After regime change in its satellites, the USSR began pulling its military, secret police, and political personnel out of these countries. This was a complicated, expensive, and ill-prepared operation that often added homegrown insult to the moral injury of the personnel being decommissioned in a turnaround no one had bothered to warn them about. A KGB agent who was stationed in the East German city of Dresden would later describe the experience as frightful and humiliating.9 The agent’s name was Vladimir Putin.
