‘We just threw everything away’

Carl Schreck, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: November 05. 2009 11:01PM UAE / November 5. 2009 7:01PM GMT

Vladimir Putin walks along the Elbe River in Dresden, Germany, where he was stationed as a KGB agent when the Wall came down. Itar-Tass / Presidential Press Service / AFP

Less than a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a group of protesters gathered outside an office building formally housing Soviet military personnel in the East German city of Dresden. The mob had just ransacked the local headquarters of the East German secret police amid an angry backlash against the totalitarian government, and the crowd demanded to know what was going on inside the Soviet residence.

From the building emerged a 38-year-old Soviet officer named Vladimir Putin who, in fluent German, explained to the crowd that he was a translator and that the building was home to a Soviet military organisation that had every right to be there.

“The people were in an aggressive mood,” Mr Putin recalled in one of several interviews published in a 2000 book titled First Person. “I called our group of troops and explained the situation. They told me: ‘We can’t do anything without instructions from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.’ A few hours later our troops finally arrived. And the crowd dispersed.”

Mr Putin, Russia’s former president and now its powerful prime minister, was a KGB agent stationed in Dresden when the Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago. Information about his work there is sparse, though he told his interviewer in First Person that he was engaged primarily in recruiting informants to keep him abreast of the activities of political actors and gleaning any available intelligence about Nato.

He recalled that his experience facing down the angry mob following the fall of the Wall left him unsettled about the future of his own country.

“When they said ‘Moscow is silent’ … I had the impression that the country ceased to exist,” Mr Putin said. “It became clear that the [Soviet] Union was sick, and that it was a deadly, untreatable affliction called paralysis. Paralysis of power.”

Mr Putin, who has called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, is to be featured in a documentary about the fall of the Berlin Wall that will be aired on Russia’s NTV network on November 8.

Members of the pro-Kremlin youth group Young Guard protest in Moscow on April 3, 2008 against the inclusion of neighbouring ex-Soviet states Ukraine and Georgia into Nato. Alexander Nemenov / AFP

The documentary, titled The Wall, was made by Vladimir Kondratyev, a journalist who worked in Germany for 11 years and worked in Bonn for Soviet state television and radio at the end of the 1980s.

Others to be interviewed in the documentary are the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, during whose tenure the Wall fell, and Richard von Weizsäcker, the president of West Germany at the time.

The interview with Mr Putin, however, is undoubtedly the highlight of the film, given the adoration with which he is showered in the state-controlled media and his proximity to the events in 1989.

“In the interview Mr Putin discusses his views on the Wall, how he felt about those events, where he was when he heard that the Wall had come down and his thoughts on East Germany,” Kondratyev said.

The Russian prime minister will also address Soviet policies during the process of German reunification and its role on subsequent German-Russian relations, Kondratyev said.

Mr Putin also plans to tell about his confrontation with the East German protesters outside the Soviet office building in Dresden, said Kondratyev, who added that the Russian premier had “thoroughly prepared” for the interview.

Kondratyev’s short preview of the interview with Mr Putin indicated that much of the Russian leader’s commentary will mirror material published in First Person, the collection of interviews released in the first year of his presidency.

Asked whether he was upset by the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mr Putin told his interviewer in the book that he “understood it was inevitable”.

“Honestly, I was only sorry for the loss of the Soviet Union’s position in Europe, though logically I understood that a position based on walls and divides cannot exist forever,” Mr Putin said. “But I wanted the change to come somewhat differently. And nothing else was proposed. That’s what is upsetting. We just threw everything away and left.”

schreck@thenational.ae