He's posted to East Germany - at the time, a backwater. And for a working-class kid from the wrong side of the tracks, getting into the most prestigious school in Leningrad was no small feat. He threw himself into being a good student. ![]() But then Putin said, well, how do I get a job here? And the guy said, you need to go to college. KELLY: Especially not ninth grade walk-ins. And the person who answered the door said, kid, get out of here. And so when he was in high school, he walked up to the front door, knocked on the door and said, I want to work here. He'd basically been a street thug, and it was his love of the KGB, studying judo, studying German, that made him get his life back on track. WEISS: So he had been a real screw-up as a kid. And you write about how he walked up to the big KGB building in Leningrad with what aim? KELLY: So that tells us a little bit of - I mean, it's - you struggle to imagine what impact that would have on a child, that that's what was happening to their family. But he died of diphtheria during the war and was buried in a mass grave. He was taken from the family, put in an orphanage so that he would have enough to eat. ![]() But what we do know for sure is that his mom barely survived the war, and Putin had an older brother who didn't survive the war. WEISS: Well, as with everything with Putin, you're not totally sure. How do we know it's true? How do we know that happened? Putin's dad plucked her off the cart and brought her home and nursed her back to health. And Putin's father, who was fighting in the Soviet Red Army, came home wounded from the war and basically found his wife on a pile of corpses in a cart being taken away. People starved to death and resorted to incredible, horrible things to survive. WEISS: So the siege of Leningrad was one of the most brutal moments of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. You open yours with a remarkable story that I had not heard before to do with Putin's parents, in particular his mother in postwar Leningrad, now St. KELLY: I have read my share of Putin books. The Kremlin wants to fuzz all of that up. What the Kremlin doesn't want you to know was that Putin was actually an undistinguished mid-level former KGB officer, and then he washed out of the KGB after barely making it to the rank of lieutenant colonel. ![]() The Russians are masters at getting in our heads and shaping the way we think about things. That's why we always see him carrying weapons, prancing around without a shirt on, that kind of thing. WEISS: Well, for more than 20 years, the Kremlin has deliberately been trying to make Putin seem like a larger-than-life James Bond-style superspy. Why did you want to tell Putin's story this way? Like, literally in one frame, he is - he's shooting lasers from his eyes at his enemies. And y'all really do have Putin resembling a comic book villain. The book is titled "Accidental Czar: The Life And Lies Of Vladimir Putin." Andrew Weiss, welcome.ĪNDREW WEISS: Thanks so much for having me. And now Weiss has written, as he pitched it to me, a seriously quirky graphic novel about the Russian president. He has met Putin, has tracked him from posts at the State Department, the Pentagon and the White House. It can be so easy that, in fact, Andrew Weiss has done it. It can be all too easy to paint Vladimir Putin as a cartoon villain, a thug, an evil genius, a spy schooled in the black arts of the KGB.
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