![]() ![]() He rose quickly through the ranks to head the FSB, the main successor of the KGB. Starting his career over for a second time, Putin packed up his bag of tricks and moved to Moscow. When he lost his bid for re-election in 1996, Putin learned a valuable lesson: never to trust the outcome of an important election to voters. Sobchak found graft and popularity hard to combine. Putin answers evasively, but with enough menace that the interviewer apologises for asking. There is also a scene in which the interviewer asks Putin if he takes bribes. Putin mostly kept himself in the shadows, but a 1992 documentary about the city’s administration features him driving around town accompanied by the soundtrack from Seventeen Moments of Spring. ![]() One person who encountered him in those days describes him as “a very dry, obviously very humourless man of small stature”. Putin resurfaced in the 90s as a fixer for St Petersburg’s democratically elected and prodigiously corrupt mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. By the time he returned home, the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse. To make matters worse, the Berlin wall came down a few years later, taking Putin’s career prospects with it. His first posting, to dreary, mid-80s Dresden, came with none of the glamour he had hoped for. ![]() In 1975, two years after Stierlitz first caught his imagination, Putin joined up. Born in St Petersburg in 1952, Putin was, in the words of the author Alex Goldfarb, “a schoolyard thug” who escaped prison only because of his talent for judo in those days, the KGB kept an eye out for anyone proficient in martial arts. This first instalment takes us only as far as Putin’s election to the presidency in March 2000, but his early days have plenty of insight to offer. Kara-Murza sees Putin as a product of his background, specifically of his KGB training: “He’s doing what he was taught to do – manipulate, lie, recruit, repress. “I have no doubt absolutely that this was done as retribution for my political activities in the Russian opposition,” he says. The first testimonial about Putin’s character comes from the opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, who has had the misfortune of being poisoned by people he is certain are connected to Putin and his state security apparatus not once, but twice, nearly dying both times. ![]()
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