Like many of you, I like to follow Current Thing, which in this case is the Tucker Carlson interview with Vladimir Putin. In it, Putin talked about the historical basis of Russia’s claims to sovereignty, while Tucker Carlson furrowed his brow and looked very confused. Confusion is understandable: after all Russians have a very different culture and way of thinking than Americans. But what I found most interesting about Putin’s history lesson was what Putin didn’t talk about: namely the history that underlies his own personal worldview. Because I like to start controversy for the clickbait (much like the majority of Western “journalists”) I would like to give you a brief primer on Vladimir Putin’s personal history, because it may explain why he acts the way he does. Unlike Putin, I’m not a scholar, so instead of this being a two-hour read, I will just give you the abbreviated Cliffnotes version.
The Vladimir Putin Cliffnotes Biography
Part 1: Early Life
Vladimir Putin was born to a poor family in a remote part of Russia in 1952. Life was very hard, and both of his brothers ended up passing away. During these formative years, it seems like he might have developed slight depressive tendencies as well as a mildly nihilistic worldview. To the rest of the world, this is called “normal side-effects of growing up in Russia.”
Despite being born in poverty, Vladimir was an exceptionally intelligent and ambitious young man who was determined to alter the course of his life trajectory. He reportedly did very well in school. Because this was the Cold War era and Russian intelligence services were very active in a constant game of geopolitical chess, positions in the intelligence agencies had a lot of power compared to other professions that he could have gone into, and Vladimir quickly ascertained that the most efficient fast track to power would involve entering the FSB, a Russian espionage bureau that is roughly analogous to our CIA.
Part 2: Secret Agent Man
As a young man, Putin was always very interested in geopolitics. Although his degrees were in law and economics, both of his theses were about the application of those fields to geopolitical issues. His legal thesis was on “The Most Favored Nation Trading Principle in International Law” while his economics thesis was on energy dependencies and their instrumentalization in foreign policy. Savvy scholars may notice that Vladimir Putin used Europe’s energy dependency on Russian natural gas as leverage during the early stage of the Ukraine conflict (meaning that if our leaders weren’t total idiots they could have predicted part of Putin’s war strategy literally 27 years in advance). People don’t tend to focus on geopolitics that much unless they hope to one day influence geopolitics, so it was clear from the start that young Vladimir had designs of leadership in mind. To be clear, I’m not criticizing his ambitions of holding power. Seeking power is not in and of itself a bad thing. Everybody who hopes to enact change in the world (whether positive or negative) seeks power. I seek power; that’s why I created Qanon. Donald Trump seeks power; that’s why he ran for office. Hillary Clinton seeks power; that’s why she seized financial control of the Democratic Party. Anybody that is trying to change society who tells you they don’t want power is lying to you, and you should be very mistrustful of such people because they have demonstrated that they are not only manipulative but also that they consider you a gullible idiot. It was thus only natural that Putin quickly joined the FSB, since they held a lot of formal power thanks to the amount of funding that they currently had as well as a lot of informal power thanks to the web of influence that intelligence agencies cultivate through their network of assets.
Because Russia was our major enemy at that time (again, remember that this was the Cold War, a time period when assassinations, espionage, and defections were the norm) we tend to think of the FSB as a sinister organization like the Stasi, but remember that this was not the way that Russians perceived it. Consider the CIA protagonist Jack Ryan from the very popular Tom Clancy novels. Would we consider him to be a bad guy simply because he is part of an intelligence agency that conducts espionage operations and sometimes kills people? Of course not; Jack Ryan is written as a patriotic hero. This is sort of like how Russian people perceived Putin joining the FSB, which is why Putin’s intelligence service background was viewed as a benefit rather than a drawback during his initial Presidential campaign. Despite the fact that Putin clearly loved power, there was always a certain patriotic component to his behavior as well. In my experience, people generally don’t enlist in a profession where they may get shot at or assassinated purely out of mercenary self-interest: there is almost always an ideological motive as well. Whether Putin still holds the same patriotic views today that he held back then is an open question. It’s hard to say currently how much of that worldview is idealism and how much is cynical public-relations strategy, but as a young man it’s clear that a certain love of country appears to have motivated him.
