Putin, the unknown who dominated Russia in record time: our criticism of the revealing book by Masha Gessen

Russian election night 2012, Vladimir Putin I cry. The dictator, who had just won a new and fraudulent victory that guaranteed him six more years in power, shed a few tears as he thanked his followers for the victory. The scene surprised many, since Putin is an individual not given to showing any kind of emotional outpouring. The next day, he clarified that the crying had not been a product of his sensitivity, but of the strong gusts of winter wind that hit his face. For the man who tyrannizes Russia and who today wages a mad war of conquest, displaying weakness is an inadmissible betrayal. In his memoirs, which appeared before he became president in 1999, he described himself as “a real bully.” Ruthless violence, contempt for fair play and the effort to suppress all kinds of dissidence are his hallmarks. To believe that he is moved by political and military strategy is a mistake: his motives are primitive and dark, more focused on himself than on the world power he represents.

The Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen (Moscow, 1967) dedicated several years to unraveling the past and personality of Vladimir Putin, interviewing dozens of people who knew him from his dark childhood in Leningrad until he became the undisputed leader who makes and he undoes without anyone questioning his designs. With the overwhelming information he gathered, he was able to write “The Man Without a Face” (2012), a detailed biography in which he intends to demonstrate -successfully- that Putin is very far from the image of an austere and determined anti-imperialist champion that a certain confused left has intended to impose, under the clumsy conviction that any despot who opposes the United States is a great man who must be defended at any cost. Gessen’s book has been republished in this warlike context where the little satrap has once again exposed his disdain for other people’s lives and his voracious pleonexia: the insatiable desire to possess what belongs to others.

The most novel section of Gessen’s work is the first, focusing on Putin’s childhood and youth, the lesser-known part of his life. There we find little Vladimir in the Soviet Union of the fifties, inhabiting a dilapidated building with communal kitchens and patios full of garbage. In that place he became a bully capable of biting and pulling out the hair of those who dared to humiliate him. Until the age of thirteen he was an outcast and a bad student, until his desire to become a KGB agent – ​​when the children of his generation dreamed of being cosmonauts – transformed him into a disciplined and studious boy. His ambition to be appointed as a spy in West Germany could never be fulfilled: he was sent to the communist counterpart, where he played a discreet, if not mediocre, role. When the USSR collapsed, Putin was a gray and insignificant being who in his espionage work had shown an absolute inability to socialize with others. On the verge of forty years, he simply did not exist.

It was a series of unforeseen events and a big mistake by the oligarchy – which thought they saw in him an obedient and malleable guy – that elevated him to the presidency of Russia. Here Gessen’s story gains drama, both because of the events he recounts and because of the fear and need for anonymity of his sources, isolated in the countryside or subjected to death threats. Although the author’s thesis that Putin has promoted the return of a new Soviet Union may be at least debatable, there is no doubt that Putin and Stalin share similar psychopathic traits: the lack of scruples in eliminating adversaries, the conviction that the end of a subversive must be as horrific as possible, even at the cost of innocent lives – this was what happened in Beslan or in the Moscow theater hijacked by Chechen insurgents – and, as we have seen in recent weeks, a cruel expansionist vocation. Messen ends her admirable book by assuring that the end of Putin is near. She affirmed it ten years ago, and the reality is that everything indicates that his ominous reign has no expiration date. In the meantime, let the Ukraine resist.