Why? You yourself said he was plain and dull.
Perhaps it was his inner strength, the same quality that draws everybody to him now.
Did you want to get married?
Just for the sake of getting married? No, never. But to marry Volodya—yes.
But you only got married three and a half years later. What did you do all that time?
I spent three and a half years courting him!
How did he finally make up his mind?
One night we were sitting at his house, and he said, “You know what kind of person I am by now. In general I’m not very easygoing.” He was being self-critical. He explained that he was the silent type; that he was rather abrupt in some things and could even insult people, and so on. He was saying that he was a risky life partner. And he added: “In three and a half years, you have probably made up your mind.”
It sounded to me like we were breaking up. “Yes, I’ve made up my mind,” I said. He let out a doubtful “Yes?” Then I was sure that that was it, we were breaking up. But then he said, “Well, then, if that’s the way it is, I love you and propose that we get married.” So it all came as a complete surprise to me.
I agreed. Three months later we were married. We had our wedding on a floating restaurant, a little boat tied up to the riverbank.
We took this event very seriously. You can tell from our wedding portrait that we were both super-serious. For me, marriage was not a step taken lightly. And for him, too. There are people who take a responsible attitude toward marriage.
And did he, as a person who was responsible and reliable, plan where you were going to live?
There was nothing to plan. We lived with his parents, in a 27-meter-square apartment—a boathouse, as we used to call them then. You know the kind, with the high windowsills? It was very hard to exchange it for another. Only one of the rooms had a balcony, and the windows in the kitchen and the other room were way up near the ceiling. When you sat at the table, you couldn’t see the street outside, only the wall in front of your eyes. It was a big minus when you were trying to trade.
Volodya’s parents lived in the 15-meter-square room with the balcony. Our room, the one with no balcony, was 12 square meters. The apartment itself was in a district of newly constructed apartment blocks called Avtovo. Volodya’s father had received the apartment as a disabled war veteran.
Did you get along well with his parents?
Yes. His parents treated me like the woman who had been chosen by their son. And he was their sun, moon, and stars. They did everything they could for him. No one could do more for him than they did. They invested their whole lives in him. Vladimir Spiridonovich and Maria Ivanovna were very good parents.
And how did he treat them?
Enviably. He treated them so kindly. He never offended them. Of course, on occasion they would be dissatisfied with something and he wouldn’t agree with them, but in that sort of situation he would hold his tongue rather than cause them pain.
How did you two get along in the early years?
The first year we were married, we lived in total harmony. There was a continuous sense of joy, as though we were on holiday. Then I got pregnant with our oldest daughter, Masha. She was born when I was in my fourth year of school, and Volodya left for a year to study in Moscow.
You didn’t see each other all that time?
I visited him once a month in Moscow. And he came to visit two or three times. It was impossible for him to come more often.
Sergei Roldugin:
One day he came from Moscow for a few days and somehow he managed to break his arm. Some punk was bugging him in the metro, and he socked the guy. The result was a broken arm. Volodya was very upset. “They’re not going to understand this in Moscow. I’m afraid there are going to be consequences,” he said. And there really was some unpleasantness, but he didn’t tell me any of the details. Everything turned out okay in the end.
Lyudmila Putina:
His training led to a trip to Germany. He was supposed to go to Berlin, but then a friend of Volodya’s recommended him to the station chief in Dresden. The friend was also a Leningrader and worked in Dresden. His tour of duty was coming to an end, so he recommended Volodya for the job. The job in Berlin was considered more prestigious and the work was apparently more interesting, since it involved travel to West Berlin. In fact, I never learned the facts, and Volodya would never tell me. We never had a conversation on this topic.
Sergei Roldugin:
They suited one another in all respects. Of course, she began to display some temper later on. She isn’t afraid of speaking the truth. And she isn’t afraid to talk about herself. Once I bought a rocking chair and couldn’t fit it into the trunk of my car, no matter how I tried. She started giving me advice: “You have to turn it this way, and not that . . .” But there was no way it was going to fit into the car, and it was heavy, to boot. I said, “Lyuda, be quiet.” She almost went into hysterics. “Why are you men all so stupid?” she yelled.
Lyuda is an excellent hostess. Whenever I came to visit, she always whipped something up fast. She’s a real woman, who could stay up all night having a good time, and still clean up the apartment and cook the next morning. . . .
Lyuda is five years younger than me. Before becoming a stewardess, she studied at a technical college. She dropped out during her third year. She was trying to decide where to go, when she and I met. She wanted advice on where to go to school. I said she should go to the university. She decided to apply to the philology faculty, first to the preparatory department. Then she went to the Spanish department and began to take languages. She learned two languages, Spanish and French. They also taught Portuguese there, but she didn’t study that much. And when we went to Germany, she learned to speak German fluently.
