If there’s one thing that Russian leader Vladimir Putin likes to prove and propagandize about, it’s his macho reputation.
Over the many years of his premiership in Russia, President Putin has taken part in many publicity stunts and set pieces, all in the hope of cultivating a certain masculine image in the Russian media, and among the Russian people.
Among President Putin’s many attempts to bolster this macho image, he has been recorded tracking polar bears in Siberia; driving a Formula One car around the St. Petersburg race track; sailing a submersible through an Arctic shipwreck; shooting a skin-sampling harpoon into the back of a whale from a zoological research vessel; catching and reeling in a 46-pound pike while on a fishing trip to Siberia; and discovering a cache of lost Ancient Greek pots while diving off Russia’s Black Sea coast.
Quite how genuine these bizarre feats and stunts are have been the source of considerable speculation over the years—and the Russian media has on at least one occasion been forced to issue a retraction when some of President Putin’s achievements have genuinely proved to be too unbelievable to be true. (Those Ancient Greek vessels he found in the Black Sea, for instance, were later grudgingly revealed to have been planted at the bottom of the sea for President Putin to “discover.”) But there is at least one field in which Putin is truly as capable as he and his media purport him to be.
He’s so good at it, that he’s even starred in his own instructional video.
Long before becoming President, in 1975 Putin joined the Soviet secret police force, the KGB, and undertook his early training at a KGB school in his home city of Leningrad. It was there that he first began to learn and study martial arts, beginning with a traditional Russian martial art named Sambo, and eventually moving on to judo, in which he was awarded a “Master of Sports” title in the late 1970s. President Putin has since gone on to claim that judo is his favorite sport—so much so that, in 2004, he coauthored an instructional book about judo, published in Russia under the title Judo with Vladimir Putin. The same book was later released to English-speaking markets as Judo: A History, Theory, and Practice, and in October 2008 was adapted into an 82-minute instructional video.
Entitled Let’s Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin, the film was released—amid considerable publicity in Russia—to coincide with President Putin’s 56th birthday celebrations. The president, dressed in a full judo uniform, announced the video at a press conference in Moscow, before demonstrating several of his favorite moves to an expectant crowd of journalists. “In a bout, compromises and concessions are permissible,” Putin advises in the video, “but only in one case: if it is for victory.”
As bizarre as the Russian president’s instructional judo movie may be, however, within the judo community it was nevertheless seemingly well-received: In 2012, President Putin was officially promoted to the Eighth Dan (out of the ten official ‘dan’ or fighting levels of professional judo) by the International Judo Federation.