You are answering like an intelligence officer. In other words, you’re not really answering. Take Markus Wolf, the former head of East German intelligence. He insulted you. He says that the bronze medal that you received, with the inscription “For services to the National People’s Army of the GDR,” is a medal that they gave to practically every secretary, provided she didn’t have any gross violations in her record.
Markus Wolf is entirely correct. And there is nothing offensive in what he said. Just the opposite. He just confirmed that I didn’t have any gross violations in my record. The only thing is that my medal, I believe, doesn’t say “for services” but says “for outstanding services to the National People’s Army of the GDR.”
You’re not expecting any sensational publications about yourself, for example, in Germany?
No. To be honest, no.
It’s kind of funny to read all that nonsense in the papers. I’m baffled to read that the Western countries are looking for agents whom I recruited. It’s all baloney. Our friends, as we called the GDR security agents, have copies of everything we produced. It is all preserved in their archives. Therefore it is impossible to say that I was involved in some sort of secret operations that were out of sight of the local GDR government agencies or the security agencies. A large part of our work was done through citizens of the GDR. They are all on the roster. Everything is transparent and understandable. And German counterintelligence knows about all of this.
I did not work against the interests of Germany. That’s absolutely obvious. Moreover, if it had been otherwise, I wouldn’t have been allowed to visit any Western country. I wasn’t a high-ranking official then. But I have traveled a lot of places since then, including Germany. Some of the GDR state security officers even wrote letters to me when I worked in St. Petersburg as vice mayor. And at a reception I once said to the German consul, “Please note that I receive letters, and that these are my personal connections. I understand that you have a campaign now against former state security agents. They are being captured and persecuted for political reasons. But these are my friends, and I will not renounce them.” He replied, “We understand everything, Mr. Putin. Everything is clear.” They knew perfectly well who I was and where I had come from. I didn’t hide it.
Lyudmila Putina:
Of course life in the GDR was very different from life in Russia. The streets were clean. They would wash the windows once a week. There was an abundance of goods—not like what they had in West Germany, of course, but still better than in Russia. There was one detail that surprised me. It was trivial—should I even mention it? It was the way German women would hang out their clothes. In the morning, before work, about 7:00 A.M., they would go out in the backyard. And each housewife would stretch a rope between these metal poles, and then she would hang her laundry out on the lines in very, very neat rows, with clothespins. They were all alike.
The Germans were very orderly in their daily life, and their standard of living was better than ours. I think the GDR state security people got higher salaries than our guys, judging from how our German neighbors lived. Of course we tried to economize and to save up enough money to buy a car. Then, when we returned home, we bought a Volga. Some of Volodya’s salary was paid in German marks and some in dollars. But we did not spend much money, except on food. We didn’t have to spend any money on anything. We lived in a government apartment with government-issued dishes.
Really, we sat on our suitcases and dreamed of returning home. At the beginning, we were really homesick. But we were pretty comfortable in the GDR. Four years passed, and in four years a foreign country and a foreign city can become almost like your own. When the Berlin Wall fell and it was clear this was the end, we had the horrible feeling that the country that had almost become our home would no longer exist.
If German counterintelligence, as you say, knows everything about your activity in the GDR, then that means that it knows about everything and everyone you worked with in your intelligence group. Your entire agents’ network is ruined.
We destroyed everything—all our communications, our lists of contacts and our agents’ networks. I personally burned a huge amount of material. We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst.
We burned papers night and day. All the most valuable items were hauled away to Moscow. But it no longer meant anything in terms of operations. All of the contacts were cut off. Work with the information sources was stopped for security reasons. The materials were destroyed or sent into the archives. Amen!
When was that?
In 1989, when they began to break into the directorate of the Ministry of Security in the GDR. We were afraid they would come for us, too.
But you can understand the people who broke into the Ministry of Security, can’t you?
You can. Only the way in which they expressed their protest was upsetting.
I stood in the crowd and watched it happen. People were breaking into the Ministry of Security (MGB). A woman shouted: “Look for the passageway under the Elba! There are prisoners there being tortured in water up to their knees!” What prisoners? Why under the Elba? True, there was a jail cell used for interrogations, but obviously it wasn’t under the Elba.
This was a backlash, of course. I understood those people—they were tired of being watched by the MGB, especially because the surveillance was so totally invasive. They saw the MGB as a monster.
But the MGB was also part of society. It was infected with the same sicknesses. There were all kinds of people who worked there, but the people I knew were decent people. I was friends with many of them, and I think that the way they are now being castigated isn’t right. It’s the same thing the MGB system did to the civil society of East Germany, to its people.
Yes, there probably were some MGB agents who engaged in persecution of people. I didn’t see it. I don’t want to say that it didn’t happen. But I personally did not see it.
