‘Tell him I will thrash them,’ Putin reportedly declares as he rejects a handwritten bid for peace from Zelenskyy.
The facts as we know them: Putin was born in Leningrad in 1952, a city that lived under a nearly three-year siege by the Nazis during World War II that wiped out most of the population of more than three million people. One million people starved to death. The siege has been termed a genocide and is described as the world’s most destructive siege of a city. His father was badly injured in the war; his mother nearly died of starvation. Before Putin was born, his parents had lost two children, one from diphtheria. Leningrad had not yet recovered, and life was extremely difficult. His parents had a room in run-down apartment with two other families. The details are sketchy, but they had no hot water, no bathtub, perhaps little or no heat. Both parents worked as much as they could to support themselves and him, his father in a factory, his mother any odd job she could get. One report says they left him with another family. But it was clear that he was left to fend for himself in the company of other kids in the apartment building. He was bullied, no doubt severely.
But at least two experiences kept him from living on the streets his entire life: He probably had support from a coach, because he learned judo to defend himself, and, after a rough time during his elementary school years, a sixth-grade teacher reportedly took interest in him. She brought out his intellect. He excelled in high school. He eventually got a law degree and joined the KGB. But the damage that led to his current behavior was obviously done. It produced a “macho, distrustful, unpredictable, a cultivator of half-truths and disinformation…a former KGB officer who remains culturally and psychologically tied to a Soviet Union that no longer exists.”
By inference, when you look at Putin’s early years, the adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) pile up—lack of food, inadequate housing, bullying, neglect, parental depression, etc. And he obviously inherited a bunch of ACEs from his parents, including wartime trauma personified by Nazi forces that threatened their existence and their homeland. But what’s also evident is what he didn’t seem to get: appropriate attachment—the strong and requisite bond between a parent and a child that leads to a healthy life and without which children can die or be damaged. That was because his parents had to work most of the time, or because they didn’t know how or were too preoccupied with their own issues to be attached parents. There’s no mention of other family members: no grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. Kindness and affection didn’t seem to be part of Putin’s world.
Nobody’s born bad
Psychologist Alice Miller wrote, “The Ignorance or How we produce the Evil”. It’s remarkable, and I encourage everyone to read it. She said that although evil exists, people aren’t born evil. How they live their lives depends on what happens after they’re born (and also before, as epigenetics is teaching us).
Children who are given love, respect, understanding, kindness, and warmth will naturally develop different characteristics from those who experience neglect, contempt, violence or abuse, and never have anyone they can turn to for kindness and affection. Such absence of trust and love is a common denominator in the formative years of all the dictators I have studied. The result is that these children will tend to glorify the violence inflicted upon them and later to take advantage of every possible opportunity to exercise such violence, possibly on a gigantic scale. Children learn by imitation. Their bodies do not learn what we try to instill in them by words but what they have experienced physically. Battered, injured children will learn to batter and injure others; sheltered, respected children will learn to respect and protect those weaker than themselves. Children have nothing else to go on but their own experiences.
We actually don’t need the details of what happened to Putin as a child to understand the roots of his current actions. People who hurt people have been hurt themselves, as Miller pointed out. Even if they’ve had just one ACE, but don’t have enough positive experiences characteristic of a healthy human being, they’re likely to have problems.
“All the childhood histories of serial killers and dictators I have examined showed them without exception to have been the victims of extreme cruelty,” Miller wrote, “although they themselves steadfastly denied this. And in this they are not alone. Large sections of society are apparently determined either to deny or to ignore these facts.”
Putin describes in his book having to traverse several rat infested floors to get to his childhood apartment and that one day he wrote that he grabbed a stick and chased a large rat into a corner. When the rat realized he was trapped, he attacked young Putin forcing him to run away in a moment that apparently impacted the future Russian president.
Koffler said that the childhood story about the rat, and other stories Putin has approved to be told about his personal life, are a conscious effort to convey to the West that he will always strike back when trapped.
"He wants people to know that when cornered, he will be fighting," Koffler told Fox News. "He will not be surrendering."
How Putin’s childhood is playing out
Madeline Albright, who served as U.S. secretary of state from 1997 to 2001, met with newly appointed acting president Putin and outgoing president Boris Yeltsin in 2000. In an opinion piece in the New York Times on February 23, 2022, she wrote:
Whereas Mr. Yeltsin had cajoled, blustered and flattered, Mr. Putin spoke unemotionally and without notes about his determination to resurrect Russia’s economy and quash Chechen rebels. Flying home, I recorded my impressions. “Putin is small and pale,” I wrote, “so cold as to be almost reptilian.”
