What does Vladimir Putin have in his head? Secrets of the president are revealed

Very few can seriously answer the question that millions of people have been asking since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began: what goes through the head of Vladimir Putin?

(Read: Putin sees some “positive steps” in talks with Ukraine)

Among these rare characters, there are two men, in particular, who were part of the kidney of the USSR and even shared the professional and personal universe of the current Kremlin autocrat.

(You are interested in: Vladimir Putin published the list of ‘hostile’ countries for Russia)

The first is Sergei Jirnov, former agent of the KGB formed to infiltrate Western administrations, which followed the same course as Putin.

The second is Alexander Adler, historian, specialist of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europeformer member of the French Communist Party (PCF), professor for many years at the party’s central school in France and a conspicuous close associate of the highest levels of the Soviet politburo, before turning to Atlanticism.

“Like a boomerang, Putin’s ‘military operation’ will return from Kiev to Moscow,” Alexander Adler, probably the best Russia analyst in Europe, tells a group of journalists.

“If there is a complex human destiny, it is that of Vladimir Putin. I see in his gesture the tragedy of a man who is committing suicide politically and probably also personally.. It is, in any case, a desperate and exasperating man, ”he specifies.

What leads you to that conviction? “His intimate personal history of him,” says the historian. “Putin is the son of two geniuses: his biological father and his adoptive father. But this not only did not help him, but also disabled him due to a kind of emulation.”

The first of these men, the historian relates, was called Broveman. In his capacity as high-ranking counter-espionage officer, the ‘Smersh’, in charge of liquidating those who had turned their weapons against Soviet power, was one of the artisans of the 1945 victory.

Although later, during Stalin’s anti-Semitic purges, he was one of the first arrested. Stalin intended to save it for a monster trial against all the old guard he wanted to behead. But Stalin died on March 5, 1953. Broverman was released, although everything changed again later, when he was sentenced to 20 years in prison, a sentence that he fully served. That was the beginning of Putin.

Because he was Broverman’s son, he was sent to a Soviet orphanage where he was malnourished and mistreated.until, in 1956, a certain Iouri Andropov (who would preside over the destinies of the USSR between 1982 and 1984), who was in charge of the socialist countries in the KGB and had known Broverman very well, decided to save little Putin, having him adopted by one of his collaborators, Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putin, although he continued to take care of him.

“Andropov’s hand appears at all levels of Putin’s career, especially in the KGB,” says Adler.

“How is this man traumatized on the one hand but, at the same time, totally trapped by fidelity to the USSR of Broverman and Andropov and by all the absurd revolutionary mythology of the KGB, could he avoid blowing up? And well, it exploded, ”says Adler.

The internal explosions

But what, according to Alexander Adler, caused this explosion?

A year and a half ago, news broke in the inner circles of Western and Russian power that Putin was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Fake news or truth, the Russian hackers traced the information and realized that he came from the Kremlin itself.

“It was then that Putin literally short-circuited. Because he understood that some were trying to create what is called in Russia a Krugovaä Poruka: a collective leadership to prevent him from ruling alone. Actually, after the death of Stalin. That was what cost Khruchtchev his job, and it is practiced from time to time.”

No one knows from which department of the Kremlin this information came, but it is clear that it was not Putin’s friends. Adler also does not know who the members of that “collective leadership” are, but he knows some, such as the current Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu -until recently one of the Russian president’s close friends-, who is one of the most important.

“Shoigu is particularly in disagreement with the alliance policy, almost axis, Moscow-Beijing that Putin imposed. Overwhelmed by achieving a balance with the United States, the head of the Kremlin ended up accepting concessions to a China whose ambitions in Siberia are very similar to political-economic colonization.

And that, Shoigu, as both a Mongol and a Buryat, cannot accept. For him, on the contrary, it is necessary to approach the West, the only one capable of helping Russia – which is far from being the great power that it was – to recover”, he specifies.

“The Tsar of all the Russias”

So Putin lied. He lied to the international community, but above all he lied to that group that Adler calls “the wise men.” He lied to them stating that, after having increased the Russian presence in Donbass to show that Moscow had the means, everything would stop. But instead of doing so, he sped up.

“Consequently, for his coup d’état he wants to do all the harm he can to Ukraine. But he also wants to do maximum harm to Moscow, to all those who challenged his power.” Adler states.

“That is why the public humiliations and the mises-en-scènes before the television cameras. That is exactly what we are seeing, in real time, in the head of a man who is not only paranoid, but also a megalomaniac, who considers himself ‘the czar of all the Russias’”, concludes Adler, who predicts an absolute failure of Putin’s adventure in the Ukraine with this phrase from Napoleon I: “You can do anything with a bayonet, except sit on it”.

“That’s exactly what we’re seeing, in real time: the head of a man not just paranoid, but megalomaniacal, who bills himself as ‘the Tsar of all the Russias’”

Alexander Adler’s interpretation is largely corroborated by Sergei Jirnov who, knowing him well, can explain in detail what Vladimir Putin’s reasoning mechanism is.

“It was there, in the so-called ‘School of the Forest’ that the real spies, called ‘scouts’, were selected, educated and trained.

Only the latter could go abroad. I myself went through there before being assigned to France, to infiltrate the National School of Administration (ENA)”, says Jirov, author of a recent book whose title is, precisely, The Explorer.

It was not the same for Vladimir Putin who, at the end of that year of studies, “was declared unfit, because his superiors judged him incapable of correctly evaluating the decisions he made and their consequences, both for himself and for the KGB,” he says.

Putin was then sent to Leningrad and, under Andropov’s absolute protection, ended up in East Germany (GDR). where he served as a liaison officer in a provincial town.

“For us KGB spies, it was a null job,” he continues.

In his opinion and that of his comrades, it was the perfect example of the “Peter principle, applied in all its splendor: the Lieutenant-Colonel Putin who reaches the limit of his powers, but continues his route thanks to the political influences exerted from above and that allowed him to surround himself with a praetorian guard that would accompany him until today, taking over all the most lucrative sectors of the State”.

“He doesn’t listen to anyone”

For Jirov, over time, the current head of the Kremlin completely changed, making a total vacuum around him.

“Today he is alone and does not listen to anyone. Not even to the FSB (exKGB), which sends him truncated reports that feed his ghosts. We are facing a Stalinist drift. You can’t say he’s crazy, but he is paranoid, with psychotic tendencies. And the confinement of the Covid increased his voluntary loneliness ”, he specifies.

Jirov says that Putin hates meetings because they put him in the presence of witnesses. He prefers to receive people tête-à-tête. To all of them he says yes, to finally —after innumerable distortions— make the decision alone, without any logical basis.

“That is what is happening today with the invasion of Ukraine. But he persists and signs, going so far as to stir up the specter of nuclear war”, says that former spy in the West who, like Alexandre Adler, describes Vladimir Putin’s inability to see reality as “disturbing”. And he concludes like the previous one: “I almost have the impression that he has decided to commit economic and political suicide.”

Luisa Corradini
THE NATION (GDA)
ARGENTINA

More world news

– European Union would approve more sanctions against Russia this Monday
– The crosswinds that await Gabriel Boric in Chile
– Caracas is debated between Moscow and Washington