In a sense, the GDR was a real eye-opener for me. I thought I was going to an Eastern European country, to the center of Europe. It was already the end of the 1980s. And suddenly, when I talked with people from the MGB, I realized that both they themselves and the GDR were going through something the Soviet Union had gone through many years before.
It was a harshly totalitarian country, similar to the Soviet Union, only 30 years earlier. And the tragedy is that many people sincerely believed in all those Communist ideals. I wondered at the time: if some changes in the USSR begin, how would it affect the lives of these people? The alarmists got it right. It was hard to imagine that such abrupt changes could take hold in the GDR. No one could have ever imagined it! And we didn’t know how it would end. Of course we had begun to suspect that the regime would not last long. Perestroika had already begun in our country—many closed subjects were now being discussed openly. But in the GDR, that sort of talk was totally taboo—they were trying to totally preserve their society. Families had been torn apart. Some relatives lived on one side of the Wall, some on the other. Everyone was followed. Of course that wasn’t normal. It wasn’t natural.
But they didn’t touch you when they broke into the MGB?
Well, crowds gathered around our building, too.
Alright, the Germans tore apart their own MGB. That was their own internal affair. But we weren’t their internal affair. Those crowds were a serious threat. We had documents in our building. And nobody lifted a finger to protect us.
We were prepared to defend ourselves against the crowd, and we would have been within our rights to do so, under an agreement between our ministries and governments. We were forced to demonstrate our readiness to defend our building. And that determination certainly made an impression on them, at least for awhile.
Did you have bodyguards?
Yes, several.
You didn’t try to go out and talk with people?
After a while, when the crowd grew angry, I went out and asked people what they wanted. I explained to them that this was a Soviet mi
litary organization. And someone shouted from the crowd: “Then why do you have cars with German license plates in the parking lot? What are you doing here, anyway?” It was as if they were saying, “We know what you’re up to.” I explained that we had an agreement, which allowed us to use German license plates. “And who are you?” they shouted. “You speak German too well.” I replied that I was a translator.
These people were in an aggressive mood. I called our group of forces and explained the situation. And I was told: “We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.” After a few hours our military people did finally get there. And the crowd dispersed. But that business of “Moscow is silent”—I got the feeling then that the country no longer existed. That it had disappeared. It was clear that the Union was ailing. And it had a terminal disease without a cure—a paralysis of power.
Lyudmila Putina:
I saw what happened to my neighbors when all those revolutionary events started in the GDR. My neighbor, who was my friend, cried for a week. She cried for her lost ideals, for the collapse of everything that she had believed in her whole life. For them, it was the collapse of everything—their lives, their careers. They were all left without jobs. There was a ban on their profession. Katya had a teacher in the day-care center who was an educator by profession. After the fall of the Wall, she no longer had the right to work in day care and educate children. They had all been officers of the MGB. She went through a psychological crisis, but then somehow she pulled herself together and went to work in a home for senior citizens.
Another German friend from the GDR found a job with a Western firm. She had worked there for a long time and was quite successful, when suddenly her boss, in the midst of a heated discussion, said that all people from the GDR were dense, uneducated, and incompetent—that they were second-class citizens. She listened to all this and said, “But I’m from the GDR. Do you think I’m incompetent as well?” Her boss fell silent. He had no retort because there was nothing wrong with her work.
Did you suffer when the Berlin Wall fell?
Actually, I thought the whole thing was inevitable. To be honest, I only really regretted that the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe, although intellectually I understood that a position built on walls and dividers cannot last. But I wanted something different to rise in its place. And nothing different was proposed. That’s what hurt. They just dropped everything and went away.
Later, back in Peter, I had a very interesting meeting with Kissinger, and he confirmed what I already thought. There was a commission called the Kissinger-Sobchak Commission, founded to develop St. Petersburg and to attract foreign investment. Kissinger came to our city several times. Once I met him at the airport. We got into a car and went to the residence. On the way, he asked me where I was from and what I was doing. He was an inquisitive old fellow. He looks like he is nodding off to sleep, but in fact he sees and hears everything. We spoke through an interpreter. He asked me, “Have you worked here long?” I replied that it had been about a year. “Where did you work before that?” asked Kissinger.
“At the Leningrad City Council,” I replied.
“And before the Leningrad City Council?”
“At the university.”
“And before the university?”
“I was in the army before that.”
“In what troops?”
“Well,” I thought to myself. “Now I’m going to upset you, Mr. Kissinger.”
“I worked in intelligence,” I said.
“Did you work abroad?” he asked calmly.
“Yes,” I said. “In Germany.”
“East or West?”
“East.”
“All decent people got their start in intelligence. I did, too,” said Kissinger.
