"Putin would very much like to, but I think he won't be able to. It's no small feat to wage war against NATO countries. Is he looking for World War III? All the Baltic states and Poland are NATO members, and there's Article 5 of the treaty. He fully understands that. Second, he certainly poses a threat, but everyone is preparing for war. Our leaders keep repeating that the post-war period is over and the pre-war countdown has begun. It's certainly unpleasant. We're checking the shelters here, and then it turns out they don't exist and nobody thought about war. But Putin's threats have a major impact on the militarization of the European Union. Finally, the question of establishing a joint military for EU states has arisen. France and Germany are not only helping Ukraine but are seriously working on their military production.
"Everyone is taking Putin's threats seriously, but let's look at the state of Russia today. The entire country is mobilized for war, and most of its production is being directed toward the military. The country won't get any richer from this. The equipment is outdated. But there's another problem that could arise: people. They are interconnected.
"Is Poland afraid? Yes, afraid of the threat, but everyone is preparing seriously. At the same time, I don't think the attack will happen because Russia will be preoccupied with Ukraine for at least another year."
Q: When you say Putin would like to but is unable to, you're assuming rationality on Putin's part, meaning that he'll act according to his capabilities. How rational do you think he is? After all, many didn't believe he would invade Ukraine.
"He has one rationality: his hold on power. He can't afford to lose it. He understood this more and more as his crimes piled up. He understood that if he loses power, it means imprisonment, in Russia or abroad. That's why he's clinging to power."
An open secret
As difficult as it is to peer into another person's psyche, even a well-known dictator like Vladimir Putin – Krystyna Kurczab-Redlich's assertions do not come out of nowhere: In the years 1990-2004 she lived and worked as a journalist in Russia, reporting on the first post-Soviet years for Polish and international media outlets like Newsweek. In 2000, she published her book "Pandrioszka" (a combination of Pandora's box and matryoshka doll), in which she depicted the political, cultural, and social transformations in 1990s Russia. The book was a success and went through reprints in 2008, 2011, and 2022.
In 2007, the journalist published another resonant book, "Głową o mur Kremla" ("Banging one's head against the wall of the Kremlin"), which expanded on Russia's two wars against Chechnya and its crimes against the Chechen people, among other topics. The book earned her the moniker "the Polish Politkovskaya", after the journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya, who reported on human rights abuses in Chechnya despite repeated threats and even an attempted poisoning – until finally, an assassin got to her on her doorstep on Oct. 7, 2006, Putin's birthday.
Kurczab-Redlich was responsible for a series of documentaries on the appalling human rights violations perpetrated by the Russians in Chechnya. Her work earned her several journalism awards in Poland, and in 2005 she was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
During her trips to the Caucasus, Kurczab-Redlich came across a mysterious story that would accompany her for years to come, and serve as the basis for a sensational biography centered on a 74-year-old woman from a small village in Georgia who adamantly claimed: "I am Vladimir Putin's real mother."
"In 2000 it wasn't a secret at all," Kurczab-Redlich recalled. "I was in Ingushetia [a republic of Russia located in the North Caucasus of Eastern Europe], running between hospitals to talk to those wounded after Russian forces opened a 'humanitarian corridor' and fired on those passing through it. During one of those visits, someone from the foreign press told me, 'There's a group here that is going to meet Putin's mother.' They said she lived here, in Georgia, in a village not far away called Metekhi.
"It turned out that not long before that, a local resident came to the Chechen establishment in Tbilisi and wanted to convince the Chechens to kidnap a woman from Metekhi – grandmother Vera, Putin's mother – for half a million dollars. The Chechens did not believe the man, so he took out tapes of her neighbors who spoke of Vera Nikolaevna, and about Vova [a diminutive of Vladimir], who lived in the village as a child. The next day, when we set out, they didn't let us enter Georgia, and I realized that there is no smoke without fire."
Years later, Kurczab-Redlich would finally reach Metekhi and hear the story Vera had been telling anyone who would listen. "I wasn't the first to reach her," Kurczab-Redlich clarified. "There's a film made about her by a Dutch director called 'Putin's Mama.' I'm recounting here what I verified myself and what is absolutely clear," she told Israel Hayom in a Zoom conversation from her home in Warsaw.
Pass the parcel
Vera Putina (the female version of the last name "Putin") was born in a small village in the Perm region of the Ural Mountains. After World War II, Vera went to study electrical engineering at a technical institute, where she met Platon Privalov, a mechanical engineering student, at a student party. The two fell in love and moved in together.
