Streetwise Professor

February 21, 2012

Portrait of A President As A Young Thug

Filed under: Politics,Russia — The Professor @ 8:14 pm

I’ve often commented how Putin has a gansta’s obsessions with respect. It comes out in particular when he talks about the United States and Khodorkovsky.  I’m convinced that Khodorkovsky sealed his fate when he gave a public presentation accusing Putin’s inner circle–and by implication Putin–with corruption, and thereby disrespected the don.

This excerpt from a forthcoming biography of Putin by Masha Gessen makes it plain that Putin’s gangsta obsession dates from his childhood.  It is his chosen identity, one that he has built-cultivated, really-for five decades.  It is not an act.  It is him.

Very revealing. And very disturbing.

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41 Comments »

  1. Well, I’m disturbed, IN MY PANTS! Where are you from? Elmer Fudd land? Weery weery disturbing!

    “Gansta” LOL, so street!

    Comment by andrewi31 — February 21, 2012 @ 11:17 pm

  2. Putin is nothing compared to genocidal maniacs that are running America.

    Comment by PeteR — February 22, 2012 @ 3:53 pm

  3. Funny coming from a streetwise prof.

    Comment by Sublime Oblivion — February 22, 2012 @ 5:31 pm

  4. Truth is stranger than fiction. A little pimp from Leningrad becomes a faceless weasel KGB agent becomes a big weasel President of Russia. The Russian Nightmare.

    He ditches his poor wife and cavorts with young girls and then makes sure the official candle lighting photo from Christmas prominently shows his “wedding ring”. What a worthless piece of crap.

    You want moral turpitude-visit the orphanages that the pimp reigns over.

    Comment by pahoben — February 22, 2012 @ 7:54 pm

  5. It is not a portrait but rather vulgar chalk caricature scrawled on the gates of Hell.

    Comment by pahoben — February 22, 2012 @ 8:06 pm

  6. Very revealing about Putin. What I found especially important–not just about Putin but about the Soviet system as a whole–was the collegial relationship with the German “RAF” AKA the Baader-Meinhoff gang. That group committed a great number of murders, kidnappings, and armed robberies in the then West Germany. According to this account, they were being “trained” in Dresden by the KGB and, presumably, the Stasi as well.

    And Putin was on such personal and friendly relations with them that he would regularly put in orders with them to steal consumer goods for him in West Germany.

    Eye-opening, indeed.

    Comment by John McCormack — February 22, 2012 @ 9:37 pm

  7. More than 100,000 came out for Putin today.

    His is much bigger than Navalny’s. Or SWP’s for that matter.

    Comment by Sublime Oblivion — February 23, 2012 @ 4:08 am

  8. I am sitting in a large basketball arena at this moment. My wife has her swearing in ceremony as a US citizen. The guy sitting in front of us is also from Russian. I guess I should try to explain that S/O will tell them what a big mistake all these people are making becoming citizens of such a vile country. After reading his comments hard to understand the happiness here.

    Comment by pahoben — February 23, 2012 @ 7:26 am

  9. All of these chumps actually went through the legal citizenship process-how conventional. The 21st century progressive assault on the antiquated concept of US borders will end this quaint process.

    Comment by pahoben — February 23, 2012 @ 7:59 am

  10. The guy to the left is also from Russia. Why are people leaving Putin’s utopia to cme here? S/O needs to start attending these ceremonies to save people from this horrible mistake.

    Comment by pahoben — February 23, 2012 @ 8:05 am

  11. “intellectuals” know far better where these people should live then they know themselves. They just do not have the capacity to understand the philosophic principles apparently. If the intellectuals deem a s$&t hole as superior they need to get with the plan and act accordingly.

    Comment by pahoben — February 23, 2012 @ 8:34 am

  12. @SO,
    From the BBC today:
    “Two railway workers told our correspondent their managers had made them take part while a group of university students said they had been paid to come, and had been told they were being bussed not to a political rally, but to a folk festival.”

