The Making of a Security Man

OPENING SCENE

Baskov Lane, Leningrad, 1960. A nine-year-old boy chases rats through the communal stairwell of a five-story apartment building. He has learned that if you corner a rat, it turns and attacks — and that the only way to survive is to move faster than the animal, to preempt its panic before it becomes your problem. He will repeat this story in his authorized biography, published just before his first presidential election, as though he is offering something essential: not nostalgia, but instruction. The communal apartment, the rats, the stairwell hierarchies — these are not incidental details. They are the laboratory in which a particular set of instincts was formed and tested before any formal training began.

The building at Baskov Lane was typical postwar Leningrad: a single apartment shared among multiple families, a common kitchen, a shared bathroom, constant proximity between strangers who did not choose each other. Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, Vladimir's father, had served in the naval infantry and been wounded fighting outside Leningrad during the Nazi siege. Maria Ivanovna, his mother, had nearly starved during the 900-day blockade — at one point, neighbors later said, she was among the bodies laid out on the street because she appeared dead. Vladimir was their third son; the first two had died, one in infancy, the second — Viktor — during the siege itself.

This was the family into which Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born on October 7, 1952. He was, in most observable respects, an ordinary Soviet child in an ordinary Soviet working-class family in an ordinary Soviet city. What was less ordinary was what he decided to become, and how early he decided it.