From Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post:
Vladimir Putin is a relic of the old communist Soviet Union, and climbed the ranks of the Russian secret police known as the KGB. He was born Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin in Leningrad in 1952, near the end of the murderous totalitarian Josef Stalin’s reign. His father served in, among other areas, the Soviet NKVD, which was involved in political oppression, while his mother served for a time in the Soviet Navy during World War II. Young Vladimir’s two elder brothers each died prior to his birth.
Steeped in Soviet ideology and methodslogy, Putin dutifully attended school and studied German, a language he is fluent in. He went on to study law at Leningrad State University, and entered the KGB (the notorious Soviet-era secret police), where he served as a foreign intelligence officer for 16 years. He resiged from the KGB in 1991 and entered politics. He moved to Moscow five years later and joined Boris Yeltsin’s administration. He became Yeltsin’s director of the ESB (the successor to the KGB), and eventually moved up to become Prime Minister, and, later, Acting President, when Yeltsin resigned in 1999.
Putin has adopted far too many Soviet-era machinations. For example, he has had zero tolerance for media critics, and, much like his predecessors, has arranged to have them be poisoned, mysteriously fall out of apartment windows to their death below, or be outright assassinateded by hired thugs. It is incredible how intolerant and uncivilized the Russian method of silencing press critics has been over the years. With no regard at all for freedoms of the press, Putin, too, has adopted the uniquely Russian way of making them disappear once they have become too critical or questioning. It is little wonder that Donald Trump has expressed admiration for this murdering authoritarian, as Trump hates the media as well.
The thought has occurred to me that dictator Putin has been coaching our naive and adoring president. Clearly, Trump’s hatred of reporters and his repeated meetings with Putin in secret, with no press people allowed in the meeting and no notes kept is not only unprecedented, but raises our eyebrows as well. So, too, are the numerous private phone calls between these thug-like leaders. We have seen Trump grow bolder and more defiant after these meetings and calls – could this uncooperative attitude by Trump be the direct result of Putin’s encouragement?