Vladimir Putin's Entire Persona is Based on a Fictional USSR Spy Character
Putin is pretending to be James Bond.
Most of what I talk about on this blog is not even a secret, really. I paywall the actual conspiracy stuff and the free stuff is all just basic translations of what Russians in Russia are saying. Today though, we are going to continue exploring what the media was saying about Putin and what Putin said about himself from the early years of his rule. Back then there was also a lot more candid talk about who Putin was and what role he played allowed in the media, both in the East and the West. Upon coming to power, Putin had favorable coverage in Western media as a reformer who could set Russian Democracy back on track and prove to the world that Liberalism and friendship with America really does work economic and social wonders.
The narrative then soured bit by bit until we got to the “Putin is Literally Hitler” position that we have now.
Putin also once enthusiastically supported Bush’s “Terror War” against the Muslims abroad and the civil liberties at home. Putin copied the same model and rhetoric and even helped America fight its terror war in Afghanistan by providing logistical support, and helping the Americans renew the “Northern Alliance” of non-Pashtuns in Afghanistan that the USSR had once relied on. Being a KGB man, it strikes me as very unlikely that Putin actually believed the standard Washington narrative about Afghanistan. The reality of what Afghanistan was could not be more different than what was presented to the public. But Putin played along anyway.
And it is only after the Western media started baying for Putin’s blood that the anti-Globalist Couch Division Freedom Warriors started taking notice of Putin and Russia.
If the Western media hates him, he must be a really good guy then! I even heard he was a Christian too!
There really isn’t anything deeper to the Putinophilia than this “I’ll just believe the opposite of what the Western media says on everything” impulse for some people. Sure, the lying media lies because they are liars. Sadly though, people seem unable to conceptualize of the possibility that the media (and their handlers) know that many people knee-jerk reject their narratives. Thus, it isn’t hard to manipulate people’s knee-jerk reactions by playing up the opposite position. In fact, this tactic was pioneered for use on children and teens and entered popular parlance as “reverse psychology”.
But, clearly, this tactic works just as well on man-children and women of all ages who simply don’t want to put in the time learning to think for themselves.
…
So that is the first part of the deception. The simple “nu-uh!” knee-jerk doing the opposite thing.
The second part is the “secret patriot” narrative that Putin’s PR team came out with and which they crafted the entire persona of Putin around. This is a broad topic, but thankfully we have already covered the mastermind behind the Putin PR strategy which tried to portray him as a secret patriot mastermind checkmating the globalists before:
Let’s pick back up where we left off.
The model for this “secret patriot Putin” narrative was actually just a modern retelling of the escapades of the famous fictional Soviet spy patriot Max Otto von Stierlitz.
The glorification of the spook state had been ongoing in the West for decades prior to the USSR rolling out its own “super-spook moralityman” competitor. You had the James Bond novels and movies, and the Harry Palmer novels and movies, just to list the two most famous examples that come to mind. Since then, we’ve also had Jason Bourne and that Alias show on ABC. On the more domestic side of things, we also have the dozens of shows glorifying the cops and the FBI shown on daytime TV to suburban house moms.
If our overlords had done it how Orwell suggested, with a big, leering, mustache-sporting, Irishman head glaring down at everyone and forcing them to repeat party slogans day in and day out, there would have been more resistance to the agenda, probably. So, instead of this more brutal, Soviet attempt at coercion, the brainwashing was done in a cleverer way with good television dramas.
In the USSR, the propaganda was far less subtle and it was well understood that the KGB was glorifying itself and its own ascent to power with these media productions. It is also always easier to see the totalitarianism lurking in the backyard of one’s neighbor than to see the totalitarianism in your own yard. From Wiki:
The culture of Imperial Russia was very strongly influenced by that of France, and Russian writers accordingly shared the disdain traditionally held by French writers towards spy novels, which was seen as a lowbrow type of literature.[2]
NOTE: “lowbrow” is a euphemism for British. No, I’m not joking (although it is funny).
