Strongman, The

Soviet society and we overestimated the Russians’ desire to live by our rules. We started with the assumption that the transformation would be quick and the chaos, which, incidentally, was not seen as chaos but as a transitional period, would soon be replaced by normal life.’ 5
    But in the 1990s many Russians found themselves drowning in the tide of capitalism rather than riding it. Moreover there was a deep resentment at the sense of being instructed by outsiders in how to be ‘civilised’. It is true that communist ideology was paper-thin, and most Russians jettisoned it easily. But they did not lose certain ways of thinking that predate the communist era and lie deep in the Russian psyche. It was common, and still is, to hear Russians regret the loss of the ‘togetherness’ they felt under communism. The ‘collective’ was not a Soviet invention, but had roots in Russian history. But it rubbed against the grain of the individualist Western mores being forced upon them now.
    The picture I have described above is a bleak one, perhaps a little bleaker than the overall situation, because undoubtedly there were great joys and advances under Yeltsin too. But it is the darker side of life in the 1990s – so easily overlooked in the West – that provided the fertile soil into which Putin would plant his ideas.
    From kommunalka to Kremlin
    This is a book about Putin in power, not a biography, but a glance at his earlier years is revealing. His background and path to the highest office give clues to the contradictory behaviour he would exhibit as president: the democrat who doesn’t trust democracy; the Westerniser whose understanding of the West is flawed and limited; a man who believes in the free market but whose world view was formed in the communist past; a fiery believer in the Russian state, with the icy, ruthless attitude of the ex-KGB man towards its ‘enemies’.
    Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in 1952 in Leningrad, a city still being rebuilt from the rubble of the Second World War, when it was besieged and bombarded by the Germans for 900 days. His childhood was spent in a kommunalka , a communal flat, in which his family had one room and shared the kitchen and toilet with other families – an experience with bitter-sweet memories for many Russians. On the one hand the conditions were awful – there was no bathroom, no hot water, and rats in the stairwell; on the other hand, communal living and the shared experience of post-war reconstruction did much to reinforce the optimistic communist ideology of the day. The young Putin’s thinking would have been shaped entirely by crude Soviet propaganda. His was not a dissident or intellectual family which might have listened to foreign radio broadcasts or indulged in subversive discussions. At school he learned that the West was an evil world where capitalists exploited the workers and prepared for war against the USSR; life in his own country, he was told, was immeasurably happier, thanks to the wise leadership of the Communist Party. Even the brief ‘Thaw’ under Nikita Khrushchev, after Stalin’s death, was over by the time Putin was 12, so his secondary school years passed under the aegis of Leonid Brezhnev – a period marked by growing militarism, confrontation with the West, political repression and ideological rigidity. It was during these years that the young Putin showed an interest in joining the party’s enforcement machine, the KGB, an ambition he realised only after graduating from Leningrad’s law school in 1975.
    Putin says he did not even think about the mass terror inflicted by the KGB’s predecessor, the NKVD, under Stalin. Indeed, he probably knew next to nothing about it. ‘My ideas about the KGB were based on romantic stories about the work of intelligence agents,’ he says. ‘Without any exaggeration you could say I was the successful product of a Soviet patriotic upbringing.’ 6
    He would have known exactly what the KGB got up to, however, when he spent his first decade as an officer in Leningrad during the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was the period when it incarcerated dissidents in labour camps and mental asylums, confiscated foreign literature, jammed foreign broadcasts, controlled all contacts with foreign visitors, vetted the few Soviet citizens allowed to travel abroad and in every possible way helped the Communist Party to exercise total control over society. Abroad, its task was to subvert Western