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publics the right to secede. This “time bomb,”
he writes, went off at the end of the Cold War,
and the former Soviet satellite states “found
themselves abroad overnight, taken away...
from their historical motherland.”
In their book, “Mr. Putin: Operative in the
Kremlin,” Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy
write that Putin often deploys “useful history”
— that he manipulates collective memory for
personal and political goals, as a means to
“cloak himself and the Russian state with an
additional mantle of legitimacy.” In the justifi-
cations for invading Ukraine, useful history is
busy at work. As Putin tells it, it’s not an inva-
sion but a reunification; it’s not a violation of
international law but the return of lawful pos-
sessions that were wrested away when the
Cold War ended.
There is an unsubtle progression to Putin’s
historical interpretations. In July, the Russian
president wrote that “true sovereignty of
Ukraine is possible only in partnership with
Russia,” which is, to say the least, a peculiar
definition of sovereignty. In his speech on
Feb. 21, he went further, asserting that
Ukraine “actually never had stable traditions
of real statehood.” Three days later, with the
invasion seeming inevitable, the threat was
reversed; Ukraine didn’t need Russian assis-
tance to survive, but it and its Western allies
posed an existential threat to Russian surviv-
al, “to the very existence of our state and to its
sovereignty.”
Putin incessantly denounces the U.S. or
NATO interventions of the post-Cold War
world — particularly in the Balkans, Libya,
Iraq and Syria — as intolerable aggressions.
In a 2013 New York Times op-ed, he warned
against a U.S. strike on Syria, urging defer-
ence to the United Nations. “Under current
international law, force is permitted only in
self-defense, or by the decision of the Security
Council,” he wrote. No wonder that, when de-
ploying force himself, from Chechnya at the
turn of the century to Ukraine today, Putin re-
liably invokes national self-defense. “ The cur-
rent events have nothing to do with a desire
to infringe on the interests of Ukraine and the
Ukrainian people,” he stated on Feb. 24. “They
are connected with defending Russia from
those who have taken Ukraine hostage.” The
formula is simple: When you swing it, it’s a
sword; when I swing it, it’s a shield.
Putin relies on standard populist rhetoric
to justify his attack on Ukraine — corrupt
Ukrainian elites, beholden to foreign influ-
ences, are looting the country and turning the
people against their Russian brethren, he
claims — and he blithely combines World War
II-era threats (Nazis overrunning Ukraine)
with those of the Cold War (Ukraine acquir-
ing nukes). Ta lk about useful history. But his
speeches on the eve of invasion made his un-
derlying preoccupation clear, with Putin ex-
pending enormous time and vitriol on the
United States. He sneered at the “low cultural
standards” and “feeling of absolute superiori-
ty” of post-Cold War America, while empha-
sizing the “empire of lies” in contemporary
U.S. politics. In particular, he reminded the
world that the United States employed “the
pretext of allegedly reliable information”
about weapons of mass destruction to invade
Iraq. He did so even while warning that
Ukraine, as a puppet regime of the West,
might deploy WMDs (which it agreed to give
up in 1994 in exchange for protection from
Russian invasion) against Russia. “A cquiring
tactical nuclear weapons will be much easier
for Ukraine than for some other states I am
not going to mention here,” he declared. “We
cannot but react to this real danger.” It’s not
his only American echo. Putin sounds down-
right Trumpy when warning that Russia will
respond to any foreign interference in
Ukraine, “and the consequences will be such
as you have never seen in your entire history.”needs a strong state power and must have it,”
he declares. Putin couches that requirement
in almost mystical terms. “From the very be-
ginning, Russia was created as a supercentral-
ized state,” he later explains in his book.
“That’s practically laid down in its genetic
code, its traditions, and the mentality of its
people.”
The 1999 manifesto, published shortly be-
fore Boris Yeltsin resigned the presidency and
handed power to Putin, is more grandiose
than grand; Putin even considers Russia’s res-
toration among the “signal events” of the new
millennium and the anniversary of Christen-
dom. But when he argues that “responsible
socio-political forces” should build the strat-
egy for Russian renewal, it is pretty obvious
whom Putin has in mind. In “First Person,”
published the following year, he ponders his
“historical mission,” praises the stability of
monarchies and considers the possibility of
amending the constitution to lengthen presi-
dential terms. “Maybe four years is enough
time to get things done,” he says. “But four
years is a short term.” A colleague quoted in
“First Person” who worked with Putin in the
St. Petersburg mayor’s office in the early
1990s recalls how, rather than hang the stan-
dard portrait of Yeltsin in his office, Putin
chose an image of Peter the Great. Russia’s
glory is his goal, but Putin’s own power is al-
ways the convenient means.
