Putin Bio

Two hours with Masha Gessen, telling us all about Vladimir Putin.

It's a lot, but I think it's important. I should've been looking for this info years ago.

Putin is aggressive and vengeful and reckless. And he doesn't hide any of that, even though he demonstrates it in sometimes subtle ways, but often in very starkly obvious ways. He wants us to know the extremes he's willing to go to.

It's classic behavior, straight out of the old movies about gang leaders. eg: Capone with a baseball bat bashing a guy's brains out in the middle of a meeting with a dozen other guys looking on.

The Putin Files (2017) - Masha Gessen on Frontline from PBS, with Michael Kirk

History, bitches.

Takeaways:

1. Authoritarians (in general) perceive the world to be a hostile place. Sometimes hostile to themselves personally, which they often then project onto their countries, which in turn helps them rationalize all sorts of shitty behavior, and that shitty behavior prompts the world to react with hostility, which perpetuates the cycle of shittiness.
2. If you want your little autocracy to prevail, you can't afford to have an independent judiciary.
3. Even a dictatorship has to rely on popular support - that's what makes propaganda and information silos very very important.
4. A preemptive counterrevolution is helpful in anticipation of protesters in the streets.
5. Putin invades Ukraine 8 years ago and watches his popularity soar, but he's not able to sell it this time.

Fascinating.