Nazi Germany, 1940. Russian spy Alexander Belov is cool in a crisis.
In a crisp white suit and tie, his hair immaculately coiffed, Belov infiltrates the SS headquarters in Berlin, assuming a German alias and manipulating his way to the top.
His goal? To valiantly serve his country by intercepting Nazi war plans.
But his mission was far from secret. Belov's face — or rather, that of actor Stanislav Lyubshin — was plastered on posters and televisions around the USSR. His adventures in intelligence were fantasies — and the central plot of the 1968 Soviet spy series, The Shield and the Sword.
A skinny 16-year-old boy, navigating Leningrad's harsh streets in the 1960s, was a fan of the series.
Drawn to the life of adventure, travel and special status depicted on screen, the young boy approached the former Soviet Union's state security police. He was told to go to law school and reapply in a few years time.
His name was Vladimir Putin and, by 1975, he was pursuing a career in counter-intelligence with the KGB.
Right place, right time
Putin was born in 1952 to a factory worker and a conscript in the Soviet navy. He has described his childhood as one marked by austerity and violence.
Susan Glasser is a former Moscow bureau chief for the Washington Post and the author of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution.
She says Putin's rough upbringing was highly formative.
"If you want to understand Vladimir Putin, try to understand the brute, almost Darwinian conditions of the courtyard in the communal apartment building that he grew up in," she tells ABC RN's Take Me to Your Leader.
"He's a scrawny young kid. He's poor, he's hungry, he's beleaguered.
"His credo in life is basically, only the strong survive, the weak get beaten."
At 12, he began to study martial arts, initially as a way to defend himself from bullies.
In the decade that followed, he would become a judo champion, known for his ability to identify his opponents' weaknesses — and strike.
"That got him off the streets, gave him a purpose in life and at the same time, he became fascinated with the KGB," explains Philip Short, a journalist and author of 2022 biography, Putin.
"He was lucky because that was exactly the moment when [Yuri] Andropov, who had been appointed in 1967 to head the KGB, wanted to attract a higher quality of candidate, not just the gumshoes who went around in a rather primitive fashion, spying on others and denouncing them, but people who could think.
"He was looking for university graduates, for people who'd come out of high school and showed promise, and that was the moment when Putin was interested in joining."
The lure of the KGB
Russian/Soviet spy shows like The Shield and The Sword and the 1973 series Seventeen Moments of Spring were somewhat of a rebranding exercise for the KGB, Short explains.
"[Andropov] wanted to change its image, to get away from the memories of the Stalinist KGB and depict an organisation which was patriotic, which was doing good work, and which would attract young people like Putin," he says.
"And he did it very successfully. Every time [those TV series] were on, the KGB recruiting officers in the various provincial headquarters would have a whole trail of young kids coming and saying, 'Please, how do I join?'"
It was an appealing prospect for many. The KGB promised travel, education, new skills and access to an elite tier of Soviet society — along with the noble objective of aiding one's country.
"We think of it as a sort of brutal, totalitarian police force, but I think that there was a veneer or propaganda that held it to be essentially a kind of Soviet Harvard, in that sense of the best and the brightest," Glasser says.
"That was the message which Andropov was conveying with films like [The Shield and The Sword]: a patriotic individual can do a huge amount for his country," Short adds.
"That was one of the great attractions for Putin, the idea that one person in any intelligence could actually do more than armies could do. It's a very kind of adolescent idea, a romantic view of foreign intelligence."
Putin ascended the ranks of counter-intelligence in the KGB, but he never reached the top tiers.
"He was only a former lieutenant colonel in the KGB; he was posted not even to the prestige posting in East Germany, but to Dresden, a backwater," Glasser says.
"People who had been generals in the Soviet KGB didn't consider Vladimir Putin to be made of the same stuff that they were."
Biographers are divided, however, on how much the institution influenced the man who would go on to lead Russia.
Glasser calls Putin "primarily a creature of that institution", where his own narratives about his past are peppered with "very elaborate cover stories" informed by KGB propaganda.
