Vladimir Putin: The Whole Story

By Arvo Tuominen

The new biography of Vladimir Putin offers an insight into current international politics through deep understanding of Russian culture and history. The book reveals who the real Putin is and why Russia is what it is. The reader will follow the footsteps of Putin through the history and collapse of Soviet Union to the gilded powerhouse of the Kremlin. Read how the Russian politics works and who decide on Russia's foreign policy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kapaibooks
• Release date: Dec 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9789526960029

Book preview

Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin

The Whole Story

Arvo Tuominen

Translated by

Timothy Binham

Kapaibooks

Copyright © Arvo Tuominen

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Translated by Timothy Binham

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Cover photograph: Lehtikuva / AFP Photo / Alain Jocard

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Published by Kapaibooks

Helsinki, 2020

www.kapaibooks.com

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ISBN 978-952-69600-2-9 (EPUB)

ISBN 978-952-69600-3-6 (Mobi)

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All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

NO ONE IS FORGOTTEN, NOTHING IS FORGOTTEN

A FIVE-KOPECK COIN AND A MIRACULOUS ESCAPE

FINLAND’S ROLE IN THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD

ANOTHER BLOODBATH

PUTIN AND MANNERHEIM

FIRST, SECOND, THIRD – SOLD!

FROM THE FINNISH WINTER WAR TO THE ANNEXATION OF CRIMEA

GREAT INLAND POWER

FACING ASIA AND THE EAST, WITH ITS BACK TO EUROPE AND THE WEST

MARE NOSTRUM

THE BALTIC IS A NATO SEA

SEVASTOPOL WALTZ

BREAKING THE ICE

GEOPOLITICS AND THE WHITE TIGER

NOTHING BEATS A TANK DRIVER WHO WRITES POETRY

V DAY IS NO LAUGHING MATTER

HOW COME STALIN IS SO POPULAR?

JUDO ON THE GEOPOLITICAL TATAMI

THE UNPREDICTABLE PUTIN AND THE MADMAN THEORY

MIRROR IMAGES

FROM THE STREETS OF LENINGRAD TO THE PALACES OF THE KREMLIN

ON THE CAREER TRACK

JAMES BOND IN THE GDR

RETURN TO ST PETERSBURG: THE ASCENT BEGINS

MAKING OF A PRESIDENT

PRESIDENT PUTIN

THE MUNICH SPEECH WAS NOT A DECLARATION OF WAR

ALL EYES ON THE OLYMPICS

THIRD TERM: THE RISE OF CONSERVATISM

FOURTH TERM: LOOKING TO HIS LEGACY

PUTIN AND FINLAND

GOOD NEIGHBOURS

NYET, NYET NATO

NATO AND ARCTIC FOXES

THE BOY IN THE BOOT

THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS

THE BIGGEST SCAM EVER

THE REVOLUTION DEVOURED ITS CHILDREN

WESTERN SUPPORT FOR YELTSIN’S ILLEGAL ACTIONS

THE DEMISE OF THE SOVIET UNION WAS A SETBACK FOR CAPITALISM

YELTSIN’S NEOLIBERALISM CONTINUED AS PUTINOMICS

FROM YUGOSLAVIA TO UKRAINE

WE’LL WIPE THEM OUT IN THE SHITHOUSE

A WARNING FROM PUTIN

ANOTHER WARNING FROM THE AMERICAN AMBASSADOR

SIAMESE TWINS AND THE LACK OF RESPECT

RUSSIA TAKES CRIMEA AND LOSES UKRAINE

MOSCOW’S THREE VLADIMIRS

VLADIMIR THE GREAT LECHER

LENIN LIES IN HIS MAUSOLEUM

OBLOMOV IS ALIVE AND WELL

PUTIN INVESTS IN RURIK

LUTHERANISM HAS ITS ADVANTAGES

ESPIONAGE IS A CAREER CHOICE

THERE’S NO ESCAPING SPIONOMANIA…

…EVEN UNDER THE FLORIDA SUN

THE HONEY TRAP

A BOTCHED POISONING?

