VLADIMIRPUTIN

EARLYLIFE
VladimirVladimirovichPutinwasbornonOctober7,1952,inthecity
ofLeningrad(laterrenamedStPetersburg)intheSovietUnion.On
September1,1960PutinbeganattendingSchool193atBaskovLane,St
Petersburg,closetohishome.In1964PutinwenttoHighSchool281
andbegantostudyGerman,whichhewouldeventuallyspeakfluently.
WhileatHighSchoolhetookupSamboandJudo,sohecouldbelikethe
heroicKGBOfficersportrayedinSovietmoviesofthetime.
19701975
In1970PutinattendedSt Petersburg State University, where was
required to join the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. At University
Putin had contact with the KGB, who routinely monitored students for
subversive tendencies and deviation from Communist beliefs and thoughtprocesses. One of Putin's tutors was Anatoly Sobchak, an Assistant
Professor of Business Law, who would later play an important part in
Putin's career.
19751985
UpongraduatingfromUniversityin1975,Putinwasacceptedintothe
ranksoftheKGBandtrainedatthe401stKGBSchoolinOkhta,asuburb
ofStPetersburg.Afterhistrainingandindoctrinationwerecomplete,
Putinworkedincounterintelligence,tryingtocatchforeignspiesand
theirRussianaccomplices.Laterhewasinvolvedinmonitoring
foreignersandconsularofficialsinStPetersburg.
19851990
In 1985 Putin was promoted to the KGB Station in Dresden, East Germany,
where he worked as a spy whilst posing as a translator. On November 9,
1989, the Berlin Wall began to come down and it was the beginning of
the end of communism and Soviet control of East Germany. At his KGB
office, Putin burnt files to prevent them from falling into the hands
of anti-communist protesters.
1990-1991
In early 1990 Putin returned to his home town of St Petersburg and was
assigned a job at the International Affairs section of St Petersburg
State University, the same University that he had attended as a young
man. However Putin's true function was to 'talent-spot' students for
possible recruitment to the KGB, and to monitor the staff and students
for signs of disaffection with the Soviet Union. At this time he
renewed his friendship with his former Professor, Anatoly Sobchak, who
was now the Mayor of St Petersburg.
Thanks to Putin's knowledge of foreign countries and languages, in May
1990 Mayor Sobchak appointed him to St Petersburg Council as his
Advisor on International Affairs. On June 28, 1990, Putin was promoted

to the position of Chairman of the Committee for Foreign and Economic

Relations, with responsibility for promoting foreign investment in St
Petersburg. Part of his duties included registering foreign companies
who wished to trade with the city, and providing them with office-space
and communications, and arranging port, transport and industrial
facilities so they could carry on their business. Previously these
things had been controlled by the Soviet Government.
Former Putin advisor Stanislav Belkovsky has described St Petersburg at
this time as the 'gangster capital' of Russia and Putin's KGB
background gave him contacts in the underworld and the police, as well
as the KGB. This meant that Putin was an excellent 'fixer' for the St
Petersburg Mayor's Office. In his capacity as Chairman of the Economic
Relations Committee Putin decided which foreign companies were able to
operate in St Petersburg, and which companies were denied entry. During
this time Putin's contact details were as follows:
office phone St Petersburg 278 1113
mobile phone 812 3126217
office telex St Petersburg 121465
On August 20, 1991, on the second day of an attempted coup against
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, Lieutenant-Colonel Vladimir Putin
resigned from the KGB. However in KGB circles there is a saying: once
you join, the only way out is in a coffin. During the training and
indoctrination phase the KGB was famous for 'getting inside the head'
of it's Officers. So on August 20, 1991, Putin may have thought that
he'd left the KGB. But did the KGB ever leave him?
While at St Petersburg Council, Putin also ran their Food Aid program,
which was intended to exchange raw materials for food, using mainly
German and Scandinavian companies. Much of the food never arrived and
there were a number of food-riots and large street protests by hungry
St Petersburg residents.
1991-1992
Following the failures of the Food Aid program, a St Petersburg
Councillor named Marina Salye headed an investigation which found that
Putin and his cronies had stolen at least 124 million Roubles worth of
food, while people in the city were going hungry. An elaborate network
of shell companies with bogus addresses and non-existent Directors had
been used to launder the money and funnel it into the bank accounts of
Putin and his associates. When confronted with the allegations, Putin
resorted to the old KGB tactic of denying everything and blaming
corrupt foreigners.
Despite being presented with a mountain of evidence Mayor Sobchak would
neither fire Putin, nor prosecute him. Given Sobchak's rapid and
unexplained accumulation of wealth during this period, a likely
explanation is that Sobchak was involved in Putin's rorts and rackets.
Councillor Salye would eventually resign from St Petersburg Council in

