Putin was a wife-beater, heavy drinker before rise to power, documentary claim

            BERLIN(LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH) — Vladimir Putin was violent to his ex-wife, Lyudmila, during their marriage, a Ger­man documentary on the Rus­sian leader has claimed.

            Putin the Man, made by ZDF television and shown this week, claimed to have been given access to the unseen files of an unidentified western intelligence agency. They included details of Putin's time as a young KGB offi­cer stationed in Dresden, Ger­many, during the 1980s, as well as his rise to power in Russia.

            A secretary inside the Dresden office code-named Lehnchen, who befriended Lyudmila Putin, told how Putin used to beat his wife regularly.

            Far from his image as a fit­ness fanatic today, the young Putin was overweight and a heavy drinker, according to the documentary.

            "He was depressed, fat, lazy and disillusioned," Mahsa Gessen, an author and activist told the doc­umentary. The files included the testimony of a woman identified as Mrs H who said Putin groped her at a party, and that his col-leagues blamed it on alcohol.

            It was the collapse of his KGB career, caused by the fall of the Soviet Union, that made Putin turn his life around and fight his way back to the centre of power, according to the documentary.

            It presented new evidence that he has misrepresented an incident from 1989, when anti-Communist protesters tried to storm the KGB office in Dresden before the Berlin Wall fell. Putin has claimed he talked the pro-testers down while posing as an interpreter. But Siegfried Dan­nath, one of the demonstrators, told the filmmakers that Putin had appeared in full uniform and told the crowd his men had orders to shoot.

            That version was corroborated by Sergei Bezrukov, a former KGB colleague of Putin's.

            The documentary also said Putin had been left paranoid and obsessed with holding on to power after a series of assassina­tion attempts. The files identi­fied five attempts on Putin's life, including one in London that was foiled by Scotland Yard. Pre­vious reports have said two men were arrested in London in 2003 in connection with a suspected plot to kill Putin.