Putin’s People. Catherine Belton

a cure – a paralysis of power,’ Putin said later.[90] ‘The Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe. Although intellectually I understood that a position built on walls cannot last, I wanted something different to rise in its place. But nothing different was proposed. That’s what hurt. They just dropped everything and went away.’[91]

      But not all was lost. Though the fierceness of the protests and the timing of the ensuing collapse appeared to have taken the KGB by surprise, parts of it, together with the Stasi, had been preparing for that day. Parts of the KGB had been planning for a more gradual transition in which they would retain an element of influence and control behind the scenes.

      Somehow, the KGB officers in Dresden managed to get one of their Stasi counterparts to hand over the vast majority of the Stasi’s files on their work with the Soviets before the protesters burst into the Stasi headquarters. Putin’s colleague from the earlier Dresden days, Vladimir Usoltsev, recounted that a Stasi officer handed over the files in their entirety to Putin. ‘Within a few hours, nothing remained of them apart from ashes,’ he said.[92] Reams of documents were taken to the nearby Soviet army base and thrown into a pit, where it was planned that they would be destroyed with napalm, but they were burned with petrol instead.[93] A further twelve truckloads were spirited away to Moscow. ‘All the most valuable items were hauled away to Moscow,’ Putin later said.

      Over the next few months, as they prepared their exit from Dresden, they were provided with special cover from the powerful head of the KGB’s illegals department, Yury Drozdov, the legendary officer in charge of overseeing the KGB’s entire global network of undercover sleeper agents. The Dresden station chief, Vladimir Shirokov, told of how Drozdov made sure he was watched over from six in the morning to midnight. Finally, in the dead of night Shirokov and his family were driven to safety across the border to Poland by Drozdov’s men.[94] Later, one of Putin’s former colleagues told journalist Masha Gessen that Putin met with Drozdov in Berlin before he travelled home.[95]

      The Dresden KGB ‘friends’ disappeared into the night, leaving little trace, abandoning their Stasi colleagues to face the people’s wrath. It was a pressure Horst Böhm, the local Stasi chief, seemed unable to bear. In February the following year he apparently took his own life while under house arrest. ‘He didn’t see any other way out,’ said Jehmlich. ‘To protect his house, he removed all the fuses and then he poisoned himself with gas.’[96]

      Two other Stasi commanders in neighbouring regions were also reported to have killed themselves. What precisely they feared most, we may never know, as they died before they’d been questioned on their roles. But for the KGB, although they’d been forced to abandon their posts, some of their legacy at least had been left intact. Part of their networks, their illegals, remained hidden far away from scrutiny and sight.[97] Much later, Putin would speak with pride of how his work in Dresden had mostly revolved around handling the illegal ‘sleeper agents’. ‘These are unique people,’ he said. ‘Not everyone is able to give up their life, their loved ones and relatives and leave the country for many, many years to devote themselves to serving the Fatherland. Only an elect can do this.’[98]

      After Hans Modrow, backed by the Soviets,[99] took over as East Germany’s interim leader that December, he quietly allowed the Stasi’s foreign-intelligence arm, the HVA, to liquidate itself.[100] Untold assets disappeared in the process, while hundreds of millions of marks were siphoned off through the Liechtenstein and Swiss front companies of Martin Schlaff. Amid the jubilance of reunification, the voices of defectors from the Stasi to the West were rarely heard. But a few of them spoke out. ‘Under certain conditions, parts of the network could be reactivated,’ one such defector said. ‘Nobody in the West has any guarantee as to whether some of these agents will be reactivated by the KGB.’[101]

      *

      When Putin returned home to Russia from Dresden in February 1990, the impact of the Berlin Wall’s collapse was still reverberating across the Soviet Union. Nationalist movements were on the rise, and threatening to tear the country apart. Mikhail Gorbachev had been thrust onto the back foot, forced to cede ever more ground to emerging democratic leaders. The Soviet Communist Party was gradually starting to lose its monopoly on power, its legitimacy coming ever more under question. In March 1989, almost a year before Putin’s return to Russia, Gorbachev had agreed to hold the first ever competitive elections in Soviet history to choose representatives for a new parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies. A ragtag group of democrats led by Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist who’d become a dissident voice of moral authority, and Boris Yeltsin, then a rambunctious and rapidly rising political star who’d been thrown out of the Politburo for his relentless criticism of the Communist authorities, won seats and debated against the Communist Party for the first time. The end was rapidly nearing for the seven decades of Communist rule.

      Amidst the tumult, Putin sought to adapt. But instead of earning a living as a taxi driver, or following the traditional path after a return home from foreign service, a post back at the Centre, as the Moscow headquarters of the KGB’s foreign-intelligence service was known, he embarked on a different kind of mission. He’d been ordered by his former mentor and boss in Dresden, Colonel Lazar Matveyev, not to hang around in Moscow, but to head home to Leningrad.[102] There, he was flung straight into a city in turmoil, where city council elections, also competitive for the first time under Gorbachev’s reforms, were pitting a rising tide of democrats against the Communist Party. For the first time, the democrats were threatening to break the Communists’ majority control. Instead of defending the old guard against the democrats’ rise, Putin sought to attach himself to Leningrad’s democratic movement.

      Almost immediately, he approached one of its most uncompromising leaders, a doughty and fearless newly elected member of the Congress of People’s Deputies, Galina Starovoitova. She was a leading human rights activist, known for her uncompromising honesty as she railed against the failings of Soviet power. After she had given a resounding speech ahead of the city council elections, Putin, then a pale-eyed and unremarkable figure, walked up to her and told her how impressed he’d been by her words. He asked whether he could assist her with anything – including perhaps by working as her driver. But, suspicious of such an unsolicited approach, Starovoitova apparently resoundingly turned him away.[103]

      His first post instead was as an assistant to the rector of the Leningrad State University, where in his youth he’d studied law and first entered the ranks of the KGB. He was to watch over the university’s foreign relations and keep an eye on its foreign students and visiting dignitaries. It seemed at first a sharp demotion from his Dresden post, a return to the most humdrum work reporting on foreigners’ movements to the KGB. But it was no more than a matter of weeks before it landed him a position at the top of the country’s democratic movement.

      Anatoly Sobchak was the university’s charismatic professor of law. Tall, erudite and handsome, he’d long won students over with his mildly anti-government line, and had risen to become one of the new democratic movement’s most rousing orators, appearing to challenge the Party and the KGB at every turn. He was part of the group of independents and reformers that took control of the city council after the March 1990 poll, and by May he’d been anointed the council’s chairman. Almost immediately, Putin was appointed his right-hand man.

      Putin was to be Sobchak’s fixer, his liaison with the security services, the shadow who watched over him behind the scenes. From the start, the posting had been arranged by the KGB. ‘Putin was placed there. He had a function to fill,’ said Franz Sedelmayer, the German security consultant who later worked with him. ‘The KGB told Sobchak, “Here’s our guy. He’ll take care of you.”’ The position in the law faculty had merely been a cover, said Sedelmayer, who believed that Sobchak himself had long been working unofficially with the KGB: ‘The best cover for these guys was law degrees.’[104]

      Despite his democratic credentials and his blistering speeches against abuses of power by the KGB, Sobchak understood all too well that he would not be able to shore up political power without the backing of parts of the establishment. He was vain and foppish, and most of all he wanted to climb. Along with hiring Putin, he’d also reached out to a senior member of the city’s old guard, appointing a Communist rear admiral of the North Sea Fleet, Vyacheslav Shcherbakov, as his first deputy