Vladimir Putin: Russia’s dark tsar. How did he come to power and can anyone remove him from it?

The Russian president has already been accused of countless crimes. Vladimir Putin has amassed a gigantic dictatorial power in his hand. He has even made sure to change his own past.

When in 2022 the world saw Vladimir Putin giving an audience behind a giant table and ordering the ruthless destruction of Ukraine during a “special operation,” many politicians were dismayed. After all, a dozen years ago German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder called him a “democrat.” And the world wanted to believe it more than would-be U.S. President Senator John McCain, who in 2016 called the Russian leader a murderer and a thug.

Vladimir Putin sings over the victims

Western celebrities flocked to Putin. French actor Gerard Depardieu and American action movie star Steven Seagal proudly took pictures with him. On Youtube, one can easily find a video of a 2010 charity event, where a relaxed Putin sings the New Orleans rhythm-and-blues standard “Blueberry Hill,” while he is applauded smiling from ear to ear: Sharon Stone, Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Kevin Costner, Alain Delon, the aforementioned Gerard Depardieu, Vincent Cassel, and only a less-amused Monica Bellucci. It was an evening dedicated to raising funds for children affected by cancer. Today, Vladimir Putin sends troops to murder, rape and kidnap children in Ukraine.

The celebrities applauding him in 2010 can of course be understood. The performance was reportedly unexpected, while Putin:

• has not yet sent Wagnerians to Syria (civil war broke out there in 2011),
• has not started completely brazenly poisoning his enemies at home and abroad (Navalny: 2020, Skripal: 2018),
• did not find himself under the shadow of suspicion after the death of democratic activist Boris Nemtsov (2015),
• hasn’t yet occupied Crimea (2014), hasn’t plotted war in Donbass and hasn’t started drowning Ukraine in blood and fire.

Yet, after all, he sang “Blueberry Hill” to himself and the stars years after:

• the invasion of Georgia (2008),
• the wars in Chechnya (1999–2009), where he put the criminal Ramzan Kadyrov in power,
• the poisoning of former KGB/FSB lieutenant colonel Alexander Litvinenko (2006), who tried to expose the truth about the death of independent journalist Anna Politkovskaya (2006),
• the assassination of Antuputin billionaire Boris Berezhovsky (he eventually departed this world in 2013),
• the attempted dioxin poisoning of Ukrainian leader Viktor Yushchenko (2004),
• the highly questionable hostage rescue in Beslan (2004) and Moscow’s Dubrovka theater (2002),
• the Kursk submarine tragedy (2000), during which Putin showed an extreme lack of empathy and disregard for the mothers of the sailors, the series of mysterious attacks on residential buildings in Russia (1999), probably plotted by Russia’s secret services and intended to justify military operations in Chechnya and Dagestan.

Despite all this, the world wanted to see Putin as a reasonable and calculating partner, the providential husband of Russia. The democratic West pretended not to hear when, in a fit of sincerity, the Russian leader showed his true face. Vladimir Putin admitted that whoever once became a Chekist would be one for the rest of his life. And the collapse of the USSR, in his view, was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century. However, leaders set on lucrative business with Russia only shrugged their shoulders.

Vladimir Putin’s hypocritical past

According to psychologists, Putin’s character and behavior may be affected by his past. It is surrounded by a lot of mystifications and misrepresentations.

Putin at the beginning of his career spread information that his grandfather cooked for Lenin and Stalin. The truth is quite different. Spiridon Putin cooked in sanatoriums throughout his life, including a sanatorium for party members — and that’s it. And yes, they may have included both Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, and Vyacheslav Molotov, because that’s what Vladimir Putin’s uncle. And maybe once or twice he was asked to cook something for a banquet at which Stalin was a guest. Maybe he even worked at one of his dais for a while? Maybe he was a cook whom the Kremlin invited to work at big banquets? Or was he replacing someone there? We won’t find out anymore. But I am sure of one thing. Half of his curriculum vitae is fake.

