Vladimir Putin has been driving taxis since the collapse of the Soviet Union

 

 After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia's economy was so turbulent that even Vladimir Putin had to work as a private taxi driver in the 1990s to make ends meet, the Russian president said of himself in a new documentary about the chaotic decade. The 90s of his country, writes the British newspaper The Times.

"Sometimes I had to make extra money as a taxi driver. It's embarrassing to talk about it, but unfortunately it was like that, "Putin said in the trailer for a new documentary about the 1990s, shown on Russia's state television Russia-24 over the weekend.

He did not specify when and for which company he worked.

 Asked if he had used the Volga car he had brought from East Germany, where he worked as a KGB officer, he said: "Of course, I didn't have another car."

After his tenure as a KGB officer, Putin returned to his hometown of St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) and in May 1990 became an adviser to Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, after which he rose to deputy mayor and head of the Foreign Economic Relations Committee.

Earlier, Putin said in a 2018 documentary that he was ready to work as a taxi driver in June 1996, when Sobchak lost the election and Putin quit his job in the city administration.

 When he was offered a job at the presidential administration in Moscow later that year, he said he could not accept it because he had no other job.

The documentary "Modern History" tells the story of the "collapse of the economy, ideology and human destinies" that followed the end of the Soviet Union.

The years after the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a wave of privatization that created the super-rich oligarchs at the expense of many Russian workers, who were thrown into severe poverty as the welfare state was dismantled and sold off.

 Amid raging public discontent over high-level corruption and wage stagnation, Russian officials have repeatedly cited the difficulties of the 1990s to illustrate how far Russians' living standards have reached.

In 2005, Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."