“A hooligan, a hooligan, a murderer,” Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee who lost to Obama in the presidential election, said of Vladimir Putin.

A madman, a dictator, a sick man who is in a hurry to leave his mark on history until the end comes: we often talk about Putin in the Western media to explain the mysterious mystery of who is the last tenant of the Kremlin.

A leader who 20 years ago seemed pragmatic and pro-Western, and who instead involved his country in a war with the West, which he will not win, but at the cost of very high human lives and material well-being.

The monumental biography, written by Philip Short, a former BBC correspondent who has already covered Mao and Pol Pot, instead has the undeniable advantage of rejecting those stereotypes from the outset, writes Corriere della Sera, quoted by Rador.

Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” can even become a trap if it is used “to appear so irrational and unpredictable that the adversary is forced to hesitate before testing your resolve.”

In his thousands of well-informed pages, in the best tradition of Anglo-Saxon biography (almost 250 known), the author focuses on two interpretive keys crucial to truly understanding a political leader:

• the first is his personality, his intimate history, where he comes from, whose son he is, what he did as a teenager, etc.
• Secondly, it is an inextricable connection between him (or her) and the country he leads, an interweaving of history, culture and interests that always moves the people, especially when it is a great nation like Russia, brought up to feel exceptional, at least until the american people

In performing this operation of truth, Short discovers some very useful arguments for understanding the imperial attitude of man.

He is right when he urges us to remember that “national leaders inevitably reflect the society from which they come.” But he is wrong when he adds: “Putin is not an aberration in Russia, any more than Donald Trump in America, Boris Johnson in the UK or Emmanuel Macron in France.”

This defect of moral equivalence between an autocracy, where the leadership remains for life, opponents are poisoned, and nine million people are prohibited from running for office; and democracies, where the president can be investigated for abuse of power or the prime minister can be sent to the Pacific region by a vote of his deputies, is the most critical and criticized point of the book.

However, we agree with the “doubt” that the author expresses to Putin. Starting with a thorough challenge to the conspiracy legend that the attacks on Chechens, which shocked Russia in 1999 and justified the most inhumane military repressions, were actually “self-made” Moscow services to promote the emergence of a new strongman.

No evidence has ever emerged to support this theory, which is nevertheless still widely held; although there are many obvious contradictions and a short list of them is effective.

Nevertheless, the brutality in Grozny, the massacre brought to the point of moral sanction, the fact that “we will destroy them in the toilet” with which Putin opened his history in power, remain a sign of leadership: when he uttered this phrase in September, he received at the presidential 2% of votes in elections. In December, it reached 40%.

The history of power in Russia certainly plays a role in this attitude towards the use of force.

But the man’s character has also changed over the past years. And this is perhaps the best part of the book, as well as the richest part of the book (since he entered the Kremlin, the mystery surrounding Putin has grown even for a biographer of Short’s stature).

The son of a patriot-communist who fought as a partisan against the Germans during the terrible blockade of Leningrad, Volodya was a boisterous child who was even ignored for bad behavior in the elementary school of the “Oktyabryat”, the “Sons of October” organization. founded by Lenin’s wife.

As a teenager, “he fought with no one, was not afraid of anything. He seemed to lack the instinct of self-preservation. It did not even occur to him that the opponent could be stronger,” said his best friend at the time, Viktor Borysenko. But this aggressiveness, which can synthesize a “weak and unathletic” physique and body, was accompanied by common sense: “He knew how to think about what he was doing and control himself.”

Street boys like him, they say even today, can only be saved by sports. And indeed, growing up, Volodya passionately devoted himself first to “sambo” – a technique of self-defense without weapons, and then to judo – a discipline in which he excelled at the regional level.

He himself said at the time: “In order to maintain my authority, I needed technique and physical strength. I knew that if I didn’t do sports, I would no longer be in the position I was used to, not even in the play, not even at school.”

In the gym, he learned that if you want to win, you have to show your opponent that you are ready to go all the way. And in the KGB, where he was hired in 1975 after graduating from Leningrad University, he learned another lesson: never carry a weapon with you if you are not ready to use it.

The KGB had been a dream for him since childhood: “TV series like The Shield and the Sword and Seventeen Moments of Spring told about the exploits of Soviet agents in Nazi Germany during the war”: unsullied heroes like James Bond.

Putin really wanted to follow them.

He went to law school because he was told it was the best way to get into the Secret Service, even though he didn’t have a career as Agent 007 afterwards. It’s very likely, even if he always tried to hide it, that between 1976 and 1979 worked in espionage and repression against dissidents in the infamous “Fifth Administration”.

And even when he finally got a place abroad (but in Dresden, not in Berlin, as he had hoped), in the fateful days of 1989 he witnessed the humiliating collapse of East Germany into the powerless superpower of Russia

An injury that always remained in his mind. No less traumatic and formative were the chaotic and terrible months of the fall of Gorbachev, the military coup, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the homeland to which he returned after the fall of the Wall.

Leningrad, where he was the deputy of the liberal mayor Sobchak (according to some reports, he was persecuted by the KGB after he would have resigned), participated in a desperate plea for food aid, with which the exhausted city turned to European countries (not receiving much, frankly).

He was even accused of a scandal when the “oil-for-food” program, the sale of Russian raw materials in exchange for Western goods, brought great enrichment to middlemen, the seeds of future oligarchs, but little bread for the city, which in the meantime returned its old name of St. Petersburg.

A sense of revenge against the West, accused of betraying Russia after it was misled, is perhaps what most unites Putin with his people and explains their still strong position.

“The Russians felt cheated,” writes Short.

In his opinion, “the decision to invade Ukraine is far from surprising, it is actually quite consistent with how Putin has always behaved when faced with the existential choice between becoming an enemy of the West and protecting his own power and Russia’s power in the world.” “. Like when he was a boy, when he threw himself into fights, convinced that he could win them, because he showed that he wanted to win them.

This does not justify the miscalculations that led him to think that he could destroy Ukraine in a few days. Nor the violent violence that hit him when he realized he couldn’t make it. Nor the revenge he is now trying to show the Europeans by keeping them cold this winter. But that partly explains why his people haven’t abandoned him (yet?).

“Russians don’t just look European, they are European, and we expect them to behave like the rest of the family.

But they stubbornly, inexplicably, refuse to do it. And this situation will not change so quickly,” the author concludes. Maybe even when Putin is gone. Corriere della Sera (Absorption of Rador)