Growing Up Jewish in the Post-Stalin Era

Berezovsky had just turned six when Stalin died in March 1953, so he had scant experience of life under the Soviet dictator. Putin was not even a year old at the time of Stalin’s death. But Stalin’s legacy cast a dark shadow on the lives of Soviet citizens for years to come, despite the much-vaunted reforms that came with the so-called thaw under his successor, Nikita Khrushchev. Stalin had more than a million of his citizens executed during his 1936–39 purges and sent a further fourteen million citizens to the notorious Gulag. Just before he died, Stalin had begun a new purge of Jewish doctors, which threatened the broader community of Jewish scientific and cultural figures.

For Berezovsky’s parents and other members of Moscow’s Jewish intelligentsia, Stalin’s sudden death came as a relief. Although antisemitism continued to prevail in all aspects of Soviet life, the danger of indiscriminate arrest and possible execution for Jews ended when Stalin’s henchmen, in particular his notorious police chief Lavrenty Beria, put an abrupt halt to the so-called Doctors’ Plot.⁵ Berezovsky’s father, Abraham, was thus able to continue his successful career as a civil engineer for the region of Moscow, even winning an award for his work from the USSR Council of Ministers.

Abraham met his wife, Anna Gelman, when she was studying medicine in Moscow, and the two married in 1943. Twelve years younger than her husband, Anna relinquished her promising medical career when she gave birth to Boris in early 1946, although she later worked as a laboratory assistant at the Pediatrics Institute of the Academy of Sciences. According to a former colleague, Anna was slavishly devoted to Boris, her only child: “She idolized her son, lived her life for him completely … She didn’t even want a second child because she could not imagine sharing her love for him with someone else.”⁶ In an interview on the occasion of her son’s sixtieth birthday, Anna recalled that when she was once compelled to discipline little Boris by giving him a spanking, she cried afterwards.⁷

In the Soviet Union, nationality was determined by ethnicity. There was no such thing as “Soviet” nationality in passports. Berezovsky’s father was Jewish, but Anna, although mainly Jewish, claimed Russian nationality from her mother’s side. This meant that Berezovsky could also be legally Russian. According to Berezovsky’s daughter Elizaveta, Anna and her husband intended to register Berezovsky as Jewish in his birth certificate. But the woman at the registry told Anna: “Please don’t ruin the boy’s life. Register him as Russian.” And so Berezovsky was officially Russian and when he was sixteen received a Russian passport.⁸

By the grim Soviet standards at the time, the Berezovsky family lived reasonably well. Abraham earned enough so that Anna did not have to work in her son’s early years—a rare privilege for Soviet women, especially given that many families were fatherless because of war deaths. And they owned a television, considered a luxury. But in comparison to the children of Moscow’s elite—scientists, artists, and military officials—who attended English Special School No. 4 with Berezovsky, the family’s lifestyle was quite modest. The Soviet system was highly stratified, and these children did not live in communal apartments, as the Berezovskys did; some of them were even driven to school in family cars. Berezovsky yearned for something better. Anna recalled: “When he was five or six years old, we were walking along Stoleshnikov Lane, and he saw a coat in a store window. He said to me: ‘Mother, when I grow up, I will buy you such a coat.’”⁹

Berezovsky began attending the English Special School, on the outskirts of Moscow, in the sixth grade and continued there for the next six years. His overall academic performance was not exceptional, but he did shine in mathematics and represented his school in numerous competitions.¹⁰ In 1962, following his graduation, Berezovsky applied for entrance to the physics department of Moscow State University. He was refused admittance because it was clear that he was Jewish, despite his Russian passport. Former Alfa Bank director Mikhail Fridman, a fellow Jew who came to know Berezovsky well—only to later fall out with him—observed: “He was an absolute Jew both in appearance, by his manner of speaking and intonations, and by his last name, first name, patronymic, and so on. Without any doubt, as a Soviet person who lived a long and productive life in the Soviet system, he fully experienced, I am sure, all sorts of discriminatory antisemitism that was then ubiquitous.”¹¹ Indeed, in his autobiography, Berezovsky describes instances of discrimination against him, but he did not become embittered or try to retaliate: “I prefer not to fight windmills, and I nevertheless consider myself as belonging to the Russian culture.”¹²

