Putin

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in Leningrad in 1952. The time and the place are both important. It was only seven years since the end of World War II in a Soviet Union still ruled by Joseph Stalin, with whom Putin’s family had a strong personal connection—Putin’s grandfather cooked for Stalin.

Leningrad and Moscow had very different fates during the war. Moscow withstood Hitler’s blitzkrieg attack of 1941, though it was a close call. German bombs hit Red Square. On the road into Moscow from Sheremetyevo International Airport there is a monument of oversized tank traps, which mark the point of the closest German advance. The Nazis were in Queens.

Moscow displayed heroic resistance, Leningrad heroic endurance. The latter city was besieged by the Nazi army for some nine hundred days. A million people died from hunger, cold, and the unrelenting shelling of the city. At the apex, ten thousand were dying a day. In the winter, dynamite was needed to blast the frozen ground to make mass graves. Putin tells the story of how his mother almost became an inadvertent victim: “Once my mother fainted from hunger. People thought she had died, and they laid her out with the corpses. Luckily, Mama woke up in time and started moaning.”

The most terrifying sight in the world in the Leningrad of those days was that of a well-fed man—it meant he was a cannibal and out hunting for more.

Those were the stories Putin heard at the kitchen table when the grown-ups drank tea. Even Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, has nothing in her biography that comes close.

The year of Putin’s birth was the last year of Stalin’s life and the time of his last purge. The anti-Semitic Doctors’ Plot accused Jewish doctors in Kremlin hospitals of murdering high Soviet officials. It was always dangerous to be too close to the Kremlin or Stalin and his inner circle, though that didn’t affect Putin’s grandfather, who cooked for both Lenin and Stalin. He must have had a very high clearance if he was not actually an official member of the security apparatus. Putin’s father survived hazardous duty performing sabotage behind Nazi lines, fighting in a demolitions battalion of the NKVD, precursor of the KGB. He was seriously wounded—they never got all the shrapnel out of him and he limped for the rest of his life. The only casualty in the immediate family was a baby who died of diphtheria during the Siege, another having died shortly after birth before the war. Putin was thus an only child, “the sun, moon and stars” to his mother, who had him baptized on the sly from her party-member husband. Putin still wears that baptismal cross. There may also be a special sense of significance or destiny instilled in only children whose predecessor siblings all died, opening the way for them, as was the case for Stalin.

In World War II the USSR lost something like twenty-six million people, and innumerable buildings were destroyed. Like many others, Putin grew up in a communal apartment where several families lived together, usually one family per room, and shared a kitchen. There was no hot water, no bathtub. The toilet, out on the landing, was filthy and freezing. A teacher who once visited his home found the bathroom “horrendous.” The stairs were infested with “hordes of rats” that Putin chased with sticks for fun, though it wasn’t so much fun when, cornered, they turned and attacked.

Not all the lessons he learned were harsh. Friendship with a Jewish family that lived in one of the communal apartment’s rooms helped inoculate him against anti-Semitism. He would also have close relations with Jewish teachers and martial arts mates. One of his Jewish teachers, Vera Gurevich, was responsible for Putin’s learning German. Spotting his “potential, energy, and character,” she decided to devote time and attention to him even though he seemed hell-bent for a life of street fights and petty crime. Under her tutelage, he developed a taste for German that would in time play an important part in his KGB career. He continued studying it in high school, where his chemistry teacher also noticed his force and drive, but still remarked, “He was ordinary, there were so many like him.”

Yet not only did that rough and ordinary boy become president of Russia, but when in Israel in 2005 he found time to visit that old teacher and tell her that he remembered her as “honest, fair and kind,” and then he bought her an apartment in Tel Aviv.

But back in his youth it was street fighting that was his passion and best skill. The lesson that the streets of Leningrad taught was simple, and it stayed with Putin his whole life: The weak get beaten. Weakness is both disgrace and danger. “The greatest criminals in our history,” Putin would say when president, “were those weaklings who threw power on the floor—Nicholas II and Gorbachev—who allowed the power to be picked up by the hysterics and the madmen.”