By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
Convicted for
the usurpation of power
The invasion of Ukraine caught many analysts of Russia off guard. Russian
President Vladimir Putin had long been thought of as rough, tough, and
brutal—but also calculating and cautious. The wild and reckless Ukrainian
adventure seemed out of character.
Some observers believe that Putin has changed due to his deep isolation
during the COVID-19 pandemic or that he has some secret illness that renders
him irrational. U.S. President Joe Biden’s former press secretary, Jen Psaki, and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio have observed that
Putin seems different since the pandemic, and rumors about a hidden
illness are circulating in Russia and among Russian émigrés. But Putin’s personal
history reveals that his decision to go to war is entirely in character—and
that he will likely continue it indefinitely.
Putin has justified his invasion by citing a long list of
grievances against the West, especially NATO’s expansion into the former Soviet
sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, and against Ukraine itself. Pandemic
isolation may have warped his thinking. But the
roots of Putin’s recklessness go back to a tendency he has shown since
childhood to lash out when he has felt wronged or betrayed. Later passages of
his life are more than stages he has lived through; they are layers that have
built on one another, turning a boy who brawled his way through adolescence
into a man who has directed his wrath against a U.S.-led West that he once
tried and failed to get along with and that he now blames for betraying him.
Early Life—The Brawler
(1952-1975)
Putin’s family barely survived the siege of Leningrad during World War
II. Although his father was a factory worker and Communist Party member, they
were stuck in a large, run-down apartment complex framing a central courtyard
frequented by neighborhood toughs after the war. Little Volodya—a
diminutive of Vladimir used by friends and family—found a way to defend
himself. “If anyone ever insulted him in any way,” a friend of his recalled, “Volodya
would immediately jump on the guy, scratch him, bite him, rip his hair out by
the clump—do anything at all never to allow anyone to humiliate him in any
way.” Putin’s wrath became even more dangerous when, at age 11 or 12, he
discovered judo and the Soviet-developed martial art of sambo. He was standing
at a tram stop in the eighth grade, another friend remembered, when “two huge
drunken men got off and started trying to pick a fight with somebody. They were
cursing and pushing people around. Vovka calmly
handed his bag to me, and … sent one of the men flying face-first into a
snowbank.” The second man started screaming, “What was that?” A few seconds
later, “he was lying there next to his buddy.” “If there is anything I can say
about Vovka,” his friend continued, “it’s that he
never let bastards and rascals who insult people and bug them to get away with
it.”
Putin’s grade-school teacher, Vera Gurevich, noticed a similar pattern: Volodya “never forgives people who betray him or are mean
to him.”
KGB—Brawling
Institutionalized (1975-1989)
The KGB, which Putin joined in 1975, codified the pattern that Gurevich described. The KGB and its predecessors (the
Cheka, the NKVD, and others) had defended the infant Soviet republic in a
bloody civil war, carried out massive purges that killed
millions of people under Joseph Stalin, and persecuted post-Stalinist
dissidents. Externally, they targeted foreign intelligence services in a
bitter, decades-long struggle. But internally, the secret police was plagued by
intense competition for advancement and other bitter internecine squabbles.
The result was a pervasive cynicism. The only former KGB chief who rose
to become supreme Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, was theoretically open to the
liberalization of the regime he headed. “In 15 to 20 years, we’ll be able to
allow ourselves what the West allows itself now,” Andropov once told a Soviet diplomat,
“freedom of opinion and information, diversity in society and art. But only in
15 to 20 years, after we can raise the population’s living standards.” But
Andropov, a veteran party apparatchik who took over the KGB in 1967, wasn’t a
KGB lifer. More representative was Stalin’s longtime secret police chief Lavrenty Beria, who was so entirely cynical that the
hyper-suspicious Stalin was quite right to fear Beria plotting against him.
Beria’s predecessors Genrikh Yagoda
and Nikolai Yezhov were executed under Stalin’s
orders: Beria would meet the same fate in the power struggle
after Stalin’s death.
