Anyone who wants to understand Vladimir Putin needs to know the
story of what happened to him one night in East Germany 33 years ago.
It was December 5, 1989, just a few weeks after the Berlin Wall fell.
In East Germany, communism was dead,
although free democratic elections weren’t scheduled until the spring.
In the east German city of Dresden, protestors stormed the regional headquarters of the East
German secret police, the Stasi, completely overrunning the office.
Then, a small group of protestors - reportedly no more than 20 - decided to head across the
street to the local headquarters of the Soviet secret service, the KGB.
Russian media later mythologized the incident and exaggerated the number of demonstrators to 5,000
Putin anticipated the protestors’ arrival and called for help from the
Soviet military stationed in East Germany to protect the employees
in the office as well as the files they had on informants and agents.
They tried to burn as many of the files as possible and even broke the furnace!
But the Red Army was not coming to their rescue.
In his biography, First Person, Putin recalled being told on the phone:
"We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.”
Those words, “Moscow is silent”,
stayed with him because it finally dawned on him that the Soviet Union had all but disappeared.
Now it was up to Putin to figure out how to get himself and his KGB
colleagues out of that dangerous mess.
How could he stop the crowd from swarming the building?
In an interview with the BBC, one of the protestors, Siegfried Dannath,
recalled how when the mob approached the KGB house, the guard immediately rushed inside.
Shortly afterward, “an officer emerged - quite small, agitated”.
That officer was 37-year-old KGB Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin.
Except he didn’t say he was a spy.
Putin said he was a translator.
He told the crowd in fluent German that the property was on Soviet territory.
According to the protestor, Putin told the group to leave, quote:
“Don’t try to force your way into this property. My comrades are armed,
and they’re authorized to use their weapons in an emergency.”
Putin was bluffing.
But the mob believed him and backed away.
Leaving staff and the sensitive files unscathed.
Long before Vladimir Putin became president of Russia, he fulfilled his teenage wish of
becoming a KGB agent - inspired by the books he read and films he watched.
He spent five years stationed in the isolated East German city of Dresden, from 1985 to 1989.
East Germany was important to Moscow. It was a satellite state of the Soviet Union
that sat on the doorstep of NATO, the western military alliance.
We don’t have much information about what kind of work Putin did
in Dresden. He’s said little about his work in the eighties.
Other than speaking about that December day in 1989.
What he witnessed was humiliating.
He saw the west winning the Cold War as the Eastern bloc crumbled under his feet.
The Atlantic wrote, “Putin's experience in Dresden undoubtedly reinforced his
view of his identity and role as the critical outsider learning from the mistakes of others.”
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev failed to prevent
the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
One of the largest and most powerful empires in history unraveled, breaking up into 15 nations,
leaving Russia a shadow of its former self.
Putin called it “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.”
He later claimed he knew the collapse was inevitable,
“I understood that a position based on walls and water barriers cannot exist forever. But I wanted
something different to rise in its place. And nothing different was proposed. That's what hurt."
Putin never rose to the top ranks of the KGB, he remained a mid-level agent,
on the periphery. In the nineties, he left the KGB to become deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, and
by the late nineties, he transferred to Moscow to work in President Boris Yeltsin's administration.
He was picked to lead the new Federal Security Service which replaced the KGB.
And then he was surprisingly chosen by Yeltsin as prime minister in 1999.
He saw how weak Russia had become.
When President Bill Clinton approved airstrikes against Serbian forces in Bosnia - Washington
didn’t even consult Yeltsin. The Serbs share deep ethnic and religious ties with Russia.
Putin’s leadership would be very different from Yeltsin’s when he took over as President in 2000.
He impressed Clinton’s point man on Russia, Strobe Talbott, the US Deputy Secretary of State,
who wrote in his memoirs that he was struck by Putin’s “ability to
convey self-control and confidence in a low-key, soft-spoken manner”.
Putin’s image though is anything but low-key.
He’s frequently photographed doing super manly things,
like fishing shirtless, overpowering opponents in judo, or driving race cars.
The macho President has put his tough image on display for both his fellow countrymen and the
world - reinforcing the image of a strong leader trying to build up a strong, resurgent country.
In 1999, just before taking office, Putin stressed the importance of strengthening
the state, writing in an article in the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta:
“Russia is in the midst of one of the most difficult periods in its history. For the first
time in the past 200-300 years, it is facing a real threat of sliding to the second, and
possibly even third, echelon of world states. We are running out of time for removing this threat.”
Many believe his actions over the years have been guided by one principle:
to “make Russia great again”
When Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula
from Ukraine in 2014 - it led to a spike in Putin’s popularity at home.
And late on February 23rd, 2022, Russia started attacking targets all over Ukraine.
Why? The clearest answer came from Putin himself.
Two days prior to the attack, Putin delivered a speech where he described
Ukraine as an illegitimate country, that it sits on “historically…Russian land”.
He views Ukraine as a lost part of Russia itself.
But Ukraine doesn’t see it that way.
It voted overwhelmingly to establish an independent state
and now seeks to join NATO which Putin is determined to block.
Putin’s closest aides today consist of those from his KGB days or who have security backgrounds.
They are believed to tell him only what he wants to hear.
He Putin is said to want to rebuild a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, bemoaning
the collapse of the communist order which traumatized him as a young agent in East Germany.
In this latest attack on Ukraine, a Russian tank could be seen flying the Soviet flag.
Officially, Russia has dismissed the possibility of reviving the Soviet Union.
Putting this story together from start to finish in just a couple of days was not easy to pull off.
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Thanks for watching. For Newsthink, I’m Cindy Pom