would not even be undercover. The Putins, like five other Russian families, were given an apartment in a large apartment block in a little Stasi world: secret-police staff lived here, worked in a building a five-minute walk away, and sent their children to nursery school in the same compound. They walked home for lunch and spent evenings at home or visiting colleagues in the same building. Their job was to collect information about “the enemy,” which was the West, meaning West Germany and, especially, United States military bases in West Germany, which were hardly more accessible from Dresden than they would have been from Leningrad. Putin and his colleagues were reduced mainly to collecting press clippings, thus contributing to the growing mountains of useless information produced by the KGB.
Ludmila Putina liked Germany and the Germans. Compared with the Soviet Union, East Germany was a land of plenty. It was also a land of cleanliness and orderliness: she liked the way her German neighbors hung their identical-looking laundry on parallel clothes-lines at the same time every morning. Their neighbors, it seemed to her, lived better than the Putins were used to. So the Putins saved, buying nothing for their temporary apartment, hoping to go home with enough money to buy a car.
The Putins had a second daughter and named her Ekaterina. Putin drank beer and got fat. He stopped training, or exercising at all, and he gained over twenty pounds—a disastrous addition to his short and fairly narrow frame. From all appearances, he was seriously depressed. His wife, who has described their early years together as harmonious and joyful, has pointedly refrained from saying anything about their family life after spy school. She has said only that her husband never talked to her about work.
Not that there was much to tell. The staff of the KGB outpost in Dresden were divided among various KGB directorates; Putin was assigned to Directorate S, the illegal intelligence-gathering unit (this was the KGB’s own terminology, denoting agents using assumed identities and falsified documents—as opposed to “legal intelligence gathering,” carried out by people who did not hide their affiliation with the Soviet state). This might have been his dream posting—except that it was in Dresden. The job Putin had once coveted, working to draft future undercover agents, turned out to be not only tedious but fruitless. Putin and his two colleagues from the illegal-intelligence unit, aided by a retired Dresden policeman who also drew a salary from the unit, tracked down foreign students enrolled at Dresden University of Technology—there were a number of students from Latin America who, the KGB hoped, would eventually be able to go undercover in the United States—and spent months gaining their confidence, often only to find that they did not have enough money to entice the young people to work for them.
Money was a source of constant worry, hurt, and envy. Soviet citizens viewed long-term foreign postings as an incomparable source of income, often enough to lay the foundation for a lifetime of good living back home. East Germany, however, was viewed as not quite foreign enough, by ordinary people as well as by Soviet authorities: salaries and perks there could hardly be compared with those in a “real” foreign land, which is to say, a capitalist country. Shortly before the Putins arrived in Dresden, the government finally authorized small monthly hard-currency payments (the equivalent of about a hundred dollars) as part of the salaries of Soviet citizens working in Socialist bloc countries. Still, KGB staff in Dresden had to scrimp and save to ensure that at the end of their posting they would have something to show for it. Over the years, certain conventions of frugality had set in—using newspapers instead of curtains to cover the windows, for example. But while all the Soviet agents lived in the same sort of squalor, Stasi agents who had apartments in the same building enjoyed a much higher standard of living: they made a lot more money.
Still, it was in the West—so close and so unreachable for someone like Putin (some other Soviet citizens posted in Germany had the right to go to West Berlin)—that people had the things Putin really coveted. He made his wishes known to the very few Westerners with whom he came in contact—members of the radical group Red Army Faction, who took some of their orders from the KGB and occasionally came to Dresden for training sessions. “He always wanted to have things,” a former RAF member told me of Putin. “He mentioned to several people wishes that he wanted from the West.” This particular man claims to have personally presented Putin with a Grundig Satellit, a state-of-the-art shortwave radio, and a Blaupunkt stereo for his car; he bought the former and pilfered the latter from one of the many cars the RAF had stolen for its purposes. The West German radicals always came bearing gifts when they went east, the former radical told me, but there was a difference between the way Stasi agents received the goods and the way Putin approached it: “The East Germans did not expect us to pay for it, so they would at least make an effort to say, ‘What do I owe you?’And we would say, ‘Nothing.’ And Vova never even started asking, ‘What do I owe you?’”