By the time Putin joined, the KGB was less murderous, but its office
politics were brutal and cynical. The KGB expanded Putin’s childhood instincts
into the world of adulthood: Politics, whether international or domestic, is a
dog-eat-dog struggle. Everybody lies, cheats, and steals. Everyone is suspect.
One must always be on guard, ready to fight fire with fire. That is the way of
the world. When U.S. leaders portray themselves as “holier than thou,” they are
hypocrites.
Putin didn’t distinguish himself in the KGB. Beginning as a lowly spy-chaser
in Leningrad, he was then assigned to Germany—not to West Germany, a prime
target of Soviet espionage, but East Germany, where he ran agents operating in
the West and kept his eye on the Stasi, the
dreaded East German intelligence service, which KGB agents didn’t trust any
more than they trusted each other. But he worked hard, played by the rules, and
found a way to please his bosses rather than trying to outshine them.
Ironically, these habits and skills equipped him to adapt to post-communism
when what was left of the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991.
Adapting to Post-Communism
(1990-2001)
As East Germany collapsed and moved toward reunification with West Germany,
Putin returned from Dresden to Leningrad. He rose rapidly to the deputy mayor
of post-Soviet St. Petersburg and, astoundingly, to post-Soviet Russia’s second
president. The skills he had cultivated in the KGB turned out to be needed in
the turbulent decade that followed the Soviet collapse. St. Petersburg Mayor
Anatoly Sobchak needed hard-working, efficient, disciplined aides, and he chose
Putin, who was not only competent, resourceful, and loyal but admirably
unprepossessing. He struck Sobchak as someone
who “does not like to stand out,” as a “person devoid of vanity, of any
external ambition, but inside he is a leader.”
Putin dealt with politicians and foreigners of all sorts in St.
Petersburg. But he trusted most of his old Leningrad friends, many of them from
the KGB, such as Nikolai
Patrushev and Aleksandr Bortnikov, who are still his closest
associates today. He “distrusted almost everyone else,” his biographer Steven
Lee Myers concluded. “He always remembered
acts of loyalty … just as he never forgave betrayals.”
These same qualities impressed President Boris Yeltsin in Moscow.
Yeltsin was charismatic, bombastic, and anti-communist but an erratic
administrator who needed competent aides, especially those inconspicuous enough
not to threaten his power, image, and authority. He also needed a successor who
would protect him after he retired from charges of corruption while in office.
So he continued to promote Putin, who became head of the KGB’s successor, the
Federal Security Service; then prime minister; and, finally, acting president
of Russia when Yeltsin, ailing and depressed, stepped down.
In 2005, Putin famously labeled the Soviet collapse a
“major geopolitical disaster” of the 20th century. He didn’t miss communism,
but his preference for a strong Russian state was already obvious. “Russia
needs strong state power and must have it,” he wrote in December 1999 in a
5,000-word manifesto published just days before he became acting president. But
Putin also sounded open in the long run to democracy: “I am not calling for
totalitarianism,” he wrote. “History proves all dictatorships, all
authoritarian forms of government, are transient. Only democratic systems are
lasting.”
Putin also seemed to welcome a kind of alliance with the West. He was
the first foreign leader to phone U.S.
President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks. He helped Washington get men
and supplies to Afghanistan. “Russia knows firsthand what terrorism is,”
he declared on Russian TV. “I
would like to say that we are with you. We entirely and fully share and
experience your pain.” He even suggested that one day Russia might join NATO.
That helps to explain, if not excuse, Bush’s infamous
appraisal: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward
and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his
soul.”
Disenchantment (2002-2007)
It’s tempting, in retrospect, to see Putin’s openness to democracy and to
the West as pure dissimulation at a period of relative Russian weakness. But if
they were real, although partial, attempts to adapt to post-communism, they
eventually brought a bitter disillusionment between 2002 and 2007—and with it a
deep sense that the West had betrayed him.
