The Rise Of Putin: Joining The KGB

0:03Gordon:For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books, join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com.

0:24Gordon:Well, welcome, club members, Secret Squirrels, to a very special miniseries that we have for each and every one of you, because we are going to pair the wonderful series that we have just started this week on Putin's chef and so much more. Evgeny Prigozhin, which has its own sort of wild contours, and we are going to be talking over the next three episodes for club members in this little mini-series on Vladimir Putin. And in particular, what we thought we'd do for all of you is to go a little bit deeper into the kind of parallel story of Vladimir Putin intertwined with that of Evgeny Prigozhin.

1:11Gordon:There's overlap with Leningrad and St. Petersburg, the emergence of a young and as we'll see, maybe relatively forgotten KGB officer called Vladimir Putin. And we are going to talk about how he sort of ascends through the ranks of the KGB and Russian politics in the 1990s to become Russia's leader. But Gordon, you and I are not going to do this alone. That sounds like too much for us to carry, Too much of a burden. So we are joined for the next three episodes by a very special guest.

1:47David:That's right. Our very special guest is Mark Gagliotti. Mark Gagliotti is one of the leading experts on the worlds of Russian organized crime and the Russian security services and what goes on at the heart of the Kremlin. Mark, welcome to the Declassified Club. It's great to be here and joining you. Thank you. You've written a number of books, haven't you, on the world of Russian organized crime and Putin. Which ones would you pick out for us as being particularly relevant here? Well, I mean, the revised edition, I should say, of my little primer, We Need to Talk About Putin, is just coming out now, which basically brings us up to date from 2018, when the book was originally written, to now, and really asks the question of whether or not we're dealing with a different Putin.

2:34My answer is basically we're dealing with Putin squared. He's still Putin, but even more so. And well, the other one I'd obviously sort of mention in this particular context is Downfall, which is precisely the book that I co-wrote with Anna Arutunian on precisely Prigozhin's rise and fall, and does this job of attempting to intertwine the stories of these two different but not entirely unconnected nasty chaps, Putin and Prigozhin.

3:05David:And we should say you also host a very good podcast of your own called In Moscow's Shadows, which kind of dives deep into the world of the kind of power politics of the Kremlin and the Russian security services. But Mark, on this series, we're going to look at Putin. At once a kind of blank slate, but also is wonderfully rich and complex and fascinates everyone and has done so much to shape our world. And we want to kind of look at his emergence, how he ends up as Russia's leader and from his kind of modest beginnings. So I guess maybe we should start with the young Putin himself and where he comes from, because the story is very much rooted in Leningrad, now St.

3:46David:Petersburg, which of course is also where a lot of our Pregosian series is set. And that's the world from which Putin emerges as well, isn't it? It is. I mean, he was born in October 1952. I remember once actually being sort of dragged aside by a Russian occultist in Moscow who wanted to go into great detail about why the fact that Putin was a Libra was so central to understanding him. I'm speaking as a Libra myself. I'd rather resent that. But the point is, yeah, he was born at a time when Leningrad was frankly still in ruins. It had been besieged catastrophically in the Second World War. Remember, more people died in the siege of Leningrad than the total war dead of Britain and the United States combined.

4:34And still one of the great spectacles of this city are these huge rolling mass grave sites where people were buried. So Leningrad was still in ruins. It was okay if you were part of the party elite, nomenclatura, but Putin absolutely was not. His family was from very sort of basic stock. I mean, he'd had two elder brothers, had both died, one during the war and one before. His mother was a factory worker. His father had been a submariner who then was in the army. But these were not in any way rich people. He lived in massively overcrowded and frankly, very very grotty accommodation and he himself it's not just that he didn't come from the nomenclatura class but uh didn't exactly distinguish himself in the sort of classic sense as a school boy he seemed more interested frankly in running with kid gangs and picking fights but people had recognized who i mean he was although he was relatively small still is but that he was pretty indomitable and that you know when he went into a fight he would go all in there was no question about that but you know this this was it he was a you know scrappy kid from the wrong side of the tracks and in some ways this is one of the reasons why he ended up going to the KGB because it was still one of the social elevators you couldn't become a university professor if you didn't have the right connections, but you had a chance of getting into the KGB.

6:10David:There's an interesting story in there. It's a 16-year-old. He actually walks up to KGB headquarters in Leningrad and basically knocks on the door cold and just says, I want to join. I mean, it's a kind of ballsy, ambitious thing to do and slightly odd. And it It seems like he's been influenced in those early days by fiction and by the kind of portrayals of the KGB and especially some of the series set in the Second World War like The Sword and the Shield to see this idea of being a KGB officer as being a kind of heroic defender of the motherland and that's what he wants to do. Well, yes and no.

6:47I mean, first of all, absolutely. It's not just Balzi, it is deeply weird to go to the KGB headquarters in Leningrad. I mean, the so-called Bolshoi Don, the big house as it was known. I mean, this is the same building that had been the headquarters of the secret police in Stalin's times. So this is a building that is as steeped in blood as one could imagine. There was the old joke about how it must be the tallest building in Leningrad because you can see Siberia from its basement. And people didn't just go to the KGB and say, hi, how do I join? So, I mean, I can only imagine just how nonplussed the duty officer must have been when this kid wanders in.

7:24But look, I don't think it was ever about being as the KGB's motto was, the sword and shield of the Communist Party. Because one of the other things about Putin was he did not, until he absolutely had to, join the Komsomol, the Uncommunist League, which again was basically a necessity if you're going to get anywhere in the party state. And so although later on in his biography he said he used to enjoy reading the works of Marx and Engels and Lenin, I somehow doubt that. So instead, I think it was from his point of view that the KGB was his chance to break in to a different kind of life. But also, this is a guy who, and here I'm playing amateur psychologist, has always been desperately looking for security.

8:10That's something that he craved and he still craves today. And from his point of view, I think the KGB was the biggest gang in town. It was the place where if you got in, that's it. You were secure. not just, I don't mean secure from being arrested or whatever, but secure from poverty, from isolation, and from, God help us all, irrelevance. As you say, he was sort of impressed by this idea that this was a career where you ended up really mattering.

8:35Gordon:I've been struck listening to Julia Yoffe's podcast called About a Boy on Putin and his kind of early life. And the rules of sort of the street, the courtyard in 1950s, 1960s, Leningrad sounded to me a lot like a prison yard. Like it sounded very similar. It's sort of this, you know, the way you get social status and influences through power. It's very often physical power. Those who are strong can do what they like. There's a high degree of sort of social consciousness around who's up and who's down. And if you're down, you're way down, and it's really hard to get back up, if not impossible. It's fascinating to sort of think about that period as, you know, which I think a lot of the Putin sort of story is overlooked, but it just is so striking when you compare that kind of power system to the one that he seems to be operating in today.

9:36Gordon:It just seems so, I don't know, like you could almost draw not quite a straight line, but something close to it. I'm curious how formative you think that experience as kind of a street brawler was and is to Putin today.

9:50David:If you want to know more about how a young Vladimir Putin found himself in the KGB, even knocking on its front door as a 16-year-old, you can access the full episode by signing up to the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com