When former Waitakere City Mayor Sir Bob Harvey was 17, he joined the pro-Soviet Socialist Unity Party. Sir Bob's interest in Mother Russia eventually drifted away, but it was rekindled in 2000 - while working as the Labour Party president - when he was handed an envelope containing 10 pages of gallery proofs of a yet-to-be-published book about future Russian president Vladimir Putin's visit to New Zealand in the 1980s. The visit occurred while Putin, who was on his way to rising through the KGB ranks, was based in Germany and Singapore and part of his brief was to report on New Zealand, Australia and Fiji. Sir Bob later found out that Putin had actually travelled to New Zealand at least two times, visiting under aliases - one of those being as a Bata shoe salesman. He's with us to look back on what he was able to learn about Putin's visits to Aotearoa.
Photo: AFP