Berezovsky also recalled that he was far from being a dissident in his youth. On the contrary, he was an enthusiastic and active member of the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) and later, in 1978, joined the Communist Party. When he disagreed with those on his party committee, he did not give up his membership. “I was an example of a classic Soviet careerist,” Berezovsky wrote.¹³ As Soviet-born British journalist Peter Pomerantsev observed of Berezovsky, he was representative of a state of mind prevalent among the elite who grew up in the late Soviet Union:

You ask them if they believed in Communism, and they say: “Don’t be silly.” “But you sang the songs? Were good members of the Komsomol?” “Of course we did, and we felt good when we sang them. And then right afterwards we would listen to Deep Purple and ‘the voices’—Radio Liberty, the BBC.” “So you were dissidents? You believed in the end of the USSR?” “No. It’s not like that. You just speak several languages at the same time, all the time. There are several ‘yous.’”¹⁴

A Family Man

Rejected at Moscow State University, Berezovsky entered the Faculty of Electronics and Computer Engineering at the Moscow Forestry Institute, where he met Nina Korotkova, who was two years behind him in her studies. The couple married in 1970, and within a year Elizaveta was born. Ekaterina followed two years later. According to Ekaterina: “Mama was incredibly beautiful, and Papa always loved pretty women.”¹⁵ They lived with Berezovsky’s parents, who by this time had an apartment on Leninskii Prospekt, near the Forestry Institute, which was spacious by Soviet standards—four rooms. They also had a dacha outside the city. Nonetheless, Berezovsky recalled that, once their two daughters arrived, they had trouble making ends meet on his stipend of a hundred rubles a month, and he had to get a part-time job.¹⁶

After achieving top marks at the Forestry Institute, Berezovsky was able to pursue graduate studies in the early 1970s at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University, earning a master’s degree in applied mathematics. He then became a researcher at the prestigious Institute of Control Sciences of the USSR Academy of Sciences and was awarded a doctorate there in 1983, as well as becoming the head of a laboratory. The institute attracted the top Jewish scientists in the country. According to one former student: “In the sphere of Soviet life, these were the brightest people who had come together. It was, to a meaningful degree, a Jewish Institute.”¹⁷ In December 1991, Berezovsky, with numerous scholarly articles and monographs to his credit, would be elected a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Section of Mathematics, Mechanics, and Computer Science.

Berezovsky later described this period of his life: “I enjoyed life as a scientist in the Soviet Union. An unregimented working day. I didn’t need to be up by eight a.m. and wade through crowds on the subway. I could sleep in, and at the same time could sit up until four in the morning and mull over interesting problems. I led the life of a Soviet artist, not the life of a Soviet worker—at a machine from the starting bell. But from dawn to dusk alone with my thoughts and the company I chose.”¹⁸

But, always restless, Berezovsky could not resist new opportunities. In the late 1980s, the Institute of Control Sciences began collaborating with the largest Soviet automobile manufacturer—AvtoVAZ, located seven hundred miles east of Moscow in the town of Togliatti—introducing computer-aided design and software systems. The collaboration, in which Berezovsky played a key role, enabled him to establish himself with AvtoVAZ management, which proved valuable for his subsequent entry into the automobile market. He later told American journalist David Hoffman: “We simply used the knowledge that I gained professionally, from the institute, and the work we had done at the institute, and started to sell that work.”¹⁹

The connection with AvtoVAZ enabled Berezovsky to become part owner of an automobile while he was still a researcher at the institute. A younger colleague, Leonid Boguslavskii, mentioned to him that his mother had a very old car that was rusty and falling apart. Berezovsky proposed that he would drive the long distance to Togliatti to have it repaired at AvtoVAZ, and then he and Boguslavskii would share ownership of the vehicle. Boguslavskii insisted on first giving Berezovsky a driving test, which Berezovsky failed outright. As Boguslavskii recalled: “Here I experienced Boria’s absolutely fantastic powers of persuasion—how he could convince someone by alternating warmth and charm with compelling arguments. He pressured me to give in and drove off to Togliatti.”²⁰ Boguslavskii later learned that on the way Berezovsky flew into a ditch and rolled the car but somehow accomplished his mission.

