Actually, the Ukraine should have been defeated long ago, but instead the fighting continues. Why? Because Vladimir Putin no longer has things under control, the historian Stéphane Courtois judges.
Almost a year has passed since Russian troops invaded Ukraine, and since then Vladimir Putin has been feared more than ever. But is the fear justified? According to historian Stéphane Courtois, Putin’s successes are more than manageable. In the t-online interview, the expert explains how the former KGB man subjugated Russia, why the West ignored all warnings and what language Putin would be the only one to understand.
t-online: Professor Courtois, Vladimir Putin is considered to be quite cunning, but his plans have so far failed due to the resistance of Ukraine. How could the Kremlin boss miscalculate so much?
Stephane Courtois: Actually, Vladimir Putin is quite incompetent, and also incredibly arrogant.
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But Putin has ruled Russia for more than two decades. This suggests that he knows how to achieve his goals in the long term.
Putin just isn’t the same anymore. Yes, he submitted to Russia without scruples. But what is Putin’s conclusion of the last twelve months? At the beginning of the war he wanted to take Kyiv by surprise. None! Then Putin thought the European Union would stand still while he rolled over Ukraine. None! NATO is “brain dead”, the Americans are pushing themselves out of Europe and letting the Ukrainian government under Volodymyr Zelenskyj be portrayed as a bunch of “Nazis”. No report, no report and no report again! Putin’s balance sheet is a total catastrophe, he is steering Russia towards the abyss at breakneck speed.
But first, let’s talk about the beginning of Putin’s career. In your soon-to-be-published “Putin Black Book,” you write that his rise was “meteotic.” How was it possible for a low-ranking ex-KGB officer to make it to the Kremlin?
Putin never left the KGB. “Once a Chekist, always a Chekist,” as the saying goes in Russia.
Stephane Courtois, born in 1947, is a historian and research director at the Center National de la Recherche Scientifique at the University of Paris Nanterre. Courtois is an expert on the history of communism, in 1998 he gave the much-discussed “Black Book of Communism” out in Germany. On January 26, 2023, the “Black Book Putin“, which he publishes with Galia Ackerman.
Founded in 1917 and soon greatly feared, the Cheka was a forerunner of the Soviet domestic and foreign intelligence service, the KGB.
I agree. Retired Secret Service Agent? Something like that does not exist. This is especially true for Vladimir Putin. The KGB was his school, his university, and this organization shaped Putin like no other. Let’s look back: On August 20, 1991, Putin claims to have left the KGB with the rank of lieutenant colonel. How could this happen? Putin was nothing, a nobody – at least that’s what it seemed on the surface. In fact, people must have pulled the strings far beyond Putin.
You have to explain that.
“Putin is a lieutenant colonel, but there are generals above him,” dissident Vladimir Bukovsky once put it. My guess is that towards the end of the Soviet Union a kind of “active reserve” of KGB men was formed – whose aim was to infiltrate the new state apparatus. “I would like to point out that the group of FSB officers sent to infiltrate the government is initially doing its job,” Putin himself remarked in December 1999, on the so-called Chekist Day of all days.
It was supposed to be some kind of joke.
I have my doubts about that. Putin is a genuine homo sovieticus, also socialized by the KGB. When he became director of the FSB in 1998, he compared it to returning to his parents’ home. Certainly, then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin had previously made some arrangements with the powerful power pullers of the KGB – or rather the FSB – regarding Putin’s appointment.
So Putin’s “ties” to the secret service was one pillar of his rise, but what about connections to the Russian underworld?
Putin maintained excellent relations with the mafia early on. From 1991 to 1996 he headed a committee in St. Petersburg for his old mentor Anatoly Sobchak, who had since become mayor of the city, and which was entrusted with trade relations with foreign countries.
