Putin

Sakharov, however, was a trickier business for the party and the KGB, which never acted in important matters without directives from the party. Of course, the KGB had ways of getting the party to do what it wanted, like feeding the leadership false or misleading information, as Andropov is believed to have done during the Prague Spring, which he wanted crushed at once. Sakharov had made the Soviet Union a nuclear power and had three times been awarded the Hero of Socialist Labor, one of the country’s highest civilian awards. In 1968, the year of the Prague Spring, The New York Times had published the complete text of Sakahrov’s long essay “Reflections,” which grappled with coexistence in a hostile nuclear world.

Andropov believed that there was still hope for Sakharov and suggested in a 1968 report to the Central Committee that Sakharov be called in for “an appropriate conversation.” However, Sakharov, a shy but fearless man, was already well beyond persuasion or threat. Two years later Andropov informed the Central Committee that it was “advisable to install secret listening devices in Sakharov’s apartment.” In April 1971 Andropov reported without a trace of irony: “Meeting regularly with anti-Soviet individuals, some of whom are mentally ill, SAKHAROV looks at the world around him mainly through their eyes. It seems to him that he is constantly subjected to provocations, surveillance, eavesdropping, etc.”

The line on Sakharov was that his anti-Soviet stances could only be the result of bad influences upon him, especially that of his firebrand wife, Elena Bonner, who had been born into Communist “royalty” and grown up in luxurious apartments (though everything in them belonged to the state, as indicated by the small copper tag with a number on every piece of furniture). Her father was executed in the purges of 1937 and her mother was in the camps from that same year until 1954. Bonner was half Jewish, more than Jew enough for the KGB. Putin, who would let those close to him know that he took no pleasure in anti-Semitism, had no problem agreeing with those who expressed such opinions on the sound philosophical basis of—why spit against the wind? But, if only from the point of view of professional finesse, he did not like how the affair was handled, especially the “illegal” arrest and internal exile of Sakharov for protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. “The Sakharov affair was crude,” judged Putin.

Putin denies that he did any work for the Fifth Directorate in its task of suppressing ideological subversion. Though his image gained luster from his work in espionage, there was no upside in admitting to helping crush dissent, especially in the years immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, when everyone was scrambling to provide themselves with some sort of democratic credentials. It is of course very much in the interest of Putin’s enemies to prove he worked in the Fifth Directorate. But it’s not only his enemies who hold that view. Putin’s friend and KGB colleague in Dresden, Vladimir Usoltsev, who wrote an entire book, Co-worker, about their relationship, took it for granted that Putin had gotten all his unorthodox ideas from all the dissident literature he had read as part of his job of suppressing it: “Gradually it dawned on me that Volodya had acquired all his fancy dissident ideas back in Leningrad while working in the 5th.” Putin, he says, showed particular esteem for the work of Solzhenitsyn, on whom he would bestow high state honors many years later.

Putin continues to deny having worked in the Fifth or having any dissident ideas, fancy or otherwise. Confiscated dissident literature, samizdat, no doubt circulated among KGB agents, sexy and forbidden as an errant issue of Playboy.

What’s the truth? There was a brief period in the early nineties when Russia was on a spree of liberty and the KGB archives were opened up to scholars and antiseptic sunlight. That didn’t last long, and it’s a safe bet that nothing of the sort will be coming along again any time soon. Given that, probably the truest thing that can be said is that it doesn’t matter greatly if Putin worked in the Fifth or merely collaborated with it from time to time or had in fact nothing to do with it. Though literature and life had already lent him a certain light ironic attitude, he was still defined by the virtue he valued most: loyalty. He was loyal to the KGB and its chief, Andropov. No matter what private sentiments he harbored, Putin would not have deviated an iota from KGB policy. He would have supported Sakharov’s exile, the use of psychiatric incarceration as punishment, and even Andropov’s ban on any public mourning for John Lennon in 1980. He was a company man.