By all accounts, Berezovsky was an incorrigible womanizer. As the 1980s grew on, he apparently tired of Nina—he was also losing interest in mathematics—and took up with a woman who was twelve years younger than he was—Galina Besharova. Besharova came from a working-class family and was employed at the Blagonravov Institute of Machine Building in Moscow. She observed after Berezovsky’s death in 2013: “Boris had a very rare quality among men—he could charm everyone … His charisma was irresistible. It was very hard to say ‘no’ to him.”²¹ For a while Berezovsky was able to lead two separate personal lives, but at one point, much to his chagrin, he arrived at Sheremetevo Airport from a trip to the United States to find that both his wife and his girlfriend had showed up to meet him.²²

Although Besharova gave birth to his son, Artem, in 1989, Berezovsky did not divorce his wife and marry Besharova until 1991. By the time the couple had a daughter, Anastasia, in 1992, Berezovsky was already involved with a Russian beauty named Elena Gorbunova, a former student at Moscow State University, who was almost twenty years his junior. In 1993, after Berezovsky moved in with Gorbunova, Besharova left Russia to take up residence in London. In 2011, she won from Berezovsky the largest divorce settlement ever awarded in Britain, $150 million.²³

One person whose close friendship with Berezovsky spanned his relationships with the three women was Petr Aven, the billionaire former director of Russia’s Alfa Bank, who testified in the Robert Mueller probe about Putin and the 2016 Trump campaign. Aven’s father, Oleg, was a director of the Institute of Control Sciences, as well as a supervisor of Berezovsky’s doctoral dissertation, and Berezovsky became a frequent visitor to the Aven home in the 1970s. Nine years younger than Berezovsky, Aven was something of a wunderkind. He earned his doctorate in economics at Moscow State University in 1980, at the age of only twenty-five, and went on to become a senior researcher at the Systems Research Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Immediately after the Soviet collapse, Aven joined Yeltsin’s new team of economic reformers, led by Egor Gaidar (a fellow student of Aven at Moscow State University), as head of the new Committee on Foreign Economic Relations and then, after the Russian Federation was formed at the end of 1991, minister of foreign economic relations. Aven would provide Berezovsky with crucial connections to Yeltsin’s inner circle and use his position to further Berezovsky’s business projects.

An Unlikely Beginning

Unlike the Berezovskys, Putin’s parents, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin and Maria Ivanovna Shelomova, were of humble origin, with scant education.²⁴ Vladimir Spiridonovich’s forebears were serfs from the Tver region of Russia. Putin’s grandfather, Spiridon Ivanovich Putin, was the first of the Putin family not to have been born under the yoke of serfdom, which ended in 1861 under the reformist Tsar Alexander II. Vladimir and Maria married in 1928, when they were both seventeen, and moved to Leningrad a few years later. During World War II, Vladimir served in a People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) battalion behind German lines and was severely wounded. (He would limp for the rest of his life.) His son, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, was not born until 1952, when Maria, who had barely survived the siege of Leningrad, was almost forty-one. Putin’s two brothers, born earlier, had both died of illness. Like Berezovsky, he was raised an only child. Vladimir Spiridonovich worked as a toolmaker in a Leningrad factory that made subway and railroad cars. According to Putin’s former elementary school teacher Vera Gurevich, “His father was very serious and imposing. He often had an angry look. The first time I came to see him, I was even frightened … And then it turned out that he was very kindhearted.”²⁵

After the ravages of war and Stalinism, Soviet citizens did not take life for granted. Just as Berezovsky’s parents did, the Putins doted on their only child. Putin’s ex-wife Liudmila observed that “he was their sun, moon and stars. They did everything they could for him.”²⁶ As a child, Putin recalled: “I did not go to kindergarten. I was an only child, and my parents were very worried about me, and so kept a close eye on me. Mama even did not work for a while, in order to spend all her time with me.”²⁷ Maria Ivanovna found employment that would allow her to spend her days with her little son. She worked nights in a bakery, unloading trays of bread, and as a night security guard in a secondhand store. The Putins were so protective of their son that he did not start school until he was almost eight, in 1960. He spent most of his time playing in the courtyard of their building. According to Putin: “Mama sometimes stuck her head out the window and shouted, ‘Are you in the courtyard?’ I always was.”²⁸