Standing in the way of that greatness and
power, Putin has long concluded, is the Unit-
ed States. Despite an early conciliatory tone —
“We value our relations with the United States
and care about Americans’ perception of us,”
Putin wrote in a November 1999 op-ed justify-
ing Moscow’s crackdown against Chechen
separatists, and after 9/11 he was among the
first heads of state to offer Washington sup-
port — any pretense of rapprochement soon
dissipated into antagonism. In 2007, Putin ad-
dressed an international security conference
in Munich and, informing the audience that
he would “avoid excessive politeness,”
launched into a diatribe against the U.S.-led
post-Cold War system.
“What is a unipolar world?” he asked. “It is
a world in which there is one master, one sov-
ereign.” He called this model not only “unac-
ceptable” but “impossible,” and criticized
Washington, mired in Iraq and Afghanistan,
for having “overstepped its national borders
in every way.” Putin assailed the NATO alli-
ance for arraying its “frontline forces” on Rus-
sia’s borders, calling that a “serious provoca-
tion.” He complained that NATO and the Eu-
ropean Union sought to supplant the United
Nations (where, conveniently, Russia enjoys a
Security Council veto) and that Western lec-
tures on freedom were hypocritical cover for
self-serving security policies: “Russia — we —
are constantly being taught about democra-
cy,” he said. “But for some reason those who
teach us do not want to learn themselves.”
Moscow did not have to accept this imbal-
ance of power, he argued: “Russia is a country
with a history that spans more than a thou-
sand years and has practically always used
the privilege to carry out an independent for-
eign policy.” The invasion of Ukraine has sup-
posedly proved his desire to upend and re-
make the international order, but Putin de-
clared those intentions, publicly and clearly,
long ago.L
ast July, Putin published an essay titled
“On the Historical Unity of Russians and
Ukrainians.” The two nations are really
one people sharing a faith, culture and lan-
guage, he asserts, and “modern Ukraine” is lit-
tle more than a creation of the Soviet era. As
always, he calls out nefarious foreign efforts
to undermine this shared heritage, but he also
laments how the Soviet Union, at its incep-
tion, mistakenly granted individual Soviet re-AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSEPosters of Vladimir
Putin in
Simferopol,
Crimea, last week
read “Russia does
not start wars, it
ends them” and
“We will aim for the
demilitarization
and denazification
of Ukraine.”It’s almost like, while invading Ukraine,
he’s trolling Washington — because both are
his targets.O
f course, the writings of a former KGB
officer — or of any politician — should
not be taken at face value; the purpose
is to obscure as much as to reveal, the content
is propaganda more than truth. Putin is a ter-
rible communicator to begin with; according
to “First Person,” his KGB instructors found
him withdrawn and tight-lipped, and even his
former wife understood him so poorly that,
when he was proposing marriage, she
thought he was breaking things off. But as
with all political writing, propaganda is en-
lightening because it reveals something about
how its purveyors wish to be perceived. Read
in wartime, Putin’s accounts offer glimpses of
the fighter he hopes the world will see in him,
and the one he imagines himself to be.
Putin shares two stories in “First Person”
that depict him as a risk-taker. He tells his in-
terviewer that when he attended the KGB’s in-
telligence school, a supervisor noted his “low-
ered sense of danger” in one of his evalua-
tions. “That was considered a very serious
flaw,” Putin recalls. “You have to be pumped
up in critical situations in order to react well.
Fear is like pain. It’s an indicator.... I had to
work on my sense of danger for a long time.”
Message: He does not fear risk as ordinary
people do.
He also recounts a time he was driving a
car with a judo coach during his university
days and saw a truck loaded with hay coming
in the other direction. Putin reached out his
window to grab some hay as he drove past,
and he accidentally veered off course. “I
turned the wheel sharply in the other direc-
tion,” Putin says, “and my rickety Zaporozhets
went up on two wheels.” Somehow, they land-
ed safely rather than crashing into a ditch.
Only when they reached their destination did
his astonished coach finally speak. “ You take
risks,” he said, and walked away. “What drew
me to that truck?” Putin later wonders. “It
must have been the sweet smell of the hay.”
Message: Putin takes what he wants, regard-
less of the dangers to himself or others.
