At that time, the president of LGU was Stanislav Petrovich Merkuriev. He was a good man and a brilliant academic.
I began to write my dissertation, and chose Valery Abramovich Musin, one of the top specialists in international law, as my academic adviser. I chose a topic in the field of international private law and began to draft an outline for my work.
At the university, I reestablished contact with my old friends from the law faculty. Several of them had stayed on there, defended their dissertations, and become instructors and professors. One of them asked me to help Anatoly Sobchak, the chair of the Leningrad City Council. Sobchak needed someone good on his team. Apparently he was surrounded by crooks. Would I go and work for him? “You know, I have to think about it,” I said. “I’m a KGB personnel officer, after all. And he doesn’t know that. I could compromise him.” “Just talk to him,” my friend said.
I should note that by that time Sobchak was already a famous and popular person. I had followed him with great interest—followed what he did and said. True, I didn’t like everything I saw, but he had gained my respect. It was even nicer that he’d been a teacher in the university where I had studied. Back when I was a student, I didn’t have any personal connections to him. Some people have written that I was practically his favorite student. That’s not true. He was just one of our lecturers for one or two semesters.
I met Anatoly Aleksandrovich Sobchak at his office in the Leningrad City Council. I remember the scene very well. I went in, introduced myself, and told him everything. He was an impulsive man, and said to me right off: “I’ll speak to Stanislav Petrovich Merkuriev. Come to work starting Monday. That’s it. We’ll make the agreement right now, and you’ll be transferred.” I couldn’t help but say, “Anatoly Aleksandrovich, I would be happy to do this. I am interested. But there is one circumstance that might be an obstacle to this transfer.” “What?” he asked. I replied, “I must tell you that I am not just an assistant to the president, I’m also a staff officer of the KGB.” He was silent for a moment. I must have really surprised him. He thought and thought, and then suddenly he said, “Well, screw it!”
Of course I wasn’t expecting that reaction. This was our very first personal encounter. He was a professor, a doctor of law, chair of the Leningrad City Council. I didn’t expect such frank talk.
Then he said, “I need an assistant. Frankly, I’m afraid of going out into the reception area. I don’t know who those people are.”
The people in Sobchak’s outer office—his closest cohorts—were harsh and rude in the best traditions of the Komsomol, the Soviet school. This disturbed the city council deputies and led to a conflict between Sobchak and the city council. Since I understood this, I told Anatoly Aleksandrovich that I would be happy to come and work for him, but that I would first have to tell my bosses at the KGB and resign from my post at the university.
This was a fairly delicate moment for me. It was difficult to tell my superiors that I intended to change jobs.
I went to my boss and said, “Anatoly Aleksandrovich is proposing that I leave the university and go to work for him. If it’s impossible, I’m ready to resign.” They replied: “No. Why? Go and work there. There’s no question about it.”
My superiors, who were fairly subtle people and understood the situation, did not try to impose any conditions on me. Therefore, although I was formally listed in the security agencies, I hardly ever set foot in the directorate building.
What’s interesting is that the bosses never once tried to use me for any operations. I think they understood that it would have been pointless. Moreover, at that moment, everything, including the law-enforcement agencies, was falling apart.
Vladimir Churov (deputy chair of the Committee for Foreign Liaison of the St. Petersburg mayorʹs office):
Before 1991, the offices in Smolny were clearly divided. The big bosses had two portraits hanging in their offices—of Lenin and Kirov—and those who were a rank below them had only Lenin’s portrait. After they took the portraits down, empty hooks were left on the walls and everyone could pick what he wanted to hang in his office. Most guys selected a portrait of Yeltsin. Putin ordered himself a portrait of Peter the Great. Two portraits were brought to him for selection. One was a romantic painting of a young, curly-headed Peter wearing epaulettes; and the other—the one Putin chose—was an engraving. It was one of the last portraits of Peter the Great when his reforms were at their most active; right after the failed Prussian campaign and the Northern war, when Peter laid the foundations of the Russian Empire.
I think that Vladimir Vladimirovich chose that portrait of Peter on purpose. It was a rare and little-known picture. Peter looked rather mournful and preoccupied.
On one occasion my colleagues from the agencies tried to exploit my proximity to Sobchak. Sobchak used to go on business trips and was frequently out of town. He would leave me to run the office. One day he was in a big rush before a trip, and his signature was needed on a document. The document wasn’t quite finished, but Sobchak couldn’t wait for it. So he took three clean sheets of paper, put his signature at the bottom, and gave them to me, saying “Finish it up,” and left.
That same evening my colleagues from the KGB came to see me. We spoke about this and that, and then they mentioned how great it would be to have Sobchak’s signature on a certain document. Couldn’t we discuss it? But I was a seasoned person—I had survived so many years without one slip-up—and I sized up the situation right away. I took out the folder and showed them the blank sheets of paper with Sobchak’s signature. And they and I understood that this was testimony to the great degree of trust that Sobchak had in me. “Can’t you see that this man trusts me?” I said. “What do you want from me?” They immediately backed off. “No more questions,” they said. “Sorry.” And everything was nipped in the bud.