Handing out assignments to RAF radicals, who were responsible for more than two dozen assassinations and terrorist attacks between 1970 and 1998, is exactly the sort of work Putin had once dreamed of, but there is no evidence he was directly connected to it. Instead, he spent most of his days sitting at his desk, in a room he shared with one other agent (every other officer in the Dresden building had his own office). His day began with a morning staff meeting, continued with a meeting with his local agent, the retired police officer, and finished with writing: every agent had to give a complete accounting of his activities, including Russian translations of any information he had obtained. Former agents estimate they spent three-quarters of their time writing reports. Putin’s biggest success in his stay in Dresden appears to have been in drafting a Colombian university student, who in turn connected the Soviet agents with a Colombian student at a school in West Berlin, who in turn introduced them to a Colombian-born U.S. Army sergeant, who sold them an unclassified Army manual for 800 marks. Putin and his colleagues had high hopes for the sergeant, but by the time they obtained the manual, Putin’s time in Germany was coming to an end.
JUST WHEN THE PUTINS LEFT the Soviet Union, that country began to change drastically and irrevocably. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in March 1985. Two years later, he had released all Soviet dissidents from prison and was beginning to loosen the reins on Soviet bloc countries. The KGB leadership as well as its rank and file perceived Gorbachev’s actions as disastrous. Over the next few years, a chasm would open up between the Party and the KGB, culminating with the failed coup in August 1991.
Watching the changes from afar, surrounded by other secret police officers—and no one else—Putin must have felt a hopeless, helpless fury. Back home, KGB leadership was pledging loyalty to the secretary general and his planned reforms. In June 1989, the head of the KGB in Leningrad issued a public statement condemning secret- police crimes committed under Stalin. In East Germany, as in the Soviet Union, people were beginning to come out into the streets to protest, and the unthinkable was quickly beginning to look probable: the two Germanys might be reunited—the land Vladimir Putin had been sent here to guard would just be handed over to the enemy. Everything Putin had worked for was now in doubt; everything he had believed was being mocked. This is the sort of insult that would have prompted the agile little boy and young man that Putin had been to jump the offender and pound him until his fury had subsided. Middle-aged, out-of-shape Putin sat idle and silent as his dreams and hopes for the future were destroyed.
In the late spring and early summer of 1989, Dresden faced its first unsanctioned gatherings: handfuls of people collecting in public squares, first protesting the rigging of local elections in May and then, like the rest of Germany, demanding the right to emigrate to the West. In August, tens of thousands of East Germans actually traveled east—taking advantage of the lifting of travel restrictions within the Soviet bloc—only to descend on West German embassies in Prague, Budapest, and Warsaw. A series of Monday-night protests began across the cities of East Germany, growing bigger every week. East Germany shut its borders, but it was too late to stem the tide of both emigrants and protesters, and an agreement was ultimately brokered to transport the Germans from east to west. They would travel by train, and the trains would pass through Dresden, the East German city closest to Prague. Indeed, first the empty trains would travel through Dresden on their way to pick up the nearly eight thousand East Germans who were occupying the West German embassy in Prague. In the early days of October, thousands of people began to gather at the train station in Dresden—some of them carrying heavy luggage, hoping somehow to hitch a ride to the West, others simply there to witness the most astonishing event in the city’s postwar history.
The crowds met with all the law enforcement Dresden could gather: regular police were joined by various auxiliary security forces, and together they threatened, beat, and detained as many people as they could. Unrest continued for several days. On October 7, Vladimir Putin’s thirty-seventh birthday, East Germany celebrated the official fortieth anniversary of its formation, and riots broke out in Berlin; more than a thousand people were arrested. Two days later, hundreds of thousands came out across the country for another Monday-night demonstration, and their numbers more than doubled two weeks later. On November 9, the Berlin Wall fell, but demonstrations in East Germany continued until the first free elections in March.