The Putins’ living quarters were confined to one room in a fifth-floor communal apartment, shared with two other families. A single gas stove for the families to prepare meals, along with a sink, was in the hallway. And near the stairs an unheated closet housed a toilet, over which residents would perch when washing by pouring water over themselves. Putin biographer Steven Lee Myers described the dwelling: “The stairs to the fifth floor were pocked with holes, fetid, and dimly lit; they smelled of sweat and boiling cabbage. The building was infested with rats, which [Putin] and his friends would chase with sticks.”²⁹

At Leningrad’s School No. 193, Putin was a restless, inattentive student. According to Vera Gurevich: “Volodia [diminutive for Vladimir] could not sit still during lessons. He was always spinning around on his seat, peering out the window, or looking under his desk.”³⁰ Putin also got very rough with his peers. His school friend Viktor Borisenko recalled: “He could get into a fight with anyone … He wasn’t the strongest in our class, but he could beat anyone in a fight because he would work himself up into a frenzy and fight to the end.”³¹ Gurevich mentioned one incident, when she took the class on an outing and there was an altercation among some of the boys. Putin threw one of his classmates, K., on the ground, breaking his ankle: “I told Volodia that it was not necessary to use force against K., but it was necessary to just speak to him convincingly. To this, my pupil replied: ‘Vera Dmitrievna, there are people who do not understand any words or do not want to understand. They understand only force.’ It stuck in my head for years.”³²

After school Putin hung out in the courtyard with tough boys who were two or three years older and much bigger than he was. Viktor Borisenko described what it was like: “I remember him well in the courtyard. In elementary grades, the courtyard for Putin was a window to the world … The atmosphere there was terrible: unshaven dirty guys with port wine and cigarettes. Drinks, obscenities, fights. And Putin among all these punks.”³³ These experiences seemed to have had a significant effect on the formation of Putin’s personality. Tellingly, Gurevich is quoted in Putin’s autobiography, First Person, as saying: “I think Volodya is a good person. But he never forgives people who betray him or are mean to him.”³⁴

When he went to secondary school and was chosen to join the Komsomol, Putin spent less time in the courtyard, and his academic performance improved. Although he achieved only average grades in math and chemistry, Putin got top marks in history and German. In the meantime, Putin, who was wiry and small in stature (around five feet six as an adult), took up martial arts, in particular sambo, which combined judo and wrestling. According to Myers: “The martial arts transformed his life, giving him the means of asserting himself against larger, tougher boys.”³⁵ Putin would cultivate an image of physical fitness and athletic prowess well into his reign as Russia’s leader.

Toward the end of his secondary school years, Putin decided he wanted to become a spy. Inspired by the hugely popular 1968 Russian television miniseries Sword and Shield (Shchit i mech), about a Soviet secret agent who penetrates Nazi military intelligence and later the SS, Putin walked into Leningrad KGB headquarters (the so-called Big House, Bol’shoi dom) and asked how he could join the KGB. The officer in charge told him that the KGB did not hire walk-ins and that he should get more education before he applied. Putin then pressed his interlocutor to suggest the best line of study for an aspiring KGB applicant and was told that law would be a good choice.³⁶

Commenting on Putin’s story, Russian journalist Nataliya Gevorkyan observed: “Imagine a boy who dreams of being a KGB officer when everyone else wants to be a cosmonaut.”³⁷ But a career in the KGB was not only prestigious; it brought material rewards. KGB officers, particularly those at the senior level, lived better than their counterparts in the military, the prosecutor’s office, or the police. They typically received more spacious housing and could avail themselves of comfortable rest homes and sanatoriums that the KGB made available to its employees and their families. If one were lucky enough to get a spot in the coveted foreign intelligence branch—often attained through high-level party or KGB connections—the opportunity of going abroad, denied to ordinary Soviet citizens, was a huge perquisite. In short, it is easy to see why a young man like Putin, from a poor, uneducated family, would be attracted to the KGB, whatever his ideological views.³⁸

In 1970, following the KGB officer’s advice, Putin entered the law faculty at Leningrad State University (LSU), which was one of the country’s best universities. That said, Soviet law was first and foremost a political weapon of the state and used to maintain the regime, not to protect legal rights. Although Stalinist methods were no longer employed, individuals who challenged the state in any way were severely punished under the Soviet legal system, which was subordinate to the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party. Putin was thus gaining a higher education in a field that focused on Communist dogma, rather than on justice. Ironically, in his third year at LSU, Putin, called Put’ka by his student friends, was able to experience a nonideological pleasure: driving his own car, a Soviet-made Zaporozhets. His mother, by a stroke of incredible luck, had won the car in a lottery. In Putin’s words: “Money was tight in our family, and to give the car to me was absolute madness. We could have sold it, after all, and gotten at least 3,500 rubles for it … But my parents decided to spoil me.”³⁹