In the Soviet Union, espionage was depicted before 1961 as something committed against the Soviet state by its enemies and not as an activity that the Soviet state itself engaged in.[3] Perhaps the best example of this attitude was the founding of SMERSH in 1943, which was an acronym for the wartime slogan Smert' shpionam! ("Death to Spies!"), which reflected the picture promoted by the Soviet state of spies as a disreputable type of person who deserved to be killed without mercy.[4]
That’s the kind of Sovietism that I can get behind.
Sadly, most people will simply dismiss my anti-spook positions as Nazism-Fascism-Bad.
Furthermore, the legacy of the Yezhovshchina and other Stalinist repression had given the Chekisty, as secret policemen are always called in Russia, a very negative image.[3]
In November 1961, Vladimir Semichastny became chairman of the KGB and set out to improve the image of the Chekisty.[4]
Semichastny wanted to erase the memory of the Yezhovshchina and give the KGB a more positive image.[5] It was during his tenure as KGB chairman from 1961 to 1967 that the cult of the "hero spies" began in the Soviet Union, the Soviet media lionising the achievements of spies such as Harold "Kim" Philby, Richard Sorge, and Colonel Rudolf Abel.[5] Inspired by the popularity of the James Bond novels in the West, Semichastny also encouraged Soviet writers to write novels featuring heroic Chekisty as their heroes.[5] One such novel was No Password Required (1966) by Yulian Semyonov, set in the Russian Civil War, which marked the first appearance of the heroic Cheka agent Maxim Maximovich Isaуev.[5]
In 1967, Semichastny was replaced as KGB chairman by Yuri Andropov who likewise encouraged writers to publish novels featuring heroic Chekisty.[5]
In January-February 1969, the novel Seventeen Moments of Spring by Semyonov, a sequel to No Password Required, was serialized in Pravda and published as a book later in 1969.[1] The novel was set in Berlin in March-May 1945 as the Red Army advanced onto Berlin, causing the Nazis to become more desperate while Isayev, who has gone undercover in Berlin under the alias Max Otto von Stierlitz, outmaneuvers their plans.[6] Impressed by the favorable public response to Seventeen Moments of Spring, Andropov pressed to have the book adopted as a television mini-series, which was filmed in 1971–72.[7] Seventeen Moments of Spring was one of the most expensive Soviet television productions ever filmed, being shot on a lavish scale that was unusual for Soviet television.
All of the leading parts were played by famous and well respected actors, which certainly contributed to its appeal.[8] The mini-series caused much protest by the Red Army, who complained that the series gave the impression that it was the NKVD that won the Great Patriotic War, as the war with Germany is known in the Soviet Union. The director Tatyana Lioznova was subsequently ordered to add in new scenes showing the Red Army advancing and taking Berlin, which added another year to its production, causing the mini-series to debut in 1973 instead of 1972 as planned.[6] To save money and give a sense of authenticity, the battle scenes Lioznova added were mostly stock footage from the war.[6] The mini-series Seventeen Moments of Spring was another enormous hit in 1973, attracting an average of 30-40 million viewers per night and turning the Isayev character into a cultural phenomena in the Soviet Union.[6]
Sadly, so many older Slavs were completely smitten by this theater production.
If you talk to older folks, chances are good that they are big Stierlitz fans. Putin himself was apparently convinced by the drama to sign up with the KGB. That’s what he himself said in a very early interview with the press. The relevant bit:
In 1991, when Putin had already left the KGB and was working for the mayor of St Petersburg, he admitted for the first time to his career as a spy in a TV documentary, which includes a re-enacted scene from Seventeen Moments of Spring. Instead of Stierlitz driving his car back to Berlin, Putin is seen at the wheel of a Russian Volga car, with the film's theme tune playing in the background.
(…)
Opinion polls indicated that voters were keen for the next president to be young, ethnically Russian, a former member of the security services and a non-drinker.
"Having lost faith in liberals, the country was searching for its Stierlitz," writes Arkady Ostrovsky, Russia and Eastern Europe editor for the Economist, in his book, The Invention of Russia.
In 1999, he notes, the Kommersant newspaper commissioned a poll asking which film character Russians would like as their next president. Stierlitz came second, after the wartime military commander Marshal Zhukov. The cover of the newspaper's weekly supplement carried a picture of Stierlitz with the caption, "President-2000".
And in March 2000, after a period as acting president, Putin was duly elected to the post.
