open Democracy News Analysis - Georgia War - Comments

Vanes on "Russia/Georgia: War of the Web"

Vanes — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 01:49:16 +0100

Well, one may disagree with the author at some points, but one thing remains clear: the forum audience here is (almost?) exclusvely russian, because it has been translated to inoSMI. Coincidence? I'm not accusing anybody of anything, but didn't happen exactly what he has written? The article does not have to be heinous or biased - just bitter and critical - and there will always be many people zeaously defending themselves as not being manipulated, because ... well this is just how people work. Nobody thinks he's being manipulated. Let's just ask: anybody would consider russians to be neutral and unbiased about their own criticism? Hell no. The important message is this: if you can select the audience, you can effectively manipulate the reaction without directly manipulating anyone. Translating and linking an article is not good nor bad - but surely it is a form of selecting the audience.

alikos on "Russia/Georgia: War of the Web"

alikos — Sun, 24 May 2009 02:02:39 +0100

Где-то я уже похожее читал, причём буквально один в один... :)

Not logged in on "Georgia’s search for itself"

Not logged in — Tue, 19 May 2009 12:44:25 +0100

President Lincoln -- : "I do the very best I know how the very best I can and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right which is said against me won't amount to anything .If the end brings me out wrong ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference"

Not logged in on "Georgia’s search for itself"

Not logged in — Tue, 19 May 2009 12:44:22 +0100

IR student on "Russia and the Georgia war: the great-power trap"

IR student — Sun, 10 May 2009 02:01:49 +0100

Hi I just wanted to know how realists would question Russian reassertion of military power and how the issue of mulitpolarity and balancing comes into the equation. Can Russia and China effectively join forces to combat the international order conceived by the West? Can Russia/ China challenge US hegemony? or is there too many nitty gritty differences between Russian and China for this to happen and whether wants to this happen anyway given that it is prospering economically in the international system regardless of it being democratic and liberal...Russia makes me curious and with the ensueing energy crisis it will be interesting as to how it acts

Annettee on "Propaganda war: Russia- 0, Georgia-1"

Annettee — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 10:16:55 +0000

well well well...dear Boris do you really believe what you write? Your language is very clear for the rest of the world Now is not it? "to block out Russian media, problems faced by Russian and Armenian citizens" such problems if there are any have any ordinary Georgian citizens too.."the ways the opposition is suppressed " very interesting...what about in your country? Do they always let opposition succeed de coupe? "they also agreed to withdraw Russian troops from the Vaziani and Akhalkalaki military bases. What is more, they kept this promise" yep..they did ..only to occupy totally other bigger parts of the country didn't`t they? " He lied when he said that Russian troops were advancing on Tbilisi with the aim of occupying Georgia and overthrowing his regime"? it seems you are not aware of that interviews your generals and other politicians in your government made and said even on high level meeting in Europe that their plan was to change the regime? How strange!

" propaganda machine is bad" you are sorry..yes you are sorry because what what can your propaganda say? You are invading the country using the ethnic groups to gain the influence over the region that your country is loosing? " In the case of Sudan evidence of genocide really has been documented" you are comparing the cases...hey! Have you eve heard that the genocide of Georgian people in 1991-1992 is also documented? In Apxazia and in Osetian region both...and do not say please that about 300 000 ethnic Georgians from Apxazia and 200 000 from so called South Osetia were exiled only by the forces of local Apxaz or Osetian boeviks...who has been always backing them? Guess..? May I advice you to read the history back to 200 years? What Russian Tzar's imperialism has done in the Caucasus? It all goes with the same script..yes please read it..but try to find the true historical version not the ones in which your country was very good in propaganda! Really there is nothing new under the sun I agree...

Indeed,here is a lot man could say about these things, but ..has it any sense to talk to you or your believers? Who is a demagogue here?

Kolchis Medea on "The Georgia-Russia conflict: lost territory, found nation"

Kolchis Medea — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:45:23 +0000

Who had supported the Georgian troops in Abkhazia?

