Dana Mathewson

As a youngster growing up in the 1960s, Putin was a typical Russian hooligan, living with his family in a communal apartment in what was then Leningrad. Several other families, including Putin’s, shared these living quarters, with no bath, often no hot water and a stinking toilet. To get to his apartment on the fifth floor, young Putin had to run up the flight of stairs, infested by hungry rats. Armed with a stick, Putin at first fended off the filthy creatures and ran away from them, before he eventually decided to observe their behavior.

Putin spent hours studying these hordes of rats. Once, as he revealed in his official autobiography "First Person,” a "huge rat” he chased into a corner with a stick had nowhere else to go, so it turned around and attacked him. That frightened the future spymaster, and he was lucky to run away fast enough to elude his adversary.

During his life and career, Putin has had several "cornered rat” moments, which have shaped his thinking and behavior. Working as a KGB officer during the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he stared down a mob of angry German citizens who broke into the Russian Ministry of Security (MGB) in Dresden.

At one point, Putin went outside to tell the protestors they were on the premises of a Soviet military organization. When the suspicious crowd demanded to know why a regular Soviet military officer spoke such good German, Putin lied and said he was a translator.

Putin requested armed backup forces, but was at first denied because "nothing could be done without orders from Moscow, and Moscow was silent.” Though Soviet military personnel eventually arrived and the crowd dispersed, the incident left a permanent mark on Putin.

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