Masha Gessen, author of “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin”, he said: “Putin’s parents worked almost all day, his mother in various unskilled jobs, his father in a factory. He was left to his own devices. She was hanging out in the yard with other kids.”
His former school teacher, Vera Dmitrievna Gurevich, reflected: “There was no hot water, no bathtub. And it was terribly cold.” His mother nearly starved to death, and young Vladimir was skinny and small. “They often teased him and harassed until he started studying Sambo, a version of martial arts, and then switched to Judo so he could compete,” Gessen wrote.
Putin is now a black beltAnd he likes the world to know it. Some even refer to his inner circle as a “judocracy”. Putin reflected in 2015: “50 years ago, the street of Leningrad taught me a rule: If a fight is inevitable, you have to throw the first punch.”.
“It’s rudimentary, and very ambitious. Very greedy,” Gessen painted him. Putin’s surrogate parents fueled that greed. He bragged about having things his father had never gotten: a wristwatch as a teenager, a car when he became a law student at the State University of Leningrad, where he earned a Ph.D. in economics.
But according to the Kremlin’s own website, Putin wanted to work in intelligence, “even before finishing school”. He volunteered at the age of 16, and was chosen from over a hundred students for the KGB. Pavel Koshelev, a classmate at the university reflected: “I would say that his most outstanding trait was his fighting spirit and his strong will to achieve his goals.”
In the late 1980s, Putin was posted to Dresden, in East Germany, to work in counter espionage. And after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he rose to become the head of the KGB’s successor, the FSB, and then Boris Yeltsin’s successor when he resigned in 1999. Putin said his KGB career prepared him for the presidency. , and who applies that discipline even today.