At LSU, Putin forged friendships with two men who would play key roles in his future career, as part of the cohort of his allies from the security services and legal agencies in Leningrad/St. Petersburg who later followed Putin to Moscow. One was Viktor Cherkesov, who was two years ahead of Putin. After graduation from law school, followed by a couple of years in the military and the prosecutor’s office, Cherkesov joined the Leningrad branch of the KGB’s infamous Fifth Chief Directorate, where he gained notoriety as a ruthless persecutor of dissidents. Following the Soviet collapse in 1991, Cherkesov rose to become head of the St. Petersburg FSB (successor to the KGB), and later worked under his old friend when Putin was appointed Russian FSB chief in 1998.⁴⁰ The second close friend and classmate was Aleksandr Bastrykin, who since 2011 has headed the powerful Russian Investigative Committee, known for prosecuting high-profile political and economic cases that are important to the Kremlin’s agenda.⁴¹

The Big House

In 1975, following his graduation from law school, Putin was formally admitted to the KGB, reportedly because of his good grades. After completing six months’ training at a KGB counterintelligence school, he became a full-fledged officer in Leningrad. Putin says in his autobiography only that he worked in counterintelligence. This could mean that he worked for the Second Chief Directorate, which was responsible for the internal political control of Soviet citizens and foreigners residing in the country, as Steven Myers and other sources say. It is also possible that Putin joined his law school classmate Cherkesov in the Fifth Chief Directorate, which focused more specifically on dissidents.⁴² Either way, as Myers notes, Putin “took part in operations not against the enemy outside, but against the enemy within.”⁴³

At this time, the Brezhnev regime had been clamping down on political dissent with increasingly repressive measures, implemented by KGB Chairman Iurii Andropov, whose trademark strategy was the incarceration of dissidents in psychiatric hospitals. Vladimir Bukovsky, the human rights activist who made the world aware of this practice, was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1976, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn had been exiled two years earlier. Leningrad was a hub of the dissident movement, in which the city’s small groups of intellectuals and cultural figures spread samizdat literature (which Berezovsky consumed avidly) and staged small protests against the regime. For Putin and his KGB colleagues, these dissidents were dangerous enemies of the state.⁴⁴

Former KGB general Oleg Kalugin, who was assigned to the Leningrad KGB as first deputy chief in 1980 after having worked abroad in foreign intelligence, described the Big House years later: “I was born in Leningrad, but it still seemed like the boondocks. Work here was not among foreigners but rather among Soviet citizens … the system was focused on exposing those with reformist attitudes, people who wanted to change, to improve things. These were the people the KGB was occupied with, instead of focusing on actual spies.”⁴⁵ Asked once what he remembers of Putin from those days, Kalugin replied: “He brought me some papers to sign. It was not a real interaction … People ask me what I think of him, what I know about his life. I do not like this topic of discussion and respond that it would be better to ask his ex-wife. She lived with him for thirty years and knows him better than I do.”⁴⁶

As Putin spied on his fellow citizens, he made lifelong friendships with two coworkers in the Leningrad KGB—Nikolai Patrushev and Aleksandr Bortnikov. Patrushev would serve as Putin’s first deputy after Putin became head of the FSB in 1998 and succeed him as FSB chief in August 1999. In 2008, after Patrushev assumed the leadership of Russia’s powerful National Security Council, Bortnikov took over his FSB post. Both men are ruthless hardliners. In 2017, Bortnikov famously defended Stalin’s purges, saying that “a significant number of criminal cases were based on factual evidence.”⁴⁷ Patrushev, arguably the closest to Putin of all his allies, is also the most hostile toward the West, although he voiced reservations about Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. According to Russian political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya: “His ideas form the foundations of decisions taken by Putin. He is one of the few figures Putin listens to.”⁴⁸ Who would have predicted that Putin and his two friends, run-of-the-mill KGB officers in the mid-1970s, would end up wielding such power over their county?

