It was at this point that Putin did the strangest, most reckless thing of his childhood. Maybe, because he wanted to experience ‘everything’. He went to the KGB headquarters and asked how he could join. Was he play-acting his father, or grandfather? Politely, those in the office told him to study hard at school and read law at university. ‘You see, he was obsessed by the patriotic spy films that were being screened all over the city at the time. They got under his skin,’ remembers Gurevich. ‘But he kept it a secret from me. He never told us he had done this until he was grown up.’
Putin did not become a street urchin. He grew closer to his teacher, to the point that he was taken along on her family holidays. In his early teenage years he discovered what were to be his two passions – judo and German. ‘After he found these he really became better and better until he was really a well-behaved – but closed – young man.’ Martial arts gave Putin the discipline he needed. He quickly became obsessed by it, eventually going on to win all-city prizes in the sport. Yet, he was more reticent to take to German. This was the subject Gurevich taught and Putin’s resistance was overcome by her insistence:
‘He once announced to me: “I don’t want to study German anymore.” I asked, “Why?” He said, “My uncle died at the front and my father was made an invalid at the front by the Germans. I can’t study German. I want to study English instead.” So, I said to him, “But all Germans are different.” I explained to him that the Germans at the front were just following orders, doing their patriotic duty. I said that there was not just the war to talk about but also German culture, German philosophy and that Germany was always a very cultured country. I said that if he studied German he would become a more learned person. To which he replied: “Fine then, so not all Germans are the same, so tell me about some interesting Germans then.” So I told him about the German communists. I asked, “Karl Marx, have you heard of him? You know he was German.” And Putin was surprised: “But I thought he was a Jew.” I said, “Yes, but he lived in Germany.”’
The nation whose war crimes hung over his childhood Leningrad came to fascinate him. Much later he would tell an audience: ‘I have two natures and one of them is German.’1 By that, he meant ordered, clean, organized and philosophical. By the time Putin left school he had turned from ‘Putka’ into a disciplined, if dour, careerist. He was admitted to Leningrad State University to study law – following the advice of the KGB headquarters. He was becoming ambitious. Gurevich, no longer his teacher but now a family friend, went to visit her former student to see how he was getting along:
‘When he was twenty-three I went to see him. He had a political map of the world on his wall. And I asked: “What do all these little flags you’ve stuck on this mean?” He replied: “The more I learn, the faster I mature.” What I did not know is that he was studying both to become a lawyer – but also trying to join the KGB. He claimed he was training to be a policeman. I suspected he was now training up for the KGB, as once I saw him with a military-style band running down his trouser leg. I thought – a regular copper, like you say you are… you most certainly are not.’
Conformists from this generation thought the Soviet Union was a successful, even wealthy country, albeit with profound problems. They knew it had ramshackle food supplies, appalling shortages and dreadful consumer goods, but they thought this could be fixed. Russians could not comprehend that a country with space stations, an intervention in Afghanistan and one-quarter of the world’s scientists was a fragile empire on a precipice. They did not know that the central planners had made the budget so dependent on the booming price of oil that the latter’s collapse would turn into a balance of payments crisis, then a fiscal crisis, then a food crisis as the USSR could not afford the imports that fed its cities, leaving it begging the West for credits – for which it would do anything in return. Worse still, even in the midst of this crisis, they were so confident that Russia was a first-rank nation that they believed the collapse of the USSR in 1991 meant everyone would be ‘living like an American’ in a few years.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was surrealist and ironic. The scientific-technical intelligentsia that had hoped for it, the shallow middle class, would live through a decade that could have come from the dystopian imagination of J.G. Ballard – turbo-consumerism amid the collapse of society. The end goal they had wished for, the economic programme they had wanted and the bureaucratic implosion they had cheered, suddenly turned Russia into a partially third-world country with memories of the space age.
The Double Disaster
Grainy footage focuses in on a young civil servant sitting on an uncomfortable chair, in 1996. He awkwardly looks at the floor, then away, just not into the lens. He eats his first words, then makes himself clear: ‘However sad and however frightening it may sound… I think that in our country a return to a certain period of totalitarian rule is possible.’ He sighs. Then for a second, a second too long, he can’t seem to find the words. ‘The danger… is not to be found in the organs that provide order, the security organs, the police or even the army. It is a danger at our summit, in the mentality of our people, our nation… our own particular mentality.’ A poor jump cut takes us to the next frame:
‘We all think in a way… which we don’t try and hide… and I sometimes think in this way… that if only there was a firm hand to provide order we would all live better, more comfortably and in safety. In fact… this comfort would be short-lived, because this firm hand will be tight and very quickly strangle us and… It will be instantly felt by every person, then in every family. Only in a democratic system where all the workers of the intelligence services, which we call KGB, MVD, NKVD and all the rest… when they know that within a year this political hand can change nationally, regionally and locally… will they ask themselves what are the laws of the country in which we live?’2
The interview is over. The young Putin’s eyes fall to the floor. The world-view of this man is a pure product of the double disaster. He is a man whose career was defined by his experiences working in the KGB in Dresden in a failing authoritarian bloc, then by working as a senior official in St Petersburg town hall in a failing democracy.
Putin’s rebaptized home town, like almost every other Russian city, was in social chaos in the 1990s. Euphoria gave way to an overwhelming feeling of anarchy. There was no promised, no anticipated, prosperity. Instead Russia was a country that felt so lost and confused that quack ‘faith healers’ became staggeringly popular. In the late 1980s and early 1990s one silent faith healer, who claimed to ‘charge’ creams, liquids and ointments, would make mute and packed halls of the sick and frightened hold up jars of water, to be electrified with his ‘healing’ power. He even had a daily morning show on television, during which tens of thousands of families in their living rooms held up pots and jars in front of their screens when he ordered them to. This could happen because St Petersburg and countless other cities shuddered through the winter of 1992, fearing famine – for the first time since the rule of Stalin.