Do you mean the children, the women, the elderly people and the doctors who were taken to the stadium in Gagra by the Abkhaz and Chechen Boeviks and annihilated there?
The number of the people killed there reaches 1500. Afterwards the Chechen and Abkhaz soldiers played football with their heads. Please note that 90% of the population in Gagra was native Georgian.
Totally, about 30 000 Georgians were killed in Abkhazia.The Abkhaz separatists were supported by the Russian, Chechen, Armenian and North Caucasian Military troops.

Ilias on "McCain & Obama Are Both Wrong on Georgia"

Ilias — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 12:22:10 +0000

About the roots of the current situation in Caucasus, the so called Orange Revolution in Ukraine and Rose Revolution in Georgia, find the answers in the following text. It’s taken from the most common open source, Wikipedia. Try www.wikipedia.org.Especially the references are really tell-tale. «Many analysts believe the Orange Revolution was built on a pattern first developed in the ousting of Slobodan Milošević in Serbia four years earlier, and continuing with the Rose Revolution in Georgia. Each of these victories, though apparently spontaneous, was the result of extensive grassroots campaigning and coalition-building among the opposition. Each included election victories followed up by public demonstrations, after attempts by the incumbent to hold onto power through electoral fraud.Each of these social movements included extensive work by student activists. The most famous of these was Otpor, the youth movement that helped bring in Vojislav Koštunica. In Georgia the movement was called Kmara. In Ukraine the movement has worked under the succinct slogan Pora ("It's Time"). Chair of Georgian Parliamentary Committee on Defense and Security Givi Targamadze, former member of the Georgian Liberty Institute, as well as some members of Kmara, were consulted by Ukrainian opposition leaders on techniques of nonviolent struggle. Georgian rock bands Zumba, Soft Eject and Green Room, which earlier had supported the Rose Revolution, organized a solidarity concert in central Kiev to support Yushchenko’s cause in November 2004.[14]Activists in each of these movements were funded and trained in tactics of political organization and nonviolent resistance by a coalition of Western pollsters and professional consultants funded by a range of Western government and non-government agencies. According to The Guardian, these include the U.S. State Department and USAID along with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute, the Bilderberg Group, the NGO Freedom House and George Soros's Open Society Institute. The National Endowment for Democracy, a foundation supported by the U.S. government, has supported non-governmental democracy-building efforts in Ukraine since 1988.[15] Writings on nonviolent struggle by Gene Sharp formed the strategic basis of the student campaigns.Former president Leonid Kravchuk accused Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, of financing Yushchenko's campaign, and provided copies of documents showing money transfers from companies he said are controlled by Berezovsky to companies controlled by Yuschenko's official backers. Berezovsky has confirmed that he met Yushchenko's representatives in London before the election, and that the money was transferred from his companies, but he refused to confirm or deny that the companies that received the money were used in Yushchenko's campaign. Financing of election campaigns by foreign citizens is illegal in Ukraine.[16] According to BBC's The Russian Godfathers[17], Berezovsky poured millions of dollars into sustaining the spontaneous demonstrations and was in daily contact with the key opposition leaders.»

Ilias on "McCain & Obama Are Both Wrong on Georgia"

Ilias — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:55:51 +0000

Let’s talk about the core of Caucasus issue. And let’s talk seriously, with evidence and references: Who really is Mikhail Saakashvili? Find the answer in the following text, by F. William Engdahl (http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/).

«The controversy over the Georgian surprise military attacks on South Ossetia and Abkhazia on 8.8.08 makes a closer look at the controversial Georgian President and his puppet masters important. An examination shows 41 year old Mikhail Saakashvili to be a ruthless and corrupt totalitarian who is tied to not only the US NATO establishment, but also to the Israeli military and intelligence establishment. The famous 'Rose Revolution of November 2003 that forced the ageing Edouard Shevardnadze from power and swept the then 36 year old US university graduate into power was run and financed by the US State Department, the Soros Foundations, and agencies tied to the Pentagon and US intelligence community.