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17136644

    Comment by Gordon — February 23, 2012 @ 8:40 am

  13. Who cares? It’s exceeding clear that the media will highlight the dozen or two cases of coerced attendance (or claims of coerced attendance) and anti-Putin ideologues will take it and drive with it.

    Comment by Sublime Oblivion — February 23, 2012 @ 9:33 am

  14. I am sitting in a large basketball arena at this moment. My wife has her swearing in ceremony as a US citizen.

    Posting to a blog during a swearing in ceremony. How discourteous. *tsk* *tsk*

    Comment by Sublime Oblivion — February 23, 2012 @ 9:35 am

  15. Still waiting for the judge. There are so many people being sworn in that the arrival time is 7am but the ceremony proper starts at 10. It takes so much time to process all these forlorn misguided people.

    Comment by pahoben — February 23, 2012 @ 9:39 am

  16. So sad. The arena is full to the rafters.

    Comment by pahoben — February 23, 2012 @ 9:43 am

  17. It is over and for me it was a very moving ceremony. I didn’t cry but my nose was leaking quite a bit.

    Comment by pahoben — February 23, 2012 @ 11:58 am

  18. … the dozen or two cases of coerced attendance…

    “Некоторые организации позаботились о сотрудниках,чтоб не холодно было сидеть на пластике.На сидениях в каждом пакете плед,конфета и мандаринка,а на самом сидении матерчатая сидушка.”

    Comment by peter — February 23, 2012 @ 12:59 pm

  19. Truth, facts, and reality are just assemblages of unimportant details for S/O and his peers. All that matters are their intellectual fantasies and illusions of superiority.

    Looks like maybe the tolerance of Vova toward Echo Moscow wasn’t as deep as you claimed S/O.

    Comment by pahoben — February 23, 2012 @ 7:39 pm

  20. It seems S/O has a fixation on Putin, his worship of Putin reminds one of how German women were in love with Hitler…..

    Comment by Andrew — February 23, 2012 @ 10:16 pm

  21. Putin is, of course, a lifelong gang member. There is NO other way to describe the KGB. He spent his life learning how to get what he wants through lies and violence. No thinking person can dispute that.

    Comment by La Russophobe — February 24, 2012 @ 6:22 am

  22. ANDREW: And that reminds one of how Russian women are in love with Putin.

    http://www.constructionlitmag.com/additions/the-cult-of-putin

    Comment by La Russophobe — February 24, 2012 @ 6:24 am

  23. Congrats Andy, SWP etc. on your new allies Hamas! 🙂

    Comment by Sublime Oblivion — February 24, 2012 @ 9:45 pm

  24. There’s something grimly amusing about a thread based on an article by Masha Gessen relying on very thin shreds of evidence indeed to demonstrate that Putin came from a KGB family, and this article getting lots and lots of play leading up to the almost foregone conclusion of the March vote in Russia, while Angelo Codevilla’s far more important article The Chosen One about Obama’s CIA grand parentage gets systematically ignored. It’s almost as if the whole Birther issue was created to distract folks from asking what the Dunhams and by extension Obama’s Mama who was dating the Indonesian Army officer Sotero were doing in Indonesia in the first place (not spying, influencing!). Codevilla being a maverick who’s been willing to stick out his neck for Jonathan Pollard (not on the grounds that Pollard wasn’t spying for Israel but simply that the stuff he passed along was low level and hence he’s probably paid his debt to U.S. society already).

    The evidence at any rate is a hell of a lot more impressive than the host SWP’s ‘evidence’ for Zerohedge being a Bulgarian KGB plant/disinformation op.

    EVERYONE who is making a splash in politics, whether domestic or foreign policy, gets a MINDER, sooner or later. EVERYONE. Even SWP has had his amusing ‘gee what a coincidence’ moments like the State Dept. arranged reunion with Nemtsov. It is simply a depressing fact of like and one that SWP and his followers here all pretend only applies in Silovik-land, there being no such thing as American Siloviks, or intelligence operations designed to influence domestic U.S. politics.

