Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin can be described as anyone. He was born on October 7, 1952 in Leningrad, today Saint Petersburg (Russia). This year he turns 70. he Son of Vladimir and Maria Putin. He is 1.70 meters tall and weighs 80 kilos. He is an Orthodox Christian, has two daughters, is divorced, and loves dogs and sports.
But Putin is not just any person. He has been repeatedly named the most powerful man in the world by Times magazine. He was a KGB agent. He has held power, for more than 20 years, of the largest country in the world. He won majority support from Russians to alter the Constitution and continue in power beyond 2024, when he would finish his presidential term. And, even, he could be re-elected until 2036, which would make him one of the leaders who has been in power for the longest time in Russia and would surpass the dictator Stalin, who lasted 29 years. He is also the head of one of the largest nuclear powers. Russia has 5,977 nuclear warheads. And right now he is the man who has the Western powers and the world in general trembling with a steel pulse after attacking Ukraine.
International analysts have various hypotheses as to why Russia launched this offensive, but one question that arises is how the decision-making process in that country works: whether they are collegial or individual decisions. There are those who claim that Putin consults only half a dozen people, a small committee of relatives, especially ‘hawks’ who came out —like him— from the security services. What is known for certain is that the decision, whether consulted or not, in the end, always ends up being that of one man: Vladimir Putin.
Ben Noble, Associate Professor of Russian Politics at University College London, explained to EL TIEMPO that some experts have gone so far as to question his rationality or even his sanity. Still, Noble isn’t sure it’s all that useful to cast Putin as crazy, but he “has clearly shown that he is prepared to incur costs that many considered simply impossible,” he says.
use fear
Harald Malmgren, a former adviser to several US presidents, recently published a column in UnHeard in which he recalls the first time he met Putin. He says that at a dinner they had in 1992, when Putin was just rising politically, they had the opportunity to talk.
At that meeting, Putin told him: “In Russia, if a dispute is about money or very important property, then the two sides will normally send representatives to a dinner. All attendees upon arrival would be armed. Faced with the possibility of a bloody and fatal outcome, both parties will always find a mutually acceptable solution. Fear provides the catalyst for common sense.” Malmgren says: “I understood then what was the main trait of his character.”
His impression of Putin, he concludes in his article, was that of a man more intelligent than most of the politicians he had met in Washington and other capitals. “Putin seemed to have the instincts of a Sicilian mob boss: quick to reward, but quick to pose a deadly risk in the event of a breach of family rules.”
And it is that each step that the Russian president takes confirms that the method he uses in crises between nations is fear. When an agreement cannot be reached in which he emerges victorious, the solution is almost always found in causing terror with disproportionate responses.
An anecdotal but telling example is when, in 2007, Putin invited Angela Merkel, the former chancellor of Germany, to his lavish presidential summer residence in Sochi, in the snowy mountains of the Caucasus and the Black Sea, to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement. When photographers and videographers arrived at the scene to record the encounter, the Russian president ushered her labrador Koni in and let her approach Merkel to sniff her.
Putin was undoubtedly aware of Merkel’s terror of dogs. In the photographic records of that moment, the chancellor is seen paralyzed with fear in front of one of the greatest adorations of the Russian president, her farmer. And also the cold and calculating gaze of this man. “He has always had an urgent need to show who is the strongest,” the chancellor summed up after the interview.
a secret life
Only one thing can be effective: go on the offensive. You must hit first and hit so hard that your opponent does not stand up,” Putin.
The irony with Putin is that despite the fact that he is the most powerful man in the world and his name is on everyone’s lips, little is known about him. Secret service agents with the help of psychologists strive to profile and discover the flaws in Putin’s complex personality. Because, curiously, it only shows or only comes to light what he wants to be told about him.
Putin always remains surrounded by a large group of journalists, cameramen and photographers accredited by his regime, who are always in charge of exhibiting their virility. And whenever she can, she shows herself bare-chested facing extreme situations, riding a horse, fishing, carrying a rifle, on a powerful Harley-Davidson motorcycle or with her hands on a nuclear bomber.
Among some of the training that Putin practices is judo, perhaps his favorite. Since he was 14 years old, the Russian president has been training this martial art and it is common to see him in competitions of this sport and teaching children the best keys. He has even published two books on the subject: Judo: History, Theory and Practice, and Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin. The latter was distributed in thousands of Russian schools through irregular contracts. And just as he was promoting it some five years ago, Putin told The New York Times reporter Celestine Bohlen: “Only one thing can be effective: go on the offensive.