Mihkail Saakashvili was deliberately placed in power in one of the most sophisticated US regime change operations, using ostensibly private NGOs (Non Governmental Organizations) to create an atmosphere of popular protest against the existing regime of former Soviet Foreign Minister Edouard Shevardnadze, who was no longer useful to Washington when he began to make a deal with Moscow over energy pipelines and privatizations.

Saakashvili was brought to power in a US-engineered coup run on the ground by US-funded NGO's, in an application of a new method of US destabilization of regimes it considered hostile to its foreign policy agenda. The November 24 2003 Wall Street Journal explicitly credited the toppling of Shevardnadze's regime to the operations of "a raft of non-governmental organizations . . . supported by American and other Western foundations." These NGOs, said the Journal, had "spawned a class of young, English-speaking intellectuals hungry for pro-Western reforms" who were instrumental laying the groundwork for a bloodless coup.

Coup by NGO
But there is more. The NGOs were coordinated by the US Ambassador to Georgia, Richard Miles, who had just arrived in Tbilisi fresh from success in orchestrating the CIA-backed toppling of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, using the same NGOs. Miles, who is believed to be an undercover intelligence specialist, supervised the Saakashvili coup.

It involved US billionaire George Soros' Open Society Georgia Foundation. It involved the Washington-based Freedom House whose chairman was former CIA chief James Woolsey. It involved generous financing from the US Congress-financed National Endowment for Democracy, an agency created by Ronald Reagan in the 1980's to "do privately what the CIA used to do," namely coups against regimes the US Government finds unfriendly.

George Soros' foundations have been forced to leave numerous eastern European countries including Russia as well as China after the 1989 student Tiananmen Square uprising. Soros is also the financier together with the US State Department of the Human Rights Watch, a US- based and run propaganda arm of the entire NGO apparatus of regime coups such as Georgia and Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution. Some analysts believe Soros is a high-level operative of the US State Department or intelligence services using his private foundations as cover.

The US State Department funded the Georgia Liberty Institute headed by Saakashvili, US approved candidate to succeed the no-longer cooperative Shevardnadze. The Liberty Institute in turn created "Kmara!" which translates "Enough!" According to a BBC report at the time, Kmara! Was organized in spring of 2003 when Saakashvili along with hand-picked Georgia student activists were paid by the Soros Foundation to go to Belgrade to learn from the US-financed Otpor activists that toppled Milosevic. They were trained in Gene Sharp's "non-violence as a method of warfare" by the Belgrade Center for Nonviolent Resistance.

Saakashvili as mafioso President
Once he was in place in January 2004 as Georgia's new President, Saakashvili proceeded to pack the regime with his cronies and kinsmen. The death of Zurab Zhvania, his prime minister in February, 2005, remains a mystery. The official version-poisoning by faulty gas heater-was adopted by American FBI investigators within two weeks of the killing. That has never seemed credible to those familiar with Georgia's gangland slayings, crime, and other manifestations of social decay. Zhvania's death was followed closely by a functionary of the Premier's apparat, Georgi Khelashvili, who allegedly shot himself the day after his chief's demise. The head of Zhvania's research staff was later found dead as well.

Figures allied with Saakashvili reportedly had a hand in the premier's death. Russian journalist Marina Perevozkina quoted Gia Khurashvili, a Georgian economist. Prior to the fatal incident, Mr. Khurashvili had published an article in Resonans newspaper opposing the privatization and sale of Georgia's main gas pipeline. Ten days before the prime minister's body was found, Khurashvili was attacked and his editor-in-chief-citing pressure from 'security service' figures he refused to name-issued him a warning.

The late premier's position on the pipeline issue was believed the direct reason for the murder of Zhvania. Zhvania's brother, Georgi, also told Perevozkina that not long before Zhvania's death he received a warning that someone was preparing to kill his brother. Saakashvili was reportedly livid when the US State Department invited Zhvania to Washington to win a Freedom Medal from the US Government's National Democratic Institute. Saakashvili tolerates no rivals for power it seems.

