In rebuilding Russia, President Putin focused on developing nuclear capabilities in order to maintain deterrence power (Al Jazeera)

When baby Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in Leningrad in 1952, a year had passed since the death of the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, Joseph Stalin, after 19 years of rule of the Soviet Union. Decades later, the union will disintegrate and the child will become the president of Russia. Indeed, he will be among the longest in power in the history of Tsarist and Bolshevik Russia, surpassing Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, and many of the tsars.

On March 17, Putin decided to renew his residency in the Kremlin for the next 6 years, followed by another 6 years until 2036. Thus, he has lived with 5 American presidents since the year 2000, most of whom saw him as an ambiguous and tyrannical man, proven each time by elections. Of questionable integrity.

In the absence of competition and the decline in the number of candidates, Putin swept the elections with a percentage of more than 87%, which is the highest percentage he has obtained since his first election in 2000, when he won with 52% against the leader of the Communist Party, Gennady Zhiganov, becoming the leader of Russia for three decades.

According to the Western vision, Putin is merely a “dictator” who suppresses freedoms and eliminates his opponents and opponents in cold blood, such as Sergei Yushenkov, Anna Politkovskaya, Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Nemtsov, and Alexei Navalny, in addition to the leader of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who went far in the dispute with his leader, but according to American writer Jim Heintz, in an article in the Associated Press, said:

“The weight of that long period, and the comprehensive suppression of effective domestic opposition voices, gives Putin an extremely powerful and perhaps unfettered hand.”

By American writer Jim Heintz

The West was not betting on Putin's downfall by losing these elections. Neither the political situation nor the objective reality of Russia allows that, nor does Putin's powerful and stubborn personality, nor the circumstances of the war in Ukraine, nor the existing global conflicts allow for a change in the Russian leadership.

After 24 years in power, Vladimir Putin has become closer to a “president of necessity” for many Russians, and even in the United States and the West, those who preferred a president of Boris Yeltsin’s standards have surrendered to the idea of ​​having Putin as absolute ruler of Russia, at least in the foreseeable future.

Somehow, after assuming power, the man did not allow things in Russia, the heir to the Soviet Union, to reach the point of total collapse, as was intended in the game of international balances and the era of colored revolutions.

Everything that happened after the year 2000 clearly indicates that Putin was building a system of government centered primarily around his personality, as he handed over the presidency under the provisions of the constitution at some point to Dmitry Medvedev (between 2008 and 2012), but the reins of power were practically in his hands while he was head of government.

He postponed the clash with the West, and chose to follow the path of liberal democracy inherited from Perestroika by Mikhail Gorbachev and after him by Yeltsin, but he also worked to purify it of much of the “chaos and impurities” and the influence of the incoming parasitic men of capitalism, and he pressured the political and economic forces to be in the service of his project. Putin's democracy was controlled and stereotyped, directed by the presence of loyal parties and a few opposition parties that were restricted and ultimately led to the results he wanted.

The West needed a lot of time to understand Putin's personality and comprehend his description of the fall of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century" and his political steps that reached the point of invading Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

The late American diplomat and politician Henry Kissinger fully understood Putin's personality and orientations when he said in an interview with the Financial Time newspaper: "His basic beliefs were a kind of mystical belief in Russian history... He felt insulted. He was insulted and threatened, because Russia was threatened by NATO absorbing this entire region." ".

CIA Director William Burns was more precise when asked about his assessment of Putin's personality, saying: "He has been brewing in a combustible mixture of a sense of injustice and ambition for many years," adding that "his views have become more rigid and he is deeply isolated." From other points of view,” according to his assessment.

Putin was elected President of Russia for the next 6 years, lasting until 2030 (Reuters)

Coming out from behind the curtain

Until the mid-1990s, Putin was a politically obscure person who was out of classification in Western intelligence circles. When interest began in studying his personality and tendencies, most reports stated that he was an intelligence man par excellence, astute and secretive to the point of being shy, and mysterious to the point of being cold and difficult to penetrate.

Until late 1989, Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin - who joined the KGB in 1975 - ran the agency's branch in Dresden, (then) East Germany. He witnessed directly the end of the Cold War with the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and many of the events that accompanied it, with all their geostrategic and historical implications and effects.

On that day, angry demonstrators stormed the Stasi (East German secret police) building in the city and then headed to the nearby KGB headquarters to storm it. Lieutenant Colonel Putin came out and confronted them calmly and confidently, saying: “You are about to storm Soviet territory, and this headquarters is full of armed elements, and they have permission to open fire in emergency situations.” It was an indirect threatening word, brief, calm, and almost cold, but the crowd dispersed after a moment.