Still, it was an abnormal situation because, after all, I continued to get a salary from them, which, by the way, was more than I was getting at the city council. But soon circumstances arose that forced me to think about writing a letter of resignation.
Relations with the deputies in the city council were not always smooth, mostly because they lobbied someone’s interests. Once a deputy came up to me and said, “You know, we have to help so-and-so. Could you do such and such?” I had already put him off several times. One day he said to me, “There are bad people here—all sorts of enemies—and they’ve sniffed out that you’re a KGB agent. You have to foil them. I’m prepared to help you, but you have to do me a favor.”
I realized that they wouldn’t leave me alone. They would blackmail me, pure and simple. So I made a difficult decision and wrote my letter of resignation. I was just sick and tired of that brazen blackmail.
It was a very difficult decision for me. Although I had done virtually no work for the agencies in almost a year, my whole life was still tied up in them. Besides, it was 1990. The USSR hadn’t collapsed yet. The August coup hadn’t taken place. No one was sure about where the country was going. Sobchak was a prominent politician, but it was risky to tie my future to his. Everything might unravel at a moment’s notice. And I also had a hard time imagining what I’d do if I lost my job at the mayor’s office. I thought that if worse came to worst, I would go back to the university and finish my dissertation and earn some money somewhere part-time.
I had a stable spot in the agencies, and people treated me well. My life in the system had been full of successes. And still I wanted to leave. Why? I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. It was the hardest decision of my life. I thought for a long time, collected myself, sat down, and in one quick draft, wrote my resignation letter.
After I turned in my resignation, I decided to announce publicly that I had worked in the security agencies. I turned to my friend Igor Abramovich Shadkhan, the film director, for help. He was a talented man. His most famous film was Test for Adults, and he worked in the television studio in Leningrad at that time. I came to him and said, “Igor, I want to
speak openly about my professional past so that it stops being a secret and so that no one can blackmail me with it.”
He taped an interview in which he asked me in detail about my work at the KGB, what I had done, when I had served in intelligence, and so on. The tape was shown on Leningrad television, and the next time someone came along hinting about my past, I immediately said, “That’s enough. It’s not interesting. Everyone already knows about that.”
But my letter of resignation had gotten stalled somewhere. Somebody, somewhere, apparently just couldn’t make a decision. So when the coup happened, I was still an active KGB officer.
Where were you on the night of August 18—19, 1991?9
I was on vacation. When it all started, I was really worried because I was way out in the sticks. I got back to Leningrad on the 20th. Sobchak and I practically moved into the city council. Well, not just us two—a whole bunch of people were camped out there, and we were there with them.
It was dangerous to drive out of the cty council compound, but we wanted to take some active measures. We drove to the Kirov Factory and to other plants to speak to the workers. But we were nervous. We even passed out pistols, although I left my service revolver in the safe.
People everywhere supported us. It was clear that if someone tried to disrupt the situation, there would be a huge number of casualties. But then that was it, the coup was over, and they chased away the coup-plotters.
What did you yourself think of them?
It was clear that they were destroying the country. In principle, their goal—preserving the Soviet Union from collapse—was noble, and they probably saw it that way. But the means and methods they chose only pushed the country further toward collapse. Once I saw the faces of the coup-plotters on TV, I knew right away that it was all over.
But let’s say the coup had ended the way the plotters had planned. You’re an officer of the KGB. You and Sobchak probably would have been tried.
But I was no longer a KGB officer. As soon as the coup began, I immediately decided whose side I was on. I knew for sure that I would never follow the coup-plotters’ orders. I would never be on their side. I knew perfectly well that my behavior could be considered a crime of office. That’s why, on August 20, I wrote a second statement resigning from the KGB.
But what if it had been blocked like your first letter?
I immediately warned Sobchak of that possibility. “Anatoly Aleksandrovich,” I said. “I already wrote one letter, and it died somewhere. Now I have to write again.” Sobchak immediately called Vladimir Kryuchkov [then KGB chief], and then he called the head of my KGB division. The next day, they informed me that my resignation memo had been signed. Kryuchkov was a true believer in Communism, who sided with the coup-plotters. But he was also a very decent man. To this day I have the greatest respect for him.
Did you suffer?
Terribly. In fact, it tore my life apart. Up until that time I didn’t really understand the transformation that was going on in Russia. When I had come home from the GDR, it was clear to me that something was happening. But during the days of the coup, all the ideals, all the goals that I had had when I went to work for the KGB, collapsed.
Of course it was incredibly difficult to go through this. After all, most of my life had been devoted to work in the agencies. But I had made my choice.
Have you read the things that were published in Moskovskiye Novosti and Ogonyok in those days? For instance, General Kalugin’s exposures?10
Kalugin is a traitor. I saw Kalugin during my time in Leningrad when he was deputy head of the Directorate. He was an absolute loafer.
