Free The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen

be a Soviet spy; in fact, he was born to be a Soviet spy in Germany. During World War II, the senior Vladimir Putin had been assigned to so-called subversive troops, small detachments formed to act behind enemy lines. These troops reported to the NKVD, as the Soviet secret police was then called, and were formed largely from the ranks of the NKVD. They were on a suicide mission: no more than 15 percent of them survived the first six months of the war. Vladimir Putin’s detachment was typical: twenty-eight soldiers were air-dropped into a forest behind enemy lines about a hundred miles from Leningrad. They had had about enough time to get their bearings and blow up one train when they ran out of food supplies. They asked the locals for food; the villagers fed them and then turned them in to the Germans. Several of the men managed to break out. The Germans gave chase, and Vladimir Putin hid in a swamp, submerging his head and breathing through a reed until the search party had given up. He was one of only four survivors of that mission.
    Wars give birth to bizarre stories, and the legend with which the younger Vladimir Putin grew up is as likely to have been true as any other tale of miraculous survival and spontaneous heroism. It may also very well explain why he signed up for a German-language elective in fourth grade, when he was still a notoriously poor student. It certainly explains why, as a schoolboy, Putin had a portrait of the founding father of Soviet spyhood propped up on his desk at the dacha. His closest childhood friend recalled it was “some intelligence officer for sure, because Volod’ka told me it was,” and Putin supplied his biographers with the name of his idol. Yan Berzin, hero of the Revolution, founder of Soviet military intelligence, creator of spy outposts in all European countries, was, like many early Bolsheviks, arrested and shot in the late 1930s for an imagined anti-Stalin plot.His name was restored to honor in 1956 but has remained obscure ever since. You would have had to be a true KGB geek not only to know the name but to have secured the portrait.
    It is not clear whether the elder Vladimir Putin had worked for the secret police before the war or continued to work for the NKVD after. It seems probable enough that he remained part of the so-called active reserve, a giant group of secret police officers who held regular jobs while also informing for—and drawing a salary from—the KGB. This may explain why the Putins lived so comparatively well: the dacha, the television set, and the telephone—especially the telephone.
    At the age of sixteen, a year before finishing secondary school, Vladimir Putin went to the KGB headquarters in Leningrad to try to sign up. “A man came out,” he recalled for a biographer. “He did not know who I was. And I never saw him again after that. I told him I go to school and in the future I would like to work for the state security services. I asked if it was possible and what I would have to do to achieve it. The man said they don’t usually sign up volunteers, but the best way for me would be to go to college or serve in the military. I asked him which college. He said a law college or the law department of the university would be best.”
    “He surprised everyone by saying he would be applying to the university,” his class teacher—the equivalent of a homeroom teacher in the United States—told his biographers. “I asked, ‘How?’ He said, ‘I’ll handle it myself.’”Leningrad University was one of the two or three most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the Soviet Union, certainly by far the most competitive in the city. How a mediocre student from a family that could by no means be considered well connected—even if I am correct in assuming that the elder Putin worked for the secret police—planned to gain admission was a mystery. His parents apparently protested, as did his coach: all of them favored a college to which Putin