Saakashvili, who cleverly marketed himself as "anti-corruption," appointed several of his family members to lucrative posts in government, giving one of his brothers a position as chief adviser on domestic issues to the Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline project, backed by British Petroleum and other oil multinationals.

Since coming to power in 2004 with US aid, Saakashvili has led a policy of mass-scale arrests, imprisonment, torture and deepened corruption. Saakashvili has presided over the creation of a de facto one-party state, with a dummy opposition occupying a tiny portion of seats in the parliament, and this public servant is building a Ceaucescu-style palace for himself on the outskirts of Tbilisi. According to the magazine, Civil Georgia (Mar. 22, 2004) until 2005, the salaries of Saakashvili and many of his ministers were reportedly paid by the NGO network of New York-based currency speculator Soros- along with the United Nations Development Program.»

Ilias on "McCain & Obama Are Both Wrong on Georgia"

Ilias — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 11:52:59 +0000

Bush’s orphans in Caucasus move towards trapping Obama

The news: Russia's Foreign Ministry expresses grave concerns over Georgia's continued military deployments to the borders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In a statement released on Friday, the ministry said the Georgian military and police presence in the area needed "special attention on the part of the UN and other international organizations operating in the region."
The statement came a week after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov quoted EU monitors in areas near South Ossetia and Abkhazia as reporting a buildup of Georgian military units and Special Forces near the borders with South Ossetia and Abkhazia. "Our 'technical devices' have also recorded this. Provocations also occur sporadically. We are concerned by this," he added.
On Thursday, Moscow lashed out at Tbilisi for not allowing Russian inspectors access to military installations on its territory. Earlier, Russia asked Georgia to admit its experts into Georgian military installations for evaluation and verification checks in accordance with a 1999 Vienna OSCE document on confidence and security-building measures. Georgia rejected both requests.

And behind the scene: The year 2008, the last year of Bush administration, was when the aggressive anti-Russian strategy of the former President of the United States has been openly unfolded and has been intensified. Washington has being escalating the tension at the utmost, with the war speculator Dick Chaney and the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, as its principal actors. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, from her years in the University until now, has never stopped seeing the phantom of the Soviet Union and has never stopped fighting windmills with it. Washington has tried to establish the NATO enlargement towards the east, at the north-Atlantic Convention of Bucharest, but it failed at the last moment due to voices of logic and political realism from the “old” Europe, have predominated. The agreements for the so-called “antimissile shield” were completed, bringing the military threat to the borders of the Russian Federation. And the peak came last August, with the adventurism of South Ossetia. The Georgian regime of Saakashvili, has been used to try the endurance and the tolerance of Russia in a military challenge, which has put in the vortex of disequilibrium the whole region of Caucasus. The intention of integrating the region of Caucasus in the American sphere of influence was not of course an inspiration of one single moment. The “orange revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia, which have been financed and headed by Washington, represented the first phase of the plan. Other things have followed: the intensive armament of the Saakashvili regime, the development of an extreme anti-Russian rhetoric from the Ukrainian President Yushchenko, the formation of an ad hoc (and military) axis between Kiev and Tbilisi and the advancement of the procedure for their accession to NATO. The objective was clear. The completion of the geopolitical encirclement of Russia from the south, the blockade of its armada from the Black Sea and from the corridor in the warm seas of the Mediterranean and the absolute control of the crucial energy corridors which bring the Russian natural gas in the Western Europe. The military and the political reaction of Russia and the unwillingness of the leader countries of the European Union to serve a scenario that subverted their interests and safety, have led Bush’s plans for the Caucasus region in an absolute deadlock. Now, South Ossetia and Abkhazia have already declared their independence (that has been officially recognized by Russia), the military mechanism of Saakashvili has collapsed, the Russian fleet not only remains in Crimea but also has attained another base of anchoring in the Sukhumi of Abkhazia, the accession of Ukraine and Georgia in NATO has been evolved in a political anecdote and in Kiev the anti-Russian “orange coalition” has fallen apart. The faithful follower of Bush, President Yushchenko, has lost control; he faces the defeat in the next elections and sees his former ally Yulia Timoshenko to keep distances from his own Atlantic extremism and to approach Moscow. It seems, in the end, that there exist two men in the planet – apart from Laura Bush - that feel even more pity for the change of the guard in the White House! Mikhail Saakashvili and Victor Yushchenko. Bush’s orphans in the Caucasus region that have remained without a protector are worn-out, used and useless for a new American strategy in the region. They do know that. And this is why; they move now towards trapping Obama into a new escalation within the strategy of tension.

