Fascism by Madeleine Albright

VLADIMIR PUTIN PLEDGES NO ALLEGIANCE TO THE DEMOCRATIC articles of faith, but he does not explicitly renounce democracy. He disdains Western values while professing to identify with the West. He doesn't care what the State Department puts in next year's human rights report, because he has yet to pay a political price in his own country for the sins reported in prior years. He tells bald lies with a straight face, and when guilty of aggression, blames the victim. He has convinced many, apparently including the American president, that he is a master strategist, a man of strength and will. Confined to Russia, these facts would be sobering, but Putin, like Mussolini nine decades ago, is watched carefully in other regions by leaders who are tempted to follow in his footsteps. Some already are.

Though Putin was born in 1952, his story begins earlier, with that of his parents, who survived-just barely-the Second World War. During the Siege of Leningrad, when famine gripped that city, his mother collapsed from hunger and, before reviving, was laid out for burial among corpses. His father, a member of Stalin's secret police, was assigned to carry out sabotage operations behind German lines in Estonia. The unit blew up a munitions depot but was informed on by unsympathetic locals. Enemy soldiers and their baying hounds chased the senior Putin, who escaped by submerging himself in a marsh and breathing through a reed. Of the twenty-eight men in his unit, just four eluded capture or death. Quickly returned to combat, he suffered a leg wound from a grenade and was hauled by a fellow soldier across a frozen river to the hospital. He limped for the rest of his life. Save for these extraordinary events, Vladimir Putin would not exist.