What does Putin have in mind? The chilling revelations of two close associates of the Russian president

Very few can seriously answer the question that millions of people have been asking since the Russian invasion began Ukraine: what goes through the head of Vladimir Putin? Among these rare characters, there are two men, in particular, who were part of the kidney of the USSR and even shared the professional and personal universe of the current Kremlin autocrat. The first is Serguei Jirnov, a former KGB agent trained to infiltrate Western administrations, who followed the same courses than Putin. The second is Alexander Adler, a historian, a specialist on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, a former member of the French Communist Party (PCF), a professor for many years at the central school of the party in France and a conspicuous close associate of the highest levels of the Soviet politburo. , before turning towards Atlanticism. Both reveal hitherto secret aspects of the life of the man who has the world on edge, outlining shocking traits of his personality.

“Like a boomerang, Putin’s ‘military operation’ will return from Kiev to Moscow,” says Alexander Adler, probably the best Russian analyst in Europe before a group of journalists. “If there is a complex human destiny, it is that of Vladimir Putin. I see in his gesture the tragedy of a man who is committing political and probably personal suicide. It is, in any case, a desperate and desperate man”, he specifies.

What leads you to that conviction? “His intimate personal history of him,” says the historian. “Putin is the son of two geniuses: his biological father and his adoptive father. But this not only didn’t help him, it disabled him due to some kind of emulation. Putin always thinks he is stronger than he is and lives in a state of impotent rage that leads to the worst excesses”.

The first of these men – relates the historian – was called Broveman. In his capacity as high-ranking counter-espionage officer, the ‘Smersh’, in charge of liquidating those who had turned their weapons against Soviet power, was one of the artisans of the victory of 1945. Although later, during Stalin’s anti-Semitic purges He was one of the first arrested. Stalin intended to save it for a monster trial against all the old guard he wanted to behead. But Stalin died on March 5, 1953. Broverman was released, although everything changed again later, when he was sentenced to 20 years in prison, a sentence that he fully served.

That was the beginning of Putin. Because he was Broverman’s son, he was sent to a Soviet orphanage where he was malnourished and mistreated.until, in 1956, a certain Youri Andropov (who would preside over the destinies of the USSR between 1982 and 1984), who was in charge of the socialist countries in the KGB and had known Broverman very well, decided to save little Putin, having him adopted by one of his collaborators, Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putinalthough he continued to take care of him.

“Andropov’s hand appears at all levels of Putin’s career, especially in the KGB”, Adler specifies.

“How could this man, traumatized on the one hand but, at the same time, totally trapped by Broverman’s and Andropov’s fidelity to the USSR and by all the absurd revolutionary mythology of the KGB, avoid exploding? And well, it exploded”, assures Adler.

The internal explosion

But what, according to Alexander Adler, caused this explosion?

A year and a half ago, news broke in the inner circles of Western and Russian power that Putin was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. fake news or truth, the Russian hackers traced the information and realized that it came from the Kremlin itself.

“It was then that Putin literally short-circuited. Because he understood that some were trying to create what is called in Russia a Krugovaä Poruka: a collective leadership to prevent him from governing alone. Actually, after the death of Stalin, the Russians are extremely suspicious of the independence of the ‘number one’ and try to frame them. That was what cost Khruchtchev his job, and it is practiced from time to time.”

No one knows from which Kremlin department that information came, but it is clear that it was not Putin’s friends. Adler also does not know who the members of that “collective leadership” are, but he knows some, such as the current Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu -until recently one of the Russian president’s close friends-, who is one of the most important.

“Shoigu is particularly at odds with the almost axis Moscow-Beijing alliance policy imposed by Putin. Overwhelmed by achieving a balance with the United States, the head of the Kremlin ended up accepting concessions to a China whose ambitions in Siberia are very similar to political-economic colonization. And that, Shoigu, as both a Mongolian and a Buryat himself, cannot accept. For him, on the contrary, it is necessary to approach the West, the only one capable of helping Russia – which is far from being the great power that it was – to recover”, he specifies.

“The Tsar of all the Russias”

So Putin lied. He lied to the international community, but above all he lied to that group that Adler calls “the wise men.” He lied to them stating that, after having increased the Russian presence in Donbass to show that Moscow had the means, everything would stop. But instead of doing so, he sped up.

“Consequently, because of his coup d’état —because it is a coup d’état— he wants to do as much harm as he can to Ukraine. But he also wants to do maximum harm to Moscow, to all those who challenged his power. That is why the public humiliations and the mises-en-scènes before the television cameras. This is exactly what we are seeing, in real time, in the head of a man not only paranoid, but megalomaniac, who considers himself ‘the tsar of all the Russias‘”, concludes Adler, who predicts an absolute failure of Putin’s adventure in Ukraine with this phrase from Napoleon I: “You can do anything with a bayonet, except sit on it”.

Alexander Adler’s interpretation is largely corroborated by Sergei Jirnov who, knowing him well, can explain in detail what is Vladimir Putin’s reasoning mechanism.

“Assigned to Leningrad (today Saint Petersburg), Vladimir Putin served nine years in the political police and then in counterintelligence, before being sent 12 months to the Andropov Institute in Moscow. It was there, in the so-called ‘Forest School’, that the real spies, called “scouts”, were selected, educated and trained. Only the latter could go abroad. I myself went through there before being assigned to France, to infiltrate the National School of Administration (ENA)”, says Jirov, author of a recent book whose title is, precisely, The Explorer.

It was not the same for Vladimir Putin who, at the end of that year of studies “He was declared unfit, because his superiors judged him incapable of correctly evaluating the decisions he made and their consequences, both for himself and for the KGB”precise.

Putin was then sent to Leningrad and, under the full protection of Andropov, ended up in East Germany (GDR) where he served as a liaison officer in a provincial town.

“For us, KGB spies, it was a null position,” he continues.

In his opinion and that of his comrades, it was the perfect example of the “Peter principle, applied in all its splendor: the Lieutenant-Colonel Putin who reaches the limit of his powers, but continues his route thanks to the political influences exerted from above and that allowed him to surround himself with a praetorian guard that would accompany him until today, taking over all the most lucrative sectors of the State”.

“He doesn’t listen to anyone”

For Jirov, over time, the current head of the Kremlin completely changed, making a total vacuum around him.

“Today he is alone and does not listen to anyone. Not even the FSB (exKGB)which sends him truncated reports that feed his ghosts. We are facing a Stalinist drift. It cannot be said that he is crazy, but he is paranoid, with psychopathic tendencies. And the confinement of the Covid increased his voluntary loneliness”, he specifies.

Jirov says that Putin hates meetings because they put him in the presence of witnesses. He prefers to receive people tête-à-tête. To all of them he says yes, to finally —after innumerable distortions— make the decision alone, without any logical basis.

“That is what is happening today with the invasion of Ukraine. But he persists and signs, going so far as to stir up the specter of nuclear war”, says that former spy in the West who, like Alexandre Adler, describes Vladimir Putin’s inability to see reality as “disturbing”. And he concludes as above: “I almost have the impression that he has decided to commit economic and political suicide.”

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