Ian Robertson and David Owen
Saturday February 26 2022, 6.00pm,
The Sunday Times
Global politics
In June 2005, during a US business delegation visit to St Petersburg, President
Putin noticed a diamond Super Bowl ring that Robert Kraft, owner of New
England Patriots football team, was wearing. He asked to see it, tried it on, and
said: “I could kill someone with this.” He then, allegedly, put it in his pocket and
abruptly left the room.
Three months later, while visiting the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the
curators took an exhibition piece — a glass replica of a Kalashnikov gun filled
with vodka — from a display case. According to his biographer, Masha Gessen,
Putin nodded to one of his guards, who simply reached over and pocketed the
piece.
Such minor thievery pales into insignificance in comparison with the use of
radioactive and chemical weapons on UK soil to cause as painful a death as
possible to perceived betrayers such as Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal,
not to mention unleashing an unprovoked war in Europe.
Putin is a self-described thug who, according to one biographer, took pleasure in
describing the street fights of his youth and emphasising his aggression,
vengefulness and diUculty controlling his temper. This core personality found a
congenial home in the KGB serving his beloved Soviet empire.
Its collapse in 1989 was an intensely emotional and painful humiliation for him
and Putin has replaced the emotional security that the KGB and the Soviet
empire gave him with the Russian Orthodox Church. In 2016 he unveiled a
statue to St Vladimir, a 10th-century founding saint of Russia. The Roman
emperor Julius Caesar made himself a demigod and had statues of himself
raised while still alive.
Putin’s out-of-control behaviour, however, goes far beyond the impulses of his
core personality. One of us (Owen) has defined the diagnostic criteria for a gross
personality distortion caused by extreme power called the hubris syndrome. Its
features include narcissism, grandiosity, a conflation of personal interests with
those of the nation, impaired judgment, diminished risk awareness and
widespread contempt for others.
Putin’s contempt, even for his closest advisers, was on display at a meeting with
his security council in St Ekaterina’s Hall in the Kremlin on Monday. When his
foreign intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, said that he “will support”
recognition of the separatist regions in Ukraine, Putin barked: “Will support or
do support. Tell me straight?” More like the headmaster harrying a group of
schoolboys.
Anyone around the world watching these scenes would conclude that Putin
brooks no discussion, let alone disagreement. He is now, by any rational use of
the word, a dictator.
Absolute power changes the human brain completely but it is the delusional
certainty in the rightness of one’s own views and the consequent blindness to
risk that makes it so dangerous in a world leader.
The only way of constraining such efects on a leader’s brain is through the
constraints of democracy, which have been painfully invented over centuries to
stop brain-distorted leaders taking their people into conflict and chaos.
Putin has systematically destroyed all the checks and balances that used to exist
in Russia, even under his beloved communist rule. Collective decision-making
has been abandoned. The politburo that functioned as a collective following
Stalin’s death in 1953 has gone; the duma, as a check on Putin’s power, gone.
President Xi of China has more limitations on his personal power than Putin.
There is no properly independent judiciary and scarcely any free press. But it
has taken him time systematically to degrade these antidotes to his power
addiction.
One of us (Owen) encountered Putin during his state visit in 2003 to the UK at
the state banquet and after that at a meeting hosted by BP, which was increasing
its investment in Russia with Putin’s approval.
At the time Owen was the chairman of Yukos International, a division of the
former Russian petroleum company Yukos. It was a time still of great hope for
the Russian Federation economically and politically and before Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, the chairman of Yukos, was arrested on Putin’s orders and
imprisoned for ten years.
Putin took his time and initially it seemed he was open to criticism and even
after two terms stepped back in favour of Dmitry Medvedev being president,
something that would be inconceivable now, such are the changes wreaked in
his brain by too much power.
What we see today is a further deterioration in Putin’s character and judgment
after his two years of extraordinary isolation caused by his fear of catching
Covid. This fear may be genuine if, for example, his immune response is
weakened. The changing contours of Putin’s face resemble that of a man on high
dosages of steroids, which can reduce immunity. Perhaps that is a better
explanation than the more frequent suggestions of failed plastic surgery or
Botox injections.
But power is as potent a brain-changer as any drug and Putin is in a dangerous
mental state because of this. His religiosity and sense of spiritual mission,
combined with his blunted risk perception and contempt for any adviser who
might contradict or warn him, means that he cannot be considered a fully
rational actor, as anyone watching his rambling and emotional speech on
Monday could see.
But Putin now has under his total control armed forces better equipped than
Russia has had since the declining years of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule. The Russian
armed forces have a new confidence with their new equipment.
The only antidote for contempt is strength and the democratic world must be
strong or it will be crushed.
But there is one consolation we can take from Greek mythology. The hubris-
inflamed Icarus flew too close to the sun and fell. And in Roman times, having
made himself a demigod, Julius Caesar came across Brutus. President Putin may
be full of anger and contempt — but he is also haunted by fear.
the writers of this article are
Ian Robertson is emeritus professor of psychology at Trinity College Dublin and
the author of How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self-Belief (Penguin,
2021). Lord Owen is a neurologist and was foreign secretary from 1977-79. He is
the author of Riddle, Mystery, Enigma: Two Hundred Years of British-Russian
Relations (2021)
SOURCE:https://www.lorddavidowen.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/inside-putins-mind-absolute-power-has-blinded-russias-new-tsar-q8gws3v5j.pdf