But this whole story was told from Western media perspective as well. There really are no secrets here, folks. Everyone knew the script at the time and spoke about it openly. The elites simply understand that the peasants don’t know how to read so they’ll just openly share the story amongst themselves in the elitist publications that ordinary people don’t read.
They are also able to keep the masses away from elite publications by making them obscene to normal sensibilities. Traditionally in the West, this was achieved by promoting gayness and the blacks. See, one of the strange side-effects of higher than average IQ is the development of a kind of “disgust-suppression” ability. Smart people can basically see gross things and have the self-control to act like they’re OK with them. So, surrounding themselves with gross art and gross people became a kind of flex for the big city types and a way to repel ordinary people from their circles. But that whole topic is far more Tom Wolfe territory than Slavland Chronicles.
I’ve digressed and need to get back on track.
Point being: the same conclusions were drawn about Putin’s strategy — that was trying to portray himself as a secret patriot who had somehow tricked the globalists and turned against them like some kind of a double agent — by Western elite media.
Putin, who Pavlovsky says was being “tested by Yeltsin,” was a revelation. Yeltsin’s “Family,” or inner circle, intent on managing the succession and maintaining its tainted power, had been plotting the post-Yeltsin era almost from the day of Yeltsin’s 1996 election (Pavlovsky calls it “a sort of Manhattan Project”). They secretly polled to find out what kind of person the Russian people considered heroic. Suddenly, right under their noses, they realized that in Putin they had a Stirlitz, the dashing fictional K.G.B. officer who is the hero of a popular old film, an undercover agent in the SS in Germany in World War II, who embodies Russian ideals. They immediately launched a campaign to turn Vladimir Putin into another Stirlitz. They created an ideology-free political party called Unity, and came in second to the Communists with 24 percent of the parliamentary electoral vote.
The man being quoted here is none other than Gleb Pavlovsky. He worked with Putin for more than a decade as part of his innermost PR team. In his youth, Gleb was an anti-Soviet activist trying to destroy the USSR from within with revolutionary activity. Pavlosky hailed from Odessa and had his base of operations there as a gangster for awhile before coming to Moscow to work with Yeltsin and then Putin.
Three guesses as to what the ethnicity of Gleb Pavlovsky was?
Shame on you for guessing right, you horrible racist Fascist.
The Stirlitz campaign revealed to Pavlovsky how Putin could overcome the dual handicaps of coming from the K.G.B. (not exactly consonant with democratic reform) and being handpicked by the despised Yeltsin. “For an intelligence officer it was easy. He had the alibi: he’s hiding and in secrecy awaiting orders.… Did he take part in reforms? Yes, but he was Stirlitz, seen in the movie as working under SS cover, but he’s not SS. Was he seen at demonstrations? Of course not! He is Stirlitz and not supposed to be seen there. And here we are reaching the paradox,” Pavlovsky continues. “But Yeltsin named him as successor, and Yeltsin was hated by the whole country. Yes, but he is Stirlitz, and he earned Yeltsin’s trust so well that even Yeltsin counts on him! That was a very deep mechanism.” Pavlovsky adds, “Of course, power should be in a way mysterious and magic. Especially in Russia. Putin answers that need perfectly.”
Meanwhile, the opposition did its part. According to Pavlovsky, “They were conducting an anti-Yeltsin campaign only. They started to truly believe their propaganda, that Yeltsin is some sort of maniac who is entertaining himself by changing prime ministers, that he is not solving a rational task of searching for a successor. Our hope was that they would be thinking of Putin as another fatal mistake of Yeltsin.” They were. “When Putin was superpopular, they called themselves his enemy—total stupidity!” The strategy played out perfectly. “When we understood everyone was thinking the way we wanted them to, psychologically we began to drink champagne,” Pavlovsky crows.
After the parliamentary elections on December 19, “which were really presidential elections, because people came to vote for Putin, we understood we couldn’t hide Putin anymore.” Had Yeltsin not taken himself out early, “that would have forced Putin to position himself regarding Yeltsin and Yeltsin’s past.” But after Yeltsin resigned on December 31, “we understood that we had one or two months for Putin to become stronger and stronger as the head of executive power.”