Yet a third story in “First Person,” from Pu-
tin’s childhood, places him in a less-daring
light. There were rats in the apartment build-
ing where his family lived, and Putin and his
friends would chase them with sticks. One
day, he spotted a large rat and trapped it in a
corner — but then it suddenly turned and
jumped toward him. “I was surprised and
frightened,” Putin recalls. “Now the rat was
chasing me. It jumped across the landing and
down the stairs. Luckily, I was a little faster
and I managed to slam the door shut in its
nose.” What’s the message here? That when
Putin thinks he’s beaten a weaker foe, all it
takes is his rival lashing out to get him to run
away?
It’s an easy and tempting analogy. The ap-
parent renewed unity of the transatlantic alli-
ance against Putin’s assault on Ukraine, and
the early resistance of Ukrainian forces and
politicians, would seem to serve as a deter-
rent to a wider, longer war. But with Putin, it
could just as well prompt further escalation.
“If you become jittery, they will think that
they are stronger,” he states in “First Person,”
describing his attitude toward Russia’s en-
emies. “Only one thing works in such circum-
stances — to go on the offensive. You must hit
first, and hit so hard that your opponent will
not rise to his feet.”
For Putin, power must not be paralyzed. It
must be wielded.
Twitter: @CarlosLozadaWPCarlos Lozada i s The Post’s nonfiction book critic
and the author of “What Were W e Thinking: A Brief
Intellectual History of the Trump Era.”Putin declared. So much of what has followed
— the unipolar era of U.S. supremacy that Pu-
tin reviles, the expansion of NATO he decries,
the diminishment of Russia he rejects and the
restoration he now seeks — only affirms his
fixation on that moment.
“What Putin Really Wants” is a perennial
topic for cable news debates and big-think
magazine covers; the new invasion of Ukraine
has prompted questions about the Russian
leader’s mental health and pandemic-era iso-
lation. But his motives can also be gleaned in
part from his book and his frequent essays
and major speeches, all seething with resent-
ment, propaganda and self-justification. In
light of these writings, Russia’s attack on
Ukraine seems less about reuniting two coun-
tries that Putin considers “a single whole,” as
he put it in a lengthy essay last year, than
about challenging the United States and its
NATO minions, those cocky, illegitimate win-
ners of the Cold War. “Where did this insolent
manner of talking down from the height of
their exceptionalism, infallibility and all-per-
missiveness come from?” Putin demanded
during his declaration of war. A world with
one dominant superpower is “unacceptable,”
he has stated, and he constantly warns that
this imbalance — exemplified in NATO’s ex-
pansion — threatens Russia’s existence. “For
our country, it is a matter of life and death,” he
contends.
In “First Person,” a collection of interviews
with Putin and various relatives and associ-
ates, he brags that he received top grades in
high school, except for one subject. “I had got-
ten a B in composition,” he admits. If so, the
teacher got it about right. His writing else-
where veers from straightforward to over-
wrought, from reflective to overwhelmingly
self-serving. Even so, these compositions
serve as memos dictated for the archives of
history: Putin’s attempts to strike a posture of
perpetual defiance, to articulate a Russian ex-
ceptionalism immune from rules and norms.
They portray a l eader intent on redressing a
perceived historical wrong inflicted on his
country and himself, and a man convinced
that Moscow must never fall silent again.I
n late 1999, Putin, then prime minister, is-
sued a long essay on “Russia at the Turn of
the Millennium,” lamenting his country’s
deteriorating international standing. He
blames Russia’s economic decline of the
1990s on the “historic futility” of Soviet-era
communism and on “schemes taken from for-
eign textbooks,” a dig at the Western consul-
tants who had parachuted in carrying market
models and bullet-point reforms. With weak
infrastructure, low foreign investment and
lousy health indicators, Putin writes, Russia
faced the real possibility of “sliding to the sec-
ond, and possibly even third, echelon of world
states.”
Nonetheless, Putin is adamant that the na-
tion could be glorious once again, that “it is
too early to bury Russia as a great power.” The
answer is not a return to Communist Party
values — they were “a road to a blind alley” —
but a long-term strategy for economic devel-
opment and moral, even spiritual, renewal.
The details are hazy, but for one: “RussiaPUTIN FROM B1CARLOS LOZADAPutin’s paper trail
of self-justifications
and resentments
FIRST PERSON
An Astonishingly
Frank Self-
Portrait by
Russia’s
President
Vladimir Putin
By Vladimir Putin
Public Affairs.
2 08 pp. $16