Volume 3   Number 64

Donald Trump kicked up a ruckus when, in a national forum about his commander-in-chief capabilities, he stated his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Such audacious comments have become a trademark of Mr. Trump, and we shouldn’t be surprised. He has said nice things about Putin in the last several years, but comparing him favorably to our President is somewhat way out, to say the least. Mr. Trump feels that Putin is someone he can do business with, and we should be friends rather than adversaries.

President Putin is almost always in the news. But still, most of us don’t really know much about him, his history and background, how he achieved his office, what his motivations are, how he operates and his accomplishments. This essay is an attempt to set the record straight. After all, if he is a man who is going to be an ally if Trump becomes President, we should fill in the blanks.

This bio was mostly excerpted from Newsweek.com of February 20, 2012. Vladimir Putin was born in St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad, in 1952. His parents had survived the siege of Leningrad during the war; his father was seriously wounded in battle. Putin has described his own childhood as being in a mean, hungry, impoverished place that bred mean, hungry, ferocious children. His father, also called Vladimir, worked as a skilled laborer at a factory; his mother, Maria, did backbreaking unskilled labor.

Putin liked to describe himself in his youth as a thug. He said education was not part of his idea of success. He was always getting into fights. At the age of 10 or 11 he learned Sambo, a Soviet martial art. This started his transformation from a grade school thug into a goal-directed and hardworking adolescent.

Along the way Vladimir decided to join the KGB, and it was expected that he would be skilled in hand-to-hand combat. In the 1960s, believe it or not, this was a very popular occupation in the Soviet Union. The KGB was glorified in the Soviet Union in a way similar to our FBI.

He then went to university, kept his grades up, and spent his free time training in judo. He became a KGB member in the middle to late 1970s and married at the age of 31. In 1984 Putin was sent to spy school in Moscow. At its completion, he was assigned to Dresden in East Germany, then considered a backwater. His job was to collect information about West Germany and the United States bases in West Germany. He was basically collecting useless information. He also recruited new agents.

Things were changing when Gorbachev came to power in the USSR in March 1985. He released all Soviet dissidents from prison and began to loosen up on the Soviet bloc countries. It looked like the two Germanys would reunite. Back in Dresden Putin reportedly was enraged. He worshipped the old order of things under Communism.

In October of 1989 riots began to break out, culminating in the toppling of the Berlin Wall. Soon in East Germany free elections resulted in the the secret police, the Stasi, being disbanded. Putin lost his job and returned to Russia after 16 long years in Germany.

He would later try to recreate the Soviet Union he had worked so hard for and adored. In another 12 years he became head of the Russian state. He was successful in transforming the country, eliminating the budding democratic reforms that had occurred, and establishing a thoroughly corrupt and inefficient authoritarian regime in the image of the old USSR.

But to become the leader of a former great empire, even though now shrunken in size, first this former KGB officer had to climb out of obscurity. He became a supporter of a local politician Anatoly Sobchak. When Sobchak was elected mayor of St. Petersburg he appointed Putin to be an international affairs advisor. Putin in the next couple of years continued to work his way up in the St. Petersburg hierarchy.

According to Investopedia of March 3, 2015, when Sobchak was defeated in 1996, Putin moved to Moscow. In 1998 he secured a position as a deputy in the Presidential Property Management Department. This agency’s purpose was to move the assets of the defunct Soviet Union to the newly formed Russian Federation. This was major since under Communism the assets of the state amounted to everything of value in the entire country.

It was an invitation to corruption, and it is believed that is where Putin began building a personal fortune now estimated to be in the tens of billions, putting him up there with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

His next job was as presidential chief of staff, to which he was appointed in 1997. From there he was named chief of the FSB, the intelligence agency and a successor to the KGB.

Putin’s was not a household name, so what caused Yeltsin to choose him as his successor? The reason seems to be very Russian. Putin was named as Yeltsin’s sixth prime minister. At the time Russia was very unstable and Yelstin was deeply unpopular and in failing health. Some thought it was a hedge so that if he was forced out of office, Putin the strong man would protect him from his many, very vocal, enemies.

