Get help with access Institutional accessĪccess to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. Unlike his predecessors, Putin speaks, and reportedly quite well, an international language besides his native Russian-this, and not only this, he has in common with Lenin. Another point that Myers rightly emphasizes is Putin's command of German, a skill he would put to rewarding use in the following years, including in his contacts with influential German personalities (Angela Merkel among them). In fact, to understand Putin's visceral suspicion of any spontaneous street demonstrations or of any civil society initiatives, one needs to remember that in the autumn of 1989 he experienced a direct personal confrontation with the unpredictable protesters in Dresden. In fact, there were at least three elements that marked his later evolution: first, exposure to a significantly better lifestyle (not only material) than the Soviet one second, contacts within the Stasi that would later be used in the dealings with Dresdner Bank and third, his first-hand experience of the spontaneous revolt of the East Germans. Yet, as Myers notices in one of the most thoroughgoing chapters, his service in Dresden was less inconsequential than many authors have assumed. Putin's career within the KGB was far from spectacular. A former New York Times Moscow bureau chief, Steven Lee Myers has succeeded in writing an insightfully penetrating and truly enlightening biography of a man who has done his utmost to camouflage his genuine biographical tribulations. Born in postwar Leningrad, he grew up absorbing Sovietism and never nourished doubts regarding the legitimacy of the Bolshevik partocracy. Vladimir Putin is the child of the Soviet political culture and, more precisely, of the KGB's vision of Soviet power, values and ideals.
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