Vladimir Putin: First Person

(Hutchinson $34.95)

Review by Barry Gustafson*

When the Herald printed on its front page a series of photos of Vladimir Putin, President of Russia and a black-belt master of judo, being thrown by a Japanese girl with a green belt, one wondered if some of the other revelations in this semi-autobiography by Putin were as reliable as his claims to have become so proficient at judo while in the KGB, the Soviet secret police, that he was able to be only narrowly defeated by the world judo champion.

This very interesting and easy-to-read book is neither autobiography nor biography. Instead it is the first stage of either, consisting of the transcripts of six interviews totalling 24 hours with Putin interspersed with comments by others, notably his wife, who have known him over the years.

Seven chapters deal sequentially with Putin as son, schoolboy, university student, young specialist, policeman and spy, democrat, bureaucrat, family man and politician. As an appendix there is an article written by Putin in December 1999, reflecting on Russia's present and future.

It is very much the type of book candidates for the presidency of the United States might release in election year, and indeed the book ends with Putin, as Prime Minister and Acting President of Russia, about to embark on the campaign that ended with his election to the presidency this year.

There is much of interest in the book, though it is franker about Putin's youth than about the more sensitive later years. One grandfather was a cook for both Lenin and Stalin. His father was a submariner, military police saboteur behind German lines and, later, Communist Party secretary in an industrial factory. His mother was a survivor of the dreadful siege of Leningrad. She had her son secretly baptised and since 1993, Putin reveals, he has never taken off the baptismal cross he wears around his neck.

Yet Putin admits that he never formally resigned from the Communist Party, and he is defensive of the KGB, which he served in East Germany for five years as well as in Russia.

He left the KGB in 1991 to go back to university but rose swiftly and somewhat strangely through the 1990s, largely as the result of patronage, at first through Anatoly Sobchak's Leningrad/St Petersburg mayoral organisation and then as part of Boris Yeltsin's presidential staff in Moscow.

Yeltsin nominated Putin first to be head of the Federal Security Service, the reconstituted KGB, last year before later in the year surprisingly appointing him Prime Minister and heir apparent to the presidency of Russia.

Putin's relationships with the very influential but shadowy and controversial Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky, and Yeltsin's influential Chief of Staff Pavel Borodin, are mentioned as important but remain somewhat unclear.

Insofar as Putin's personality, principles and policies come through, he appears to be an intense man, a hard worker, intelligent and self-confident, and an ardent nationalist who does not think that the old Soviet Union was all bad.

His future as Russia's new leader will be watched with interest but it is too early to guess how well he will solve Russia's many serious problems.

It is also far too early for either a substantial autobiography or a definitive biography of the man.

* Barry Gustafson is a professor of political studies at Auckland University. He has just published His Way, a biography of Sir Robert Muldoon.