The New Tsar (7 page)

At last, after nearly a decade of tedium monitoring foreigners and dissidents in Leningrad, he was learning the craft that he had imagined as a youth. The institute’s three main departments were headed at the time by veterans of the KGB’s “golden age” of espionage—the years before, during, and after World War II: Yuri Modin in political intelligence, Ivan Shishkin in counterintelligence, and Vladimir Barkovsky in scientific and technological intelligence. All made their reputations as spies in London, and Modin was the last controller of the group that became known as the Magnificent Five, the young Cambridge graduates, including Kim Philby, who were recruited during the 1930s as agents of the Soviet Union and ultimately penetrated the highest levels of British power. Although long since exposed and dismantled, the operation remained “a model for young intelligence officers” at the institute.
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Comrade Platov was learning from the KGB’s stars.

On April 28, 1985, while still completing her university degree, Lyudmila gave birth to a daughter. She wanted to name her Natasha, but Vladimir had already made up his mind. She would be named Maria, or Masha, after his mother. He missed his daughter’s birth, but after the mother and child were released from the hospital, he received a pass to visit and celebrated his new family with Sergei Roldugin, who became Maria’s godfather, at the dacha of Roldugin’s father near Vyborg, by the Finnish border. Though she did not know it, Lyudmila herself was undergoing
a thorough background check of her health and temperament; she learned of it only after she was summoned by the university administration office and told that she had been cleared of any suspicion.
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Vladimir was now an established family man at the most critical juncture in his life so far. His hopes for going abroad—for moving up to the elite work of foreign intelligence—depended on his success at the Red Banner Institute, and this was decidedly mixed. It was clear from his language immersion that he would serve in a German-speaking country. The only question was whether he would be assigned to the capitalist West—meaning West Germany, Austria, or Switzerland—or the Soviet satellite in the east, the German Democratic Republic. Serving undercover in the West would have required another year or two at the institute, with deeper and deeper training in local customs that often betrayed foreign origins—basic aspects of capitalist life, like mortgages, could stump and betray a Soviet operative.
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Vladimir would later claim that he preferred to serve in East Germany, but the choice was not his to make.

The institute’s graduation commission decided on assignments based on performance and personal comportment. And despite the stakes, his behavior put it all at risk. He was able to return to Leningrad for short breaks, and during one of them, he again got into a fight, during a confrontation on the metro with a group of hooligans, as he recounted to Sergei Roldugin. This time, he suffered as much as those he confronted, breaking his arm in the fight. He told Roldugin there would be consequences, and indeed he was reprimanded, though he never explained the punishment to his friend. “He has a fault which is objectively bad for the special services: he takes risks,” Roldugin said. “One should be more cautious, and he is not.”
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His evaluation at the end of his year in training was mediocre. He did not suffer from excessive ambition—the word “careerist” was practically a slur in the Soviet system—but Colonel Frolov noted several negative characteristics. He was “withdrawn and uncommunicative.” While “sharp witted,” he also possessed “a certain academic tendency,” a polite way of describing his pedantic manner.
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He did not have the family connections or background to grease the path to a prestigious posting. The fight on the metro in Leningrad almost certainly contributed to the abrupt end of his studies at the Red Banner Institute. Instead of continuing for another two years of grooming for the elite ranks of spy craft, he left at the end of the first. And when he received his assignment,
it was not to West Germany, but to the East. It was not even to Berlin, a hub of Cold War espionage since the defeat of the Nazis, but rather to Dresden, the provincial capital of Saxony, near the border with Czechoslovakia. For the first time, he received a foreign passport. He was almost thirty-three and had never left the Soviet Union before.

CHAPTER 3

The Devoted Officer of a Dying Empire

O
f all the socialist states established by the victorious Soviet Union after the war, the German Democratic Republic seemed to have built the workers’ paradise Communism promised—only one managed by oppression and terror as much as by ideology. The Ministry of State Security—the Stasi—maintained a network of 91,000 employees, with at least 173,000 informants, maybe more, in a nation of seventeen million people. “One can no more place a boundary around the Stasi,” one historian wrote about the ministry’s omnipresence, “than one can encircle a scent in a room.”
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To Vladimir Putin, newly promoted to the rank of major, it seemed he had moved backward in time. He considered East Germany “a harshly totalitarian country,”
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not so much a nation as a pervasive security apparatus. He liked it very much.

The KGB maintained an enormous presence in East Germany. At its base in Karlshorst in Berlin, where the Soviet army was also headquartered, it employed hundreds of workers throughout the Cold War. The Stasi’s officers—“dear friends,” as their Soviet counterparts invariably called them—were both allies and rivals. The Stasi did much of the KGB’s political work, providing the majority of intelligence reports cabled back to the Center in Moscow—not only from Germany but from all of the Soviet bloc. The KGB also treated its “dear friends” with patronizing wariness that the Germans resented. One of the KGB’s biggest operations, begun in the 1970s in Brezhnev’s time and code-named LUCH, or “beam,” furtively recruited German agents to monitor and deliver reports on their own party leaders, government officials, and ordinary people for disloyalty to the Soviet cause.
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The KGB residence in Berlin was the largest in the world. By contrast, the office in Dresden was a tiny outpost of the agency’s worldwide intrigue. The city, straddling the Elbe River, never had more than six
to eight KGB officers. Their office was located at No. 4 Angelikastrasse in a gray two-story mansion with a red-tiled roof in Neudstadt, across Dresden’s famous bridges from the city’s historic center. Here, in a corner office on the second floor, Major Putin would work for the next four and a half years.