    So now comes one Justin Raimondo to point out the background of the guy the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s Mitch McConnell appointed to help Rand Paul break into the GOP maintream, which he has done with remarkable success (see second post).

    Now imagine if a senior advisor to Putin had routinely worked with the Nuclear Freeze movement in the 1980s, worked with the American Communist Party, etc etc etc. I daresay you old fart Cold Warriors and young in Cold Warriors wouldn’t stick your heads in the sand and say he was just another Leftist fellow travelling activist. No siree.

    I feel for your Ron Paul. Because I’ve been there too. Everyone seeking to influence American foreign policy for the better gets a minder now and then. EVERYONE. There are no exceptions to the rule.

    And no, I won’t stick around here to be kicked around. Just cut the crap that the CIA and or the orgs it admits to have founded in the Cold War era have not blown back on the U.S. with what Codevilla documents as the ‘controlled’ ‘moderate’ or if you prefer, Fabian Socialist Left. Codevilla of course, having left out the part about Soros NGOs being obvious CIA fronts in the late 1980s and Soros being untouchable as a result.

    Witness the inexplicable rise of Barack Obama from relatively unknown Illinois State Senator to the White House. At least in Putin’s case Deutsche Bank guys had their eyes on him as far back as 1997 as a man in Sobchak’s cabinet who could get things done for foreign investors in St. Petersburg. What did Obama do besides vote present and hook up with Rezko, Penny Prizker? Why all the noisy waving of Obama’s birth certificate, faked or not (and I doubt faked)? Could it be that you notice hardly a soul has stepped forward to discuss or write about how they knew Obama way back when at Columbia U, or even before that in grade school? The contrast even to a known spook like Putin who has dozens if not hundreds of classmates and acquaintences stretching back decades who remembered who he was before Yeltsin plucked him from obscurity is very telling.

    Comment by Mr. X — February 24, 2012 @ 10:20 pm

  25. Remember, everyone of importance gets minders in U(S)S A. Everyone.

    http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1852/article_detail.asp

    Here’s The Chosen One — amazed In Q Tel Gov-oogle hasn’t already driven it down into the bowels of search results (like Soros ‘Nazi collaborator’ interview from the early 1990s on YouTube) or blocked it altogether

    http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/02/02/can-ron-paul-be-tamed/

    “At [Sen. Mitch] McConnell’s request, the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent an adviser to Kentucky to watch over Rand Paul’s general-election campaign — ‘to be the grown-up in the room,’ according to one Washington Republican who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly.

    “The adviser, Trygve Olson, developed a friendship with Rand Paul, and the two realized that they could teach each other a lot — to the benefit of both candidate and party. Olson showed Paul and his campaign establishment tactics: working with the news media, fine-tuning its message. And Paul showed Olson — and by extension, McConnell — how many people were drawn to the GOP by his message of fiscal responsibility…. And at Rand Paul’s suggestion, Olson joined his father’s presidential campaign this year, basically to do what he did for Rand: help bring the Paul constituency into the Republican coalition without threatening the party. It’s probably no small coincidence that the partnership helps Rand’s burgeoning political career, too.”

    Who is Trygve Olson? A former official of the International Republican Institute (IRI), a tax-funded “regime-change” operation under the rubric of the National Endowment for Democracy, Olson was involved in several of the “color revolutions” that swept Eastern Europe and the central Asian former Soviet republics during the Bush years. This New York Times article reports on his activities in Belarus meddling in their internal politics and plotting to overthrow its thuggish President, Alexander Lukashenko: he also played a part in stirring up similar trouble on Washington’s behalf in Serbia and Poland.

    At a meeting of the New Atlantic Initiative, another semi-official interventionist outfit, in 2004, Olson appeared on the same podium as various government apparatchiks of the old Cold Warrior/Radio Free Europe type, who gave seminars on the ins-and-outs of successful “regime change.” While others gave talks on Lukashenko’s “links” to Saddam Hussein and Israel’s other enemies in the region, Olson gave a presentation on polling results in the country. A particular area of concern was the possibility of an economic or political union with Russia, which was seen by the participants as the main threat to “democracy” and Europeanization in Belarus. And while meddling in Eastern Europe appears to be his specialty – his wife, Erika Veberyte, served as chief foreign policy advisor to the Speaker of the Lithuanian parliament – this biography on the web site of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University says:

    “Mr. Olson has helped advise political parties and candidates in numerous countries throughout the world including nearly all of Central and Eastern Europe, Indonesia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Serbia.”