disgust and retire to the countryside, but as of 2015 she still had in
her possession the papers proving Vladimir Putin's guilt.
1992-1996
While he continued as Chairman of the St Petersburg Economic Relations
Committee, Putin amassed a fortune in bribes and kickbacks. Corruption
Case 144128 was an investigation carried out by Lieutenant-Colonel
Zykov of the Russian Federal Police, into a construction company called
Twentieth Trust. After being registered by Putin's Economic Relations
Committee, 2.5 billion Roubles was transferred to the company for
building projects which were never started. Much of the money then
disappeared and Lieutenant-Colonel Zykov's team traced some of it to
Spain, where it was used to build large villas for Putin and his
associates.
In March 1994 Mayor Sobchak promoted Putin to be First Deputy Chairman
of the St Petersburg Council. In May 1995 Putin set up the 'Our Home Is
Russia' political party, which supported Russian President Boris
Yeltsin. Putin managed it's 1995 Election Campaign and was leader of
it's St Petersburg Branch for several years. In 1996 Sobchak lost the
St Petersburg Council election and Putin went to Moscow to work for
President Yeltsin. As a Deputy Chief of the Presidential Property
Management Department, Putin was responsible for administering Russia's
foreign assets and overseeing the transfer of Soviet and Communist
Party assets to the Russian Federation.
1997
On March 26, 1997, President Yeltsin appointed Putin as Deputy Chief of
Presidential Staff and Chief of the Main Control Directorate of the
Presidential Property Management Department. Others to hold this
position were Alexei Kudrin and Nikolai Patrushev, both of whom would
become cronies of Putin. Back in St Petersburg, ex-Mayor Anatoly
Sobchak was being investigated for corrupt activities and after a
police interview on Friday October 3, 1997, Sobchak appeared to have a
heart-attack and was taken to hospital. The next few days were a
National Holiday long-weekend in Russia and as police resources were
stretched, Sobchak's hospital room was left unguarded. During the night
he was spirited away by people working for Putin, who had arranged a
private plane to fly Sobchak to France. He was later seen walking
around the streets of Paris with no signs of ill-health.
1998
President Yeltsin was in poor health and was mindful of the corrupt
practices by which he and his family had become immensely wealthy while
selling off Soviet assets to Russia's new Oligarchs. Noticing how Putin
had 'looked after' ex-Mayor Sobchak, Yeltsin decided to do a deal with
Putin. If Putin would be 'understanding' of Yeltsin's corrupt past,
Yeltsin would advance Putin's career. On May 25, 1998, Putin was
appointed First Deputy Chief of Presidential Staff for regions, then
two months later on July 25, Putin was made Director of the Federal
Security Bureau (FSB). As a security, intelligence and secret-police