The image-makers poured it on: Russians saw Putin distributing hunting knives to Russian troops at the Chechen front on New Year’s Day, Putin using crude prison slang to say how he’d deal with Chechen guerrillas (“We’ll ice them while they’re shitting in the outhouse”), Putin flying a two-seat military jet. “Putin demonstrated all the time he can do things,” says Pavlovsky. “He showed that as a secret intelligence officer he is able to handle weapons, the jet.” The Russian populace, humiliated by the loss of the first Chechen war in 1996 and the loss of their status as a superpower, and weary of the ubiquitous corruption in the government and the downturn of their economy, yearned for a young, vigorous leader they could be proud of—someone who would restore law and order and show who was boss. Democracy was almost a secondary concern.
Once people accept that Putin is working as an undercover freedom spy, they will always write off anything that he does as a clever 5D move to trick or distract the globalists. A kind of maskirovka kayfabe judo-flip. It is exactly the same as QAnon in the West. Trump will probably start a war with Iran when he comes to power and the narrative will be that actually this is a clever ploy to flush out the pedophile-Satanists hiding in the Hollywood Tehran tunnels. Once the adrenochrome farms in Lebanon are shut down, it will be child’s play for the patriots to put Hillary Clinton into prison. Actually, according to Q, she was put into Gitmo by Trump 5-some years ago already.
I’m pointing out that this is a religion, really.
And like all successful religions, this one lets its converts feel smug and superior to others without actually having to do anything other than proselytize the faith. Speaking of faith, all we have to do is check what the Chabad people wrote about Putin. I’ve covered pretty much all of these points before on the blog, but they’re all in one place here:
Putin's Surprising Jewish Connection"
In the long history of Jews in Russia, the government has rarely been an ally, and often been the source of persecution. Current Russian president Vladimir Putin, however, is a powerful exception, with Jews playing a significant role in his personal history and his inner circle. With the Russian army a major player in the potentially explosive multi-national puzzle unfolding in Syria, this personal element could become an important, perhaps decisive, factor in how the conflict unfolds.
At the International Assembly of Chabad Representatives in 2007, Russia’s Chief Rabbi, Rabbi Berel Lazar, often referred to as “Putin’s Rabbi”, told a remarkable story about the Russian leader, which he heard from Putin himself.
“When he was a young child, he grew up in a very poor family. His parents were always out at work. He was fortunate that the next door neighbor was a Hasidic Jewish family, and they always made sure to invite him over,” Lazar explained. “They were extremely kind to him, and he realized that not only were they kind to a child that wasn’t theirs, not only were they kind to a child that wasn’t Jewish, but they were kind to a child in a time and place when it was dangerous to do that.”
“Thirty years later, because of the gratitude he felt for that family, and for the respect he felt for the Jewish people as a whole, as deputy mayor of the city of Leningrad, he granted official permission to open the first Jewish school in the city.”
The family in Lazar’s story was that of Anatoly Rakhlin, Putin’s high-school wrestling coach, a man he considered to be a father-figure and at whose funeral he cried. Putin described the family in his autobiography, First Person.
“(They were) observant Jews who did not work on Saturdays, and the man would study the Bible and Talmud all day long,” he wrote. “Once I even asked him what he was muttering. He explained to me what this book was and I was immediately interested.”
Putin’s Jewish connection was not an anomaly limited to his childhood memories. In 2005, when Putin made an official visit to Israel, he visited his high-school teacher, Mina Yuditskaya Berliner, who lived in Tel Aviv. He even bought her an apartment in the city when he heard she was living in poor conditions.
Arkadi and Boris Rotenberg were his judo sparring partners under Coach Rakhlin, and remain his close friends to this day. The Rotenberg’s are billionaire contractors, and the relationship is mutually beneficial, with the Rotenberg brothers getting government contracts worth many billions of dollars.
This is the Jew-Jitsu mafia that I’ve written about before:
And I cover his mentor in that article as well. He is important and we will return to him in a bit.
In fact, Putin has surrounded himself with rich and successful Jews, such as Moshe Kantor (net worth $2.3 billion), Lev Leviev (net worth $1.5 billion), Roman Abramovich (net worth $9.1 billion) and Victor Vekselberg (net worth $13.6 billion). They are all close friends and confidantes of the Russian president, and they are all quite openly Jewish.
