The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy Read Online Free

life.It kept secret files on more than six million East Germans; in Dresden alone, the files the secret police compiled wouldstretch almost seven miles.According to the regime’s own records, the East German government employed 97,000 people and had another 173,000 working as informants. Nearly one in every 60 citizens was somehow tied to the state’s security apparatus. Even as a KGB officer,Putin wasshocked at how “totally invasive” the government’s surveillance was of its own citizens. He later described his time in East Germany as “a real eye-opener for me.” “I thought I was going to an Eastern European country, to the center of Europe,” he told a Russian interviewer. But it wasn’t that. “It was a harshly totalitarian country, similar to the Soviet Union, only 30 years earlier.”
    As a Soviet intelligence officer working in a client state, Putin very likely saw signs of East Germany’s rot before others. He likely would have read the Stasi reports—many of which were sent unfiltered to Moscow—that painted an increasingly dark picture.These reports documented the rising demands of the people and described the regime’s own economic record keeping as fraudulent. He would have seen the signs of a moribund economy, as government subsidies had long outstripped state revenue. In 1989, near the end, the signs of collapse were on his doorstep.There was a run on Dresden banks. At the Dresden train station,crowds tried to fight their way onto trains bound for the West. On October 4, ten thousand East Germans gathered, and the police used truncheons and tear gas to keep them from overrunning the station to board the cars. The crowds tripled in size over the next several days.
    The confusion of watching a Soviet outpost collapse around him was quickly followed by fear. The ties that bound the Stasi and the KGB were plain to anyone. The East German officers referred to their Soviet counterparts as “the friends.” Indeed, the KGB station where Putin worked was across the street from the Stasi’s offices. After the Berlin Wall was breached, Putin and his colleagues set about covering their tracks. “We destroyed everything—all our communications, our lists of contacts, and our agents’ networks. I personally burned a huge amount of material,” Putin later recalled. “We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst.” On December 6, when crowds of East Germans stormed the Stasi’s building, Putin worried that they would direct their anger across the street at him and his colleagues. And they almost did. As angry East Germans began to assemble, Putin went outside to address the crowd. Claiming he was no more than a translator, he told them it was a Soviet military organization and they should move on. Worried about the crowd’s aggressive mood, Putin called the detachment of local Soviet military officers to protect them. And heremembers being told, “We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.” His fear turned to alienation. “That business of ‘Moscow is silent’—I got the feeling then that the country no longer existed. That it had disappeared.”
    It is hard to imagine that those years did not leave a mark on the psyche of the young intelligence officer. Putin saw firsthand the costs and inefficiencies of the East German police state. He watched as the country’s centrally planned economy fell further behind and East German officials worked furiously to hide these failings with subsidies they could never recover. And the experience brought home the weaknesses of the Soviet system that he served as well. “Actually, I thought the whole thing was inevitable,” Putin later said, referring to the fall of the Berlin Wall. “I only regretted that the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe, although intellectually I understood that a position built on walls and dividers cannot last. But I wanted something different to rise in its place. And nothing different