organization, the FSB is a new name for the old KGB, and so Putin was
now running the agency where he had once worked as a spy.
1999
President Yeltsin had already hired and fired four different Prime
Ministers when, on August 8, 1999, he appointed Putin as Acting Prime
Minister of the Russian Federation. President Yeltsin also announced
that he wanted Putin to succeed him as President, and Putin agreed to
stand in the Presidential Election. As a largely-unknown 'backroom boy'
Putin needed a boost to his public profile and Yeltsin arranged for a
flattering and sympathetic biography of Putin to be published.
But the thing which ensured Putin's win in the Presidential Election
was the wave of apartment bombings which took place in Russia during
September 1999. The apartments were attacked at night, while their
inhabitants slept inside, and 293 people were killed and over one
thousand injured. Putin said angrily on television: 'Well be chasing
the terrorists everywhere. At the airports . . . or in the toilet.
Well waste them in an outhouse.' Putin announced that there was a
'Chechen trail' in the apartment bombings, which happened only one
month after he was appointed Prime Minister. Within weeks Putin had
launched an invasion of the breakaway Republic of Chechnya, which
wanted independence from Russia. This invasion marked the beginning of
the Second Chechen War, which Putin waged with unremitting brutality,
using bands of FSB Officers as mobile death-squads to kill, rape and
torture Chechen civilians, while the Russian military bombed and
shelled Chechen cities like Grozny into rubble.
Yuri Felshtinsky, co-author of the book 'Blowing Up Russia', says that
the First Chechen War in 1995 had been started by President Yeltsin as
a way of postponing an election that he looked certain to lose. Yeltsin
argued that you cant run an election in wartime and so, because the
war with Chechnya had been started, the election would have to be
delayed for a few months. The First Chechen War distracted peoples
attention away from Yeltsins corruption and by delaying the election
and appearing to be a war-leader and protector of the people, Yeltsin
eventually won the Presidential Election.
2000
The ploy that had worked for Boris Yeltsin in 1995, also worked for
Putin five years later. In March 2000 Russia's new hero and war-leader,
the previously unknown Vladimir Putin, was elected President of the
Russian Federation.
But the families of the apartment bombing victims were finding it hard
to believe the explanation that was being offered by the Russian
Government. The story that the bombings had been carried out by Chechen
terrorists simply had too many holes in it and several of the victims'
families hired a former KGB/FSB Officer, Mikhail Trepashkin, to conduct
his own inquiries into what had happened. Contacts in the FSB told
Trespashkin that the apartment bombings were 'not what they appeared to

be' and warned him not to dig into the matter. Despite this, Trepashkin
went ahead with his investigation anyway, but found that he was blocked
at every turn. The authorities refused to cooperate with him in any
way, and all facts in the bombings were treated as Top Secret and were
thus unable to be disclosed or discussed. Worse of all, vital crimescene evidence (including human remains) was destroyed when bulldozers
were sent in to clear the sites of the bombings soon after the
apartment blocks being blown up.
A fifth apartment block in the town of Ryazan had been intended to be
blown up, but it was saved when residents noticed strangers dragging
large white bags into a basement of the apartment building. The local
police were called in and after arresting the strangers, the police
discovered they were FSB Officers. The large white bags turned out to
be full of a powerful Russian Army explosive called 'Hexagon' which was
wired-up to Russian Army detonators. Hexagon is similar to the Western
explosive RDX and it is worth noting that Hexagon is only made at one
factory in the whole of Russia. The explosive is tightly controlled and
not available to anyone other than the Russian military and FSB. When
this information became public the FSB announced that a 'training
exercise' had been underway at the Ryazan apartment building and the
entire episode was 'a terrible mix-up'. But the FSB ever explained why
a 'training exercise' would involve wiring-up real detonators to enough
real high-explosive to level a block of apartments that had hundreds of
innocent civilians living in it.
2000-2005
President Putin denied any involvement in the apartment bombings,
however no Chechens were ever charged over them, despite the fact that
the bombings were used by Putin as an excuse to start the Second
Chechen War. Several Russians were ultimately found guilty of the
apartment bombings, but this was done in secret trials, which leaves
open the possibility that the suspects were coerced into making their
confessions. Many people who have tried to investigate the apartment
bombings have been assassinated, including:
Yuri Schekochikhin (a member of the Duma Russia's Parliament)
Sergei Yushankov (another member of the Duma)
Alexander Litvinenko (a former KGB/FSB Officer who defected to
Britain and was killed by being given a cup of tea laced with
radioactive Polonium)
Anna Politkovskaya (a journalist, author and human-rights activist
who held joint Russian and United States citizenship. She was born
in New York City where her parents were Soviet diplomats, and she
was shot dead in Moscow on Vladimir Putin's 54th birthday, October
7, 2006)
Three attempts were made in the Duma to examine the apartment bombings
and all three were voted down by Putin's United Russia Party. When
former KGB and FSB Officer Mikhail Trepashkin helped a Duma Member to
investigate the bombings, Trepashkin claims the police harassed him and

