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Hello, and welcome to Tomorrow Will Be Worse, which began as a letter about Washington but is now, true to its name, basically a letter about Russia. I blame Vladimir Putin, who is the subject of this week’s dispatch. (If you want to read about the insanity of domestic politics—either in Washington or in the nation at large, you can’t miss what my colleagues Tina Nguyen, Peter Hamby, Eriq Gardner, and Tara Palmeri are writing.)
Yesterday was Victory Day in Russia and much of the former Soviet Union. (When victory over Nazi Germany was declared in Berlin late on May 8, 1945, it was already the 9th in Moscow.) This year, it was a big day mostly because Western and Ukrainian analysts were expecting Putin to use the occasion to formally declare war on Kyiv—rather than hiding behind the fig leaf of a “special military operation”—and to announce a nationwide draft. Neither happened.
Instead, Putin’s speech at the Victory Day parade on Red Square—which looked far too fascist for my comfort—didn’t even mention Ukraine. It focused on connecting his invasion to World War II, something readers of TWBW will know he’s been doing for months. He also trotted out a conspiracy theory to justify this war: the West, he claimed, declined to sign a treaty accepting the indivisibility of European security (i.e., Russian veto power over it), then NATO began gobbling up territory on Russia’s borders (false), and was preparing an invasion of “our historical lands, including Crimea” (false again). “Russia made a preemptive strike against this aggression,” he thundered. “It was a necessary, timely, and the only correct decision. The decision of a sovereign, strong, and independent country.” (I found this last sentence to be a bit curious: if you have to keep telling us you’re strong, sovereign, and independent, are you really?)
Watching Putin, full of rage and fury on Red Square, made me think about his strange relationship to World War II. On the one hand, his family was profoundly marked by it. On the other, he has made it into such a toxic death cult that I sometimes wonder if he invaded Ukraine just so that he too could have a World War II-style victory to call his own, just like Josef Stalin did. Can one truly be father of the nation without a big and bloody victory?
It also made me think of all the things I read and heard in researching my book, Motherland, which will be released sometime next year. Putin’s generation was indelibly shaped by the war, even though they were born years after the guns fell silent. These are markers that outside observers often miss. This week, I thought I’d snap a Soviet cultural lens over your view, to help you see what people like me see when we see Putin—and what still remains invisible to so many in the West.
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About a Boy: The Roots of Putin’s Evil |
Putin’s childhood taught him many lessons that shape his thinking and actions to this day: that might makes right, that existing hierarchies can only be changed through violence, that force is the only language that matters, that power is always a zero-sum game. |
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Putin was born in October 1952, seven years after the end of the war, in a city that still bore its scars. Leningrad, which endured a nightmarish 900-day siege, had lost more than a million of its citizens to starvation. One of them was Putin’s older brother. Putin’s mother Maria nearly became another, but, according to family lore, someone heard her moaning and pulled her off a pile of corpses. She had fainted from hunger and was taken for dead.
Putin’s father Vladimir was also very nearly killed. In the summer of 1941, when the Nazis invaded, he volunteered, at the age of 30, for the front. He became a member of the forces of the N.K.V.D., the predecessor to the K.G.B. and the employer of his father, Spiridon, who was one of Stalin’s chefs. (Spiridon had many sons, and though all of them went off to war, according to his grandson, many did not return.)
In the first winter of the war, the elder Vladimir was pinned down by fighting on a bend in the Neva River, just to the east of Leningrad. “It was a horrible meat grinder,” his son Vladimir recalled decades later. A German threw a grenade at his father at close range and shattered his legs. He nearly bled out but a fellow soldier—a neighbor from back home—saw him and carried him on his back to a field hospital, which is where Maria Putina, haggard and gaunt with hunger, found him. Seeing the state his wife was in, Vladimir started sneaking her his meals until the nurses noticed he was fainting from hunger and banned Maria from visiting. “As a result, they both survived, but my father limped for the rest of his life from this injury,” Putin said. “One of his legs was bent like a wheel.”
When Putin was born, his mother was 41, impossibly old for those times. He was her third son: one had died in infancy, and the other in the siege. She was determined to have this son live, and she and a neighbor secretly baptized him...
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