Erfurt, Thuringia, East Germany (GDR). A crowd ransacks the offices of the secret police, the Stasi. The same thing happens that day in Dresden. Vladimir Putin is also present in the Dresden offices, and he will write: “The fact that Moscow remained silent gave me the feeling that the country no longer existed: that it had begun a terminal illness.” A few days later, they receive the order to burn the archives: in Dresden, they use the designated incinerator, but due to the sheer volume of documents, it jams and explodes. They then switch to a furnace in the nearby barracks, but that too blows up due to the excessive heat. The remaining documents are then buried in a hole with the intention of burning them with napalm. However, the unit assigned to do this never arrives, so they are burned as best they can, simply with gasoline. Putin returns to Leningrad a few weeks later: on February 3, 1990.
