Анджела Стент - Putin's World - Russia Against the West and with the Rest

Once he joined the Leningrad KGB after graduating with a law degree from Leningrad State University, he continued his German studies in preparation for being sent to Germany. But to which Germany? Putin claims that in order to go to West Germany, he would have had to spend another couple of years in the USSR for extra training, so he opted for East Germany, which did not require more training, because he wanted to leave “right away.” 16So the thirty-three-year-old KGB agent set out for Dresden, which at that time was considered a provincial backwater in the GDR, although its party chief, Hans Modrow, was a leading reform-minded politician. A more prestigious posting would have been in the capital, East Berlin. But Putin apparently relished being in East Germany, which compared to the Soviet Union was a consumer paradise. His two-and-a-half-room apartment in a drab building on the Angelikastrasse was a decided improvement on his childhood kommunalka, and he was able to buy a car. Putin’s former wife, Ludmilla, later recalled that life in the GDR was very different from life in the USSR. “The streets were clean. They would wash their windows once a week.” 17

What did Vladimir Putin do in Dresden during his five-year stay? There is no agreement on this question, largely because information about his years there is very scant. Putin’s own account of what he did is minimalist. He says he was engaged in “the usual” textbook political intelligence activities: “recruiting sources of information, analyzing it, and sending it to Moscow—recruitment of sources, procurement of information, and assessment and analysis were big parts of the job. It was very routine work.” 18He was a senior case officer. In 2001, he elaborated on his training by saying that the key attributes of a good case officer are the ability to work with people and with large amounts of information. 19Putin has downplayed the extent of his activities in the GDR. Soviet and East German senior intelligence officials have confirmed that he was not on their radar screens, as have Western intelligence officials. 20

Others have suggested that Putin’s KGB activities in the GDR may have been more extensive. Rahr claims that a “thick fog of silence” surrounds Putin’s Dresden years, and anyway it would not be in the interest of the German government to reveal what it knows. 21Some have claimed that Putin was part of Operation Luch (“ray,” or “beam”). This was a KGB project to steal Western technological secrets. Others argue that Luch involved recruiting top party and Stasi officials in the GDR with the aim of using them to replace the anti-reform die-hard Honecker regime. 22Indeed, Luch became the subject of an investigation by the German authorities after Putin came to power because they were concerned he might have recruited a network in East Germany that survived the fall of the wall. 23Apparently he did begin to recruit people, only to have them exposed after the Stasi (secret police) files were opened following unification. 24

Whatever the extent of his activities in the GDR, Putin may have seen Dresden as the first stepping-stone in an international career. But his time there ended very differently than he had expected. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, largely because, in the face of mass, peaceful street protests, Gorbachev made a principled decision not to use force to keep in power unpopular communist governments and because the East German police state had run out of steam. 25When an angry mob showed up at the Dresden Stasi headquarters—where the KGB was co-located in December 1989—demanding access to its voluminous files, Putin had to defend the building and burn the documents, “saving the lives of the people whose files were lying on my desk.” 26Indeed, the furnace exploded because it could not burn all the files fast enough. 27In his autobiography, Putin complains bitterly that there were no instructions from Moscow. “Moscow was silent…. Nobody lifted a finger to protect us” from the crowd outside. At this moment, he feared for his own safety. 28

One month later, a dejected Putin left Dresden. As a parting gift, his German friends gave his family a twenty-year-old washing machine, with which they drove back to Leningrad. The GDR would disappear nine months later, and the USSR would follow suit two years later. Putin’s 2000 epitaph on German unification was critical but unsentimental: “Actually, I thought the whole thing was inevitable. To be honest, I only 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,” he concluded. “They just dropped everything and went away.” 29

Putin emerged from five years in the GDR not only with a deep understanding of East German society but also with a foundation that would prove important to him in his post-Soviet career. One East German who later became an important member of his inner circle was Matthias Warnig. After the fall of the wall, Warnig became head of the Dresdner Bank office in Saint Petersburg in 1991, and by 2002 he ran all their operations in Russia. 30He subsequently became the managing director of Nord Stream.

The five years in Dresden influenced Putin in other ways. He lived through the sudden collapse of a rigid, repressive system that was unable to deal with dissent. The experience of fending off the mob at the Stasi headquarters apparently gave him a lifelong aversion to dealing with hostile crowds. It also reinforced for him the need for control, particularly over opposition groups. Nothing like that should ever happen again, especially in Russia. He left the GDR humiliated by Moscow’s unwillingness and inability to support him during his most difficult hour, and not knowing what would await him when he returned to the USSR, which had dramatically changed during his five years abroad.

Angela Merkel’s experience growing up in the GDR has given her a complex view of Russia. According to her Stasi file, to which she had access after unification, “Although Angela tends to see the leading role of the Soviet Union as something of a dictatorship to which all socialist countries are subordinated, she is enthusiastic about the Russian language and the culture of the Soviet Union.” 31This description would be equally true today. Just as Putin knows more about Germany than any of his predecessors, Merkel knows more about Russia than any previous chancellor. In her office hangs a silver-framed portrait of Princess Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst—better known by her Russian name of Catherine the Great. Merkel admires Catherine as a strong ruler and a reformer.

Merkel was born in Hamburg, the daughter of a pastor, but the family moved to East Berlin shortly after her birth. There is some debate about why her father chose to go to East Germany to minister to East German Lutherans, whose activities were closely watched by the Stasi. It could have been ideological or a shrewd career move. Relatively little is known about her early life and about the extent to which her father worked with the East German authorities. She has said, “I never felt that the GDR was my natural home.” 32She excelled at mathematics and Russian in high school, initially placing third in the Russian language Olympiad for all GDR students and winning a trip to the USSR. Two years later she placed first in the Olympiad. Merkel often speaks Russian with Putin and understands Russia partly through the lens of its rich culture. She has a deeper understanding of Russia than most of her European counterparts.

But Merkel’s attitude toward Russia has also been shaped by her experiences in the GDR, beginning with the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the pain it imposed on so many divided families. The repression she experienced firsthand and the pervasiveness of Stasi informers instilled in her a strong commitment to human rights and personal freedoms. She is also undoubtedly more attuned to the modus operandi of former communist intelligence officials than many other Western leaders, having lived in a police state for the first part of her life. A chemist by training, she entered politics in the last days of the GDR in 1989. Merkel and Putin are more familiar with each other’s background and culture than is the case for many other world leaders. They understand each other in a unique way. They epitomize the centuries-old symbiotic relationship between Russia and Germany.