PUTIN IN RETIREMENT

 

Jerry Harkins

 

 

Praskoveevka, Russia, October 7, 2040.  As the afternoon sun warmed the stunning scenery of this Black Sea town, I sat down for a one-on-one interview with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the recently retired President of the Russian Federation.  My Russian is good as is his English but we agreed to use a translator to help with the idiomatic parts.  After forty-one years at its helm and still vigorous at 84, he has begun work on his memoirs which he plans to publish posthumously.

 

JPH:  Happy Birthday, Mr. President.  I trust you are enjoying retirement in good health.

 

VVP:  Yes, yes.  Of course.  It is naturally an adjustment and there are times when life seems a bit too bland but that is to be expected.

 

JPH:  This is the first interview you have given since your retirement.  Why did you choose to talk to an American reporter?

 

VVP:  My compatriots are not as interested in my reflections at this moment as are the foreign media.  They have other things to worry about.  Also I think it may have something to do with our attitude toward history.

 

JPH:  How do Russians regard history?  And how does that differ from the Americans?

 

VVP:  We understand the importance of history differently.  To us, history is a relatively small collection of mostly unimportant facts and a great deal of mythology.  Perhaps not so much myth as reconsideration.  Not so obsessed with the way things happened as the way they should have happened.  History, then, can serve as the foundation of our communal life, our social contract.  For Americans, I think, law, not history, fills that role.

 

JPH:  It has been said that what people believe happened is of more practical importance than what may have actually happened.

 

VVP:  Which is true.  Americans believe in what they call the rule of law.  But the interpretation of law must change as society changes.  The American Constitution never claimed that separate is not equal.  Some of your judges have admitted as much while at the same time saying that segregation is not unconstitutional.  But most know that segregation has outlived its usefulness and is simply no longer tenable.

 

JPH:  Let me turn to what I hope is an easier question.  Looking back, what do you consider your most important achievements and what are your regrets, if any.

 

VVP:  Two achievements come to mind and they are related.  One, I restored the political and cultural genius of Russia and, two, I brought about an historical improvement in its economic system.  Our country had suffered from generations of leadership that was too weak or too brutal or too ideological, often all three at the same time.  In addition, I achieved a workable balance between traditional Russian culture, especially its religious aspect, and the imperatives of this technological age.  This was not so much my achievement as the outcome of a process initiated by Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev

and Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin.  I only nurtured it and helped realize their vision.  Are there any regrets?  Yes, naturally.  But I do not dwell on them.  I and all Russians know from birth that serenity is to be found in vodka.  But as long as I was part of the government, I felt I must not drink.  A great sacrifice for my country.

 

JPH:  Some people were surprised when you also encouraged the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church.  Have you always been a religious person?

 

VVP:  No, I am not personally very religious.  But I have always known that Orthodoxy is the foundation of Russian culture.  Lenin erred when he set out to destroy it.  Like many others inside and outside Russia, he misinterpreted Marx.  Russians feel their religion as consolation in a harsh climate.

 

JPH:  Lenin erred?  The Father of Communism?  Or have you parted ways with Communism?

 

VVP:  No, not at all.  But even Communists are fallible and Lenin made errors.  With regard to religion, he mis-understood Marx.  Like many others, he remembered only one phrase of his famous statement on religion.  “Religion is the opiate of the people.”  In fact, these words are part of a remarkable and insightful paragraph that ends with the observation, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

 

JPH:  Why did Marxist Communism fail?”

 

VVP:  Communism did not fail.  Communists failed.  Especially Stalin.   As Khrushchev said, the essence of Stalinism was the cult of the personality.  In his Secret Speech he was very clear about it.  “It is impermissible” he said, “ and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god.”  The Russian preference for strong government was carried to a terrible extreme.

 

JPH:  In your farewell address, you said that you had hoped to achieve a more fruitful partnership with the United States.  You also said this was unfinished business.  What stood in the way?

 

VVP:  Several factors.  We and the Americans have much in common but we also differ in ways that make us incomprehensible to each other.  They look at us and see only a dictatorship.  We look at them and see chaos.  To us, they are unpredictable.  We are a moral people.  They are moralistic.  Also hedonistic.  I envy their successes but when I tried to experiment with their so-called free market capitalism, it failed in Russia because our oligarchs became as corrupt as theirs.

JPH:  Yet you were friendly with and supportive of more than a few of those oligarchs.

VVP:  Of course.  To paint every member of a class with the same brush is ideology and foolish.  I am not an ideologue and not a fool no matter what my wife might think on occasion.

 

JPH:  You took significant risks with your interference in American elections.  Why did you prefer Trump even after his disastrous first term?

 

VVP:  To ask that question is to answer it.  What leader in my position would not have preferred a buffoon as the leader of his principal competitor?

 

JPH:  Buffoon?