Sergei Roldugin:
Before they left for Germany, Masha was born. My former father-in-law had a dacha near Vyborg, a wonderful place, and after we picked Lyuda up from the maternity hospital we all went out there and spent some time together—Volodya, Lyuda, my wife, and I. Of course, we celebrated the birth of Masha. We had dances in the evenings. “Hold the thief, hold the thief, it’s time to catch him!” Vovka could move well, although he didn’t seem particularly good at ballroom dancing.
Before we left for Germany, they had to put Lyudmila through a security clearance. They began this process while I was studying in Moscow. At that point I still didn’t know where I would be posted; but wherever it was, it would place stringent demands on my family members. For example, one’s wife had to be in good health and be able to work in a hot and humid climate. Imagine you’ve gone through five years of training, and then, when you’re finally ready to go abroad, into the field, to work, your wife can’t go due to poor health. That would be terrible!
They checked Lyudmila out thoroughly. They didn’t tell her about it, of course. They called her into the university personnel department when it was all over, and reported that she had passed the special clearance procedure. So we went to Germany.
Part 5
THE SPY
Though the standard of living is high and the beer is good, the Putins find East Germany a backward place. The country seems stuck in a totalitarian state that Russia left three decades before. Putin is shocked by the atmosphere of fear and stagnation. Then the Berlin Wall falls and chaos breaks out. Mobs ransack the Stasi headquarters. They surround the KGB offices. Panicked, Putin calls for military backup, but receives this ominous answer, “Moscow is silent. ” He suddenly feels as though everything is falling apart, as though the Soviet Union has simply disappeared.
You came to the KGB in 1975 and resigned in 1991. Sixteen years. How many of them did you spend abroad?
Not even a full five. I worked only in the GDR, in Dresden. We went there in 1985 and left after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1990.
Did you want to go abroad?
I did.
But the KGB was working officially in the GDR and the ot
her socialist countries. As one of your former colleagues said, the GDR is a province, from the perspective of foreign intelligence-gathering.
Probably. Actually, from that perspective, Leningrad is also a province. But I was always quite successful in these provinces.
But this wasn’t like The Sword and Shield, was it? What about the romance of intelligence?
Don’t forget that by that time, I had already worked in the agencies for 10 years. How romantic do you think that was?
Intelligence was always the fanciest organization in the KGB. The agents lived abroad for years. You could spend three years in a capitalist country or four to five in the so-called socialist camp. Then you’d go for nine months of retraining in Moscow and go abroad once again. I have a friend who worked in Germany for 20 years and another who worked there for 25 years. When you come home for nine months between trips, you don’t fully integrate back into life. When you come home from serving abroad, it’s hard to get used to our reality. You’re more aware of what’s going on. We young people would talk with our older colleagues. I don’t mean the really old ones who remember the Stalin era, but people with work experience. And they were a generation with entirely different views, values, and sentiments.
One of my friends worked in Afghanistan as head of a security group. When he returned home, we grilled him a lot. Do you remember what it was like here then? Everything that was connected to Afghanistan was a constant “Hurrah!” We all felt very patriotic. So we talked to him, and I asked him how he felt about his work in Afghanistan. You see, his signature was required for missile launchings. Without his signature, the decision to bomb would not be made. His answer to my question came as a shock to me: “You know, I judge the results of my work by the number of documents that I did not sign.” That really stunned me. After conversations like that, you start to think and rethink things. A person we respected was saying this. These people were authorities in the best sense of the word. And suddenly their opinion was at odds with the customary, established clichés. In intelligence at that time, we were allowed to think differently. And we could say things that few normal citizens could permit themselves to say.
Lyudmila Putina:
We arrived in Dresden in 1986. I had graduated from university by that time. Masha was a year old and, we were expecting a second child. Katya was born in Dresden. I only knew the German I had learned in school, no more.
I did not receive any special instructions before the trip. I just went through a medical exam and that was it. Our people worked completely legally in the GDR, after all. We lived in the building that housed the German state security, the Stasi. Our neighbors knew where we worked, and we knew where they worked. Although perestroika had already begun in the USSR, they still believed in the bright future of communism.
What did you do in Germany?
The work was political intelligence—obtaining information about political figures and the plans of the potential opponent.
Is it correct to say you were involved in “intelligence from the territory”?
More or less, although that phrase generally means foreign intelligence-gathering from the territory of the USSR [about other countries], and we were working from the territory of East Germany. We were interested in any information about the “main opponent,” as we called them, and the main opponent was considered NATO.
