Russian President Vladimir Putin is remoted — and getting extra so. President Joe Biden calls him a battle legal. American intelligence says Putin’s personal advisers are deceptive him concerning the battle, telling Putin what he desires to listen to. So what’s going by way of this secretive, solitary dictator’s thoughts? We’ve discovered one man who thinks he is aware of the reply.
Journalist and creator Marvin Kalb has cherished Russia for nearly 70 years. Within the early Nineteen Fifties, he studied Russian historical past as a PhD candidate at Harvard. In 1960, he moved to Moscow as a reporter for CBS Information. He’s interviewed many highly effective Russians. However he’s by no means talked to Vladimir Putin. To get perception into Putin, Kalb says, it’s higher to examine him than to interview him.
For an episode of Right now, Defined, host Noel King talked with Kalb about how Putin has come to depend on a skewed model of historical past and an more and more small circle of advisers — and what meaning for the battle in Ukraine. A partial transcript of their dialog, edited for size and readability, is beneath.
Marvin Kalb
I’ve discovered through the years that if you happen to learn intensely what a pacesetter says or writes or thinks about himself, you’re going to get a fairly good concept of what he really is. Typically in an interview, you get solely what a significant political determine needs to convey. And he does that very effectively. Putin is an astoundingly good interview. And reporters who get interviews with him do very effectively as a result of he can play to the persona. He is aware of the right way to take care of folks. That’s terribly necessary to him.
Noel King
Primarily based in your a few years of studying and observing, and figuring out that you’ve got a eager sense into who persons are, who’s Vladimir Putin?
Marvin Kalb
Vladimir Putin in the meanwhile is a really lonely determine. He’s lastly a dictator. He was an authoritarian determine. He used to have the sort of energy {that a} czar had. He’s now an absolute dictator. And for him, that’s a nasty factor.
What it means is, on the one hand, he has absolute energy to do no matter he desires in Russia. However the folks round him at the moment are petrified of him. And that signifies that they may inform him what they assume he desires to listen to. That could be very dangerous for any chief of any nation. Putin now’s in determined want of stable, one hundred pc verified data, and he isn’t getting it. That’s the perception of the US authorities, of Western nations, and I feel, logically, given the historical past of dictatorship, that while you get to an absolute high level of energy, you start to lose it. And Putin now’s within the means of dropping the ability that for many of his life, he sought to build up.
He’s a former KGB official. One of many younger males within the dying days of the Soviet Union who would attempt to reside within the synthetic world created by the KGB. He would think about what the Western world was like. He would strive very arduous to grasp it. He would decide up a language. The federal government gave him each alternative to study as a lot concerning the enemy as he might, and he did, and he thought he would be capable to determine the right way to manipulate the enemy in order that he might destroy it. That was the entire level of the KGB operation. It was an intelligence unit, but it surely was additionally a unit that operated to attain sure ends. And for the KGB, the tip has all the time been the dissolution of the Western menace.
Noel King
We all know that US intelligence has tried to evaluate whether or not the pandemic modified Vladimir Putin’s psychological state, whether or not isolation from the pandemic modified him. Was he a solitary individual earlier than the pandemic?
Marvin Kalb
Each chief is, to some extent, a lonely determine, however Putin was not. Putin loved being with folks, however on the similar time, he was all the time very suspicious of all people. And so there was all the time a distance between him and anybody he was negotiating with. And positively between him and an individual he would regard as an enemy, and so, sure, distance existed. He was surrounded all the time by his personal intelligence, his personal ambition, his drive for energy. And when he achieved that, he was excellent at persuading the person above him, the president of Russia, [Boris] Yeltsin. Within the Nineteen Nineties, Yeltsin introduced him down from St. Petersburg to Moscow and Yeltsin appointed Putin the pinnacle of the KGB, or the brand new model of it. And a few years later appointed him prime minister. After which when Yeltsin needed to resign, he regarded round and the one individual he felt he might belief was Putin.