POLONIUM FOR LITVINENKO

SNOWDEN’S BOMB

PUTIN’S RIGHT ARM

NAPOLEON AND PUTIN

AFTERWORD

A RUSSIAN KEKKONEN

THE POSITION OF THE RUSSIAN GOD IS NOT A SINECURE

POST-PUTIN RUSSIA

THE CULMINATING POINT IS PAST

STOCKTAKING

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

Vladimir Putin has been the leader of Russia for so long that it is difficult to imagine the country without him. The day when he must stand down is approaching, however, for no matter how fit the man is both physically and mentally, eventually even Putin’s step will shorten and his memory will start to fail.

Putin did not rise to power in the same way as an ordinary politician; he was selected for the job by the ‘family’ of his predecessor Boris Yeltsin. The voters were merely left to corroborate the decision. On 26 March 2000, Putin garnered 52.94% of the popular vote. No doubt the election of his successor will follow a similar pattern: a jury of some sort will sift out its candidate, who will initially be appointed Prime Minister to build up a reputation with good deeds. After that, the presidential election will be a mere formality.

In the early years of his career, the reticent and soft-spoken Vladimir Putin seemed like an accidental president who would not be able to hang on to power for long. This is not how things turned out, however. Putin grew with his task and is now one of the most influential politicians of our era. The image projected by the media is that Putin is responsible for everything that goes on in Russia, though in fact he is not quite that omnipotent.

In a radio speech on the BBC in October 1939, Winston Churchill called Russia a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. The Second World War had just begun, and Churchill was preoccupied with the question of the Soviet Union’s intentions, especially its relations with Nazi Germany. This was, after all, the most interesting question of all for Britain, Europe, and the whole world at the time.

Matryoshka dolls

Matryoshka dolls usually consist of an odd number of nesting wooden dolls, a traditional symbol of eternal life in Russia. Nonetheless, the end of the Putin era is nigh .

Churchill also said: I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia [...] but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest. Churchill held that the broader national interest was more important than the subjective perspective of individual leaders, decision-makers, and ordinary citizens. Consequently, he saw Joseph Stalin not as a crazed despot but as an enforcer of the Soviet Union’s geopolitical interests.

Of course, the subjective views of political leaders are not entirely insignificant, but the demands of geography and national interest provide a more rational basis for assessing the development of Russia or any other nation. Given that Vladimir Putin himself has repeatedly spoken of geopolitics, I will devote a considerable portion of this book to this topic.

Although Russia’s current active cross-border foreign policy is widely ascribed to Putin, it was in fact launched before he became president. Its father can be identified as Yevgeny Primakov, who was appointed foreign minister in 1996. He developed what is known as the ‘Primakov Doctrine’, according to which Russia would no longer consent to be tethered to the West – especially the United States. Instead, the country would position itself as an independent centre of power in the world, contributing to the development of a multipolar world as an alternative to American hegemony.

Putin in Kremlin.

Putin accomplished an extraordinary social rise from a working-class home to become one of the world’s most powerful leaders in the gilded cage of the Kremlin, from which the road leads either to freedom or to prison – depending on whether his successor grants him immunity, as Putin did to Yeltsin.

In 2014, Sergei Lavrov, who succeeded Primakov as foreign minister, summed up his predecessor’s doctrine as follows: The moment he took over the Russian Foreign Ministry heralded a dramatic turn of Russia’s foreign policy. Russia left the path our western partners had tried to make it follow after the breakup of the Soviet Union and embarked on a track of its own.

As president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin is sometimes depicted as a particularly unpredictable individual who repeatedly produces surprises and keeps the world on its toes. Nonetheless, Russia is not the ‛Land of Red Dusk’ of the Soviet period any more, as it is possible to travel there freely and a great deal of information is accessible. The riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma today is therefore Putin, as we know little about him as a person. This is of course as you might expect of an intelligence officer.

The purpose of this book is not only to analyse the ‛enigma’ named Putin but also to describe the class journey made by the only surviving son of a poor family from a cramped communal apartment in Leningrad to the gilded halls of the Kremlin, and of all that happened on the way.

To be sure, heaps of books have already been written about Putin, but so far none by Finns, nor from the perspective of Finno-Russian relations. After all, we share 1,300 kilometres of common border and a great deal of common history, which is why there is a need for us to have our own perspective towards our neighbour and its leader. Moreover, of all the Russian leaders so far, Putin is most familiar with Finland and the Finns, which is by no means insignificant from our point of view. He is also the first Russian leader born in Saint Petersburg since Nicholas II.

