In Dresden Vladimir Putin learned the trade of the KGB officer. Stasi documents show how much that shaped him. Today the Russian President turns 70.
During her 16-year chancellorship, Angela Merkel occasionally sent the Russian President Radeberger beer. Hard to come by for ordinary East Germans, what was once the GDR’s premium drink was Vladimir Putin’s favorite beer when he was working for the KGB in Dresden. “Angela,” the head of the Kremlin once admitted on Russian state television, “sends me a couple of bottles of Radeberger beer from time to time.”
When Putin celebrates his 70th birthday this Friday, Angela Merkel is unlikely to send him any more presents. Since his brutal invasion of Ukraine, the two have become strangers – even if the former chancellor recently advocated thinking about “how something like relations with and with Russia can be developed again”.
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What sounds reasonable at first glance overlooks a fact others have forgotten: Putin is not your typical politician who has worked his way up through a party and learned to compromise and gain trust in the process. Rather, the Russian president is an intelligence officer socialized in the KGB, who accidentally ended up at the top of the Russian state and handed it over almost entirely to former cadres of the Soviet secret police.
Putin learned the secret trade in Germany, of all places, where he worked for the Dresden KGB liaison officer from 1985 to 1990. This is where the first main administration responsible for espionage had sent the then 33-year-old on his first assignment abroad. And here he experienced four years later how civil protests brought down the SED dictatorship.
The experience of how he was only able to prevent a group of angry demonstrators from storming his office in 1989 has left a lasting impression on him – and explains why he tries to nip every protest in Russia today in the bud.
Even as a schoolboy, Putin tried to get hired by the Leningrad KGB. But there he was recommended to first complete a law degree, which often enough involved working as an informant. At the age of 23 he was finally allowed to enter the service of the Soviet secret police, where he fought as a non-commissioned officer against real and alleged spies for almost a decade. Finally, in 1984, Putin was sent to the Red Banner Institute in Moscow to learn the craft of foreign espionage.
Exactly what Putin did during his at least 16-year tenure with the KGB is still a mystery. Unlike in Germany, the archives of the secret service in Russia, which was officially dissolved in 1991, are largely under lock and key. However, documents from the GDR State Security Service provide information about his work for the KGB in Dresden. The Federal Archives have now published hundreds of documents and several dozen photos, which for the first time allow a closer look at the embossing of the Russian President.
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The documents show a diligent and ambitious spy officer. After a short time, Putin rose in the GDR from captain to major and finally to lieutenant colonel. In addition, he held the post of party secretary, which was important for a career in the Soviet Union.
As early as 1987 he represented his boss Lazar Matwejew and received his first award. Three months later, Stasi Minister Erich Mielke personally presented him with the NVA’s bronze medal of merit.
There is a great deal of speculation about Putin’s activities in Dresden. Allegedly, he would have supplied RAF terrorists with weapons and smuggled neo-Nazis into the Federal Republic. He is said to have run a KGB cell in Dresden with Nord Stream boss Matthias Warnig and recruited reform-oriented SED functionaries and GDR civil rights activists in the “Ljutsch” (blast) campaign in order to overthrow Erich Honecker. None of this is confirmed by the documents.
Instead, the documents make it clear how Putin learned the trade of a spy officer from scratch in Germany. Above all, this included a clear enemy image of the West, with which Putin now regularly came into contact. In addition, it took a lot of staying power to recruit West Germans as agents in complex operations. The tools at Putin’s disposal were lies, deception and threats – behaviors that can still be seen in the Russian president today.
In Dresden, Putin was considered a “master of secret combinations,” as one of his colleagues put it in an interview. “He was a director, or even a conductor, if you will, of artificially created situations in which people of interest to him were tested.” awards rewarded.
It is not known how many people Putin was able to get into espionage. The index cards of his agents are scattered in the Stasi’s huge personal index, which has not yet been digitally accessed. Only if you have a concrete suspicion can you find out whether a person was registered for the “friends” – as the Stasi called the KGB internally.
Their names were all recorded in backup process XII 2135/74. However, only two pages with 83 names have survived from the file, which was once over 90 pages long. RAF terrorists or GDR civil rights activists are not among them. Instead, the KGB preferred to recruit East German police officers who worked for Area I (K1).
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It was not only much easier to recruit them than West Germans, but also had the advantage that they had their own informal employees (IM) who the KGB could take over at the same time. The KGB then used these informants to recruit West Germans as spies through their contacts in the West – because Putin was only allowed to recruit East Germans for this purpose.
The documents include, for example, the case of a police officer who the KGB registered in 1982 as a so-called lead IM (FIM). “In the interests of friends,” he urged an acquaintance to apply for a trip to the West in order to get in touch with a member of the Bundeswehr. Because the detective drank a lot, was heavily in debt and was involved in criminal circles, his superiors sent him into early retirement for “security reasons”.
Because the phone was switched off at home after leaving the police service, Putin asked the Stasi in 1989 to unblock it again – which happened immediately.
A similar case is that of the FIM “Henry”. The police officer also worked for the K1 and, among other things, led a lecturer at the TU Dresden as IM. Through this, the KGB was able to oblige a West German woman from Besigheim “to cooperate voluntarily by means of a written declaration”. The trio ended up in the Stasi files mainly because the KGB installed a listening device under the lecturer’s sofa. When the West agent came to visit in 1987, her son found the device and put it in his pocket – which caused the Stasi to get upset.
The documents contain further references to agents. Especially in the legacies of Hardi Anders, who as the first deputy of the head of the Stasi in Dresden was responsible for contact with the local KGB, names keep appearing. However, because they were blacked out by the Federal Archives, they may not be made public.
It therefore remains unclear who the SPD politician was, for example, who taught at the police academy in West Berlin and who was to be “enlightened from the point of view of possible recruitment”. However, the numerous inquiries from the KGB make it clear that they regularly had the Stasi comb through their archives in order to find potential espionage candidates.
The documents also show how much Putin’s secret service past still has an impact today. Although his office consisted of only a few employees, at least three of his former colleagues from Dresden belong to his closest management circle: Yevgeny Shkolow, who for years was considered “Putin’s top cadre officer” in the Kremlin, Nikolai Tokarev, who as head of Transneft was responsible for the huge oil pipelines and Sergei Chemezov, who now heads the Russian defense industry. They all became multi-millionaires thanks to Putin and are on the EU’s sanctions lists.
The reason why Putin surrounds himself with so many KGB officers is simple: he can rely implicitly on the “siloviki”, as the representatives of the armed forces in Russia are known. In the KGB’s “code of honor” there is nothing worse than treason, which in Soviet times was punishable by death. As recently as 2010, the Russian President made it clear in front of the cameras: “The traitors will bite the dust. Trust me.”
For a long time now, Putin has not received congratulatory letters from the Stasi on his birthday, which in Dresden coincided with the state holiday of the GDR. But the hope harbored by Saxony’s Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer that the Russian President can be brought to his senses through negotiations is unlikely to be fulfilled.
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From their experience with the Stasi, he and Angela Merkel should know that there are no compromises for a KGB officer in combat with the enemy. Or, as Putin put it, when he congratulated his former boss in Dresden on his 90th birthday: “Working with you was a good lesson in life for us – on a human and professional level.”