Sure enough, in December 1999 Yeltsin resigned and the presidency fell into Putin’s lap. It’s been there ever since. As one of his first actions he initiated steps that would prevent any actions against the former regime of Yeltsin.

Investopedia of March 4, 2015 says, “In 2008, term limits forced Putin to switch from president to prime minister. After one interim term as prime minister, he returned to the presidency and has remained in that position ever since. While Putin once famously disparaged Communism as a blind alley, his actions while in power mimic those of many a Secretary General of the USSR.”

One of Putin’s old KGB tactics seems to be taking care of dissident journalists. According to Politifact of January 4, 2016, Russia ranks 180 out of 199 countries for press freedom. It has gone down steadily in recent years. Two nonprofits estimate as least 34 journalists have been murdered in Russia since 2000. These killers are rarely caught in Russia and those who hire them have never been disclosed.

By comparison three were killed in the United States in a comparable time period. While there is no evidence that Putin ordered the murders, it is believed that he created the climate for these assassinations. Given his past association with the KGB this doesn’t seem far fetched.

Then there was the unusual case of Alexander Litvinenko, a former spy who had obtained asylum in the United Kingdom from alleged crimes in Russia. On November 1, 2006 he was hospitalized and died three weeks later. The cause was lethal polonium-210 which induced acute radiation syndrome. He was poisoned. Imagine carrying out a killing using a highly sophisticated poison in another country. The main suspect in the case remains in Russia where he is protected by diplomatic immunity.

So this is the guy Trump wants to cozy up with. He should remember what President George W. Bush had to say about Putin when they first met. “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.”

Well, President Bush got part of it right. He is interested in his country. Over the 16 years Putin has been in power, according to Quora.com of March 21, 2015, some of the highlights of his regime are:

• He carried out criminal actions to keep himself in power: targeted bombings, political persecutions, political assassinations and persecution of dissent are all part of his repertoire.
• He changed the political system and government structure to ensure he could stay in power and benefit his personal interests.
• He began a series of wars and military aggressions from Chechnya and Georgia to Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea.
• Corruption is Russia, and Putin has added on to the system. He has stolen from the country to the tune, some say, of $40 billion, and counting.
• He deprived Russia of a free press.
• He has initiated the most evil propaganda machine since Goebbels in Germany.

Despite all this he is quite popular in Russia with approval ratings up around 70 percent according to the controlled media. This, despite the fact that the Russian economy has tanked the last couple of years and the country is in the doldrums.

Putin surrounds himself with the aura of a physically strong man who loves outdoor sports and recreation and still keeps up with his marital arts. He talks of his tough guy youth quite often.

He captivated the population with incursions into Georgia, the Crimea and Ukraine, seeking to restore elements of the old Soviet Union. Russia has a history of despots going back to the monarchy and Stalin. The populace apparently still admires the autocrats and are not unhappy with the loss of what democracy they had for a few short years. So despite an economy in the doldrums and a history of violence and corruption Putin is still popular. Go figure?

This is the man Donald Trump wants to cuddle up with. With his narcissistic personality, Trump is extremely vulnerable to flattery. And Putin has given him that. “He is a bright and talented person without any doubt,” Putin said, adding that Trump is “an outstanding and talented personality.”

So Mr. Trump returned the favor saying: “It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond”, in a statement released by campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks. “I have always felt that Russia and the United States should be able to work well with each other towards defeating terrorism and restoring world peace, not to mention trade and all of the other benefits derived from mutual respect.”

Adding to that, Mr. Trump has a fondness for strong, despotic regimes. Some of his favorite foreign countries, whose leadership he has spoken well of besides Russia, are: North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirate. By any standards, these are not models of democracy.

Mr. Trump would be wise to bear in mind what the Russian chess champion and dissident, Gary Kasparov, said about Mr. Putin: “Vladimir Putin is a strong leader in the same way that arsenic is a strong drink.”

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