Putin in a meeting.

WITH VERA IN THE KITCHEN

When studying Russian in St Petersburg in the summer of the year 2000, I would sit watching television in my landlady’s kitchen, sipping vodka and nibbling at zakuski. Putin already appeared fairly regularly on television to pronounce on a variety of subjects, which inspired me to make a prediction: "ras Putin, vsegda Putin" (once a Putin, always a Putin). As it turned out, I was right. My landlady was an admirer of General Alexander Lebed – after all, Lebed was charismatic, an eloquent speaker with a fine voice: in short, a hero. By comparison, Putin in those days was as grey as a mouse. My landlady was therefore certain that Putin would only be a transitional leader, and that Lebed would be the next president. The ‛ras Putin’ joke was a pun. Rasputin was a faith healer who amassed a great deal of political power in the tsar’s court after having cured Crown Prince Alexei of haemophilia. Scientists have subsequently deprived Rasputin of his miracle worker’s cape by finding a medical explanation for his stanching trick. The court physicians had prescribed the new wonder drug aspirin to the crown prince at the time. It was later discovered that aspirin thins the blood and therefore aggravates haemophilic tendencies. Rasputin thus worked his ‛miracle cure’ simply by using his mysterious aura to banish the court physicians and their aspirin, as the bleeding stopped as soon as the medication was discontinued.

In 2000, Alexander Lebed was Governor of Krasnoyarsk Province. The general was interviewed regularly on TV, as he had clear opinions, terrific charisma, a great sense of humour and a strong will. He also spoke Russian so clearly that even I could understand him. Lebed had been a boxing champion in his youth, had received the title of Hero of the Soviet Union in the Afghanistan war, and had come third in the presidential election of 1996, won by Yeltsin with the backing of the oligarchs. At the time, the Russians still generally expected Putin to be a mere flash in the pan, and that Lebed would win the 2004 election and put the country’s affairs straight. It was said by some that Lebed would be Russia’s own Pinochet and restore order, as people were tired of the svoboda (freedom with chaos) of the Yeltsin period. Fate intervened, however, for Lebed died from injuries sustained in a helicopter crash on 28 April 2002. Naturally, this gave rise to a spate of rumours of the type Why was Alexander Ivanovich Lebed killed?, but the investigators found no indication of foul play. Flying in dense fog, the helicopter had hit an electric power line. The accident was thus simply the product of the indifference so typical of Russia.

Alexander Lebed

In the photograph, General Alexander Lebed celebrates his third place in the 1996 presidential election. Despite attempts to persuade him, the highly popular Lebed, who was Governor of Krasnoyarsk Province at the time, decided not to run in the 2000 election, as Putin had been groomed for the job.

Lebed was an unusual politician in that he had no political allies. He was thought of as a man of action and something of a loose cannon who might cause problems for the oligarchs, since he owed them nothing. The oligarchs could barely hide their relief when Lebed died.

Subsequently, however, Vladimir Putin has thoroughly fulfilled the hopes that some people had pinned on Lebed. As the economy grew, so did Putin’s stature. The rise in oil prices made regular salary payments possible, improving the standard of living. Putin brought the oligarchs to heel, led the country into war and started building up Russian influence on other continents.

The aging statesman still has plenty of new challenges to tackle. Not least of these is his succession, on which Putin commented in an interview in the Corriere della Sera in summer 2019: It’s premature to talk about this. There are still five years of intense work ahead, and considering the dizzying speed with which the world is changing, it’s difficult to make predictions. Believe me, I have lots to be getting on with in my current role.

In the early years of his presidency, Putin seriously sought integration with the West and even toyed with the idea of joining the European Union. Putin understood that Europe and Russia belong together, as they always have done, for better or worse. However, EU membership never materialised, as instead of seeking cooperation, NATO began to expand its territory into Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. The Kremlin realised that it would be left alone. Russia therefore formulated a new foreign policy introduced by Putin in a speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. The Kremlin began to work on an alliance of its own, the Eurasian Union.

WHEN THE WORLD FELL APART

In his much-quoted Munich speech, Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20 th century. It was certainly a geopolitical catastrophe for Russia, as following the disintegration of the Soviet empire, 20 million Russians were left outside the country’s borders.