At the core of this was the steady expansion of NATO. Putin has
contended that Western leaders had promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in
1990 that NATO would not expand “one inch” to the east. This isn’t
true. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker did orally promise “not one inch” but never
in writing, and he later claimed he was referring to East Germany, not barring
a more general eastward expansion; West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and
Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher declared more
broadly that NATO would not expand to the east. But U.S. President George H.W.
Bush shut down such talk, telling Kohl, “To hell with that. We
prevailed, and they didn’t. We can’t let the Soviets clutch victory from the
jaws of defeat.”
So NATO incorporated Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999
and added Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, plus three former Soviet
republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, in 2004. Worse still would be George
W. Bush’s insistence in 2008 that NATO remains open to Ukraine and Georgia,
too.
But Putin’s list of grievances went much further: the NATO bombing of
Belgrade; the U.S.-led war in Iraq; and two critical “color revolutions” in
other post-Soviet states—the Rose
Revolution in Georgia, leading to the 2004 election of
pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili, followed by the Orange
Revolution in Ukraine, which prompted an election redo
and brought to power pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko
over his pro-Russian opponent Viktor Yanukovych. Putin saw these
upheavals as having been created and manipulated by Washington, with the
Georgians and Ukrainians playing an essentially passive role—part of his
pattern of detecting the U.S. hand behind everything. This view gives the CIA
too much credit but is a natural product of his KGB background.
By 2007, Putin had had enough. At the annual Munich Conference on
Security Policy that February, he issued a blazing indictment of the United States,
citing “unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions,” “almost uncontained
hyper use of force,” overstepping “its national borders in every way,”
“military operations that are … killing people—hundreds and thousands of
civilians,” and substituting “NATO or the EU for the U.N.,” which is “the only
mechanism that can make decisions about using military force as a last resort.”
Interregnum (2008-2012)
Putin could have followed these bitter complaints with a burst of
actions against the United States. But 2008-2012 marked a lull in the growing
tension resulting from changes in Russian and U.S. leadership.
The Russian Constitution barred Putin from serving a third consecutive
term as president. He wasn’t prepared to ignore that restriction (although he later
arranged to eliminate it and thus clear the way for him to serve as president
until 2036), so he chose his prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, to replace him
for the next four years. Although Medvedev was effectively his puppet, Putin
allowed him to set a more liberal tone and gave him one more chance to improve
U.S.-Russian relations. The new U.S. president, Barack Obama, set out to do
likewise.
In response to Obama’s attempt to “reset” relations, Medvedev agreed on
a new nuclear arms control treaty, New START, that extended limitations
on intercontinental missiles for another 10 years. He refrained from vetoing a U.N.
resolution authorizing the use of force to prevent Libyan leader Muammar
al-Qaddafi from obliterating opponents in the city of Benghazi.
Obama spokesperson Robert Gibbs summarized the president’s view
of Medvedev this way: He “genuinely feels like they can sit down or call each
other and work through a series of issues in a very frank and honest way, that
each side is always negotiating in good faith, and that there’s a level of
confidence and trust also that’s built up in the two sides working together.”
In contrast, Obama regarded Putin, whom he saw
slouching behind Medvedev in Moscow, as “looking like the bored kid in the back
of the classroom,” a taunt that infuriated Putin. Perhaps it reminded him of
his childhood struggles.
Putin remarked later that he found
the U.N. resolution on Libya, which Medvedev failed to veto, “flawed and
inadequate,” allowing the United States and its allies not just to protect
Benghazi but to pursue and destroy Qaddafi. As for Saakashvili, Putin told French President
Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008, “I’m going to hang him by the balls. … Why not? The
Americans hanged Saddam Hussein.”
It’s tempting, in retrospect, to see Putin’s openness to democracy and
to the West as pure dissimulation at a period of relative Russian weakness. But
if they were real, although partial, attempts to adapt to post-communism, they
eventually brought a bitter disillusionment between 2002 and 2007—and with it a
deep sense that the West had betrayed him.
