They had more lucrative assignments in mind than revenge.The raging question in the world today is who is the real Vladimir Putin and what are his intentions. The elites from these two organizations knew where the money was and how to use it. And those tens of thousands of people coming out of the collapsed CPSU and KGB had other tasks in mind-most notably making a living in new conditions. But also the entire mood in Russia, the heart of the Soviet Empire, was quite different compared to the rest of the Soviet Bloc-it was one thing to unmask someone in Poland who had worked for the Russians it was quite another to reveal that a Russian son had been spying on his father, for example.128 Russians as a whole sensed that such a settling of accounts would be divisive, ruinous, and pointless. As mentioned earlier, Putin himself admits that in Dresden, after the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, he burned so many files that the furnace exploded. Clearly the KGB got there first, and files, lots of files, were burned. No one in Russia wanted a repeat of this, and indeed there has never been such a period in post-Soviet Russia. Eastern Europe at this time was awash with exposés as high-ranking politicians were unmasked as agents of either the KGB or local security services. Petersburg for especially important cases, who was assigned to examine Putin’s activities for criminal behavior, even went so far as to allege that two of Putin’s later associates, Anatoliy Sobchak and Dmitriy Medvedev, both of whom were teaching law at Leningrad State University at the time, had provided Putin with information (“I Anatoliy Sobchak, i Dmitriy Medvedev byli ego stykachkami”).127 Thus Putin would not have been the only person interested in “cleansing” his own file of damaging materials. Lieutenant Colonel Andrey Zykov,XVII the lead Russian investigator in St. He also would have been tasked to monitor political activity among faculty and students at the university.

“As the KGB rezident at Leningrad State University and as an employee of the Leningrad Fifth Chief Directorate, where he worked as a member of the active reserves after returning from East Germany, Putin would certainly have had access to the lists of agents and informants who worked for the KGB during the Soviet period.

Putin's Kleptocracy by Karen Dawisha