Original subtitles

MAN: Happened twice, both times in exactly the same way.

Both times I was in Moscow,

I started feeling really sick for no reason.

And within the space of a few minutes,

I was completely incapacitated.

I couldn't breathe, my heart was racing,

and within hours all of my major life organs were shutting down

one after another.

I remember both times very clearly thinking,

"This is it. This is the end."

The official diagnosis give to me by my doctors in Moscow was

toxic action by an unidentified substance,

so translated from medical speak to normal human language,

it means poisoning.

I have no doubt by the way this was done,

that this was done by people

somehow connected with the Russian domestic security services,

and I have no doubt absolutely that this was done as retribution,

for my political activity in the Russian opposition.

(SIREN WHOOPS)

There's been a strangely high mortality rate

over these past two decades

among the people who are standing up against Putin's regime...

..journalists, human rights activists,

political opposition figures.

A mortality rate that I don't think can be explained

by any normal statistical model.

We're all products of our experience we're all products of our background

we're all products of our education.

Vladimir Putin's background is the Soviet KGB...

..one of the most repressive organisations

in the history of humanity.

He's doing what he was taught to do.

Manipulate, lie, recruit, repress.

(SHOUTING)

He seems to be quite good at his job.

MAN: Putin was very small, but he was a fierce fighter.

MAN: There is a vengeful side to Putin.

He is a man who never forgets a slight.

MAN: I'm quite clear on what I think drives him -

to make Russia great again.

He's a convinced patriotic Russian.

MAN: You can't make a president in a few months, just like...

(CLICKS FINGERS) ..a click of your hand.

It's just impossible.

MAN: This is the code of the spy.

Nothing is forgotten and nothing is forgiven.

WOMAN: Good evening.

Could this be another example of a Russian being poisoned

on UK soil?

The man in hospital tonight, Sergei Skripal,

is in a critical condition.

MAN: Counter-terrorism officers have take charge of the investigation

into the suspected poisoning of a former Russian agent

in Salisbury on Sunday.

Sergei Skripal had been convicted in Russia 12 years ago

of passing secrets to MI6.

MAN: President Putin's spokesman told me earlier,

"We have no information about what happened. We cannot comment."

WOMAN: For many people, Soviet childhoods are pretty grim.

Most people lived in appalling conditions.

Behind the grandiose architecture,

these dark alleyways and dark courtyards and street gangs,

and it's... it's pretty filthy.

It's not a very nice place to be a small boy.

He was a schoolyard thug,

and part of a gang.

He was very small, but he was a fierce fighter.

He was saved from going into the crime life by sports.

His coach of judo pulled him out of this street life,

and he became a very avid fighter.

MAN: The KGB were watching

who was doing this kind of sports in the Soviet Union.

Putin didn't make any secret out of the fact

that he wanted to work for the secret services, with KGB.

He dreamt to become a kind of Stierlitz,

which is the Russian version of James Bond.

(JAUNTY MUSIC, MAN SINGS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

MAN: Asking, you know, "Do you remember the character Stierlitz?"

it's like asking anybody in this country,

"Do you remember the character Bond?"

You know, yes, you remember the character Bond.

The theme of Stierlitz in Seventeen Moments Of Spring,

the idea of, sort of, a glorious Soviet spy,

I think is very important,

and this was an extremely important film to Putin.

He was 21 years old when Seventeen Moments of Spring was released,

and two years later, he joined the service.

He joined the KGB.

Now, I can easily talk about that, you know.

For 20 years, I was intelligence officer.

My generation of... of kids

were brought up in the sentiments

of very heroic novels about World War II.

In the heroic of small kids, who were fighting fascism.

And the heroism of our intelligence officers.

RAHR: For an agent, it was very important,

if he wanted to have a good job,

to be married, happily married,

'cause otherwise, we can't trust you fully.

You could do your own business with other woman there.

We would dislike this.

Putin's wife, Lyudmila, when he dated her for the first time,

he never told her that he working for the KGB.

He was telling her that he worked for the police.

And he examined her character.

He sent his friends and they wanted to date her as well,

and she said, "No, I have already boyfriend.

"I have Vladimir."