At the core of this was the steady expansion of NATO. Putin has
contended that Western leaders had promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in
1990 that NATO would not expand “one inch” to the east. This isn’t
true. U.S. Secretary of State James Baker did orally promise “not one inch” but
never in writing, and he later claimed he was referring to East Germany, not
barring a more general eastward expansion; West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl
and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher declared
more broadly that NATO would not expand to the east. But U.S. President George
H.W. Bush shut down such talk, telling Kohl, “To hell with that. We
prevailed, and they didn’t. We can’t let the Soviets clutch victory from the
jaws of defeat.”
So NATO incorporated Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999
and added Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia, plus three former Soviet
republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, in 2004. Worse still would be George
W. Bush’s insistence in 2008 that NATO remains open to Ukraine and Georgia,
too.
In 2011, Medvedev and Putin announced that Putin would stand for the
presidency in the 2012 election. The fact that the two men alone dared to
decide such an important matter (although voters later reelected Putin), along
with grievances over the 2011 Russian legislative election results, sparked
mammoth protests in Moscow. Putin blamed U.S. Secretary of
State, Hillary Clinton. “She set the tone for some of the actors in our country
and gave them a signal,” he said three days after the 2012 vote. “They heard
the signal and with the support of the State Department began active work.”
7 Putin’s Gorge Rises;
the U.S. Seems Irresolute (2012-2016)
The term “active work,” used by the
KGB to
describe ongoing intelligence operations, underlined Putin’s charge that the
protests resulted from CIA meddling. In response, he cracked down on dissent at
home and stepped up military assistance to Bashar al-Assad as the Syrian
dictator attempted to crush his opposition. Obama warned that any use of
chemical weapons by Assad would cross a red line and trigger strong U.S.
counteraction. But when Assad did just that, Obama retreated. Putin took that as a sign
that he could increase pressure on Ukraine, where Yanukovych, elected president
in 2010, had been ousted by massive
protests in 2014 and replaced by a pro-Western government.
Conclusion
It was not coincidental that the 2014 crisis and Russian military
aggression against Ukraine occurred during Russia’s re-Stabilisation.
From 2012-2021, the number of Russians who favored Soviet dictator Joseph
Stalin (who used charm) doubled. This whereby the
number of Ukrainians with a positive view
of Stalin continued to decline.
The first two junctures and the ‘gathering of Russian lands’ had a
deadly impact upon Ukraine and directly led to the 2014 crisis and ongoing
Russian-Ukrainian war. The UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Human Rights)
estimated that in 2014-2021 there were high casualties among civilians
and the Ukrainian military.A third critical juncture
took place in 2020 when Russian constitutional changes extended Putin’s term in
office until 2026. This introduced a modified
version of Orthodoxy-Autocracy-Nationality, drawn up in 1833 under
Emperor Nicholas I, where Sarov’s triad is reused in official
Russian narratives in a revitalized
continuous manner.
But the idea that Russia’s leader always fights to the finish is a
myth. It came from a story about Russian President Vladimir Putin and a
rat. As a child, he chased a rat around his family’s apartment building,
trapping it in a corner. The rat then lashed out and attempted to bite him.
This experience, in Putin’s words, taught him that if
cornered, you have to fight to the finish line every fight, and “you need to
assume that there is no retreat.”
Western officials have often cited this story for how
Putin allegedly never backs down and is particularly dangerous when
cornered.
This rat story has led many in the West to fear that Putin may
undertake more brutal and destructive steps, even resorting to chemical or
nuclear weapons, if he’s trapped in a humiliating defeat in
Ukraine. That assumption is behind Western pressure on Ukraine to give up
territory and make concessions to end the war with Russia. French President
Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, German Chancellor Olaf
Scholz, and even NATO Secretary-General Jens
Stoltenberg have repeatedly suggested that Europe wants
“some credible negotiations” and “diplomatic solutions.” Likewise, Macron has
said, “We must not humiliate Russia so that the
day when the fighting stops, we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic
means.”
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