Marques Vickers examines a propaganda story introduced by Russian President Vladimir Putin crediting himself with single-handedly defusing a hostile East German crowd intent on ransacking the Dresden KGB offices in 1989. The edition recounts the narrative, first related in Putin's published memoirs "First Person" (2000) and later embellished in a 2009 broadcast via a Russian national television documentary.
Between 1985 and 1990, Putin was stationed as a KGB officer in Dresden, Germany, the third largest city of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). He was officially titled as a consular officer, but most scrutinizing Western observers have concurred that his energies were directed towards recruiting spies and siphoning out information regarding West German high technology industries. Other sources have conjectured that he commanded an investigative team with the East German Stasi police that investigated political crime within the GDR.
On the evening of December 5, 1989, a large crowd (speculated at 15,000 people) reportedly surrounded the Dresden Stasi prison. They then entered the facility overwhelming the outnumbered guards. The compound was located across the road from Putin's KGB bureau where a faction of the crowd descended upon.
The biggest discrepancy between Putin's biography and the television documentary is in the later Putin brandished a pistol and threatened to shoot trespassers, Russian media has integrated this encounter prominently into their bravado character construction of Vladimir Putin. Did the incident actually occur?
Putin's tenure in Dresden and intimate view of the GDR's collapse has been acknowledged as an influential contributing factor to his hard-line and aggressive foreign policy.
The book features over 100 photographs of the Dresden KGB bureau, Stasi prison facility including a decrepit Russian interrogation wing, the former nearby residence of the Putin family, and renovated center core of Dresden.