Читать книгу The Story of Putin - United States Department of Defense - Страница 18

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Vladimir Putin, upon leaving East Germany as the Berlin Wall collapsed, and the Cold War with it, returned to Leningrad. He accepted a KGB posting within the University after refusing a higher-level position at KGB headquarters in Moscow. He claimed to have recognized the futility of working in Moscow as the Soviet system slowly disintegrated and desired no part in it.1 In the aftermath of the 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev, Putin resigned from the KGB and further attached himself to a former friend and now mayor of Leningrad, Anatoly Sobchak, eventually rising to the position of deputy mayor of (renamed) St. Petersburg.2 Upon Sobchak’s defeat in the elections of 1996, Putin accepted a series of positions within Russian President Yeltsin’s administration in Moscow, where he quickly caught the respectful eye of the aging president. Putin eventually rose to a position within the Presidential Staff, followed shortly thereafter by an appointment in July 1998 to head the Federal Security Service (FSB), the primary successor organization to the KGB, a job that Putin had recently told his wife he would never take even if offered.3 Merely one year later Putin would be named acting Prime Minister of the Russian Federation and Boris Yeltsin’s designated successor. But events involving the United States and Russia that occurred in the timeframe between Putin’s return from Germany and his sudden placement into power at the close of the decade would permanently affect the eventual second President of the Russian Federation. These events would seem to confirm the pre-conceived notion of an inherent hostility by America toward Russia.

1 Gevorkyan, First Person, 68.

2 Ibid., 80.

3 Ibid., 106.