Did Russian boys grow up during the Cold War dreaming of someday being Blofeld? I can imagine a pubescent Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin emerging from the darkness of a 1965 screening of Thunderball at the Leningrad Odeon Theater, rubbing his hands together gleefully, thinking “yes! Yes! That is what I want to be when I grow up!” before going to the local Petco to buy his first (of many) Persian cat minions.
It is an image that must remain in my imagination, of course, since James Bond didn’t make it to Russian movie screens until the 1990s, when the Cold War had ended. Maybe the future Russian dictator collected samizdat copies of the collected works of Ian Fleming when he was a callow student at the KGB Academy, or perhaps snuck across Checkpoint Charlie for a James Bond movie festival at some uber-hip repertory house when he was pushing papers in East Germany in the 1980s?
Whatever the case, Putin almost certainly learned an idiosyncratic lesson from the adventures of 007: That the villains were the heroes, and General Grubozaboyschikov, Auric Goldfinger, Rosa Klebb and, of course, Ernst Blofeld were characters worth emulating. I mean, someone has to say it – Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is a living, breathing, honest-to-God Bond villain.
That was abundantly clear on Saturday, when the Russian Duce gravely warned Ukraine: “If they continue to do what they are doing, they are calling into question the future of Ukrainian statehood. And if this happens, it will be entirely on their conscience.” In effect, he was warning Ukrainians that if they did not give their independence up to him, they would lose their independence, in the kind of tortured logic that only makes sense to wild-eyed men with heavy foreign accents wearing black turtlenecks in 1960s espionage thrillers.
I couldn’t help but think of that scene from Goldfinger where, strapped down to a table with a laser beam inching toward the Crown Jewels, Bond defiantly asks “do you expect me to talk?” Auric Goldfinger laughs as he leaves his lair, “no Mr. Bond I expect you to die!”
Putin’s boasts and threats make no sense because they don’t have to – this is not a war that needs, in his mind, either justification or rationale. Many have noted that he claims that the invasion is necessary to “de-Nazify” a government led by a Jewish president, whose grandfather was murdered by actual Nazis in the Holocaust. And to accomplish this “de-Nazification,” the Russian dictator has dispatched the Wagner Group, a combination mercenary contractor/paramilitary unit/cult with well-known neo-Nazi ties, to assassinate Volodymyr Zelensky.
Putin’s henchman Dmitry Utkin.
The Wagner Group’s founder is a former GRU Lieutenant Colonel and Nazi mega-fan named Dmitry Utkin, who moonlights as the CEO of a management firm owned by oligarch and Putin confidante Evgeny Prigozhin. Utkin is such a Hitler fanboy that he had SS insignia tattooed on his neck and chest, including the rank patch of an SS hauptsturmführer. And if that wasn’t enough, he looks exactly like a Bond-villain henchman, like Jaws, Kronsteen, or Oddjob Drax.
Seriously, you can’t make this shit up.
Indeed, like a true cinematic villain, Putin needs neither rationality nor rationale to bring mayhem to Ukraine and, it’s hard not to suspect, the rest of the world; mayhem is the point. The litany of Putin’s complaints leading up to the invasion read now like the whingeing of a movie psychopath – quite like Danny DeVito’s Oswald Cobblepot in Batman Returns – with an overdeveloped persecution complex and narcissistic delusions of grandeur: “Everyone’s out to get me… No one respects me… I’m going to show them!”
Like all the best cinematic villains, Putin’s bellicosity is the outward expression of his vacuousness and impotence; the violence is not power, but a proxy for the absent power to which he believes he is entitled, and which he demands the world acknowledge. As Hannah Arendt noted in “On Violence” in Crises of the Republic: “Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.”
This explains his appeal to the Redhatted neototalitarian rabble that has been singing the Russian dictator’s praises since he first invaded Ukraine eight years ago, even if they are humming their tune in sotto voce at this very moment. They, too, are a churning, sweaty mass of impotent grievance seeking relief in a spasm of violence. Like the disgraced former president Donald Trump, what they see in Putin is pure, uninhibited impulse that calls no person, no law, and no authority its master. These are the people who cheer Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and root for any bad-guy who “gets away with it.”
Putin is not immoral so much as he is amoral: unrestrained id without a trace of what we might recognize as humanity. He sits alone at long tables in empty rooms and never smiles. Even riding on horseback bare-chested, or shooting captive tigers for “sport,” the Russian dictator never betrays a sign of anything so human as enjoyment. It is as if he is in a state of pure reflection, of existential terror, where he knows that his being is nothingness without action. So, he acts, and acts out, to hold back the void.
The reality of this is palpable in contrast to his adversary in Kyiv. Where Putin always chooses to be photographed alone and at a distance in monumental, gilded, baroque chambers, Zelensky has preferred to be seen in the medium frame, surrounded by his spouse and children, often grinning, even once with festive face paint. It is known that Putin does have a family, although his spouse Lyudmila Shkrebneva left him – or he left her, it isn’t clear – around the time he annexed Crimea in 2014, and his daughters (either two or three) seem to be estranged and live under assumed names.
Volodymyr Zelensky with his comrades in Kyiv.
Zelensky has made passionate appeals to the world, promising his people that he will never abandon them, and has been seen striding through the streets of his besieged capital accompanied by his advisors and cabinet colleagues. Putin only allows himself to be seen indoors, alone, making threats and speaking in cold-blooded, technocratic tones about his “special military operation.” He cannot even bring himself to say something as emotionally loaded as the word “war,” and he dispassionately threatens the world with nuclear annihilation without so much as a wave of his hand.
On display in this war are two radically different masculinities: The one is open and honest, unafraid to express real emotion, connected to family, and conscious of duty and an obligation greater than the self. The other is cagey, calculated, isolated, and conscious of nothing but itself. Zelensky has comrades; Putin has henchmen.
It is no wonder that Zelensky, whatever his other shortcomings might be, has electrified imaginations around the world. Here is a man who is also fully human, whose defiance is tempered with a tangible concern for his people and who, for all of his impressive skills as a communicator, sometimes loses the script. “If you can’t close the sky now, … tell me how many people have to explode, how many arms, legs, heads have to fly to reach you?” the Ukrainian president asked at a press conference last week, visibly straining for the right words, yet somehow far more eloquent because of it. Putin would never allow himself to be caught so flatfooted… So human.
That is because the Russian Duce is a Bond villain, and not even one of the good ones, like Dr. No or Scaramanga, but more General Georgi Koskov from The Living Daylights: A cardboard cutout of a cardboard cutout. Take a close look into Putin’s eyes, and there really is nothing there. Whatever his ambitions for world domination, he is no Blofeld. As cartoonist Michael P. Ramirez depicted him in the Las Vegas Review Journal last week, Putin is not even anything as prosaic as Josef Stalin – he’s Stalin’s pathetic MiniMe.
But his pathos should elicit neither our pity nor sympathy, but only our ridicule. This was something that the great Charlie Chaplin knew so well when he portrayed Hitler, that most monstrous of all villains, as Adenoid Hynkel in The Great Dictator, frolicking with a blow-up globe and stuck in a recursive series of absurd fascist salutes with his Bacterian opposite number Benzino Napaloni.
This is not to say that we should not take Putin seriously. He is a vile, evil man capable of committing unspeakable violence, as we have seen in Syria and Chechnya, and it behooves us to remember that. But Arendt also noted that the “greatest enemy of authority… is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.” No one owes Putin the respect he craves, and we can ensure that he never gets it by recognizing him as the pathetic caricature that he is.