer willing to use force to prevent the democratisation of its satellite states. The tanks that rolled into Budapest to crush the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and in 1968 snuffed out ‘socialism with a human face’ during the Prague Spring were no longer a viable option. Even so, few East Germans considered the collapse of the GDR to be a real possibility.
Having failed to convey the desperate need for change to the two Erichs, Gorbachev hammered the final nail into their coffin on a visit to East Germany in October to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the founding of the state, when he warned that ‘life punishes those who come late’. From that point on, the hotlines between Moscow and East Berlin – usually buzzing with businesslike exchanges between the two Communist allies – fell silent. At a 40th anniversary dinner for the security services, during an interminable rant against the state’s enemies Erich Mielke exhorted Stasi agents: ‘Execute them – and where necessary without a court judgment’. Erich Honecker also remained intransigent. He told Markus Wolf: ‘I will never allow here what is happening in the Soviet Union’. Wolf noted in his diary: ‘No enemy could have achieved what we did in terms of incompetence, ignorance, self-aggrandisement and the way we have torn our own roots out of the thoughts and feelings of ordinary people’.
Meanwhile, Wolf ’s friend Hans Modrow, the softly-spoken, greyhaired secretary of the Communist Party (SED) in Dresden, refused to suppress anti-government demonstrations, which had become a nightly feature of city life. Wolf and Modrow were reputed to have led a clique of reformers inside the SED, although Wolf chastises himself for not having done a great deal more to change the East German system from within. Putin and his fellow KGB agents had seen the writing on the wall. ‘We were the young generation of the security service,’ Vladimir Usoltsev told Der Spiegel magazine. ‘It was absolutely clear to us that Soviet power was marching inexorably into the abyss.’ Sensitive documents were shipped to Moscow or burned. Lists of contacts and files about Soviet agents went up in smoke. ‘We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst,’ Putin says.
The unthinkable happened at 6.53 on the evening of 9 November 1989, when a member of the new East German government was asked at a press conference when the promised new East German travel law would come into force. He answered: ‘Well, as far as I can see, straightaway – right now’. Thousands of East Berliners surged to the border crossings and demanded to be let through to the West. At 10.30 that night, the border was opened at Bornholmerstrasse – the historic moment that signalled the fall of the Berlin Wall.
On the evening of 6 December the KGB compound was besieged by a baying crowd, which had already ransacked the Stasi headquarters across the road. Putin hurried to his office and was issued with a handgun. He went outside and tried to deflect the protesters’ anger by claiming that the KGB building was in fact a Soviet military installation. Someone shouted: ‘Then why do you have cars with German licence plates in the car park? What are you doing here anyway?’ Putin replied that there was an agreement that allowed the Russians to use German plates. ‘And who are you?’ another man shouted. ‘You speak German too well.’ Putin told them he was an interpreter. He then went back inside the building and put through a call for help to the commander of the local Soviet garrison, but was told: ‘We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.’
Moscow did indeed remain silent.
In subsequent years Putin’s reaction became famous: ‘I got the feeling that the country no longer existed, that it had disappeared’. One report from that fateful night in East Berlin states that the mob did manage to force their way into the building, only to be greeted by the sight of Russia’s future president standing at the top of the stairs brandishing a handgun. He addressed them calmly, with a cold half-smile: ‘Come up if you wish, but before you get to me six of you will be dead’. This seems unlikely – there were a number of KGB agents in the building at the time and Putin’s lone stand sounds like a spin doctor’s attempt to turn him into a KGB James Bond. Putin will only say that the Russians ‘were forced to demonstrate our readiness to defend our building and that determination certainly made an impression on them, at least for a while’.
In fact, bloodshed was averted when a small group of Soviet paratroopers drove up and the mob dispersed. Putin says the events of that evening severely demoralised him, because: ‘They just left’. His dedication at this point wasn’t to the Soviet system, whose decay he recognised, but to the KGB as the protector of Russian greatness, Vladimir Usoltsev told Der Spiegel magazine: ‘He always had a poetic touch – the peculiar pride in belonging to the special corps of defenders of the Motherland, the Chekists’.
