Putin’s People. Catherine Belton

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СКАЧАТЬ an officer in the feared and hated KGB. It is still the first wave of the democracy movement, a time when admitting this could compromise his boss, Sobchak, a rousing orator who rose to mayor on a tide of condemnation of the secrets of the old regime, of the abuses perpetrated by the KGB. To this day, Shadkhan still questions whether Putin’s choice was part of a careful rehabilitation plan. ‘I always ask why he chose me. He understood that I was needed, and he was ready to tell me he was from the KGB. He wanted to show that people of the KGB were also progressive.’ Putin chose well. ‘A critic once told me that I always humanised my subject matter, no matter who they were,’ Shadkhan recalls. ‘I humanised him. I wanted to know who he was and what did he see. I was a person who had always criticised the Soviet authorities. I endured a lot from them. But I was sympathetic to him. We became friends. He seemed to me one who would drive the country forward, who would really do something. He really recruited me.’[2]

      Throughout the film, Putin artfully takes opportunities to stress the good qualities of the KGB. Where he served, he insists in response to a delicate question on whether he abused his position to take bribes, such actions were considered ‘a betrayal of the motherland’, and would be punished with the full force of the law. As for being an ‘official’, a chinovnik, the word need not have any negative connotation, he claims. He’d served his country as a military chinovnik; now he was a civilian official, serving – as he had before – his country ‘outside the realm of political competition’.

      By the end of the documentary, Shadkhan appears to have fully bought in. The film concludes with a nod and a wink to a glorified KGB past: Putin is shown surveying the icy river Neva, wrapped against the cold in a fur hat, a man of the people behind the wheel of a white Zhiguli, the boxy car ubiquitous in those days. As he watches over the city with a steely and protective gaze, the film closes to the strains of the theme tune from a popular Soviet TV series – 17 Moments of Spring – that made a hero out of an undercover KGB spy who had infiltrated deep into Nazi Germany’s ruling regime. It was Shadkhan’s choice. ‘He was a person exactly of his profession. I wanted to show how it turned out that he was still in the same profession.’

      Putin, however, had taken care in the interview to give the impression that he’d resigned from the KGB as soon as he’d returned to Leningrad, as St Petersburg was then called, in February 1990. He told Shadkhan that he’d left for ‘all kinds of reasons’, not for political ones, indicating that he’d done so before he started working in May of that year with Sobchak, then a law professor at Leningrad’s State University and the fast-rising star of the city’s new democratic movement. Putin had returned to the tsarist-era capital from five years of service in Dresden in East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR), where he’d served as liaison officer between the KGB and the Stasi, the East German secret police. Later legend had it that he’d confided to a colleague that he feared he might have no better future than working as a taxi driver on his return.[3] Apparently he was keen to create the impression that he’d cut all ties to his old masters, that Russia’s rapidly changing order had cast him adrift.

      What Putin told Shadkhan was just the start of a string of falsehoods and obfuscation surrounding his KGB career. In the imploding empire that he had returned to from Dresden, nothing was quite as it seemed. From the KGB villa perched high on the banks of the river Elbe overlooking Dresden’s still elegant sprawl, Putin had already witnessed at first hand the end of the Soviet empire’s control of the GDR, the collapse of the so-called socialist dream. The Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact power bloc had shattered around him as its citizens rebelled against the Communist leadership. He’d watched, first from afar, as the aftershocks began to reverberate across the Soviet Union and, inspired by the Berlin Wall’s collapse, nationalist movements spread ever more rapidly across the country, forcing the Communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev into ever more compromise with a new generation of democratic leaders. By the time of Putin’s interview with Shadkhan, one of those leaders, Boris Yeltsin, had emerged victorious from an attempted hard-line coup in August 1991. The abortive putsch had sought to turn the clock back on political and economic freedoms, but ended in resounding failure. Yeltsin banned the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The old regime, suddenly, seemed to have been swept away.

      But what replaced it was only a partial changing of the guard, and what happened to the KGB was a case in point. Yeltsin had decapitated the top echelon of the KGB, and then signed a decree breaking it up into four different domestic services. But what emerged in its place was a hydra-headed monster in which many officers, like Putin, retreated to the shadows and continued to serve underground, while the powerful foreign-intelligence service remained intact. It was a system where the rules of normal life seemed to have long been suspended. It was a shadowland of half-truths and appearances, while underneath it all factions of the old elite continued to cling to what remained of the reins.

      Putin was to give several different versions of the timing and circumstances of his resignation from the KGB. But according to one former senior KGB officer close to him, none of them are true. He would tell interviewers writing his official biography that he resigned a few months after he began working for Sobchak at the university, but his resignation letter had somehow got lost in the post. Instead, he claimed, Sobchak had personally telephoned Vladimir Kryuchkov, the then KGB chief, to ensure his resignation at the height of the hard-line August 1991 coup. This was the story that became the official version. But it sounds like fiction. The chances of Sobchak reaching Kryuchkov in the middle of a coup in order to secure the resignation of one employee seem slim at best. Instead, according to the close Putin ally, Putin continued receiving his paycheque from the security services for at least a year after the August coup attempt. By the time he resigned, his position at the top of Russia’s second city’s new leadership was secure. He’d penetrated deep into the country’s new democratic leadership, and was the point man for the administration’s ties with law enforcement, including the KGB’s successor agency, the Federal Security Service, or FSB. His performance as deputy mayor, as clearly presented in the Shadkhan interview, was already slick and self-assured.

      The story of how and when Putin actually resigned, and how he came to work for Sobchak, is the story of how a KGB cadre began to morph in the country’s democratic transformation and attach themselves to the new leadership. It’s the story of how a faction of the KGB, in particular part of its foreign-intelligence arm, had long been secretly preparing for change in the tumult of the Soviet Union’s perestroika reforms. Putin appears to have been part of this process while he was in Dresden. Later, after Germany reunified, the country’s security services suspected he was part of a group working on a special operation, ‘Operation Luch’, or Sunbeam, that had been preparing since at least 1988 in case the East German regime collapsed.[4] This operation was to recruit a network of agents that could continue to operate for the Russians long after the fall.

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      DRESDEN – When Putin arrived in Dresden in 1985, East Germany was already living on borrowed time. On the verge of bankruptcy, the country was surviving with the help of a billion-DM loan from West Germany,[5] while voices of dissent were on the rise. Putin arrived there at the age of thirty-two, apparently fresh from a stint training at the KGB’s elite Red Banner academy for foreign-intelligence officers, and began work in an elegant art deco villa with a sweeping staircase and a balcony that overlooked a quiet, brightly-painted neighbourhood street. The villa, surrounded by leafy trees and rows of neat family homes for the Stasi elite, was just around the corner from the grey sprawl of the Stasi headquarters, where dozens of political prisoners were held in tiny windowless cells. Hans Modrow, the local leader of the ruling Communist Party, the SED, was known as a reformer. But he was also heavy-handed in his efforts to clamp down on dissent. All around the eastern bloc, the mood of protest was increasing amidst the misery and shortages of the planned economy and the brutality of state law-enforcement agencies. Sensing an opportunity, US intelligence agencies, with the help of the Vatican, had quietly started operations to funnel printing and communications equipment and cash to the Solidarność protest movement in Poland, where dissent against the Soviets had always been the strongest.

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