Putin: A Russian Spy Story review – 'schoolyard thug' who became an unstoppable leader

In 1973, Soviet Central Television aired a new drama series called Seventeen Moments of Spring, about a Russian secret agent posing as a high-ranking Nazi official called Stierlitz. Stierlitz, James Bond’s Soviet equivalent, was a deliberate propaganda creation – the book on which the series was based was commissioned by the then head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov. In one concrete sense, the effort was successful: it made 20-year-old Vladimir Putin want to become a spy.

The three-part documentary series Putin: A Russian Spy Story (Channel 4) portrays the Russian leader – who, if you include his contrived second stint as prime minister, has outlasted three US presidents and looks well positioned to see off a few more – through the prism of his past. It features interviews with those who have worked with him, those who have known him well and those who have run up against him. Some, including Boris Yeltsin’s daughter Tatyana Yumasheva, are speaking on UK television for the first time.

The first testimonial about Putin’s character comes from the opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, who has had the misfortune of being poisoned by people he is certain are connected to Putin and his state security apparatus not once, but twice, nearly dying both times. “I have no doubt absolutely that this was done as retribution for my political activities in the Russian opposition,” he says. Kara-Murza sees Putin as a product of his background, specifically of his KGB training: “He’s doing what he was taught to do – manipulate, lie, recruit, repress. He seems to be quite good at his job.”

This first instalment takes us only as far as Putin’s election to the presidency in March 2000, but his early days have plenty of insight to offer. Born in St Petersburg in 1952, Putin was, in the words of the author Alex Goldfarb, “a schoolyard thug” who escaped prison only because of his talent for judo; in those days, the KGB kept an eye out for anyone proficient in martial arts. In 1975, two years after Stierlitz first caught his imagination, Putin joined up.

His first posting, to dreary, mid-80s Dresden, came with none of the glamour he had hoped for. To make matters worse, the Berlin wall came down a few years later, taking Putin’s career prospects with it. By the time he returned home, the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse.

Putin resurfaced in the 90s as a fixer for St Petersburg’s democratically elected and prodigiously corrupt mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. One person who encountered him in those days describes him as “a very dry, obviously very humourless man of small stature”.

Putin mostly kept himself in the shadows, but a 1992 documentary about the city’s administration features him driving around town accompanied by the soundtrack from Seventeen Moments of Spring. There is also a scene in which the interviewer asks Putin if he takes bribes. Putin answers evasively, but with enough menace that the interviewer apologises for asking.

Sobchak found graft and popularity hard to combine. When he lost his bid for re-election in 1996, Putin learned a valuable lesson: never to trust the outcome of an important election to voters. Starting his career over for a second time, Putin packed up his bag of tricks and moved to Moscow.

He rose quickly through the ranks to head the FSB, the main successor of the KGB. At the time, Boris Yeltsin could barely walk in a straight line, let alone run the country, and Russia was in search of a leader who could bring stability. Nobody thought it was Putin. “That was just simply impossible to sort of grasp,” says Mikhail Fishman, the former editor of Russian Newsweek, “because we just didn’t know his face.”

Yeltsin, however, had benefited from Putin’s skilled use of kompromat: the president’s enemies were entrapped and exposed. Yeltsin made Putin his prime minister and his successor. There was the small matter of getting a charmless nobody elected, but, in a country crying out for order, Putin’s KGB history was not considered a drawback.

The most chilling voice to grace this documentary is Putin’s own: prosaic, earnest, flatly recounting his story in his peculiar, dull-but-still-untrustworthy manner. At the end, though, its menace was in its absence. On the night of the March 2000 election victory, a camera crew sat with Yeltsin as he called Putin to congratulate him. But Putin was busy; he would have to call back. The crew waited with Yeltsin, but the call did not come. An hour and a half later, it still had not come. According to those present, it never did.