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From 1985 to 1990, the KGB stationed Putin in Dresden, East Germany. During that time, Putin was assigned to Directorate S, the illegal intelligence-gathering unit (the KGB's classification for agents who used falsified identities) where he was given cover as a translator and interpreter.
In Ot pervogo litsa, Putin muses on this point, admitting that "the GDR in many respects was an eye-opener for me. I thought that I was going to an East European country, to the center of Europe. Outside it was already the end of the 1980s ... [but] in dealing with the people who worked for the MGB [Ministry of State Security, or Stasi], I realized that they themselves and the GDR were in a situation which we had gone through many years ago already in the Soviet Union. It was a harsh totalitarian country, similar to our model, but 30 years earlier. And the tragedy is that many people sincerely believed in all those communist ideals. I thought at the time: if we begin some changes at home, how will it affect the fates of these people?"
As Putin ruefully concluded after crowds descended on his workplace during the political upheavals in Dresden and East Germany, and there was no immediate response from Moscow: "It was clear the Union was ailing. And it had a terminal, incurable illness under the title of paralysis. A paralysis of power."
Perhaps no personal experience other than his time in Dresden could have done more to convince Vladimir Putin that his future activity, in the KGB or otherwise, could not be guided by blind loyalty to an ideology or to specific political leaders. His loyalty had to be to the state itself rather than to a specific system of governance. The ambiguities of the GDR in the second half of the 1980s were perfect training for Putin's move to the center of government in Moscow a decade later.
(Edit: the underlined opinion, right or wrong, leads to the loaded term “fascist.”)
Putin saw that the collapse of the GDR "was inevitable." What he "really regretted," when the Berlin Wall and everything else came crashing down, he said, was "that the Soviet Union had lost its position in Europe, although intellectually I understood that a position based on walls and water barriers cannot exist forever. But I wanted something different to rise in its place. And nothing different was proposed. That's what hurt." ---------------
"... some observers say that Vladimir Putin has no face, no substance, no soul. He is a “man from nowhere,” who can appear to be anybody to anyone. Indeed, as president and prime minister, Mr. Putin has turned himself into the ultimate political performance artist. Over the last several years, his public relations team has pushed his image in multiple directions, pitching him as everything from big game hunter and conservationist to scuba diver to biker—even nightclub crooner."... read more.
Vladimir Putin as Statist: Restoring the Greatness of Russia
Hill and Gaddy trace the identities back to formative experiences in Putin’s past, including his early life in Soviet Leningrad, his KGB training and responsibilities, his years as deputy mayor in the crime and corruption ridden city of St. Petersburg, his first role in Moscow as the “operative” brought in from the outside by liberal reformers in the Kremlin to help control Russia’s oligarchs, and his time at the helm of a resurgent Russian state. The authors then examine the nature of the political system Putin has built, explaining it as a logical result of these six identities.
Vladimir Putin has his own idealized view of himself as CEO of "Russia, Inc." But rather than leading a transparent public corporation, he runs a closed boardroom, not answerable to its stakeholders. Now that his corporation seems to be in crisis, with political protests marking Mr. Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, will the CEO be held accountable for its failings?
"For more than a dozen years—the equivalent of three American presidential terms—Vladimir Putin has presided over the largest nation on the planet, the second most powerful nuclear arsenal, and massive natural resources. Yet there is still debate about who he really is. Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy have gone a long way in answering that question, starting with the title, which makes a crucial point: even though 'Mr. Putin' was, in his upbringing and early career, a prototype of the Soviet man, he’s no longer ‘Comrade Putin.’ His aim is not the restoration of communism. He has made a deal with the capitalists who have thrived in Russia over the past two decades: they support him in the exercise of his political power, and he supports them in amassing their fortunes.”—from the foreword by Strobe Talbott --------
Pick your poison: Western propaganda or post-Soviet (for lack of a better word).
If you lean toward Ludwig von Mises, definition: mises.org
First, where Communism seeks to substitute the state for private ownership, fascism seeks to incorporate or co-opt private ownership into the state apparatus through public-private partnership. Thus fascism tends to be more tempting than Communism to wealthy interests who may see it as a way to insulate their economic power from competition through forced cartelization and other corporatist stratagems.
