The Man Who Changed the World: 7 Unheard Facts About Vladimir Putin

More than two decades ago, Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia. Since then, he has been leading the country with grand ambitions. The Russian population is paying a high price for it.

Do swidaniya Vlad? Which translates as Goodbye, Vladimir? That is what analysts are now asking because of the ever-worsening stuff for Russian President Vladimir Putin, especially since the start of the Ukraine war.

It was more than 20 years ago that Boris Yeltsin, already visibly frail at the time, nominated him as prime minister and designated successor as head of the Kremlin. Since then, the now 69-year-old has been prime minister, president, prime minister and president again and again – for the Russian constitution has a limit on how long the state can stay in office.

Not even he himself expected that Putin would ever reach the highest offices. He grew up as a boy in a working-class family in a Leningrad backyard. His mother endured the nearly 900-day blockade by Hitler’s Wehrmacht in the Neva city.

To fight back against the strong guys, Mr Sutka learned judo, and after school, joined the KGB at an early age. Until the fall of the GDR, He served with the Soviet intelligence service in Dresden. In 1990, Mr KGB’s first job after that was at Leningrad State University, supervising Western study-abroad students.

Only a year later, he moved to City Hall, became deputy to Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, at a time when press writers campaigned for change from Gorbachev to Yeltsin, from the Soviet Union to Russia, and for Leningrad to be renamed back to St. Petersburg, and organized sit-ins in front of Putin’s and Sobchak’s offices.

The Reformer

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He was still a long way from Moscow then and even further from the highest office in the state. After arriving in the Kremlin, he was making trips to Fidel Castro’s Cuba and to China. During his first two and a half years in office, he tidied up what his predecessor Yeltsin had left undone: Fundamental tax reforms, privatization of land or reform of corporate law.

Putin has consolidated the state that threatened to fall apart under Yeltsin, not least through relentless campaigns against the separatist Caucasus republic of Chechnya. He also increased state revenues thanks to his “flat tax” uniform tax rate. He was thus able to pay wages and pensions on time and even gradually increase them. Putin became – with former Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev as head of Gazprom’s supervisory board and today’s head of Sberbank, Herman Gref, as minister of the economy – the reformer-in-chief.

Until Yukos’ fall from grace in 2003, in which Putin had the disagreeable oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky imprisoned and drove the country’s second-largest oil producer into bankruptcy. The state oil giant Rosneft took over its much more agile private rival.

After media oligarchs Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gussinsky had already fled and former oligarch Khodorkovsky had to endure almost ten years in prison, most major entrepreneurs gave up their own ambitions, submitted themselves to the Kremlin or, like jet-setting billionaire Roman Abramovich (Chelsea FC), voluntarily signed a contract with state-owned companies. Under Yeltsin, the strong and pluralistic media came under Kremlin control.

The Oligarch Maker

On the other hand, the class of oligarchs had by no means been abolished. In their place came the state oligarchs. The owners of large corporations, the bosses of the quasi-monopolies Rosneft, the Gazprom or the Sberbank, and close friends from Putin’s Petersburg days who, together with the Kremlin boss, owned the dacha collective “Osero,” a sort of settlement of summer houses, at a lake not far from the Neva metropolis.

But Putin owed his re-election to social benefits, economic stability, and the visible and tangible upswing after the destructive decade of change following the fall of the Soviet Union. First mass protests in Moscow, brutally beaten down and ending with years of imprisonment for demonstrators, did not occur until 2011/12, after first rigging the Duma election and then announcing that Putin – who after two terms as president was now prime minister again – wanted to be re-elected head of state.

The Expansionist

In 2014, Putin overcame an emerging economic crisis and clearly dwindling approval ratings with a major foreign policy maneuver: first, “green men” – Russian soldiers without insignia – annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. Russian troops then began providing massive support to separatists in eastern Ukraine.

This war in the Donbass is more of a partial Russian invasion than a civil war. Moreover, it serves three goals: To showcase Moscow’s modernized military power, disavow Ukraine as a model of reform for Russia, and draw new borders in Europe.

The Donbass invasion has massively destabilized Ukraine – which again most recently demonstrated a peaceful transfer of power by ballot with the election of TV comedian Volodimir Zelensky – and plunged it into an economic crisis that threatens its very existence.

Chaotic conditions in Ukraine should discourage Russians from seeing the Soviet Union’s second-largest successor state as a model of reform for themselves. After all, there are free elections and pluralistic media. However, there are still considerable economic problems due to the war in the east.

