It is said of the late head of the Soviet Politburo, Leonid Brezhnev, that he kept a cage of doves for amusement at his dacha. They were gentle creatures, shown to guests and fed regularly. Just as often, Brezhnev, when feeling particularly dominant in his political life, would go to the cage and shake it violently, laughing in delight at the flapping panic and fear he had caused the birds.
As every dictator has moments of feeling anxious, stressed or unsure of his position, perhaps the then-chairman wished to reassure himself that, in the Kremlin or in his home, among his minions, he was master – but only for a time.
Outside of hoary legends, any temporal head of a police state may wish to seem like a benevolent hero in his/her lifetime, but there is always the nagging, back-of-mind knowledge that their time will end. Peacefully or violently, they will be gone from earth. To the Herods, Alexanders and Hitlers of this world, the thought of this is terrifying. But the more one spends a career in the spotlight, the harder it is to find repose in privacy.
After a certain watershed of violent acts which overtop the bounds of decency, there is no more peace to be found. Watching the fitful, desperate decrees of Brezhnev’s successor, a man who in his youth would never have dared to challenge either Brezhnev or his colleagues, one is moved by turns to horror and pity: horror at the massive suffering he is now causing to the people of Ukraine, and pity at the image of Vladimirovich Putin as a flailing salamander of public life, frantically seeking to wriggle away from exposure and recapture his former imagined security. He does not realize that we can see this.
But it is evident to all, for Putin has far overplayed his game. As a KGB operative and thus a long-time creature of the dark, he feels safest when he thinks himself most inscrutable, and fancies that mere western minds can never analyze his motives or predict his moves. He has contempt for both the American President and the gallant President of Ukraine, considering one to be either doddering and the other outgunned and hopelessly naïve. Knowing others are watching, Putin does not wish to be seen, at any cost, as weak or vacillating, but he is in fact very easily understood.
His reactions give him away as fearful and isolated: “You’ve got sanctions? I’ve got bombs!” This is normal for a global wanna-be who seeks to project an outsize and threatening presence from a country where size equals power, and brutality has often been mistaken for strength.
His epiphany came during his days as a junior spy station operative in East Berlin, when the Berlin Wall dissolved. Alarmed, and signalling KGB headquarters for an action directive, Putin received the terse reply: “Moscow is silent!” In other words, look to yourself, although then and now, there is not much to look at. Instead, we see an unattractive, powdered TV image of a balding man who possesses an outside head and chest but distressingly short, slightly bowed legs.
This causes him to appear rather like the Wizard of Oz of children’s books, posturing and threatening nuclear winter for those in Russia and elsewhere who do not show him sufficient respect. Like an aging Mafia don, he schemes and attempts to model his career after Stalin and Hitler at the height of their power, whose word was absolute and signalled life or death.
Putin’s reality, however, is jolting. Lacking a functioning aircraft carrier but fond of submarines as fellow creatures of the dark, Putin rattles his rusty missiles and the world steps back a pace. His mystique is tangible, formed from an enduring fascination with mythic heroes and authors of fiction such as Jack London in the arctic wild, writing of savage heroes braving the elements alone. And Putin is a loner, like his favorite authors outside of canned politspeak.
Hemingway ranks high in his estimation, a man of action and spare, undescriptive prose; Putin aspires to be like him also, and at age 70, as years diminish his physical strength, he desperately wishes the world to believe that he is. But time is inexorable, and Putin, like Brezhnev and his terrified doves, will soon leave earth.
Meanwhile, there is a war to finish, and like his idol Hemingway, Putin prefers self-destruction to failure. In prelude for the final showdown, like Lenin, he is destroying as many dissenters as he can, nor is he much concerned with how this is done – poison, assassination, or an unseen knife in the night: what is not exposed for him, does not exist, but the stage of his crimes is now larger.
He wishes the world to know how powerful he is, with many lives snuffed out by as many cluster weapons as his army can launch. An aged, wounded bear, grown old in Russian years, Putin trusts only the counsel of a few who, like him prefer nuclear winter as preferable to losing face.
While not employing the desk-pounding tactics and screams of “we will bury you!” favored by Khruschev, Putin has perfected a blank, glittering death stare for the cameras, making sure his best angle is shown to good advantage.
Gripping TV images of terrified refugee grandmas and children sheltering in train stations are only part of the backdrop to this scene. Putin makes war on a remarkably young country, and much of its population, like its President, is under 50 years of age. There will be survivors with long memories in this war, and they and their children have time – no one doubts the will – to move beyond the blustering dictates of a Russian government which seems to finally have begun to know that too much power in the hands of so few is a combustible recipe for Biblical-level disaster.
There is a time to evade direct answers and ignore what is happening right in front of us, across the world – and there is a time to stand up to a vicious, grotesque bully who knows his support and strength are slipping away.
It is no secret to anyone, what prompted Putin to lash out now with hellish destruction after years of playing a long chess game in diplomacy – and he will not stop with Ukraine, either; he is after bigger game – as many former Soviet nations as he can herd and capture, all brought back into the fold of the old Soviet umbrella.
Let us not stand too far off, or too long. And may God himself deliver the United States from blustering figureheads and timid reluctance to lead, and give us another Lincoln, another F.D.R. and yes, another Eleanor Roosevelt who called out injustice and said “I am bearing witness” until justice was done. Putin has played a long game, with only his rules. Let us checkmate it.
Linda Berry is a Northsider.
