The KGB was on a roll. On September 7, 1978, on a crowded London street, Georgi Markov, a defector who broadcast for the BBC’s Bulgarian radio service, often ridiculing the Bulgarian Communist regime, was assassinated with a poison (ricin) pellet fired from a miniaturized gun in the tip of an umbrella, a masterstroke of disguise in forever rainy London. Coincidentally, or not coincidentally, the date was also the birthday of the Bulgarian Communist dictator Todor Zhivkov, who must have been gladdened by this gift. Coincidentally, or not coincidentally, the assassination of the gadfly journalist Anna Politkovskaya would take place on Putin’s birthday.
Putin was in his element. The USSR may have been run by an increasingly doddering and sclerotic Leonid Brezhnev, but the KGB was vigorous and flush with success. Penetration of the enemy’s embassies and crafty assassination in the name of the cause—what could be better? Since he was in his element, he thrived and so came to the attention of the people in foreign intelligence, the classiest and most coveted branch of service, since it meant foreign postings, action on the front line, access to goods. He was called in by the foreign-intelligence people for a series of conversations. They liked what they saw and sent him to Moscow for a year’s worth of advanced training at the Dzerzhinsky KGB Higher School. Named for Felix Dzerzhinsky, often called with jocular affection “Iron Felix,” the founder of the first Soviet secret police, the school specialized in “skills enhancement”[73] and had itself suffered greatly in the purges of 1937–38, when practically the entire teaching staff had been shot.
Nowadays, in one measure of progress, the KGB Higher School, a sprawl of yellow-brick buildings in southwest Moscow, is so famed for its computer experts that the lampposts outside the institute’s grounds are festooned with posters offering high-paying jobs in IT.
Nineteen seventy-nine, the year Putin spent immersed in his studies and training at the KGB Higher School, was a time of tectonic shifts within the Islamic world, and between the Western and Islamic worlds. The Iranian Revolution ousted the pro-Western shah and replaced him with a theocratic government. Radicals seized the holy places of Mecca, and the Saudis could not expel them without outside, i.e., French, help. In late December the USSR invaded Afghanistan in what would prove a protracted, failed, and fatal war, instrumental in the collapse of the system and, ultimately, in the rise of Vladimir Putin.
After returning to Leningrad from Moscow, his skills enhanced, Putin worked for three and a half years in the First Directorate, intelligence. Or did he? Some observers maintain that Putin also spent time in Directorate 5, which was charged with crushing dissent.
Andropov strove for “the destruction of dissent in all its forms” and, foreshadowing Putin, declared that “the struggle for human rights was a part of a wide-ranging imperialist plot to undermine the foundations of the Soviet state.”[74] He was, no doubt, sincere. Andropov had seen what had happened in Hungary. A small discussion group named after nineteenth-century poet Sandor Petofi begins considering reformist ideas and the next thing you know security officers are hanging from lampposts.
Two figures dominated the opposition landscape: the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, creator of the Soviet H-bomb and leader of the human rights movement. In 1971 an attempt had been made on Solzhenitsyn’s life in a Moscow store, where he was smeared with a gel most likely containing ricin from the KGB’s poison factory. He became violently ill, but Solzhenitsyn, who had survived World War II, the Gulag, and cancer, wasn’t easy to kill. In early 1974 the KGB simply put him on a plane and exiled him to the West.
Sakharov, however, was a trickier business for the party and the KGB, which never acted in important matters without directives from the party. Of course, the KGB had ways of getting the party to do what it wanted, like feeding the leadership false or misleading information, as Andropov is believed to have done during the Prague Spring, which he wanted crushed at once. Sakharov had made the Soviet Union a nuclear power and had three times been awarded the Hero of Socialist Labor, one of the country’s highest civilian awards. In 1968, the year of the Prague Spring, The New York Times had published the complete text of Sakahrov’s long essay “Reflections,” which grappled with coexistence in a hostile nuclear world.
Andropov believed that there was still hope for Sakharov and suggested in a 1968 report to the Central Committee that Sakharov be called in for “an appropriate conversation.”[75] However, Sakharov, a shy but fearless man, was already well beyond persuasion or threat. Two years later Andropov informed the Central Committee that it was “advisable to install secret listening devices in Sakharov’s apartment.”[76] In April 1971 Andropov reported without a trace of irony: “Meeting regularly with anti-Soviet individuals, some of whom are mentally ill, SAKHAROV looks at the world around him mainly through their eyes. It seems to him that he is constantly subjected to provocations, surveillance, eavesdropping, etc.”[77]
The line on Sakharov was that his anti-Soviet stances could only be the result of bad influences upon him, especially that of his firebrand wife, Elena Bonner, who had been born into Communist “royalty” and grown up in luxurious apartments (though everything in them belonged to the state, as indicated by the small copper tag with a number on every piece of furniture). Her father was executed in the purges of 1937 and her mother was in the camps from that same year until 1954. Bonner was half Jewish, more than Jew enough for the KGB. Putin, who would let those close to him know that he took no pleasure in anti-Semitism, had no problem agreeing with those who expressed such opinions on the sound philosophical basis of—why spit against the wind? But, if only from the point of view of professional finesse, he did not like how the affair was handled, especially the “illegal” arrest and internal exile of Sakharov for protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. “The Sakharov affair was crude,” judged Putin.[78]
Putin denies that he did any work for the Fifth Directorate in its task of suppressing ideological subversion. Though his image gained luster from his work in espionage, there was no upside in admitting to helping crush dissent, especially in the years immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, when everyone was scrambling to provide themselves with some sort of democratic credentials. It is of course very much in the interest of Putin’s enemies to prove he worked in the Fifth Directorate. But it’s not only his enemies who hold that view. Putin’s friend and KGB colleague in Dresden, Vladimir Usoltsev, who wrote an entire book, Co-worker, about their relationship, took it for granted that Putin had gotten all his unorthodox ideas from all the dissident literature he had read as part of his job of suppressing it: “Gradually it dawned on me that Volodya had acquired all his fancy dissident ideas back in Leningrad while working in the 5th.”[79] Putin, he says, showed particular esteem for the work of Solzhenitsyn, on whom he would bestow high state honors many years later.
75
Gregory Freeze et al., ed.,