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There is an old saying that the best thing about a man is his dogs.

Unlike cats, dogs take the responsibility and do the heavy lifting when it comes to bonding with a person. They seek approval from people. Dogs will perform hilarious and sometimes humiliating tricks for a treat. Try getting a cat to perform.

I’ve always gotten along with dog owners. I find that regardless of the breed, dog owners are most often friendly and it is a positive joy to watch them play with their dog as I play with Molly. There is a strong, unshakable connection (at least as far as guys go) between man and beast. Put another way:

If you were to ask a dog owner why they love their dogs so much, they’d probably tell you that they have a close and enduring bond with their dogs, they care about them on a deep level, and know their dogs care about them in return, offering company, love, and an undeniable loyalty.

One of the other things they’ll tell you, is that they have a relationship with dogs that they simply can’t have with human beings. This is part of what makes dogs so loveable, their differences from humans.”

People who prefer dogs over other types of pets (e.g., cats, birds, reptiles, fish) have three strong traits as a rule.  These are: Discipline; a strong sense of duty and they tend to be good planners.^[1]  Conventional wisdom suggests that men who like large dogs are men who seek order and dominance. And it was no small feat for President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin to dominate the government of Russia.

President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin

I’ve seen many photos of President Putin with his various dogs. There was Koni (1999-2014) a female black Labrador Retriever whose name had no particular relevance to Russian names (or so I read.) The rumor was that he named his female black lab after Condoleezza Rice, or at least this is what Psychology Today reports:

The dog’s full name [was] Connie Paulgrave and there are unconfirmed rumors that Koni was named after the former U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.“

If so, was it a deliberate or tongue-in-cheek insult to her or some racist joke instead? I traced the time-line when President Putin first met Condoleezza Rice, and that was only briefly when he was on the administrative council of St. Petersburg in the early to mid 1990’s and she was attending a conference while serving in the elder Bush’a administration as Senior Director, of Soviet and East European Affairs in the National Security Council. It was only after being appointed as National Security Adviser in January 2001 when she again saw President Putin in Slovenia in July of 2001. But by then, he already had Koni for seven months, so it seems doubtful that he had any personal basis to name the dog after Secretary Rice. Still, President Putin may have followed her career during the nineties and named the Labrador after her anyway. Only he can tell for sure.

As the online journalistic magazine further notes:

Putin has a “strong man” attitude. He displays an apparent lack of regret or remorse for his unethical decisions and the negative effect they have on innocent people. He also fails to accept responsibility for negative outcomes, and typically blames others when something goes wrong. . . .

“Putin is an autocratic and authoritarian political leader. Decades of studies in the field of organizational psychology show that such leaders are more prone to take important decisions themselves. They also tend to be more task-oriented than interested in the general welfare of their people. Another telling sign is that they maintain a distance between themselves and others – partly through the use of punishments and threats.”

One study focused on authoritarian leaders, such as Trump (U.S.), Erdoğan (Türkiye), Orbán (Hungary), Netanyahu Israel and, of course, Putin (Russia.) The particular traits identified (Dark Triad (narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism) formed the so-called “Dark Triad.”

I’ve written about narcissism elsewhere in my blog.  The Mayo Clinic defines Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD: DSM-5 301.81 [F60.81]) as “a mental condition in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, troubled relationships, and a lack of empathy for others.”

Is Vladimir Putin a narcissist?  Psychotherapist Dr. Joseph Burgo writing in the Atlantic magazine thinks so.  As long as a decade ago, he speculated that Putin might be narcissistic:

Photos of the Russian president scuba-diving, piloting a plane, behind the wheel of a race car, demonstrating his skill in martial arts, and baring his chest on horseback only contribute to this view and evoke the predictably derisive response: Putin is a narcissist.”

Burgo is the first to offer alternative explanations for his hypothesis:

• Putin’s apparent desire to reunite former Soviet republics could suggest he harbors fantasies of unlimited power. But it’s also at least in part clearly a political response to the dispersal of ethnic Russians in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
• He shows difficulty tolerating criticism, which could be because his pride is easily injured. But it’s also clearly a method of maintaining control of his government that has strong precedents in Soviet and Russian history.
• His invasion of Ukraine could be seen as the move of a man who feels he’s entitled to have what he wants. But it could be a cool-headed political strategy aimed at ensuring Russia’s regional dominance and ability to challenge the West.
• All those action man photos could be a symptom of a grandiose self-image. But maybe he just took his shirt off because it was hot that day.