The following day Putin carried on with his duties, suffering in silence for what he saw as the wounded pride of the Motherland. His only regret, he says, was that the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe without even attempting to replace the Communist system in East Germany with something else: ‘They just dropped everything and went away,’ he says. Lyudmila, who had become quite attached to her East German surroundings (German was by now her second daughter’s first language), expressed her sorrow for the secret agents of both countries who had lost their sense of purpose, virtually their raison d’etre. One of her neighbours, she says, cried for a week: ‘She cried for her lost ideals, for the collapse of everything that she had believed in her whole life’.
Unbeknown to his wife, Putin was still in full operational mode. Like all Stasi officers, Klaus Zuchold was now unemployed. Having sent a copy of Zuchold’s file to Moscow, Putin received permission to induct him into the KGB. On 16 January 1990, he visited the German’s flat and presented his 12-year-old daughter Cindy with a book of Russian fairytales. When he was alone with Zuchold, he dictated a letter of allegiance to the KGB, which Zuchold wrote and signed. The two men then celebrated with glasses of Sekt, a German wine.
Putin gave his new agent the codename ‘Klaus Zaunick’ and reminded him that he was sworn to silence, and that there would be serious consequences if he spoke out. The German magazine Focus claims that Putin then revealed the identities of some of his top agents in East Germany, but that is almost certainly untrue since, whatever his detractors may hold against him, Putin is fiercely loyal. It is more likely that Zuchold was told to be a ‘sleeper’ until things had quietened down, and then gather information for Moscow on politicians, scientists and business leaders.
PUTIN met with the victime of disastrous wildfires in Voronezh, housed in temporary shelter, to listen to their woes. Environmentalists blamed the fires on a new Forest Code and powerful timber lobbies for dismantling the centralised system of forest protection.
A few days later Putin was recalled to his homeland, so his association with Zuchold came to an abrupt end. KGB agents were heading home in droves as the once-mighty Soviet empire shrank before the world’s eyes. When the GDR ceased to exist with the reunification of Germany on 3 October 1990, the Putins were already back in Leningrad. Once more they moved in with his parents, who had been allocated a new three-roomed flat on Sredneokhtinsky Prospect near the Okhta River. Apart from a beautiful new daughter, the Putins had little to show for four and a half years in a foreign posting. As a parting gift, their German neighbours had given them a 20-year-old washing machine, which Lyudmila used for the next five years. She was astonished to discover how little things had changed in Leningrad. There were the same long lines of people outside the shops, the same ration cards and coupons, the same empty shelves. ‘For a while after we returned home I was even afraid to go to the shops,’ she says. ‘I would just dart into the nearest shop, buy whatever was most necessary and go home. It was horrible.’
Putin was offered work at the headquarters of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) in Moscow. He turned it down largely because no apartment was included in the offer and his parents were now in their eighties. They had not seen their son in all the years he was away and he was reluctant to leave them again. He had also lost faith in the USSR’s ability to survive the shock waves convulsing its empire. Having witnessed one country collapsing around him, he had no wish to repeat the experience at home. Although generally adept at hiding his feelings, he let his friend Sergei Roldugin know that he felt betrayed: he and his comrades had filed reports from Dresden warning about the imminent collapse of the GDR and had recommended what action should be taken, but nobody at Moscow Centre had read their reports.
Markus Wolf, who had fled to Moscow to avoid charges of treason and espionage brought by his West German enemies, found that Gorbachev had thrown him and his fellow agents to the wolves. ‘There was no great rush of comradely support from our Moscow friends,’ he writes. ‘Like us, they had been completely unprepared for what happened.’ Wolf was denied political asylum in Russia and after a long legal battle served a short prison sentence in Germany.
Putin was still employed by the KGB but in the ‘active reserves’, for which he received a nominal retainer. With hundreds of redundant agents flocking back to Russia as Communist regimes went down like dominos in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania, it soon became abundantly clear that there was a surfeit of KGB talent on offer to anyone who wanted to hire some well trained muscle. Many became security consultants, bodyguards, night watchmen, even bouncers at the new nightclubs and discos.
Putin’s prospects looked bleak. He was heading for 40 and had a family to feed, house and clothe. Friends say he became depressed. Lyudmila took a part-time job teaching German at the university, reluctantly leaving Masha and Katya in the care of their grandmother for several hours a day. It was not a happy existence. Putin invested the little nest egg they had saved in Dresden in a Volga saloon. He told friends he wanted to practice law but if that didn’t work out he had a back-up plan: ‘Perhaps I will have to drive a taxi.’
