Rodney Atkinson
Free Nation
Free Nation
Vladimir Putin is a few years younger than I am. Like me he spent several years in Germany. Like me he lost an elder brother to diphtheria (his during the Nazi siege of Leningrad, mine just after the second world war). His mother, despite her extreme suffering under the Nazi oppression of Russia did not hate German soldiers. My father, a prisoner of war for 5 years and often put in German "revenge camps" in chains and fed on bread and water, did his best to understand the suffering of Germans under a vile dictatorship and liked visiting Germany after the war. He encouraged me to learn and study German, as I am sure, from what we know, Putin's mother would have done.
Five of Putin's father's brothers died in the second world war. I lost a grandfather and a great uncle. Neither Putin nor I would speak German fluently today had our families instilled a hatred of the former foe. But that does not mean that Putin, like myself, does not grasp the very serious threat posed today by that same combination of European and American corporatism and German Eastward expansion which caused that war.
Nor are we blind to the remarkable similarities between the extent of "German EU's" territory today and that occupied by Nazi Germany in the 1940s.
Vladimir Putin's first job was to recruit spies in St Petersburg (the former Leningrad) then went to Moscow in the early 1980s then to Dresden in East Germany in 1984. Then back to St Petersburg (1990) as assistant to the Rector of the University. When offered a promotion in Moscow he turned it down: "I have two small children and old parents," he said. "They are over 80, and we all live together. They survived the blockade during the war. How could I take them from the place they were born in? I could not abandon them."
Five of Putin's father's brothers died in the second world war. I lost a grandfather and a great uncle. Neither Putin nor I would speak German fluently today had our families instilled a hatred of the former foe. But that does not mean that Putin, like myself, does not grasp the very serious threat posed today by that same combination of European and American corporatism and German Eastward expansion which caused that war.
Nor are we blind to the remarkable similarities between the extent of "German EU's" territory today and that occupied by Nazi Germany in the 1940s.
© putin.kremlin.ru | Vladimir Putin with his father
Vladimir Spiridonovich and mother Maria Ivanovna
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