The ancient Russian cities were not guarded by walls. The Kremlin was the inner fortress that protected the governor’s palace, the cathedral and other important buildings of the Administration. Apparently, the authorities did not fear the onslaught of the hordes coming from the vast steppes, but rather took shelter from their own, as if the population constituted a potential danger and should be kept safe from sudden explosions of violence or, perhaps, of embarrassing demands. In a scene from the documentary ‘Putin’s Witnesses’, directed by Vitaly Manski, the politician is surprised by a visit from a former teacher. The awkwardness of the meeting is evident. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (St. Petersburg, 1952) seems reluctant to go back to his adolescence and surrender to the vulnerability of memory. The town and the memory can be disturbing and even dangerous.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that now, in the midst of the invasion of Ukraine, Putin receives his closest collaborators or some illustrious visitors in the Kremlin, keeping a more than prudential distance from them.
Hermeticism, the ability to overcome inconveniences and the atmosphere of suspicion, run through the life and work of the almighty Russian leader, as if his existence were a transcript of the eventful history of his homeland. The paradox also identifies it. The sight of the guards of honor opening the doors of the magnificent San Jorge Hall and paying the customary salute to the president is already part of our imagination. Actually, that pomp is far from its origin. No one could imagine that Vladimir Putin, born in 1952, was the son of a married couple who had a 7-square-meter room and shared a bathroom with other families in their humble flat in Leningrad, today Saint Petersburg.
Putin meets in Moscow with members of his security council before the invasion of Ukraine. /
Its irresistible ascent constitutes a mystery not yet revealed. The triumph of the will, some would argue, the promotion of the proletariat in a socialist system, others would assure. But the personal course of the young Putin did not seem optimistic. This young man with the icy expression and straight lock of hair had a good chance of becoming a ‘vor v zakone’, a member of organized crime, rooted among the humblest. Because the communist revolution did not put an end to the mafia, which emerged in the time of the Tsar, but its security forces used it as a tool against the opposition both in daily life and in the gloomy interior of the Siberian ‘gulag’. The forms of one and the other hardly changed and, over time, their interests even converged.
the fall of the wall
The young judoka and brand new lawyer was captured by the KGB, the Soviet secret police, always in need of strong and ruthless men. His determination predicted success in the hierarchical apparatus. He was sent to East Germany, but the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 also brought down his professional aspirations. The young agent left a country that was falling apart to return to another also in ruins. Two years later, the Soviet Union gave way to the Russian Federation, an unknown quantity devoid of its superpower status.
The political transition plunged the territory into chaos. Entrepreneurs seasoned in the unofficial market and an elite of high officials, the so-called nomenklatura, seized the enormous resources derived from economic privatization. Meanwhile, more than 50% of the population was plunged into poverty. Inflation reached 84% in 1997. Corruption, misery and the struggle for resources translated into violence. In 1990 there were 21,145 homicides and, five years later, 45,257 were recorded in the brand new republic.
Putin converted to the new order as a member of the team of Anatoly Sobchak, mayor of St. Petersburg, and became deputy mayor until his boss lost the election. Perhaps, then, he understood the troubles of democracy and its inconvenience when aspiring to absolute power. He left his native city and moved to Moscow, where he became part of the presidential structure.
Putin wants to green imperial laurels; like 60% of his compatriots, he regrets the dissolution of the USSR
The great mystery covers the period between 1996, the year in which he arrives in the capital as a modest bureaucrat, and 1998, when he is appointed director of the FSB, the organization that replaced the reviled KGB. Perhaps the key lies in the connection between the new political class, the secret services and organized crime. Aleksandr Litvinenko, the agent poisoned with polonium 210, denounced the complicity of the security service with drug cartels. Other sources attribute Putin’s irresistible rise to the support offered by tycoon Boris Berezovski. None can testify. Both died abruptly in exile in London.
Putin’s candidacy for the presidency is also in the dark. The broadcast of a video of a sexual nature ruined the career of Prosecutor General Yuri Skuratov, who was determined to prosecute Boris Yeltsin for corruption offences. There is a suspicion that the secret services were behind the operation and that the rowdy leader thanked him for the favor by becoming his mentor.
The shot in which Yeltsin, elated by the electoral victory of his protégé, picks up the phone to congratulate him is anthological. ‘Putin. From spy to president ‘, the documentary by Nick Green, shows the dismayed face of the former president when he is aware that the new chief executive will not return his call and that he has quickly turned the page. He is the new tenant of the Kremlin and soon the fortress will exert its enormous influence on the new guest.
The threat was out there, on the other side of the walls, as it has always been in the history of the giant. It was then that the uncomfortable witnesses, the dissidents and the critical voices, regretted having drunk that cup of tea. Litvinenko, the businessman Roman Tsepov or the journalist Anna Politkóvskaia were some of the victims. Their murders have not been clarified.
That gray individual in the shadow of others proved to have horizons at the height of his mandate. Since he took power, Putin has been determined to green the imperial laurels. Like 60% of his compatriots, he publicly laments the dissolution of the USSR. But, unlike the nostalgics, he doesn’t drown his sorrows in vodka. The president acts. His first war mission was in rebel Chechnya. Some brutal attacks, of unknown affiliation, against apartment buildings in the capital prompted the offensive. The devastation gave way to an Islamic and pro-Russian regime led by Ramzán Kadýrov, a faithful ally of the central government.
Chessboard
The former Soviet Union has become a chessboard between the West and Moscow. The Baltic republics swung rapidly towards the Atlantic axis, while the Central Asian states fell into the hands of local officials turned satraps. Russia fostered ties with the authoritarian presidents of Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, and was especially sensitive to liberal revolutions, movements that questioned the continuity of the ruling elites, generally close to power in Moscow.
Putin, the judoka and karate fighter, responds to blows with cunning precision. The strong man, literally and figuratively, reacts without qualms against attempts to break the status quo. There are always excuses to mobilize the battle tanks. The Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003 inspired the military invasion and segregation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and the Velvet Revolution four years ago in Armenia gave way, interestingly, to the Azeri offensive. Russia, a traditional ally of Yerevan, allowed to do and imposed peace between irreconcilable enemies.
The pragmatic and discreet man of yesteryear has mutated into the champion of nationalism and the old conservative and orthodox essences of the Slavic people, but he is also the ideologue of a new Russia determined to counterbalance NATO from, curiously, a fiercely capitalist system.
Ukraine has been the last of his punishments. The Euromaidan or Revolution of Dignity of 2014 placed Ukraine in its target. After amputating the Crimean peninsula and the eastern region of Donbas, he has launched his conquest, the most ambitious, risky and unpredictable operation of his long mandate. Some call him crazy, others visionary. But perhaps Putin is not the tyrant that everyone sees, but the victim, yet another, of the Kremlin, the walled epicenter of power, ambition and fear.
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