Dan Snow's History Hit - Putin, Power and Personality

Episode Date: July 24, 2022

Vladimir Putin has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm. He invades his neighbours, most recently Ukraine, meddles in western elections and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia. But who is the man behind the headlines?For years, Philip Short was a foreign correspondent for the BBC. He is now the author of many acclaimed biographies. Having spent eight years interviewing those who dealt with Putin as part of their official duties, Philip joins Dan on the podcast to explore the personality of Putin and the forces and experiences that have shaped his decisions since he took on the role of president in 2000.Produced by Hannah Ward.Mixed and Mastered by Peter Dennis.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi buddy, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Vladimir Putin, you may have heard of him. He may be looming on your horizon to the east. Well, it's a big month for Vladimir Putin. He's the subject of a new biography. A new biography by the very brilliant Philip Short. He was a BBC foreign correspondent. He's written wonderful biographies of Mao, Pol Pot, and François Mitterrand. Bit of a tough hit on Mitterrand there. Tough company to be in, but maybe go and read it. Maybe he deserves it. And he is a very brilliant journalist. He's talked to more than 200 people from Putin's past. He's delved way back into his childhood. He's talked to people in the KGB, political apparatchiks who knew Putin as he climbed the greasy pole.

He's got some very interesting conclusions indeed. In this podcast, I talk to Philip Short all about the man who really holds most of our futures in the palm of his hand. Depressing thought. Here is Philip Short talking about Vladimir Putin. Enjoy. Philip, thank you for coming on the podcast. Pleasure. Are you in hiding at the moment? Am I talking to you from an undisclosed location? Well, I must say my neighbours have said

that they're going to paint on their roof. It's not this house. It's a house a bit further down the valley. But no, I mean, frankly, I think he has other things to bother about rather than me at the moment. I think he's got bigger problems than an accurate discussion of his background.

Let's talk about him. Born October 7th, 1952 in what was then Leningrad. What's important about his earliest years? Well, he was born when Stalin was still in power. And if you look at Putin's life, it encompasses everything that has happened since the death of Stalin. Khrushchev coming to power, the Khrushchev thaw, the opening of the Soviet Union to a very small degree, then the clampdown under Brezhnev, the Gerontocrats who followed him and just it was all stagnating, and then Gorbachev and Perestroika and the attempt at reform, which proved too much for the system to take. So the Soviet Union collapsed. So that's the background against which he grew up, against which he was formed and in which he lived. And he is, in a sense, a reflection of the whole of that period. I mean, one of the things that for me is interesting about Putin is he's a kind of, not a mirror image, but he's in a sense, the embodiment of very much that the Soviet Union went through and that now Russia is going through. He's an authentic Russian. And people probably in

Russia won't like that, many of them, because they don't want to think that Putin is a reflection of how their country has developed. But he is, in much the same way that Boris Johnson is British and Trump is American. These are not aberrations. They stem from the society and the culture which we have. Terrifying, but sadly true. Johnson can only exist within Britain and Britishness. I'm afraid so, yes. So talk to me about his childhood,

his parents. Is it true his mother's from Kalinik, that strange part of East Prussia that was nicked by the, was handed over to the Soviets after the war? I mean, what's important about his family upbringing is how affluent or not were they growing up? They were not affluent at all. And his youth and his childhood were, as with most people, very formative. He grew up in a tough area of Leningrad, a very poor area, where most families were broken families. They didn't have a couple with children. Either the father had gone off or there was a single mother. It was a difficult upbringing in an area where criminality was rampant. It was a difficult upbringing in an area where criminality was rampant.

He was a little tear away as a child, and he learned a lot of what he knows even today about life in the courtyard, where he played around and fought with the other kids, many of whom would go on to become criminals, who would become street children or organized criminals. It was a difficult upbringing. He had a loving family, but a family which didn't show its love. His father was very taciturn, didn't show emotion. There was no kind of sentimentality in his family. He was the child of their old age.

His mother was 40 when he was born. In that sense, he was pampered. He was given a lot of freedom. And in the end, it was sport that kind of kept him off the streets because he became fascinated with, first of all, Sambo, which is a Russian martial art like judo, and then actually with judo. And that kind of focused him and separated him from these ruffians, these young hooligans who were ruling the courtyard and with whom he'd been hanging out before. But he also learned during that time, never to give up a fight, to fight as though it was the last thing you were going to do, you're fighting for survival. And his friends described, you know, people would stay away from

him because they didn't want to tangle with this very small, wiry, thin youth who would just go berserk when there was a fight and who loved fighting, who would pile in. It wasn't that fights came to him. He would find when there was a fight going and join in. And then gradually, not settled down, but found his focus in life, which was that he wanted to join the KGB. He wanted to become a judo champion. He wanted to go to university. And he showed the same kind of determination, the same self-discipline, iron self-control that he'd shown in his fights with his friends to try to get to a different state of life, to a better place in life. Philip, I was talking to a senior naval officer the other day who said that they've picked something up in their close analysis of Putin, which is since the invasion of Ukraine, he's dropped his pretense at speaking sort of high Russian, if that's the right word. And he now speaks very much more in the patois, the accent of the kind of ghetto of his childhood. Is that something you've come across? I think the key word is pretense. What is a pretense with Putin? And what is the reality?