warned him off. When he ignored the warnings his car was stopped and a
police officer placed a loaded machinegun on the back seat of his car,
then charged him with being in possession of an unlicensed firearm. A
Court found Trepashkin guilty and sent him to jail for two years. When
he got out and continued to speak about the apartment bombings,
Trepashkin was stopped by police again, 'loaded up' with weapons and
sent to jail for another two years.
Russian expert David Satter says that while the apartment bombings
killed hundreds and led to the invasion of Chechenya, which killed
hundreds of thousands, it is considered a 'success' by Putin because it
brought him into power and also because it entrenched the Yeltsin
system of corruption which has made Putin and his cronies rich beyond
the dreams of avarice. If Putin were being honest, which he seldom is,
he would probably argue that he is acting to make the Russian State
'strong' and that the vast numbers of dead people are just 'collateral
damage'.
Whether he is aware of it or not, Mr Putin still seems to be following
his KGB training and indoctrination, which holds that the needs of the
State are of paramount importance, and that human beings are
expendable.
In March 2000, Putin's first act as President was to grant former
President Boris Yeltsin immunity from prosecution for any crimes that
he had committed. When Lieutenant-Colonel Zykov of the St Petersburg
Police tried to pursue Vladimir Putin in Corruption Case 144128, the
Prosecutor-General of Russia ordered the case to be closed because, as
President, Mr Putin cannot be investigated. In 2003 the CEO of Yukos
Oil, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, embarrassed Putin by asking him what he was
doing about corruption, and a few months later Khodorkovsky was
arrested and eventually sent to a Siberian prison-camp for ten years.
Yukos Oil was then broken-up and sold to Putin's associates. Today Mr
Khodorkovsky lives in exile in Switzerland and he believes that
Vladimir Putin is sliding towards a fully-totalitarian regime, and that
what we are seeing in Russia is NOT a 'failure of democracy', but
instead the deliberate 'rise of a kleptocracy'.
In 2003 the German police raided a company called SPAG in Frankfurt, in
connection with investigations into money-laundering by the Tambovskaya
Mafia of St Petersburg. Real Estate transactions were being used by
SPAG to launder the proceeds of drug, prostitution and peopletrafficking rackets, and German police were shocked to discover that on
the Advisory Board of SPAG were the German Chancellor, Gerhard
Schroder, and the Russian President Vladimir Putin. Schroder and Putin
are close friends who celebrate birthdays together and after consulting
Chancellor Schroder, the German police shut down their investigations
into the SPAG money-laundering. In 2005, two weeks before losing the
German Federal Election, Chancellor Schroder authorized a one billion
Euro loan guarantee for Russia's natural gas pipeline into Europe, and
after retiring from politics Mr Schroder was made Chairman of the

