We Need to Talk About Putin: Why the West Gets Him Wrong полностью

These experiences left their marks on Putin as much as his time in the KGB. However, it is interesting to wonder how far before and after his service he has been chasing and idolising a fantasy image of the spooks rather than the reality. In his autobiography, First Person, he admits that before he joined the KGB, his picture of the agency came from spy stories, films and television programmes. The appeal was less the tradecraft or the nature of the missions as much as the sense that a spy really mattered. As he put it, ‘I was most amazed by how a small force, a single person, really, can accomplish something an entire army cannot. A single intelligence officer could rule over the fates of thousands of people. At least, that’s how I saw it.’

This thought that a single intelligence officer could rule over the fates of thousands., one might suggest, was what gave a scrappy kid from the wrong side of Leningrad an idea of how to get power and a sense of significance. The irony is that while he has, since then, become the lord of the spies, his actual career in the KGB was perhaps less distinguished than he might have liked.

After all, there were KGB officers and KGB officers. For all the artfully crafted mythology built around him, Putin was never some Soviet James Bond. He was at first posted in counter-intelligence, but in 1985, in part a result of his good command of German, he was sent to Dresden, in Communist East Germany. At this point, he transferred to the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, its foreign espionage division, though he never left the German Democratic Republic and seems largely to have been collating records and debriefing Soviet and East German citizens who travelled abroad. He filed reports for others to read, got plump on German beer (he admits to putting on 25 pounds), saved money to buy a car and generally lived a comfortable life. His was not exactly a glittering career, and when Viktor Kryuchkov, who had been head of the First Chief Directorate at the time, was later asked about Putin, he had to admit that he had never heard of him.

As a result of that posting, Putin missed the reformist excitement of the Soviet Union in the later 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev began to peel away the decades of repression and stagnation. Instead, his experience was of the once-disciplined German Democratic Republic falling apart around him, as Moscow essentially allowed the Germans to go their own way. While crowds besieged their offices, the KGB officers burned documents by the armful and pleaded for protection from the local Soviet garrison, but the Chekists were told they could do nothing without orders from Moscow, ‘and Moscow is silent’.

For Putin, the lesson seems not to have been that all empires fall, and the bloodier ones tend to fall harder. Nor even that the Soviet system had proven beyond reform. Rather, that the real problem of the USSR was that, in his own words, ‘it had a terminal disease without cure – a paralysis of power’. As president, he would demonstrate a determination to prove that the state retains both power and the will to use it. He has some of the tradecraft of the trained security service officer, especially when it comes to identifying and exploiting people’s vulnerabilities, but his experiences were from the late KGB, one driven not by dreams of Marxist-Leninist glory but corrupt self-interest. He did not witness the positive side of Gorbachev’s perestroika reform programme, just the cataclysmic outcomes, which he is clearly keen are not repeated.

He was also pretty mediocre at the job, so while he might look to the KGB’s successors as his natural allies and constituents, there is also an element of ‘wannabe-ness’ about this relationship. He has, for example, blessed the growth of what is almost a personality cult around Yuri Andropov, who was head of the KGB from 1967 to 1982 and General Secretary of the Communist Party for fifteen months in 1982–4, before succumbing to kidney failure. In 1999, Putin put flowers on Andropov’s grave to mark the eighty-fifth anniversary of his birth, and a year later he placed a plaque commemorating him on the building where he had lived. In 2004, he even saw that a statue to the man was erected in St Petersburg. Meanwhile, he periodically invokes Andropov’s memory as a brilliant intellect and an unswervingly ruthless patriot, and has encouraged an explosion in the number of articles and books about his life and times.