Chapter 121: Siege

450     was born in Leningrad . . . on October 7, 1952  “Vladimir Putin Fast Facts,” CNN, June 19, 2024, www.cnn.com/2013/01/03/europe/vladimir-putin-fast-facts/index.html.

450     cooked for Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin “Putin Says Grandfather Cooked for Stalin and Lenin,” Reuters, March 11, 2018, www.reuters.com/article/world/putin-says-grandfather-cooked-for-stalin-and-lenin-idUSKCN1GN0P6/.

450     led the October Revolution in 1917, which overthrew . . . Alexander Rabinovich, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1976), xvii–xxxiii, 202–304. Find the library book at search.worldcat.org/title/2318388.

450     established a one-party communist state  PBS, “Vladimir Lenin,” Commanding Heights, accessed April 15, 2025, www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/prof_vladimirlenin.html; and “The Russian Revolution—Part 1: From Idealism to Terror,” CBC Radio, November 3, 2017, www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-edition-november-5-2017-1.4384859/the-russian-revolution-part-1-from-idealism-to-terror-1.4384899.

450     heading . . . until his death in 1924  Thomas A. Baylis, Governing By Committee: Collegial Leadership in Advanced Societies (Albany, NY: State University New York Press, 1989), 93–95. Visit search.worldcat.org/title/17981143to find this book at a library near you.

450     succeeded Lenin. By the 1930s . . . established a conventional dictatorship  See Oleg V. Khlevniuk “Stalin as Dictator: the Personalisation of Power,” in Stalin: A New History, eds. Sarah Davies and James Harris (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 109–116. Find the library book at search.worldcat.org/title/60320249.

450     was the cook’s son  Richard Sakwa, Putin: Russia’s Choice, 2nd ed. (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2008), 2. Find this book at a local library at search.worldcat.org/title/370520258?oclcNum=370520258.

450     worked in a factory  Sakwa, Putin, 2. Find the library book at search.worldcat.org/title/370520258?oclcNum=370520258.

450     passed away before turning one. His second brother . . . died from diphtheria in 1942  Sakwa, Putin, 2; and Gemma Aldridge, “Vladimir Putin Lost Own Brother in War-Torn City as He Is Blamed for Killing Hundreds of Syrian Children,” Mirror, October 9, 2016, www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/vladimir-putin-lost-brother-wartorn-9009408. Find Sakwa’s Putin at a library at search.worldcat.org/title/370520258?oclcNum=370520258.

450     bombarded or starved . . . more than one million Russians . . . 872-day siege Journalist and historian Anna Reid estimates that “about three quarters of a million civilians—between a quarter and a third of the pre-siege population” of Leningrad died from starvation. Anna Reid, “Myth and Tragedy at the Siege of Leningrad—Gallery,” The Guardian, September 15, 2011, www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2011/sep/15/siege-leningrad-history-anna-reid; and Irina Titova, “Leningrad siege survivors recall their ordeal after 75 years,” Associated Press (AP) News, January 26, 2019, apnews.com/general-news-868ae25703c44a35aa23c061ab583ec2.

450     the deadliest in human history  Reid, “Myth and Tragedy at the Siege of Leningrad—Gallery,” www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2011/sep/15/siege-leningrad-history-anna-reid; and David M. Glantz, The Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1944: 900 Days of Terror (London: Cassell, 2004), 97. Find the library book at search.worldcat.org/title/61301373.

450     lost five of his six brothers in the war  Alexey Timofeychev, “Vladimir Putin Reveals His Family’s WWII Ordeals in Magazine Article,” Russia Beyond, May 7, 2015, www.rbth.com/politics/2015/05/07/vladimir_putin_reveals_his_familys_wwii_ordeals_in_magazine_article_43003. Russia Beyond is operated under the umbrella of a state media agency. “About Us,” Beyond Russia, accessed April 15, 2025,www.rbth.com/about.

450     died on the Eastern Front  Sakwa, Putin, 2. Find the library book at search.worldcat.org/title/370520258?oclcNum=370520258.

450     occupying the Tver region . . . killed Putin’s grandmother  Sakwa, Putin, 2. Find the library book at search.worldcat.org/title/370520258?oclcNum=370520258.

450     survived off military food rations . . . when she visited him in the hospital  Sakwa, Putin, 3; and Vladimir Putin with Nataliya Gevorkyan et al., First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia's President Vladimir Putin, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), 8–9. Find Sakwa’s Putin at a library at search.worldcat.org/title/370520258?oclcNum=370520258 and First Person at search.worldcat.org/title/44013067.

450–451 working in the Soviet navy . . . prompted . . . joined the Soviet Union’s secret police  Sakwa, Putin, 2; and “Invasion of the Soviet Union, June 1941,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, June 11, 2021, encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/invasion-of-the-soviet-union-june-1941. Find the library book at search.worldcat.org/title/370520258?oclcNum=370520258.

451      with a lifelong limp Sakwa, Putin, 3; and Vladimir Putin with Gevorkyan et al., First Person, 7–9. Find Sakwa’s Putin at a library at search.worldcat.org/title/370520258?oclcNum=370520258 and First Person at search.worldcat.org/title/44013067.