Putin kept his KGB employment a secret from most of his acquaintances, including for a while, his future wife Liudmila, who he met in 1980 through a St. Petersburg friend. Always cautious, Putin waited for three and a half years to propose marriage. Liudmila, a flight attendant from Kaliningrad, initially found Putin “plain and dull,” but she was soon drawn to his “inner-strength.”⁴⁹ Once married, the two moved in with Putin’s parents, as was the custom in Soviet days—because of the extreme housing shortage—and the birth of their first daughter, Masha, soon followed. The Putins’ second daughter, Katerina, was born in Dresden, in East Germany, where the family moved in 1985. According to a KGB colleague there, Vladimir Usol’tsev: “Putin was the master of the house. This was clear … Liudmila simply knew her place, so to speak. She was modest, quiet. Volodia sometimes just with his eyes would tell her: ‘look, I am talking, and you shut up,’ or something like that.”⁵⁰

Putin was vague in his autobiography about how long he worked in counterintelligence for the Leningrad KGB, and biographers have offered conflicting accounts.⁵¹ But an official biography, published on his sixty-ninth birthday, states that Putin remained a counterintelligence officer until after he was sent to Moscow in 1979 for training at the Felix Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB, a stepping-stone for career advancement.⁵² According to a study for Washington’s Wilson Center, the Dzerzhinsky School devoted considerable attention to “the cultivation of what were described as ‘Chekist’ [a reference to Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka] values: unquestioning loyalty to the Soviet Communist system and its defense from foreign and domestic adversaries.”⁵³ A few months after his return to Leningrad, Putin was transferred to the First Department (foreign intelligence) of the Leningrad KGB, where he worked as an officer in Directorate RT, which conducted “reconnaissance from the territory of the USSR” (razvedka s territorii). RT officers recruited foreigners who were visiting the city and employees of foreign consulates to spy for the KGB. According to Russian journalist Andrei Soldatov: “Directorate RT was a truly totalitarian approach to intelligence. It made the territory of the Soviet Union a gigantic trap—all regional branches of the KGB had special departments tasked to look for ways to recruit foreigners on their soil.”⁵⁴

Deutschland über Alles

Putin’s career advancement was slow. It was not until 1984 that he was singled out for a year of study at the Andropov Red Banner KGB Institute outside Moscow and received espionage training that prepared him for work abroad. A year later, in the summer of 1985, he was sent to the East German industrial city of Dresden, where he could use the German he learned in school and later perfected at the Red Banner Institute. Dresden was not a plum KGB posting, by any measure. Had Putin made a greater impression on his teachers at the Red Banner Institute or on his superiors in Leningrad, he might have been sent to West Germany under cover as a diplomat, or at least to East Berlin, where the KGB had a much larger presence because of the close access to the West. As one former KGB colleague observed: “In principle, Vladimir Vladimirovich did the very same work in Dresden that he did in Leningrad, only from the territory of the GDR [German Democratic Republic].”⁵⁵

In Dresden, Putin joined a group of eight KGB officers whose job was to liaise with employees of the Ministry of State Security of the GDR—better known as the Stasi, the East German political police—and possibly recruit foreign businessmen, scientists, and students who came to the city. As there were two others nicknamed Volodia in the group, Putin was called “little Volodia,” apparently because he was short in height.⁵⁶ Liudmila arrived in Dresden with Maria in late October 1985. As she later told a Putin biographer, she immediately felt at home there because she grew up in Kaliningrad, formerly a German city, Königsberg, which came under Soviet control after World War II: “The same solid, old mansions, mixed with new buildings. And then—that smell of special coal briquettes used at home for cooking cutlets, just like in Kaliningrad. A specific smell that is unique.”⁵⁷

Liudmila recalled that her husband had set aside some money for her to buy something for herself on her arrival and was later “unpleasantly surprised” when, inside of new clothes, she purchased practical household items. “As far as clothes were concerned,” she said, “I have sewn almost all my own clothes since the eighth grade. And Germany was no exception.”⁵⁸ Putin, by contrast, was not so restrained. Masha Gessen interviewed a former member of the radical terrorist group Red Army Faction (RAF), which the KGB was cultivating, who told her that Putin was always eager to get his hands on coveted items from the West and even managed to obtain from him a state-of-the art shortwave radio and a car stereo.⁵⁹