A loafer, perhaps, but he remembers you.
He doesn’t remember anything.
He does remember, and he says that from the point of view of the intelligence service, you worked in a province and had nothing to show for your performance.
Oh, he doesn’t remember a thing. He couldn’t remember me. I had no contact with him, nor did I meet him. It is I who remembers him, because he was a big boss and everybody knew him. As to whether he knew me, there were hundreds of us.
Vladimir Churov:
A few months after the coup, the House of Political Enlightenment, which had belonged to the Communists, was given to the city. Fairly soon afterward an international business center was opened there. But the new leaders treated the Communists generously and left them part of the building. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation occupied almost a whole wing of the building, along with other Communist organizations. There was a flagpole on the roof of the building. The Communists decided to use it to hang a red flag. And each time the new city leaders drove out of Smolny, they would see that red flag. It was perfectly visible from the windows in Sobchakʹs and Putin’s offices.
Putin gave the order to have the flag removed. But the next day it appeared again. Putin gave the order again—and again the flag was taken down. Back and forth it went. The Communists began to run out of flags and started using all sorts of things. One of their last versions wasn’t even red but more of a dark brown. That put Putin over the edge. He found a crane, and under his personal supervision, had the flagpole cut down with a blowtorch.
When did you leave the Party?
I didn’t. The CPSU ceased to exist. I took my Party card and put it away in a drawer.
How did St. Petersburg get through 1993?
It was just like Moscow, only people didn’t shoot each other. The mayor’s office was in the Smolny building by then, and the deputies were in the Leningrad City Council building.
So there was basically the same kind of conflict in Peter as Yeltsin had with the Supreme Soviet [parliament]?
Yes. But it is important to note that there wasn’t the same division between the law-enforcement agencies that there had been in 1991. The FSB11 leadership—Viktor Cherkesov was the head—announced their support for the mayor from the start. The FSB introduced a number of measures advocating the arrest of extremists who were plotting provocations, planning to blow things up, or trying to destabilize the situation. And that was the end of it.
Marina Yentaltseva (Putin’s secretary from 1991 to 1996):
The first time I saw Vladimir Vladimirovich was from behind the glass door of an office. I was sitting across from the door and putting on my lipstick. Suddenly I saw the new director of the Committee for Foreign Liaison walking down the hall, and I thought, “Uh-oh, now he definitely won’t hire me for the job.ʺ But everything was fine. He pretended that he hadn’t noticed a thing, and I never put my lipstick on at work again.
My mother
Mariya Ivanovna Shelomova
My father
Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin
Grandad was a cook for Lenin and Stalin.
After he was wounded, my father worked on a collective farm.
My father in the navy in 1932.
With my mother in July, 1958
With my parents before I left for Germany in 1985
Grandma Olya lived her whole life in the country.
Sasha Grigoriev (right) runs the FSB in the St. Petersburg-Leningrad region.
Three photos of me in the KGB
My favorite portrait of Lyudmila.
I proposed to Lyudmila and three months later we married.
I married late in life, in 1983, when I was already thirty.
My first daughter, Masha, was born in 1985.
These are my lovely ladies.
At the dacha with our poodle Toska.
Masha, on the right, wants to become a manager, and Katya an interior designer.
Judo is not just a sport. It’s a philosophy.
Clinton is very charming.
(September 1999 in Aukland, New Zealand)
Boris Nicholayevich Yeltsin’s birthday, February 1, 2000.
A few seconds later Boris Nicholayevich turned to me and said, “Take care of Russia.”
I wouldn’t say that he was a strict boss. Only people’s stupidity would make him los
e his temper. But he never raised his voice. He could be strict and demanding and yet never raise his voice. If he gave an assignment, he didn’t really care how it was done or who did it or what problems they had. It just had to get done, and that was that.
Vladimir Churov:
In 1991, Sobchak decided to create the Committee for Foreign Liaison at the Leningrad City Council. It was headed by Vladimir Putin.
At that time, the city’s foreign trade was in the same shape as the whole country’s. It was dominated by state monopolies and monstrous, government-authorized firms such as Lenfintorg or Lenvneshtorg. Customs, banking, investment, the stock market, and other such structures simply didn’t exist.
The Committee had to quickly create the preconditions for cooperation with Western market economies. They began by opening the first branches of Western banks. With Putin’s active involvement, they opened branches of Dresdner Bank and Banque Nationale de Paris.
The city administration concentrated on attracting foreign investors. The Committee created investment zones, such as the Parnas zone and the Pulkovo Heights zone, that still exist to this day. They also developed an original scheme: They invited a large investor, Coca-Cola, to take over a plot of land in Pulkovo Heights and install high-capacity power and communications cables, hoping that other companies would follow suit. It worked. After Coca-Cola developed their piece of land, Gillette came, then Wrigley, and then some pharmaceutical companies. An economic zone thus took shape within the city, where total investment now exceeds half a billion dollars.
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