The difficult childhood, the bond with his country, the mysteries: the former BBC correspondent wrote a monumental biography (Marsilio) of the Russian leader
“A hooligan, a bully, a murderer.” Senator John McCain, the Republican candidate defeated by Obama in the presidential elections, said this about Vladimir Putin. A madman, a madman, a dictator, a sick man who is in a hurry to leave a mark on history before the end comes: we often say this about Putin in the Western media, for explain that rebus wrapped in a mystery within an enigma that is the last tenant of the Kremlin. A leader who twenty years ago seemed pragmatic and pro-Western, and who instead ended up dragging his country into a war with the West that will not win, but at a very high price in human lives and material well-being.
The monumental biography written by Philip Short, the former BBC correspondent who had already told about Mao and Pol Pot, has instead the indisputable advantage of rejecting these stereotypes from the start. The “theory of the madman”, developed by Richard Nixon, can even turn into a trap, if you use it to “seem so irrational and unpredictable that the opponent is forced to hesitate before testing your resolve.”
In his thousand well-informed pages (the volume is published by Marsilio), according to the best tradition of Anglo-Saxon biography (almost 250 are known), the author focuses rather on two crucial interpretative keys to truly understand a political leader: the first is the personality, his intimate story, where he comes from, who is his son, who was a boy, and so on. The second is the indissoluble link between him (or her) and the country he leads, the intertwining of history, culture and interests that always moves a people, especially when it is a great people like the Russian one, educated to feel exceptional at least as much as that. American.
In conducting this operation-truth, Short opens some very useful glimpses to understand the imperial attitude of man. He is right when he invites us to bear in mind that “national leaders inevitably mirror the society they come from.” But he is wrong when he adds: “Putin is no more an aberration in Russia than Donald Trump in America, Boris Johnson in the UK or Emmanuel Macron in France.” This lack of moral equivalence between an autocracy in which leadership is for life, opponents are poisoned, and nine million people have been banned from running; and democracies where a president can be investigated for his use of power or a prime minister can be sent to the Pacific by a vote of his he MPs, is the most criticizable, and most criticized, point of the book.
However, we accept the “benefit of the doubt” that the author grants to Putin. Starting from the careful contestation of the conspiratorial legend according to which the attacks attributed to the Chechens that shocked Russia in 1999, and which justified the most inhumane of military repressions, had actually been “homemade” by the Moscow services, to facilitate the rise of the new strong man. No evidence has ever emerged to justify this theory, which nevertheless still has wide circulation; while there are many obvious contradictions, and Short lists them effectively. Nevertheless, the ferocity used in Grozny, the massacre elevated to a moral sanction, that “we will annihilate them in the toilet” with which Putin inaugurated his history in power, remain the hallmark of a leadership: when he uttered that sentence in September, he was credited in the presidential polls with a paltry 2% of the vote. By December he had reached 40%.
The history of power in Russia certainly plays a role in this attitude to the use of force. But also the character of the man forged in previous years. And here is perhaps the best part of the book, and also the richest in sources (since he enters the Kremlin, the mystery that surrounds Putin becomes more dense even for a biographer of the value of Short).
The son of a Communist patriot, who had fought as a partisan against the Germans during the terrible siege of Leningrad, Volodya had been a turbulent child, even discarded for misconduct in elementary school by the “oktjabrjata”, the organization of the “children of October” founded by Lenin’s wife, the red version of the Baden-Powell Boy Scouts. As a teenager «he fought with anyone, he was not afraid of anything. It was as if he lacked any instinct for self-preservation. He didn’t even think that his rival could be stronger and give him a good reason, ”said the best friend of the time, Viktor Borisenko. But this aggression, which perhaps epitomized his short stature and “lean and non-athletic” body, was accompanied by his common sense: “He was able to reflect on what he was doing and to control himself.”
Street children like him, it is still said today, can only be saved by sport. And in fact Volodya, growing up, passionately devoted himself first to “sambo”, a technique of self-defense without weapons, and then to judo, a discipline in which he excelled at the regional level. He himself then recounted: «To maintain the authority I had, I needed technique and physical strength. I knew that if I didn’t start playing sports, I would no longer have the position I was used to, neither in the playground nor at school ». In the gym he learned that if you want to win you have to show your opponent that you are willing to go all the way. And in the KGB, where he was hired in 1975 after graduating from Leningrad University, he learned another lesson: never carry a gun with you unless you are ready to use it. The KGB had been a dream for him since he was a boy: «Television series such as The shield and the sword e Seventeen moments of spring they recounted the exploits of Soviet agents in Nazi Germany during the war »: spotless heroes, James Bond types. Putin wanted very strongly to imitate them.
He enrolled in Law because they told him it was the best way to get to the secret services. Even if his career was not a 007 career. It is very likely, even if he has always tried to hide it, that between ’76 and ’79 he worked on espionage and the repression of dissidents in the infamous “Fifth Directorate” . And even when he finally got a seat abroad (but in Dresden, not in Berlin as he hoped), in the fateful days of ’89 he ended up humiliatingly witnessing the collapse of East Germany, in the helplessness of the Russian superpower. A trauma that has always remained well impressed in his mind. Equally traumatic, and formative as his worldview, were the chaotic and terrible months of the fall of Gorbachev, the military coup, the end of the Soviet Union, the homeland to which he had returned after the fall of the Wall. In Leningrad, where he acted as deputy to the liberal mayor Sobcak (according to some he was chased by the KGB, according to him he had already resigned) he participated in the desperate request for food aid that an exhausted city addressed to European countries (without receiving a lot, to tell the truth). He was even accused of having been involved in a scandal, when the “oil for food” program, the sale of Russian raw materials in exchange for Western commodities, brought great enrichment to the mediators, embryos of the future oligarchs, but little bread for the city, which returned to the country. meanwhile to the ancient name of St. Petersburg.
A feeling of revenge against a West accused of having betrayed Russia after having deluded it is perhaps what most unites Putin to his people, and which explains their still strong hold. “The Russians felt cheated,” writes Short. For him, “far from being bizarre, the decision to invade Ukraine it is actually perfectly consistent with the way Putin has always behaved, every time he has been faced with an existential choice between antagonizing the West and defending his own power and that of Russia in the world ». Like when he was a boy, when he got into fights he convinced he could win them because he showed he wanted to win them.
This does not justify the miscalculation that made him believe he could overthrow Ukraine in a few days. Nor the angry violence he brought down on her when she realized she wasn’t going to make it. Neither is the revenge you are now attempting to take on Europeans by keeping them cold this winter. But it partly explains why his people have not (yet?) abandoned him.
«The Russians – concludes the author – not only look European, they are Europeans, and we expect them to behave like the rest of the family. But they inexplicably, stubbornly, refuse to do so. And this situation will not change so quickly ». Maybe not even when Putin is gone.
The book
Philip Short, «Putin. One life, his time », translation by Anita Taroni
and Stefano Travagli, Marsilio (pp. 992, euro 34)
September 8, 2022 (change September 8, 2022 | 07:33 am)
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