The story of Spiridon Putin is perhaps the most beautiful example of how — from behind the scenes — Russian propaganda works. It doesn’t matter whether the story is true or not. What matters is that people believe it. The grandfather who Rasputin was enamored of, and who later cooked for both Lenin and Stalin, was a great publicity stunt for Vladimir Putin before the election, because he combined in his biography eras that Russians — despite all the evil that happened back then — have a fondness for.

“Since the leaders of the USSR trusted my grandfather, you can trust me.” — Vladimir Putin seemed to say.

The grandfather issue perhaps covers a mystery even bigger. It concerns Putin’s origins. For it has been questioned that he was born in 1952, and that his parents were Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin and Maria Ivanovna Shelomov. Journalists gathered evidence that he was born two years earlier, and that his mother was Vera Nikolaevna Putin, who came from a village in the Urals.

She fell in love with a man who, it turned out, led a double life. She became pregnant with him while he was already married. That’s why she left the cheater, and left her son in the care of his grandparents. She took him away after three years, when she was already living in Georgia with another man. However, the brutal stepfather beat the boy and called him a bastard, so after another few years the child was returned to the grandparents’ roof. In turn, these sent him to his relative Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, a former enclave officer. There, the teenage Vladimir began to pretend to be his son. Perhaps even under his influence, he decided to pursue a career in the KGB.

How the authors of Putin’s biography died

Evidence for this version of events was checked during Putin’s 2000 presidential campaign by well-known businessman Ziya Bazhaev and journalist and publisher Artiom Borovik. Unfortunately, both died in a plane crash. Questions related to Putin’s parents and the accident itself have remained unresolved.

Why was the plane hired by Ziya Bazhaev, numbered 87440, swapped overnight for machine numbered 88170, the very one that crashed? Why did part of the left wing disappear without a trace either while it was still at the airport or already in transit to the Institute of Aviation Technology, where it was to be examined? Why is it impossible to determine who was approaching the plane that night? Why did the pilots, despite properly executed maneuvers, fail to counteract the leftward tilt? What caused this tilt? —These and other questions can be asked endlessly without any answers.

Experts’ findings indicate that part of the left wing of the plane was covered with liquid mazut of a special composition developed in KGB laboratories at the end of the USSR. This substance changes the structure of the object on whose surface it is located and thwarts its functions. This would explain the strange behavior of the left wing’s ailerons and the loss of controllability of the machine.

Putin’s dark tsar goes for power

By contrast, Putin made absolutely no secret of his past in the secret services. He even recognized that it lent him authority. He stated that former U.S. President George Bush senior, before his great political career, “did not work in the laundry, but was a CIA agent.”

Before ending up in the KGB, Putin graduated from Leningrad University with a degree in law. He was already in his thirties when he was approached by the KGB (to which he had applied himself while still a teenager) and sent for training. Starting in 1985, he served for five years in the German Democratic Republic, recruiting secret collaborators under the guise of diplomatic service. After German reunification, he returned to Leningrad.

On the other hand, after the collapse of the USSR, his political career gained momentum. First he became deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. Then he got a job in the administration of Russian President Boris Yeltsin. From 1998 to 1999 he even headed the Federal Security Service, which became the successor to the KGB after the collapse of the USSR. This opened the way for him not only to the office of president, but also to establish a dictatorship.

Not a day goes by that doesn’t provide evidence that freedom of speech and human rights don’t exist in Putin’s Russia. The nabotoxed dictator, who chases younger women and has illegitimate children, is also not a model family father. Yet Russians love him. Because he has restored their pride in their country’s power, which is once again feared by the whole world, as it was in the days of the USSR. They are not amused by the macho image of the president when he takes photos with wild predators, rides half-naked on horseback or flies with cranes.

They don’t even mind that many areas of Russia are stuck in poverty, yet the Kremlin dictator has amassed a gigantic fortune. The number of billions Putin has is difficult to estimate, yet tallying this fortune makes no sense.

After all, as Russian independent columnist Anton Oriech stated, “He doesn’t need billions for anything. He has everything he wants anyway, because all of Russia belongs to him. Like it used to belong to the tsar.”

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