Vladimir Putin Read online

  ‘I do . . . Or do I?’

  BE AN ENIGMA

  Since Putin’s divorce he’s courted intrigue by being extravagantly coy about his relationship status.

  He has denied rumours of a fling with a gymnast, but in 2014 told journalists: ‘A friend of mine from Europe, a big boss, recently asked me, after what happened last year: “Listen, is there a love in your life?”

  ‘I say, “In what sense?”

  ‘“Do you love anyone?”

  ‘I say, “Yes.”

  ‘“And does anyone love you?”

  ‘I say, “Yes.”

  ‘He must have decided that I had completely gone wild.

  ‘“Thank God,” he said, before downing the vodka. “Everything is fine. Do not worry.”’47

  Be More Vlad

  To make yourself as romantic and mysterious as Vlad, try varying the way you say goodbye. By constantly switching between passionate tonguings and stiff, formal handshakes, you can keep everyone guessing about the tempestuous nature of your relationships, leaving you free to get on with quietly expanding your zone of influence.

  ‘By the way I just found some Bronze Age earthenware under your sofa.’

  CASUALLY FIND AN ANCIENT RELIC

  On only his third scuba dive, Putin was filmed discovering a haul of ancient Greek amphoras just two metres below the calm, clear surface of the Black Sea.

  ‘Treasure!’ he told reporters with a grin.48

  Despite the popularity of the diving spot, the priceless pottery must have gone unnoticed for over 1,400 years. Incredible!

  Be More Vlad

  Why not conveniently stumble upon a historically important relic of your own and show your friends how keen-eyed and cosmically lucky you are?

  If stuck for rare artefacts to plant, simply bury some gold pieces (aka chocolate coins) at the park, and get a passer-by to film you excitedly digging them up.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind, I’m just making a few edits to your diary.’

  REWRITE HISTORY

  Putin’s Russia runs on national pride. So it’s no surprise he’s made some tweaks to some of the nation’s less glorious chapters.

  A textbook for history teachers that Putin put his weight behind49 seemed to excuse Stalin – generally regarded as one of history’s great monsters – for merely doing what the circumstances of World War Two demanded. Meanwhile the Perm-36 Gulag Museum in Siberia has been taken over by the state and relaunched to celebrate the camp’s role in beating the Nazis, ignoring the brutal labour forced on dissidents there.50

  Be More Vlad

  You too can rewrite the embarrassing parts of your history. Say you’ve been looking at some websites you’d rather your family didn’t know about (perhaps you’ve been doing research for an academic paper on human desire, which you’d naturally like to be a surprise). With a little savvy, you can erase your browsing history with a trail to something more savoury, like a page on how to knit sweaters for orphaned wallabies – innocent in the knowledge that you’re merely indulging in some mild Putinesque revisionism.

  ‘We were going to go for the bare lightbulb look but we thought fuck it.’

  SAY NO TO UNDERSTATEMENT

  Putin wields interior design like a weapon, with influences appearing to include Emperor Nicholas II, Saddam Hussein and Liberace.

  The palaces he’s built and the aircraft he’s had furnished display a taste for scale, baroque splendour and aggressive use of gold ormolu, with all subtlety crushed under tonnage of marble.

  Even his secret pleasure residence at Cape Idokopas – with casino, theatre, helipads, lavish frescoes and courtyard gardens – seems calculated to dwarf and intimidate supplicants.

  Be More Vlad

  It’s a hard look for the rest of us to pull off on a shoestring, but even a few statement pieces ( jewel-encrusted loo seat, giant marble bust of yourself next to the dishwasher) can be enough to help prevent your visitors ever feeling truly at ease.

  ‘Keep up at the back, scooter section! I want a tight formation as we pass Auntie Pam’s house!’

  STAGE A PARADE

  Holding a parade is a cheerful, fun and inclusive way to show people how much death you can dish out.

  In 2008 Putin revived the Soviet tradition of military parades through Red Square. The stated goal was to remember the eightieth anniversary of the Great Patriotic War (that’s Russian for World War Two), but the vehicles on display weren’t from the forties. They included an array of powerful new tanks and mobile missile systems capable of launching long-range nuclear strikes – a testament to Putin’s increased military spending.

  Be More Vlad

  If you would like to use the firepower at your disposal to impress your sweetheart or intimidate a rival, consider putting on a parade in the park where they have lunch. Technically speaking, only three vehicles are required to constitute a parade, so you could stage one with as few troops as one car, one bike and a Roomba robot vacuum. If you really want to shock and awe your audience, why not throw in a ground-to-air missile launcher as well (aka a young relative carrying a catapult)?

  AFTERWORD

  Once you’ve tried all the tips in this book, many of the problems you may have in life will melt away. That’s the Vladimir Putin: Life Coach PromiseTM.

  However, now that you are the reigning figure in your street or office pod, a new problem may rear its head: the fear that your newfound supremacy could one day end. That someone even more cunning could come along and overthrow you (e.g. kick you off the allotment committee and take your parking spot).

  We do not know if Putin himself has such worries. Maybe, once in a long while, when he’s swimming meditative lengths of the Kremlin pool, a whisper of self-doubt reaches him from a distant wing of his mind palace, warning him that his luck can’t last forever.

  If so, he hasn’t let on. Nor has he revealed any clever techniques for dealing with such worries. So we are sadly unable to offer a final Putin-inspired tip for advanced students anxious about maintaining their grip on power.

  Instead, we recommend you seek further advice from the man himself, via his annual phone-in show, Direct Line with Vladimir Putin, broadcast on live TV by Russia 1, Russia 24, RT and Channel One Russia.

