The New Tsar (10 page)

Lieutenant Colonel Putin’s role in the events surrounding the dissolution of East Germany was a small act in the face of uncertainty, if not danger. For a fleeting moment, he was indeed an intelligence officer standing alone in defense of his country, a single man able to affect the course of history—in Germany, no less—just as he had imagined as an impressionable young man two decades before. He acted with calm, stoic determination. He avoided a security breach and also bloodshed. And yet there would be no recognition of his actions that night, no commendation, no medal.
Moscow is silent
. The phrase haunted him for years afterward. He sensed that night that his career was coming to an end. So too was his country.

CHAPTER 4

Democracy Faces a Hungry Winter

I
t was bitter enough for Vladimir Putin to witness the collapse of the Soviet ideal in Europe, helpless to reverse the losses. He knew that a divided Germany could not endure, despite Erich Honecker’s vow early in 1989 that the Berlin Wall would stand “in 50 and even in 100 years.” For Putin, what mattered more was what he saw as an unconditional Soviet surrender, followed by a humiliating, chaotic, and catastrophic retreat. “That’s what hurt,” he said. “They just dropped everything and went away.”
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The men and women he had worked with for nearly five years were cast aside, abandoned by their Soviet patrons, left to the mercy of West Germany and their own vengeful citizens. The Putins’ neighbors and friends found themselves abruptly out of work, ostracized because of their employment in the Stasi. Katya’s preschool teacher, an officer of the Stasi, was barred from working with children. One of Lyudmila’s friends “cried for her lost ideals, for the collapse of everything that she had believed in her whole life,” she recalled. “For them, it was the collapse of everything—their lives, their careers.”
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The intelligence officers felt particularly betrayed. Markus Wolf, head of East Germany’s foreign intelligence until 1986, resented Gorbachev’s indifference after 1989, though he briefly received refuge in Russia. “There had been no great rush of comradely support from our Moscow friends during the past stressful months,” he wrote. “Like us, they had been completely unprepared for what happened. The supposedly eternal brotherhood to which we had raised our glasses down the years was now a ragged band.”
³
Horst Böhm, the Stasi chief in Dresden, committed suicide in his home on February 21, 1990, shortly before he was to testify before a commission on the future of the unraveling state, though rumors persisted that he was murdered to prevent him from appearing
in a criminal trial of Dresden’s despotic boss, Hans Modrow.
⁴
The East Germans soon learned the truth of the KGB’s Operation LUCH, the decades-long effort to spy on them. Horst Jehmlich, Böhm’s aide, felt betrayed by Putin personally. “They cheated and lied to us,” he said.
⁵

The KGB in East Germany was in disarray, scrambling to destroy or remove its intelligence files while severing or covering up its networks of agents and laying the foundations for new ones. The last chief in Dresden, General Shirokov, ordered the removal and destruction of twelve truckloads of documents from the headquarters of the Soviet armored division. They burned so many that the furnace designed for the task broke. A battalion commander then dug a pit on the grounds, dumped the papers, and ordered the pile doused with gasoline.
⁶
Lieutenant Colonel Putin, too, burned files—“all our communications, our lists of contacts and our agents’ networks”—but he and his colleagues spirited the most important ones back to the KGB archives in Moscow. The real danger was the exposure of the KGB’s secrets to the West and NATO, though there was little he or anyone else in the Dresden outpost could do to stop that now.

