Who Is Vladimir Putin?

Vladimir Putin showed up at his campaign headquarters late on election night, not yet certain of victory, in a crew-neck sweater, no tie. And he held a press conference, carried live on television.

In America, such behavior by a politician would be so mundane as to go unnoticed. In Russia, folks are still talking about it.

Putin seemed relaxed, even joking a bit with reporters. "Never in my worst nightmares did I think I'd be running for president," he said, as reporters laughed. "Politics is not a decent business."

Russians, who haven't had much to admire in their public officials lately would certainly agree with that one. And when Putin went on to say how relieved he was that he hadn't made any promises during the campaign he would later be unable to fulfill, Russians liked that, too.

His performance added new material to Moscow's number one game these days: trying to figure out just who this new president is. There are already plenty of word plays on his name: Ras-Putin being the most obvious.

Westerners — especially Americans — are fixated on Putin's KGB past and his refusal to say how he plans to run the government. It all seems ominous and mysterious.

But for many Russians, there's nothing mysterious about the man at all. He is instantly recognizable, a bright guy from a poor family who, when offered a good job, grabbed at the chance to improve his station in life.

Alexei Pushkov, a political analyst here, told me, "It's hard for Americans to understand what the KGB could be for some people in Soviet society. Look, they tried to recruit me three times, but it made no sense for me to join. My parents were diplomats, I lived in Moscow, I had already worked for the United Nations in Geneva."

"Putin's father worked in a factory, they lived in a communal flat in Leningrad and he had no prospects. The KGB comes and offers him a job. He is suddenly part of the most important institution in Soviet society. It opened up possibilities to him that would have been impossible. I understand him completely."

Putin was in the foreign intelligence branch of the KGB, which was a real elite in its day. Its officers were multilingual and traveled abroad. For the most part they weren't involved in the suppression of domestic dissent. And in the 1980s, they were one of the great forces for reform from within the party and government. They had seen the world and knew the Soviet Union had to change.

Which is not to say Putin is a Jeffersonian Democrat. But neither is he a Stalinist. Pushkov says that most of all, he may just be a regular Russian patriot, suspicious of the west, aggrieved at the miserable state of his country and government.

Two days after the election, a leading Russian newspaper ran the headline: "Who is Putin? A Mirror of our Society."

Which gets us back to the sweater on Election Night.

Russians may understand Putin but they don't yet know him very well. At frst he was obviously uncomfortable in the top job. A friend told me about one of Putin's early appearances as president, at a variety show honoring troops of the Interior Ministry. Putin was invited up to the stage unexpectedly to speak to the crowd. He spoke, stiffly, offering up some sort of patriotic drivel about serving the Motherland, and sat down.

By election night he seemed to have grown more comfortable in his skin, as the Russians like to say. He told reporters he had spent the day in the country taking a traditional Russian banya, sort of a cross between a sauna and a steam bath, where you sit with your pals, drink beer, and hit each other with birch leaves to get the blood going.

Putin said his friends were "simple people, real people, no kind of slyness about them, it's good to spend time with them." And he refused to say where he had gone or who they were. "They're just regular people, they're not prepared to handle you," meaning the press, he said with a smile.

My Russian friends like to think they are finally seeing the real Putin. Sveta, a Russian journalist I know, who voted for the liberal Grigory Yavlinsky, watched Putin on election night and reluctantly, almost embarrassed, said, "I like him. He seems like a normal person."

A person who goes to the banya, who loves his wife and two daughters, who wants order where there is none, who attacks the Chechen "bandits" mercilessly, no matter the cost to innocents in the way.

I told Alexei Pushkov I saw only one mystery about Putin, whether he's up to the job of leading Russia to a place worth going. Pushkov said no, there are two mysteries: whether he's up to the job, and whether he will succumb to the same endemic corruption as almost everyone in public life. In which case almost nothing else will matter.

by Mark Katkov.
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