Putin: His Life and Times Philip Short Bodley Head, €22.99
Vladimir Putin has been in power for more decades than any European leader.
This book looks back at his slow but determined rise, punctuated with increasing frequency by disturbing events: the murders of Alexander Litvinenko and the journalist Anna Politkovskaya; the annexation of Crimea; intervention in the 2016 US election; and of course Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Other books have studied Putin’s psychology and career, most notably the chillingly-titled, The Man without a Face, by Masha Gessen, a renowned intellectual and critic of Putin living in New York. But Philip Short’s 830-page tome brings a dazzling wealth of detail and insight to the genre.
Short is a former BBC journalist who has written biographies of dictatorial leaders, including Mao Zedong and Pol Pot. This book draws on eight years of research and Short’s conversations with Western heads of state, ministers and advisers who dealt with Putin, Russians who worked with him, and members of the various secret services – almost 200 interviews in all.
It is a masterly portrait of one of the most calculating and impenetrable individuals on the world stage.
Far from having been neglected as a child, Putin was cared for by a doting mother, although times were clearly hard in the waning years of the Soviet Union. When he played with other children it was in a courtyard filled with garbage and overrun with rats.
One of the memorable anecdotes from his early years (a story he often told) is drawn from when he chased after a rat with a stick. When he cornered the creature, it attacked him back.
Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2001 at the Kremlin. Photo: Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images
Some of the boys he befriended in this courtyard would grow up to become criminals, as did those with whom he practiced judo. Yet he was sheltered, skipping pre-school because his mother wanted to look after him at home. “Apart from me, she had no other goal in life,” he once wrote.
Short takes readers through Putin’s school days — during which, perhaps unsurprisingly, he seems to have been a headache for his teachers. “His obstreperousness as a small boy was not simply, as he claimed, a rebellion against school discipline,” Short writes. “It reflected a desire to be different.” His classmates described Putin as a boy: “Attracted to risk.”
He later settled down and studied law before joining the KGB, where his nickname was “The Moth” because he was so thin. Here he rose through the ranks – and made connections.
Video of the Day
He married his now ex-wife, Lyudmila – in an unhappy and unequal 30-year-long union – and spent time stationed in East Germany.
Short describes an intricate web of relationships through which Putin navigated and manoeuvred. As far back as the 1990s, some of the names we are still familiar with crop up. When Putin was assistant to the mayor of Leningrad, he met Dmitry Medvedev (who later traded power with him for a presidential term in 2008 to 2012).
Even then, the 25-year-old Medvedev was “the only person he seems to have trusted completely”, Short observes.
Later, as the protégé of Boris Yeltsin, Putin was anointed prime minister, then finally president. He took the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov under his wing after Kadyrov’s father had been killed by dissidents. This “thuggish” figure had “assembled a personal security force of a thousand men, made up largely of rebels who had surrendered, who quickly acquired a horrific reputation for sadistic violence”.
Back then, Putin used Kadyrov to cement control of Chechnya; today, he has unleashed Kadyrov’s forces on Ukraine.
Putin emerges from this book as an individual who understands the Russian people. He strove to distance his rule from Yeltsin’s chaotic tenure, crafting the self-image of a calculated, pragmatic leader, though one who was unafraid of brutality.
According to one newspaper: “His tough stance on Chechnya has endeared him to virtually all Russians... The more the West pressures [him], the more attractive he appears to Russian voters.”
Vladimir Putin speaks to his wife Ludmila in front of the Taj Mahal 04 October 2000. Photo: John MacDougall
As the account proceeds, another, vital character begins to loom large in Putin’s imagination: the United States. Putin got along well with George W Bush, who told the press after their first meeting: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.”
Repeatedly, however, the Russian president complained of being belittled by American leaders, treated as a vassal, and accorded insufficient respect.
Over the years the relationship faltered, and soured. It was John McCain who phrased America’s ambivalence toward Putin most memorably: “I looked into Mr Putin’s eyes and I saw three letters, a K, a G and a B.”
In its geopolitical dealings, Russia has also long been preoccupied with the former Soviet states, which Short characterises as a jostling group of unhappy relatives. “Like siblings in a dysfunctional family, suddenly freed from an abusive parent, they were condemned to go on living alongside each other amid rancours and injustices, rivalries and hatreds, inherited from the past.”
But even Short seems surprised by the invasion of Ukraine, which took place just before this book was going to press. Although nobody knows what Putin truly had in mind, some of the steps he was taking appeared to lay the groundwork for a departure from power – retirement, if you will.
He had introduced legislative measures to ensure former presidents would receive immunity from prosecution for crimes committed both during their presidency, and before and afterwards. Short says that from 2018 on Putin appeared to disengage from public life.
As one Russian analyst observed: “He must be planning something.”
“There was just one piece of unfinished business,” Short notes. “Ukraine.”
So that is where we are today. It’s an abrupt end to a narrative that remains drastically unfinished. Short hazards a number of guesses as to the factors that might affect Putin’s future, including another pandemic or the imperatives of climate change.
The history of the Soviet Union did not end when the bloc dissolved in the 1990s, he says, but instead has come “roaring back”.
And, Short adds: “There is no reason to think that when Putin leaves the scene, the West’s problems will be over.”