Then he said something that was completely unexpected and very interesting. “You know, I am very much criticized for the position I took regarding the USSR back then. I believed that the Soviet Union should not abandon Eastern Europe so quickly. We were changing the balance in the world very rapidly, and I thought it could lead to undesirable consequences. And now I’m being blamed for that position. People say, ‘See, the Soviets left, and everything’s normal. You thought it was impossible.’ But I really did think it was impossible.” Then he thought a while and added, “Frankly, to this day I don’t understand why Gorbachev did that.”
I had never imagined I might hear something like that from the lips of Henry Kissinger. I told him what I thought, and I will repeat it to you right now: Kissinger was right. We would have avoided a lot of problems if the Soviets had not made such a hasty exit from Eastern Europe.
Part 6
THE DEMOCRAT
Disillusioned with the KGB, Putin decides to embark on an academic career. He returns to Leningrad University intending to write his doctoral dissertation, but is persuaded to work for Anatoly Sobchak, the chair of the City Council, instead. He throws himself into politics. As Sobchak’s deputy, he gets involved in the economic and political reconstruction of St. Petersburg and helps Sobchak in his bid to become mayor. But then things get rough. Lyudmila has a terrible car accident ; their dacha is destroyed by fire; and Sobchak looses the mayoral elections. Putin resigns from the Council to plot his next move.
Did you ever think that the KGB had become obsolete?
I was offered a job in the central office in Moscow, but I turned it down. Why? I knew that there was no future to the system. The country didn’t have a future. And it would have been very difficult to sit inside the system and wait for it all to collapse around me.
Sergei Roldugin:
I remember how confused and upset Volodya felt about the collapse of the whole intelligence network in Germany. He would say, “You just can’t do that! How can you do that? I know that I can be wrong, but how can the most highly qualified professionals be mistaken?” He was very disenchanted. I said to him, “You know, Volodya, don’t get me started.” Then he said, “I’m going to leave the KGB!” And I said to him, “There’s no such thing as a former intelligence agent.”
Volodya spoke from the heart, and I believed him. But how can you escape the knowledge and information in your mind? You can stop working at this organization, but its worldview and way of thinking remain stuck in your head.
The work we did was no longer necessary. What was the point of writing, recruiting, and procuring information? Nobody at Moscow Center was reading our reports. Didn’t we warn them about what was coming? Didn’t we provide them with recommendations on how to act? There was no reaction. Who wants to work for nothing? To spend years of your life—what for?—just to get paid?
Let’s say, for example, that my friends in scientific and technical intelligence paid several million dollars for some information about an important scientific discovery. It would have cost our country billions of dollars to independently develop the same project. My friends would procure this information and send it to the Center. People there would look at it and say, “Wonderful. Great information. Thanks. Kisses. We’ll recommend you guys for medals.” But then they wouldn’t use the intelligence. They wouldn’t even try, because the technical level of our industry simply didn’t allow for it.
In short, when we returned from Germany in January 1990, I continued to work in the agencies, but I began to think quietly about a backup plan. I had two children, and I couldn’t afford to throw everything away. What could I do?
Sergei Roldugin:
When Volodya came back from Germany, he told me that he had been offered a promotion in Moscow or Peter. We discussed which position would be better, and I said, “In Moscow, they’re all bosses. There are no normal people there. One guy has an uncle in the ministry, another has a brother, a third has a brother-in-law. And you don’t have anybody. How will you make it there?” Volodya thought for a while and then said, “But Moscow . . . there are prospects there.” But I could see that he was clearly leaning toward staying in St. Petersburg.
I was happy to go “undercover” at Leningrad State University (LGU). I wanted to write my doctoral dissertation, check out the university, and perhaps get a job there. So in 1990, I became assistant to the president of the university, responsible for international liaison. I was in the “active reserves.”
Lyudmila Putina:
We followed perestroika and were aware of everything that went on from 1986 to 1988, but only from television. We heard people’s stories about the happy mood of those years.
But when we returned home, I didnʹt notice any changes—there were the same terrible lines, the ration cards, the coupons, the empty shelves. For a while after we returned home I was even afraid to go to the store. I wasnʹt able, like some people, to sniff out all the bargains and to stand in all the lines. I would just dart into the nearest store, buy whatever was most necessary, and go home. It was horrible.
Besides, we hadn’t accumulated savings while working in Germany. The car ate up all our money. Our German neighbors did give us their old washing machine, a 20-year-old model. We brought it back home, and used it for five more years.
The situation changed for my husband at work. Despite the fact that, as far as I could tell, his work in Germany had been successful, he was clearly thinking about what to do next. I think at a certain point he felt that he had lost touch with his life’s real purpose. And of course it wasn’t easy, parting with the past and making the decision to go into politics.
First Person Page 7