    The “color revolutions” of the Bush era were brazen attempts to overthrow regimes deemed unfriendly to the US, and absorb the scattered pieces of the former Soviet Union into the Western sphere of influence. Of course, these efforts all backfired: in Georgia, for one example, our chosen candidate set up a veritable dictatorship, jailed his opponents for “treason,” and launched a disastrous war against Russia. In Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, too, our sock puppets set themselves up for a backlash: both US-installed regimes have since been ousted, either by being unceremoniously voted out of office or by force. In Venezuela, the US government has long sought to overthrow the blustering caudillo, Hugo Chavez, and our meddling has only played into his hands, enabling him to muster nationalist resentment against the democratic opposition. The same is generally true elsewhere. These “strategic” deployments of “soft power” never work, and wind up hurting our interests rather than advancing them.

    Another aspect of these “soft power” deployments is the inevitable involvement of the American intelligence community in some form or other, engaging in covert operations with no real congressional oversight and without the knowledge or consent of the American people. This can lead to all kinds of abuses that inevitably impact on our domestic politics – an area where the CIA is supposedly forbidden from entering, although that has never been the case.

    In the New York Times piece on the Belarussian operation, the reporter describes a meeting attended by Olson and Belarussian dissidents as “a meeting of the freedom industry,” a telling description because that’s exactly what it is: an industry, one in which Olson is a player. It’s the “regime change” industry that has flourished in this country ever since the start of the cold war. The necons played a key role in staffing the organizations and semi-official front groups into which billions of our tax dollar flowed: Reagan gave the National Endowment for Democracy to them as a sort of playground, where they were out of the way and free to think they had some real influence on the administration. In the post-cold war world, the NED took on added importance – and more tax dollars – as the US tried to cash in on the Soviet collapse by sponsoring “color revolutions” throughout the former Soviet bloc. It didn’t matter that the very reason for launching these cold war institutions was no longer in existence: as one needn’t explain to a Ron Paul supporter, government programs have a life of their own, and killing them is akin to driving a stake through the heart of a vampire – a difficult and often impossible feat.

    So we have a major player in the “regime change” industry as a “senior advisor” to the Paul campaign: and not only that but a pedagogical relationship between Olson and Rand Paul. The latter has presumably learned from the former why draconian sanctions on Iran – deemed an “act of war” by his father – are a good idea and ought to be supported. Paul recently joined ninety-nine other similarly clueless US Senators in voting “aye” on what is in effect an economic blockade against Iran.

    The Establishment’s strategy is clear: get to the father through the son, whose political career can be imperiled by the GOP elders, like McConnell (although that didn’t stop Paul from getting elected over McConnel’s opposition). If the Paul campaign is “infiltrating” the GOP, as Gardner puts it, then the GOP Establishment is intent on infiltrating the Paul campaign at the highest levels.

    Comment by Mr. X — February 24, 2012 @ 10:23 pm

  26. It’s as if Obama sprang fully formed as an adult at the age of 33, sui generis, upon Cook County/Hyde Park as a Community Organizer. No colleagues from the Harvard Law Journal, no classmates besides the one or two he quotes in his first ‘Call me Barry’ autobiography writing their own stories in the Huffington Post, and a Social Security number the Birthers are suing to prove once belonged to a dead person in Connecticut, a state Obama had no connection with whatsoever.

