Word: leningraders
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Putin chose his direction in life, she says, 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...
Born in 1952, toward the end of the cruel Stalin years, to a lower-class family, Putin was the child of a religious mother who survived the siege of Leningrad and a faithful Communist Party father invalided out of the army with multiple shrapnel wounds. He was a late child, born when his mother was 41 years old. His two brothers died young, one shortly after birth, the other of diphtheria during World War II. Although Vladimir Sr. was party secretary at the train-car factory where he worked, Volodya's mother had him secretly baptized in the Russian Orthodox...
Putin duly entered Leningrad State University law school in 1970. Classmate Leonid Polokhov, though five years older, befriended Volodya through their shared love of sports. In those days, he says, even though the school was a training ground for apparatchiks, the law faculty had a reputation for mildly progressive thinking. But Putin, he says, "didn't pick up this freethinking spirit...
...service offered a privileged lifestyle and a chance to see the forbidden world of the West. Putin was trained in the ways of the spy and given the perks reserved for the communist elite. He was eventually placed in the First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence, not dissident surveillance) in Leningrad, and there he seemed stuck for nine years, evidently not the top of his class. Sometime during these years he met his wife Lyudmila--a flight attendant--and they had two daughters, now 14 and 13. He shrouded his work in mystery and loved the secrecy...
...that was radically altered. While he had been tasting the ways of the West, his country had roiled through the reversals of perestroika. Moscow Center's talent spotters took no interest in him, and he was given a low-rent KGB "cover" job assisting the rector at his old Leningrad university, a position normally reserved for a retiring agent. He was unsure how he fit into the new order, says a close aide. Worse, says Polokhov, who met him again in 1990, Putin was "hurt that the state did not want him anymore." Polokhov says Putin told him then that...