 

VVP:  Do you doubt it?  Trump was a man of no intelligence, no character, no sense of statecraft.  Given to ruling by childish temper tantrums.  He was easy to intimidate, to dominate in a meeting because he never prepared.  He didn’t read.  I thought maybe he couldn’t.  My life was much easier than it would have been under Mrs. Clinton or it had been under Mr. Obama.

JPH:  What about his successor?

VVP:  Mr. Biden.  Personally, of course, he was a charming man.  Personable, polite, honest.  Politically, he was very smart and very tough.  He inherited a difficult challenge from Trump the buffoon.  Of course, he understood our strengths and weaknesses much better than Trump and was, therefore, harder to deal with.  Harder but always pleasant.

 

JPH:  You have spoken of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev who also played the buffoon, did he not?

 

VVP:  “Played” is exactly the right word.  With him, it was an act.  He was actually a very shrewd leader.  At least when he was sober.  When he got dressed in the morning, he donned that personality.  I was told by those who knew Eisenhower that he also liked to play a role.  In his case, it was of an average or slightly below average peasant.  You have an expression for this, I think.  Joe Sixpack.  Eisenhower was trying to hide the fact that he was a genius.  I myself have been accused of acting the part of a macho hero.  My wife thinks this is very funny.  But Trump, bah!  He really was a fool.  The vaunted American democracy was not immune to making stupid choices.

 

JPH:  Perhaps, but Trump was a serious danger to world peace.

 

VVP:  Yes, certainly.  But he was a bully and ultimately bullies are always cowards.  Trump avoided military service due to the agony of bone spurs.  Poor baby.  I guess his family could not afford to have a doctor remove them.  If he threatened to use his nuclear football, I was reasonably certain that there would have been a putsch in the White House.  Or maybe even in your Congress.  Although I have my doubts about the functionality of all legislative bodies.  Perhaps your military would have stepped in.  Our intelligence services took that possibility seriously.  I less so.  Like journalists, intelligence agencies have a vested interest in seeing the world in vivid colors.  I speak from personal experience.

 

JPH:  What attracted you to a career in the secret police?

 

VVP:  In the police, you mean.  “Secret” should go without saying.  Every police force has many secrets, some more than others.  But I really don’t know why I chose intelligence work.  My father, of course, spent some time in domestic intelligence.  Neither of us had a sterling record.  You know, I was never a committed Communist, any more than Trump seemed to be a committed Republican.

 

JPH:  Was Communism, then, a failure that you recognized early in life?

 

VVP:  Obviously, it was a failure as a practical matter.  Everyone knew that.  Each five year plan yielded worse results than the one before it.  More importantly, it failed as an ideology.  I think all ideologies are doomed to failure because they have an aversion to uncomfortable facts.  Capitalism is a repulsive idea.  Democracy is better as an idea but is vulnerable to human weakness.  I am happy when people call me a technocrat but not if they mean I am soulless.  I think of myself as soulful, what the Germans would call seelenvoll, fully human.  Vladimir Vladimirovich, the soulful technocrat!

JPH:  You say it failed as a practical matter.  Did it succeed in any other way?

VVP:  It would be difficult to succeed in any way if it failed in practical matters like feeding people.  Still, it is an attractive idea.  "To each according to his needs; from each according to his abilities."  It is humane whereas capitalism is "red in tooth and claw."  However, humanism should never include show trials, starvation and mass executions.  No ideology is immune from contradictions.  You cannot eat theory.

 

JPH:  Yet there are many who think of you as a leader who was willing to –– ah, I guess the polite word is “sanction” –– his opponents.

 

VVP:  Yes.  In the sense that I was the Russian leader, everything that happened on my watch was my responsibility.  I was reading recently about the English King Henry II who had a similar reputation after several of his men assassinated a troublesome archbishop.  It took centuries for him to weather the responsibility for that and to gain recognition as England’s greatest King.  So there is hope for me yet.  We had a similar situation in 1918.  When the Bolsheviks executed Tsar Nicholas and his family, the deed was actually done by a squad under Sverdlov.  Was he responsible?  He had orders from Yurosky who may have had orders from Lenin.  You see, we really don’t know or care about the historical reality.  Our history is better for the myths surrounding the deed as it is also in the almost mythical case of Rasputin.

 

JPH:  So much for history.  You have led an interesting and important life and will be remembered by future historians.  Do you think about how they will treat you?

 

VVP:  I suppose they are why I want to write my memoirs which the historians at least will have to read.  But really it will not mean much.  The era I represent –– say the era that began with the first world war –– has been a punishing one for humans.  Times of great confusion refuting any idea that history has an orderly narrative like a novel.  How will future scholars interpret my role in it?  I certainly do not envy them the task.

 

JPH:  Thank you, Mr. President.