Because he has these two sides. And people have noticed this, certainly, at least since he was in St. Petersburg in the early 90s, when he was deputy mayor, that he didn't speak like Gorbachev, like Yeltsin, like most of the Soviet leaders before him. He spoke a very refined literary kind of Russian. And people really noticed this because it's something which marks intellectuals in St. Petersburg, but it's not something that politicians, let alone politicians who have a kind of rather dubious background in some respects, would use. But at the same time, he has absolute trademark vulgarisms. And the question is, does he bring out these vulgarisms? What you're talking about since Ukraine, he's kind of said once, you know, I don't send my generals in to chew snot.

Snot is something which he refers to very often. He talks about journalists smearing snot and their erotic fantasies across the page. It is vulgar. It's deliberately vulgar. Now, is it something he puts on? Is it something which when he's under stress or when he feels very strongly about something, it comes out, this patois of his childhood, these kind of street slang expressions? I think with Putin, one of the consistently difficult things to know is, is he acting?

Is he playing a part? Is this really how he is? Or is it something which he's using as an instrument? And that's true, not just of language, but of many of the effects that he wishes to convey. I mean, that huge long table that he was sitting at, where he was at one end and about 15 yards away, he had some of his colleagues. It was a wonderful shot. At one end of the table, the defence minister and the chief of staff were kind of looking rather pathetic and cowering. Why did he do that? Well, people said, well, he's become unhinged. Other people said, oh, he's afraid of COVID. No, it was absolutely deliberate. It was a theatrical display to make people think, oh my God, he's completely irresponsible. What's he going to do next?

The Kissinger madMadman idea, you know, like Nixon used to use, if they think I'm completely crazy, they'll be a bit more careful what they do. And I say that because a couple of days later, we saw him sitting right next to the Chief of Staff and the Defence Minister, whom he'd been metres away from before. So, he stages what he's doing to have an effect. Let's talk about his career. He achieved his childhood dream of joining the KGB. Well, what was the KGB at that time and where was he sent? The KGB at that time was a dream for a lot of intelligent young Russians. If you joined the KGB, you had forbidden knowledge. They didn't worry so much, many of them, and I'm not just talking about Putin.

Lots of others who've left similar accounts that they learned Serbo-Croat or Albanian or some obscure language in the hope that when they graduated, they would find a niche in the KGB. Why? Yes, forbidden knowledge, as I said, they were allowed to know things which ordinary Soviet citizens weren't allowed to know. And they had the possibility of traveling abroad, of having access to foreign currency, commissariats with foodstuffs that ordinary Russians couldn't buy, of a lot of privileges. And that little card, it's called an Udostovrenia, the little badge that KGB officers carried. That inspired

fear. If you were in that position, you had an awful lot of power. So lots of young people, bright young people in the Soviet Union, wanted to join the KGB. And he manages to do that. Where's he sent? And what's his job? Well, he was sent abroad eventually, but only to East Germany. I think he was a mediocre KGB officer in the sense that he wanted to go to Bonn or to a Western capital, and he didn't get there. On the other hand, there were, what, quarter of a million KGB officers of various levels and in various different departments of the KGB, and only about 3,000 of them went abroad. So the fact he got abroad at all was a very considerable achievement,

given that he didn't have patronage, he didn't have people who were kind of pushing behind him. He was not an exceptionally bright linguist or an exceptionally bright student. Given his circumstances, he did pretty well, but he wasn't a high flyer by any manner of means. What's his job in East Germany? He had a really, really boring job. I mean, there've been lots of stories about, oh, you know, he dealt with the Red Army faction

and he planned the terrorist attacks. I mean, frankly, forget it. None of that is true. And this, again, is one of the problems. There have been so many myths about Putin, both in the KGB and later on. The first step of any biographer is you have to actually try to find out what's true and what is not. So what did he do in East Germany? He was dealing with trying to recruit illegals. Illegals are people who, not under diplomatic cover,