Moshe Kantor is the man who came up with the “de-Nazification of Europe” slogan that Putin then used with his SMO. He used to invite Putin over to Israel to talk about the Holocaust and putting deniers into jail. I’ve written about Kantor and Putin before, but it was hidden in a larger article:
On the Jewish New Year, celebrated in September, Putin sent a holiday greeting to Rabbi Lazar, wishing the Russian Jewish community a “sweet and happy New Year.”
“For centuries, Jewish values inspired lofty ideals,” Putin wrote. He said that these values enhanced “relations among different peoples…through charity and education, all in the interest of the public good.” In a direct manner, he pledged “fierce opposition to any manifestation of anti-Semitism and xenophobia.”
Patriot-mode activated: Ah, but he’s just Stierlitz. He is just pretending to be an SS officer while secretly being a Soviet Antifa Values Patriot, see? I am clever than you because I believe this to be true and require no proofs other than blind faith. This also makes me morally superior to you. I wait until a ZAnon blogger shares top secret information from the Kremlin Z-file with their paid subs to know the true story happening behind the scenes!
Putin puts his money where his mouth is and donated a month of his salary as president to the Jewish Museum in Moscow. His name is proudly listed on the museum wall as a donor.
Perhaps due to his connection with Jews on a personal level, Putin can be said to view Russian Jews as first and foremost good Russian citizens. This has already had international repercussions. When Putin met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September to discuss the developing situation in Syria, the meeting produced positive results, with Putin expressing his strong connection with Israel.
“We never forget that in the State of Israel reside many former Soviet citizens, and that has a special implication on the relationship between our two states,” Putin stated. “Every Russian action in the area has always been very responsible. We are aware of the artillery against Israel and we condemn it. “
Syria continues to get bombed by Israel with impunity and regularly. Putin did NOT save the territorial sovereignty of Syria.
The Russian anti-aircraft weapons do not protect Syria, nor do they shoot down Israeli planes doing the bombings.
has dozens of articles talking about how Russia is actually on the side of Israel in the Middle East and he’s right. Moscow cultivate these Third Worldist anti-Zionists personalities simply to have a card to trade in negotiations with the West and with Iran. But more on that another time.We continue:
In 2011, at the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress in Moscow, Putin said, “Israel is, in fact, a special state to us. It is practically a Russian-speaking country. Israel is one of the few foreign countries that can be called Russian-speaking. It’s apparent that more than half of the population speaks Russian.”
In 2014, Putin was one of the few political leaders who supported Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, saying at a meeting with representatives of the Rabbinical Center of Europe to fight anti-Semitism and xenophobia, “I support Israel’s battle that is intended to keep its citizens protected.”
Putin is a powerful player in the explosive situation in the Middle East. There are clearly political and military considerations that cause him to look upon Israel as an ally, but it might be the personal connection he has with Jews that has led him to be the most pro-Israel Russian leader the world has seen in a long time.
And yet, we are told that Putin was raised a secret Orthodox Christian by ZAnon, right? Well, the Patriarch also said the same to be fair. But the Western media has reported on his faith as well. From an interview with The Guardian:
In our meeting with Putin, he said that he was insistent that young Russians start going back to church. He wore a cross around his neck and I later learned he had been secretly baptised by his mother as his father was an atheist. He seemed fascinated that I was a reverend and questioned me about faith. I pushed the envelope and raised why he had sentenced Pussy Riot for singing in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow and he said the church had been deeply offended. I said but a church, despite its offence, believes in the primacy of forgiveness not punishment for a blasphemy, and he looked at me with blinking incomprehension as if to say why would they forgive? But did I sense I was in the presence of evil? No.
Like, don’t get me wrong, Christianity in all of its forms (except Marcionism) is just a Jewish spin-off religion. So the fact that Putin was attending secret Torah-reading sessions in Leningrad could be spun as something that an aspiring Christian would do. After all, Christianity is just an inferior, second-class form of Judaism for non-Jews (Noahide slaves) and the Church acknowledges their debt to the Jews and their own Jewish origins. The Bible of the Jews and Christians is basically the same minus a few books and the rabbi Yeshua stuff towards the end. But that part is less than 10% of the total book.