You must hit first and hit so hard that your opponent doesn’t stand up.” Although he was referring to judo, no doubt his message reflected a character of his personality.
As Bohlen pointed out, in an article on how Putin puts image before words, it is not difficult to read in his body language that he likes to show a masculine image that is also tied to his explicit machismo. As the brilliant journalist collected in the article published in 2014, when the seizure of the Crimean peninsula was taking place, and two French journalists asked her what she thought of Hillary Clinton’s comments in which she compared that attack by Russia with the Hitler’s aggression in the 1930s, Putin scoffed and said, “It is better not to argue with women,” adding, “When people push the limits too far, it is not because they are strong, but because they are weak. But maybe weakness is not the worst quality for a woman.” Currently, in Russia, a woman is murdered every 40 minutes and it is estimated that between 12,000 and 14,000 women are murdered by their partners or relatives annually.
Alpha male behaviors are a real problem because, as analysts point out, it seems as if he tries to convince others that he is the strongest all the time. The political scientist Stanislav Belkovski, founder and director of the National Strategy Institute, states in Putin’s book that the key to understanding him would be the absence of family love in his childhood.
The current president would have spent his entire life looking for a substitute family, after he was sent by his biological parents with a couple from St. Petersburg, who became his official parents. The childhood traumas would be so deep that, over the years, Putin became a loner who only feels comfortable in the company of animals.
“Vladimir Putin’s only friends are his labrador retriever Koni and the Bulgarian sheepdog Buffy,” notes Belkovski. But how, being such a lonely man, with a reputation as an outcast until he was 13, he suddenly became a model student, a judo expert and at the age of 16 he joined the KGB? And how, then, in the most powerful man in the world?
In The Man Without a Face’, the author Masha Gessen asserts that Putin’s strength is based on control of the media, on the combination of respect and fear that he instills, on his all-powerful influence over the main businessmen after the persecution of those who they have resisted him, in the firm support for his candidacy of the Security Forces and the military-industrial complex, to whom he has promised to double the budget, and in a substantial improvement in the economy. In selling the idea of “making Russia great again”.
Gessen, a well-known Russian-American journalist, profiles Putin in her book as a monster obsessed with control, cruel to unsuspected extremes, cynical, corrupt, nihilistic and vindictive, a mobster bent on recovering Soviet glory, and sick with pleonexia: “ The insatiable desire to seize what, by right, belongs to others”.
A new tsar?
For many, he is a fanatical expansionist, determined to create a space for Russian domination. To others, he is an isolationist concerned with protecting the identity of the country from him. Empaths blame Westerners. Putin, the bellicose, would be the product of a country “humiliated” by the United States and Europe after the end of the Cold War. Unable to comprehend trampled national sentiment, they never measured the extent of the trauma wrought by the demise of the Soviet Union. For them, more than a realist, Putin would be a great sentimentalist: “He who does not regret the disappearance of the USSR has no heart. He who desires its restoration has no head”, he usually says.
Putin has been called a tsar many times, by many people, and for a long time. However, Ben Noble does not use the term as he is not quite sure what he is adding. “Putin is the leader of a personalist authoritarian regime. He is a dictator, albeit one who does not dictate all important decisions, particularly those that are of least interest to him and where he acts as an arbiter between competing elite groups.”
However, it is interesting to note that the rule of Russia’s last Tsar, Tsar Nicholas II, was undone by the Russian Empire’s involvement in World War I. “If Putin is endangering his own rule by launching this war in Ukraine, then perhaps that’s a historical parallel that might make the use of the term ‘tsar’ more appropriate,” Noble says.
As for how Putin sees himself, Malmgren recounts that the Russian president repeatedly mentioned his admiration for Peter the Great, so much so that he was convinced he sees himself as his incarnation.
“It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Putin considers himself personally, inextricably intertwined with the fate of the Russian state. He is concerned about his legacy and his notion of the essence of the Russian state as a great power. And yet, an action (the war against Ukraine) aimed at cementing his position in history could, in fact, undermine his legacy, ”says Noble.
And he concludes: “Putin could go down in history, in part, as the man who said he would not invade Ukraine, but then did.”
SIMON FARM MATIAS
Sunday Newsroom
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