    Comment by Mr. X — February 24, 2012 @ 10:26 pm

  27. Nothing new in the book, no sources, and a perfect PR-Action. That’s all.

    Comment by Juergen Roth — February 25, 2012 @ 7:13 am

  28. Congrats SUBLIME PSYCHOPATH, RUSSIA, on your new enemies, dozens and dozens of civilized nations across the planet:

    http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2012/02/24/friends_of_syria_vow_support_for_opposition/

    Comment by La Russophobe — February 25, 2012 @ 7:18 am

  29. World’s only superpower says Russia is a “despicable murderer” in Syria, host of nations rally to do battle with the evil that is Russia.

    https://twitter.com/#!/larussophobe/status/173396826303635456

    Comment by La Russophobe — February 25, 2012 @ 7:21 am

  30. A love the Crazy anonymous Mr X – He is making a very bad job for his Anti-American dictator buddies –

    President Obama said Washington will keep pressuring Syrian President Bashar Assad to stop the “slaughter” of civilians, saying it was imperative that the world unite in condemning the Syrian military onslaught.

    “It is time to stop the killing of Syrian citizens by their own government,” Obama said after a conference by a group of nations known as the Friends of Syria concluded in Tunisia.

    The move by the group is aimed at jolting Assad and his allies into accepting demands for a democratic transition, even as they are still unwilling to commit to military intervention to end the nearly year-old bloodshed.

    http://www.freep.com/usatoday/article/53231034?odyssey=mod%7Cnewswell%7Ctext%7CFRONTPAGE%7Cp

    Comment by Anders — February 25, 2012 @ 6:36 pm

  31. X-I just do not understand why you compulsively base your comments on linkages between the US and Putin/Russia. They are different in material ways and no broad analogy exists politically nor socially. Your incessant implication of essential equivalency is so far from truth that it causes me to wonder what possibly could be your fundamental motivation to so energetically endeavor to demonstrate this equivalence.

    Oh yes it comes to me now that you have some personal financial interest apparently strong enough to cause you to be a public apologist for a totally and absolutely corrupt person and his government. I honestly had forgotten.

    Comment by pahoben — February 25, 2012 @ 7:30 pm

  32. As The Professor has pointed out this pro Putinism from reported Ron Paul Libertarians is one of the most bizarre juxtapositions Imaginable.

    Comment by pahoben — February 25, 2012 @ 7:47 pm

  33. It’s as if Obama sprang fully formed as an adult at the age of 33, sui generis, upon Cook County/Hyde Park as a Community Organizer. No colleagues from the Harvard Law Journal, no classmates besides the one or two he quotes in his first ‘Call me Barry’ autobiography writing their own stories in the Huffington Post

    Well, there was Remnick’s bio that quoted several hundred people from every stage of his life. So your point is proven totally false. Of course, not only on those grounds.

    Comment by mossy — February 26, 2012 @ 6:12 am

  34. Moissy I said I wasn’t getting into it — but several hundred people on a scale of the Clintons or Bushes that all knew him way back when? Um, doesn’t look like anything close to that — the author appears to cite at most a couple dozen or so people PRIOR to the Chicago era. I was hardly disputing how many folks knew him after 33. And the lack of a single article with his real name on it — but only one loosely attributed to him that Codevilla can find — is quite telling. Here was a man who was content to vote present, who knew which buttons to push and tickets to punch, and who always gravitated to powerful patrons, or kryshes if you will, that whether they were intel connected billionaires like Soros or more Chicago machine patrons like Penny Pritzker, were ready to make him their vehicle.

    If you don’t trust the reviewers comments fine, but even Publishers Weekly admits nearly all of the material is straight from Obama’s TWO count em’ TWO autobiographies, not people that knew him PRIOR to that critical transition age from Harvard Law Review to Chicago ‘community organizer’.

    And personality — the tendency to be whatever everyone around him wanted him to be — just doesn’t account for the difference either.

    “X-I just do not understand why you compulsively base your comments on linkages between the US and Putin/Russia.” The host of this site has compulsively and constantly declared the U.S. fit to judge Russia in every way shape or form, regardless of the ledger in terms of dead babies (an issue he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about), dead victims of aerial bombing/wars, etc etc. The author of this site believes the U.S. has the God he doesn’t believe in right to overthrow the governments of multiple nations as the mandarins he pretends to distrust in D.C. see fit.

