Читать книгу Putin’s People онлайн | страница 47
Almost immediately, he approached one of its most uncompromising leaders, a doughty and fearless newly elected member of the Congress of People’s Deputies, Galina Starovoitova. She was a leading human rights activist, known for her uncompromising honesty as she railed against the failings of Soviet power. After she had given a resounding speech ahead of the city council elections, Putin, then a pale-eyed and unremarkable figure, walked up to her and told her how impressed he’d been by her words. He asked whether he could assist her with anything – including perhaps by working as her driver. But, suspicious of such an unsolicited approach, Starovoitova apparently resoundingly turned him away.[103]
His first post instead was as an assistant to the rector of the Leningrad State University, where in his youth he’d studied law and first entered the ranks of the KGB. He was to watch over the university’s foreign relations and keep an eye on its foreign students and visiting dignitaries. It seemed at first a sharp demotion from his Dresden post, a return to the most humdrum work reporting on foreigners’ movements to the KGB. But it was no more than a matter of weeks before it landed him a position at the top of the country’s democratic movement.
Anatoly Sobchak was the university’s charismatic professor of law. Tall, erudite and handsome, he’d long won students over with his mildly anti-government line, and had risen to become one of the new democratic movement’s most rousing orators, appearing to challenge the Party and the KGB at every turn. He was part of the group of independents and reformers that took control of the city council after the March 1990 poll, and by May he’d been anointed the council’s chairman. Almost immediately, Putin was appointed his right-hand man.
Putin was to be Sobchak’s fixer, his liaison with the security services, the shadow who watched over him behind the scenes. From the start, the posting had been arranged by the KGB. ‘Putin was placed there. He had a function to fill,’ said Franz Sedelmayer, the German security consultant who later worked with him. ‘The KGB told Sobchak, “Here’s our guy. He’ll take care of you.”’ The position in the law faculty had merely been a cover, said Sedelmayer, who believed that Sobchak himself had long been working unofficially with the KGB: ‘The best cover for these guys was law degrees.’[104]