And that was enough for him to be proud of her

and to understand that she really likes him.

(BELL DINGS)

KENDALL: He ends up in Eastern Germany,

and he's not even in the capital, Berlin.

He's sent to Dresden, a provincial backwater.

And I think if you've been brought up in Leningrad

and then you've trained a bit for the KGB in Moscow,

going to Dresden,

quite the opposite from what you'd hope from your foreign posting,

to taste the forbidden fruits of the West.

And I think it probably must've been a bit of a let-down.

You get a hint of it.

His wife talks about how they were homesick

and longed for the Soviet Union.

So, it feels as though they had a comfortable life,

but not a particularly exciting one.

He drank a lot of beer and there were a lot of pictures

at parties, in restaurants, or among friends.

You know, if you go there on a very secret mission and you're a top spy,

no picture exists of you,

not in books, nor in the collections of your friends

or in family albums.

So, I shouldn't portray him more than he was.

(SHOUTING, CHEERING)

And then his world collapsed.

His dreams collapsed.

MAN: East Germany has tonight opened its borders to the West.

28 years after the Berlin Wall was built,

its people are once more free to travel anywhere.

I was Moscow correspondent at the time,

and I wouldn't have said at the end of 1989, the beginning of 1990,

that I would expect

that within two years, the whole Soviet Union would collapse.

So, I don't suppose he did either.

I think it must've been a huge shock.

(SHOUTING)

He didn't welcome these changes.

He knew that he had to... return back from the GDR,

a country which didn't exist anymore 'cause it was reunited as Germany.

He had a wife and two small daughters.

He had a car, which he took to drive back from Dresden to St Petersburg.

He didn't know what kind of career he will have in the new Russia,

what will happen to him, to his family, to the country.

(SHOUTING, CHEERING)

YAKUNIN: Coming back to '90s in St Petersburg...

..it was gloomy city.

Despite the fact that there were some new expectations...

..it was a real trauma to Soviet society.

They were losing their sense of belonging to great country,

to great history.

They were losing the means for survival.

When the institutions lost the ability to function,

of course criminality is rising.

(SIREN WAILS)

They had contract killings every single day.

They had bombings nearly every single day.

There's people being killed left and right.

I mean, it's, like, pretty much comparable to Chicago in the 1930s.

And probably Chicago was not as violent as Russia.

PUTIN:

MAN: Just now President Putin denied

having anything to do with the election interference in 2016.

Every US intelligence agency has concluded that Russia did.

Who do you believe?

People came to me, they said they think it's Russia.

I have President Putin. He just said it's not Russia.

I will say this - I don't see any reason why it would be.

I have great confidence in my intelligence people

but I will tell you that

President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

SEDELMEYER: Well, Vladimir Putin came into my life

through a problem that I had with my investment at the time.

Through my activities as a supplier for law enforcement equipment,

I ended up in Russia.

One of the deputy police chiefs thought it was a good idea

to try to take over my investments.

So, I want to the US consulate and someone there said,

you know, "The guy you should... you should confront with this problem

"is really Vladimir Putin."

(MAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN)

Putin is a guy that became sidekick

to the first democratically elected mayor of St Petersburg,

Anatoly Sobchak.

And so I went to see him.

Vladimir Putin was a very dry, obviously very humourless man

of rather small stature.

You could see it was very important to give you a good handshake,

to look you straight into the eyes.

He basically says, "No, I'm not gonna get involved.

"I'm busy enough protecting my mayor.

"I don't need an additional headache."

That's exactly what he said.

I didn't understand what... what that meant

until I went out and I learned

that Mayor Sobchak was completely corrupt, corrupt to the bone,

and one of Putin's main functions was to keep him out of trouble.

RAHR: There were no real rules, there were no real laws.

Of course, people bribed in order to get certain privileges.

I was told by people who were close to Sobchak,

"You have to pay $100,000

"in order to have a soup with him."

But they didn't manage to keep the city running as it should be.

The city was collapsing.

People were searching for food.

Everything was dark.

Sobchak needs someone who is, sort of the interface

between what they call the organs of state,

that is the KGB, the police, anybody of executive power

that he could potentially get into a conflict with.

