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      2. Into the Shadows: Putin in the KGB and the Case for a Long Term Cognitive Predisposition

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The KGB recruited Vladimir Putin upon his graduating from Leningrad State University in 1975 with a law degree. Putin was stationed briefly in Leningrad observing foreigners in the city before being selected to undergo training in foreign intelligence, which he completed in 1983. He then transferred to Dresden, East Germany where his primary tasks involved monitoring politicians and communist party officials of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).1 Far from the idealized notion of espionage he had longed for, Putin described himself as merely an adept bureaucrat and information gatherer.2 His assignments within the KGB never lived up to his lofty expectations. The indoctrination process of becoming a KGB officer, however, could only exacerbate what anti-American sentiment he had developed in childhood under the Soviet propaganda system and in college during a Communist education.

Once a member of the KGB, always a member of the KGB. Vladimir Putin’s time in the Soviet-era secret police could be analogous to someone who is initiated in the Society of Freemasons: not an official cult, but nevertheless possessing a definitive cultlike culture. As a KGB officer, even if assigned to relatively non-critical posts with seemingly menial duties, Vladimir Putin was effectively indoctrinated to mistrust the United States and the West. Their anti-Americanism was involuntarily forced into them. Putin had been trained to rely on a certain thought process, a KGB mentality in which official manufacturing of enemies within and outside the nation is commonplace.3 Those enemies or manipulators often take the alleged form of a Western entity, be they real or fictitious. Putin, like many of his Soviet-era predecessors, was trained to fabricate the illusion of an enemy and brought up to discount almost anything emanating from the official (or even unofficial) correspondence of the Cold War-era United States and Western civilization as a whole. Publically available statements, documents, or transcripts are assumed to contain nothing but misleading information; “therefore, the harder the Americans try to convince the Russians that they mean no harm, the more the Kremlin becomes suspicious of U.S. intentions.”4

The prominent academic Robert Jervis would presume that Vladimir Putin suffers from a severe case of cognitive predisposition. Jervis holds that a person’s past experiences and observance of events will dramatically affect how they interpret information in the future.5 Jervis further expounds on four variables that determine how much an event might affect an individual’s perceptual predisposition; the more variables that are applicable, the more likely the event dramatically affects said person’s predispositions. America’s and the Soviet Union’s global chess game that has come to be called the Cold War represents the event under study in this. Specifically important is Putin’s involvement in it. The first variable asks if the person experienced the event first hand. As a citizen of the Soviet Union and KGB officer stationed in divided Europe, this variable obviously applies to Putin.

Second, did the event occur in the person’s early adult life? Putin joined the KGB right after college and matured during the height of the Cold War, so yes. Third, did the event result in big consequences for the person’s nation or the person himself? Another obvious yes. Fourth, was the person familiar enough with the international environment that alternative explanations or perceptions regarding the event in question were possible? Putin, in the KGB and stationed in a foreign state, was much more informed of the international situation than the average Soviet citizen. He, therefore, was exposed to alternate analyses of the international situation than what a Soviet commoner heard exclusively from state-run propaganda.6 All four of Jervis’s variables are applicable to Putin’s experience in the Cold War and KGB. This implies that those events, and in the case of this thesis the anti-Americanism intrinsic in those events, dramatically affected Putin’s perceptions. Those perceptions became engrained in the cognitive psyche of Putin during the Cold War, only to remain long past the end of the Cold War and persist to the modern day.

A person’s beliefs are formed from cognitive predispositions toward information that is consistent with their pre-held views. Information that subsequently conforms to those pre-held views resonates even more. It is a psychological-unmotivated bias that reinforces and strengthens the original belief, which can make it extremely difficult for leaders of states to receive and interpret signals properly, potentially conflating their threat perceptions. “The decision maker who thinks that the other side is probably hostile will see ambiguous information as confirming this image, whereas the same information about a country thought to be friendly would be taken more benignly.”7 Putin matured in the Soviet and KGB establishment to consider the United States hostile, so anti-Americanism was warranted, and his perception of information about the United States, therefore, will only further endorse such a pre-ordained hostile character, making ongoing anti-Americanism equally warranted.

Many influential world leaders consider the global environment to be one of perpetual high conflict, whereas some see opportunities for common interests more likely.8 One could probably place Vladimir Putin in the former grouping, due in no small part to his predisposed KGB-mentality. Many of Putin’s remarks in this, the 21^st century, could as easily have been pronounced thirty years ago on a podium under a collection of red Soviet flags. In 2012 he, like so many Soviet leaders before him, resorted to missile rhetoric, calling nuclear weapons the primary mechanism for ensured Russian security while simultaneously denouncing Russian free press reports during the 1990s that painted the armed forces in any negative light, calling such anti-military or anti-government news stories a “real moral crime and an act of treason.”9 The Soviet mentality equated any anti-government rhetoric as potentially treasonous, to be investigated and prosecuted by the KGB. Additional examples of Putin’s KGB-mentality-inspired actions and rhetoric, specifically toward the United States, shall be offered in subsequent sections of this chapter.

1 Ibid., 60.

2 Ibid., 63.

3 Sarah Mendleson and Theodore Gerber, “Us and Them: Anti-American Views of the Putin Generation,” The Washington Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2008): 131.

4 Mikhail Tsypkin, “Russian Politics, Policy-making and American Missile Defense,” International Affairs 85, no. 4 (2009): 782.

5 Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1976), 217.

6 Ibid., 239.

7 Robert Jervis, “Perceiving and Coping with Threat,” in Perspectives on Security, ed. Richard Lebow (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 18.

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