According to the Dutch documentary, Vera's relationship with Platon was short-lived. She chose not to marry him after he received a package one day from his village containing cured pork and a letter from his wife. That same day, Vera kicked Platon out. This was also the reason she did not want him present for her child's birth, and why the child was named Vladimirovich instead of taking the patronymic Vladimir Platonovich after Platon's first name. Vera never revealed to the child the real identity of the father.
Vera returned to her village immediately. A few months later, on Oct. 7, 1950, she gave birth to Vovka. Putin's official birth date is Oct. 7, albeit two years later, in 1052. This gap would later receive an interesting explanation that seemingly ties in with the scant details known about Putin's childhood from his official biography.
According to Kurczab-Redlich, "After the birth, Vera stayed to raise Vovka at her parents' house, but she wanted to continue her studies. When Vovka was around two years old, she left for Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan [then part of the USSR]. In Tashkent, she met a soldier named Giorgi Osepahvili, who promised to marry her. Vera agreed, but when she arrived with him in Metekhi, it turned out he was far from as wealthy as he had told her – nevertheless, she stayed. A year later, Vera asked her mother to bring Vovka, then three years old, to her.
"Vovka once again was passed around like a parcel, after Vera had left him with his grandmother as a child. He got used to her, was probably treated well enough, and suddenly he arrives at this strange woman, his own mother, and an environment where a different language is spoken. At first, everyone was still charmed by him because he looked different, with blue eyes and blond hair, and was generally a good child."
"When Vovka was 7, his mother and Giorgi had children of their own. That was the cue for hell to break loose for the young Putin. His stepfather abused him, compounding the deprivation and shame of hunger the family suffered. Older villagers told foreign journalists how they gave the cute Vovka apples. Shura Gabinashvili, a former Russian teacher at the village school, told The Telegraph in 2008 that she had taught Putin between 1958 and 1960, but was warned not to discuss it publicly. Nevertheless, she said Vovka was the brightest student in her class. "He loved Russian fables and Russian was his favorite subject," Gabinashvili claimed. "He also liked fishing and wrestling. He was the shortest child in the class but he always wanted to win at everything."
The truth buried
But the house was not a home for Vova. Giorgi continued to beat him. In the documentary, Vera acknowledges that Giorgi treated him harshly, but said that young Vova was a quiet and bookish child who didn't enjoy socializing. The stepfather pushed to have Vova removed from the household.
Kurczab-Redlich continued, "When Vova was 10, Vera again brought him to his grandparents. He was supposed to be in fourth grade. She remembers that he cried bitterly, but says she didn't even hug him – because she didn't want to fall apart herself."
Q: How could she give up her child?
"She told me outright, 'It's awful, I know. I handed over Vovka and exchanged him for my daughters [with Giorgi]. My husband didn't want him here, the child of a stranger.' Look, this is the Caucasus, you have to understand that. They always taunted Vovka that he was a bastard. He learned sambo there [a martial art with Soviet origins]."
Q: How did she talk about him when you met her? Was there any warmth in her voice? Did she seem like she felt guilty?
"She spoke in pain, in great pain, but she also used to say that if he had stayed in Metekhi – he would have remained unknown, a lunatic, and would never have become president."
Q: As in, she felt proud in some sense?
"I wouldn't say that. She just presented it as a fact, matter-of-factly. She also said she gave up on him (in her heart) when he bombed Georgia [in 2008]. I must say she is very shrewd: when she didn't feel comfortable answering certain questions, she would say 'Holy Mary told me to do so'. She is a very religious woman – when it suits her, at least," Kurczab-Redlich added, laughing.
But the days of the presidency were still a long way ahead in the early 1960s in Leningrad, where Putin's official biography begins. According to the official version, he was born to Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin and Maria Ivanovna Putina, both born in 1911. According to Kurczab-Redlich's version, he was brought there by his grandparents, who left him in the hands of relatives, who would from then on be presented as his biological parents.
"Imagine that in Leningrad, before Vova's arrival, no one saw Maria pregnant or with a baby carriage," Kurczab-Redlich said. "The two children of Vladimir and Maria, Viktor and Oleg, died. One during the Nazi siege of Leningrad, and the other even before that. Children who grew up in the same block said that Maria brought the new child in her arms, said he was her son, Vova, and asked that they not insult him. Something like that.
