Rat catcher…
judo master…
scheming world leader — all can describe Russian President Vladimir Putin.
So how did a relatively unknown former KGB officer become the leader of Russia?
The real story of Putin's rise may surprise you.
If baby Vladimir Putin's crib had been a rusty bear trap, it would seem perfectly in line
with the rest of his harsh upbringing.
In his book, First Person, Putin revealed that his father was a physically disabled
factory worker who suffered a serious leg injury during World War II.
Putin's mother swept streets, cleaned lab equipment, and did other odd jobs for meager
pay.
Putin and his parents lived in a tiny room as part of a shared apartment.
They had no bathtub or hot water, and their toilet sat next to a dangerously dilapidated
stairwell that was riddled with holes.
To pass the time, Putin and his pals harassed the rats that plagued his apartment's stairwell.
It was during one of those rodent hunts that the future president learned a valuable lesson
about the dangers of backing opponents into a corner.
Putin wrote in First Person:
"Once I spotted a huge rat and pursued it down the hall until I drove it into a corner.
It had nowhere to run.
Suddenly it lashed around and threw itself at me.
I was surprised and frightened.
Now the rat was chasing me."
Putin got away, but the memory never escaped him.
Vladimir Putin's home life was no picnic.
But he more than compensated by devouring classroom time with disruptive outbursts.
His official Kremlin biography depicts the early portion of his education as a period
of chronic tardiness and infrequent studying.
He seldom dressed properly and seemed to wear rebellion like a badge of honor.
The young Putin ignored lessons, chucked chalk erasers at fellow students, and fought his
gym teacher on multiple occasions.
The unruly Putin's grades were middling for the most part.
However, he excelled at history and German.
German in particular had a stranglehold on Putin's heart — he even kept German flashcards
in his chemistry textbook.
Every good teacher knows there's a big difference between performance and potential, which certainly
proved true in Putin's case.
Behind his veneer of audacity was the beating brain of a grade-A student.
In sixth grade, a teacher helped him tap into his inner scholar and his marks improved significantly.
Putin's high school years were a complete 180 from his puckish primary school days.
After getting accepted to a school for the gifted, he established himself as an outstanding
student.
From there he went to law school and soon after joined the KGB.
Most youngsters have big dreams for their adult careers that get whittled down by reality.
But Vladimir Putin pretty much brought his fantasy to fruition.
From the ninth grade on, Putin knew that he wanted to join the KGB.
Driven by his naïve boyhood yearning, he traveled to the KGB headquarters in Leningrad
to offer his services.
However, officials told him to go to law school instead.
He listened, earning a law degree in 1975.
Evidently impressed with his follow-through, the intelligence agency offered Putin a post,
which he gladly accepted.
He soon went to spy school, where he honed his German skills and judo-chopped his way
to a black belt.
In 1985, Putin traveled to East Germany to do intelligence work.
The details of his exact activities are murky at best, but The Atlantic suggested he may
have collected technological secrets or enlisted high-ranking government officials as part
of a mission called Operation Luch.
In 2017, Putin made a stunning revelation, after claiming to have worked with "illegal
intelligence."
In other words, his activities somehow involved deep-cover espionage without the cover of
diplomatic protections.
East Germany provided a drastic departure from the brutal austerity of Soviet Russia.
It had cleaner streets, good beer, and greater political freedom.
Since he was now living in East Germany, Putin could pursue far finer things than stairwell
rats, including trendy clothes and a car.
The spy life wasn't too glamorous, but it didn't need to be when he could just knock
back a cold one with a comrade or flip through a fashion catalog.
However, there always comes a time when fantasies fade.
Putin's rude awakening came in November 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
"The wall that the East Germans put up in 1961 to keep its people in will now be breached
by anybody one who wants to leave."
Citizens had already been pouring into West Germany.
But once freedom seemed assured, many began turning their attention and aggression toward
the Soviet officials who had long stifled their freedom.
Fearing violent upheaval, Putin desperately sought support from Moscow officials.
But instead of getting the tanks he requested, Putin received a harrowing reply:
"We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow.
And Moscow is silent."
The words were deafening.
Communism had been cornered, but instead of ferociously defending itself, it surrendered
without a single squeak.
"Soviet influence is collapsing before his eyes and he calls home, he radios home, and
home isn't there."
The Atlantic succinctly summarized how this influenced the disillusioned spy:
"Putin learned that his future activity, in the KGB or otherwise, could not be guided
by blind loyalty to an ideology or to specific political leaders.
His loyalty had to be to the state itself."
After crashing to Earth from his Communist cloud, Vladimir Putin wanted to create a system
grounded in nationalistic fervor and subservience to ruling institutions.
During his first stint as Russian prime minister, he fleshed out that vision in a 1999 document
titled "Russia at the Turn of the Millennium."
Commonly referred to as "The Millennium Manifesto," the document presented Putin's reading of
Russia's past and future prospects.
In the document, the then prime minister primarily attributed Russia's history of political upheaval
to a divided populace.
Denizens had grown overly enamored with foreign concepts like free speech and individuality.
For Russia to take its place in the pantheon of great nations, citizens needed to unite
under a muscular central government.
Rather fittingly, two days after unveiling his manifesto on Russian destiny, Putin became
president.
Ten years separated the fall of the Berlin Wall and Vladimir Putin's ascent to the Russian
presidency.
During much of that intervening period, Putin was a relative unknown.
And once he became known, he aroused little confidence among political experts.
