Putin says Berlin Wall's fall was inevitable

Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin meets with leaders of the United Russia political party at his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, October 30, 2009.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Vladimir Putin has spoken for the first time to a television interviewer about the fall of the Berlin Wall and his role in confronting an angry German crowd of protesters while working as a KGB officer stationed in Dresden.

Putin, by far Russia's most powerful politician, described the Wall as something artificial and its end as "a normal, natural event," said the journalist who conducted the interview, Vladimir Kondratyev of Russian channel NTV.

"What had to happen, happened. I believe the division of Germany had absolutely no future," Putin said in an advance clip of the interview aired by NTV.

NTV will screen the full interview Sunday evening.

Kondratyev, who was working for Soviet television in Bonn, West Germany in 1989, said that despite Putin's spy brief in East Germany "neither Putin, nor Kohl, nor Gorbachev -- nobody could have known that the wall would fall at that time."

"Prime Minister Putin doesn't remember in detail how he spent (that day), all the more since it was nighttime, it was late. Many people in the Soviet Union, including Gorbachev, found out (about the Wall) in the morning" the interviewer said.

Those hoping for confirmation of a dramatic story that Putin personally threatened East German demonstrators with a gun when they surrounded his KGB offices in Dresden will be disappointed.

"I can honestly say Putin answered that question very modestly," Kondratyev said. "He doesn't want his role to stand out.

State television channel Russia Today said an eyewitness of the Dresden riots of December 1989, Volker Getz, described to an interviewer several years ago how a "fair-haired officer with a pistol in his hands" told the crowd the building was Soviet territory and threatened to shoot anyone who entered.

"Later, we learned that this KGB officer became your president," Getz said, according to Russia Today's website.

Kondratyev doubted this account, adding that Putin did not mention a pistol in the interview. The prime minister said only that he went out to speak to the demonstrators and convinced them his offices were part of a Soviet military installation.

That fits with the only other account by Putin of the 1989 events, in "First Person," a book of interviews conducted after he became acting president in 1999.

There Putin describes how he tried to calm the Dresden crowd, explaining away his fluent German saying he was an interpreter. But he makes no mention of a weapon and says he phoned colleagues about what to do.

"After a few hours our military people did get there. And the crowd dispersed," the book quotes him as saying.

Far from promoting himself as a fearless hero saving the KGB headquarters single-handedly, Putin seems more at pains in the television documentary to portray himself as a good friend of the German people -- key trading partners for Russia.

Putin retains a special affection for the country from his Dresden days. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is a close contact and after leaving office went on to chair a consortium led by Russia's Gazprom which wants to build a new pipeline under the Baltic Sea to supply Germany.

Asked in the interview whether he still felt nostalgic for communist East Germany, Kondratyev quoted Putin as saying:

"On the level of daily life, of course there is such a feeling....but as far as the political direction is concerned, we orientate ourselves toward the Federal Republic of Germany which exists today."

Asked if there was not a contradiction between Putin saying the fall of the Berlin Wall as "inevitable" and his much-quoted comment that the fall of the Soviet Union was the greatest geo-political tragedy of the 20th century, Kondratyev snapped:

"What do you expect, Putin to say that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a stroke of great good fortune ?"

(Editing by Janet McBride)