"It was strange for all the residents of the block: how could a 40-year-old woman, who almost died of starvation during the siege, suddenly become pregnant, years after the war? How did no one see her pregnant – and suddenly there was a new child in the family? They issued him a new birth certificate stating that he was born in 1952 because he had to go to first grade and relearn everything. So they enrolled him in first grade. That's how Vova's real biography began. But in his official biography, until this moment, the woman listed as his mother is not his mother, his father is not his father, his birthplace is not the real place and even the date is different by two years."
Putin's alternative biography – the real one, if you believe Vera Putina – was very well known in Georgia, but was also often met with skepticism. Kurczab-Redlich said she was aware of this, but drew attention to the fact that it has never been disproven.
"Vera Nikolayevna said that nuns visited her and took blood samples, ostensibly for DNA tests, but the results were never published," she said. In 2008, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov addressed the story once, denying it. However, over the years the Kremlin has developed a reputation for being particularly unreliable, to put it mildly.
What added an air of mystery to the story, if not necessarily proof of its credibility, were the deaths of two journalists, Russian Artyom Borovik and Italian Antonio Russo, who were reportedly about to publish Vera Putina's story before the 2000 presidential elections. Borovik was killed in a plane crash on his way to Kyiv, and Russo was shot shortly after broadcasting the footage of Vera to Italy. The connection between the deaths and Putina, who passed away last May, was never proven.
"They didn't want to listen"
Q: Let's return to Putin as president. Today it seems clear to everyone what kind of ruler he is. But there were early signs of which way the wind was blowing long before: in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and igniting the war in Donbas, in 2008 with the invasion of Georgia, and even in 2007 Munich speech about the end of American hegemony. How did Western leaders miss the new danger in the Kremlin?
"It started much earlier, with the takeover of television channels, reducing the number of parties in parliament, and restoring the Soviet anthem. Personally, I felt it at one particular moment: on May 9 [the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany) there was always a line of people who wanted to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the Alexandrovsky garden. There was something that united them and inspired them together, a kind of shared inspiration. I admired that. And then, on May 7, 2000, Putin is sworn in as president – and two days later suddenly you can't get out of the metro. Everything is closed, everything is fenced off with iron barriers, and you can't lay wreaths like you could under [President of Russia from 1991 to 1999 Boris] Yeltsin. The atmosphere changed."
According to Kurczab-Redlich, at that time and long after, few in the West heeded the warnings or even wanted to hear them.
"I followed his speeches, I heard all the statements about 'lifting Russia from its knees', I also heard in 2002 from FSB [Federal Security Service, formerly the KGB] people that he couldn't digest the withdrawal of the Soviet army from Eastern European countries. But they didn't want to listen to me then. They called me 'the chief anti-Putinist'."
Q: But why did this happen, in your opinion? Why did they turn a blind eye?
"First, Yeltsin and [US President Bill] Clinton had almost friendly relations, they met without [wearing] ties [suggesting informality]. Russia was opening up to the West. Second, the Western elite wanted quiet. The West, which had forgotten what war was, lived a comfortable life of abundance and didn't want war, and certainly didn't want to think about what was happening inside Russia. It was far away, but you could make a fortune from doing business with it, even though everyone – especially in London, the capital of the Russian oligarchs – knew very well where the money came from. But even the most upright lawyers in Britain were bought with that money.
"Take [Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom] Tony Blair, for example. In February 2000, about two weeks before the elections that were to be held on March 17, Blair flew with his wife to St. Petersburg, and the Putins received them and took them to the Mariinsky Theater. Blair came to raise Putin's horn in the eyes of the West. A short time before that he received an intelligence report on the atrocities of Russia in Chechnya. Blair did not even glance at it. There were 130 signatures of intellectuals and journalists against the war in Chechnya, but that did not stop Blair from flying [to Russia], and they signed very favorable contracts in the oil field. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth II received Putin – the first Russian leader to be honored in such a way (by the way, he was late as always) while a film festival in London at the time screened the horrors of the Russians in Chechnya."
For years, Western leaders kept showering Putin with honors and maintaining warm relations with the Kremlin. French President Jacques Chirac awarded him honors, and President Barack Obama began a reset with Russia, despite the warning signs – and perhaps even because of them, in order to appease the Russian president. Moscow too was not idle, building a well-padded network of connections and influence in the West with oil and gas dollars.
Former senior officials like ex-Chancellor of Germany Gerhard Schröder and former French Prime Minister François Fillon received seats on the boards of state-owned corporations, lending the Kremlin their prestige.