they establish themselves in a Western country under an alias, pretending to be Western citizens. It's something that our intelligence services don't do because, you know, it's simply not worth it. But the Russians, it's a long tradition and they do it. So he was trying to find people who might serve as illegals. He had absolutely no success, whatever. As well as that, he was supposed to be recruiting agents. He had a little bit more success on that, but it was very, very marginal. He was a good little cog in the KGB machine who ticked the boxes and did what he was supposed to and was promoted bit by bit. But

he would never have gone hugely high in the KGB if he'd stayed with them. What happens? The Berlin Wall comes down. Putin's in Dresden, East Germany. What's this new world order? What are the opportunities but also dangers for Putin? Well, he didn't like the Berlin Wall coming down because this was his world that was disappearing and he couldn't do anything about it. I mean, the whole point of all these guys in East Germany and places like it when the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse and its empire in Europe was collapsing, was they could only look on. They couldn't do anything at all. And this was the seminal event in their lives. This was their whole universe, which was

ending. It opened, as it happened, enormous opportunities for Putin, because within Russia, liberals, the democratic opposition was beginning to establish a foothold. And the KGB, instead of being sort of desperately worried about dissidents all the time, started to worry about the democratic opposition, and it needed people who could get close to these new democratic politicians, like the guy who became the mayor of St. Petersburg, the mayor of Leningrad, Anatoly Sobchak. And Putin was assigned by the KGB, something he's always denied, but which is true, he was assigned to be Sobchak's minder. And over the following years, it's very interesting, he was kind of torn. Do I stay with my loyalties to the KGB? Or do I switch my loyalties to this rather impressive politician whom he liked, and who was in a sense his mentor? And in the end, he did switch,

though not formally. He still remained formally a member of the KGB, but increasingly he became a St. Petersburg politician and part of that democratic movement that was then evolving. So he is sort of transitioning from KGB operative to going into politics. What were his big breaks? Was he riding the coattails of Sobchak? He didn't even ride the coattails. Sobchak found him. He was the guy who could make things happen because Putin was very organized, very efficient

at a time in Russia and in a place where there really weren't many people who could actually make things happen. It was one of the New York Times correspondents who was in Russia at that time, who went to St. Petersburg and met Putin, said, he's the guy who can push the buttons that Sobchak needs to make things happen. I've heard that from so many people. He could make the trains run on time. You know, Sobchak would dream the mayor of Leningrad. He was a kind of visionary and was interested in culture. He was interested in foreign policy. He wasn't actually interested in the nuts and bolts of making a big city of 5 million people in a very powerless economic situation work. Putin did that for him. So he was promoted, he became deputy mayor, he became first deputy

mayor, he became acting mayor. Acting mayor of a city of 5 million in Russia's second city is quite an important role. And that essentially established the basis for him to go on to Moscow, start being promoted within the presidential administration. And from there on, it just continued. This is Dan Snow's History Hit. Talking about Vladimir Putin. All coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga.

And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. In this period of Lemmingrad, what was his relationship like with the liberalising agenda in Russia?

When do we start to see a kind of worldview take shape? Well, I think probably it started to take place in East Germany. I say probably, I can elide that probably. It started to take place in East Germany, as he realized, first of all, that the elements of a market system, which had continued in East Germany, you know, you had private shops, you had a lot of private market activities, and that they really worked. And in East Germany, when he was there in the 80s, there were things which you couldn't find. The attitude was so different from the Soviet system, where everyone was surly and griping, and nothing was available,

and the shelves were empty, and so on. So in East Germany, he started to think about what kind of system worked and what kind of system wouldn't. When he got back to St. Petersburg, then it all started to happen in practice. And you must remember that the early 90s, things changed from one day to the next. It was not the kind of gradual change which we have in our societies, everything was being completely upended. And what was impossible, unthinkable, one week, three weeks later, would become pretty much normal in terms of people being able to demonstrate, people being able to establish businesses, people being able to start their own banks. All this stuff, which you went to prison for in the Soviet Union, suddenly became doable.

So it was a period of absolutely extraordinary change. And in St. Petersburg, Putin was among the more liberal people, in some respects, more liberal even than the mayor, Sobchak, over, for example, Western investment, the idea that Westerners could invest in Russia and buy Russian property, Russian real estate. Most Russians thought that was absolutely unthinkable. You know, it was kind of humiliating. Putin reconciled himself to that. He accepted what the IMF was trying to do in Russia with aid, but also to some extent shock therapy with trying to change things, privatization. And along with people like Kudrin and Chubais, the father of privatization, he was among the economic liberals. What about the big move to Moscow? What was his first job in Moscow? Well, he had to move to Moscow because Sobchak lost an election and he was on bad terms with Sobchak's successor. And he didn't want to stay anyway, had it been since Sobchak had lost. But he built enough of a network of contacts because many of the people in Moscow had come from St. Petersburg. It's a whole kind of St. Petersburg network that had established itself around Yeltsin and Moscow.