In fact, there were only a few elements in the headquarters who were afraid of the reaction of the demonstrators, according to the account of one of the KGB officers who attended the incident, but this, according to his estimation, was one of the early signs of how the lieutenant colonel, who became head, managed conflicts and the strength of his emotional stability, which Everyone who met him later talked about him.

Due to the nature of the transformations, Putin did not stay in Dresden for long, as he returned to his hometown of Leningrad, which due to the transformations also returned to its old name of St. Petersburg, where he held several local positions, and among them he witnessed the rapid decline and painful fall of the Union of Soviet Republics to the point of disintegration in 1991, then economic and social deterioration, to the point that he worked as a taxi driver at night, as he said in one of his interviews.

What he later called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” occurred before him, an intelligence man who had lived through the days of Soviet glory, and had imbibed the ideas of his teachers, Yuri Andropov and Yevgeny Primakov, and he did not have much to do when he was appointed between 1996 and 1998 to a marginal position as deputy head of the administration. Presidential possessions, but fate played its game and he witnessed a rapid and remarkable rise when he assumed the presidency of the Russian Federal Security Service, the heir to the KGB, and then the prime ministership one year later, succeeding Primakov.

Vladimir Putin was neither among the first nor the second ranks of Mikhail Gorbachev's men nor Boris Yeltsin's men, and he was not one of the officials produced by perestroika (reconstruction). Rather, he was on its margins. He may have slipped through its cracks to reach the highest intelligence position in the country and then the prime ministership to be on top. Evidence of how bad the country's conditions have become.

Boris Yeltsin (right) on the day he relinquished power on December 31, 2000, and Vladimir Putin appears on the left (Al Jazeera)

Perestroika restructuring

On the morning of December 31, 2000, the Russians and the world were surprised when Boris Yeltsin relinquished the presidency and all the positions he held in the Russian Federation. It is not known specifically what role his prime minister played, but information indicated that Putin pressured his president with files, the price of which was his departure from power.

It is certain that Putin, who became president after the March elections, was dissatisfied with the outcome of the situation in Russia. He wanted to rebuild, but far from the communism in which he previously believed. “The political system that existed under communism had reached a dead end and the economy had become... Incapable of progress,” he said in an interview with American director Oliver Stone.

He also longed for the Soviet era, as he mentioned in another interview, because “whoever does not long for the Soviet Union is without a heart...but whoever wants to restore the Soviet Union is without a mind.” He realized that the geopolitical situation had changed irreversibly.

During his first presidential term (2000-2004), President Putin appeared to be a pragmatic politician devoid of ideology. He followed in the footsteps of his predecessor Yeltsin in drawing closer to the United States and Europe and working to meet Western “standards.” The economic, social and political shock that followed the fall of the Soviet Union was present and influential, and required an unbearable amount of time in order to restore stability and heal the wounds of the fall of the Soviet Union.

Color revolutions with Western support also began to occur on the outskirts of Russia, in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004, and some Baltic countries joined NATO and some of them the European Union. All of this represented a warning bell to Putin, who knew, by virtue of his training and experience as an intelligence officer, that the Russian national security system was beginning to... On the borders of the former Soviet Union countries.

Putin was, by nature, influenced by the classic ideas about Russian ideology, and what the philosopher Ivan Ilyin proposed about the danger of Western democracy to Russia and the impossibility of taming the country’s ethnic, geographical and cultural diversity according to Western perceptions, and the necessity of a central government system or a “Russian national dictatorship” led by a strong national leader. It achieves unity and stability.

He was also aware deep down that the Russians had been deceived by the promises of democracy, which led to years of humiliation, poverty, and helplessness, in his estimation. Putin referred to this in several subsequent conversations, saying, for example:

“Russia was deceived by the West after the end of the Cold War. It fell victim to an aggressive NATO. After 1991, when Russia expected to be welcomed into the family of civilized nations, nothing of the kind happened. They deceived us.”

By Vladimir Putin in an interview with broadcaster Tucker Carlson

Putin also approached the ideas of the philosopher Alexander Dugin, who worked to renew “Eurasianism” in conjunction with his own rise to power. Putin’s last choice was that Russia could not be subordinate to the West, which does not open its embrace to Russia as much as it seeks to contain and isolate it, and that confronting This is due to the presence of a leadership that mixes tsarism and Stalinism, in addition to a new Russian trend in which the Orthodox Church converges with the Slavic or Eurasian world.

