Issue #13/94, July 6 - 20, 2000
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Putin the Permanently SurprisedBy John Dolan In First Person, Vladimir Putin presents himself as an amnesiac innocent who just happened to work for the KGB for a couple of decades and then by accident wound up as President of the Russian Federation. You get the impression of a man who wakes up each morning, looks outside and says, “Just think of it! The sun rose again!” Putin then notices a lump in the bed next to him and says, “Lyuda! It is ‘Lyuda,’ isn’t it?” As his wife nods wearily, Putin places his hand on his heart and says, “I’m touched—you stayed the night!” At this point, the Putins’ dog Toska enters, and Putin draws back in terror: “No, this is too much! There’s an animal in the house!” His two daughters follow, running into their parents’ room to say good morning, and Putin smacks himself on the forehead, “My God! You mean we have children?” He turns to Lyuda and says embarrassedly, “So does that mean we....?” Once again, Lyuda gives him a weary nod. First Person uses a Q&A format to present Putin as an ordinary guy, telling his life story to three friendly Russian journalists. It’s all studiedly casual. As the journalists explain, “These were meetings ‘with our jackets off’—although we all still wore ties.” The journalists toss Putin very soft questions. Only in the last part of the book, when they bring up the Babitsky case, do they show any spirit at all. And there, of course, it’s a matter of protecting the interests of the journalist’s guild. For the rest of the book, they let Putin get away with simple-minded answers which would have shamed Reagan, and bouts of selective amnesia even Sgt. Schultz would have rejected as far-fetched. Putin’s strategy (or the one developed for him by his handlers) is simple: he is a dull man, and he wants you to know it. He insists on it. There’s nothing like a coat of gray paint to cover up bloodstains and other evidence, and Putin paints himself grayer than a mothballed battleship, managing to make a life spent in intrigue and corruption seem as bland as the career of a Safeway checker. Putin summarizes his life in a sort of prose poem printed at the beginning of First Person. It’s worth quoting in full, for its remarkable compound of dullness and guile: “In fact, I have had a very simple life. Everything is an open book. I finished school and went to university. I graduated from university and went to the KGB. I finished the KGB and went back to university. After university, I went to work for Sobchak. From Sobchak, to Moscow and to the General Department. Then to the Presidential Administration. From there, to the FSB. Then I was appointed Prime Minister. Now I’m Acting President. That’s it!” Putin’s first two claims: that he’s lived “...a very simple life” and that his life is “...an open book”; are set together to imply they’re synonymous. They’re not, of course; dull men may do evil, secret things. In fact, dull men are much better suited to dirty work. If you’re looking for an assassin or a bagman, you’d hardly advertise for sensitive, high-strung intellectuals. You’d want phlegmatic dullards like Putin. Putin’s gift for dullness as a survival strategy seems to have been inherited. While claiming that his family has always been “very ordinary,” he mentions with pride that his grandfather, a cook, “...was transferred to one of Stalin’s dachas [and] worked there for a long time.” Putin adds that “for some reason they let [my grandfather] be. Few people who spent much time around Stalin [survived], but my grandfather was one of them.” Putin then suggests the key trait which enabled his grandfather to survive: “My grandfather kept pretty quiet...My parents didn’t talk much about the past, either.” For three generations, then, this “very ordinary” family survived in a lethal environment, protected by their dullness and silence. Putin opens up only when talking about the Second World War. In this, as in most of his accounts, he is simply repeating the Soviet pattern. The USSR always preferred to focus on the Great Patriotic War, not only because Russia’s war was truly heroic but because events before and after it were not exactly “an open book,” and certainly not a book most people cared to open. As Leon Aron did in his recent Yeltsin biography, Putin or his handlers use his obscure childhood to insert little details designed to appeal to various focus groups. He nods to Jews in the audience by claiming to have spent as much time with his elderly Jewish neighbors as he did with his own parents, then fawns on the Christians with this transparent bit of cross-waving: “When I was born...my mother had me baptized. They kept it a secret from my father, who was a party member...Many years later...I went to Israel as part of an official delegation. Mama gave me my baptismal cross to get it blessed at the Lord’s Tomb. I have never taken it off since.” Putin the Devout. And why not? Courtesy costs nothing, as the saying goes. Repeated often enough, such stories may even be believed. No doubt the ikons of the twenty-first century will feature Putin’s blank, fishy face backed with a nimbus. But Putin’s devotion was clearly more focused, in his youth, on another object of worship: the KGB. It might seem a bit awkward, interviewing the head of a very scary state about his decades as a spy, especially about whether he did any spying as an undergraduate at LGU. It wasn’t entirely unheard-of for Soviet students to do a little freelance snitching