Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 30, 2000
DRESDEN, Germany
...Putin defends the Soviet-era intelligence service to this day. In recent comments to a writers' group in Moscow, he even seemed to excuse its role in dictator Joseph Stalin's brutal purges, saying it would be "insincere" for him to assail the agency where he worked for so many years. Fiercely patriotic, Putin once said he could not read a book by a Soviet defector because "I don't read books by people who have betrayed the Motherland."
I will try once more to explain this to you and then I am done. My oldest daughter, as I have said is from Russia, adopted.
Her birthparents were horrid people. But we do not tell her she is the product of two horrid people, do you understand why?