“We have to talk about Putin. It is truly necessary. Not only because, like it or not, he is one of the most important people on the planet, nor because of the geopolitical impact of the battle he is waging with the West with bragging and deception, with memes and money, but also because he has become a planetary symbol that everyone defines to their liking” says Mark Galeotti in “We have to talk to Putin” (Captain Swing), a small volume in which he tries to offer keys to better understand this character that everyone talks about and very few they really know because he is not a chess player, but a judo player, which makes him opportunistic and unpredictable, which “explains why we are so often unable to anticipate his moves.”
He remembers his origins in the KGB and believes that “he masters some of the techniques of a well-trained security agent, especially when it comes to detecting the vulnerability of people and using it, but his experience comes from the last KGB whose engine They were no longer Marxist-Leninist glories and dreams, but corrupt personal interest.” He is still very identified with the Chekists and is a fan of spies, but in his professional practice he never became a Soviet James Bond because he never had much experience in the field and his activity was limited to the management of services .
He denies that he is a communist in the ideological sense. “Rather, he seems to miss the order of that time and, of course, he is hurt by the loss of the condition of undisputed superpower that the Soviet Union held.” But “behind Putin’s throne there is no particular character who pulls the strings, nor any particular philosophy or philosopher who models his thinking.” He is, yes, “a visceral patriot who believes that Russia should be considered a great power not because of its military power, its economy or any specific indicator, but because it is Russia”, although he is aware that the West is more powerful than his country, a giant with feet of clay in which 90% of its wealth is in the hands of 10% of its inhabitants.
He considers him the “man with a thousand masks”, pragmatic, who adopts “the pose of adventurism and that he is not afraid of anything” but who is basically prudent and averse to risk (this essay was written before the invasion of Ukraine), accepts and covers up corruption and admits to some extent its enemies, but does not tolerate betrayal. “Putin is not a tyrant who kills indiscriminately” because he is a “compassionate autocrat”, even though he has accepted or tolerated others doing it for him. The problem is that he is “largely valued not as a man, not as a politician, but as an icon of Russia” of which ordinary citizens are not “ardent supporters”, but rather “victims”.
In the last pages there is an addendum on the Ukraine war, which leads him to state that “Putin was wrong not because he lost his mind, but because he was allowed to make apparently rational decisions on the basis of multiple errors of judgment regarding the real situation… He had surrounded himself with subservient minions, hawks like himself, and ambitious sycophants who vied with each other for the chance to tell him not what he needed to hear, but what he wanted to hear.” And he finally conceptualizes him as a “little gray man”.
At the same time, Captain Swing publishes another work by Galeotti: “A Brief History of Russia. How to understand the most complex nation in the world”, a brief essay but written with excellent knowledge of the past of this Eurasian giant and good knowledge of the people of it by the author’s own science.