Putin has also demonstrated to the Europeans that he can shift borders in post-Cold War Europe. The sanctions imposed as a result have severely damaged the Russian economy – with the central bank alone having to burn through more than $65 billion to stabilize the ruble on the market – but have not led to any political relenting in the Kremlin.

The Divider

For Putin believes he has the longer leverage. He senses that as economic problems loom in the West, the calls for an end to the Russia sanctions will grow louder and louder – and they could be ground down if the Kremlin does not relent.

There is a difference of opinion about Putin: former chancellor of Germany Gerhard Schröder sees him as a “flawless democrat,” and others despise him as an unscrupulous autocrat. But Putin is playing with this.

Calling the fall of the USSR the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” his goal is to return Russia to the world stage, divide Europe and make Russia once again one of the dominant powers on the continent. Having never come to terms with its waning influence in Europe, Russian does not want to leave independent states like Ukraine to their own fate and wants to divide Europe.

To achieve this, it is relying on the support of populist parties in the EU, on its heavily modernized army, on the breach of the INF disarmament agreement still negotiated by Gorbachev and Reagan, on a new disarmament debate that is dividing Europe, as well as on its role in Syria.

Through Moscow’s intervention alongside the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Mr Putin has not only shown despots around the world that they can rely on him and that he can win wars for them. He has also divided NATO partners Turkey and the United States through his Syria intervention.

The Geostrategist

Most importantly, the Kremlin leader has managed Russia’s return to the world stage to some extent by recapturing large parts of Syria. Since then, many European policymakers have been almost unanimous in saying that global problems can only be solved with Russia.

In terms of geostrategy, Putin’s perfidious power politics are having a destructive effect on politicians of the era after Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, who have always attached importance not only to dialogue with Moscow but also to a clear anchoring in the West and a strong NATO. But instead of seeing that Moscow is becoming more and more of a problem, they put their faith in a very one-sided willingness to engage in dialogue.

By showing in Syria and Venezuela and elsewhere that Russia can be relied upon, Russia will allow other controversial leaders to escape the narrative of Western values. With Iran’s help, he deeply entangled Turkey in a military game in Syria while simultaneously drawing Ankara to his side through the sale of the S-400 missile defense system and significantly diminishing Turkish influence over Central Asia. Putin also organized cooperation with Saudi Arabia and the oil export cartel Opec, just as he clarified increasing cooperation with China.

The Economic Holdout

In economic terms, there is no doubt that Putin has brought Russia forward after its decline during the Yeltsin years. The Russians thanked him in March 2018, when he received 76.6 percent of the vote for his fourth term as head of state, the highest ever.

Yet Putin’s economic record is now mixed: with poor economic growth, Russia ranks far and away at the bottom of all Eastern European countries. According to the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, Russia is already “on the brink of recession.

Andrei Netsheyev, former economics minister, warned that “real incomes, which have now been falling again for years, could lead to serious shocks in the banking system in the event of an economic recession”. And central bank leaders are already worried that economic growth is currently being fueled only by private consumption, primarily financed by unsecured consumer loans.

Increased value-added tax, higher retirement ages and continuing economic misery have caused Putin’s standing among the people to shrink. Now, with 21 million people, 14.3 percent of Russians again live below the poverty line, which is equivalent to 160 euros a month for employed people and 120 euros for pensioners. According to polls, in 2018, only 18 percent of Russians disapproved of Putin; today, 38 percent do. The trend is rising sharply. This is because, says Netsheyev, “the Kremlin does not seem to be ready for the necessary institutional and structural reforms.”

Putin relies on the state economy instead of the middle class and entrepreneurship. And so, above all, salaries of civil servants and employees of state-owned corporations such as Gazprom, Rozneft and Sberbank have risen significantly. Today, a public servant is the favorite occupation of younger schoolchildren between Kaliningrad and Kamchatka – instead of “Bisnesmen,” i.e., entrepreneurs, in the past.

The Cynic

Nobody knows whether Putin will actually retire after the constitutionally final end of his term in 2024. In his YouTube video blog, his opponent, the dispossessed Yukos oil magnate Khodorkovsky, has already spread various scenarios of how the lawyer from the Neva could use constitutional tricks to keep himself in office. He does not trust anyone and wants to protect his wealth during his term in office, says his rival, longing for revenge.

Putin, this much is clear from watching him for decades, has skinned himself again and again. He has preserved only his will to power and his cynicism: After the tragedy surrounding the sinking of the nuclear submarine “Kursk” shortly after his first presidential inauguration in 2000, the then inexperienced politician replied impassively and with an embarrassed smile on the US talk show “Larry King”: “It sank.”

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