451      controlling . . . including its new puppet state, East Germany “The Soviet Union and Europe after 1945,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, accessed April 18, 2025, encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-soviet-union-and-europe-after-1945; and “The End of WWII and the Division of Europe,” University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center for European Studies, accessed via Wayback Machine, April 16, 2025 capture, web.archive.org/web/20250416071311/europe.unc.edu/the-end-of-wwii-and-the-division-of-europe/.

451      studied German in middle and high school  Putin, First Person, 16–17, 21. Find the library book at search.worldcat.org/title/44013067.

451      enrolled in law school . . . He finished in 1975 Putin, First Person, 23; and Philip Short, “The Extraordinary Story of Putin’s Early Life,” The Times, June 25, 2022, www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/the-extraordinary-story-of-putins-early-life-ng7x3kf2f. Find the First Person library book at search.worldcat.org/title/44013067.

451      worked at the Committee for State Security  Putin, First Person, 40–43; and Sakwa, Putin, 8. Find First Person at a library at search.worldcat.org/title/44013067 and Sakwa’s Putin at search.worldcat.org/title/370520258?oclcNum=370520258.

451      succeeded his father’s NKVD “The KGB (which is the Russian acronym for ‘Committee for State Security’) is the name under which the powerful Soviet ‘secret police’ organization was known between 1954 and 1995. Among its previous names were ‘Cheka’ and ‘NKVD’, while presently it is known as the Federal Security Service.” PBS, “KGB Deep Background: Reference Detail,” Red Files: Secret Victories of the KGB, accessed April 18, 2025, www.pbs.org/redfiles/kgb/deep/kgb_deep_ref_detail.htm.

451      Through planting disinformation  In the 1980s, in what historian Douglas Selvage calls “one of [the KGB’s] most successful propaganda efforts during the Cold War” the KGB launched a disinformation operation “and then worked to spread the thesis internationally that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), which causes AIDS, had originated in U.S. government experiments to develop a new biological weapon. According to this thesis, the AIDS virus had been created for deployment in a future war or against various unwanted groups and minorities inside and outside the United States.” Douglas Selvage, “Operation ‘Denver’: The East German Ministry of State Security and the KGB’s AIDS Disinformation Campaign, 1985–1986 (Part 1),” Journal of Cold War Studies 21, no. 4 (Fall 2019), doi.org/10.1162/jcws_a_00907, 73. For other examples of Soviet disinformation at this time, see U.S. State Department, “Soviet ‘Active Measures’: Forgery, Disinformation, Political Operations,” Special Report No. 88, October 1981, www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP84B00274R000100040004-8.pdf, 1, 2, 3.

451      Through front groups that sowed chaos  U.S. State Department, “Soviet ‘Active Measures,’” www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP84B00274R000100040004-8.pdf, 1, 2, 3; and Catherine Belton, “Did Vladimir Putin Support Anti-Western Terrorists as a Young KGB Officer?” Politico, June 20, 2020, www.politico.eu/article/did-vladimir-putin-support-anti-western-terrorists-as-a-young-kgb-officer.

451      engaged in assassinations See Belton, “Did Vladimir Putin Support Anti-Western Terrorists as a Young KGB Officer?” www.politico.eu/article/did-vladimir-putin-support-anti-western-terrorists-as-a-young-kgb-officer on the connections between the KGB and the terrorist activities of the Red Army Faction in West Germany. See also Craig R. Whitney, “Ex-Official Links to K.G.B. to a Killing,” New York Times, June 13, 1991, www.nytimes.com/1991/06/13/world/ex-official-links-kgb-to-a-killing.html; and Richard Nelsson, comp., “The Poison-Tipped Umbrella: The Death of Georgi Markov in 1978—Archive,” The Guardian, September 9, 2020, www.theguardian.com/world/from-the-archive-blog/2020/sep/09/georgi-markov-killed-poisoned-umbrella-london-1978.

451      returned home  Sakwa, Putin, 10–11. Find the library book at search.worldcat.org/title/370520258?oclcNum=370520258.

451      after sixteen years . . . he resigned . . . for the first elected mayor of Leningrad  Sakwa, Putin, 10–11; and Celestine Bohlen, “A.A. Sobchak Dead at 62; Mentor to Putin,” New York Times, February 21, 2000, www.nytimes.com/2000/02/21/world/aa-sobchak-dead-at-62-mentor-to-putin.html. Find the library book at search.worldcat.org/title/370520258?oclcNum=370520258.

451      moved to Moscow to work in the administration . . .  Sakwa, Putin, 13–14. Find the library book at search.worldcat.org/title/370520258?oclcNum=370520258.

451      climbed up the ranks Sakwa, Putin, 13–14. Find the library book at search.worldcat.org/title/370520258?oclcNum=370520258.

451      appointed Putin the director . . . or FSB  Sakwa, Putin, 14; and PBS, “KGB Deep Background,” www.pbs.org/redfiles/kgb/deep/kgb_deep_ref_detail.htm. Find the library book at search.worldcat.org/title/370520258?oclcNum=370520258.

451      shocked the world . . .  “Statement by Boris Yeltsin,” www.en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24080.

451      named . . . acting president Bohlen, “Yeltsin Resigns, Naming Putin as Acting President To Run in March Election,” www.nytimes.com/2000/01/01/world/yeltsin-resigns-overview-yeltsin-resigns-naming-putin-acting-president-run-march.html.