Word: stelmakova
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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...
...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...
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