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00:00From the time he began studying German in high school, Vladimir Putin probably already
00:04had his sights on joining the KGB.
00:06He got his wish, and way more.
00:08This is the story of Putin's KGB career, a career that took him right into the Kremlin
00:13as president of Russia.
00:15Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, then known as Leningrad,
00:20on October 7, 1952.
00:22Although his parents Maria Shalomova and Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin had two other
00:27sons, they both died as young children.
00:29As a result, according to Childhood Biography, they became protective parents who did the
00:33best they could to keep Putin alive and well.
00:36Both parents worked in factories after the Second World War, and Putin himself claimed
00:40in his official state biography that he came from, quote, an ordinary family.
00:45It was a simple upbringing, a communist upbringing.
00:48His father was a party member, while his grandfather used to be Stalin's chef.
00:53His childhood involved practicing judo and reading spy novels.
00:57By the age of 14, he was excelling academically and was admitted to the prestigious school No.
01:01281 for high school, where he began studying the German language.
01:05Intellectual Takeout reveals that around the same time, Putin decided to have a go at becoming
01:09a spy and went to a local KGB branch.
01:12After asking for an appointment to discuss his future career, the receptionist put him
01:15in touch with a dutiful senior agent, who advised him to join the military or study law,
01:20but in any event, not to contact the agency again.
01:23Five years later, Putin followed the senior agent's advice and went to study law at Leningrad
01:27State University.
01:28While at university, Putin met Anatoly Sovchak, one of his law professors who would become important
01:34in his future political career.
01:36During his final year at Leningrad State University, Putin was finally contacted by the KGB.
01:41After being put on a probationary track, he officially joined the agency after graduating in 1975.
01:46A Wilson Quarterly article, The Once and Future Rocha, explains that initially, Putin was
01:51relegated to a local Leningrad branch rather than being given, quote, a more desirable foreign
01:56post.
01:57Former KGB agent Oleg Kaluncin claimed that,
02:00"...all that office did was harass dissidents and ordinary citizens, as well as hunt futile
02:05for spies."
02:06And despite the millions of rupholes and thousands of man-hours spent, between 1960 and 1980, not
02:11a single spy was caught by the local Leningrad KGB.
02:15Putin was a, quote, low-level cog.
02:17Radio Free Europe reports that Putin's work with the Leningrad branch mainly consisted of
02:21recruiting foreigners who came to the Soviet Union and Soviet citizens who communicated with
02:26foreigners or were going abroad.
02:28In 1983, Putin married Lyudmila Alexandrova Shkrebneva, who worked as a flight attendant for
02:33Aeroflot at the time.
02:35The KGB, which stands for Komitet Gazudarstvenoy Bezupasnosti, was the Soviet Union's intelligence
02:42agency, security agency, and secret police rolled into one.
02:46Although the modern KGB was established in 1954, it had its roots in the Cheka, established
02:51by Vladimir Lenin in 1917.
02:53According to PBS, the KGB had their hands in everything, from running the gulag labor camps
02:58to engaging in espionage.
03:00The agency conducted assassinations as well, with nearly untraceable poison, often a go-to
03:05weapon, according to Big Think.
03:07The Atlantic reports that Vladimir Putin was recruited to the KGB by Yuri Andropov, then-chairman
03:12of the KGB, as part of the agency's attempt to bring in people from different societal groups.
03:17During the 1970s, Andropov developed a recruitment scheme to bring some new perspectives into the
03:22KGB and create an atmosphere for finding new ideas and dealing with the state's myriad problems.
03:26In 1985, Putin received a foreign posting, working in Dresden, East Germany, under the cover
03:33of a translator.
03:34Although information on his time there is scant, his duties were apparently similar to those
03:38in Leningrad.
03:39The Washington Post reports that,
03:41"...putin likely sought out East Germans who had a plausible reason to travel abroad,
03:45such as professors, journalists, scientists, and technicians who could covertly link up with
03:50agents permanently stationed in the West."
03:52But according to Politico, it's possible that Putin had a far more significant role.
03:56A former member of the Red Army faction, a far-left German terrorist group active from
04:011970 to 1998, claimed that Putin supported their operations.
04:06Since the organization had difficulty buying weapons in West Germany, they'd reportedly
04:10pass a list of weapons off to Putin and his colleagues, who would make sure that an agent
04:14in the West would set up a drop-off in a secret location.
