Читать книгу The Story of Putin - United States Department of Defense - Страница 15

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Born into a poor family after the Great Patriotic War, Vladimir Putin’s childhood was marked by standard Soviet deprivation: cramped and paltry living conditions, food rationing, and isolation from the outside world. A self-described childhood “hooligan,” Putin was at best an average student and preferred to remain in the background and refrained from any leadership over his classmates. His teachers, nevertheless, recognized his intelligence, even if his grades never seemed to coincide. His childhood instructors also note his generally unforgiving nature toward anyone that Putin believes betrayed him, regardless of the severity of the issue in question.1 He took a particular liking to martial arts, specifically Judo because of the necessity of hard work, physical fitness, and blood compared to the “ballet” nature of karate. Putin’s love of Judo would continue into present day, where he still routinely practices. Putin’s admiration of those who are willing to toil in the extreme and his general loathing of any disloyalty cast some light on Putin’s more recent behavior has a head of state, especially regarding alleged slights by the United States and international community.

By the time Putin attended college at Leningrad State University (LGU), most LGU faculty were ardent communist supporters, so Putin became exposed to the most ardent anti-American and anti-Western Soviet propaganda while in college, under the guise of receiving a higher education and studying law.2 Putin’s exposure to Sovietized anti-Americanism would only increase exponentially as he now fancied a career as an officer in the KGB to do his part to protect the Soviet Union. His childhood ambitions of becoming a pilot or sailor had dissipated with age. Popular movies had portrayed a glamorized version of service within the state security apparatus, to which Putin had succumb before entering college.3 His romanticized vision of spies and KGB service continued after his initial recruitment into the security services from the University, but eventually the truly mundane nature of the service hit him like so many whose popculture vision of reality is quashed by true reality.

1 Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Kolesnikov, First Person, trans. Catherine Fitzpatrick (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2000), 13, 16.

2 Eric Shiraev and Vladislav Zubock, Anti-Americanism in Russia from Stalin to Putin (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 140.

3 Gevorkyan, First Person, 17.