The New Tsar (9 page)

The cadre on Angelikastrasse watched these developments from a distance, and reacted cautiously. Colonel Matveyev did not like what he saw stirring in Moscow under Gorbachev, but the others, perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, would later say that they knew the Soviet system was cracking under the pressure released by perestroika and glasnost. “We were the young generation of the security service,” Usoltsev recalled. “It was absolutely clear to us that Soviet power was marching inexorably into the abyss.”
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Lieutenant Colonel Putin, too, shared a grim view of the state of the Soviet Union. He thought the war in Afghanistan had become “senseless and in fact criminal.”
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He saw for himself the comparative wealth of the “decadent” West as he perused the catalogues of German department stores that were so coveted in the KGB office that they were bartered and sent back home to serve as fashion templates for seamstresses.
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Scouring newspapers like
Der Spiegel
or magazines like
Stern
for tidbits to fill their intelligence reports to the Center, he and his colleagues could see for themselves the unvarnished reports of disasters, like the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine in 1986, and know that the official version amounted to a lie. In a way, glasnost came to the security forces first, since they had access to what was forbidden then, but soon would spill into the public consciousness.

The little outpost in Dresden mirrored the divisions within the KGB as a whole over the tectonic changes under way at home, the divide between the hardliners and reformers, between the old guard and the new generation. At the end of 1986, the release of Andrei Sakharov from exile in Gorky prompted a tirade from Colonel Matveyev, but sympathy
from his favorite underling. Lieutenant Colonel Putin would now and then express admiration for dissidents like Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn. The evening after Sakharov’s release from exile, he surprised Usoltsev again. “Don’t forget,” he said, “only the obvious military superiority of the West can bring the unconstrained masters in the Kremlin to their senses.”
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In another instance, as early as 1987, he told a Red Army doctor who knew him in Dresden that he supported the idea of holding elections for the new president of the Soviet Union,
²⁶
three years before it happened. His ambivalence was already evident. He sensed the need for political and economic change, but like Gorbachev and many other Russians, he favored evolutionary change, not radical reform. As many others, he never wanted the state to collapse.

—

T
he head of the First Chief Directorate in Moscow, Vladimir Kryuchkov, quickly adapted to Gorbachev’s new thinking, at least on the surface. Kryuchkov was like Putin in many ways: a fitness fanatic, a workaholic, and a teetotaler who “caused dismay in the traditionally bibulous” ranks by banning drinking at farewell parties for officers about to go abroad.
²⁷
He became one of Gorbachev’s closest advisers, embracing a new openness in intelligence matters, and in 1988, he became the KGB’s chairman; by then the KGB had already begun to sense that the bloc created in Eastern Europe was doomed.

From their Dresden outpost, Lieutenant Colonel Putin and his colleagues could also see that the government led by Erich Honecker, an obstinate old Marxist, was losing popular support. Honecker and his Stasi chief, Mielke, steadfastly refused to replicate Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, but ordinary East Germans sensed the change in the air; the latent desire for basic freedoms was awakening, as it was elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The country’s “disappearance” was inevitable, Putin thought, but he had no idea it was imminent.
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In August 1989, Hungary opened its borders with Austria, allowing citizens to cross freely. East Germans, who could travel within the Soviet bloc, began heading there in hopes of emigrating onward. Protests appeared in cities across East Germany, energized by people demanding, at a minimum, what the Soviet leader was offering his own citizens: elections, freedom to criticize one-party rule, and market reforms that would offer greater material prosperity. The fear of the Stasi remained, but in that fervent year of revolution—from Lithuania to Tiananmen Square—it was no longer enough to keep people silent and fearful in
their homes. In Leipzig on September 4, an opposition movement formed within the Church of Saint Nicholas and held a small protest after services that Monday night. The “Monday protests” grew with each passing week and spread to other cities, including Dresden. By October, tens of thousands had joined in the opposition movement, while thousands more had bolted for the West.

On October 2, Honecker issued orders to put down the protests by force, but a paratrooper unit dispatched to Leipzig never carried them out. The next day, Honecker’s government tried to stem the flow of emigrants by banning travel to Czechoslovakia. When Gorbachev arrived in East Berlin on October 6, ostensibly to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic, the end was already nigh. He pressed Honecker to address the protesters’ demands, saying, “Life punishes those who delay,” but the latter remained defiant. “We will solve our problems ourselves with socialist means,” he declared in his speech with Gorbachev at his side. “Proposals intended to weaken socialism will not blossom here.”
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Less than two weeks later, he was ousted, replaced by his deputy, Egon Krenz, in hopes of stanching the political upheaval. It was too late. The momentum of the protests became irreversible, and the increasingly erratic actions of the government hastened its own collapse. On November 9, a government spokesman announced that the Politburo had authorized East Germans to travel freely to the West and said, when asked, that as far as he knew the change took effect immediately. Tens of thousands of people promptly arrived at the Berlin Wall, overwhelming the border guards. With no clear instructions from the top, the guards let them through. They were greeted on the other side by euphoric West Germans. And together they began tearing down the most infamous symbol of the Cold War.

