One way to think yourself into the warped mind of a despot like Russian President Vladimir Putin is to first probe into the dark recesses of your own psyche, then figure out what is different in his. The list is long, but one cognitive snafu that is common and relevant is called deformation professionelle.
We use the French term not only because that language often captures things better, but also because the phrase has an embedded pun that does not translate into the English “professional deformation.” Formation professionelle means vocational training. Deformation professionelle therefore refers to the tunnel vision, biases and distortions we imbibe as we become expert at whatever we do.
Many prosecutors, for example, walk down a random street and, looking left and right, see people who are guilty of something, just not yet caught. Defense attorneys strolling on the same sidewalk will look around and behold human beings who are unjustly accused of something or other, and probably harassed by an overbearing inquisition.
Usually, deformation professionelle is all around us, but no more than a nuisance. It applies to the professor who comes home at night and annoyingly stays in lecture mode with the spouse and kids. Or the tech guy at your company who — left to his own devices and in the name of cybersecurity — would make logging on to your computer so difficult that you might never do a jot of work again.
In the general context of geopolitics, and the Russian attack on Ukraine specifically, the stakes are, of course, immeasurably higher. Putin suffered his deformation professionelle in the KGB, the major spy agency of the former Soviet Union. He worked there from 1975, when he was in his 20s, until just before the Soviet Union collapsed.
To this day, he likes to emphasize that there is no such thing as a “former” KGB agent — people might have left the agency, but it never left them.
Long before becoming leader of a nuclear power, he built an identity and personality as a spook.
Ponder this. He did not rise to power after running for office, shaking hands and kissing babies — nor after managing a business, curing patients, achieving a scientific breakthrough or selling widgets. Putin got into pole position to be the Kremlin’s alpha male by spying on human beings, as well as tracking, manipulating and often discarding them.
What did that do to Putin’s mind as we encounter it today?
Ruediger von Fritsch, a former German ambassador to Russia, describes the psychological consequences as he observed them. Putin sorts everything in life — private or public, Russian or global — into categories of actual or potential hostilities, conspiracies or threats.
Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist, concurs, saying: “He is constantly speaking of betrayal and deceit.”
As Putin sees history and current events, Krastev says: “Things never happen spontaneously. If people demonstrate, he doesn’t ask: Why are they out on the streets? He asks: Who sent them?”
Viewed thus, many of Putin’s hallucinations become fathomable. The Soviet Union did not fall; it was pushed (by a hostile West). The “color revolutions” in former Soviet Republics were not primal yells for freedom by people who felt oppressed; those protesters were hired or manipulated by the CIA and other Western secret services. Ukrainians do not want to join the EU for its promise of prosperity, progress and liberty; they are doing it because they are run by Nazis whose real objective is to encircle and betray Russia and Putin.
Another aspect of this particular deformation professionelle concerns truth — or rather, the complete absence and irrelevance of the very notion. For years, people like Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born British author, have pointed out that Putin flaunts his power by defining “reality” as arbitrarily as he pleases.
The once-and-always KGB agent knows that “if nothing is true, then anything is possible,” Pomerantsev says. “We are left with the sense that we don’t know what Putin will do next — that he’s unpredictable and thus dangerous. We’re rendered stunned, spun and flummoxed by the Kremlin’s weaponization of absurdity and unreality.”
While he was German ambassador to the Kremlin, Von Fritsch experienced first-hand the cognitive whiplash this produces in others.
“In some conversations in Moscow after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, I had the feeling that we invaded the peninsula rather than Russia,” he says.
If there is no truth, it no longer matters whether you distort reality or invert it, as long as you can. In Putin’s system, lying is not a bug, it is a feature.
So what makes Putin different from the rest of us? A lot. First, while we might all suffer from some deformation professionelle (journalists are hardly immune), most of us are not spies.
Second, biased as our worldviews might be, most of us still have to occasionally encounter and interact with other people who have different perspectives.
Putin, by contrast, appears to be completely isolated in his alternate reality.
Third, even when we go off the deep end, most of us do not have enough power to hurt millions of innocent bystanders (although the grieving people of Uvalde, Texas, know that a person acting alone can still destroy the lives of many). Putin does have that ultimate power, which comes with the codes to launch nuclear weapons.
His formative years in the KGB caused a deformation professionelle in Putin that has left him cynical, paranoid, vengeful, unscrupulous, ruthless, and above all, mendacious.
Ukraine, the West and the world must keep that in mind in calibrating a strategy against him.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering European politics. He is a former editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for The Economist.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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