Читать книгу Putin’s People онлайн | страница 46

*

When Putin returned home to Russia from Dresden in February 1990, the impact of the Berlin Wall’s collapse was still reverberating across the Soviet Union. Nationalist movements were on the rise, and threatening to tear the country apart. Mikhail Gorbachev had been thrust onto the back foot, forced to cede ever more ground to emerging democratic leaders. The Soviet Communist Party was gradually starting to lose its monopoly on power, its legitimacy coming ever more under question. In March 1989, almost a year before Putin’s return to Russia, Gorbachev had agreed to hold the first ever competitive elections in Soviet history to choose representatives for a new parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies. A ragtag group of democrats led by Andrei Sakharov, the nuclear physicist who’d become a dissident voice of moral authority, and Boris Yeltsin, then a rambunctious and rapidly rising political star who’d been thrown out of the Politburo for his relentless criticism of the Communist authorities, won seats and debated against the Communist Party for the first time. The end was rapidly nearing for the seven decades of Communist rule.

Amidst the tumult, Putin sought to adapt. But instead of earning a living as a taxi driver, or following the traditional path after a return home from foreign service, a post back at the Centre, as the Moscow headquarters of the KGB’s foreign-intelligence service was known, he embarked on a different kind of mission. He’d been ordered by his former mentor and boss in Dresden, Colonel Lazar Matveyev, not to hang around in Moscow, but to head home to Leningrad.[102] There, he was flung straight into a city in turmoil, where city council elections, also competitive for the first time under Gorbachev’s reforms, were pitting a rising tide of democrats against the Communist Party. For the first time, the democrats were threatening to break the Communists’ majority control. Instead of defending the old guard against the democrats’ rise, Putin sought to attach himself to Leningrad’s democratic movement.