Then there is the missing Superbowl ring that quickly moved from Patriot owner Robert Craft’s finger into Putins’ pocket in 2005.  Several years ago I had the opportunity to ask Russian specialist and former official of the White House National Security Council Dr. Fiona Hill what she thought about that.  She graciously repliedto my note “this appears to be a true story, Ron.”

Donald J. Trump likewise possesses narcissistic traits.  The British newspaper “The Independent” reports of an occasion where Trump popped into a wedding reception and gave a speech where he talked about himself.  Perhaps for this reason journalists and authors often say of him that he wants to be the baby at every baptism, the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral².” 

When a narcissist is consumed only with himself, he has little regard for anyone else.  To Donald J Trump, a person in the U.S. is either a patriot who loves his country or not based on whether they love him or not and, of course, if he accepts them.  To him, the overwhelming majority of the Western media that criticize the 45^thpresident are “fake,” while those dozen or so newspapers, television networks or bloggers that adore him represent the truth as far as facts and worldviews are concerned.  These are his true patriots.  Not those other “over-rated” Americans (including brave, war heroes on the General Staff such as Generals John Kelly, John Allen, Jim Mattis and others) who criticized him.

President Putin feels as if the West did not properly respect Russia after the fall of communism. He is likewise intolerant of criticism.  Many of his critics are found dead either poisoned, fallen from a great height, shot, etc.  The cause of death of those in detention is uncertain.  Earlier this year, Radio Free Europe, a network funded by the U.S. Government reported on the deaths of seven such dissidents and critics, both men and women.  I cannot personally say whether each of these people were sworn enemies of President Putin or if they just criticized the war in Ukraine, corruption, or if they were perceived by President Putin as a dangerous rival.  It is possible that someone else (or no one) was responsible for Alexi Navalny’s death and President Putin was not complicit in any conspiracy.

In another article, Dr. Burgo writes:

Bullies and narcissists thus follow similar psychological strategies for building and defending their identities. In fact, rather than viewing them as distinct psychological entities, it makes more sense to see their interconnection: All bullies are narcissists, with an inflated sense of self-importance and a marked lack of empathy for their victims’ suffering, while many narcissists turn out to be powerful bullies.”

And yet, isn’t it possible to see President Putin as a bully in terms of his intent to destroy Ukraine piece-by-piece starting with the Crimea in 2014 claiming and/or carving out state-sized tracks of land, including Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, Mykolayiv, and Zaporizhzhya Oblasts?  In fact, at this very moment as I write this, Russian troops are massing on Ukraine’s northern border, perhaps to open another front.

In this bloody endeavor, Putin is assisted by Patriarch Kirill (née, Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev), the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church.  Here, Patriarch Kirill has an agenda of his own, that of reclaiming personal control of the wayward Orthodox Church in Ukraine.  The two schemers would make Niccolo Machiavelli proud.

Putin is proud of his dogs.  He uses his dogs occasionally to assert himself when meeting other world leaders. A well-known occasion is when he met with Angela Merkel, the one-time Chancellor of Germany. Bringing his black Labrador into the room put the Chancellor ill at ease.

Once during President George W. Bush’s administration President Putin was a guest at the White House and on that occasion he met Barney, President Bush’s now deceased Scottish terrier. Bush recalls that:

A year later, Laura and I go visit Vladimir and his wife — this was before he decided to be with a gymnast 30 years younger — and he says, ‘I want you to meet my dog.’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ And I’ll never forget, out runs a huge Russian hound,” Bush said. “And Putin says ‘Bigger, stronger, and faster than Barney.'”

Bigger.  Stronger.  Faster.  So there is competition even among dogs as President Putin sees it.

When I see photos or video of Putin playing with his dogs, I have trouble understanding how someone who loves animals so much can be so brutal.  Of course, Adolph Hitler had his German Shepherd Blondi. Like Dr. Burgo, I wonder if there is another interpretation of events that I am missing?

President Putin’s dogs

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Footnotes

¹Gosling, Samuel & Sandy, Carson & Potter, Jeff. (2010). Personalities of Self-Identified “Dog People” and “Cat People”. Anthrozoos: A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People & Animals. 23. 213-222. 10.2752/175303710X12750451258850.

²(sometimes repeated in reverse order.)