Putin is a curious mixture of KGB and what you might call Russian orthodoxy/imperialism.
The idea that animates him is the idea of a great Russia,
A powerful Russia.
His war in Ukraine, is essentially, it's a colonial war.
It's a moment of imperial ecstasy and agony.
And hey, it turns out that actually Ukrainians don't want to be dominated by Moscow,
and therefore we find ourselves in the situation of bitter and bloody conflict.
In order to understand where we are now in 2022,
I think you've got to go back almost 70 years to 1952,
when Vladimir Putin was born.
Biography isn't necessarily destiny,
but he came from a pretty working-class family in what was then Leningrad.
His grandfather, allegedly was cook to Lenin and Stalin.
So, there was already a connection with the Kremlin.
What was interesting about the young Putin is that he had one burning ambition
and the ambition wasn't to make the world a better place,
the ambition was to join the KGB.
It was a time of Soviet patriotism and propaganda.
There was one TV film in particular that Putin just adored,
that played on his young psyche.
Which was called The Shield and the Sword.
An undercover Soviet spy is in the Nazi high command,
Seemingly working for the Germans,
but actually saving the Soviet Union and saving the motherland.
Putin saw that, decided he wants to join the KGB
and he became an operative.
He acquired a nickname at some point during this period,
which was, his nickname was 'Moth'.
And basically the thing about the moth was that you don't notice the moth,
the moth flies around unseen in the dark
and you think well it's only a moth
and then one day you go and put your favourite coat on and it's full of holes.
That was a kind of metaphor for how Putin operated.
And eventually he joined the most prestigious department of the KGB
called the KGB's first directorate,
which dealt with foreign intelligence.
But he doesn't go to Washington,
where the glamorous people go, where the well-connected young spies go.
He doesn't go to London or Paris.
He goes to Dresden, East Germany's second city.
Yes he was in the KGB, but was he a super spy? No.
Was he actually rather average, verging on mediocre?
I think he was.
The Soviet Union has now built up its forces to a level far higher
than it needs for its own defence.
And more and more people are asking just what are the Russians up to?
When Russians or Soviet citizens
in the late 1980s were going through Perestroika, reform, greater freedoms,
Putin was still in KGB mode in provincial East Germany.
And then from his point of view this great catastrophe happens.
Mr Gorbachev tear down this wall.
One of the most formative moments for Vladimir Putin
was the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Supposedly, a crowd turns up at the KGB headquarters in Dresden
and Putin holds them off and the KGB are able to burn all their files
and their lists of secret agents and assets and so on.
Allegedly, Putin contacted Moscow and said look you know we're under siege here,
what do we do?
And he says: Moscow was silent.
The red flag was still fluttering above the Kremlin tonight,
but the Soviet empire it symbolised was no more.
The 90s was a fantastically unstable period in Russian history.
Putin returns from Dresden to Leningrad
and he embraces the new democratic Russia
in the shape of Anatoly Sobchak, who was his old law professor.
And Sobchak ends up becoming the mayor of the new city
or the renamed city of St Petersburg and Putin becomes his aid.
He becomes quite an important functionary in the city administration,
he becomes the head of its foreign relations committee.
At a time where there are food shortages,
where it's cold, where no one really understands how capitalism works.
And the allegation, which I found quite compelling
is that this is when Putin's personal corruption starts.
What you have to understand is that St Petersburg in the 1990s
is the most criminal city in Russia.
It has two governments,
it has a political government headed up until 1996 by Sobchak
and it has a shadow government, a night government,
of mafia, of gangsters, of villains.
And, you know what?
The villains and the KGB guys and the politicians,
they all go to the same restaurants.
And essentially the kind of nucleus of KGB offices that Putin made in St Petersburg,
he took with him as he rose and rose and rose up the political ladder.
What we see from '96 onwards is that Putin has the most stunning rise,
I mean it's a sharp, vertical ascent.
By 1998 from nowhere he's been appointed head of the FSB,
the Federal Security Service, which is the main domestic successor to the KGB.
Sweeping back into the Kremlin courtyard,
President Yeltsin's desperate to shake off his image as a sick man of Russia.
This is a sort of chaotic period, where Yeltsin is in poor health
and what Yeltsin is looking for is a kind of successor,
who will guarantee that he can hang on to all the money he's stolen
and they try out various candidates.
And then they think, well what about that FSB guy?
He's a bit grey, he seems quite loyal.
He seems quite, you know manipulable, I mean someone we can control
and they think, OK let's try Putin.
He goes from being an obscure Kremlin apparatchik within three years
to becoming president of the Russian Federation.
Behind me in the Kremlin there's a new man in charge.
Six months ago hardly anyone had heard of him.
This was not inherently down to the charm and talent of one man,
essentially what was going on with Putin as it's kind of figurehead
was a counter-revolution by the KGB.
That's essentially what happened, the KGB were out
by 2000 they were back.