Moscow: Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Sunday said he feels nostalgia for the former East Germany, in the most revealing description yet of his half-decade as a KGB agent in Dresden under communism.
Putin said in an the interview with the NTV channel that he had good memories of his 1985-1990 posting in the city that included learning German, excursions to the mountains and contacts with his East German counterparts.
"I still remember this warmth and cordiality," he said in the interview to be broadcast later today for a documentary to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall two decades ago, excerpts of which were published by Russia's news agencies.
"I am very thankful for this. In this respect there is some feeling of nostalgia.”
"But we see how the Federal Republic (post-reunification Germany) is developing and we are happy that we have good relations on a new basis," he said.
"This of course makes any nostalgia secondary."
Putin said that during the tumult of November 1989 demonstrators came right up to the KGB offices in Dresden.
"We explained to them the building belongs to the Soviet Army and in line with agreements we have the right to be here and we work here. The people dispersed after some time but in general it was a stormy, turbulent time."
Opening up for the first time in detail about his hitherto mysterious past in the intelligence service, Putin described his time in East Germany as "not the worst years of my life and I would even say good ones."
"We made friends with our colleagues, got to know a world that was new for us and I became familiar with the language and had contacts with people. Our children went to the German nursery school. We talked to our neighbours.”
"This door into a completely different world was very interesting.”
"We had many contacts not only with our colleagues from the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) but from other areas," he said, fondly recalling excursions to the mountains at Christmas.
The Prime Minister said that he found the sight of the Berlin Wall "unnatural and unreal”.
But he blamed the Soviet Union's Western allies in World War II for the post-war division of Germany, saying that under Joseph Stalin "Soviet diplomacy never set the task of the division of Germany."
Putin said it was clear by the time of his posting that East Germany was stuck in the past compared to the Soviet Union and its leadership resistant to change.
By then, East Germany's citizens could see that the quality of life was higher in the West and people were free to travel and take an active part in political life, he said.
"Unfortunately, there was nothing similar in the socialist system, it could not withstand competition," he said.
As president, Putin in 2005 described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century, an opinion his successor Dmitry Medvedev
declined to endorse in an interview this weekend.
Putin said he gave great weight to the importance of relations between Russia and modern Germany, expressing hope his own experience of the country had made a modest contribution.
Bureau Report
First Published: Sunday, November 08, 2009, 23:09