Highlight
Putin, in a newspaper interview last year, hinted that he believed the system could have been salvaged. Others thought this to be unrealistic and believed the system itself would have to be junked. Yuri Andropov, the KGB boss and later Soviet leader, had responded in the early 1980s by trying to impose more discipline on the ailing system, and many in the KGB shared his hope it could be saved from within. The Soviet economy was also in trouble. Clearly, Putin was on the seam of East-West confrontation at the end of the Cold War, and the lessons were self-evident. Putin's work with the Stasi won him a bronze medal in November 1987 from the East German security service, but the reasons for the award are unknown. Intelligence specialists and political scientists said Putin may have had a political assignment to make contact with East Germans who were sympathetic to Gorbachev, such as the Dresden party leader Hans Modrow, in case the Honecker regime collapsed. Putin was formally assigned to run a Soviet-German "friendship house" in Leipzig and carried out the duties, but this apparently was his own cover story. Putin also turned to the Stasi for help with routine logistics, such as obtaining a telephone they were strictly controlled and apartments. It is possible Putin was targeting Western military operations.