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WARNING: LONG POST
The Book of the Week is “Putin” by Philip Short, published in 2022.
In this hodgepodge of a slightly sloppily edited volume, the author recounted many of the historical events in which Russian leader Vladimir Putin played a role. The history portion was too broad to be covered in one volume. It could have been detailed better in three or four separate books.
Putin was born in October 1952 in Leningrad in the former Soviet Union. Beginning in his youth, he studied a martial-arts discipline similar to judo, and later on, judo, and read the classic Russian novels. In the mid-1960’s, after Nikita Khrushchev was ousted, the country regressed politically and culturally. The new dictator, Leonid Brezhnev, forced the people to study Marxism and Leninism and cracked down on dissidents, whom he felt were unduly influenced by the evil West. Corruption skyrocketed.
In the USSR, ironically, there were TV shows glorifying the (British, Western) “James Bond” character: “…which related the exploits of Soviet agents in Nazi Germany during the Second World War, depicted intelligence officers as selfless patriots and heroes, defending their homeland at the risk of their lives.” In late summer 1968, such shows made Putin want to join the KGB.
Yuri Andropov happened to have begun actively recruiting new members to the spying agency. Putin’s application had various disadvantages for acceptance: He came from a working-class family, had yet to complete his military service, and hadn’t studied law at university. Other disqualifying conditions included Jewishness of oneself or relatives, having family overseas or having a criminal record.
In autumn 1970, Putin began his legal education. In that time and place, students were rote-learning robots of Stalinist ideology. They were allowed neither critical thinking, nor original thoughts. Still, a few of the rigorous KGB hiring requirements were waived for Putin. It was always possible bribery was a factor in his getting the job, but he did have one special connection. His grandfather had worked as a cook for the Communist Party elite. The KGB officially became Putin’s employer in spring 1975. Putin’s career in a nutshell: He sucked up to father figures in his workplace. That is how he moved up through the ranks quickly, even though his performance was mediocre.
Putin’s job was to try to get various expatriates in academic and communications social-circles in Leningrad to defect to the Soviets. He had little, if any success. Nonetheless, he was an ideal spy because his appearance and behavior were forgettable. His activities the next several years will never be known. Anyway, by the late 1980’s, he had a wife and daughter. He had been “kicked upstairs” to Dresden (a city out in “the sticks”). From seeing the capitalist conditions there, Putin began to realize that the competition of free markets (even black markets!) were superior to Communism.
As is well known, the tail end of the 1980’s saw tumultuous world events. The new Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, let the people read authors such as Pasternak, Orwell and Solzhenitsyn. There were various power struggles occurring between and among alpha males in the former Soviet satellites and within the USSR’s political bodies. A vast number of Eastern European refugees fleeing their newly discovered crushing oppression, poured into Western Europe.
Ironically, in the 1990’s, it was Soviet satellites that fell like dominoes to Western political, economic, social and cultural influences. Not (as it was propagandized during the Cold War) entire countries whose citizens’ hearts and minds were exposed to Soviet ideology. In 1992, Boris Yeltsin became the newest leader of the people of Russia. He naively followed American consultant Jeffrey Sachs’ financial advice, and crashed its economy with “shock capitalism.”
In the early 1990’s, Putin served as the right-hand man to Anatoly Sobchak, mayor of Leningrad. The latter ingratiated himself with world leaders in order to get himself invited to social events and broker peace deals. He was bored by the monitoring of day-to-day operations of paper-pushing and interactions with citizens he was supposed to be leading. Putin threw a rare temper tantrum when Estonia expressed a desire to become independent. For, his goal was to keep as many territories under the Soviet umbrella as he possibly could.
In spring 1996, Putin bought himself a graduate degree– an academic credential useful for obtaining a high-level political position in Moscow. It proved useful. By the late 1990’s, Russia was dealing with privatization of real property among oligarchs, and then a financial crisis due to plummeting oil and gas prices, and certain natural resources– its biggest exports.
By 2003, Russia was becoming Communist all over again. The author related the propaganda put out by stakeholders in the Ukraine war about why Russia was claiming sovereignty over Ukraine again, but failed to mention that Ukraine’s land contains certain kinds of rare and valuable substances that are used in specific industries; grabbing them can result in blood-for-oil type conflicts.
Anyway, read the book to learn: how, in 2004, when he ran for reelection or was appointed (in fear-and-force oriented and unfair “elections”) again and again and again as a candidate for “president” or “prime minister,” Putin didn’t let pesky provisions in his country’s Constitution prevent him from staying in power; of the staged and scripted political shenanigans including but not limited to those involving Pussy Riot, dissident Aleksei Navalny, the Magnitsky Act, the Ed Snowden affair, unrest in Syria, Crimea and the rest of Ukraine, the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, etc., etc., etc.