Putin’s biographers, both Western and Russian, have dissected his career in Dresden to ascertain exactly what he was doing at the KGB outpost. Vladimir Usol’tsev portrayed Putin as a skilled KGB sleuth: “In Dresden, Putin recruited candidates to become illegal agents. This is very hard, painstaking work … Putin was a good master at secret schemes.”⁶⁰ Journalist Catherine Belton seems to have interviewed the same former RAF member, apparently named Klodo, who spoke with Masha Gessen. Belton concludes that Putin was leading strategy meetings with the group and giving orders, but Gessen had a different impression: “Handing out assignments to RAF radicals, who were responsible for more than two dozen assassinations and terrorist attacks between 1970 and 1998, is exactly the sort of work Putin had once dreamed of, but there is no evidence he was directly connected to it.”⁶¹ Russian journalist Dmitrii Zapol’skii, who has followed Putin’s career closely, clarified Putin’s relationship with the RAF: “The group in Dresden itself was clearly only a ‘technical’ unit, a ‘cog’ in the machine of the Soviet intelligence network. Putin did not play an independent role there. He only transmitted orders from his immediate superiors. I would not exaggerate his contacts with Klodo or his work along this line.”⁶²

However difficult it might be for Putin admirers to accept that the current leader of Russia was an unremarkable employee of the KGB, the records speak for themselves. Mark Galeotti, an expert on the Russian security services, concluded from a recently declassified KGB report on Putin that in Dresden he was acting in an administrative capacity, rather than engaging personally with potential recruits: “Technically, this was First Chief Directorate work, but in many ways it was not. He was not recruiting and running agents so much as collating reports, liaising with the East German Stasi (who gave him his own access pass) and responding to queries from Moscow.”⁶³

In his January 2021 documentary, Putin’s Palace, Aleksei Navalny, who accessed Stasi archives in Dresden, described Putin’s stint in East Germany thus: “Putin came to Dresden in 1985 as a petty KGB officer, an ordinary employee of the nonsecret residency—the official KGB office in East Germany … this was where idle employees sat at party meetings and awarded each other mementos.”⁶⁴ As veteran Russian journalist Leonid Mlechin observed: “Over time, there has been a lot of talk about Vladimir Putin belonging to the group of twentieth-century superspies. In reality he was a low-ranking officer in a minor position. Putin did not make a grand career in intelligence.”⁶⁵

Gorbachev Changes Everything

Whatever Putin’s work in Dresden, it was difficult for him to watch the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe crumble during his tenure there from 1985 to 1990. Soviet leaders had weathered the 1980 crisis in Poland, sparked by labor unrest at the Gdansk shipyards and the emergence of the Solidarity movement. But the Kremlin’s decision not to send military troops into the country was a harbinger of its nonintervention in other Soviet Bloc countries. By the spring of 1985, following the deaths of the much-revered former KGB chief Andropov, who served as Soviet Communist Party chief in 1982–84, and his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, a younger reformist leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was at the helm. It was not long before Gorbachev’s “new thinking” in foreign policy would result in efforts to end the expensive arms race with the West and loosen Moscow’s grip on the countries of the Soviet Bloc. In the GDR, the KGB soon wore out its welcome.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in early November 1989, thousands of protestors stormed the Stasi building in Dresden on December 5, as Putin and his comrades watched from the balcony of their compound around the corner on Angelikastrasse. According to Putin’s own account, when demonstrators began to gather outside the KGB building, he, as the most senior officer there at the time, called the Soviet military command in Dresden to ask for protection but was refused because orders from Moscow were required. Although he had no authorization to act on his own, Putin decided he had to protect the KGB’s highly sensitive files. Putin recalled that, despite warnings from his colleagues, he went outside, accompanied by a Soviet soldier, and approached the angry mob. He told them that the compound was a Soviet military object and would be defended with firearms if anyone tried to enter. He then ordered the soldier to reload his weapon in order to demonstrate his point, and the two walked back into the building. Although the protestors did not try to enter the building, they did not leave until after Soviet paratroopers finally arrived and surrounded the compound.⁶⁶After Putin became Russia’s president, Kremlin-sponsored television portrayed him as a hero who saved the day for his comrades by facing a crowd of thousands. In fact, subsequent eyewitness accounts revealed that there had been no more than fifteen or twenty demonstrators outside the KGB’s building.⁶⁷

