The first time Vladimir Putin waged war it was against the rats which infested the corridors of his bleak boyhood home in a dilapidated Soviet apartment block.
Telling the story of those vermin now, he makes clear he won his battles against them, possibly using the story to illustrate how he overcame post-war devastation and poverty to succeed.
In First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait, published in 2000, he writes: “There were hordes of rats in the front entryway. My friends and I used to chase them around with sticks.
”Once I spotted a huge rat and pursued it down the hall until I drove it into a corner. It had nowhere to run. Suddenly it lashed around and threw itself at me. I was surprised and frightened. Now the rat was chasing me.
“Luckily, I was a little faster and I managed to slam the door shut in its nose. There, on that stair landing, I got a quick and lasting lesson in the meaning of the word cornered.”
The anecdote may be part of his carefully curated narrative, but it gives us a glimpse into the making of the man who now has the world holding its breath.
Putin was born on October 7, 1952, in Leningrad, now St Petersburg, a city that had been under siege for 900 days in the Second World War. More than a million people had died of starvation, many families entirely wiped out.
In the war, Putin’s father, Vladimir, was away fighting, while his mother, Maria, almost starved to death. Putin writes: “Once my mother fainted from hunger. People thought she had died, and they laid her out with the corpses. Luckily Mama woke up in time and started moaning.”
His father was one of only four of the 28 men in his unit to come home from the war, and for the rest of his life limped because of shrapnel injuries.
The couple are believed to have lost their two older children, one to diphtheria during the war, the second from another childhood illness.
Vladimir Putin was a “miracle baby” who arrived late. His communal home was dire, shared with two other families.
His former school teacher Vera Dmitrievna Gurevich said: “There was no hot water, no bathtub. The toilet was horrendous. And it was so cold, awful.”
Putin was a street kid, small for his age and bullied so he had to toughen up fast.
Masha Gessen, author of The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin, says: “Putin’s parents worked pretty much around the clock, his mother various unskilled jobs, his father at a factory. He was left to his own devices. He hung out in the courtyard with other boys, like all children did.
“And he was often picked upon and bullied until he started studying Sambo, a version of martial arts, and then later switched to Judo so he could compete.”
He is now a black belt and likes the world to know it, some even referring to his inner circle as a “Judocracy”. Putin reflected in 2015: “50 years ago the Leningrad street taught me a rule: if a fight is inevitable you have to throw the first punch.”
Masha says: “He’s scrappy, very ambitious, very, very greedy.”
She says Putin’s doting parents fed that greed. He had a wristwatch as a teen – something his dad didn’t have. When they won a car they reportedly gave it to their student son.
Masha suggests by treating him as their “king”, Putin’s parents gave him a sense of entitlement. She said: “There’s a lot of proof he feels he is chosen now.”
The proof could include his sprawling “Putin’s Palace” home, and those photos of him riding horses bare-chested. More recently, making French President
Emmanuel Macron sit at the other end of a ridiculously long table says everything about his need to feel superior.
According to the Kremlin website, Putin wanted to work in intelligence “even before he finished school”, and volunteered at 16. He holds a law degree from Leningrad State University plus a doctorate in economics, and was picked from 100 or more students for the KGB.
Pavel Koshelev, a college classmate and fellow KGB officer, said: “His most outstanding trait, I would say, was his fighting spirit and his strong will to achieve his goals.’’
In the late 1980s, Putin was posted to Dresden, East Germany, reportedly to work in counter-espionage.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he rose to become 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 presidency. That discipline is still clear today as he works 16 and 17-hour days, something which took its toll on his family life. He married Lyudmila Putina, a former air hostess, in the mid-1980s and doted on their two daughters.
After he and Lyudmila divorced in 2014, she reportedly said: “Our marriage is over due to the fact that we barely see each other. Vladimir is completely submerged in his work.”
