On Nov. 9, 1989, the whole world was riveted by the spectacle of people dancing, singing and toasting one another atop the Berlin Wall—and by the impassioned efforts of delirious Berliners to demolish it with chisels, hammers, pickaxes and any other tools they had. Everyone was celebrating the collapse of communism and the dawn of a new era of freedom.
Well, not everyone. In the East German city of Dresden, a 37-year-old KGB officer and his comrades began burning files, fearing that the irate protesters who targeted the Stasi secret-police headquarters in East Berlin would also come after them.
“I personally burned a huge amount of material,” the KGB officer recalled later. “We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst.” When he called the Soviet military base nearby asking for guidance, he was told: “We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.”
Looking back at the fall of the Berlin Wall, the KGB officer conceded that those events and what he termed the Soviet Union’s regrettable loss of power in the region was “inevitable” since “a position built on walls and divides cannot last.” Then he added: “But I wanted something different to rise in its place.”
The KGB officer’s name was Vladimir Putin .
Mr. Putin offered those recollections during a series of interviews with three Russian journalists in 2000, the year he was first elected president. They were published in Britain as the book “First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Portrait by Russia’s President.” The idea was to portray Mr. Putin as a tough but sympathetic leader.
After the epic events of 1989, Germany was unified, and most of the countries of the old Soviet empire that embraced democracy and economic reforms performed remarkable turnarounds, with both the European Union and NATO welcoming them as new members. The European Council’s recent designation of Poland’s former Prime Minister Donald Tusk as its next president signals the extent of the Continent’s transformation and integration.
At the same time, Mr. Putin looks more determined than ever to take his country down a path to “something different.”
To that end, he is seeking to undermine Ukraine’s latest attempt to follow the example of Poland and the other new democracies that have emerged as truly independent states. On Friday, Ukraine announced that a Russian column with 32 tanks, 30 trucks and more fighters crossed into the separatist region in eastern Ukraine, further imperiling an already tenuous cease fire. With his tormenting of Ukraine, Mr. Putin is spreading fear from the Baltic states to Moldova, stirring nervous governments and citizens to wonder who he will target next. Taking a page from the old Soviet playbook, Mr. Putin sees Russia as a power player so long as it is feared—the more feared, the better.
His attitude toward his own people isn’t much different: Like Machiavelli, he believes that it is better to be feared than loved.
Of course, Mr. Putin relishes the opinion polls that show overwhelming support for his aggressive nationalism, including his ostentatious disdain for everything from international borders to those Western leaders, like President Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel , who have applied economic sanctions. But don’t be fooled: Like all pseudo-democratic leaders, Mr. Putin is terrified of any signs of opposition at home, which is why he instinctively resorts to repression.
How else to explain the arrest on Oct. 18 of Lyudmila Bogatenkova, the 73-year-old director of the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee in the Stavropol region, a group that had the temerity to charge direct Russian military involvement in eastern Ukraine? Or the current bid by the Justice Ministry to close down Memorial, the country’s legendary human-rights organization? This group of courageous activists was founded in 1989 under the auspices of Andrei Sakharov, the dissident physicist and Nobel Peace Prize winner.
In 2012, when Mr. Putin staged his return to the presidency, he cracked down hard on demonstrators who were appalled by his refusal to allow for a genuine political transition. Since then, he has continued to squeeze the last remaining media outlets that have questioned his policies.
All of this is bad news for the region and for the Russian people, but not a surprise given what Mr. Putin concluded from his experiences in East Germany 25 years ago. What is more surprising is how he has succeeded in conveying the impression that there is no alternative to Russia’s current course.
When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later, Western leaders—and many Russians—imagined that Russia would become steadily more integrated into a post-Cold War system. According to that idealistic script, the West’s gain would not be Russia’s loss. The more neighbors like Poland, the Baltic states and, yes, Ukraine stabilized and prospered, the more this would benefit Russia, allowing it to move in the same direction.
For Mr. Putin, that is the road not taken. Stuck in his 1989 KGB mindset, he sees the possibility that Ukraine might become a success story as a colossal danger—not an opportunity. If Ukrainians succeed, Russians may start asking openly why they should tolerate the same kind of corrupt autocracy that Ukrainian protesters swept out of power earlier this year.
But by trying to ensure Ukraine’s failure, and thus avert those kinds of questions, Mr. Putin is undermining his own country’s prospects. He is ensuring that its already shaky economy will be weakened further and that, both on the European and larger world stage, Russia will become increasingly isolated. Meanwhile, the Russian ruble, which has depreciated by almost 30% since the beginning of the year, nearly went into free fall this week before rising slightly.
All this brings to mind the Russian story about two peasant farmers. Each has just one cow that is skin and bones. Suddenly, one of the cows begins to rapidly gain weight, allowing its owner to prosper because he has more and more milk to sell. Seeing that the other farmer is increasingly miserable, a fairy comes to him with the offer to fulfill one wish. “Kill my neighbor’s cow,” the farmer replies.
Vladimir Putin is that farmer. So long as he remains in power, his country is unlikely to afford its citizens the chance to prosper and live in peace.
Mr. Nagorski, a former Newsweek bureau chief in Berlin and Moscow, is the author of “Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power” (Simon & Schuster, 2012).