Gorbachev was also making important changes at home, introducing demokratizatsiia (multicandidate elections for both party and state bodies), glasnost’ (freedom to express views publicly), and perestroika (political and economic restructuring). He understood that the Soviet command economy was no longer viable. The country’s economic situation was declining rapidly, largely due to its exorbitant military spending, and some form of privatization was called for. Two new laws, passed under Gorbachev’s direction in 1987, permitted state enterprises to adopt practices used by private businesses and allowed foreign investment in Soviet firms. These changes paved the way for Berezovsky to become a businessman. In his words: “I was absolutely happy in the Soviet Union. And then this life ended, in 1989, when the institute stopped paying salaries, and I felt some sort of uncertainty, or threat, hanging in the air, and life became uncomfortable … I made an absolutely crucial decision: to discontinue doing science and start doing business, which was at the time called ‘speculation’… For me a completely different life began, with risk, responsibility, and freedom.”⁶⁸

Berezovsky approached the management of AvtoVAZ with a proposal to form a joint venture with an Italian Fiat supplier, Logosystem, and in May 1989, LogoVAZ was established, with Berezovsky as general director. Badri Patarkatsishvili, a Georgian who was responsible for AvtoVAZ’s spare parts distribution in the Caucasus, provided some of the start-up capital for LogoVAZ and later joined its management. As the late American journalist Paul Klebnikov noted, LogoVAZ was established to provide AvtoVAZ with state-of-the-art computer software, but before long the new firm dropped that mission and started to sell automobiles made by AvtoVAZ.⁶⁹

AvtoVAZ was the Soviet Union’s largest domestic car manufacturer, producing around seven hundred thousand cars (the brands Lada and Zhiguli) annually, and Soviet citizens, craving mobility and status, were snapping them up by any means possible. AvtoVAZ director Vladimir Kadannikov and his deputy became shareholders in LogoVAZ while keeping their positions at AvtoVAZ, so they made sure that the new joint venture was profitable. LogoVAZ bought the cars at artificially low prices set by the state and sold them on the domestic market at considerable profit. In the words of journalist David Hoffman: “The traders were effectively sucking the value out of AvtoVaz, but they were doing it with the permission of the managers inside.”⁷⁰

Within three years LogoVAZ was selling forty-five thousand AvtoVAZ cars annually, grossing revenues of nearly $300 million on these sales alone.⁷¹ Andrei Vasiliev, editor of Kommersant when Berezovsky later owned the publication, made these wry observations after Berezovsky’s death: “Boria [Boris] really had a brilliant intuition. When they were still working as AvtoVAZ dealers, he came and said, ‘We will buy out all the Zhiguli that AvtoVAZ has for a year in advance.’ They scooped up all their stash, took their mothers’ savings from under pillows and mattresses, sold their wives and all invested in these tin cans called Zhiguli. At that moment, the economy switched to dollars, the ruble collapsed, and the price of the Zhiguli was fixed in hard currency … This is how he made his first millions.”⁷²

Eager to expand his business by exporting raw materials from Russia, Berezovsky traveled to Lausanne, Switzerland, in early 1991 with Nikolai Glushkov, a founding member of LogoVAZ and chief financial officer of AvtoVAZ. Glushkov, who held a doctorate in theoretical and mathematical physics, had worked for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Trade for ten years and thus had valuable experience with foreign markets. He would remain one of Berezovsky’s closest allies for years to come. Berezovsky and Glushkov managed to enlist a Swiss commodities trading company, André & Cie, to go into business with LogoVAZ as a Swiss-Russian joint venture, but with Berezovsky and his partners owning the majority of the shares. In the words of Klebnikov: “For Berezovsky, the reincorporation of Logovaz represented an extraordinary achievement. The Soviet Union had not yet fallen, and here was a Russian businessman, operating without the advice of the KGB or other internationally minded parts of the Soviet establishment, setting up a sophisticated international financial structure, complete with reputable foreign partners, shell companies, and tax shelters.”⁷³ Berezovsky later recalled that, when he started his business in 1989, he had only three thousand rubles, “half the price of a car,” to his name.⁷⁴ It was not long before he would be frequenting an exclusive men’s clothing store in Zurich and driving a Mercedes.