04:17However, since most of the Red Army faction members are either in jail or dead, this claim
04:21is difficult to verify.
04:22In 2015, however, an investigation by Corrective revealed that Putin likely had more authority
04:28in Dresden than initially suggested, possibly responsible for a plan that involved blackmailing
04:32a professor with, quote, "...pornographic material."
04:35There's even a suggestion that he took part in an operation tasked with stealing technological
04:39secrets.
04:40Though little is known about Putin's Dresden assignments, he was rising through the ranks
04:43of the KGB during his time in East Germany.
04:46The Moscow Times reveals that by 1990 he had become a lieutenant colonel, and the year before
04:51had been given a bronze medal for, quote, "...outstanding service to the East German National People's
04:55Army."
04:56The KGB was closely intertwined with the State Security Service, or Statsi, of the German
05:01Democratic Republic, or East Germany.
05:03The Statsi participated in their own intelligence and secret police activities, but the tie between
05:08the two services was so close that Statsi officers were considered, quote, "...chechists
05:12of the Soviet Union," according to author John O'Kohler.
05:16East Germany was also significant for the KGB because it lay on the front lines of the Cold
05:20War.
05:21It was a place where agents could cross from one side to the other, and it held more than
05:24300,000 Soviet troops and an assortment of Soviet intermediate-range missiles.
05:29According to a Statsi defector, the GDR could do nothing without coordination with the Soviets.
05:34The Statsi's surveillance operations were instrumental for the KGB.
05:38Monitoring hundreds of thousands of German citizens, the Statsis amassed millions of documents,
05:43and the KGB kept tabs on those who could take justifiable trips abroad.
05:47In the secret Statsi files, over 10,000 people were marked as being, quote, "...of interest
05:52to the KGB."
05:53According to the New York Times, in 2018, Putin's Statsi photo ID card was even discovered in
05:58German archives.
05:59And although this doesn't imply that Putin worked directly for the Statsi, it proves that
06:03Putin had access to the Statsi's headquarters in Dresden, most likely for recruiting locals
06:08for his intelligence work.
06:10As the Berlin Wall came crumbling down, the tide started to turn.
06:14It took a month, but eventually the protests reached Dresden.
06:17The Times Magazine reveals that in 1989, German protesters gathered outside Vladimir Putin's
06:21office and threatened to storm the building, calling for an end to the Soviet-backed government.
06:26In his official biography, Putin claimed that he frantically requested instructions from
06:30Moscow but received no reply.
06:32The BBC reports that Putin and his KGB colleagues decided in lieu of official instructions, they
06:37should simply burn all evidence of their work.
06:40Putin himself recalls,
06:41"...I personally burned a huge amount of material.
06:43We burned so much that the furnace burst."
06:45According to Russia Beyond, the most prized documents went to Moscow, but everything else
06:50went up in flames.
06:51Although Putin realized that the GDR's collapse was, quote, inevitable, according to The Atlantic,
06:56what he regretted was the fact that,
06:57"...the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe, although intellectually I understood
07:02that a position based on walls and water barriers cannot exist forever.
07:06But I wanted something different to rise in its place, and nothing different was proposed.
07:11That's what hurt."
07:12The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, coming shortly after the end of communist rule in
07:16East Germany, was, for Putin and like-minded colleagues, a crisis of epic proportions.
07:20"...when I say that the fall of the USSR was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th
07:26century, I'm talking about a humanitarian catastrophe above all."
07:31By 1991, Putin had returned with his family to St. Petersburg and retired from the KGB.
07:35But in 2004, he claimed that,
07:37"...there is no such thing as a former KGB man."
07:42On returning to the Soviet Union, Putin initially planned on doing a doctoral dissertation and working
07:46at Leningrad State University.
07:48But after his former professor, Anatoly Sobchak, was elected mayor in 1991, Putin joined his
07:53team as an advisor and, quote, "...head of external relations."
07:57But according to the two worlds of Vladimir Putin, Putin also continued his work as a spy.
08:02DW reports that Putin started working for the St. Petersburg City Hall one year before
08:06Sobchak's election, and from his earliest days there, his work came under scrutiny when
08:11it was discovered that Putin had permitted the sale of highly undervalued steel in exchange
08:15for foreign food aid that never arrived.
08:18An investigation recommended that Putin be fired, but his termination never came.
08:22From March 1994 to 1996, Putin served as Sobchak's deputy mayor.