Putin continued soft diplomacy and calmly managed the conflict with the West, but he was haunted by history and an obsession with Russian isolation, and strongly convinced of Tsar Alexander III’s saying that “Russia has nothing to rely on except two allies, its army and its fleet.” So he sought to build Russian military power, especially the nuclear weapon that He saw in it the power of deterrence and a protective shield.

President Putin speaking with his Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu (Reuters)

Tsar's Wars

Putin's vision of everything that was happening on the outskirts of Russia seemed to be a Western attempt to surround it and isolate it with color revolutions and NATO, which required protecting its security by force. Thus, the Russian army intervened again in Chechnya in 1999 (and Putin was prime minister), and the military operations officially ended on April 15, 2009. The Russian army also intervened in Georgia in August 2008.

In March 2014, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula following the outbreak of protests in Ukraine that led to the ouster of pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovych. Putin said at the time: “We have every reason to assume that the outrageous policy of containing Russia, which has been ongoing since the 18th century and continues today...they are constantly trying to push us into a corner.”

From the angle of his attachment to Russian history and ideology and his vision of the conflict with the West, Putin’s reactions were always strong and violent towards neighboring countries and the former Soviet space that tried to depart from Russia’s control, as their fate ranged between partition or uprooting part of the territories (Georgia and Ukraine).

From this angle, the Russian army intervened in Syria in September 2015, to maintain access to warm waters and establish a permanent presence on the coast of the Mediterranean (at the Tartous and Hmeimim bases), and the security advisor to the Russian Duma, Alexei Plotnikov, said at the time that it was “a strategic decision to protect the security of... "And Russia's interests in the Middle East, and to confront the West's attempts to dominate the region."

In this context, Putin seemed to be applying the idea of ​​the “Eurasian Doctrine” theorist, Alexander Dugin, which he mentioned in a lengthy article entitled “Towards a New Russian Empire,” in which he said, “The new empire must be established all at once as an empire, and it is not permissible to postpone this process to the distant horizon in the hope of “If appropriate conditions exist in the future.”

Also based on this doctrine and considering that “every war gives birth to another,” the Russian army intervened in Ukraine in February 2022 and annexed its east. History was also present when Putin said: “Ukraine is an artificial state that was created based on the desire of Joseph Stalin and did not exist before 1922.” ".

After two years of heavy losses for both sides, during which the war reached the heights of escalation, the threat of nuclear weapons, an unprecedented international division, and an American-European alliance to help Ukraine and defeat Russia, Putin insists that this war cannot be defeated and is “a matter of life or death for Russia and may determine its fate.”

Analysts believe that the outcome of the war will effectively determine the fate and future of Russia and Ukraine together and the entire global balance. Putin continues to fight it despite the apparent fragility of the home front in some periods, military shortcomings at times, and the crisis of dissent and coup by the leader of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, driven by the decisive election result in his favor and Western exhaustion that resulted from the length of the war and the disarray of the Ukrainian fronts.

With the continuation of the war and its fluctuations, the West is still confused about Putin’s personality, between that arrogant, narcissistic person who is shown in the Russian media caressing a tiger, practicing judo, swimming in icy waters, carrying a hunting rifle while bare-chested, or piloting a Tu-160 nuclear bomber, and... That “murderous and crazy” man, as US President Joe Biden describes him, the “cruel tyrant” who does not hesitate to poison and kill his opponents, and the adventurer who invades countries and threatens to use nuclear weapons.

In his book “The Psychology of Spies and Espionage,” published in 2022, Norwegian professor Adrian Furnham, professor of psychology at the Oslo Business School, believes that Putin is “a victim of his own propaganda. He listens to a specific number of people and turns a deaf ear to everyone else, and this gives him a strange vision of the world.” Only a few in the West see him as a leader who seeks to preserve Russia’s security and restore international balance, and a skilled chess player on the global geopolitical map that sometimes endures heated conflicts in order to establish the facts of geography and history.

Regardless of the results of the war in Ukraine, Russia’s dilemma, according to analysts, will be who will succeed Putin: the “strong patriot” or the “adventurous autocrat” in the absence of real effective institutions and the scarcity of those who possess charisma. Various political experiences globally have proven that the absence of a charismatic leader who has a complete monopoly What all powers often lead to the disintegration of states.

Whatever the dispute over Putin’s personality, his psychological tendencies, his complex policies, and what may happen in Russia, the judo player haunted by the obsessions of the great tsars and the one carrying the nuclear button will remain a heavy burden on the West for many years to come.

Source: Al Jazeera