Part 3: Hero
As I mentioned, the Cold War was a time period when the West was effectively at war with the Soviet Union, although the violence was typically conducted discreetly in the shadows rather than out in the open. If you were a field agent back then, you could go clubbing one night, stumble down the wrong alley, and never be seen again. In other words, while the average citizen or soldier didn’t take a lot of risk, the intelligence agents did. And nowhere was this risk higher than in Germany, which was the front line of this shadow war. At the time, Germany was divided into two countries: West Germany (which embraced the neoliberal principles of NATO) and East Germany, a communist regime that was part of the Soviet Union. A giant wall literally ran through the center of Berlin, and all travel between East and West Berlin was carefully monitored through military checkpoints. Thanks to its location and history as the German capital city, Berlin was literally the espionage capital of the world back then. My point is that if you were an intelligence agent back then who wanted to make your mark, Germany was the proving ground. Consider the mentality and worldview of a person who is willing to go to the front lines for their ideology, and now consider how their worldview might be impacted when the Cold War ended with their side decisively losing.
When Communism collapsed - a process that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989 and ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 - Vladimir Putin could see the writing on the wall well in advance. After all, he was well-positioned to see the beginning of the end. As an angry mob closed in on the KGB and Stasi headquarters - perhaps in part incited by the winners of this political conflict - Vladimir Putin was hard at work burning classified documents, so that if the lynch mob broke in and killed everybody, at least classified Soviet secrets would be safe. I believe this to be one of the rare moments in his life where Putin was genuinely angry. The Soviets had a tank army stationed in Dresden at the time and they could easily have dispersed the angry mob if they chose to deploy it. Instead, they were willing to endanger the lives of their own field agents and the classified secrets of their own country rather than risk tarnishing their international image. It’s not hard to imagine how Vladimir Putin might undoubtedly have felt betrayed by his own leadership.
Regardless, the collapse of the communist regime of East Germany proved a valuable learning experience for Putin because he got a little preview of what the fall of the Soviet Union would be like a few years later - a brief descent into mob rule with the hitherto respected intelligence agencies humbled, and then a free-for-all as greedy oligarchs and aspiring strongmen all sought to claim a piece of the spoils. As an economist, Putin also got a chance to observe how the weak economic system of a failing Communist regime could easily be subverted by Western neoliberalism, transferring power from the state into the hands of the wealthy elites. This means that the process started to repeat itself in Russia - when the power of the central government collapsed and local oligarchs rushed in to claim their piece of the pie - Vladimir Putin had already spent two years preparing for it. He was not going to let the same thing that had happened in Germany happen here. Do you remember how I mentioned that intelligence agencies cultivate an informal web of influence through their contacts and assets? This is the part where Vladimir Putin leveraged it.
During the fall of Communism, as the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia went into economic freefall. The standard of living for the average Russian dropped significantly while simultaneously a class of kleptocratic oligarchs rose to power. Vladimir Putin essentially rose to power on a promise similar to the one Trump had made: only I can fix this. And to his great credit, he did. The Russian economy, previously in free fall, righted itself after Putin assumed power. The standard of living rose. After a private conversation with the oligarchs, Putin secured their promise to kneel to state authority, as embodied by him. While he did not live up to his promise to eliminate the oligarch class entirely, he was able to curb their worst excesses by turning them into his subordinates.