  Удачи, товарищи

  ENDNOTES

  1 ‘Russia tested nerve agent on door handes before Skripal attack, UK dossier claims’ Guardian, 13th April, 2018

  2 From Vladimir Putin: The Road to Power by Oleg Blotsky, cited in article ‘Book Details the Unenviable Life of Mrs Vladimir V. Putin’, LA Times, 16th September, 2002

  3 ‘Putin’s lakeside “notables” targeted in sanctions’, Reuters, 21st March, 2014

  4 ‘Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin are on the bed together’, The Times, 9 October, 2017

  5 ‘St Petersburg “troll farm” had 90 dedicated staff working to influence US election campaign’, Independent, 17th October, 2017

  6 ‘Inside the Russian Troll Factory: Zombies and a Breakneck Pace’, New York Times, 18th February, 2018

  7 Rice, Condoleeza (2011), No Greater Honour, Crown Publishing, Penguin Random House

  8 ‘Bush’s Love of Pootie-Poot Putin’, Guardian, 20th May, 2002

  9 ‘Russian Observers Charge Fraud in Putin’s Landslide Re-Election’, Bloomberg.com, 19th March, 2018

  10 ‘Ballot stuffing, vote-rigging and fraud: Russians on alert for tricks that may help Vladimir Putin win election’, Telegraph, 12th February 2012

  11 ‘The Trumps of Russia?’ Guardian, 15th July, 2017

  12 ‘Why Does Vladimir Putin Keep Giving His Watches Away to Peasants?’ Vice, 17th September, 2013

  13 ‘Former aide says Putin has no strategic plans’, Time, 5th November 2014

  14 Zygar, Mikhail (2016), All the Kremlin’s Men, Public Affairs, Perseus Books Group

  15 ‘Putin tells Edward Snowden: Russia doesn’t carry out mass surveillance’, Guardian, 17th April, 2014

  16 ‘Vladimir Puti
n presents Steven Seagal with Russian passport’, Guardian, 25th November, 2016

  17 Myers, Steven Lee (2015), The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin, Alfred A. Knopf

  18 ‘Revealed: the $2bn offshore trail that leads to Vladimir Putin’, Guardian, 3rd April, 2016

  19 ‘Panama Papers: Who is Sergei Roldugin’, International Business Times, 4th April, 2016

  20 ‘No one knows Putin’s exact net worth, but many speculate he’s the wealthiest person on the planet’, Business Insider, 17th March, 2018

  21 ‘Cut-and-paste job: “My father wrote Putin’s dissertation”’, RFE/ RL, 7th March, 2018

  22 ‘Russia’s plagiarism problem: even Putin has done it!’ Washington Post, 18th March, 2014

  23 Kasparov, Garry (2015), Winter is Coming, Public Affairs, Perseus Books Group

  24 ‘What about that “whataboutism”’, San Francisco Chronicle, 10th September, 2017

  25 Hillary Clinton on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, 19th September, 2017

  26 ‘The Aussie who taught Putin Body Language’, Moscow Times, 1st July, 2018

  27 ‘In Sochi, the mark of a Russian vodka oligarch’, The New Yorker, 20th February, 2014

  28 ‘Here are ten critics of Vladimir Putin who died violently or in suspicious ways’, Washington Post, 23rd March, 2017

  29 ‘Putin on Isis’, Financial Times, 23rd October, 2015

  30 ‘Berezovsky quits Duma, at “ruining of Russia”’, Independent, 18th July, 2000

  31 ‘Putin, before vote, unveils “invincible” nuclear weapons to counter West’, Reuters, 1st March, 2018

  32 ‘Putin Comes Clean on Crimea’s Little Green Men’, Sky News, 10th March, 2015

  33 ‘How Vladimir Putin Rose to Power’, Business Insider, 14th February, 2017

  34 ‘Рыболовный анонс предвыборной кампании: зачем оголился Путин’, MKRU, 6th August, 2017

  35 Myers, Steven Lee (2015), The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin, Alfred A. Knopf

  36 ‘Putin erupts in struggling Russian town’, CBS News, 8th June, 2009

  37 ‘Putin calls internet “a CIA project”’, Guardian, 24th April, 2014

  38 ‘“Paranoid” Vladimir Putin hires even more food and drink tasters’, Mirror, 11th March, 2018

  39 ‘Analysis: Sidelined Vladimir Putin turns to motorcycle tricks’, Telegraph, 8th July, 2009

  40 ‘Russian Network Seized in Raid’, Washington Post, 15th April, 2001

  41 ‘Country Profile: Russia’, BBC News, 6th March, 2012

  42 ‘Satire is thriving in Russia, while many Russians aren’t’, Newsweek, 2nd May, 2016

  43 ‘It’s now illegal in Russia to share an image of Putin as a gay clown’, Washington Post, 5th April, 2017

  44 ‘Russia puts Sergei Magnitsky on trial – three years after he died in custody’, Guardian, 8th March, 2015

  45 ‘Putin says Pussy Riot “got what they asked for” as jailed women appeal’, Guardian, 8th October, 2012

  46 ‘Sochi: the costliest Olympics yet’, Guardian, 9th October, 2013

  47 ‘Russian President Vladimir Putin “in love” with gymnast Alina Kabayeva, Express, 20th December, 2014

  48 ‘Putin “finds” Greek urn on dive, news.com.au, 11th August, 2011

  49 ‘The Rewriting of History’, Economist, 8th November, 2007

  50 ‘The Kremlin is trying to erase memories of the Gulag’, New Republic, 23rd June, 2014

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  With special thanks to Hannah Knowles, Gordon Wise, Jamie Byng, John Sears, Belinda Sears and Grace McGeoch.

  ‘A triumph’

  Telegraph

  ‘Excellent’

  Observer

  ‘Beautiful, brilliant, funny’

  HELEN WALSH, author of Go to Sleep