pipeline consortium.
2005-2011
Edward Lucas of 'The Economist' says of Vladimir Putin: 'He was trained
by the KGB to deceive foreigners. He has a sharp eye for human weakness
and is very good at persuading and intimidating people. He's been doing
this with Western leaders, sometimes with charm and sometimes with
threats.' Each time Putin succeeds in fooling Western leaders it
reinforces his ego, and strengthens his opinion that the West is weak,
and this emboldens him to take crazy risks and implement even more
extreme measures. Deep inside Vladimir Putin's head, the KGB training
once implanted the idea of 'degenerate Western capitalists' and, even
though he is now a capitalist himself, Putin is still operating like a
rogue KGB Agent, hell-bent on destroying the Western Powers.
It's almost as if he gets bored running Russia with his peculiar mix of
corruption and tyranny, and by destabilizing the Western world, Putin
is able to 'let off steam'. It's also possible that he gets his kicks
by playing-out boyhood fantasies of himself as the hero KGB Agent,
carrying out the KGB mission of sowing fear, uncertainty and chaos in
the West. The reason I say this is that, according to some reports,
Putin sometimes insists on the Russian Elite calling each other
'comrade' during meetings, which harks back to the way Russians
addressed each other in Soviet days. In Soviet times the law was often
applied arbitrarily and harshly, and many Russians dreamed of currying
favor with someone higher up the pecking-order who could afford them
protection.
Former Russian tycoon Sergei Kolesnikov, now living in exile in
Tallinn, Estonia, says that to do business in Putin's Russia, you must
buy 'protection', which they refer to as 'buying a roof'. The more you
pay, and the higher-up the people you pay-off, the more 'protection'
you have, and the more success your business will enjoy. If you give a
'present' to Vladimir Putin, then it's like having God protecting you.
Kolesnikov describes how 'gifting schemes' are used to pay bribes and
launder the money, with the untraceable proceeds eventually ending up
in something like RosInvest, in which Vladimir Putin owns 94 percent of
the shares. Kolesnikov used to own 2 percent of RosInvest and that 2
percent was worth millions. Former Putin advisor Stanislav Belkovsky
estimates that Putin has a personal wealth of 40 billion US Dollars,
and this figure has apparently been confirmed by the CIA, which means
that Putin is one of the wealthiest men in the world.
So Mr Putin is very definitely a capitalist, yet he sometimes makes the
Russian Elite call each other 'comrade' during meetings, as if the
Soviet Union is still alive and well. And all the while, Putin is
relentlessly trying to destabilize the capitalist West. It's a puzzle,
and maybe you'd need a shrink to figure it out.
2011 TO PRESENT DAY
Putin's great wealth has become a problem, however, for if he ever

retires from political power, the next Russian President might go after
his money. And with so many crimes committed, and so many people
murdered, who can Putin trust? Like Stalin, Putin is the undisputed
ruler of the Kremlin, but he is also imprisoned by the Kremlin. After
two terms as Russian President, in 2008 Putin was compelled by Russian
law to relinquish the post, so his associate Dmitry Medvedev became
President and then appointed Putin as Prime Minister. The original plan
was for Medvedev to serve two terms as Russian President, but in 2011
Putin was shocked when the 'Arab Spring' saw many powerful dictators
fall from power and lose their lives. So, in the Kremlin-controlled
2012 election, Putin returned himself to the Presidency.
When US President Barack Obama began making overtures of friendship
towards Russia in 2015, Putin's KGB-trained mind interpreted this as a
sign of Western weakness and he responded by sending Russian forces to
back the Syrian dictator Assad, and lay waste to Syria's biggest city,
Aleppo. The outpouring of Syrian refugees de-stabilized the European
Union, but this is in keeping with the old KGB objectives of causing
fear, uncertainty and chaos in the West, so Putin probably rates this
as another 'success'. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians have
been killed and injured, but the KGB training always stressed that the
good of the State is all that matters.
Putin's latest project has been to meddle in the US Presidential
Election and whatever happens as a result of that, Putin will see
himself as once again being the winner. The Soviet Union may be long
gone, but the KGB is alive and well and living inside Putin's head. So
Putin, continues to sow fear, uncertainty and chaos in the West, just
like the 'good old days' of the Cold War. Meanwhile, with a median
wealth of just 871 US Dollars, the people of Russia are poorer than the
people of India. Ordinary Russians are bedevilled by the lack of
democracy and by a legal system which, like everything else in Russia,
is controlled by the man in the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin may believe
that the backward and corrupt system he has created is good, because in
his mind it makes the Russian State 'strong' and this is proved (in
Putin's mind) by his ability to cause chaos in Western nations.
And as the KGB training taught him, that is Putin's real 'mission'.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1. 'Putin's Way', a 2015 documentary by Neil Docherty. A FRONTLINE WGBH
Boston production with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
http://www.pbs.org/video/2365401766/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin