First Person Read online

  I was drafted into the army and served in Leningrad. Once, Vovka came over to see me in his Zaporozhets. I jumped over the fence and went AWOL. We went cruising around Leningrad all night. The muffler was broken, and we raced around, singing songs. I can even remember the song we sang:“We had just one night,

  Someone’s train left this morning,

  And then someone’s plane a little later . . .”

  We sang and sang, very loudly, without any inhibitions. After all, the muffler was broken.

  Once my mother was given a state lottery ticket instead of change at a cafeteria, and she won a Zaporozhets car. I was in the third year of university and we couldn’t decide what to do with that car for a long time, since we were living very modestly. I had just bought my first coat when I came back from working construction, a year after the vacation with my friends in Gagry. This was my first decent coat. Money was tight in our family, and to give the car to me was absolute madness. We could have sold it, after all, and gotten at least 3,500 rubles for it. That would have settled our family budget well in advance. But my parents decided to spoil me. They gave me the Zaporozhets. I lived the good life in that car. I used to drive it everywhere, even to my matches.

  I was a pretty wild driver, but I was terrified of crashing the car. How would I ever repair it?

  Once you did get into an accident, though. You ran over a man.

  It wasn’t my fault. He jumped in front of me or something. . . . Decided to put an end to his life. . . . I don’t know what on earth he was doing. He was an idiot. He ran off after I hit him.

  They say you chased him.

  What? You think I hit a guy with my car and then tried to chase him down? I’m not a beast. I just got out of the car.

  Are you able to remain calm in critical situations?

  Yes, I remain calm. Even too calm. Later, when I went to intelligence school, I once got an evaluation, where they wrote the following as a negative character assessment: “A lowered sense of danger.” That was considered a very serious flaw. You have to be pumped up in critical situations in order to react well. Fear is like pain. It’s an indicator. If something hurts, that means something’s wrong with your body. It’s a sign. I had to work on my sense of danger for a long time.

  Evidently you aren’t a gambler?

  No, I’m not a gambler.

  Toward the end of university we went to military training camp. Two of my friends were there, one of whom had gone to Gagry with me. We spent two months there. It was much easier than the athletic camps, and we got really bored. The main source of entertainment was cards. Whoever won went to the village and bought milk from an old lady. I refused to play, but my friends didn’t. And they lost everything quickly. When they had nothing left, they would come and plead for money. They were real gamblers. And I would ask myself, “Should I give them anything? They’ll just lose it.” And they would say, “Listen, your few kopecks won’t save you anyway. Why not just give them to us.” And I would say to them “Alright. After all, I have a lowered sense of danger,” and hand over the cash.

  Boy, did they make out like bandits! They couldn’t lose for winning. And we went to buy milk from the lady every night.

  University is a time for romances. Did you have any?

  Who didn’t? But nothing serious . . . if you don’t count that one time.

  First love?

  Yes. She and I even planned to tie the knot.

  When did that happen?

  About four years before I actually got married.

  So it didn’t work out?

  That’s right.

  What got in the way?

  Something. Some intrigue or other.

  She married someone else?

  Someone else? Yes, later.

  Who decided that you wouldn’t get married?

  I did. I made the decision. We had already applied for a marriage license. Everything was ready. Our parents on both sides had bought everything—the ring, the suit, the wedding dress. . . . The cancellation was one of the most difficult decisions of my life. It was really hard. I felt like a real creep. But I decided that it was better to suffer then than to have both of us suffer later.

  That is, you literally ran away and left her at the altar?

  Almost. Except that I didn’t run away. I told her the truth—as much of it as I considered necessary.

  Do you not want to talk about it?

  No, I don’t. It’s a complicated story. It’s the way it was. It was really hard.

  Do you have any regrets?

  No.

  Sergei Roldugin:

  I liked his girlfriend, she was a pretty girl; a medical student with a strong character. She was a friend to him, a woman who would take care of him. But did she love him? I don’t know. Lyuda, his wife—or Lyudik, as we call her—now, she really loves him.

  I got along very well with that girl. I think her name was also Lyuda. She used to worry about his health. It wasn’t just, “Oh, honey, how do you feel?” She would say, “Now, I can tell your stomach is hurting.” I don’t know what happened between them. He didn’t tell me anything. He just said that it was all over. I think the falling-out was just between them, because their parents had agreed to the match.

  Vovka suffered, of course. The thing is, we are both Libras and we take things like that very much to heart. And at that time I saw that he . . . that his . . . that he was a very emotional person but he simply could not express his emotions. I often used to tell him that he was terrible at making conversation. Why did he have such trouble talking?

  Of course, he is Cicero now, compared to the way he talked back then. I used to explain to him, “You talk very quickly, and you should never talk so quickly.” As a stage performer, I thought I could help him out. He had very strong emotions, but he could not put them into any form. I think his profession left its imprint on his speech. Now he speaks beautifully. Expansively, intelligibly, and with feeling. Where did he learn to do that?

  So you didn’t collaborate with the KGB while you were an undergraduate?

  They didn’t even try to recruit me as an agent, although it was a widespread practice at the time. There were many people who collaborated with the security agencies. The cooperation of normal citizens was an important tool for the state’s viable activity. But the main point was the kind of basis this cooperation was established upon. Do you know what a “seksot” is?

  It means secret colleague or collaborator.

  Right. But do you know why it has acquired such a negative connotation?

  Because collaborators fulfilled a certain function.

  What function?

  Ideological.

  Yes, ideological. They did political sleuthing. Everyone thinks that intelligence is interesting. Do you know that ninety percent of all the intelligence information is obtained from an agent’s network made up of ordinary Soviet citizens? These agents decide to work for the interests of the state. It doesn’t matter what this work is called. The important thing is upon which basis this cooperation takes place. If it is based on betrayal and material gain, that’s one thing. But if it is based on some idealistic principles, then it’s something else. What about the struggle against banditry? You can’t do anything without secret agents.4

  So when did you join the KGB?

  All those years in university I waited for the man at the KGB office to remember me. It seemed that he had forgotten about me. After all, I had gone to see him as a school kid. Who would’ve thought that I could have such spunk? But I recalled that they didn’t like people to show their own initiative, so I didn’t make myself known. I kept quiet.

  Four years passed. Nothing happened. I decided that the case was closed, and I began to work out different options for finding employment either in the special prosecutor’s office or as an attorney. Both are prestigious fields.

  But then, when I was in my fourth year of university, a man came and asked me to meet with him. He didn’t say who he was, but I
immediately figured it out, because he said, “I need to talk to you about your career assignment. I wouldn’t like to specify exactly what it is yet.”

  I picked up on it immediately. If they didn’t want to say where, that meant it was there.

  We agreed to meet right in the faculty vestibule. He was late. I waited for about 20 minutes. Well, I thought, what a swine! Or was someone playing a prank on me? And I decided to leave. Then suddenly he ran up, all out of breath.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  I liked that.

  “It’s all arranged,” he said. “Volodya, there’s still a lot of time, but how would you feel if you were invited to work in the agencies?”

  I didn’t tell him that I had dreamed of this moment since I was a schoolboy. I didn’t tell him, because I remembered my conversation in the KGB office long ago: “We don’t take people who come to us on their own initiative.”

  And when you agreed to work in the agencies, did you think about 1937?

  To be honest, I didn’t think about it at all. Not one bit. I recently met up with some old colleagues from the KGB Directorate—guys who I worked with at the very beginning—and we talked about the same thing. And I can tell you what I said to them: When I accepted the proposition from the Directorate’s personnel department (actually, my recruiter turned out to be an official in the subdivision that served the universities), I didn’t think about the [Stalin-era] purges. My notion of the KGB came from romantic spy stories. I was a pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education.

  You knew nothing about the purges?

  I didn’t know much. Yes, of course, I knew about Stalin’s cult of personality. I knew that people had suffered and that the cult of personality had been dismantled. . . . I wasn’t completely naïve. Keep in mind that I was 18 when I went to university and that I graduated at age 23.

  But those who cared to know, knew all about it.

  We lived under the conditions of a totalitarian state. Everything was concealed. How deep was that cult of personality? How serious was it? My friends and I didn’t think about that. So I went to work for the agencies with a romantic image of what they did.

  But after that conversation in the vestibule, I heard nothing more. The man disappeared. And then there was a phone call; an invitation to the university’s personnel department. Dmitry Gantserov—I can still remember his name—was the one to speak to me.

  But there was almost a slipup at the employment commission. When they got to my name, a representative from the department of law said, “Yes, we’re taking him into the bar.” Then the agent who was monitoring the students’ assignments suddenly woke up—he had been asleep somewhere in the corner. “Oh, no,” he said. “That question has already been decided. We’re hiring Putin to work in the agencies of the KGB.” He said it right out loud like that, in front of the job-assignment commission.

  And then several days later I was filling out all sorts of application forms and papers.

  They told you they were hiring you to work in intelligence?

  Of course not. It was all very systematic. They put it sort of like this: “We are proposing that you work in the field where we’ll send you. Are you ready?” If the applicant was wishy-washy and said that he had to think about it, they would simply say, “Okay. Next!” And that person wouldn’t have another chance. You can’t pick your nose and say, “I want this and I don’t want that.” They can’t use people like that.

  You evidently said you were ready to work where they sent you?

  Yes. Of course. And they themselves didn’t even know where I would be working. They were just hiring new people. It’s actually a routine matter, recruiting personnel and determining who should be sent where. I was made a routine offer.