On the other hand, Short says the rest of the world must be "very careful" not to view Putin as a product of the KGB.
"He fitted all their criteria, absolutely. But Putin was Putin before he went into the KGB."
A master manipulator
Putin claims that he retired from the KGB in August 1991, in a show of support for Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who was subject to a coup d'etat.
Over the next six years, he held various political and government positions and made some powerful friends. One of them, the soon-to-be finance minister Alexei Kudrin brought him to Moscow, where Putin went on to head Russia's domestic intelligence service, the FSB.
It became clear as his career developed that Putin was a master manipulator.
"Once he got into politics … he was the guy who knew which buttons to push. He got into his element and was extremely successful," Short says.
"Putin is very good at playing his interlocutors, knowing what is going to resonate with them, what's going to be an effective tactic."
His days in counter-intelligence, Glasser argues, imbued him with a conspiratorial edge.
"That's the kind of person who traffics in the spies within. That's the kind of person who's going to deal with conspiracy theories and [be] very suspicious of those around him," she says.
Even one of Putin's most vocal critics, Russian politician Ilya Ponomaryov, can attest to his acuity.
"He is a great manipulator; he is a brilliant psychologist," he says.
"He knows how to read people, how to recruit people on his side, how to convince [them] to act in his favour."
In 1999, when Prime Minister Boris Yeltsin was casting around for potential successors, Putin appeared seemingly out of nowhere as a loyal and hardworking candidate.
"He's an accidental prime minister and then president of Russia," Glasser says.
"[Yeltsin] was almost plucking a faceless bureaucrat from one of the Russian ministry buildings and saying, 'Now you're in the Kremlin'.
"If it weren't for the extraordinary corruption surrounding Boris Yeltsin and the desire on the part of Yeltsin's family to find someone who would protect them … Putin never would have risen in this way."
He was Russian prime minister for just a few months, before Yeltsin retired early and Putin stepped in as president. He would go on to lead for 18 years, with four intervening years as prime minister under President Dmitry Medvedev.
Invention and re-invention
Putin's reign has been punctuated by publicity stunts.
From posing for macho photographs on horseback to reportedly scaring German chancellor Angela Merkel with his dog, Putin is unafraid to project a strong image.
But, according to Philip Short, Putin's "cult of personality" is borne from strategy more than ego.
"He's sought to rehabilitate what he regards as traditional Russian values, not necessarily because he believes in them, but because he believes that they will resonate with the majority of Russian people," he says.
Take, for example, the infamous photos of shirtless Putin swaggering through the Russian countryside.
"This is the period between 2008 and 2012, when Medvedev was president, and increasingly, [Putin] wanted to stay in the forefront of the media scene and to remain politically important and alive for the Russian people," Short says.
"So that was when you had these pictures of him on horseback, bare chested, swimming through Siberian rivers, doing all these crazy things that were going to keep him on television, keep him in the eyes of the Russian people."
While the image of Russian machismo may have wooed the public back then, Putin has since projected a very different image.
"There was a remarkable speech one Easter where he looked like the absolutely archetypal Russian grandfather, sitting next to the table with tea and the kulich, the Russian Easter cake, a fire burning in the background," Short says.
"But again, it's all strategically calculated. It's all tactics to project a particular image."
Short recounts how, when Putin was working in St Petersburg in the early 1990s, he was friendly with an American mayoral advisor who was gay, and even kept him from being fired for his sexuality.
Yet two decades later, homophobic policies became a staple of Putin's Russia.
"Why? Because he believes that a large part of his political constituency wants that," Short explains.
"So a lot of what Putin does, he does for calculated reasons, not because he necessarily believes in it himself."
Putin's own past, particularly his early years, is coloured by this mythology. Much of what biographers know of his youth comes from his 2000 autobiography, First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia's President.
"There are huge gaps in our understanding that are almost extraordinary when you consider the role that [Putin] has played on the world stage for the last two-plus decades," Glasser says.
"Vladimir Putin is anything that Putin wants to be."
RN in your inbox
Get more stories that go beyond the news cycle with our weekly newsletter.