This remarkable feat is something that I don’t think many Westerners understand to this day. While most of us think of Russia today as a corrupt kleptocracy, it’s difficult to emphasize how much worse it was before Putin assumed power. Before Putin, Russia looked like it may have been on track to mirror the collapse of the Soviet Union, fragmenting even further into many separate nations run by local warlords. Putin managed to halt this collapse and brought order and prosperity back to Russia. While I don’t agree with some of his behavior in the decades since then, I think this moment represents a snapshot of Putin at his most heroic. It is hardly surprising that many Russians at that time lionized him, and photos of a barechested Putin riding a horse became synonymous with machismo. It’s important to note that Putin’s actions benefited America also: at the time, Russia had a huge nuclear arsenal that was lying around virtually unguarded, and the prospect of those nuclear weapons falling into the hands of bickering warlords - or even worse, being sold to terrorists by greedy Russian kleptocrats - was something that a lot of CIA analysts at the time were extremely worried about.
Part 4: Authoritarian
When it comes to politics, the public’s memory is short. If Superman was a politician, he could single-handedly save Earth from a meteor, and eight years later the public’s attitude would be “Well, what have you done for me lately?” This is why it’s unsurprising that over time, the goodwill that Putin had acquired from rescuing the Russian economy slowly dissipated.
This resulted in a bit of a divide between how Putin sees himself versus how the average Russian citizen sees him. From Putin’s perspective, he’s still the hero of Russia - the guy who almost singlehandedly saved their economy and stopped the country from fracturing. Who is better qualified to lead their country, if not the man who saved it? But to the newest generation of Russian zoomers, fresh out of college, all this stuff happened when they were like two years old. It means nothing to them because they weren’t around for it. All they know is that the Russian economy used to be on the upswing and now it is stagnating. They’re facing possible conscription in a war that they don’t fully understand. And political systems have a natural tendency to generate corruption unless they are routinely pruned, which means that the Russian zoomers see more corruption than ever. Putin most likely views their perspective as a morale crisis - possibly even the result of hostile propaganda from the West - and Russia’s state-run media has responded with propaganda of its own to counter it.
Part 5: No Exit Ramp
We now come to Putin today: an elderly statesman who is trying to strategize his retirement. Putin’s not stupid: he knows that he can’t govern Russia forever. At a certain point, either his mind will weaken or his body will, and then all the power he has acquired will be meaningless: the only things that will really matter will be his legacy and his bloodline. He attempts to exert as much influence as possible over both by surrounding himself with people who are very loyal to him: in fact to a certain extent Putin values loyalty over competence. However, his motives have changed. Putin used to be predominantly concerned with himself, but now his thoughts have turned towards retirement. How will he be perceived by history after he passes away? And what will happen to his children? Despite the common Western view of Putin as a heartless monster, it’s clear that he loves his family simply from all the effort that he’s taken to keep them out of the public eye. I think that if Putin could be guaranteed a soft landing after resigning power, ensuring that his family would be protected and looked after even after his passing, he would probably step down voluntarily.
Unfortunately, the cutthroat nature of Russian politics means that it’s difficult to guarantee what will happen if Putin steps down from office, and the West hasn’t really done a great job of offering him the soft landing that he wants. On the contrary, Putin is openly called a “war criminal” and the EU is even considering placing sanctions against Tucker Carlson simply for interviewing him. They’ve made it very clear that the moment Putin loses his grasp on power they will do their best to lock him in jail and throw away the key. In my opinion, this is dumb because we’re basically incentivizing exactly the opposite behavior that we want from Putin. If we want him to voluntarily relinquish power, then we have to give him some options for doing so that result in a happy ending for him.
Anyway, that concludes my highly abbreviated Cliffnotes version of Vladimir Putin’s life and worldview. If you enjoyed this extremely short analysis, please be sure to follow and subscribe to my Substack for more highly condensed popular culture reviews, such as my upcoming review of Star Wars Episode 1, which tells the story of how an angry young man is politically radicalized by a strange religious cult.
factual mistake: FSB is not the analogue of CIA even remotely. before the collapse of the soviet union KGB was doing both foreign intelligence and internal counter-intelligence. Putin was hired by KGB. then it collapsed with the soviet union, giving birth to a number of organizations: FSB (mostly counter intelligence/ counter terrorism within russia), SVR (foreign intelligence) and GRU (military intelligence). the analogue of CIA is SVR. And FSB, the director of which was Putin before becoming president, is more like FBI