08:27Putin was incredibly loyal to Sobchak, and when Sobchak narrowly lost the election in 1996,
08:32Putin left St. Petersburg.
08:34ABC reports that Sobchak continued to be Putin's mentor, though, gearing him towards national
08:38politics.
08:39He soon set out for Moscow and the presidential administration.
08:42In 1997, Putin was named deputy chief of staff to Boris Yeltsin, then president of Russia.
08:48The following year, Putin was named chief of the FSB, a successor organization of the KGB.
08:53According to Radio Free Europe, in 1993, Yeltsin had tried to dilute the former KGB's power
08:59by taking the Vimpel Special Forces unit out of the FSB.
09:02But two months after Putin became the new director in 1998, he brought the Vimpel unit
09:07back under FSB control.
09:08Before long, Yeltsin promoted Putin again, this time to the position of prime minister
09:13on August 9, 1999.
09:15At the time, Putin was Yeltsin's fifth prime minister in under two years.
09:19CNN reports that Yeltsin claimed that Putin was the ideal choice to handle a Caucasus crisis.
09:24Putin would eventually stabilize that crisis.
09:27Many ended up criticizing his brutal response to the conflicts in Dagestan and Chechnya.
09:32It was clear, though, from the beginning that Yeltsin wanted Putin as his successor, and
09:35on December 31, 1999, as Yeltsin resigned, he named Putin acting president.
09:41The secret agent who became president.
09:44Vladimirovich Putin
09:47As acting president, one of the first things Putin did was pardon Yeltsin of charges of
09:50corruption that had dogged him when he resigned.
09:53The resignation, meanwhile, had triggered elections for March 26, 2000.
09:57Although Putin had arrived on the political scene as a relatively unknown face, ThoughtCo
10:01explains that,
10:02His law-and-order platform and decisive handling of the Second Chechen War as acting president
10:06soon pushed his popularity beyond that of his rivals.
10:10And when the polls closed, Putin was elected to the presidency with 53 percent of the vote.
10:14According to Der Spiegel, after being elected in 2000, Putin went to the old KGV headquarters
10:19in Moscow and joked to 300 former colleagues,
10:22Instruction number one of the attaining of full power has been completed.
10:26After becoming president, Putin stayed loyal to his KGV roots.
10:29Time magazine reported in 2015 that the group of generals and KGB veterans in Putin's inner
10:34circle had started to hold sway over Russian politics.
10:38According to The Atlantic, during a National Security Council meeting in 2016, six of the
10:42eight people in attendance were KGB veterans.
10:45Putin wasn't the only ex-KGB agent to become the head of an ex-Soviet republic.
10:49Herr Aliyev, the third president of Azerbaijan, was the head of the KGB's Azerbaijani branch before
10:55becoming president.
10:57There's considerable speculation as to how much Putin's career in the KGB influences
11:01his decision as president today.
11:03Many of his outspoken critics have ended up poisoned or murdered, a tactic often utilized
11:08by the KGB.
11:09NPR writes,
11:10Proven or not, the radioactive death of vocal Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko hangs like
11:15a cloud over Putin's head.
11:16Meanwhile, the murder of Anna Politkovskaya is thought by some to have been a way to silence
11:21her reporting, which, according to RFI, exposed the Russian president as a power-hungry product
11:27of his own KGB history.
11:28Let me give you some names.
11:30Anna Politkovskaya shot dead.
11:32Alexander Litvinenko poisoned by polonium.
11:36Sergei Magnitsky.
11:37Some outlets, like Foreign Policy, claim that with the FSB, Putin has essentially brought
11:42the KGB back into existence.
11:44In its full name, the Ministry of State Security was the same name given to Stalin's Secret
11:49Service, which operated from 1943 to 1953.
11:53And by combining domestic surveillance with foreign espionage under Putin, the FSB has
11:57operationally returned to its KGB roots.
12:00In the end, even though the Soviet Union fell, as Catherine Belton writes,
12:04the institutions the security men worked in did not break down, nor did their personal
12:08networks disappear.
12:10Having seen what mass uprisings can accomplish in Germany, in his time as president, Putin
12:14has been quick to suppress dissent.
12:16As First Post reports, Putin's security forces crushed a wave of anti-government demonstrations
12:21in 2012.
12:22Currently, the Russian president repeatedly jails opposition leaders and activists.
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