By the beginning of the new decade, Lieutenant Colonel Putin and his cadre had been recalled home, but he had one final mission as a Soviet intelligence operative. He continued to recruit informants, hoping to establish a new network of agents that would serve as a rear guard in the democratizing East Germany. He turned to his old friends and contacts, including an inspector in Dresden’s police department and a Stasi officer named Klaus Zuchold, whom he had first met four years earlier. Zuchold had taken him on one of his first tours of Saxony—even before Lyudmila arrived—and visited him frequently. Zuchold apparently had never worked for the KGB until after the events of 1989. In January 1990, in one of his final acts, Lieutenant Colonel Putin formally recruited him, sending his Stasi file to the Center in Moscow for approval. He dictated Zuchold’s letter of allegiance to the KGB, gave his daughter a book of Russian fairy tales, and toasted the occasion with Soviet brandy.
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It proved to be a short-lived success: a year later, after the reunification of Germany in October 1990, Zuchold accepted an offer of amnesty and not only revealed his own recruitment but exposed fifteen other agents who had been in the KGB’s Dresden network.
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The betrayal of agents—and the seizure of the Stasi’s enormous collection of files by the West German BND and subsequently their public disclosure, which also exposed the extent of the KGB’s activities—enraged
Lieutenant Colonel Putin. He later told his old friend Sergei Roldugin that the Stasi should never have turned over its archives, never have betrayed those who had worked as informants. Roldugin rarely heard him talk about his work and rarely saw him so emotional. “He said it was equal to treason,” Roldugin recalled. “He was very upset, extremely,” but also ashamed and remorseful. He had been powerless to help his German comrades as their secret world imploded. “I felt it,” he told Roldugin, “like a fault of my own.”
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In February 1990, packing boxes, each numbered and named, filled the Putins’ modest apartment. The apartment felt like a storage room. The KGB’s withdrawal, followed by that of the Soviet military, suddenly freed up housing in Dresden. Jörg Hofmann, a young man whose wife had connections in the city administration, managed to acquire the lease to the apartment. He stopped by to see it while the Putins awaited the movers. The walls were covered in tinfoil wallpaper, the windows decorated by cutouts of Russian nesting dolls, made by the girls. The Putins were polite and friendly; the lieutenant colonel betrayed no outward bitterness or other emotion. He simply told Hofmann he was going home.
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On March 1, the Hofmanns moved in. In four and a half years, the Putins had managed to save some of the hard currency he earned, and a neighbor gave them a washing machine. It was twenty years old, but it worked for another five years.
¹¹
It was all they had to show for his career as a foreign intelligence agent. Their belongings were packed in a shipping container and sent to Moscow. The couple, with their two young daughters, boarded a train, also to Moscow. On the journey back, a thief made off with Lyudmila’s coat and what rubles and marks she carried.
¹²

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T
he Putins had from afar followed the upheaval of Gorbachev’s era—the public excitement engendered by perestroika and glasnost—but whatever they expected, what they found when they returned disappointed them. After the comparative comforts of East Germany, life at home seemed a shock. “There were the same terrible lines, the ration cards, the coupons, the empty shelves,” Lyudmila recalled.
¹³
She feared going to the store, unable to “sniff out the bargains and to stand in all the lines. I would just dart into the nearest store, buy whatever was most necessary, and go home. It was horrible.” They had missed the liberating intellectual and political spirit of the era, the release of banned films and previously censored novels like
The Master and Margarita
, Mikhail Bulgakov’s masterpiece imagining Satan’s visit to Moscow, or Boris Pasternak’s
Doctor Zhivago
. The new freedom to read, to debate, to think openly, had been electrifying for so many, but they had returned to Russia at the moment when Gorbachev’s liberalizing reforms were beginning to unravel.
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Lyudmila felt her husband “had lost touch with his life’s real purpose.”
¹⁵
His career as a KGB officer stood at a crossroads. He joined a mass repatriation of intelligence operatives from abroad, not only from Germany but from all of Eastern Europe and other far-flung battlegrounds of the Cold War, like Afghanistan, Angola, Mongolia, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Yemen. They were defeated, dejected, and effectively out of work, displaced refugees of a crumbling empire. The Center in Moscow was the typical destination for officers returning from a posting abroad. Only nothing was typical anymore. For three months at the beginning of 1990, Putin was not even paid. The KGB initially offered him a position at the First Chief Directorate’s headquarters in Yasenevo, the wooded, heavily guarded compound southwest of Moscow. His rank and appointment would normally have merited an apartment in Moscow, but none was available. With so many intelligence veterans in search of homes, he would have to wait, possibly for years. Lyudmila liked Moscow and wanted to move there, and he understood that whatever prospects he had for advancement existed in the capital, not in Leningrad, but his vague doubts about the Soviet Union’s future had hardened. After fifteen years, his career was unspectacular, and no longer inspiring. In his last year in Dresden he sensed the disorganization of the organs of power, the breakdown of discipline, the theft and lawlessness within his own ranks.

