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Angelikastrasse was located directly across the street from the city's main Stasi headquarters. The East German dictatorship, headed in those years by Erich Honecker, remained steadfastly rigid even as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was beginning to experiment with political and economic reforms at home. The broad Stasi network was used often by the KGB, and the raw intelligence sent directly to Moscow. But the biggest intelligence operation was the East German secret police, the Stasi, who monitored hundreds of thousands of citizens and kept millions of documents on file. At the time, several thousand KGB officers reported to a headquarters at Karlshorst, outside Berlin; Soviet military intelligence also was stationed in East Germany. Berlin was a constant source of Cold War tensions and intrigue. The German Democratic Republic was home to 380,000 Soviet troops and Soviet intermediate-range missiles. He arrived in Dresden at age 32 when East Germany was a major focus of Moscow's attention. After a few years spying on foreigners in Leningrad, Putin was summoned to Moscow in the early 1980s to attend the elite foreign intelligence training institute, and then was assigned to East Germany. Putin later recalled that the KGB targeted him for recruitment even before he graduated in 1975.
Valery Musin, then a university lecturer, said the law department was a training ground for the KGB, the police and the bureaucracy. He entered Leningrad State University's law department in 1970, but the Soviet Union was not a state governed by the rule of law. Petersburg, to a factory foreman and his wife in 1952, shortly before Stalin's death. Putin has never campaigned for office, and he told an interviewer two years ago he found campaigns distasteful.
Putin has vowed Russia will not revert to totalitarianism, but he has not demonstrated much skill working with Russia's fledgling, competitive political system. He has said the Russian economy has become "criminalized," but so far only hinted that he would tackle the powerful tycoons who lord over it. But he also has expressed enthusiasm for reasserting the role of a strong state. He has embraced the conviction that "there is no alternative" to market democracy, and soberly acknowledged Russia's economic weaknesses. What Putin has taken from these experiences is not entirely clear. Petersburg, he had a taste of the ragged path of Russia's early transition to a free-market, democratic system. From the front line in East Germany, Putin saw how the centrally planned economies of the East staggered to disintegration.