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Article: Russia's Mystery Man.
- Article from:
- Newsweek International
- Article date:
- January 17, 2000
- Author:
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On the eve of orthodox Christmas last week, the man who spent 16 years in the KGB serving the greater glory of communism attended services at the Church of the Holy Trinity in southern Moscow. Ever since he rescued his two daughters from a burning dacha outside St. Petersburg three years ago, Vladimir Putin's friends say, he has become an increasingly religious man. Attending a Christmas service was no act for the cameras. But the church was carefully selected nonetheless. In the early 19th century Mikhail Kutuzov, the Russian general immortalized in Tolstoy's "War and Peace," who drove Napoleon out of Moscow and then beat him all the way back to Paris, used to go to mass ...