max1m on "Georgia war: auditing the damage"

max1m — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:23:22 +0000

Because u only looked at one part of the report

BigC on "Georgia war: auditing the damage"

BigC — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 20:37:00 +0000

I looked at the report and it details human rights abuses by Georgian troops over and above the indiscriminate shelling which the author mentions. Why has he concentrate on Russian and South Ossetian abuses only?

Bruce Tasker on "The Caucasus: a region in pieces"

Bruce Tasker — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 07:19:32 +0000

“This kind of zero-sum thinking is most acute in the region between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, many of whom seem content to see their respective country suffer so long as the other side in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is feeling pain too”.

The writer firstly places Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the same category, when in fact they are on two opposite sides of the conflict and their positions are completely different. Azerbaijan would dearly love to have its lands back and to alleviate the suffering of its estimated 1 million refugees by sending them back to their homes.

Secondly, the reference to Armenians actually means the Armenian authorities (illegitimate regime), who pursue a secretive and deceptive negotiation process to resolve [or under unacceptable conditions not resolve] this longstanding conflict. The entire process from the Armenian side is thoroughly corrupt; demands for massive personal benefits frustrate the negotiations, whilst the regime balances on the one side how long it can hold out before Azerbaijan eventually decides on the military option, and on the other, what terms of agreement it feels the Armenian and Karabakhi people will tolerate - seemingly without any level of compensation.

Then, of course Turkey has thrust itself into the equation, pressing for a team of historians to decide on Genocide, which has most decidedly mudded the already murky waters – an important factor not covered in this article.

makho on "South Ossetia: News from a Nowhere Zone"

makho — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 20:14:04 +0000

You say "there have not been cases of arson or murder in the region", read the HRW report. Please next time get all the relevant information before writing the article, your profession demands that.

ducafeli on "Putin: mentality of a street fighter "