He met his old station chief and mentor, Colonel Lazar Matveyev, who was then stationed at Yasenevo. “I don’t know what to do,” he told Matveyev in the graying colonel’s apartment in Moscow. Matveyev, for all his affection for his former underling, did nothing to persuade him to stay in Moscow or even in the KGB. “Talk Lyuda out of it,” he told him intimately, “and go to Leningrad.”
¹⁶
There at least he had an apartment where they could live: his parents’. The elder Putins had moved into a larger place, this time on Sredneokhtinsky Prospekt, not far from the academy where Vladimir had first trained after joining the KGB. So he accepted a job as the assistant to the rector for international affairs at his old university, a KGB position intended to keep an eye on students and visitors. At last, he would be “undercover,” though the true identity of officials in posts like that was, by intention, a poorly kept secret. It
never hurt for people to know the KGB lurked everywhere. He now rejoined what Oleg Kalugin, the former deputy director of the KGB in Leningrad, described as “this absurd, stupendous ziggurat, this terrifyingly centralized machine, this religion that sought to control all aspects of life in our vast country.”
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The university’s rector, Stanislav Merkuriev, was a theoretical physicist appointed early in Gorbachev’s tenure. He spoke English, German, and French and was determined to open the stifled system of higher education. By the time of his early death in 1993, he had earned plaudits for making the university one of the best in Europe.
¹⁸
He surrounded himself with like-minded professionals—and, as he surely would have known, one last minder from the KGB. For an aging KGB veteran, the university post might have been a sinecure, comfortable and undemanding, but for a lieutenant colonel, only thirty-seven and with years of service ahead of him, it seemed a dead end. He had little prospect now of securing another assignment abroad; the KGB was downsizing, and his achievements hardly merited a post. His career in foreign intelligence thus came crashing to an end. Not even Matveyev could reach down a hand to pull him up. He told Sergei Roldugin that he planned to leave the KGB altogether, though Roldugin had his doubts. “There is no such thing as a former intelligence agent,” he said. He empathized with his friend’s anger and confusion, but he also understood his mentality. “You can stop working at this organization, but its worldview and way of thinking remain stuck in your head.”
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L
eningrad had changed little outwardly, but perestroika breathed new life into the city’s politics. In March 1989, while the Putins were still in Dresden, cities across the Soviet Union held the first competitive elections in the country’s history to choose representatives to a new quasi-parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies. Instead of rubber-stamping Communist Party leaders, as Soviet elections invariably did, voters in Leningrad rebelled and rejected the top five candidates, including the city’s party leader, Yuri Solovyev.
²⁰
One of those elected instead was a tall, charismatic professor of law at Vladimir Putin’s alma mater, Anatoly Sobchak. Born deep in Siberia and educated in Leningrad, Sobchak had already gained prominence as a critic of the Soviet system. He wrote widely, advocating market reforms and the rule of law; his doctoral dissertation had been rejected as politically incorrect. Sobchak’s law school colleagues had unexpectedly nominated him
to be one of four candidates from the university’s district on Vasilievsky Island, which also included the sprawling Baltic shipyard and thousands of shipbuilders and stevedores. Despite the Communist Party’s efforts to screen out opposition candidates, Sobchak managed to place second in a kind of political caucus held in the shipyard’s Palace of Culture after delivering a late-night speech that, extemporaneously, evoked Martin Luther King Jr. “I dreamed of a time when our state would become law-governed—a state that didn’t permit the granting of rights and privileges to some people at the expense of others,” he wrote later.
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