After five years stationed as a spy in Dresden, watching the collapse of communism first in East Germany, then back home in the Soviet Union, Vladimir Putin returned to Leningrad, now renamed St Petersburg, and became head of the city's "external relations committee". 

His job was to attract foreign investment, and to set up barter deals with Western countries to alleviate the city's dire food shortages.

It was 1991 and, as I recently discovered, I once found myself (as a BBC reporter) in the same room as him – at the side of the St Petersburg mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, during a meeting with visiting British minister, Peter Lilley. Re-watching the footage, I recognise the features: the soft hair parted to one side, the protruding fishlike lips, the rolling, gangsterish gait. He is unobtrusive and slightly nervous, as you would expect from a man used to living in the shadows.

Putin's job exposed him to the horrors of one of the Soviet Union's lowest and most humiliating periods. St Petersburg at the time was on the brink of starvation. I visited a so-called "vegetable depot" which was supposed to supply the city's whole network of shops. In a system devoid of incentives, almost the entire produce went to waste.

The Soviet planning system had collapsed. Long lines of angry customers were forming outside empty food stores. Russia was forced to beg for humanitarian aid, like some Third World country. A fellow correspondent in Moscow once coined the phrase "Upper Volta with rockets". That was really how the decaying Soviet Union looked, and Putin knew it. When he came to power nine years later he vowed never to let that happen again.

But being in charge of St Petersburg's food imports apparently presented Putin with great temptations. Since the city had no hard currency with which to buy food imports, he was given the task of arranging barter deals – supplying Soviet oil and other raw materials in exchange for imports of foodstuffs. In 1992, an investigation by members of the St Petersburg city council established that the raw materials had been duly exported, but the food supplies – to the tune of $92 million – had never materialised. Responsibility for the missing millions fell directly on Putin's shoulders, and the council demanded his dismissal. His boss, Sobchak, stood by him, but the whiff of corruption has stuck to Putin ever since.

When he later became president, Putin presided over the creation of a state in which corruption is so widespread and so complex that one Russian businessman told me I would never, as a Westerner, understand it. Putin surrounded himself with cronies from his previous life – from the St Petersburg administration, from the KGB, even friends from his judo club and co-owners of a "dacha co-operative". He gave them the best positions in government, allowed them to commandeer the most lucrative sectors of Russia's economy, its banks and mass media. One of the leading opposition figures, Andrei Navalny, has dubbed Putin's party, United Russia, "the party of crooks and thieves" – a coinage so successful it almost certainly contributed to the party's poor performance in last December's parliamentary elections.