We overlapped, Vladimir Putin and me. Putin arrived in Dresden in August 1985 as a 32-year-old KGB major. He was working undercover as a consular officer, recruiting academics, journalists, and business people to spy for the Soviet Union in the West. I was in Dresden and throughout communist East Germany often in those days; I was a twenty-six-year-old high school German teacher and doctoral dissertation writer focused on Marxist-Leninist language theory and education in the so-called German Democratic Republic.
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Jeffrey Gedmin: The KGB and me
This undated file picture shows Soviet policemen standing guard in front of the KGB building (aka Lubianka) in Moscow, with a portrait ov Vladimir Lenin on it.