In Dresden, the tumult consumed the KGB office. Lieutenant Colonel Putin was deeply conflicted, or at least would later claim he was. He said he sympathized with the protesters’ broad demands, but his heart was also with his Stasi friends. The Stasi, he thought, was “also part of society” and “infected with the same sickness,” not an alien force that should be cast away with the decrepit political leadership. What he despised—what he feared—was the rule of the mob. And that is what he watched unfold around him. Worse, no one in Moscow seemed to care. He complained that the KGB, consumed with the internal struggles under way at home, ignored the warnings and recommendations
that he and his colleagues were sending. Not only was the Soviet Union under duress, but now his own career appeared to have become an afterthought, a dead end. “The work we did was no longer necessary,” he recalled later. “What was the point of writing, recruiting, and procuring information? Nobody at Moscow Center was reading our reports.”
³⁰

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November did not end the protests. Nor did it immediately bring the government down. The Stasi’s security network remained in place, though its authority began to erode. After the euphoria in Berlin, opposition groups formed and pressed their demands for free elections. The demands turned to the Stasi itself. In Dresden, an opposition group organized a protest outside the Stasi headquarters on December 5. A few hundred appeared at first, but soon they were joined by thousands. From a side balcony of the mansion on Angelikastrasse, the KGB’s team could easily see the crowd swarming the Stasi compound. Lieutenant Colonel Putin ventured outside to its fringes to observe more closely. At five o’clock, overwhelmed by the size of the crowd and unable to calm the situation by fear alone, Böhm relented and ordered the gate opened. The protesters poured into the compound, milling through the buildings that until that evening had instilled only dread. Böhm, dazed and ashen, pleaded for calm as the crowd ransacked his headquarters. The takeover was largely peaceful, but in Putin’s mind the crowd was deranged, consumed by madness. He remembered a woman shouting, “Look for the passageway under the Elbe! There are prisoners there being tortured in water up to their knees!” He knew it was nonsense—but only because he knew very well where the prison cells actually were.

It was dark by the time he retreated to the mansion. A new, more senior KGB officer, Major General Vladimir Shirokov, had replaced Matveyev earlier in the year. He had left the mansion that night at nine o’clock and was somewhere out in the city. As the crowds rummaged through the Stasi buildings, a small group broke away, turned up Angelikastrasse, and gathered outside the KGB outpost, its purpose and occupants no secret to those protesting. A security guard stationed in a small guard house scrambled inside to inform Lieutenant Colonel Putin, who was the senior officer on the scene, with only four others inside. He was angry and alarmed; responsibility for the KGB’s property—its files, its secrets—was his now. He ordered the guards to prepare for an assault,
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and then he telephoned the Soviet military command in Dresden, asking that reinforcements be sent to protect the building. An officer on duty told him he could do nothing because “there are no orders from
Moscow.” He promised to inquire, though. When the officer did not call back, Putin called again.

“Well, so?” he pressed.

“I asked Moscow,” the officer replied, “but Moscow is silent.”

“And what will we do?” he asked.

“For now, there’s nothing I can do to help.”
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He was stunned. Whatever his doubts about the fate of the Communist system, he remained a dedicated officer of the state. Now the state was failing him at a moment of crisis. “I had the feeling then that the country was no more,” he recalled, the bitterness still raw years later, “that it had disappeared. It became clear the [Soviet] Union was ailing. It was a deadly, incurable disease called paralysis—a paralysis of power.”
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He agonized over what to do. Even without an explicit declaration saying so, it was clear the Soviet leadership no longer intended to prop up East Germany’s government, as it had in 1953, as it had by force in Hungary in 1956 and again in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Putin could not use force against the mob outside, and in fact he did not have the firepower to do much anyway. He thought of the files inside—the intelligence reports to the Center—and the almost unimaginable consequences if they fell into the hands of the rabble. The documents would not only betray the KGB’s work but also affect the “the fates of concrete people,” those who had collaborated with him and his colleagues over the years, people “who once trusted the security bodies” of the Soviet Union. He was sure he would face a military tribunal if the files were compromised, and yet he had no orders detailing what he could do to protect them. He thought of his career in the KGB and his family who relied on it. He sensed then that the Soviet Union would collapse and with it the only life he had known: his service as an intelligence officer.
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It was at this nadir, nearing midnight, that Lieutenant Colonel Putin committed the riskiest, most decisive known act of his KGB career. Dressed in his uniform, he went outside. Though he kept a KGB-issued pistol in the office safe, he did not retrieve it. He walked out alone to the mansion’s gate, without his hat and without orders, and he bluffed.

The mood on Angelikastrasse was not aggressive so much as euphoric. A group of two dozen men gathered on the street outside the gate talking excitedly among themselves, amazed that the dreaded Stasi had crumbled without a fight. Siegfried Dannath, who had two years before had the encounter with his dog outside the KGB mansion, stood among them. Someone challenged the guard on duty to let them in, but he said
nothing. After he disappeared into the house, they were not sure what exactly to do next. It was then that Dannath saw a short officer emerge from the front door, walk down the few steps, and approach. He said nothing at first and then spoke slowly and calmly.

“This house is strictly guarded,” he said in German so fluent that Dannath was surprised. “My soldiers have weapons. And I gave them orders: if anyone enters the compound, they are to open fire.”

He did not shout or menace. He simply spoke those few words, paused, and then turned and walked back into the house. The men on the street only murmured in response. Dannath felt the mood change. The protesters thought better of trying to storm the gates. No one wanted violence, and they had already toppled the Stasi. Taking on the KGB was another thing altogether. So they dispersed, drifting down Angelikastrasse to rejoin the throng milling about the Stasi compound.
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A few hours later the Soviet base received some orders at last, and commanders sent two armored vehicles with soldiers who were no longer needed.

Legends grew out of this night, embellished according to author and agenda. In some versions, “hundreds” of protesters “stormed” the building. In others, guards positioned at the window pointed their AK-47s at the crowd, ready to shoot to kill. In one telling, the Russian officer brandished a pistol outside, or at the top of the stairs to the second floor, staring down a horde that pressed up toward him. Nothing so dramatic happened that night, and what did happen was overshadowed by the far more significant events unfolding in Berlin, including the resignation of the Communist Party’s security committee and the detention of Erich Honecker. Egon Krenz resigned the next day, giving way to the first non-Communist leaders in East Germany’s history.