The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia

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When you shake hands with Vladimir Putin you scarcely notice whether it is a firm or a weak handshake. It is his eyes that consume you. He lowers his head, tilting his eyes upwards towards you, and fixes you for several seconds, as though memorising every detail, or maybe matching your face to a picture he had memorised earlier… It is a glowering, piercing, highly unsettling look.

Russia’s ‘national leader’ is like no other country’s president or prime minister. The former KGB spy was rather reserved and gauche at first, when he was unexpectedly propelled into high office in 1999. But he has grown into a man with no inhibitions – a strongman and a narcissist, who flaunts his physical strength in ever more frequent photo-shoots. In the beginning we saw only a few selected images – Putin the judo champion, Putin at the controls of a fighter jet. Later – particularly after he moved from the president’s office to that of the prime minister in 2008 – he began to invite camera crews on expeditions designed solely to project a film-star image. They showed him putting satellite tracking devices on polar bears, tigers, white whales and snow leopards. He took the cameras along to see him swimming the butterfly stroke in an icy Siberian river, and riding a horse through mountains, with bare chest and dark shades. He personally put out wildfires, drove snowmobiles, motorbikes and Formula One cars, went skiing and scuba-diving, played ice hockey, and even crooned ‘Blueberry Hill’ in English and played the piano in public – unembarrassed by his inability to do either. In August 2011 he had a cameraman on hand when he stripped to the waist for a doctor’s examination.

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