Word: polokhov
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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...
Throughout his university years, Putin was ever in pursuit of his KGB dream. Judo had made him determined, resolute, hardworking, and he put those talents to work earning solid grades. "If you told him what he had to do, he learned it," says Polokhov. Putin had little time for social life and never joined the sportsmen's friendly drinking. Recalls Polokhov: "I think he was really born to work...
...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 of the job. But finally he complained to Polokhov that his career was going nowhere. "Though I didn't know his exact position," says Polokhov, who was working for the military prosecutor's office, "he let me know he was dissatisfied...
...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 he was "fired without a pension" from the agency he had so lovingly served for 15 years. When Polokhov expressed his own indignation, he recalls, Putin...
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