With Putin, the writer, cartoonist and colorist, Darryl Cunningham, invites you to discover how a simple spy could become the master of the Kremlin.
From newspaper to comics
Writer and cartoonist Darryl Cunningham uses the popular media of journalistic comics to decipher the Putin mystery. This biography edited by Delcourt is full of a lot of poorly known information. Cunningham presents well the context of Putin's career. Even ignorant of history, the reader understands the course of Perestroika and then the causes of the collapse of the USSR.
The transition from communism to a market economy was accompanied by an increase in corruption due to the fragility of the central government. Putin participates as an agent at the St. Petersburg City Hall in food markets. A class of wealthy investors, the oligarchs, is formed by taking advantage of privatizations and the clientelism of certain politicians. Indeed, the ground was propitious with the collapse of the communist economy and the anarchy in power due to the erratic character of Boris Yeltsin. Putin became the successor of the latter because his alcoholism and related diseases prevented him from governing. Once in the Kremlin, he abolished all democratic laws and quickly imposed himself in Moscow and the provinces by abolishing the elections of regional governors.
A man of secrets
However, this biography is not just a political pensum but it is a comic worthy of a John Le Carré novel. The reader is caught up in the meteoric rise punctuated by the mysterious deaths of a lone man at the start. Indeed, Putin's childhood in a collective dwelling in Leningrad is poorly known and only by a complacent biography. His father started as a spy before working in a wagon factory but perhaps he remained an agent of domestic espionage?
The scant information that the head of the Kremlin has delivered serves to build his legend more than to give reality. We can make a rapprochement with Erdogan. He was a brawler at school but is channeled by a Russian-Japanese martial art, sambo. From high school, he wanted to become a secret agent. There are still many questions. What was Putin doing at the beginning of his career in East Germany? When did he leave the KGB? Was he an agent by being deputy mayor of St. Petersburg? Is Putin the richest man in the world? This secret is combined with total indifference: it does not care what the West thinks of Litvinenko's poisoning in England.
A presidency punctuated by drama
Throughout his reign, Putin imposed his political dominance, but failures also multiplied. The Kursk submarine disaster and a hostage-taking in a theater illustrate Putin's common reaction. In the face of opposition or rebellion, he uses unlimited violence and feels no compassion. It uses Chechen terrorism to strengthen its power. By Syria, we also understand the fusion between old methods of mass bombing and the use of chemical weapons with new methods such as the "alternative truth", i.e. propaganda, disseminated on social networks. His opponents and competitors were killed or went into exile. This is reflected in the tragic story of Anna Politkovskaya's death on Putin's birthday! The dictator not only changes politics but maintains social conservatism as evidenced by homophobic laws.
Darryl Cunningham uses to show it with an illustrative drawing: there is almost no dialogue but images around the text. The portraits are inspired by photos and images are very realistic for weapons but elsewhere deliberately childish for the Russian people. Despite Putin's grip and the rigging of elections, there remains constant local opposition from the oligarchs, journalists and feminists of Pussy Riots. However, the book turns out to be quite depressing: Putin's popularity ratings rise after each war, the opposition keeps being beheaded, and Putin gets re-elected.
An American point of view
Even if the information is all accurate and Darryl Cunningham's point of view is very well documented. The American journalist adopts a point of view. According to him, NATO integration is only an excuse to attack Ukraine. Putin's goal is to reconstitute the USSR by annexing all of Ukraine. The vision of the fall of the USSR is very internal: Gorbachev must reform the country because too much military spending and fails for lack of economic liberalism. Cunningham says nothing about the role of the United States in pushing Russia into the arms race with the Star Race program. Australian journalist Julian Assange is seen as a naïve manipulated by Russia to spread Hillary Clinton's emails in order to win Donald Trump. We are sometimes in conspiracy theory when the author seeks to explain why Trump never criticizes Putin.
Putin is a disturbing character and keeps many secrets whose complexity this biography in comics restores. The book ends with proposals to fight the Russian dictator: closing our financial markets to often fraudulent Russian investments. However, once the book is closed, one realizes that while the book reveals a lot, many mysteries remain unsolved.
On the site, you can discover other biographies in comics with Erdogan and George Best.