And they helped him. And so he went to Moscow, and he worked looking after the Kremlin's foreign property. Now, that may seem little, but they had about $600 billion worth of foreign property, embassies, trade missions, property in all kinds of different countries. Again, because things were changing so fast, he moved very quickly from one position to another. He moved from there to become head of what was called the Control Directorate, which basically was a kind of inspectorate general that kept tabs on what was happening in all the ministries in the provinces as well, who was cheating, who was embezzling, which administrations were deeply corrupt. They were

all deeply corrupt, which were the most corrupt. The defense ministry, for example, was extremely corrupt, and Putin spent a lot of time investigating that. So he was there in a very influential position, and then moved higher up the presidential administration. He became in charge of regions. administration, he became in charge of regions, he became eventually head of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, head of the Security Council, which is a bit like the National Security Advisor in the United States, and finally Prime Minister. Was he personally corrupt? I mean, he's chasing corrupt people around. Are we seeing the beginning of his amassing of wealth? Well, you say the beginning of his amassing of wealth? Well, you said the beginning of his amassing of wealth. That raises the question of whether he's amassed it. And I think the answer is he has not,

but we'll come to that in a second. Yes, everyone was corrupt. There was an American banker who was working there who said to me, there are A's, B's and C's. The A's, and there are very, very few of them, don't accept money for anything. The B's, well, they try to do their job, but they try to squirrel away money for their retirement or whatever. Putin was a B, and the C's won't raise a pen unless you pay them up front. gratuities. You know, there's a difference between accepting money from businessmen to say, well, thank you for the help you gave me, and accepting a bribe, which is upfront and saying, I'll give you this money if you do that. Putin would accept gratuities, but very carefully, because he said this at the time, that if you accept bribes, you render yourself vulnerable, laying yourself open to being blackmailed later by others who can show that you were dishonest. And I think that's been very important for him. And when you say, has he amassed money now?

No, the CIA has actually no evidence that he's amassed great wealth. People say, oh, he's got $200 billion. Well, where did they get that figure? It's plucked out of the air. There's no evidence for it. as he has great personal wealth. And the reason he doesn't is partly he can't afford to make himself vulnerable to that kind of pressure from others, which he would be under if it were known and if it could be proved that he amassed an immense fortune illicitly. And also, what's he going to do with it? You know, in Russia, power is what counts. You can lose your money at the drop of a hat. If you have power, then you have everything. You don't need money. He has access to absolutely everything he could want. What's he going to use money for?

This is one of these canards that you keep hearing, but there's no basis for it. In 1999, Putin becomes prime minister. Yeltsin steps down the last day of that year and Putin begins, beginning of 2000, he is Russia's president. How does he cement his position within Russia? Cleverly, dishonestly, corruptly. You know, Russia, even during the Soviet period, Soviet period was a bit of an exception, but Russia, all through its history, has been a patrimonial state. And the way that works is that the kingpin, the czar in the empire, now a leader like Putin, gives those around him, his supporters, the possibility of amassing great wealth. It's not that he amasses great wealth for himself, but he gives those around

him the possibility of enriching themselves. And in return, they provide absolutely unstinting loyalty. And that happens at Putin's level. It happens at the next level down for ministers, for governors, for city mayors, all the way through the system. That's how it works. city mayors all the way through the system. That's how it works. Giving people the possibilities of rent seeking. It's not even bribery. It's not even embezzlement. It's government contracts from which they can make loads and loads of money because they submit bids, which are exorbitant, but because of their political connections, they get the business and they rake off huge amounts of money. And that's how the whole thing works. It's not a mafia state, it's a patrimonial state. In terms of his popular appeal, because he does win elections,

initially, certainly, was strength, projecting strength. Is that a cliche that Russian leaders need to do that? Or is there something in that? He is, even now, basically popular. And that's something that people in the West find very difficult to understand, especially over the last two or three years, when a system which was actually quite dynamic, and there was a certain amount of freedom in the Russian system up till about 2018, 2019, has now clamped down, clamped down more and more and more, and has become much more dictatorial. But even now, a majority either support him or are passive and kind of go along with it. And you're going to ask why. I think one of the key reasons is that people remember the total chaos in the late 80s and especially the early 1990s when Russia really was not just a basket case, but all values

were kind of missing. A tiny example, schoolgirls in high school, something like 30%, thought it would be a really good career to be a prostitute. All the kind of moral bases of society had gone. You could walk around the street and find yourself in a fight. You could be shot in gang warfare. You didn't have enough to eat. It was appalling. So for most ordinary Russians, that memory is still very strong. When I say ordinary Russians, especially the older generation. So now Putin has a kind of guarantee against that. And he has, despite everything, life in Russia is vastly better than it was in the Soviet Union for almost everyone.

