Now for something a little different. Came across this from RadioFreeEurope...
From Chasing Rats To Blood Baths: How Putin's Childhood Shaped His Leadership
TBILISI -- Julia Ioffe, a Russian-American journalist, has extensively covered Russia and contributed to publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
RFE/RL's Georgian Service interviewed Ioffe at the ZEG Tbilisi Storytelling Festival in Georgia's capital, of which RFE/RL is a media partner, where she presented a panel on Vladimir Putin's childhood.
Now the Washington correspondent for the U.S. news website Puck, Ioffe recently launched a
podcast titled About A Boy: The Story Of Vladimir Putin, which explores how the Russian president's challenging early life shaped his transformation into the leader he is today.
Ioffe spoke about Putin's early life in the "dvor," a communal courtyard in Russia often associated with a tough, working-class life where people commonly have to survive on their street smarts.
RFE/RL: What do you think would be some of the most important lessons Putin took from his experience in the dvor and his youth years in Leningrad, when he was a gang member?
Julia Ioffe: So, this is a very key part of the podcast [concerning] what the lessons are, and the way they continue to inform Putin today, the way they continue to inform his decision making, including in Ukraine, including on the world stage. But the lessons are that physical weakness is weakness. You will be devoured. That physical strength is everything. That violence is the only way to change hierarchies, established social hierarchies, that compromise is for weak people and that everything is a zero-sum game.
[It means] that if I'm winning, that means you're losing, and if you're winning, that means I'm losing, so I better change that. There's no such thing as a win-win situation. So, all the people in the West who call for a compromise and a diplomatic solution and negotiations with Putin over Ukraine fail to take into account that he himself does not believe in negotiations. And he does not believe that there can be a world in which both he wins and Ukraine wins. The amount by which Ukraine wins is the exact amount to him by which he loses -- and he cannot allow that.
RFE/RL: We don't hear much about Putin talking about himself and his youth. Considering what he has spoken about, you know, chasing rats, being involved in gang fights, it leads me to a question: How much of this image is crafted? How much of this is what he wants the Russian people to believe, by selling an image of an underdog that always stood up for himself and paved his way with blood and sweat. How much of this is manufactured?
Ioffe: We know that some of it is true, because we've heard from other people in his life that his parents were quite poor and uneducated, that he did live in a terrible communal apartment, that his parents really were quite traumatized by the war and quite absent.
And we know that this generation in Leningrad, this immediate postwar generation, grew up with really traumatized parents. That's why we try to focus not so much on Putin individually and what actually happened when he was in sixth grade or fifth grade or whatever, but talked about the broader, generational, citywide, countrywide, generation-wide things that were happening that would inform him because, first of all, I don't think a boy from the intelligentsia would be able to fake this, and if he was able to fake this, I don't think he'd be able to keep this up for 24 years. There's something about it that's quite genuine, quite obviously real.
Second, the fact that this is the image he goes with is telling, because he thinks, I think correctly, that a lot of the country grew up like this or knows someone who grew up like this. It resonates with them, because it's something they know, either because they grew up like this or their parents grew up like this, or their grandparents grew up like this, or all of the above. And that's the Russian everyman.
RFE/RL: Yeah. A dream come true for every Russian "gopnik." ("Gopnik" loosely translates as "thug.")
Ioffe: Yes, gopnik, exactly.... But yes, this is his image of the Russian everyman. [Former U.S. President Donald] Trump has an image of the American everyman; this is Putin's image of the Russian one, and, so far, he's been right. And it's also kind of determinative -- he's also created much more of this underclass in Russia through his policies. And now we're seeing that that's who goes and dies in Ukraine, because their lives don't mean much. They're not worth much to them, to their government. Creating this underclass that is disposable and politically convenient for him....
The third point I'd make is that it's not so much that he's positioning himself as an underdog, and not even as a schoolyard bully, but he's positioning himself as somebody who is from the streets, who knows what real life is. That he's a realist. He's not an idealist. He's not going to promise you things he can't deliver on. He knows what the real world is like. He knows that, as Russia's representative on the world stage and inside Russia, it's this Hobbesian dog-eat-dog world that he's presenting to people. He's like, I know what the world is really like, and I know how to live in that world, and I know how to win in that world. It's not that I'm an underdog, it's that I'm a winner in that world. I know how to use violence.
RFE/RL: As they say, [in Russian] "the kid done good."
Ioffe: Exactly, exactly, exactly. One other thing I'll say about [Putin] in the dvor. And it's something that was pointed out to me by my father and his friends, men of that generation before I really read the campaign autobiography, before I made this podcast, before I looked into any of this.
And I just remember they would all say, "He's so little," like it would have been very hard for him in the dvor and you can see how he is obsessed with his own shortness and how he wears lifts in his shoes, and how he gets photographers to photograph him a certain way.
He is someone who, because of his size, is clearly constantly aware of his own weaknesses and trying to get ahead of people perceiving his weaknesses, which is, I think, also something that comes from being physically small in a world where physical force and physical strength are the only things that determine your social standard.
RFE/RL: Well, that does nothing to alleviate the stereotypes about short people being....
Ioffe: [laughs] I wasn't trying to.
RFE/RL: Let's move from Putin's childhood to the recent version of him. And in 2014, you wrote a piece called The Loneliness Of Vladimir Putin. And the question I would ask is, if he was lonely back then [as a child], how lonely is he now? Or has he found some playmates that he can finally play with?
Ioffe: I think now he's quite lonely. I think we saw that in the pandemic, the way he isolated himself and how scared he was for his own health. The fact that he just demoted [former Security Council head Nikolai] Patrushev, who was one of his closest advisers, that he demoted [former Russian Defense Minister Sergei] Shoigu, who is one of his closest friends, as far as he has friends. It seems like he is telegraphing to us that he doesn't need anybody, he doesn't need to listen to anyone, he doesn't need anyone's input, advice, second opinion, that he knows everything himself.
The longer he's in power -- [Russian author Leo] Tolstoy wrote about this -- the longer you're in power, the higher up you get, the lonelier you are. And to me, when you ask about the loneliness of Vladimir Putin, I just keep thinking what he said about a decade ago, when he said how lonely it is for him, because there's no one to talk to.
Gandhi's dead, Churchill's dead. And that's the level he imagines he's at, and that those are his equals. And so, of course, he feels lonely, but I think that's also kind of where the idea to invade Ukraine came out of: the deep isolation of the pandemic. Like, we all went a little crazy, but we showed it by starting weird hobbies and ordering too much stuff online. And he did it by cooking up a plan to invade Ukraine.
RFE/RL: So he has ascended in his own eyes, like in a very, very twisted version of Coriolanus. He's no longer a man, but a dragon.
Ioffe: [laughs] Yeah
You can read the rest here....
Russian-American journalist Julia Ioffe recently launched a podcast about Vladimir Putin's childhood and spoke to RFE/RL's Georgian Service about how the Russian president's hard-scrabble early life shaped who he is today.
www.rferl.org
