The same forces that were to tear apart the Comecon (Council for Mutual Economic Support) and the Warsaw Pact could not be prevented from tearing at the very fabric of Soviet rule at home. It is his experience in Dresden, in fact a personal trauma, that today prompts the former KGB lieutenant-colonel turned Tsar of all the Russians to refer, time and again, to the dangers of Russia falling apart.
Putin must have felt the paralysis of the Honecker regime. And of course he had been told repeatedly about the strategic role of the GDR, home to more than twenty crack Red Army divisions, for the Soviet system. Meanwhile, he was living modestly with his wife and two daughters in a small apartment in what the Germans call, with no sympathy, Plattenbau – the drab standard housing facilities regarded as a privileged habitat under socialism. Professionally, the many years in Dresden were devoted, with the young lieutenant-colonel’s usual perfectionism and assiduousness, to such KGB business as controlling the East German Staatssicherheit, or Stasi, from afar and recruiting operatives and long-term sleepers for the Soviet cause.
Germany, even in its very modest and restricted Eastern version, was a formative experience for Putin not only in terms of presenting the end of empire but also with regards to his personal outlook on life. In the early 1980s the German Democratic Republic was often praised by its sympathizers as Comecon’s model student.
A world of make-believe
It did help that a truly fantastic amount of data-laundering was going on, mostly accepted by the West. Statistically, East Germany was marching from triumph to triumph. There were two reasons: Günter Mittag, the chief of state planning, expected targets, even if they were patently absurd, to be met and norms overfulfilled. This in turn secured all kinds of benefits for managers as well as for the people on the shop floor. So statistics were not only embellished but also fabricated, and everybody learnt to live in a world of window-dressing. One would like to see the reports that Putin sent home; given his sharp eye for human weakness he must have sensed, more than most people, that the GDR was increasingly becoming a house of cards. Did he warn his superiors that trouble was brewing and that the Soviet Titanic was heading towards the iceberg? East Germans had a more down-to-earth way to describe the state of the state: ‘We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.’
Strange though it sounds in retrospect, most observers in the West did not grasp what was going on, and those who did were careful not to be denounced as cold warriors out to minimize the glories of ‘real existing socialism’, as the official description went. Meanwhile the symptoms of decline, in fact decay and desperation, kept coming to the surface. In 1982, when the Schmidt-Genscher government was about to collapse and Helmut Kohl was preparing to take over, the GDR chiefs applied, discreetly, for a stand-by credit to the tune of one billion Deutschmarks, handled without much fuss, once Kohl was in office, via the state chancellery in Munich under the watchful eye of Franz Josef Strauss, minister-president of the state of Bavaria. This should have set off all alarm bells in the West and among Soviet German-watchers, among them Vladimir Putin. How could the East German regime ever ask the ‘class enemy’ to help if not in utter despair? In fact after that first financial flirtation, handled through the Bayerische Hypotheken und Wechselbank, sheer necessity pushed the East German planners even further. They began to think, sometimes aloud, about a loose confederation destined to establish an umbilical cord of credits and subsidies to the doomed East German economy – all of this in the name of peace and stability. Did Putin realize what kind of Ostpolitik was going on between the Stalinist diehards in East Berlin and the Kohl-Genscher government in Bonn? This kind of political drama was probably well above his level, and Dresden was certainly not the most important vantage point.
But if the lieutenant-colonel in Dresden ignored the writing on the wall he was certainly not alone. The GDR had developed a miraculous system of data-laundering, insisting that every East German mark – East German housewives called them, disdainfully, ‘aluchips’ – had to be counted as equivalent to one Deutschmark, West Germany’s unassailable currency. The reality could be felt when it came to changing East German aluchips into what used to be called ‘valuta’ – i.e. real money, dollars or, preferably, Deutschmarks. The black market price varied, but was rarely below 6 aluchips for one real mark. Die Geige, the violin, was what East Germans called the green 20-Deutschmark bill that showed not only Dürer’s stunningly beautiful portrait of Elsbeth Tucher of Nuremberg but also a violin. It was East German code for real money that would secure scarce services and all kinds of goods from the West not otherwise available to the man in the street.
Putin must have realized the double standards, the window-dressing, the crumbling future, the hollowness of the regime. Did he also see the mortal danger for the Soviet project? One would like to know not only what he thinks today about those tectonic shifts that took place under his eyes but also how he realized – or failed to realize – what was coming at the time. His command of German was excellent. His education in all things German would have allowed him to feel that the earth under Soviet power was trembling. The breakdown of the Soviet Union ranks for him as one of the great geopolitical catastrophes of the twentieth century, a century of breakdown and catastrophe by any standard. What happened in and around 1989 was, for Putin and his friends, a warning that turned slowly and inexorably into the Soviet endgame. The fall of the Berlin wall on 9 November 1989 meant not only uncertainty about the greater scheme of things, but also uncertainty as to the KGB officer’s personal future and that of his family.
From Leningrad to St Petersburg
Always a realist, Putin did not insist on seeing Soviet rule over East Germany being wound up but requested permission to go to Leningrad. In those trying times he must have asked himself if he had backed the wrong horse. In 1990 he renewed his old acquaintance with Professor Anatoli Sobchak, who in Soviet times had been something of an outsider due to his more cosmopolitan training and style and who, when the shadows over the Soviet system grew longer and darker, was emerging as one of the natural leaders of a new Russia. In fact, although he had little administrative experience, he was elected to be mayor of Leningrad, a city of five million people affected by all the symptoms of Soviet decline: unemployment, lack of resources, breakdown of industry, shortages of everything from food to hope. Trying times indeed. Putin, a Leningrad lad who had known the city and its citizens from his early days, wasted no time in grieving for the past and turned up as an assistant to Sobchak as early as 1990, specializing in international contacts and communication, certainly helped by his command of German, French and English and the experiences he had gathered in East Germany. By ex-Soviet standards he was an expert on the outside world.
Soon he rose, under Sobchak, to be the successor to Anatoly Chubais in what Alexander Rahr in his biography described as the ‘reform motor in the Neva metropolis’. In 1996, however, Sobtschak, described by foreign diplomats at the time as a charismatic personality, failed to invest in his campaign for re-election and had to retire. Putin remained in St Petersburg but set his sight on Moscow. He was in for a disappointment when Chubais, looking for a deputy at the head of the presidential administration, chose Alexei Kudrin, who had a reputation as a financial technocrat, instead of Putin with his widely praised talent for organization.