Did you travel into West Germany?
No, not once while I was working in the GDR.
So what exactly did you do there?
The usual intelligence activities: recruiting sources of information, obtaining information, analyzing it, and sending it to Moscow. I looked for information about political parties, the tendencies inside these parties, their leaders. I examined today’s leaders and the possible leaders of tomorrow and the promotion of people to certain posts in the parties and the government. It was important to know who was doing what and how, what was going on in the Foreign Ministry of a particular country, how they were constructing their policy on certain issues and in various areas of the world, and how our partners would react in disarmament talks. Of course, in order to obtain such information, you need sources. So recruitment of sources, procurement of information, and assessment and analysis were big parts of the job. It was very routine work.
Lyudmila Putina:
We did not discuss work at home. I think the nature of my husband’s work made a difference. There was always a principle at the KGB: Do not share things with your wife. They told us that there had been incidents when excessive frankness had led to unfortunate consequences. They always proceeded from the premise that the less the wife knew, the better she’d sleep. I socialized fairly often with the Germans, and if one of my acquaintances was undesirable, Volodya would let me know.
Life in the GDR was probably better than in Peter?
Yes, we had come from a Russia where there were lines and shortages, and in the GDR there was always plenty of everything. I gained about 25 pounds, and weighed about 165.
And how much do you weigh now?
165.
What happened?
Let me tell you honestly . . .
The beer?
Of course! We used to go to a little town called Radeberg, where there was one of the best breweries in East Germany. I would order a three-liter keg. You pour the beer into the keg, you add a spigot, and you can drink straight from the barrel. So I had 3.8 liters of beer every week. And my job was only two steps from my house, so I didn’t work off the extra calories.
And no sports?
There were no facilities there. And we also worked a lot.
Lyudmila Putina:
We lived in a service apartment in a German building. It was large, with 12 entryways. Our group took up five apartments. Volodyaʹs driver and his wife lived in another building. And there were four other apartments with military intelligence nearby. All the rest were Germans who worked at the GDR state security.
Our group worked in a separate building—a German mansion that was surrounded by a wall. It had either three or four flours, I donʹt remember. But it was only a five-minute walk from our apartment to that building. From the window of his office, Volodya could see little Katya in day care. In the morning he would take Masha to the day-care center, which was right under the windows of our apartment, and then take Katya to the nursery.
They always came home for lunch. All of the guys would have lunch at home. Sometimes they would come to our house in the evenings—friends from work, sometimes Germans too. We were friends with several families. It was fun. We talked about nothing special, told jokes and anecdotes. Volodya knows how to tell a joke well.
On the weekends we would take trips outside the city. We had a service car, a Zhiguli. This was considered a pretty good car in the GDR, at least compared to the local Trabants. Getting a car in those days in the GDR was as difficult as it was in the Soviet Union. So, on the weekends, we would take trips with the whole family. There were many beautiful places outside Dresden. Saxony was only 20 to 30 minutes away. We would take a walk, have some hot dogs and beer, and then head home.
You had some evident successes when you worked in Dresden.
My work went well. It was normal to be promoted while working at a foreign posting. I was promoted twice.
What was your job title when you came to the GDR?
I was a senior case officer. My next job was assistant to the head of the department. That was considered quite a good advance. And then I was promoted to senior assistant. There was nothing higher. Above me was the top managerial level, and we only had one boss. So as an incentive, I was made a member of the Party committee of the KGB representation in the GDR.
There are reports that you took part in an operation called Lightbeam.
I don’t know, exactly. I wasn’t involved in it. I don’t even know if it was executed or not. As far as I can remember, it involved working with the political leadership of the GDR. I didn’t have anything to do with it.
> But people say that you were the one who controlled the former secretary of the Dresden regional committee of the SED, Hans Modrow.8
I met Modrow a few times at official receptions. That was the extent of our acquaintance. He socialized with people of a different rank—the commander of the army, our senior communications officer. And, in general, we didn’t work with Party functionaries. Including our own, by the way. It was prohibited.
And you weren’t the one to obtain the documentation about the Eurofighter bomber?
I wasn’t involved in technical intelligence. I didn’t do that line of work. Why have they made up so much about me? It’s complete nonsense!
Well, they wanted to portray you as a super-spy. And you’re denying everything. But then why did you get promoted?
For concrete results in my work—that’s what it was called. Success was measured by the quantity of realized units of information. If you procured information from the sources you had at your disposal, put it together, and sent it to the relevant offices, you would obtain the appropriate evaluation.
First Person Page 6
