82 The Economist March 26th 2022
Culture
UnderstandingRussia’spresidentGreyness, greed and grievance
H
e warned us. Vladimir Putin gave no
tice of who he was, and what he was
capable of, in “First Person”, a transcript of
interviews published in 2000, at the start
of his overlong rule. In his youth, he re
called, he had been a tough little hoodlum
who fought rats in the stairwell of his com
munalapartment building and, later,
brawled with strangers on the streets of
Leningrad. “A dog senses when somebody
is afraid of it,” he had learned, “and bites.”
He prized loyalty and feared betrayal. He
was hypersensitive to slights, to both his
country and himself (concepts which, in
the decades that followed, became peril
ously blurred). He bore grudges.
One of them was over the collapse of the
Soviet Union. In the interviews he remi
nisced about a jaunt to Abkhazia and a judo
tournament in Moldova: the Soviet empire
had been his wealth and pride, and when it
fell, he took it hard. “I wanted something
different to rise in its place,” he said of the
lost Soviet influence in eastern Europe.Frantically burning papers as a kgbofficer
in Dresden in 1989, grieving the “paralysis
of power” that seemed to have afflicted
Moscow, he came to associate protesting
crowds with disintegration. Corruption,
meanwhile, was only to be expected in
Russia, he implied—“and if somebody
thinks that somebody stole something, let
him go and prove it.”
Sometimes the Mr Putin of “First Per
son” appears frank, at others, cagey and
withdrawn. Few people knew him well; he
was seen as a grey man, inscrutable. Grey
ness, grievance and the greed of corruption
have been the dominant themes in booksThe West has struggled to grasp the threat posed by Vladimir Putin,
as a bibliography of his long rule shows→Alsointhissection
84 VivienLeighandLaurenceOlivier
85 HomeEntertainment:Read Montaigne
85 TheSassoondynasty
86 Johnson: Renamed placeswritten about him in English since. As he
amassed resentments, secrets, assets and
fears, the emphasis on these features has
shifted. Looking back at a bibliography of
Mr Putin shows how he has been
changed—or exaggerated—by power, and
how haltingly the world has grasped the
threat he poses.
As Mr Putin rose without trace from St
Petersburg to Moscow in the 1990s, then
from the leadership of the fsb(the princi
pal successor to the kgb) to the presidency,
greyness was the main tone. Given his oxy
moronic slogans, such as “managed
democracy” and the “dictatorship of the
law”, and his moves to neuter Russia’s
media, courts, parliament and oligarchs,
observers rarely mistook him for a genuine
democrat. But some saw his cooperation
with the West after the September 11th
attacks as the start of a permanent realign
ment, not just a tactical feint. Many were
slow to realise that his abuses were bound
to seep across Russia’s borders.
In “Putin: Russia’s Choice” (2004) Rich
ard Sakwa thought the country had shaken
off nationalism and imperialism; he was
confident its economic modernisation and
global integration would continue.
Andrew Jack was warier in “Inside Putin’s
Russia” (2004), noting Mr Putin’s demo
cratic backsliding and disregard for human
rights. The “contradictions of economic
liberalism and political authoritarianism