Going for the Throat

In his election campaign biography, 'At First Hand', Vladimir Putin fondly reminisces about the hero of his teenage years: Leonid, the young Putin's judo mentor. The Russian President-elect recalls how Leonid once asked the coach of a rival karate class to vacate the gym for his judo boys. The arrogant trainer ignored him. "Then," Putin recounts with obvious delight, "Leonid strangled him slightly, removed his unconscious body from the mat, and told us to go ahead."

The Random House Dictionary of the English Language helpfully defines the term thug as "one of a former group of professional robbers and murderers in India, who strangled their victims." Coincidentally, during the week that the Putin biography was published last month, Anatoli Averkin, a 30-year-old prisoner in Yoshkar-Ola and ardent Putin loyalist, fell out with his cellmate, who endorsed Communist leader Gennadi Zyuganov in the recent election. In the ensuing political debate Averkin strangled his opponent. Two weeks later another Putin admirer, Colonel Yuri Budanov, a commander in Chechnya, celebrated his idol's election victory. A happy Budanov got drunk and then kidnaped and strangled an 18-year-old Chechen girl suspected of sniping at his troops. Averkin and Budanov may not have read the Putin book, but they still got the message: You need to be a thug to get ahead.

Those worried about the Putin presidency trace the roots of their apprehension to the President-elect's teenage yearning to join the KGB and to his KGB past. But it was only natural for an ordinary 15-year-old Soviet boy to dream of joining the KGB as an intrepid officer, ready to die for cause and country. A human being is what his information makes him, and a Soviet boy lived on a harsh information diet. Sophisticated Soviet intellectuals, eager for state prizes, dachas, fat royalties and foreign trips, glorified the KGB that most of them loathed and feared. How could 15-year-old Volodya Putin withstand the charms of Stanislav Lyubshin and Oleg Yankovski, famous actors who played KGB agents in the movie that inspired him to join the KGB?

The sad paradox is that the official propaganda bred good qualities like diligence, persistence, enterprise and loyalty. But to what end? Well-meaning boys grew up to be diligent and persistent hunters of dissidents and freethinkers; enterprise eventually served only vested corporate or private interests; and loyalty degenerated into a mutual code of silence among thieves. This reflects the tragic incongruity of Russian history, formulated by philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev in his book 'The Russian Idea': "The pure messianic idea of the Kingdom of the Lord, the Kingdom of Truth, was muddled by the idea of the imperialist will to power ... Russian communism ... corrupted the quest for the Kingdom of Truth with the will to power."

But once little boys grow up, are exposed to new information, see the world in all its complexity and still insist that what they were taught as children is true, then that really is a reason to worry. In 'The Dragon', a biting satire on both Hitlerism and Stalinism by Russian writer Yevgeni Shwarts, a vile sidekick of the play's deposed dictator tells Sir Lancelot: "It's not my fault. I just did as they taught us." Lancelot answers: "This is how they taught us all, but why did you have to be the best pupil?" It's not Putin's KGB past, but his present mindset that is so unnerving.

Putin's past hasn't prepared him to function as the efficient executive Russia so badly needs. Rather than supervise the affairs of the state, which is gripped by chronic political, economic and financial crises, Putin fights the Chechen war and totally concentrates on the military. He has attracted considerable attention by donning helmet and flight suit to fly to Grozny in a Su-27 combat jet, a move that filled the military brass with pride, but caused civilians to joke that the Kremlin considered buying a couple of new Sukhois to replace the airliners Yeltsin used.

Earlier this month Putin further pleased the military by taking a submarine dive. Russian admirals accorded their Commander-in-Chief full honors, traditionally reserved for a professional submariner on his first dive: they poured him a glass of sea water and had him kiss a sledgehammer. Hospitality turned to toadying when they treated Putin to roast piglet, a Soviet navy tradition normally reserved for sailors who have torpedoed an enemy ship. We have yet to learn what Putin has torpedoed. In the absence of the President-elect, the cabinet was forced to adjourn a session on the looming energy crisis that threatens to wreck the country. Ordinary citizens were left to wonder whether Putin would walk on water if his sub sank.

"If Yeltsin and Chubais were the farce Lenin and Trotsky of our criminal-elite revolution," says Professor Dmitri Furman, a Russian political scientist, "Putin is emerging as its farce Stalin." The system is likely to turn out as evil and oppressive, but not as all-pervading, since it's proving to be so petty and gray. But even a farce Stalin is a Stalin, and thugs are thugs. Alas, it seems that more strangled bodies will be removed from the Russian mat before this farce is over.