For a simpler term, I would call Putin a fixer in the day.

He was always in the shadows.

You know, if there were pictures being taken

of Sobchak doing something,

even if Putin was there, he wasn't gonna be in the picture,

or if he was, he was gonna be off in the corner.

Sobchak trusted him,

because Putin proved, first of all, to be very loyal.

Loyal to Sobchak.

He's a bulldog.

He grabs on and he gets something.

1992, there is a documentary film director

who wants to make a series of short films

to introduce those people working in the St Petersburg administration

to the public, the whole team.

And for the film, he decides to set the scene.

And Putin, sitting behind the wheel of the Soviet Volga he's driving,

and in the background, there is music,

there is a theme tune from Seventeen Moments of Spring playing.

(JAUNTY MUSIC PLAYS)

Putin is not an accidental man.

The idea to bring this tune

and bring out this association with Stierlitz

was... was clearly very important.

Power, power, more and more influence

in St Petersburg connections,

with Western politicians.

He made himself indispensable for Sobchak.

Until 1996...

..when Sobchak lost the governors elections.

He lost everything. He had no money.

He was again in a situation where he had nothing.

SEDELMAYER: The lesson from Sobchak's loss was that

you cannot leave the democratic process to elections

and you cannot leave the elections to ordinary people,

in the sense that someone could vote you out of office.

WOMAN: I would like to make a statement

about the death of Alexander Litvinenko.

Mr Litvinenko suffered a cardiac arrest

caused by his ingesting polonium 210

while drinking tea at the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel.

Mr Litvinenko was deliberately poisoned

by Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun

acting on behalf of others.

There is a strong probability

that they were acting under the direction

of the Russian domestic security service,

the Federal Security Service, or FSB,

and the inquiry has found

that the FSB operation to kill Mr Litvinenko

was probably approved by President Putin.

MAN: There's a very famous word in Russia, 'poryadok',

which means 'order'.

If you ask Russians what they want out of their leaders,

what they want is poryadok.

What they want is order.

At that time, the president was Yeltsin,

who was visibly very unhealthy, kept on humiliating himself.

(ANTHEM PLAYS)

For the ordinary Russian,

who thinks of himself as a citizen of a proud country,

this was just intolerable.

(ALL SHOUT)

KENDALL: A lot of the people who were around Yeltsin at the time

were looking for someone who could take a grip.

Russia had spent ten years sliding into anarchy

with hyperinflation,

trying to cope with the loss of all the Soviet republics.

It had defaulted on its debts.

It had, sort of, lost its way.

And society seemed to be out of control.

MAN: Putin moved to Moscow from St Petersburg in 1996...

..as a... (SCOFFS) ..low-mid-level bureaucrat,

whom they found a position inside the Kremlin apparatus.

Very quickly he starts growing.

In a year, year and something,

he becomes the head of Russian FSB,

the Russian special forces.

This is an incredible career.

MAN: When Putin was installed as director of the FSB in 1998...

..corruption had become so pervasive,

FSB assets were just simply there for hire

for any gangster or businessman who wanted to use them.

GOLDFARB: When Putin came in,

everybody expected that he would start cleaning the stables...

..ridding the FSB of corruption.

So, that's how it all started.

I've never met Putin in my life,

but he's the subject of my obsession in a way,

since he ordered the killing of my friend Litvinenko.

Sascha Litvinenko's conflict with Putin was not political.

It was a conflict of...

..an honest cop with corrupt superiors, essentially.

They met,

and Sascha Litvinenko started explaining to Putin

that this one should be removed and that one should be removed

and that is a crook and so on, and Putin listened to him.

Then ordered him out of the FSB,

because he was making too much trouble.

That's how Sascha Litvinenko's conflict with Putin started.

The stakes were very high.

Yeltsin could be prosecuted.

The danger comes in the figure of the prosecutor general,

Skuratov.

Skuratov already started investigation

in Yeltsin's financial dealings,

with huge political support of Russian parliament behind him.

Behind Yeltsin is Putin as the head of FSB

and... and... and... and... and a willingness to... to fight.

So, what they do?

They expose this prosecutor general on television.