Dresden, one of Europe’s beautiful cities, was still disfigured by the shattered ruins of the Frauenkirche. The Baroque church remained unrepaired four decades after the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945 as a symbol of the horrors of war—and, for more contemporary propagandistic purposes, of Western barbarity. Angelikastrasse, across the river, was a short, pretty street, lined with trees and gardens that flowered each spring into a tapestry of colors, so unlike the crumbling monumental architecture of Leningrad. Across the intersection where it met the main road, Bautznerstrasse, there lurked a large compound that extended to a bluff overlooking the Elbe’s wide, grassy estuary. After the war, the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, turned a small building there on the bluff into a military tribunal where they prosecuted not only the remnants of the Nazi regime but also opponents of the new Communist state.
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The Stasi, after its creation, took over the compound and steadily expanded it. In 1953, it built a prison with forty-four cells, where over the years eventually more than twelve thousand prisoners would be held awaiting interrogation and imprisonment.

By the time Major Putin arrived, the Stasi headquarters had become a secret city-within-the-city. Inside were administrative offices, including a VIP guest house and enough apartment blocks to house three thousand people. There was also a building set apart from the rest, where officers pulled bulky headphones over their ears and listened to hours upon hours of conversations recorded by hidden listening devices across the city. The Stasi’s chief in Dresden, Horst Böhm, had an office on the second floor of the main building, overlooking a paved courtyard where the Stasi officers played volleyball and soccer, sometimes with their KGB comrades from across the way.

So stagnant was life in the Soviet Union then that even a sclerotic socialist system like East Germany’s seemed prosperous by comparison, dangerously full of temptations, especially for young officers of the KGB and the Red Army: women, money, and booze. All were dangerous paths to ideological degeneracy.
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The Soviet officers and soldiers deployed to Germany scavenged whatever they could acquire—blue jeans, pornography, and even weapons—to sell or barter on the black market for vodka,
then being restricted by the Red Army’s commanders. Even among the KGB’s elite cadre, officers and their spouses bought food, clothes, and electronics—luxuries in short supply back home—and shipped them home for others to peddle on a ravenous black market.

When he arrived in Dresden in August 1985, Vladimir had realized his childhood dream: he was a foreign intelligence officer sent abroad to battle the enemies of the state. And yet, his experience was far less cinematic than he had once imagined. He was not even undercover. He was a case officer, joining a dissipated, cynical staff in a provincial outpost of the KGB’s empire. His colleagues promptly nicknamed him “Little Volodya,” since there were already two other Vladimirs in the mansion on Angelikastrasse, “Big Volodya” and “Mustachioed Volodya.”
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Big Volodya was Vladimir Usoltsev, who had arrived two years before. He had trained and served in provincial offices of the KGB in Belarus and Krasnoyarsk and was by now deeply jaded.

When Konstantin Chernenko died earlier that year, before Little Volodya arrived, Usoltsev and his colleagues toasted to the illness that took him swiftly, rather than forcing the country to endure another prolonged period of uncertainty. Usoltsev mocked the bureaucracy, the insatiable demands from the Center, and its obsession, in his mind, with imaginary threats. He joked that “the most dangerous weapon” of the KGB spy in Dresden was the spike with which he punched holes in the reams of reports dutifully and uselessly sent to Moscow, many of them no more than a summary of political events reported in the local press.
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“Volodya Putin came to the KGB for heroic romanticism,” he wrote, “but in Dresden there could not by definition be any special romanticism, and by then he already understood that perfectly.”
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Still Little Volodya fit right in. He almost immediately ingratiated himself with Dresden’s station chief, Colonel Lazar Matveyev, who had served there since 1982. Matveyev was short, even shorter than Putin, softening around the middle and nearly bald except for two neatly trimmed fenders of white hair. Born in 1927, he was from the old school, a devoted Soviet intelligence officer whose father and mother had died in the Great Patriotic War. He took the young major under his wing, admiring his purposeful work ethic and his integrity. The year before Putin arrived in Dresden, the KGB began paying its officers there the equivalent of $100 in hard currency, a lavish sum distributed in dollars and marks. In Usoltsev’s mind, a stint in East Germany was for most officers of the KGB “a unique chance to ensure their comfortable old
age.”
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Not for Putin, though, nor for his wife. Matveyev adored Lyudmila as a beautiful young mother who was not, like the others, “a mercantile woman.” He made no secret among the rest of the KGB cadre on Angelikastrasse that Little Volodya was his favorite—above all because this young major showed no sign of being “a careerist” determined to outshine his superiors. He was a “crystal clear person” and a real “working man,” though not the sort of subordinate to overdo it by working day and night.
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At first, Lyudmila was still in Leningrad, finishing her degree. Little Volodya moved in briefly with a colleague on the top floor of a long, newly built apartment block at 101 Radebergerstrasse, a short five-minute walk from the KGB mansion. The building abutted a Soviet military barracks on one side and a forested park on the other, the northeastern edge of Dresden. Like most buildings in the neighborhood, it housed Stasi and Soviet officers and their families. It was a small, self-contained community of secret police and spies. The neighborhood included a military exchange, a store selling Russian products, schools for the children, a cinema showing Soviet films, and a
banya
(the Russian version of a sauna). Major Putin later moved into an apartment on the fourth floor above the first of twelve separate entrances to the building, each of which had its own stairwell, though there were no elevators. The apartment had only four rooms covering seven hundred square feet. It was not luxurious, but it was his first home of his own.

When Lyudmila arrived in the fall of 1985, cradling Masha, she found waiting on the kitchen table a basket of bananas, then a scarcity back home. At first, it felt to her that they had woken in a dream. The neighborhood was charming, the streets clean. The windows in the apartment were washed once a week. The German wives strung their laundry in rows on metal poles planted in the grassy garden outside, tidy and all very much alike.
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