As though on cue, he heard that Galina Vasilievna Starovoitova, an important reformist politician and feminist defender of ethnic minorities – and graduate of Lenin State University (LGU) – was looking for someone to drive her around the city. There was little pay attached to the job, but Putin reasoned he might learn something to his advantage from the woman seated in the back of his Volga, since she was already wellknown. He volunteered for the post. ‘He said he believed in her cause and so he wanted to help,’ says Ruslan Linkov, one of Ms Starovoitova’s aides.
Putin still needed to earn a living and just when things were at their bleakest one of those fortuitous events that became the hallmark of his career occurred. He was offered a job monitoring foreign students at his alma mater, Leningrad State University, as assistant rector for international affairs. ‘I was happy to go undercover at LGU,’ he says. ‘I wanted to write my doctoral dissertation, check out the university and perhaps get a job there.’ So in March 1990 he became assistant to the university president, Stanislav Petrovich Merkuriev.
His sudden reappearance in the law faculty raised some eyebrows, although no one was under any illusions about his true function: it was well known that this post was always held by a KGB officer and that Putin would be spying on the students. Nevertheless, he appointed Valery Abramovich Musin, a specialist in international law, as his academic adviser and drafted the outline of his dissertation. Putin could well have ended up with a career as an international lawyer if one of his friends from student days, now on the university staff, hadn’t approached him with an invitation to meet Anatoly Aleksandrovich Sobchak, one of the leading lights in Russia’s fledgling democracy movement.
Sobchak, a handsome man with a golden tongue, had risen to prominence with hard-hitting attacks on the Communist elite. Considered unreliable by the Soviet authorities, he had never been allowed to travel abroad, but under Gorbachev his career had blossomed, and the nation listened to his speeches once he was elected a people’s deputy. In May 1990, Sobchak had been appointed chairman of Leningrad City Council (Lensoviet). The city was in a parlous state: unemployment was high, crime was rising and everything was in short supply. Although born in Siberia in 1937, Sobchak had taken a law degree at LGU and had later joined the university’s staff. He had been one of Putin’s lecturers for a couple of semesters, although they had never actually spoken.
Putin bowled along to the chairman’s office in the Mariinsky Palace on St Isaacs Square and there Sobchak explained he needed an experienced assistant to act as a buffer between him and the fraudsters and crooks who were everywhere. He was impressed with the fact that the assistant rector spoke good German and some English and was a notably cool customer. Putin had been recommended by Stanislav Merkuriev and, according to the Kremlin property supremo Pavel Borodin, Galina Starovoitova had also put in a good word for him. After a short interview, Sobchak offered to have Putin transferred from the university staff to the council payroll. Indeed, he wanted to know whether Putin could start work as early as the following Monday. The country was falling into disarray and things were happening with great speed.
‘Sobchak was already a famous and popular person,’ Putin says. ‘I didn’t like everything but he got my respect.’ Putin replied that he would be happy to start on Monday but there was one thing the chairman should know: ‘I am not just an assistant to the president,’ he said. ‘I’m also a staff officer of the KGB.’ Sobchak was silent for a moment and then he said: ‘Well, screw it. I need an assistant. Frankly, I’m afraid of going out into the reception area. I don’t know who those people are.’
Putin got the job and the transfer.
Sobchak’s supporters were shocked at his judgment when it became known in democratic circles that Putin was a KGB officer. Questioned about his assistant, Sobchak quipped: ‘Putin is no KGB operative, but my former student’.
Things could have gone awry when one of the ghosts from his Dresden past came back to haunt him. Klaus Zuchold, fearing he was about to be exposed, turned himself over to German intelligence in December 1990. Zuchold supplied the Germans with a detailed description of his KGB friend and mentor, Vladimir Putin. He also disclosed the names of four former East German policemen who had spied for the KGB.
Putin denies he was part of operations aimed at setting up a network of East German spies. Today, he finds it ‘kind of funny to read all that nonsense in the papers. I’m baffled to read that the Western countries are looking for agents I recruited. It’s all baloney.’ The most senior spy was an inspector in the Dresden police force known as ‘Schorch’, whom Putin allegedly ran himself. The inspector was still working for the KGB when he was arrested in April 1993. By then, however, Putin’s life had taken a completely different trajectory. Leningrad had been renamed St Petersburg and he had risen with meteoric speed to become deputy mayor of Russia’s second city.