    “They are different in material ways and no broad analogy exists politically nor socially.” But at least I can agree with that. I stand by my basic point that Obama is at least an indirect product of a silovik family and multiple CIA-influenced or front foundations and CIA friendly billionaires. If you refuse to see the parallels to Putin, that’s your problem.

    Comment by Mr. X — February 26, 2012 @ 10:17 pm

  35. Other than perhaps yourself pahoben, this site and its supporters, both open and federal government-connected (a more or less common thread running from SWP’s State Dept. pals to rytb), will never display the slightest bit of humility, the slightest conservatism of doubt when it comes to America ever minding its own damn business and getting its own shit together in this wider world. It just isn’t in their professional, monetary or ego interest to do so, period. Neither is it in the interests of the Almighty Status Quo whose leading critics SWP hates so much.

    So no, I’ve never received a dime for ever saying anything good about Russia, for the record, or rather comparing the slow but steady progress towards greater individual wealth and liberty in Russia (despite the Russian State) while this country has gotten poorer and less free every year for at least the past twelve years. SWP in his little academic and conference jet setting ivory tower can’t see that. He cannot see the TSA groping kids as part of a larger social sickness that perverts and ensures even the ‘good intended’ interventions in places like Kosovo, Syria or elsewhere ensure only Islamist jihadi-friendly gangsters make those places bigger hellholes than they were before the Pentagon so lovingly love bombed them.

    Comment by Mr. X — February 26, 2012 @ 10:23 pm

  36. He cannot see that the reason this country leaves the Border wide open with homicidal maniacs getting guns from our own government while we spend billions abroad is to deliberately destroy this country along Roman Empire lines, period. And I got news for you pahoben — it ain’t the Kremlins that are doing that. They couldn’t pull it off during the Cold War even when they were admittedly tossing some rubles and gold towards some Gramscian long marchists. Only globalist one worlders who worship Santa Muerte or money or Lucifer on the inside can do that.

    Comment by Mr. X — February 26, 2012 @ 10:24 pm

  37. And last of all, I was unaware that Profesor Igor Panarin managed a Vulcan mind meld or send some KGB rays into the brains of the Wyoming Legislature to initiate a bill on preparaing for the collapse of the federal government and/or the U.S. dollar. So it would seem despite all of SWP’s rage for the machine, the trend towards decentralization, prepperism, skepticism of massive and eternal wars abroad (including Cold Wars against the Russians and Chinese), Ron Paul fandom and perhaps Rand support for 2016 — are an unstoppable wave. So I’m on the winning team, and shills for the Almighty Status Quo who are going to get a gutted or hyperinflated pension for their status quo shilling are on the losing team.

    Comment by Mr. X — February 26, 2012 @ 10:29 pm

  38. the author appears to cite at most a couple dozen or so people PRIOR to the Chicago era.

    First there was “no one.” Now there are “at most a couple dozen of so people.”

    Maybe if you read the book, you’d raise your figure even higher.

    This is where you apologize for lying and admit that you based your entire crackpot theory on false information.

    Mr X, if you want lament the downfall of the US — have at it. But why you feel compelled to make up a story about how Russia is the antedote to these perceived American woes is beyond me.

    Comment by mossy — February 27, 2012 @ 2:15 am

  39. Moissy your Coinintelpro is showing.

    Comment by Mr. X — February 29, 2012 @ 7:25 pm

  40. Sorry Moissy I’ll take Codevilla over a guy who mainly quoted a bunch of Obama cronies any day of the week.

    Comment by Mr. X — February 29, 2012 @ 7:29 pm

  41. Elections are over and it looks like Putin has won. Ample SWP material lives on! Thank God. I watched an interview of Ms. Gessen tonight, and if she is the epitome of sceptism against Putin, we’ll all fall asleep before we can remember his first name. (Despite her obnoxious left earring and boyish good looks.)

    Comment by Chelsea Kosmin — March 5, 2012 @ 12:22 am

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