Strongman, The

democracies, steal military and industrial secrets, spread communism to developing countries and help the secret services of the ‘fraternal socialist states’ of Eastern Europe to crack down on dissent. We do not know exactly what Putin did during those years, but one can infer from his work in counter-intelligence and in monitoring foreigners in Leningrad that he was totally committed to the Soviet cause and vigilant to the dangers of Western subversion. To this day he is crushing in his contempt for those who ‘betray the motherland’ and (as we saw in 2010 when he welcomed home ten Russian spies who were uncovered in the US) full of admiration for those who follow his own career path as a secret agent.
    Sergei Roldugin, a family friend, recalls that when he asked the young Putin at the time exactly what he did in the KGB in Leningrad, he replied enigmatically: ‘I am a specialist in mingling with people.’
    In 1985, promoted to the rank of major, Putin was sent to mingle with the people of communist East Germany. He was based in Dresden, and says his job was ‘political intelligence’ – recruiting informants and gathering information about political figures and about the plans of ‘enemy number one’ – NATO. At this stage he must still have been ideologically driven, and still he had no first-hand experience of the West. Neither did he experience at first hand the remarkable awakening of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). While Moscow newspapers and theatres were tearing up the falsified images of the Soviet past and slowly dropping the clichés about Western villainy, Putin was based in one of the communist bloc’s most repressive states. The East German leader, Erich Honecker, resisted the winds of change blowing in from Moscow to the last. Putin would have witnessed the gathering unrest in East Germany, however, which culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989. Indeed, in the weeks leading up to the collapse of communist power, it was precisely in Dresden that the peaceful revolution began, with demonstrators taking to the streets to protest – right under Putin’s nose.
    So Russia’s future leader had an unusual vantage point from which to observe the collapse of communism. While missing the Gorbachev revolution at home, he saw at close quarters how East Europeans seized their destiny and wrested themselves free of the Soviet orbit. In his KGB role he was also scrutinising NATO’s response, and will have been keenly aware of the verbal promise allegedly given to Gorbachev by the US secretary of state, James Baker, during the German reunification process, that the alliance would not take advantage of the collapse of communism to expand into the former Soviet bloc.
    When the game was up for the East German communists – and for the Soviet Union’s hegemony over the country – Putin frantically incinerated all the most sensitive files in his Dresden office, and had to brandish a pistol to fend off a rioting crowd that was intent on ransacking the place, having already stormed the offices of the East German secret police, the Stasi. Later Putin claimed he could understand the crowd’s reaction to the Stasi: ‘They were tired of the Stasi’s absolute control. Society was totally intimidated. They saw the Stasi as a monster.’ (There is no indication that he recognises that Russians had the same view of the KGB.)
    For Putin the most vexing part of the whole episode was that when the angry crowd was threatening his offices, and he called the Soviet military chief in the Dresden district for help, he was told they could do nothing without a green light from Moscow. ‘But Moscow,’ says Putin, ‘was silent. I had the sense that the country didn’t exist any more. It was plain to see that the Soviet Union was sick. And the sickness was a deadly, incurable one called paralysis. The paralysis of power.’
    Putin says he understood that Soviet control over half of Europe, based as it was on repression and barbed wire, could not go on for ever. But he admits he resented the loss of influence and regarded it as a national humiliation. ‘We just abandoned everything and left.’
    It was at this point that Putin made an abrupt life-change that introduced him for the first time to outlooks and influences that would challenge everything he had believed in as a schoolboy, as a student and as a KGB agent. In