Putin

Putin’s romantic image of the Chekist—bold, incorruptible, wearing a long black-leather coat and dispensing revolutionary justice from a Mauser, or later, infiltrating Nazi circles or stealing atomic secrets from the West—was all part of the past. These were the Brezhnevian seventies, the era of stagnation, when dissidents were hounded and ended up in work camps or psychiatric hospitals where, as one former inhabitant described it, “After a breakfast of mush came shock therapy. You’re given a large dose of insulin, the sugar disappears from your blood and you go into shock. You’re tied to your bed with strips of torn sheets, not ropes. When they’re in shock, people go into convulsions. They scream and howl. Their eyes look like they are going to pop out of their head.”

If he was even aware of such things at the time, they would have been easy for Putin to justify. In any case, he was too happy and excited to be a part of the secret elite that really ran the world. A friend of Putin’s, Sergei Roldugin, who went on to become the lead cellist in the Mariinsky Theater Symphony Orchestra, recalls Putin as a young KGB operative: “Once, at Eastertime, Volodya called me to go see a religious procession. He was standing at the rope, maintaining order, and he asked me whether I wanted to go up to the altar and take a look. Of course I agreed. There was such boyishness in this gesture—‘nobody can go there, but we can.’”

On the way home drunken students tried to bum a cigarette from Putin, who refused. One of them then shoved or punched Putin. As his friend remembers: “Suddenly somebody’s socks flashed before my eyes and the kid flew off somewhere. Volodya turned to me calmly and said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ And we left. I loved how he tossed that guy! One move, and the guy’s legs were up in the air.”

Though their paths diverged—the KGB for Putin, classical music for Roldugin—they kept in touch, bound by youth, the streets, a shared sense of loyalty. In early 2016 the Panama Papers would reveal that Roldugin was at least nominally in charge of some $2 billion in offshore capital, pretty good for a cellist.

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Putin is only intermittently visible in the ten years between entering the KGB and surfacing in Dresden, East Germany, in 1985. Odd had it been otherwise. He was now a soldier on the “invisible front.” As his friend noticed, this offered the secret satisfactions of knowing what others did not know and being able to do what others could not. He was being initiated into a secret elite. Part of that initiation was a new relationship to oneself that relieved him of the need to be sincere. The difference between the inner and the outer man, which might be called hypocrisy in a common Soviet citizen, was, in the case of a KGB officer, an operational necessity. In KGB training there is also an element of self-mastery that would have been familiar to Putin from martial arts, except that now it was used to manipulate others. Upon entering any training facility an agent would be given a new last name, to break his conditioned response to his own name, to free up his relationship to his own identity, the easier to slip into aliases and disguises.

Another force would begin shaping any new recruit, imperceptibly but implacably. Paranoia was both the strong suit and an occupational hazard of the KGB. Their task was to be suspicious. History had clearly demonstrated that it was always better to err on the side of excess suspicion. The KGB would agree with the Sicilian proverb that says To trust is good, not to trust is better.

But the trouble with paranoia is that it cannot set limits on itself, and so grotesqueries are committed. For example, when the Soviets wanted to transfer submarines from their southern bases to those in the north, they would not send them out by the short and easy route through the Black Sea, then to the Mediterranean and out to the Atlantic, from where they would pass over Scandinavia to Murmansk in the Arctic Circle. That route would expose the submarines to the spying eyes of NATO. To avoid that unacceptable risk, the subs were placed on floating dry docks, covered with tarps, and hauled on a fifty-one-day journey through the country’s internal river system as detailed in the book Rising Tide: The Untold Story of the Russian Submarines That Fought the Cold War: “Only the nineteenth century Mariinsky Canals presented a true problem. Too shallow and too old, they often required the crew to pull the dock along and at the locks old women and pack animals pitched in to force the old controls to do their job.”

Old women! Pack animals!

But there was nothing new in any of that—a Frenchman who served in the tsar’s armies in the late 1500s said of Russia: “This is the most distrustful and suspicious nation in the world.”