They have this footage of him having sex with some ladies

in some apartment in Moscow,

and they air this footage on television.

After that...

..Prosecutor General Skuratov was dismissed.

It was the first time, probably, when

we saw that you can achieve...

..a very important political outcome

through some kind of special operation

by exposing your opponent with kompromat.

Yeltsin won this fight.

And of course we know Vladimir Putin played huge role

in this special operation.

When Yeltsin appointed Putin as active prime minister in August '99,

he immediately said, "This is my successor.

"He will be Russia's president."

And that was impossible to believe.

That was just simply impossible to... to sort of grasp,

because we just didn't know his face.

Even those who supported Yeltsin were thinking that,

"Hey, this is crazy. He can't make it.

"You can't make a president in a few months,

"just like a click of your hand.

"It's just impossible."

He would definitely lose,

and everything that had been achieved by then

would be destroyed.

I have to admit, I don't remember my first feeling of,

"What is Putin, who is Putin?"

You remember this famous question, "Who is Mr Putin?"

We didn't know who he was.

But what definitely changed everything was...

..the war.

WOMAN: Rescue workers are searching

through the remains of a block of flats

destroyed by a huge bomb blast early today.

MAN: There were reports that

an apartment building in Moscow had been blown up.

About 100 people were killed and many, many more were injured.

Then several days later,

another apartment building was blown up in Moscow.

MAN: This is number six Kashirskoye Avenue,

or what's left of it,

home until today to 120 people.

The eight-storey building collapsed in on itself,

pulverising all who lived inside.

It was clear that what we were dealing with was

a series of terrorist acts.

This is when fear came to Moscow.

This was something very new feeling in the air.

The authorities said that this was the work of Chechen terrorists.

No proof.

But the aggressivity of the population was such

after so many years of hardship under Yeltsin...

..and the anger against the Chechens was so great

after an unsuccessful war

that was fought in the middle of the 1990s,

in which Russia suffered serious defeats,

that no-one waited for evidence.

Ryazan is a city south-east of Moscow, about 100 miles.

One night, a resident of a building saw a car pull up to the building,

and he witnessed people going down

and taking sacks of some mysterious substance into the basement.

He called the police, they came, they went down into the basement

and they bolted back up the stairs and they said,

"There's a bomb in the basement."

Shortly afterwards, those who were responsible for placing the bomb

were arrested.

But they produced FSB identification.

And an order came from Moscow saying to release them.

Short time later, the head of the FSB

got on national television and said that

the events in Ryazan were not an attempted terrorist attack.

For two days, they had been saying that

this was an attempted terrorist attack

and the vigilance of the citizens of Ryazan had prevented it.

Now, with the FSB agents arrested, caught red-handed,

they changed their story and said that

this was a training exercise.

What was taking place was a test of vigilance.

Well, I personally have no doubt

that is could not have been a training exercise.

It could not have been a test of vigilance.

I consider it as a conspiracy theory.

I can't take it.

I can't believe...

..that Russia's government or special forces

were able to orchestrate a terrorist...

..terrorist attacks like that.

If you talk about forensic evidence, it's an open question.

Who blew up the houses?

But there is lots of circumstantial evidence

pointing at some group in FSB,

engaged again of Chechens to blow up these houses

to provoke the invasion of Chechnya.

(HELICOPTER WHIRRS)

And two weeks after the explosions, after these bombings,

the assault on Chechnya started.

That's when the real war started.

There was a demand to restore Russia's pride...

..some self-esteem...

..and to win the war.

That was the primary demand, not people's lives.

He used criminal slang.

He used the word 'mochit', which in Russian is...

It's what Russian gangsters use.

It means 'turn into liquid', 'liquidate',

but it's..it's a very crude word.

Putin's popularity rating soared,

and he immediately became the saviour of the country.

Suddenly, he was the defender of the homeland.

Kind of curtain of silence fell over Russia

on the issue of the apartment bombings.

The phrase "The less you know, the better you sleep",

in Russian, if you'd like it... (SPEAKS RUSSIAN)

It means, "better not to know too much".

It's dangerous to know too much.

(MAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN)

Subtitles Diego Moraes(oakislandtk) www.opensubtitles.org