In the 20-odd years since we met, Mr. Putin has charted his course by ditching democratic development for Stalin’s playbook. He has collected political and economic power for himself — co-opting or crushing potential competition — while pushing to re-establish a sphere of Russian dominance through parts of the former Soviet Union. Like other authoritarians, he equates his own well-being with that of the nation and opposition with treason. He is sure that Americans mirror both his cynicism and his lust for power and that in a world where everyone lies, he is under no obligation to tell the truth. Because he believes that the United States dominates its own region by force, he thinks Russia has the same right.
Alice Miller had some observations about other dictators that are pertinent to understanding Putin’s particular actions over the last month. Adolf Hitler was beaten mercilessly during his childhood by a father who was illegitimate and of Jewish descent, both of which, during those times, brought him constant and overbearing shame his entire life.
In the entire history of anti-Semitism and persecution of the Jews, no other ruler had ever hit upon the idea that, on pain of death, every citizen in his country must provide proof of non-Jewish descent extending back to the third generation. This was Hitler’s OWN PERSONAL BRAND OF MANIA. And it is traceable to the insecurity of his existence in his own family, the insecurity of a child constantly living under the threat of violence and humiliation. Later millions were to forfeit their lives so that this child – now a childless adult – could avenge himself by unconsciously projecting the grim scenario of his childhood onto the political stage.
Stalin was also brutalized by his father when he was a child, she pointed out.
Stalin was an only child. Like Hitler he was the first child to survive after three siblings who had died in infancy. His irascible father was almost always drunk and laid into his son from an early age. Despite the fame and power he later achieved, Stalin suffered throughout his life from a persecution mania that drove him to order the killing of millions of innocent people. Just as the infant Stalin lived in fear of sudden death at the hands of his unpredictable father, so the adult Stalin lived in fear even of his closest associates. But now he had the power to fend off those fears by humiliating others.
China’s Mao Zedong and Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu also had brutal childhoods, with consequences that, in Mao’s case killed 35 million people, and in Ceaucescu’s case, forced women to have unwanted children, Miller pointed out. We can add others: the members of Myanmar’s junta who have murdered millions, mostly Rohingya as well as other minority groups; the Chinese leadership that is imprisoning hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in prison camps….the list goes on,
Of course, dictators can’t become dictators absent an environment that supports their ability to accumulate power. In The Real War, Richard Nixon wrote that the “Darwinian forces of the Soviet system produce not only ruthless leaders, but clever ones.”
Stalin killed nearly a million people per year in the quarter century of his rule. Khrushchev and Brezhnev both served apprenticeships under Stalin, not by distributing food stamps or serving in a Peace Corps, but by efficiently eliminating those whom Stalin saw as threats to his power. Khrushchev was sent to the Ukraine by Stalin in 1938 to conduct a political housecleaning. Within a year 163 of the 166 members of the Central Committee there had been liquidated. Khrushchev was then promoted to full membership in the Politburo.
Acting out unresolved issues
In Putin’s second speech on Feb. 23, he said:
The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime.
To this end, we will seek to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation.
When I first read this, I couldn’t figure out why Putin used the words “genocide” and “denazify”. But, in light of his childhood, now I do. And his compulsion to avoiding looking weak, and equating being good with power is also clearer, in the following quote.
During a press conference reported by the Washington Post, Putin said that using military might to resolve problems was a good thing. The main thing, he added, was to avoid weakness. “Well, why do you think that the good must always be frail and helpless? I do not think that is true,” Putin said. “I think good means being able to defend oneself.”
In Putin’s mind, he feels threatened by Ukraine and considers himself a victim. He must defend himself, just the way he had to do by learning judo as a child, and thus has come up with a plethora of reasons to justify his invasion. But it’s clear he’s acting out the suffering, deprivations, and existential threats experienced by his family and community during the Second World War, experiences buried so deep in his mind that he’s not conscious of them. and he is now inflicting those same circumstances on the families in the cities of Ukraine.
It doesn’t have to be this way, and that’s what the PACEs Connection community is dedicated to preventing. “Having the power to destroy doesn’t mean being strong,” Miller pointed out. “Real strength means being able to understand our feelings and our history so that we become free to act from conscious motives instead of being driven by unconscious fears like Stalin, Hitler, and others.”
Including Putin.
Is it too late to save the traumatized boy trapped in the body of a dictator? How can love save him, and us as well?
SOURCE: Aces too high news.