Vladimir Putin was in East Germany, working for the KGB, when the Berlin Wall fell.
In his memoir First Person, published in 2000, Putin recalls asking a nearby Red Army unit to protect the KGB headquarters in Dresden. The answer he received shocked him: “We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.” Putin later said: “I got the feeling then that the country no longer existed. That it had disappeared.”
Searing experiences like that are formative. The lesson that Putin seems to have drawn from 1989 is that great empires can collapse because of internal political disarray. Having seen Moscow fall silent, Putin may now hope to see Washington fall silent and the “American empire” collapse in its turn.
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