ducafeli — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:50:22 +0000

Putin's character was a significant factor in Russia's behaviour to Georgia, argues Dmitri Travin. Childhood on the mean streets of St Petersburg taught him to fight his way out of a corner
Russia's isolation by the international community in August-September 2008 was to a great extent determined by objective circumstances. However, one subjective factor played an important role too. That was the character of Vladimir Putin, who despite his change of role from President to Prime Minister remains the dominant political figure in the country.
The economic growth of the last decade, based as it is on oil and gas, is the most important of these objective factors. This gives the Kremlin considerable room for political manoeuvre. Europe's dependence on Russia's energy resources mitigates the foreign policy consequences of drastic military steps. Consumers of our energy resources are wary of falling out with Russia without very good reason.
The considerable growth in real income of the Russian population has also served to distract people from politics. It gives them the illusion that everything is going well in the country, and that the deterioration of our relationship with the outside world will not affect their wallets.
Putin's hard-line policy has also been popular in Russia, as we have seen in recent years. Many citizens feel that the country has ‘got up from its knees' after the difficult years of the 1990s. They believe that the country's standing is enhanced by its ability to stand up for its national interests and to lash out at an enemy now and then. It is hardly surprising that the Kremlin plays up to this to strengthen its own position. ‘A small, victorious war' has been considered good for public opinion since the late 1990s, when Putin set out to establish his power in Chechnya. The invasion of Georgia in August 2008 also went down well. Especially as the Chechen terrorist Shamil Basaev and the Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili are regarded by many Russians as aggressors.
The effect of US policy
US policy in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf region has also played a significant part in changing Russians' ideas about good and evil in the sphere of international relations. In the late 1980s- early 1990s the democratic West had a kind of moral authority for many citizens of Russia who supported reforms. That authority has been lost. People associate the invasion of Georgia with the invasion of Iraq and the threats against Iran. They compare our support for the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia with the recognition of Kosovo's independence by many western countries.
I myself work a lot with students, and do a good deal of public speaking to middle-aged and elderly audiences. I can say from experience that even at the very beginning of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, it was far easier to convince audiences of the need for constructive cooperation with western countries than it is today, after Kosovo and Iraq.
The Putin factor
Economic, domestic and international political factors have thus all combined to encourage Putin to take the drastic action which has led to increased international isolation. However, Russia's foreign policy decisions have also been informed by personal characteristics that go back to the Prime Minister's childhood. In a country with a real division of power, with a system of political checks and balances, these personal characteristics would not have such major consequences. But in Russia today, where Putin's authority is extremely high and where the authority of the government and leading political party are determined almost exclusively by public support for the so-called national leader, these personal qualities play a most important part in determining political policy.
When explaining his position on an issue, Russia's Prime Minister has recourse more and more often these days to arguments of the ‘it takes one to know one' kind. Take his response in an interview on the ARD television channel after the war when a German journalist criticised the bombing of a residential building in the Georgian city of Gori. He referred with heavy irony to the Americans, who in suppressing the Taliban in Afghanistan killed hundreds of peaceful civilians. The same goes for Russia's recognition of the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The main Russian argument is that western countries behaved exactly the same in Kosovo.
Events in Afghanistan and the Balkans are, of course, objective factors in international politics. But in his speeches, Putin characteristically puts much less emphasis on standing up for Russian interests than on the fact that Russia is not behaving any worse than anyone else.
Putin the street fighter
So what characteristics are we talking about? Putin's own stories of his childhood and reports by several people who knew him at the time are very telling. Commentators tend to be misled by the fact that Putin comes from Petersburg, often called the cultural capital of Russia, as also by the fact that he graduated from the second best university of the country, and speaks German fluently. While taking all this into account, we should not ignore other important aspects.
Putin is the first of his family to belong to the intelligentsia. His father worked at a factory. His grandfather was a cook, and his great-grandfather was a serf in the provinces. Putin may have spent his childhood in Petersburg (Leningrad as was), but it was not an elite intellectual environment. He lived in a ‘kommunalka', a communal apartment, where several families who are not related live in the same apartment because they cannot afford one of their own. There are ‘kommunalkas' in Petersburg to this day. Like many children those days, he spent his free time outside in the yard, with boys of a pretty rough kind.
