Cool heads, short memory: Why Putin and his fellow KGB officers avoided lustration and made successful careers
Although Vladimir Putin's official biography paints a portrait of a heroic spy in East Germany, in reality his main tasks with the KGB related to political investigations, searches, and jailing dissidents in Leningrad. How is it that after the transition of power, Putin and his KGB colleagues not only stayed free, but made successful careers in the “new” democratic Russia of the 1990s?