Putin The KGB Hero in Stasi Land Defends Russia With One Small Pistol 29/10/09 (Russian Media Orchestra)
Putin told NTV reporter Vladimir Kondratyev in a half-hour interview how he managed to calm down an angry crowd of East German protesters outside the KGB headquarters in Dresden in late 1989.Putin’s interview was aired as part of the 50-minute film at 7:25 p.m on NTV on Sunday, Nov. 8 , 2009 one day before the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall.Putin served as a KGB officer in Dresden from 1985 to 1990. His only brush with history there occurred on Dec. 5, 1989, almost a month after the wall fell.After storming the nearby local headquarters of the East German Secret Police, or Stasi, protesters gathered outside his office building. Putin recalled how he met the crowd personally and told them in German that this was a Soviet military organization. When people replied suspiciously that he spoke German too well, “I told them I was a translator,” he said.Mr Putin will be shown discussing the incident in a documentary called The Wall to be broadcast on state-controlled TV next month.The programme’s maker, Vladimir Kondratyev, has defended his decision to make Mr Putin one of the film’s main characters. Mr Kondratyev believes that Mr Putin, who worked as a KGB agent hand-in-glove with the East German Stasi intelligence service during the 1980s, did a lot to hasten the wall’s collapse. Yet his description of Mr Putin’s actions suggests the opposite.”He was one of the few Soviet citizens who had first-hand experience of East German demonstrators when a crowd ransacked the Stasi’s office in Dresden and then prepared to storm the building where Putin and his Soviet spy comrades were working,” Mr Kondratyev told the daily Kommersant newspaper.”Putin succeeded in persuading the crowd to fall back.” State TV has in the past described how Mr Putin brandished a pistol in front of the crowd and used his fluent German to make it clear he was prepared to use it.”This is Soviet territory and you’re standing on our border,” he was quoted as saying. “I’m serious when I say that I will shoot trespassers.” A witness was quoted as saying that Mr Putin issued the threat with his trademark assurance. In the documentary,
🛑 BERND PULCH ARCHIVE | SECURE MIRROR 