From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng (Original Message) Sent: 11/3/2007 1:06 AM Volume 47, Number 9 · May 25, 2000 The Making of Mr. Putin By Tatyana Tolstaya, Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia's President Vladimir Putin, with Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, Andrei Kolesnikov, Translated from the Russian by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. The Russian original, Ot pervovo litsa, is available on the website www.vagrius.com.
Public Affairs, 207 pp., $15.00 (paper)
At this year's forum in Davos the question "Who is Putin?" was put to the members of the Russian delegation. They became confused, looked at one another, and mumbled something incomprehensible. There was laughter in the hall. But indeed, who is he?
For a certain group of Russians—let's call them left liberals—the answer was obvious from the beginning: Putin is a bloody tyrant and a future dictator. This point of view requires no detailed evidence. It is enough that Putin worked in the KGB for many years. For that matter, for this part of the liberal intelligentsia, which has recently supported Grigory Yavlinsky and his Yabloko Party, conclusions are obvious in advance and without any argumentation. In their dogmatism the members of this group are indistinguishable from their opponents. It's no accident that this group is called the "liberal gendarmerie." The opponent of a bad person almost always seems good in their eyes. Black and white are their basic colors.
By the time of the election, left liberals had formed their judgments from uneven but identically repellent components: Putin worked in the KGB; he is presiding over the war in Chechnya; he hates the Radio Liberty correspondent Andrei Babitsky and called him a traitor. With this, the question of trusting Putin became closed and the left liberals called on everyone to vote for Yavlinsky. (Five percent of the voters did so.) The logic was the following: "We know that we will be defeated, but we will take defeat with our heads proudly raised. We will express our protest against impending dictatorship. We will lose beautifully."
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