The whole New Testament is like a pamphlet in comparison.
Only bizarre Twitter Christians seem to not understand who started their faith and why. Everyone else either understands it and rejects it (anti-Christians) or understands it and is thrilled by it (98% of Christians).
Cognitive dissonance about their fake religion aside, I don’t think most underground Christians in Russia were doing Torah-study with their Jewish neighbors during the USSR years. Nor would they be happy to hear that this is what their Orthodox president was getting up to in his free time. More importantly, normal non-Christian Russians would not be happy to learn this little fact. It is strange that Putin feels comfortable admitting it in his autobiography and yet so few people know or talk about it.
The reasons?
Easy, we covered them before: “Ah, he must just be saying that to throw his enemies off the scent. He is our Stirlitz!” And the other reason being that the masses do not know how to read, of course.
And, as it turns out, the man being referred to as Putin’s Torah-neighbor is none other than the Judo teacher who would connect Putin to his earliest criminal underground friends, the Rotenberg brothers. I hadn’t connected the two personalities (the neighbor and the judo coach) before. But even Vanity Fair covered his close relation ship with the Jew-Jitsu master more than a decade ago. From that same article earlier:
Last December 31, Boris Yeltsin—in a brilliant tactical move—resigned unexpectedly and made Putin, who was then prime minister, his successor, thereby forcing early elections in March. Putin, one of whose first decrees as acting president was to absolve the vulnerable Yeltsin of any prosecution after he left office, got 52 percent of the vote.
Why did Putin absolve the corrupt Yeltsin of his crimes against Russia?
Patriot-mode activated: Ah, well, that’s just a clever maneuver of our Orthodox Patriot spy. He’s maneuvering the Globalists into a checkmate. Just have faith. Only two more decades of Putin-Stierlitz to start seeing results!
The campaign was designed as a clever series of macho photo ops in which Putin said almost nothing but proclaimed a “dictatorship of the law,” while the state-owned media mercilessly slandered his opponents.
On May 7, the day of Putin’s inauguration, Anatoly Rakhlin was outside Moscow at a tournament, but the next day the Kremlin tracked him down the moment he registered at a hotel in the capital. Rakhlin was picked up in an official car and whisked in his sweats to the inner sanctum of the Kremlin, to have lunch alone with the exhausted new president of Russia in his private dining room. “I was with him 15 years. His mother died, his father died. I am a second father.”
So Putin had no father in his life before this Rakhlin stepped in to fill the void. Whether or not Putin was secretly Christian because of his mother, it was his surrogate father who taught him Torah and Judo. As for why he decided to take young Putin under his wing when pretty much everyone else in his Judo club was Jewish is … well … it raises some questions about Putin’s ethnic background, doesn’t it?
But perhaps we can speculate about that another time.
I have no trouble accepting the idea that Putin is a double-agent. In fact, that is a core thesis of the blog now. I wouldn’t even mind the comparison to Stierlitz, really. The only problem with the comparison is that the final loyalty of the double agent Stierlitz is never questioned by the audience. We know that he is on our side because the TV tells us so. But with real life double-agents, well, who is to say where their true loyalty lies?
All I am offering is a choice here.
You can continue believing that this double-agent is secretly on your side. But I will show my evidence as to why I think that he might not be. The rest is just emotional resonance. Which story do you like to hear more? If you like the story of Stierlitz, you will probably like Putin because he models himself on something that he knows that you and others like. People generally like new things (Putin) that are made to resemble other older things that they like (Stierlitz). As long as the propaganda-creators can convince us that ____ is actually Luke, Jesus, or James Bond, then the people who already like these fictional characters will get onboard.
It is a simple trick, really.
"So, surrounding themselves with gross art and gross people became a kind of flex for the big city types and a way to repel ordinary people from their circles."
Aside though it may be, I think this explains the entire postwar "avant garde" or "hip" or "beat" movement, the Grove Press Gang or Calder Crowd (from their US and UK publishers). The earlier "Modernists" tried to do the same thing by being "difficult" to read. Joyce combined both tropes, Ulysses being both difficult and dirty.
Abrahamic Judoism, you say?