Even when Boris Yeltsin promoted Putin to prime minister in 1999, analysts largely agreed
that the upstart would have limitations as far as what he could accomplish.
Putin's track record up to that point was fairly barren.
After serving briefly as deputy mayor of Leningrad, Putin worked under President Boris Yeltsin
between 1998 and 1999.
He started as a liaison between the Kremlin and lower government offices, became head
of security for a while, and soon got tapped to be prime minister.
Five months later, Yeltsin stepped down and named Putin president.
In less than two years, Putin had gone from being a political question mark to a giant
red exclamation point.
However, as The Washington Post reported, the young president won public approval by
waging an aggressive war against Chechen rebels and touting himself as a tough guy.
When the time came to officially elect a new Russian president, Putin won decisively.
"Future starts here and now.
Future is you!"
RT hilariously refers to Vladimir Putin as a, quote, "Judo Knight" and features him swiveling
his hips and tossing docile opponents about like dolls.
Judo is so essential to Putin's identity that he politically aligns himself with billionaire
judo enthusiasts.
Some have even referred to his inner circle as a "judocracy" According to Newsweek, this
Putin views judo as:
"[A philosophy that] teaches self-control, the ability to feel the moment, to see the
opponent's strengths and weaknesses, to strive for the best results."
That ethos has come to define his political decision-making and approach to geopolitical
conflict.
According to Russian deputy finance minister Sergei Aleksashenko, Russia's 2014 Crimea
takeover perfectly illustrates the president's judo state of mind.
According to the deputy finance minister, rather than engaging in a bloody battle, Putin
curried favor with ethnic Russians in the Ukrainian military, largely eliminating the
need for fighting.
Viewed in light of Aleksashenko's assessment, it seems fair to say that the judo knight
turned his opponent's main line of defense into a defect.
In a similar vein, political wonk Nikolai Petrov has argued that Putin uses economic
sanctions on Russian businessmen to consolidate power.
It seems that in a world where geopolitics often gets likened to chess, Putin trips up
adversaries by playing a different game altogether.
In many ways, Vladimir Putin is a historical hybrid, a Soviet era holdover adapted to modern
times.
That becomes abundantly clear when one examines the way he wields information as both a shield
and a weapon.
As Wired explained, unfettered information makes Putin uncomfortable, given his KGB training.
For years, knowledge was what you stole or withheld from others, not something you nakedly
shared with the world.
Moreover, the collapse of the Soviet Union coincided with increased internet access and
intellectual independence.
In Putin's mind, it was a sign that society had veered off course and needed correcting.
As president he resolved to return Russia to a kind of pre-knowledge state.
Initially Putin limited his focus to controlling television and newspapers, unaware of the
internet's true transformative potential.
Then, 2011 happened.
That year, oppressed Arab citizens lashed out against their governments in response
to damning documents released by Wikileaks.
Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter helped fuel the uprisings.
Tunisia's government toppled.
"Either this is the first Arab revolution of the 21st century, or it will be brutally
suppressed."
In Russia, accusations of electoral chicanery spurred voter unrest.
But unlike Moscow in 1989, Putin refused to stay silent.
It was time to drop the hammer and also the sickle if need be.
In 2012, the Kremlin began quashing unwanted websites and sent internet trolls after bloggers
and journalists who criticized the regime.
Naturally, hacking became a technological trump card.
Despite ruling Russia for the better part of 20 years, Vladimir Putin has remained unreadable
as ever to presidents and pundits alike.
It's almost as if a former Soviet spy with a law degree and a strong dislike of political
transparency has been running the show all this time.
And what a show it's been.
New York Times contributor and longtime Russia correspondent Steven Myers spent years observing
the workings of the Kremlin and offered a few insights on what makes Putin so impenetrable.
Unsurprisingly, Putin keeps the media on a tight leash and himself on an even tighter
one.
During interviews, he answers controversial questions with cautiously worded equivocations,
always sure not to paint himself into a corner.
Aside from heavily scripted press conferences and choreographed public engagements, most
of what he does goes unreported.
Meanwhile, the slightest hint of criticism from any public figure gets swiftly snuffed
out.
Putin also puts up a technological wall, though not necessarily in the way that you think.
In a 2014 Time article, Simon Shuster argued that the ex-spy's aversion to using modern
technology has made him incredibly difficult to tap.
He doesn't use a cell phone.
He owns a computer but avoids using the internet.
Additionally, Putin gets his news delivered directly by intelligence officials via folders
and paper documents.
It goes without saying that the President of Russia is extremely tech-averse.
Vladimir Putin's life has spanned an absurd number of historic events.
He was born five months before Joseph Stalin's death.
He witnessed Communism's collapse firsthand and inherited his first presidency from the
Soviet Union's last leader.
Furthermore, Putin literally reshaped another country by taking one of its territories.
Given his seemingly forever-long reign, many have wondered when will Putin retire from
politics?
In 2014, Russian reporters asked the president point-blank whether he intended to change
the constitution to make his reign permanent.
Putin responded that changing the constitution would be, quote, "detrimental for the country."
He also added that he had no intentions of doing it.
The Independent noted that Russia's constitution prohibits presidents from having more than
two consecutive terms.
Putin became a three-term president by simply taking a break in between to become prime
minister a second time.
However, in 2021, he signed a law that would allow him to potentially serve until 2036.
The new legislation essentially "zeroes out" his previous terms.
Currently, nobody knows his intentions because, as Putin put it, he has yet to decide if he'll
leave the presidency.
After all, the truly powerful don't have to cling to their power — they simply have
it.
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