The clues were all there. We might have had some indication from the fact that Putin was an ex-KGB hardman. After all, the KGB was rather better known for spreading fake news and murdering dissidents than it was for its friendly tolerance of liberal democracies. But just in case we didn’t spot that glaring indication, and soon after he burned all his files from his East German posting, Putin declared the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of Soviet Russia ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’. Then, in his first speech after he came to power in Moscow, he made dark threats about anyone who dared to oppose Russia – and he made good on them by invading Chechnya and killing tens of thousands of people.
He also quickly took control of Russian TV channels and started putting out relentless pro-himself and anti-Western propaganda. He had journalists arrested. It was just like the bad old days of Communism – except now, instead of being the enforcing arm of a political party, the secret service – now renamed the FSB – pretty much ran the government.
Another thing that remained constant from the days of the KGB was the way Putin’s opponents kept dying in ‘mysterious’ circumstances. And when I say ‘mysterious’, I actually mean ‘really quite crazily obvious’ circumstances. Like when Alexander Litvinenko made the mistake of accusing Putin of running a mafia state and said that he had arranged the execution of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. (She in turn had foolishly accused Putin of arranging the bombing of several apartment buildings in Moscow as a pretext for declaring war on the Chechens – and had been assassinated on the comb-over kleptocrat’s birthday.) Litvinenko was killed when two men from Moscow tricked him into drinking tea laced with a rare radioactive poison, polonium-210. A poison that came from a Russian nuclear reactor and left traces all over London, literally showing the assassins’ footprints as they moved in on their victim – not to mention the radioactive towel they used to clean their hands afterwards.
Putin’s recent attempts to interfere in elections have been just as unsubtle. Banks close to Putin have loaned millions of pounds to French fascist Marine Le Pen. Funny money sloshed around pro-Leave organisations in the UK’s Brexit referendum. Several MPs have further accused him of interfering in our 2015 general election.
Then, there’s Donald Trump. There are the Russian hacks of the Democratic National Congress and the way they were leaked during election season. There are the funny stories about Trump being filmed taking a golden shower in a Moscow hotel and subsequently blackmailed. There are the less amusing repeated contacts between Trump affiliates and Russian agents during the run-up to the election. There’s the fact that Putin sent Donald Trump his congratulations within an hour of Clinton’s concession. Putin may now have reason to regret helping out this most wild and unpredictable of allies – but it’s worth remembering that when the Russian Duma heard the election result, the gathered assembly broke into applause. It’s also worth remembering the way Trump quickly appointed Rex Tillerson as his secretary of state, in spite of the fact that he has billions of dollars of financial interests in Russia and the Kremlin had awarded Tillerson the order of friendship in 2013. Putin’s left a trail as glowingly radioactive as the polonium that did for poor old Litvinenko. There’s little doubt that vital parts of the current US administration are in Putin’s trouser pocket.
Worse still, we all know there’s plenty more room in there for other world leaders.
* Putin has actually boasted about being a school bully on his official website.
Date of birth/death: 2 February 1905 – 6 March 1982
In a nutshell: Evangelist for the virtue of selfishness
Connected to: Donald Trump, Rex Tillerson, the Koch brothers, Boris Johnson
In 1917, when the novelist and political theorist Ayn Rand was twelve years old, she watched as Bolsheviks wrecked her family business in St Petersburg. She didn’t like that. In fact, she bore a grudge. She hated Communism so much she decided that only its direct opposite must be true. She proposed an upside-down Marxism. Instead of the workers being the people who produce the things of value in the world, Ayn Rand declared that the bosses and owners and wealthy were the real source of good.
More than that, Rand fed bosses the appealing notion that they deserved their money. In books like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead she told the rich that they aren’t parasites or exploiters or immoral. She celebrated individuals who put themselves first. She portrayed these fortunate souls as superhuman. She urged the rich to keep their money and refuse to help everyone else. In her ultimate counter-intuitive coup, she came up with the theories of the ‘virtue of selfishness’ and ‘enlightened self-interest’. Which are fancy ways of saying: feel free to do whatever the hell you like. Rand backed this up by characterising anyone who wasn’t rich as despicable – a ‘moocher’ class, who deserve contempt instead of help. ‘If a man is weak he does not deserve love,’ Rand once told an interviewer, with characteristic charm.
I guess you can see where all this is going?
Yes: Ayn Rand is a wanker-magnet. She’s tremendously popular with many of our current world leaders. Influential pro-Brexit campaigners Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell have produced a book based on Rand’s ideas. Boris Johnson has written Rand-inspired articles declaring the rich ‘an oppressed minority’. His fellow Tory cabinet minster Sajid Javid claims he once read a scene from The Fountainhead when wooing the woman who – remarkably – became his wife. He also told a political film society that the film of the book articulated just ‘what I felt’.
US politicians and commentators love Rand even more. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was a member of Rand’s inner circle from the 1950s to the 1980s. The libertarian Rand Paul has declared ‘I am a big fan.’ Meanwhile, Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House of Representatives and leading Republican climate-change denier, once told an Ayn Rand fanclub: ‘The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.’ He also said: ‘It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff.’
And so it goes on. And on. And on. A bit like her novels. Christopher Hitchens once accurately described these weighty tomes as ‘transcendentally awful’. But although the books are unusually bad, they do pull off one clever trick. Rand manages to flatter people like Carswell and Paul Ryan and Rand Paul by telling them that they are the brains and brawn of the world. She tells them they are ‘rational’ and that they are simply following an unbiased, straightforward truth: ‘objectivism’. And the killer blow is that the books are pitched low enough that these not-so-great great thinkers are able to understand them. They are written in basic English, and she keeps the busy plutocrats’ attention by leavening her blunt, simple ideas with emotion, sex, guns, explosions and absurd sci-fi-tinged adventure. Even Donald Trump is a fan.
That’s right. Donald Trump once claimed to have read a book. And according to Trump, this book – Rand’s novel The Fountainhead – ‘relates to everything’. He especially likes the novel’s hero, Howard Roark. Trump has expressed great affinity with this character, who spends 700 pages ranting about everything he doesn’t like in the world and then blows things up when he doesn’t get his way. Who can say what Trump sees in him?
Elsewhere, Rex Tillerson, Trump’s controversial Secretary of State and friend of Vladimir Putin, has said that his favourite book is Rand’s biggest novel, Atlas Shrugged. Atlas Shrugged starts with the famous question ‘Who is John Galt?’ – and then spends 1,200 long pages explaining.
This book is, as the critic Whittaker Chambers noted, a work of ‘shrillness