"It was only in 2014 that their eyes opened a bit," Kurczab-Redlich continued. "There were sanctions following Crimea and Donbas. But what are 'sanctions'? The West expressed concern. When I hear that my leadership is concerned, I tremble and recall the death tolls in Chechnya, the number of torture victims there, and statements that it was an internal Russian matter."
Q: Let's go back to the beginning: what motivates Putin more than anything? What is his main motivation?
"I think he has two. He declared one when he was still a presidential candidate. He said, 'How great it is that no one is above you. I am my own master.' That was most important to him. The second is money. His childhood was so impoverished that now he cannot stop. He even has a golden toilet brush. He has about 20 palaces that he uses. He has everything imaginable. Is that a normal soul? Note that even his inauguration was different: [Mikhail] Gorbachev and Yeltsin were sworn in at the State Kremlin Palace. Vova came and received a royal inauguration. He has an inferiority complex, and I would say he is a sociopath. Other people exist for him only as long as they are needed. If they interfere with him – they will die. If they pose a danger to him – they will die."
These days, Kurczab-Redlich is working on a revised and updated version of the biography. This time it will include Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the poisoning of [Russian opposition leader Alexei] Navalny, and the destruction of Aleppo.
"I need to write about them because people forget very quickly. They forget all the evil and horror."
Q: Could you have predicted in 2002 that Putin would become what he became in 2022?
"Yes, I could have, but I could never have imagined that the democratic world would allow it. It is inconceivable. I believed in the democratic principles of the West. I didn't think it would be so easy to buy everyone. I don't understand the West."
The race after the true story
This article could have ended with the previous sentence, but perhaps one more explanation is needed about Putin's official biography. It has always been full of holes regarding his childhood, but throughout his tenure in the Kremlin, parts of his adult life also began to disappear.
For example, in the book "First Person," commissioned ahead of his first presidential campaign, his friend Sergei Roldugin recounted pointing out Putin's foul language and Putin's secretary from his St. Petersburg, Marina Yentaltseva, city hall days shared how he used to ignore his wife. But later, after Putin consolidated power, it turned out that detailing his close friends was a bonanza for corruption investigations. Investigative journalists found that Roldugin was one of the proxies under whom Putin's vast wealth was registered, while Yentaltseva married another of the president's friends, Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller, and according to investigations, the two stole billions from public coffers. In 2022, "First Person" was removed from the Kremlin website.
Another biography, written by a former military correspondent named Oleg Blotsky, also disappeared. Blotsky, a Putin admirer, wrote the book "Vladimir Putin: A Life Story," which became a bestseller in 2001. But no publisher agreed to print the second volume, "The Road to Power," and TV channels ignored the existence of the biography he authored. The 200,000 copies he published with the help of the Armenian diaspora in Russia were removed from all libraries and bookstores.
Another biography, written by former military correspondent Oleg Blotsky, an admirer of Putin, also disappeared. Blotsky's book became a bestseller in 2001, but no publisher agreed to print the second volume. The 200,000 copies he published with the help of the Armenian diaspora in Russia were removed from all libraries and bookstores.
Why? According to the independent Proekt website, there are three possible explanations: Putin's family was portrayed as very ordinary and simple; Blotsky showed photos of Putin's relatives and KGB comrades, some of whom would later become nominal owners of giant companies; and finally – Putin's depiction was not particularly flattering. His then-wife Lyudmila said he was chronically late for dates ("being an hour and a half late was no big deal. I cried time and again") and refused to help her with basic tasks like carrying groceries when she was pregnant. The book by her German friend Irene Pietsch, "Piquant Friendship," in which Lyudmila called Putin a "basilisk," was also not printed after 2002.
Documentary films have also been shelved. In 1992, when Putin was still working at the St. Petersburg city administration, he was interviewed extensively by documentary filmmaker Igor Shadkhan. Putin said, among other things: "We all thought – and I won't deny it, I thought so too - that if we imposed order with a firm hand, we'd all live better, in comfort and security. In reality, that comfort would quickly disappear, because that firm hand would soon start strangling us." In retrospect, seeing Putin's entrenchment of authoritarian rule, it's easy to understand why those words had to disappear.
And it is at this very point that Putin's biography dovetails neatly with his tendency to rewrite history – a practice that resonates strongly with the Stalinist tradition of erasing "traitors" from official photographs and striking their names from encyclopedias. For his part, Putin uses Russia's history as a political and diplomatic tool for all intents and purposes, concealing certain parts and distorting others. As the adage sometimes attributed to Churchill goes, Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. It seems Putin thinks so too.
