Death of a Dissident - Alex Goldfarb [81]
The train-car factory allocated the family a 220-square-foot room in a communal apartment on the fifth floor of a dreary walk-up at No. 15, Baskov Street, twenty minutes by foot from Nevsky Prospect, Leningrad’s main street. Gurevich recalled that the apartment “did not have any amenities. No hot water, no bathtub. A horrific toilet, cold and depressive, leading to the stairwell…. There was practically no kitchen, only a square dark windowless hallway. A gas stove stood on one side and a wash-basin on the other, leaving hardly any space to squeeze through. And behind this so-called kitchen dwelled another family.”
As a boy, and later to his friends, Vladimir was known as Volodya. One of Volodya’s early impressions in life was of the hordes of rats that lived in the front entryway. He used to chase them with sticks. “Once I saw a huge rat and went after it, until I got it in a corner…. It turned around, and rushed at me. It was unexpected and very scary. Now the rat was chasing me … but I was faster, and I slammed the door shut behind me, in its nose.” That was how he “learned, once and forever, the meaning of the word ‘cornered.’”
By his own admission the young Putin was a shpana, the slang term for a juvenile delinquent. Later it became the source of the many street-gang profanities in his public vocabulary. Even though he was small, he was a ferocious fighter. As one of his classmates recalled, in schoolyard fights the preteen Putin was “like a little tiger. He would leap at his enemy, scratch, bite, pull hair.” Despite a concerted effort by his teacher and his father, he fell in with bad company: two brothers, who dwelled in the world of the rooftops, garages, and warehouses of the neighborhood. He became fiercely loyal to his friends.
In First Person Putin admitted that it was hard to predict “where it would have ended” if, at the age of eleven, he had not taken up martial arts. His judo coach “played a decisive role” in his childhood by “pulling [him] out of the street.” His initial motivation to start judo was “to be able to stand up” for himself “in the street and in school.” Judo taught him discipline, concentration, and tactical skills. It became his overwhelming passion. According to his coach, he fought like a “snow leopard, determined to win at any cost.”
His teacher Vera Gurevich welcomed his new obsession, because it kept him out of trouble. But she noted that from then on he preferred sports to the company of his classmates. He became a black belt and a winner of citywide competitions.
In college he became the all-Leningrad champion for judo, and he continued the sport while learning the tradecraft of espionage. A classmate at School 101 of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (also known as the Red Banner Institute of Yuri Andropov), who now lives in Washington, recalls that whenever he passed the gym, he heard “shrieks and screeches.” He knew “even without looking [that] it was Putin, training.”
In First Person Putin himself makes it clear that he learned lessons in social Darwinism as a street kid and school menace, and his descriptions of several of his judo fights are full of telling details of violence and of his fighting attitude. Years later, as president, these qualities would reappear as subdued aggression, both in word and deed. For example, one of his most quoted remarks as president is this aphorism of power: “We demonstrated weakness, and the weak are beaten.”
As Berezovsky explained to me years later, Putin’s bellicose image was actively promoted by his campaign managers in 1999. It resounded with the mood of the majority of Russians. Their wounded national pride in the aftermath of the