Word: kgb
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Putin told Ted Koppel on ABC's Nightline last Friday that he was bringing in, as investigators, former KGB colleagues "who are untarnished and have no connection with corruption." Still, the jury is out on the level of Putin's anticorruption zeal. Two prominent members of the Family, Dyachenko and Yumashev, are actively involved in his election campaign. But clouds seem to be thickening over the head of Berezovsky, the most unpopular and pugnacious of the so-called oligarchs. A belief is growing among Russia's political and business elite that Putin wants to destroy Berezovsky's political power. There...
...when studying the heroic days of the Leningrad siege. "Intelligence officers were really glorified," says Stelmakova, "in movies, literature, propaganda." Putin fell for the "romance of intelligence service." Putin says he was so keen to join up that he actually went one day--at age 15--to the local KGB headquarters to volunteer. There, a benevolent spook explained that "we don't take people who come to us on their own initiative." His advice: Go to law school...
...what will this can-do guy do with the near authoritarian power invested in Russia's President by its constitution? He has always been the competent staff officer, the universal soldier supremely faithful to his bosses at the time--whether they were Soviet hard boys at the KGB, reforming zealots in St. Petersburg or the corrupt and failing Yeltsin regime. Now he will be giving the orders. "We do not know enough of him, and he does not know enough of himself," says Dimitri Simes, president of Washington's Nixon Center, "to know how he will evolve...
...schoolboy Putin too who first conceived of a career in the KGB. Tamara Stelmakova, now 70, still teaches at School 281, the secondary school specializing in chemistry that Volodya attended at 14. She remembers an ordinary boy who stood out mainly for his "beautiful" reports on "political information" in the mandatory Marxist ideology class. Volodya, she recalls, was "always speaking as if he knew what he was talking about," mesmerizing his audience with his smooth delivery. She recalls him as a well-mannered student with poor grades in chemistry, good grades in history and German, and "always...
...course an older generation of Russian reporters is quite accustomed to being treated as enemies of the state, because that was the way of the KGB. And acting president Putin, of course, is a career KGB official...