on their schoolmates. The journalists construct a question allowing Vladimir Vladimirovich to make a simple denial: “So you didn’t collaborate with the KGB while you were an undergraduate?” Putin hits it out of the park: “They didn’t even try to recruit me as an agent...” adding, for the sake of verisimilitude, “...although it was a widespread practice at the time.” As Putin tells it, the KGB politely waited until he graduated before proposing to him. And Putin could hardly contain his joy at being asked: “I had dreamed of this moment since I was a schoolboy.” So Putin, the blushing bride, marries “the agencies.” This is a sticky moment for the journalists. The KGB, after all...it’s not quite like working in a shoestore.... They realize they have to ask something...some sort of ‘conscience’ question. Here’s the one they serve up. “And when you agreed to work for the agencies, did you think about 1937?” This is just the sort of pitch Putin likes: low and inside. He sends it flying: “To be honest, I didn’t think about it at all.” This reply could actually serve Putin for the answer to all questions which don’t involve names and dates. This, you begin to suspect, is the quality which makes this gray little man so useful to the people running Russia: “I didn’t think about it at all.” In order to give Putin’s KGB career the proper spin, he and the three mice interviewing him use the “old hardliners vs. young reformers” story line—which, as Matt Taibbi pointed out in a recent eXile- can be applied to any set of characters in Russia. Here’s the summary provided at the beginning of the chapter summarizing Putin’s KGB career: “After a stint in Counterintelligence with some stodgy hard-liners, Putin is sent to the Andropov Red Banner Institute in Moscow for additional training. The officers quickly take notice of the smart and unflappable trainee. He’s offered a spot in the most coveted of divisions: foreign intelligence. Meanwhile, he meets a stunning airline stewardess, Lyudmila. He impresses her with hard-to-come-by tickets for three nights at the theater, procured through his KGB connections. Their courtship lasts three years. They marry and are transferred on Putin’s first assignment abroad: Dresden, East Germany.” It’s the old Hollywood formula: Boy meets KGB, boy marries KGB, boy meets stewardess and lets her come along for the ride. It’s very clear from Putin’s narrative that Lyuda came a rather distant second to his career as a spy. But was Putin any good as a spy? He was assigned to East Germany, after all. This was rather like a Mormon missionary getting assigned to Utah: not exactly a challenging environment. Putin himself remarks on his surprise at finding, in the DDR, the “totalitarian state that Russia left three decades before.” And what, exactly, did he do? Putin’s response emphasises dullness: “It was very routine work.” Dullness uber alles! His only response to the collapse of the DDR in 1989 is annoyance at “the way [demonstrators] expressed their protest,” It was, he says, “upsetting.” In the “upsetting” world which emerged on the death of the USSR, Putin’s bland obedience was put to work in some very murky dealings, first with Sobchak and later with Yeltsin. But don’t expect to learn anything about those years from this book. Putin and his wife (who’s brought on-stage to give us “the real Putin”) spend pages describing the day their dacha burned, what happened to their first dog, and Lyuda’s car accident—but Putin has absolutely nothing to say about what he did in Petersburg. This is a typical exchange: “When Sobchak flew to Paris, where were you?” “In St. Petersburg... “Tell us about it.” “What’s to tell?” What indeed. A man who could make the spy game seem duller than running an autobody shop has no trouble graying up any narrative whatever. Putin describes his rise through the corrupt Yeltsin hierarchy as something in which he had no part at all. When asked how he was made head of the FSB, his answer is “The President simply signed a decree.” And how did Putin learn about his promotion? Purely by accident: “Kirienko...said, ‘Hi, Volodya! Congratulations!’ I said, ‘What for?’ He said, ‘The decree is signed. You have been appointed director of the FSB.’” The pattern becomes almost comical after a few chapters. The journalists ask Putin about his place in some event, and he either denies that it took place at all or, if that’s impossible, claims he happened to stumble in purely by accident, and against his will. Did Putin know he was being considered for the Premiership? “No, it never entered my mind.” Did the FSB bomb those apartment buildings in Moscow? “What! Blowing up our own apartment buildings?” You start to wonder how Putin would deal with other events. Putin on a TV cooking show, explaining how to bake a cake: Putin walks backwards onto the set, bumps into the counter, exclaims, “What’s this? Flour? Eggs? A mixer?” Putin turns to the camera, a tear in his eye: “It’s clear they expect me to produce a cake! Akh, what else can I do?” Strange that so crude a production should be so effective. But the book is doing its job, as a quick look at its Amazon listing demonstrates. Some fool Canadian actually makes a parallel between Putin and Lincoln. It’s stunning to realize that the world is pretty much like Goodfellas, and the moral of the story is the one DeNiro tells the young Henry Hill: “Never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut.” And someday you may be President of Russia.
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