  Sergei Roldugin:

  Vovka told me right away that he was working in the KGB. Practically right away. Maybe he was not supposed to do that. He told some people that he was working in the police. On the one hand, I treated these guys with caution, because I had had some run-ins with them. I had traveled abroad and knew that there were always people posing as inspectors or officials from the Ministry of Culture. You had to keep your mouth shut when you were around them.

  I once told a colleague of mine, “Come on, they’re normal, they’re nice guys.” And he said, “The more you talk to them, the more dirt they will have in your file at 4 Liteiny Street.”5

  I never asked Volodya about his work. Of course I was curious. But I remember once I decided to corner him and find out something about some special operation. I got nowhere.

  Later I said to him, “I am a cellist. I play the cello. I could never be a surgeon. Still, I’m a good cellist. But what is your profession? I know, you’re a spy. I don’t know what that means. Who are you? What do you do?”

  And he said to me, “I’m a specialist in human relations.” And that was the end of our conversation. And he really did think that he was able to judge personalities. When I divorced my first wife, Irina, he said, “I predicted that that’s exactly how it would turn out.” I disagreed—you couldn’t know what would happen between me and Irina from the start. But his comment made a big impression on me. I believed what he said: that he was a specialist in human relations.

  Part 4

  THE YOUNG SPECIALIST

  After a stint in counterintelligence with some stodgy hard-liners, Putin is sent to the Andropov Red Banner Institute in Moscow for additional training. The officers quickly take notice of the smart and unflappable trainee. He’s offered a spot in the most coveted of divisions: foreign intelligence. Meanwhile, he meets a stunning airline stewardess, Lyudmila. He impresses her with hard-to-come-by tickets for three nights at the theater, procured through his KGB connections. Their courtship lasts three years. They marry and are transferred on Putin’s first assignment abroad: Dresden, East Germany.

  At first they assigned me to the Secretariat of the Directorate, and then to the counterintelligence division, where I worked for about five months.

  Was it like you imagined it would be? What you were expecting?

  No, of course it wasn’t what I had imagined. I had just come from university, after all. And suddenly I was surrounded by old men who had been in their jobs during those unforgettable times. Some of them were just about to go into retirement.

  One time a group was drafting a scenario. I was invited to join the meeting. I don’t remember the details, but one of the veteran agents said that the plan should be followed in such-and-such a way. And I piped up: “No, that’s not right.” “What do you mean?” he said, turning to me. “It’s against the law,” I said. He was taken aback. “What law?” I cited the law. “But we have instructions,” he said. Once again I cited the law. The men in the room didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about. Without a trace of irony, the old fellow said, “For us, instructions are the main law.” And that was that. That’s how they were raised and that’s how they worked. But I simply couldn’t do things that way. And it wasn’t just me. Practically all my peers felt the same way.

  For several months I went through the formalities and knocked off some cases. I was sent to agent training for six months. Our school in Leningrad wasn’t too exceptional. My superiors believed I had mastered the basics but that I needed some field preparation. So I studied in Moscow, and then came back to Petersburg for about half a year in the counterintelligence division.

  What year was this?

  What year? It was at the end of the 1970s. Now people say that was when Leonid Brezhnev was beginning to tighten the screws. But it was not very noticeable.

  Did you join the Communist Party while you were at the KGB?

  To join the intelligence service, you had to be a party member. There were no exceptions. That rule made for some strange episodes. For instance, if a person had worked in a security unit for less than a year and was transferred to another unit. In the interim period, he grew out of Komsomol age. It was impossible to admit him to the p
arty because nobody could give him a recommendation. To receive a recommendation, you had to have worked with a unit for at least a year. Nobody knew this person for a period longer than a year, so nobody could recommend him for party membership. He was ineligible for the Komsomol because of his age and he couldn’t be admitted to the party. An intelligence man has to be a party member, so he was dismissed from the security service. It’s ridiculous, but it’s true.

  They say that security people didn’t like party appointees.

  That is true. Party appointees were disliked. People who joined the intelligence service after being full-time party officials invariably turned out to be good for nothings, loafers and careerists. There were all kinds, but they usually had overblown egos. They were brought from some mid-level party post immediately into a top post with the KGB. They envisioned themselves only as big directors, and they didn’t want to be operatives. Naturally, they always caused resentment among the professionals.

  What other things caused resentment among the professionals?

  I know for a fact that they resented it when non-establishment artists were harassed. In Moscow they used bulldozers to sweep away paintings. I still don’t understand who came up with the idea—some member of an ideological department in the regional or central party committees. The KGB objected, saying that it was a stupid thing to do, but some guy in the ideological department of the Central Comittee in Moscow put his foot down for reasons I can’t understand. I guess he was just conservative. And because the KGB was a highly regarded division of the party, they had to do as the party told them.