Putin: Birth and Rebirth

Over these two or three decades, hundreds of thousands of texts will be written about Putin, repeating popular nonsense like the idea that Putin’s behavior is determined by his KGB past. Where do you get that from? For example, does today’s behavior of Gennady Gudkov get determined by his past work in the KGB or not? Gudkov is a political emigrant, a foreign agent. And if Gudkov’s KGB work didn’t define him, why should Putin’s? Even formally: he was not a prominent figure in the KGB, he wasn’t even offered to stay there after the USSR collapsed. And in the 1990s, Putin was quite a liberal. Everyone seems to have forgotten that in 1997, risking his career and freedom, he organized Anatoly Sobchak’s escape from Russia. And in Putin’s early 2000 election campaign, people sincerely said that Putin was “this kind of guy, a market reformer and democrat!”

And Putin’s first presidential steps confirmed this. Forgotten? But at the beginning of his presidency, for example, a ban was introduced on arrests without a judge’s sanction. And one of my acquaintances, whose business was targeted by the FSB, was released from detention because the judge did not give such a sanction.

So everything started exactly as Pushkin (so valued by Putin) wrote: “the beautiful beginning of Alexander’s days.” And then continued, also according to Pushkin: “A weak and sly ruler, a bald dandy, an enemy of labor, accidentally warmed by glory, then ruled over us.”

My point is simple. Putin was not always the blood-stained despot who couldn’t care less about the chimera of conscience, morality, and law; who easily kills both Navalny, Prigozhin, and thousands of people in war. Putin underwent a transformation. And I would like to see someone who truly knows how and why this happened. But what matters to us now is who he has become. And he has become a figure whose touch turns people into moral transformers (although he would probably chuckle—“into transformers!”). In short, he turns them into nobodies, into scum.

The current Putin is an anti-Midas. Who would have thought he had such a talent? But it’s true! What a fantastic organizer of political purges Sergey Kiriyenko has become in his administration, this Kinder Surprise, a democrat who once helped create the Union of Right Forces with Nemtsov and Khakamada! Definitely a surprise!

What a dull croaker Dmitry Kiselyov has turned into! Everyone forgot that he once refused to broadcast propaganda about Soviet tanks in Vilnius and was expelled from foreign broadcasting with a wolf ticket. They forgot that after the USSR collapsed, Kiselyov hosted the program “Window to Europe,” then moved to Ukraine and spoke about how freely he breathed there. But then he met Putin, fell head over heels in love—and apparently entered into a spiritual marriage with him.

But the brightest example is Dmitry Medvedev’s transformation. It well illustrates why Putin likes broken (but skillfully vile, like Simonyan) people close to him. This is a very archetypal story about a model student girl and her dull gray friend who believed in love but got smeared in mud—and now are convinced that nothing but dirt exists, and all beautiful words are for fools and idiots.

Sometimes in high school such a pair forms. She is from a professor’s family, has her own room in a separate apartment—a model student who reads novels and dreams of all-consuming passion. And with her is a gray mouse from a communal apartment, about whom no one can say anything because there’s nothing to say. She’s a pale moth who doesn’t read books but goes to the cinema and also believes in great and bright love. But one day, instead of love, she receives an invitation to a party, a party in the Kremlin, where she is roughly and harshly used without any love. By whom exactly? By power and life! Because life, according to a joke, is harsher than a member.

And this pale weakness, having learned that there is no love in the world, that it’s just blah-blah-blah to cover up cruelty, wants to make sure everyone has exactly the same life. And she doesn’t calm down until the model student friend, upon her suggestion, experiences the same and even worse, because the model student sinks to the bottom despite being a professor’s daughter and fans herself with a fan to entertain the whole brothel: “Mad animals! Half-dead dog Biden! Freaks Merz and Macron! Eurodegenerates! Green aphids! British thieves! Euroimbeciles! Mad granny Ursula! Hyperactive frozen idiots! Banderite freaks!!” This is a quote from Medvedev’s fresh Telegram.

Medvedev’s meltdown was so stunning that people still try to explain it by alcoholism. But a person who not long ago eloquently proclaimed that freedom is better than unfreedom—this pro-Western guy with an iPhone in his hand—cannot, sober, spit at the West: “They are bastards and degenerates. They want death for us, Russia. And while I live, I will do everything to make them disappear!”

However, just as Medvedev’s speechwriters wrote about freedom and unfreedom for the president, now some clever SMM specialist writes his texts in Telegram in the tone of a drunken prostitute. The question is not about drunkenness but that the current Medvedev is satisfied with this image: a perpetually muddy alcoholic.

And the main thing is that this image suits Putin very well. Putin looks at the world and humanity through the lens of his own experience. All people are scum. And Medvedev, this professor’s son and, according to Narusova, Sobchak’s favorite, is worse than a thug from a communal apartment. In Putin’s universe, any person is ready to betray and break; the question is only about the incentive and the price.

And the main thing is that people bend before power. Life is a zero-sum game: if one wins, another loses. And “win-win,” a win for all, was invented by cynics to fool fools. There is no love, only lust, but if you have power behind you, you can take any Olympic champion. Life is shit and scum, an endless war of all against all, and you must be the strongest to break everyone, to win and dominate, or else they will break and dominate you. Let fools pray to their Navalny, who flew to the other world because he believed in the power of ideas, not whips. But you should believe only in the whip, the baton, the mop handle, the sledgehammer, violence.

And the worst thing is that you can’t argue with Putin.

This is exactly how everything happens in Russia.

And wherever things are different in the world, Putin is sure it’s the fairy tales of liberalism.

And of course, you can try to find your beautiful fairy tale somewhere in the world. Or, staying in Putin’s Russia, emigrate into quiet and sorrowful numbness. Or, tired of resisting, slowly become like Kiriyenko, Simonyan, Kiselyov, Solovyov, Medvedev.

But that’s where the options end. I have no other reality for you for the next twenty or even thirty years. Choose.

Happy birthday, Putin!