The New Tsar (98 page)
Authors: Steven Lee Myers
Putin joined the KGB in 1975 and was assigned to work in Leningrad, first serving in counterintelligence and later joining the First Chief Directorate, which oversaw foreign intelligence.
Putin spent a decade working for the KGB in Leningrad, rising rather slowly through the ranks. In 1985, the KGB sent him to East Germany, where he served in an outpost in Dresden. He appears here in 1980 with his superior in Leningrad, Yuri Leshchev, who was also sent to East Germany, but to the far more important KGB headquarters in East Berlin.
The KGB worked closely with East Germany’s notorious secret police, the Stasi. In this photo taken in January 1989, Putin, then a lieutenant colonel, appeared with his colleagues from the Stasi, as well as the Soviet and German militaries at a reception in the 1st Guards Tank Army Museum in Dresden. Putin is second from the left in the first row, standing. In the back row, third from the left, is a Stasi officer who would become a close personal and business friend, Matthias Warnig. Another KGB colleague who would rise with Putin in government and business, Sergei Chemezov, is also in the back row, seventh from the left.
On July 28, 1983, after a prolonged courtship, Putin married Lyudmila Shkrebneva, a stewardess who worked for Aeroflot and lived in Kaliningrad.
Putin’s first daughter, Maria, was born in Moscow in 1985. He and Lyudmila are shown here with their friends Sergei and Irina Roldugin.
The Putins’ second daughter, Yekaterina, on the left, was born in Dresden in 1986.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Putin returned to Leningrad in 1990 and, while still in the KGB, went to work as an adviser to Anatoly Sobchak, one of the leaders of the nascent democratic movement in the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed after the abortive putsch in 1991, Sobchak became mayor of the newly renamed St. Petersburg, and Putin became his deputy, overseeing foreign economic affairs.
Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former lieutenant colonel in the KGB and later the FSB, became a whistleblower while Putin was the FSB’s director. Litvinenko appeared at a press conference in 1998, along with other agents, some of them disguising themselves with masks and sunglasses, and accused the agency of running rackets and ordering assassinations. Litvinenko ultimately fled to London, where he became a vocal and opportunistic critic of the Kremlin. In November 2006, he was poisoned by a dose of radioactive polonium-210 that investigators would trace back to Russia.
On August 27, 1999, only weeks after Boris Yeltsin appointed him prime minister, Putin flew to the southern republic of Dagestan to award medals to local and national police and military fighters who repulsed an incursion into the republic by Chechnya’s separatist rebels. The fighting presaged Russia’s second war in Chechnya following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
On December 31, 1999, Boris Yeltsin resigned as president, making his prime minister the acting president until elections were held three months later. Between the two men is Aleksandr Voloshin, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, who remained in the post under Putin until a falling-out with the Kremlin in 2003. Moments after this photograph was taken, Yeltsin turned to Putin and said, “Take care of Russia.”
Putin and his beloved black Labrador, Koni, during an interview with
The New York Times
in October 2003. Koni often appeared with him even during official meetings at his residence, serving as a humanizing prop or an intimidating one, as Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who is afraid of dogs, learned when Koni circled her during her first meeting with Putin.
