Patriot Games

Vladimir Putin lives his Olympic dream.

by David Remnick March 3, 2014

Subscribers can read the full version of this story by logging into our digital archive. Not a subscriber? Get immediate access to this story, along with a one-month free trial, by subscribing now. Or find out about other ways to read The New Yorker digitally.

Keywords: Russia;; Olympics;; Sports;; Sochi, Russia;; (Pres.) Vladimir Putin;; Soviet Union;; Russian History

A quarter century ago, as jubilant citizens took sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, an officer in the Dresden station of the K.G.B., fed a raging furnace with the documentary evidence of Soviet espionage activities in East Germany. Putin was grateful for his Dresden posting. He had grown up in Leningrad, an uneven student with early dreams of serving the state. One of his grandfathers was a cook for Lenin and Stalin. His father was an undercover operative during the war. Putin’s parents barely survived the Nazi siege; an older brother did not. After a rough upbringing, Putin had enjoyed a halcyon four years in Dresden. He had a pretty wife and two young daughters, and enough leisure to play Ping-Pong, fish in the rivers outside town, and drink beer in the city’s pubs and breweries. He drank so much beer that he gained twenty-five pounds. Now the happy days were ending. The Wall had been breached, and Putin was shovelling top-secret files into the fire so quickly, he recalled in a book-length interview, that “the furnace burst.” This was early in November, 1989. Later, angry Germans threatened to break into the K.G.B. compound. Putin’s superiors called Moscow for reinforcements, but, he says, “Moscow was silent.” The state was failing even its most resolute foot soldiers. Within a few months, Putin slipped back home to Leningrad and took a position as “vice-rector”—the residential spy—at the local university.

As the Soviet Union began to unravel, there was a pervasive mood of desperation in its most repressive offices. Occasionally, that desperation took on comic dimensions. One fall morning in 1990, when I was working as a Moscow correspondent, I was reading a stack of newspapers—a requirement of the job—and came across an article of tangy interest in Komsomolskaya Pravda. The headline read “MISS K.G.B.”; below was a photograph of a woman in her twenties, named Katya Mayorova, provocatively adjusting the strap of her bulletproof vest. She had, it seemed, won a beauty contest at Lubyanka, the K.G.B. headquarters. This was new. I took a sip of coffee. The article described how Comrade Mayorova wore her vest with “exquisite softness, like a Pierre Cardin model.” Beyond “mere beauty,” her talents included the ability to deliver a karate kick “to her enemies’ head.” I called Lubyanka, which, by now, had a press office, and asked if I might interview Katya Mayorova. The press officer was effusive: Why not? Bring a camera! On the appointed day, I went to Lubyanka, where Comrade Mayorova explained to me that the K.G.B.’s beauty contest, such as it was, took place in “private.” She was wearing an angora sweater. She liked the Beatles. She worked as a secretary, but was certified in the handling of small arms. “They try to give us all-around skills,” she said. Assured once more, if in an unexpected form, that the Soviet Union was in a state of mortal delirium, I thanked Katya and took my leave. A year later, the statue outside Lubyanka of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, dangled from a noose held by a crane. After a short while, “Iron Felix” toppled to the ground, where protesters hacked away at his metallic corpse, the better to bring home a jagged souvenir of the recent past.

Great powers seldom retreat forever. But, to the people who suffer their fall, the sense of diminishment is acute. For Russians, the end of the Soviet Union was not merely a new charter, a new flag, a new set of lyrics to an old anthem. There were plenty, in the cities, mainly, who rejoiced in the liberating sense of possibility—the open borders, the cultural ferment, the democratic potential—but for many millions of their compatriots, Putin among them, the collapse launched a decade of humiliation, marked by geopolitical, economic, and cultural disarray. In 1999, as Yeltsin handed the Presidency over to him, Putin said, “Russia is in the midst of one of the most difficult periods in its history. For the first time in the past two or three hundred years, it is facing a real threat of sliding into the second, and possibly even third, echelon of world states.” . . .