Member-only story
The Sting in the Tail of Putin’s Ideology.
A deep irony underpins Putin’s messaging, one that is entirely lost on the Russian people…
In Russia, nothing is more dangerous than the appearance of weakness.
Peter Stolypin, Third Prime Minister of Russia; assassinated in 1911.
In the early months of 2000, Secretary of State, the late Madeleine Albright became the first senior U.S. official to meet the then, newly appointed and largely unknown, acting President of Russia, Vladimir Putin.
Reminiscing about this meeting in her last piece for the NYT, she says that other than his KGB background, the Clinton administration knew very little about Putin, and Albright said the meeting “would help (her) take the measure of the man and assess what his sudden elevation might mean for U.S.-Russia relations.”
Putin’s rise to power in Russia had occurred largely in a vacuum as far as the West was concerned. He was the nowhere man; a one time Deputy to St. Petersburg’s liberally minded, Western-oriented mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. An ex-KGB man with a mostly unimpressive record who had somehow slipped past all the wannabe’s to become Yeltsin’s anointed successor.
But what sort of man was he?
