Putin started in a communist system, but he change Russia into a kleptocracy and has some hard-line stances against LGBTQ people in Russia, so he's not much of a communist today.
Honestly, Putin's story is sort of interesting.
Came from a pretty average background and he never really stood out. He went to law school but never practiced law. He wanted to become a spy after reading some Russian novels about espionage (their version of James Bond). He was stationed in East Germany and married an average woman, Ludmilla. He later quietly dumps her and starts dating younger women. He's rumored to have several mistresses across Europe.
Anyone who wants to understand Vladimir Putin needs to know what happened to him on a night in Dresden in 1989.
www.bbc.com
Once the USSR collapsed, he became a taxi driver and later scored a gig with the Mayor of St. Petersburg (Putin later poisoned him in 2000 since he knew too much about Putin's background). Leveraging his position and KGB background, he was able to connect organized criminals and KGB officers with public $$$. Setting the stage for when he and his oligarch friends would rule the entire country instead of one city. He rose in the ranks and was later summoned to work in Moscow under Yeltsin. Yeltsin was corrupt and enriched himself and his family in his own right. And think about it, it's hard not to. For decades they'd lived with the government having ownership in major industries. Yeltsin took over as Russia's rushing to privatize major industries and the temptation to benefit personally from some of this was just too great.
Yeltsin in the late 90s began to struggle with poor health, corruption charges, and a bad economy. Makes Putin prime minister and then hoping that Putin would protect him and his family from further investigations, he resigns as President creating a vacancy that Putin will soon walk through. And that's where the legend begins! He was seen by most Russians as a young, athletic, and "pure" leader who wasn't a politician. This all happens in 1999-2000 and Putin hasn't ever looked back.
To shore up support, he most likely framed Muslim terrorists in a series of apartment building bombings. He used his KGB connections (the KGB became the FSB) to bomb Russian apartment buildings. He then used these bombings as a real to bomb the hell out of Muslim communities in Chechnya. So now he's seen not only as Yeltsin's young successor but he's a protector of Russia. He was seen as someone to "clean up" the corruption while grossly enriching himself and his buddies in much of the way Trump did in just four years. Friendly media is praised while critical media finds itself under tax fraud investigation. CEOs of companies and media outlets who don't support him/buy into his corruption end up in prison so they either get with the program or sell out to a Putin-friendly person. Hence, the rise of the oligarchs.
Throughout the 2000s Putin came under investigation. People knowing his background, journalists prying into his corrupt business dealings. Putin had an easy solution, use the FSB (old KGB) to eliminate pesky journalists. He literally had journalists shot and apartment buildings bombed to eliminate his critics. Today? There is no free press. Journalists can't expose his corruption because the free press no longer exists in Russia. That's why most of their population has no idea what's actually going on in Ukraine.
Journalist David Satter claims that Putin and the FSB may have been involved with the deadly Russia apartment bombings in 1999.
www.businessinsider.com
And it's been that way for 22 years now. He uses Russian natural resources to sell to desperate countries in Europe. He enriches himself and his oligarchs. They use their money to continue to spread corruption throughout the world. He's basically a form of the mafia but extended over an entire nation. His "family" are foreign and domestic toadies who have bought into his corruption. He has them by the balls. Since he's former KGB, the one thing he knows how to do is corrupt people. Trump was too dumb to understand that. Just look at how simple it is, take for example when Trump lied about not having any business dealings with Russia in 2016 while Michael Cohen was trying to set up a Trump Tower Moscow. Putin got his dirt on Trump. If Putin ever wanted, he could expose to the world that Trump had lied. What about when Don Jr at first denied meeting with Russians in Trump Tower? More dirt. Throughout the Mueller Report you read of Trump lying. Often, Putin didn't even have to try to get blackmail since Trump would deny things on Twitter. Putin would know the truth and could use that as leverage whenever he wanted.
And that's how he's run his country for 22 years. Bribe a police officer, politician, or CEO? He's yours. If they deny taking the bribe? You have even more dirt on them since you have the truth. If a journalist sniffs something, have the journalist killed. If the CEO grows a spine? Threaten them with tax fraud, wrecking their family's funds, and throw them in prison. That person flees the country? Poison their tea when they aren't looking. Stuff that Trump would do if he were given 20+ years of presidential power. We already got a taste of that in his last two years, blackmailing Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden, pretending to care about religious values, heavy crackdowns on protesters (think about what Trump did to BLM protesters at Lafayette square), asking election officials in Georgia to find the # of votes he needed to win, asking state legislators to declare election fraud to win, diminishing doctors who don't toe the line, attacking his political opponents of being traitors, using propaganda to brainwash the population already predisposed to grievances, and using his position to enrich himself, etc.
This book is haunting in disclosing all of the corrupt stuff he did early in his career and it's a pretty easy read:
Amazon product ASIN B0078XFTTEThis one is pretty thorough and definitely not easy summer reading:
Amazon product ASIN B07VMZYK13And this is one a happy medium:
Amazon product ASIN B00CO65N4G
If you want to know specifically about Don Jr's telling of "we discussed child adoption" in the summer of 2016 Trump Tower? Read this one:
Amazon product ASIN B00O30HFT2He's an American. His story tells you about the death of his friend which led to the Magnitsky Act.