When a state loses large chunks of territory, the natural reaction is a phantom pain of the sort felt by someone who has lost a limb. The countries that gained their independence from the Soviet Union also suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, as Tarja Halonen, President of Finland from 2000 to 2012, once described the situation in Estonia.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians could travel freely to the West for the first time in the country’s history. This took some getting used to on both sides of the border. For example, Russian tourists were humiliated in the Finnish border town Lappeenranta by shopkeepers who affixed signs to their doors saying, One Russian at a time. The rapid rise of the Russian economy and living standards in the first decade of this century was reflected in a change in attitudes at both national and individual level. Russia forcefully demanded that its interests be considered in international affairs, while Russian tourists were sometimes known to jump the queue at international airports and places like the prestigious Stockmann department store in Helsinki. The state and its citizens were throwing their weight around in rather similar ways.

Putin and Yeltsin.

When Boris Yeltsin, who was a charismatic figure but had lost his support by the end, handed over power to Vladimir Putin, the mouse-like successor was thought to be merely a transitional president.

At the time that Putin came to power, Russia was in bad shape. If the Soviet Union had been an experiment with a system of pure government without markets, the 1990s in Russia were an experiment with a system with markets but no government.

To be sure, the capitalist revolution was a tentative one, if only because there were no guidebooks in libraries on how to accomplish it, whereas there were whole shelves filled with books on how to make a communist revolution. The economic reformers who came to power in the early 1990s therefore did what they could with the help of western advisers – not surprisingly, with dire consequences.

The blame for the failure of this revolution was laid on the United States on the grounds that the shock therapists had been recruited from there, but the real culprits for the privatisation of natural resources that amounted to theft, the rise of the oligarchs and the poverty of ordinary people were Russia’s own leaders. The result, however, was that America, admired nationwide when the 1990s began, was widely hated in Russia by the end of the decade.

The Americans themselves were self-critical. In 2000, the United States Congress published a report according to which the Clinton administration had wasted a historic opportunity to help transform Russia into a democracy by putting too much trust in Russian leaders such as Yeltsin, Chernomyrdin and Chubais. The report asserted that the funds allocated to the reconstruction of Russia had been stolen because of the negligence of the United States government.

By the time that Putin became president in 2000, the economy was improving apace, largely due to a rise in the world market price of oil. Around the same time, the administration started reining in the market and bringing the oligarchs into line. Street crime virtually disappeared. After two terms as president, Putin was succeeded by Dmitry Medvedev, under whom the country drifted into another economic crisis. Medvedev was a one-term president, and Putin took over again after him. This tandem arrangement gave rise to protests, to which Putin proved to be highly allergic. He began to restrict the operation of undesirable organisations, relying increasingly on anti-western forces and the Orthodox Church. In the midst of all this, he seems to have forgotten the lessons of the Soviet era, according to which throttling the constant confrontation of opposing views, civic debate and the quest for truth will bring society to a halt.

Putin in a kettlebell.

Growing with the job and helped by the price of oil, Vladimir Putin has moved up to the heavyweight category in world politics. The photo shows his image immortalised in a 16 kg kettlebell.

Although economic growth in Russia has been slow for the last ten years (as it has elsewhere), the Putin years have witnessed, among other things, the complete transformation of St Petersburg and Moscow. These cities no longer differ all that much from metropolises in the West. Their inhabitants drive Mercedes cars, sip coffee at Starbucks and other icons of globalisation; hipsters dress the same way as in Berlin (and better than in Helsinki). You might say the socialist hangover very quickly gave way to a capitalist high.

On the nature of this change, Putin himself has said: Whoever doesn’t miss the Soviet Union, doesn’t have a heart. Whoever wants it back, doesn’t have a brain. Putin started his presidency as a western-minded leader who tried to maintain contact with the intelligentsia in his country even though he felt that it had let him down. In later years, he has relied more on security forces than on civil society. Elections are little more than vertically directed spectacles, and new political groups have to pass a ‘filter’ to be recognised. The mainstream media is commercial through and through, but loyal to Putin. Putin has also enjoyed extremely high popular support all these years, for there is always strong demand for a powerful leader in Russia.

THE ERA OF CONFRONTATION WAS NOT OVER

When the Cold War ended, it was widely believed that nations would coexist peacefully like brothers henceforth. That is not how things turned out. States still have their own interests, and they conflict with the interests of other states.

In