Volodya Putin was clearly a boy not lacking in noble instincts. Almost everyone who knew him as a child remembers that he stood up for the weak, and that although he was short and puny, he was brave enough to fight boys stronger and heavier than him. But commentators have studiously overlooked another very striking and important fact. Conflicts did not so much seek Putin out, as Putin seek them out. Do I see a fight? Can I join in? And when he did join in, he always threw the first punch.
In drawing a psychological portrait of Putin, some Russian writers have observed that people like him are not aggressively inclined. But so many tales of fights involving the young Vladimir have surfaced that they sound more like scenes from a Hollywood thriller about gangs from Chicago or the Bronx than the accounts of eyewitnesses from Leningrad in the 1960s-1970s. Life in Petersburg was certainly no idyll at the time. Yet no Petersburg boy of that generation (and the author of this article is one of them) could really say that there were fights going on on every street corner.
Actually, Putin himself has been quite open with journalists about what he was like in Leningrad in the 60s:
‘...I was a hooligan, not a pioneer.'
‘Are you joking?'
‘Absolutely not. I was a real hood.'
Political analysts usually ignore this self-assessment, or treat it as a joke. But they're wrong. Boys like young Volodya were rare in those days. Very few boys in the 1960s-70s were not included in the so-called pioneers, the mass children's communist organisation named after Lenin. There were probably not more than one or two in a class. And how many were summoned to a ‘comrades' court' by their neighbors? This really was unusual.
Putin really was hauled up in front of one of these. Although he was a bright little fellow, who didn't work badly and got Bs and Cs, he really was not admitted to the pioneers until he was 12, as opposed to the normal age of 9. Hoolignism was the only reason why he was not allowed to join the ranks of the ‘young Leninists'.
‘Growing up in the yard was like living in the jungle,' Putin once said himself. ‘Very much so. Oh yes!" And Vladimir's life soon began to develop according to the laws of the jungle. Theatres, museums and concert halls - was it that kind of Petersburg childhood? Well, not exactly.
To be top dog out there in the yard, you had to smash your opponent in the mug and ‘work him over' (this is the expression Putin once used about terrorists, when he was already president). What's more, you had to fight desperately ‘to the last drop of blood', without backing down. There are lots of stories about him as a fighter. And they all say the same thing, what words they use. Some say Volodya would work himself into a frenzy. Some say he was like a tiger, some that he was like a panther. What they're getting at is that this was the boy's way of expressing himself. It was character-forming.
Later on, when he was studying at the KGB intelligence school, he was described as having ‘very little sense of danger'. Perhaps this is an inborn characteristic. But it is more likely that it is the result of a childhood spent fighting in the yard, having to hit your opponent first, and leave the thinking till later. Isn't this the quality we see in Putin later, when the Russian authorities began the second Chechen war? Isn't this what distinguishes his actions today, what is leading to Russia's isolation?
The well-known Russian publicist Andrei Piontkovsky wrote in March 2000: ‘The Petersburg yard where a boy from a poor family living in a ‘kommunalka' spent all his time - this is where he really learned about life. An ordinary yard of the 1950s-60s, with brutal fights, the power of the street gangs and the cult of force. To survive in this environment, weedy little Vovochka had to be cunning and brutal, to appear strong and never experience moral doubts and suffering.'
The crucible of Putin's morality
While Piontkovsky has put his finger on the factors that formed Putin's character, the conclusion is still somewhat one-sided. Putin's personality is more complex, and it cannot all be explained by cunning, brutality and lack of moral norms. But what it does explain is the very particular notion of morality that underpins the Russian president's character.
There is the desire to punish the bad guys without really thinking about the political consequences. The desire to fight uncompromisingly, because bad guys only understand force. The desire to take things to their logical conclusion, as boys do in the yard, where a good fight is the norm, where a bad peace is nothing more than a temporary hiatus, an accidental exception to the rule.
Putin's love of martial arts - initially boxing, then sambo (unarmed self-defence) and later judo - all this goes back to the days when he lived by the laws of the jungle. And it also explains his genuine desire to serve in the KGB. He was still a schoolboy when he went to the Leningrad office of the KGB on Liteiny Prospekt to ask how he could get a job there.
Putin the communicator
And the KGB taught him another very important thing. When talking about what he did in the KGB, Putin has said himself that they made him a specialist in communicating with people. And he does indeed communicate extremely professionally in public, as well as with individuals on whom he wants to make a good impression. Almost everyone he talks to says that when they leave the president, they are quite sure that they've managed to persuade him. But none of the highest ranking officials in Russia can say today that they have been able to persuade Putin to follow their policy on fundamental issues.
Perhaps this is what happened to President Bush, who said after one of his first meetings with Putin that he was able to get a sense of his soul. Yet despite this Bush has not been able to establish a good working relationship with the Russian leader.
Today Putin acts on the international stage in more or less the same way that he fought boys in the yard. He acts with flair, trying to achieve personal self-affirmation, rather than a rational, positive result. But at the same time he is extremely good at concealing his aims, at finding an individual approach to everyone he deals with. The leaders of western countries were clearly not able to understand this strategy, and as a result they lost out to Russia.
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