Outside his studies, the young student was interested in Western music. He played the guitar and gave a recital from time to time. Literature captivated him; he would read poems to his classmates, and even the banned samizdat from the political underground. The social sciences caught his interest more than the natural sciences, and he joined a political club. A dissident he never was. On the contrary, in the summer of 1970, barely seventeen years old, he knocked at the door of the local KGB headquarters. His boss in later years remembered in Komsomolskaya Pravda what happened: ‘Putin’s wish to work within the secret service goes back if not to his childhood then certainly to when he was a teenager. Immediately after finishing college he came to us in the administration and asked: ‘“How can I become a KGB agent?”’
This was, by any standards, an exceptional application. The seasoned officer, however, advised young Putin to wait a little and first get a degree. The advice he received sent him in the direction of legal studies, which he took up in due course, after serious preparation, at the elitist Law Faculty of Leningrad University.[1]
Joining the elite corps
Was he intent on becoming one of those faceless bureaucrats spying on their fellow-citizens, or running a small section of the vast Gulag archipelago? Alexander Rahr assumes that it was rather his ambition to be an insider to information and the power that comes with it. Putin did not have to serve his years as a conscript but took part in pre-military exercises under the auspices of the Institute for Military Affairs, finishing with the nominal rank of lieutenant. He also practised Sambo, a martial art, and became an accomplished judoka.
His life at university took an important turn when in his first year he came to know Professor Anatoli Sobchak. The professor had the reputation of being something of a dissident. His dissertation had dealt with – under Soviet rule – an eccentric subject, nothing less than the de-monopolization of state property. Thinking the unthinkable was not at a premium in Brezhnev’s time and it took Sobtschak ten years to obtain his doctoral degree. In later life the professor and the student were to meet again, the older one mayor of post-Soviet St Petersburg, the younger one an administrator.
Towards the end of Putin’s second year at the faculty of law his heartfelt wish was fulfilled, and he was admitted to the KGB. This was a well-paying opportunity, promising further training and wide opportunities for promotion. Some years before, the recruiting officers had invited Dr Sobchak to join the ranks but he had refused their overtures.
Putin did not rise to be a Soviet James Bond but stayed in Leningrad and became a bureaucrat in the KGB administration. In his autobiography Putin mentions that he disliked the way the KGB was employed to crush dissident art and harass the artists. He probably found this rather petty and beneath the dignity of a service that had to save the motherland from its real enemies at the secret front. Being a sports amateur and well versed in foreign languages – he speaks German, English and French – he was chosen to chaperon foreign visitors and delegations and even travel abroad with Soviet groups to protect them against enemy influence in whatever form. This may have given him a wider view on the world than what was usually available for a young Russian just out of university. But he also had more mundane jobs to do like accompanying religious processions and making sure that nothing untoward occurred. After a year of special training in Moscow, Putin was promoted to counter-intelligence. That had always been the elite unit of the KGB, mostly reserved for the offspring of the high party nomenclatura – Putin was clearly an outsider, but conscious of the privileged position offered to him. To prove his mettle he had to make a parachute-jump out of a plane, and to ensure his loyalty he had to join the CPSU. After that he had to carry out surveillance in St Petersburg, spying on fellow students and recruiting, by hook or by crook, foreign visitors to work for the KGB. It was an unappetizing task, probably not what Putin in his patriotic dreams had wished to do. He had to pressure people into spying, but he preferred softer methods of persuasion.
To Westerners visiting the Soviet Union he must have talked a great deal about the dangers of nuclear war and the attractions of peace, and how important it was that young peace-lovers should help the great cause by working for ‘the organization’ – which would also pay handsomely, and discreetly. In his memoirs, however, Putin makes an interesting remark about what he learned in those years: ‘dealing with people’ or, in one word, communication. Whether he really created a network of spies, or succeeded only in recruiting a couple of true agents – there is room for speculation. In the eighth year of his presidency he paid homage to some eminent former Soviet spies, thus paying off a moral debt to what Russians still call ‘the organization’.
Dresden
It was at a time of high East-West tension over Soviet and NATO missile deployment, with dramatic repercussions in most Western countries and especially in Germany, when in 1985 Putin was sent to Dresden, the second most important city in East Germany – his excellent command of German serving as a strong argument in his favour. But it was also a time when the huge and overextended Soviet edifice showed serious signs of weariness, dysfunctional politics and the widespread resignation of the people. ‘Soviet man’ had not emerged and was ever more unlikely ever to make his or her appearance. It was true that sending oil and gas through giant pipelines to the West at rising prices seemed to work in favour of the Soviet system. However, disillusionment with the workers’ and peasants’ paradise, waste and technological backwardness, misfortune in Afghanistan and humiliation abroad and on top of all this the resilience of Western Europe in the face of the renewed Soviet threat – many factors worked together to create, the longer the ‘leaden years’ of the Brezhnev era lasted, a sense of looming breakdown, loss of direction, disasters waiting to happen. And, indeed, they were not long in coming.
Meanwhile, Putin was part of that elite corps that, apart from the dissidents on the other side of the political divide, was best situated to understand the threat to the Soviet system. In Dresden, he must have been aware from close observation and first-hand knowledge that even the showcase of socialism, the German Democratic Republic, was tottering towards its grave. He was in a good position to witness, half inside and half outside, the falling apart of the East German state and, with it, the beginning of the end of Soviet rule over Eastern Europe. Once the outer empire had crumbled – the fall of the Berlin wall on the night of 9 November 1989 was both in reality and symbolically the breakthrough – there was no way, except by putting up a desperate last struggle and sending in the tanks, to preserve the inner empire.
Losing an empire
This was, however, not Gorbachev’s solution. He knew, and the generals knew as well, that military intervention like that of 1956 in Hungary and Poland and 1968 in Czechoslovakia could not be repeated, nor was another pincer movement against Poland a viable option. This would have ruined relations with the US, forced Russia into a new arms race and made domestic reform in Russia impossible. And, in any case, after the oil price had collapsed in 1985 there was no money to pay for military extravaganzas.