NEWSWATCH: “THE VERY STRANGE WRITINGS OF PUTIN’S NEW CHIEF OF STAFF” – The New Yorker/Masha Gessen
… Putin changed his chief of staff, replacing an old K.G.B. colleague, Sergei Ivanov, with Anton #Vayno, a younger, little-known bureaucrat who has been serving as deputy chief of staff. … The possibilities are endless …. Vayno, who is forty-four, … not a surprising choice. … a member of the Putin clan for years, and, for at least the past four … the President’s personal assistant, managing Putin’s appointment schedule. … he has written several articles and at least one book. These are bizarre and, now that their author is one of the most powerful men in Russia, frightening.
* * *Vayno has also co-authored a book put out by an academic publisher in 2012. Called ‘The Image of Victory,’ it begins with a quotation by Putin, which reads, in full, ‘Winning trust is key.’ … the book appears to offer nothing less than a recipe for global domination. Written as a theory of everything, the book covers all of history and all of human nature … The basic idea, though, seems to be absolute triumph through the use of tactics from sambo — Soviet martial arts — in everything, especially in economics. That is, if one assumes that there is a basic idea in the book. …