In 1994, during a ceremony of the European Union in Hamburg, the President of Estonia Lennart Meri, called the Soviets “occupiers”. Not everyone noticed, but at that moment an official who was part of the St. Petersburg delegation got up and left the room. Few knew his name. Vladimir Putin was an obscure municipal bureaucrat, led at the time by Anatoly Sobchak, one of the “democratic” champions of post-Soviet Russia. But this was noticed and the episode now serves Masha Gessen, an American journalist and writer of Russian descent, to update her portrait of the head of the Kremlin. Twenty-eight years later, Gessen recounts, the decision to attack Ukraine is development, perfectly consistent with that reaction which at the time might have appeared impulsive, but was in reality the manifestation of an idea of the world that the St. Petersburg bureaucrat, a once he became president, he transformed into his imperial restoration program. “And if it still seems incredible to us, it is because we refused to see what was before our eyes.” Everything we see today in Ukraine had already been seen in Chechnya: disappearances, summary executions, rapes, cities and towns reduced to blackened concrete skeletons. But who, here, had really seen?
Masha Gessen ten years ago dedicated an essay-reportage-analysis to Putin entitled “The man without a face” and told his story as an “unlikely ascent”. Now that book, published at the time by Bompiani, returns for the Sellerio publisher (in the same translation by Lorenzo Matteoli) with an introduction that is equivalent to an update by Gessen herself. The volume is on sale at the Book Fair. “I had been in Moscow and Kiev in the weeks leading up to the invasion. No one in either city seemed to believe it could actually happen, not so much because the evidence was doubted, but because the prospect of war was literally unbelievable. And it continued to be unimaginable, even after the war started ».
But then why? They did not imagine it in Kiev, the chancelleries of Western countries did not understand it, which also had intense relations with Moscow, such as Germany, France and even Italy, as it was possible.Is it possible that superficiality, opportunisms, conveniences have blinded everyone in the face of a goal that Putin had declared without reticence since the beginning of his “unlikely” rise? Even the warnings of the CIA, which in recent months had announced a military invasion as imminent, were not taken seriously. Perhaps we still remembered the fact that as soon as the Cold War was over and the deterioration of the generality of Soviet infrastructures was observed, the CIA itself had confessed to having exaggerated the power and efficiency of the enemy military apparatus for propaganda purposes.
Be that as it may, in Masha Gessen’s analysis, the decision to attack Ukraine and unleash this senseless war was perfectly predictable. “Not only had Putin told us from the beginning that his goal was to restore Russia’s lost imperial glory, but he had also been clear about the means he would use.” Putin, therefore, is not “crazy”. Asking whether he is “insane” is a “misleading” question. It is also futile because Putin told the world what kind of universe he lives in: “It is a universe in which Russia suffers constant humiliation after the collapse of the Soviet Union which he called the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of our time.”
Masha Gessen experienced firsthand the historical parable of her country, political, cultural and customs, all elements that contribute to Putin’s ideological construction and are also important in the decision to attack Ukraine.
The journalist was born in Moscow in 1967 into a family of Jewish intellectuals. In 1981 her parents decide to emigrate to the United States, to Boston. But ten years later, after the fall of the USSR, Masha decides to return to Mosca. He belongs to a generation born and raised within the regime but which at the time could hope for a future of freedom and opportunity in a “country that was inventing itself at a dizzying pace”. Gessen then told the story of that illusion and subsequent disillusionment in a dense book also published by Sellerio with the title “The future is history”.
But for her there was an additional complication, because a LGBQ + militant who lived with a partner and together they had adopted children. That is, it represented exactly the model of the family against which the ideology of the traditional Russian family was being reconstructed, the social canon of Putinism which had – and has, as Patriarch Kirill’s stances show – the Orthodox Church as the main ally in the taking of the company.
Masha Gessen, since 1992 had settled in Moscow, in the office of US News & World Report and remained there until 2013, when she was forced to leave the country due to constant threats, to her and also to her family. She is a stubborn and irreducible militant: she does not intend to be defined as either male or female and in the introduction to the new edition of her book on Vladimir Putin, the words that refer to her end with the vowel “schwa”. Details that matter.
Masha Gessen, in this new part of the book, recalls his dissent with Alexey Navalny who defined the Putin regime as a “party of swindlers and thieves”; Masha’s investigation, culminating in the biography that has now been republished, says something else about the head of the Kremlin: “a man who killed people both by wars and by using assassins.”
And now? Gessen’s analysis, leaves powhat hopes: «He will go on, whatever it takes, in terms of money and human lives. Navalny was wrong: brutality, domination, unlimited power are Putin’s ultimate goals; the riches represent only the loot and the strumento “.
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