It's less true today than it was two or three years ago, but it's still basically true. Okay, so there's Putin that you have interviewed hundreds of people about and you've studied, is there a disconnect between the Putin that we see today and the Putin that you have studied through these years of his rise? I mean, is he the same man or has something changed? No, he's the same man. And that's something which, again, we find difficult to accept. And what has happened in Ukraine is actually totally consistent with the way he has acted in the past. In 2003, he arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest man in Russia, the head of Yukos, a very brilliant entrepreneur, because Khodorkovsky

had political ambitions, or at least Putin thought he did, and he was probably right. For Putin, it was much more important to bring the oligarchs into the line, to force them to accept the system he'd created, than to risk Western disinvestment, severe economic problems as a result of cracking down on oligarchs. Exactly the same with the annexation of Crimea. It was more important to get Crimea into Russia than to worry about sanctions from the West. Today, the invasion of Ukraine, extremely harsh sanctions, really serious effects on the Russian economy. They're not perhaps quite as serious as the West hoped. Again, the economic fallout is secondary. The politics are primary. So he's been completely consistent in all that. So you don't buy this argument about his physical decline and the longer he's held on to power, it's corrupted him. This is a great example of

hubris and overreach. Is that something that's changed? Has he got more detached from reality? I don't really buy that. Yes, overreach. I think the cost of what he's doing in Ukraine is probably going to prove prohibitive. And that is overreach. That is a miscalculation. But what is this war in Ukraine really about? It's a struggle between Russia and America. It's Putin's attempt to force the Americans to recognize that Russia has interests and that Russia is an independent player, which is not going to toe the American line. If you go a little bit further, if you like, it's an attempt to upend the whole security structure that America has been leading in Europe since the end of the Cold War.

And that's something that Putin has wanted to do. He's become more and more concerned about American domination, America's refusal to accept Russia's interests, as he sees it. He's become more and more concerned about that over the last 15 years, since 2007. So it hasn't come out of the blue. It's something which was foreseeable, which could have been avoided in theory, but in practice probably couldn't. I sort of see it as a Shakespearean tragedy. It was written in the stars and no one could do anything about it,

that this relationship between America and Russia was going to become a train wreck. And it has become a train wreck. And poor Ukraine is the terrain on which this battle is being fought out. Lastly, as you point out, he's not an aberration within Russia. If he does go, if there's a coup, so he's removed, he dies. He does sort of reflect the current Russian official thinking about that security arrangement, about the balance of power in Europe. He's not particularly out on a limb here. No, not out on a limb at all. And it's not just the official view.

There's always been this thing in Russia that Russians have been torn between the idea that they're part of Europe, they're part of the West. That's the westernizing view. And the idea that the West is out to get them. The West wants to bring Russia to its knees. And Putin himself has been pulled in both directions. And now it's the second part of that dyad, the idea that the West is out to get us, which is absolutely dominant. So yeah, he is a reflection of a lot

of what many Russians think. And I don't think he's in declining health at all. My view, having watched him very carefully over the last 10 years, it's okay, he's 10 years older, coming up to 70, but he doesn't have health problems. This is wishful thinking. If he does go, it will either be because he's been there far too long and he decides that he's able to move to a different position. I think that's what he's actually wanted, but whether he'll be able to do

so is another matter. Or eventually his health will fail and then someone else will take over. But the someone else is not going to be that different, might even be worse. Well, on that very happy thought, thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast. Tell everyone what the book's called. Right, it's called Putin, His Life and Times, and it's published by Bodley Head. It's quite a thick book, but it's not difficult to read. Absolutely not. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much indeed, Dan. Real pleasure being with you. Thanks folks for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History. As I say all the time,

I love doing these podcasts. They are the best thing I do professionally. I feel very lucky to have you listening to them. If you fancied giving them a rating review, obviously the best rating review possible would be ideal. It makes a big difference to us. I know it's a pain, but we'd really, really be grateful. And if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable, don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors, that's flying high in the charts. We've got our medieval podcast, Gone Medieval with the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. We've got the ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes. And we've got warfare as well, dealing with all things military. Please go and check those out wherever you get your pods.