194 CHAPTER Six ■ The IndIvIdualv ladimir Putin: The Individual
and his Policies
“Putin is a Soviet Leader for the 21st Century,”
writes Maxim Trudolubov, editor of an in de pen
dent Rus sian newspaper, in The Moscow Times.
Putin’s regime is “an attempt to strengthen the
Soviet experiment and take it to its logical
conclusion... improving upon the per for mance
of former Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin, Josef
Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yury
Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev.”a Ashton Car
ter, U.S. secretary of defense, thinks that Putin
“says what he thinks; he couldn’t be clearer. He
regrets the demise of the Soviet Union. He
wants re spect for Rus sia’s greatness. He wants a
voice in the world. And he wants a nonthreaten
ing neighborhood.”b But is that all we need to
know?
Putin’s personal website reveals birth in 1952
to parents of humble origins, living an ordinary
life in a communal apartment in Leningrad, today’s
St. Petersburg. An unmotivated and undistin
guished student through the middle school years,
he later began to take studies seriously and
see a future. After earning a degree from Lenin
grad State University, he spent 16 years in the
Soviet secret ser vice, the KGB, where he was
schooled in intelligence and counterintelli
gence. From 1985 to 1990, he was stationed with
the KGB in East Germany, just as East Germany
was unravelling. After resigning from the KGB, he
spent six years in administration in his native city
before moving to Moscow and rapidly rising
through the ranks of Rus sian bureaucracy.
While Putin was the first post– World War ii
generation leader, he worked closely with the
struggling Rus sian leadership. Then from 2000–
2008, he was president of the Rus sian Federa
tion; prime minister from 2008–12, and then
president again starting in 2012.
Putin has carefully crafted a strong personal
image— a 5 foot 7 inch bare chested, horse
backing riding, tiger wrestling, race car driving,
hockey playing macho man. Yet in the same
breath, he is viewed as a straight shooting, prag
matic prob lem solver willing to respond to que
ries in an annual televised phonein. He is viewed
as a moral family man, an image skewed by a
recent official divorce. The passage of a contro
versial law banning homosexual propaganda in
2013 and the failure of the government to pre
vent homophobic vio lence illustrate Putin’s sup
port of traditional values. He has established
excellent relations with the vari ous religious
groups in Rus sia and shown strong support for
the Orthodox Church, a purveyor of traditional
Rus sian values. He supports the construction of
a huge but controversial 82 foot monument in
Moscow to St. Vladimir, Rus sia’s patron saint,
founder of both the Rus sian Orthodox Church
and the modern Rus sian state. As a female mem
ber of his teenage fan club gloated, “Putin is like
God to me. i perceive him as daddy. He is a per
fect man— politician, sportsman, family man. i
want my husband to be like him.”
Much of Putin’s personal image has mani
fested itself in policy positions. He has stood up to
the West, saying no to NATO expansion. Seeing
weakness in former leaders like Tsar Nicholas ii
and Mikhail Gorbachev, he has vowed never to
bend to others. He responded to the travesty
of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s cession of
Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 by retaking Crimea in
2014 to great popu lar acclaim. And, buoyed byBehind The headlines