The Evil dark side of Putin
Whether he likes it or not, the Winter Olympics that opened in Sochi yesterday are being seen as “Putin’s party”, a showcase for everything he has done, and failed to do during almost 14 years as Russia’s paramount leader.
The Olympics come after a good year for Putin. At home the mass protests that accompanied his election to a third presidential term in 2012 have fizzled out and his approval ratings are reassuringly high. Confident of his grip on power, he has pardoned his arch foe Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oil tycoon jailed a decade ago, and the Pussy Riot protesters who sang an anti-Putin song in a Moscow cathedral in 2012.
Overseas, Putin scored points staving off a western military strike against Syria and brokering chemical weapons talks. Moscow’s ally Bashar-al-Assad is still in power. He has bullied and cajoled Viktor Yanukovich, Ukraine’s president, into ditching plans to sign a European Union trade pact and instead move closer into Russia’s orbit. Yet the Sochi games have thrown a spotlight on the dark side of Putin’s Russia.
Islamist rebels based in the North Caucasus, where Russian federal forces are battling an escalating insurgency, have set a goal to disrupt the event.
If that was not enough to drive away visitors, a string of western statesmen from Barack Obama to his German counterpart Joachim Gauck and the UK prime minister David Cameron have decided to skip the Sochi games, apparently in protest at the Kremlin’s suppression of human rights.
To crown these problems, opposition activists are presenting the Olympics as a poster child for the corruption and cronyism corroding Putin’s Russia. According to their allegations billions of dollars have been misspent in preparations for a games that, costing more than $50 billion, will be the most expensive Olympics ever.
Fear of instabilityRuled for centuries by Imperial Tsars and then Soviet communist dictators, Russia does not lend itself to reform. The world’s biggest country is deeply conservative, fearful of instability and afflicted with a deep-seated low self-esteem.
Putin has built his popularity on the contrast with the chaotic 1990s when Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s western-leaning first president built the basis of a democratic, market economy from the ashes of the Soviet Union. Millions were thrown into poverty and violent conflicts erupted in the North Caucasus threatening to tear the country apart.
Kremlin aides say that the transformation of Sochi from drab Soviet-era seaside resort to a modern sports capital fit to host the Olympics is a matter of “personal pride” for Putin and a symbol of the progress Russia has made under his rule. For his part Putin has denied he’s on an ego trip, instead presenting the Sochi games as a shot in the arm for Russian morale.
“After the collapse of the Soviet Union, after the dark and, let’s be honest, bloody events in the Caucasus, the public attitude in Russia became very negative and pessimistic,” he told reporters in Sochi last month. “We have to pull ourselves together and realise that we can deliver large-scale projects on time and with high standards.”
Western officials say Sochi is about more than that. “Putin is driven by two things,” says one European diplomat in Moscow. “A strong belief about Russia’s place in the world and the conviction that only a strong state can ensure stability.”
For a man who is constantly in the public eye, Vladimir Putin remains an enigma to many. Even his enemies tend to direct criticism not at the president himself, but at the flaws of the regime.
The Kremlin has a team of public relations experts working on Putin’s image, led by Dmitry Peskov, a moustachioed former diplomat who has served as the president’s press secretary since 2000.
Russians are fond of conspiracy theories and many believe Putin has a double or two. Indeed some of his macho, action-man media appearances have stretched the bounds of credibility. Over the years he has been photographed piloting warplanes, fishing and horse riding while stripped to the waist, or shooting a tranquiliser dart into a wild tiger.
Putin has admitted that some of his stunts – such as the time he donned a wetsuit and dived to the bottom of the Black Sea to retrieve a supposedly ancient Grecian urn – were staged to flag his pet projects from Russian history to healthy lifestyles or wild life conservation.
Western media greet each incident with hilarity, ever ready to poke fun at the 61-year-old Russian president’s pecs. But if Putin’s adventures provide entertainment in the West, they get a better response from many of his fellow countrymen.
Many Russians were alarmed and embarrassed by the frequently erratic behaviour of Boris Yeltsin who, in one famous incident in 1994, was too drunk to get out of his plane to meet then taoiseach Albert Reynolds on the tarmac at Shannon airport. So even if Putin’s image makers sometimes go over the top, it’s a relief by contrast to have a super fit – and sober – president in charge of their country with its daunting problems and nuclear arsenal.
Putin’s private life, however, is a closed book. He and Lyudmila Putina, his wife of 30 years, announced they were separating last year in what they presented as an amicable divorce. Mrs Putina put on a brave face saying her husband’s hectic work schedule meant they rarely even met. The couple have two grown-up daughters who have rarely been seen in public.
Inevitably Putin’s divorce revived earlier rumours that the president was dating former Olympic gymnast and State Duma deputy Alina Kabayeva, who is 30 years his junior. Peskov brushed aside suggestions that his boss had secretly remarried, saying the president worked so hard there was no time romance.
Biography Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in Leningrad – now called Saint Petersburg – to a factory foreman and his wife in 1952, shortly before the death of Josef Stalin. The family lived in one room of a kommunalka - the communal apartments that housed millions of urban Soviets at the time. Leningrad had endured a gruesome, 900-day siege by Nazi forces in the second World War and, although honoured by the Soviets as a “city of heroes”, was run down and traumatised. Amenities at the Putin home were basic, the place stank and rats lurked in the stairwell. Although small for his age, Putin had a reputation at school for getting into street fights. He took up judo and excelled.
Putin set his heart on a career in the KGB after reading a novel about an intrepid Soviet spy who infiltrated Nazi lines. In First Person, a collection of interviews published in 2000, he said that as a boy he knew little about the secret service’s involvement in Stalin’s brutal purges and was a “pure and utterly successful product of patriotic Soviet education”.
A bright student, Putin enrolled in the law faculty at Leningrad State University, then a favourite recruitment ground for the KGB.
After a few years as a junior spy in Leningrad, Putin was transferred to Moscow for foreign intelligence training and then posted to East Germany.
Aged 32 he settled into what was to be a seven-year stint at the KGB office in Dresden right next door to the local branch of the Stasi, East Germany’s dreaded secret police. Code-named “the Moth”, he was promoted twice, reaching the mid-level rank of lieutenant colonel.
When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Putin’s job in Dresden collapsed with it. He returned to his home city the following year as Germany was reunited. The Soviet empire was crumbling.
Isabel Gorst
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