HOME | NEWS | THE MAGAZINE | BOOKS | SITEMAP | EMAIL
				Russia's Leader A Soviet Spy Turned Religious

Newsmax.com, Jan. 10, 2000

Did Vladimir Putin find God, or just a better job?

The new Russian interim president was expelled from West Germany as a Soviet espionage agent in the late 1970s, during the heat of the Cold War.

Today, the same once-cold-blooded spy is warmly advocating "Christian ideals" in his new Russia.

Rising unexpectedly from the ranks of KGB spies to Boris Yeltsinís prime minister, then to his possible successor pending elections, Putin wasted no time parading his changed colors.

In fact, he made it the subject of his first official pronouncement upon becoming acting president when Yeltsin resigned the Russian presidency on the last day of 1999.

On New Year's Eve, Putin said the ideals of Christianity "will allow us to strengthen mutual understanding and concord within our society and will support the spiritual and moral revival of the Fatherland.î

One week later, before ostentatiously attending a church service, he repeated that refrain by saying the Orthodox Church could help mold a new sense of Russian nationhood.

The Financial Times of London reported Putin promised fellow church-goers he would uphold all democratic freedoms, including the freedom of religious conscience.

That wasnít exactly the line he was pushing when he was hard at work for the late Soviet Union, whose official policy was that religion, as "the opiate of the masses,î should be stamped out.

The very week that Putin was posturing as a friend of religion, Western news outlets were unraveling his trail as a communist spy.

The German newspaper Saechsische Zeitung, quoting intelligence sources, reported that Putin had arrived in the West German capital of Bonn in 1975 under the guise of a correspondent of TASS, the official Soviet news agency, then expelled a few years later for espionage.

Putin popped up again in the East German city of Dresden, where he held an "important post in the external services of the KGB" from 1984 to 1990, according Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, BND.

There, he was decorated in 1988 by the communist East German government for his "considerable servicesî as a KGB agent, the Agence France-Presse news service reported.

Der Spiegel magazine reported the KGB concentrated in Dresden on recruiting West German businessmen and East Germans hoping to emigrate, and using them as plants in the West.

It said German counter-intelligence sources are convinced spies recruited by Putin could still be in the West, providing Moscow with information.

Meanwhile, all across Russia hundreds of churches taken over by the Communists are being steadily reclaimed for their original purpose, according to the Financial Times.

In Moscow, one of its writers reported after attending a recent candlelight service at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, a Russian Orthodox church blown up by Stalin in the 1930s, then rebuilt in the 1990s by Mayor Yuri Luzhkov:

Worshippers were not worried that religious freedoms would be threatened in Russia ó even though the country is now run by a former officer in the KGB, which played the central role in suppressing religion under communism.

Times change and so do individuals' consciences, they said.