So Putin turned his successor, and virtually instantly established a brand new sort of governance in Russia. He had his KGB of us able to roll into energy not solely in Moscow and St. Petersburg, however everywhere in the nation. It’s a huge nation. It extends over many time zones. It’s troublesome to run a rustic that enormous and Putin had his folks in place to run it, he had management over the whole operation. He turned the boss.
Noel King
And so who surrounds Putin now? Who’re his advisers? Who’re his mates?
Marvin Kalb
The people who find themselves round him now are the identical folks, roughly, who’ve been round him for the previous 22 years. They’re the folks from the KGB. He allowed these folks to take management over giant financial belongings within the nation. Oil, fuel, timber, invested within the arms of a really small group, and this small group proved to be efficient sufficient for Putin to change into the boss and run this very advanced society.
Noel King
What does it inform you that Vladimir Putin has not made new mates over the past 22 years? That the identical individuals who surrounded him when he was a KGB agent encompass him as he’s president of a world energy?
Marvin Kalb
And that’s a particularly necessary statement, as a result of what we study from it’s that we’re coping with a person who had a sure imaginative and prescient of the world 20-30 years in the past and retains it solely in sharper kind at this time.
Please bear in mind, Putin is at the beginning a Russian nationalist. The query that comes into thoughts: is he an ultra-nationalist? By which, I imply, does he see every thing from a Russian viewpoint? And the reply, sadly, is sure. And since he sees every thing from a Russian viewpoint, he appears to be like at a rustic, for instance, like Belarus; at Ukraine; they’re each Slavic. They’re each Orthodox in faith and due to this fact in his thoughts, they’re Russian. And it’s not comprehensible to him in any respect that people who find themselves authentically Russian, as he sees it, might ever be in riot in opposition to Moscow. In his thoughts, they must be a part of Moscow.
So we are able to look now on the battle in Ukraine and say, “Isn’t it marvelous?” and certainly it’s, that democracy seems to be holding on in Ukraine. For Putin, that’s heresy. That’s blasphemy. That’s unacceptable. And so he’ll proceed to struggle to attain the belief of what to him is completely regular.
Noel King
At this level, it has change into very clear, in each reporting from on the bottom and in reporting from the US Pentagon, Vladimir Putin isn’t profitable the battle in Ukraine. It appears as if it’s too early to say he’s dropping it. What does that do for his psychological state, do you assume?
Marvin Kalb
Oh, I feel it’s a shattering expertise. That doesn’t imply it completely undermines him. He’s a robust man and he’s very good. He’s crafty, the truth is. There’s a Russian phrase, хитрый, which implies crafty, in a avenue nook sense. He understands energy and he understands the utilization of energy. He has little or no persistence for intelligence that involves him saying, “We’re killing too many individuals.” Neglect all of that. The place are we when it comes to the tip that I’ve articulated as our coverage aim?
In actual fact, his coverage aim, now, is rarely going to occur. He thought the battle could be over inside two or three days. We’re now right into a second month and it could go on for much longer than this. I hope not, but it surely’s attainable. And in his thoughts, he’s pursuing a respectable historic aim. And might he lose? No. Can he persuade himself, ever, that he has misplaced? No. The one individuals who can persuade him won’t ever persuade him, they must do away with him in a technique or one other. And people are the folks closest to him. They’re those who know his thoughts, know his strategies as a result of they’re the identical folks.
And in the event that they do away with him, there could also be any person very very like him who would come into energy, or if we’re fortunate … if we’re fortunate, we could get to see the opposite promise of Russia … of literature, of music, of historical past, of progress, of creativity — Russia and the Russian folks, it’s an excellent society.
And if there have been one other method of leaving the KGB mentality and reaching into the opposite Russia, we’d all be so significantly better off led by the Russian folks themselves. Is it attainable? Sure. It’s there. It has to emerge from the soot and the gutter that it exists in at this time.
Hearken to the total episode of Right now, Defined wherever you get podcasts, together with Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher.
