The authors have been dealing with Vladimir Putin for two years World news
He warned us. Vladimir Putin considers who he is, and what he is capable of, in “The First Man”, a transcript of interviews published in 2000, at the beginning of his long reign. In his childhood, he recalled, he had been a tough little hoodlum who fought rats on the stairs of his apartment building and, later, fought with strangers on the streets of Leningrad. He has learned that: “A dog knows when someone is afraid of it, and it bites.” He values loyalty and fears betrayal. He was sensitive to slights, to both his country and himself (ideas which, in the following decades, became socially dangerous). It stirs emotions.
One of them is on the collapse of the Soviet Union. In interviews, he recalled a jaunt to Abkhazia and a judo tournament in Moldova: the Soviet empire had been his wealth and pride, and when it fell, he took it hard. “I want something else to rise in its place,” he said of the lost Soviet influence in eastern Europe. Under the guise of a KGB officer in Dresden in 1989, dealing with a “powerhouse” that seemed to have dismayed Moscow, he came to join the crowd protesting the demolition. In the meantime, corruption will be expected in Russia, he said – “And if someone thinks that someone stole something, let him go and show his evidence.”
Sometimes Mr. Putin of the “First Man” appears sincere, at others, cagey and withdrawn. Few people know him well; he was seen as a gray man, inscrutable. Greyness, grief and the greed of corruption have been major themes in the books written about him in the English language since. As it incorporates angers, secrets, possessions and fears, the emphasis on these features changes. A look back at Mr. Putin’s writings shows how he has been changed—or exaggerated—by power, and how to stay in the world has become the danger he does.
As Mr Putin rose without a trace from St Petersburg to Moscow in the 1990s, then from head of the FSB (first agent to the KGB) to the post of president, gray was the main tone. Given his oxymoronic phrases, such as “democratic rule” and “rule of law”, and his moves against Russia’s media, courts, parliament and oligarchs, observers rarely doubt him for true democracy. But some see his cooperation with the West after the September 11th attacks as the beginning of a permanent renaissance, not just a tactic. Many are reluctant to realize that his exploits are bound to go beyond Russia’s borders.
In “Putin: Russia’s Choice” (2004) Richard Sakwa thinks the country has shaken and killed the country and the imperial government; he is confident that his economic recovery and globalization will continue. Andrew Jack is the protagonist in “Inside Putin’s Russia” (2004), noting Mr Putin’s reversal of democracy and disregard for human rights. “The contradictions of economic freedom and political authority will be destroyed”, he predicted. But he judged this “independent Chekist” to be more reliable than his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.
The comparison is widespread: Mr Putin’s outwardly sanguine views were initially colored by a feeling that things had been bad, and could be again. It seemed to capture the familiar Russian transition between embracing and rejecting the West. The question seems to be how useful or deterrent it will prove to Western systems—not whether it can try to remake the world.
Darkness and the don
David Satter was among the first Anglophone analysts to measure evil in the system. In “Darkness at Dawn” he accused the FSB of setting off a string of bombings in Russia in 1999 that killed 300 people and sparked the second Chechen war – thereby helping Mr Putin, who oversees the conflict. , to protect the president. Few are willing to entertain this idea; several Russians who chased it came to a sticky end. (Substitute the word “Ukraine” for “Chechnya”, and Mr Putin’s comments on the war in “First Man” are consistent with today’s murder and lies. His “historical mission” is to prevent the destruction of Russia, he says; what may look like anger. is really self-defense.)
At the time the authors understood that all of Putin’s Russia, not just Chechnya, was ruled by force rather than law. As the rackets and redistribution of wealth became brazen, and the lives of pharaonic insiders, greed ousted grayness as the main theme in the commentary. The mafia became the preferred metaphor for Mr Putin’s clique of siloviki, or warriors.
In “The Man Without Eyes” (2012), for example, Masha Gessen portrays Mr Putin, then set to take over the presidency after pro-forma as Prime Minister, as a dictator and a dictator. This version of him — a KGB terrorist turned mafia boss — is “hidden in plain sight”, but revealed by that romantic and gray paneer. Death and terror are a political necessity for Mr. Putin, the author wrote. He doesn’t differentiate between the city’s interests and his own.
The terrorist network is detailed in “Putin’s People” (2020). In the system of “KGB capitalism” described by Catherine Belton, the government in Russia is a machine for extracting rents and possessions, politics is a dispute over who gets them, and the president is the leader. The siloviki were bound together by a regime of coercion, in which secrets were weapons and debts; for his part, Mr. Putin has shed a lot of blood and made many enemies retire. Apart from personal enrichment, the spoils are used to corrupt the West, black money is flowing around the world to finance “operational measures” and “restoration to the international status of the country”.
A third trait—complaint—is often apparent as well. Notably, in 2005 Mr Putin described the fall of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century”. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union had left Russia devastated and humiliated. But the fact that his government bluster is more than camouflage for graft, and where it may lead, is too late to sink in.
In “The New Tsar” (2015), Steven Lee Myers perceptively recognized the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 as a breaking point. Large protests against the result of an election that was in favor of Mr. Putin’s candidate. The change combines personal shame with geopolitical revelation; His fear of the people, and his sense of the danger of democracy, was heated.
He “treats the experience as hatred”, wrote Mr. Lee Myers, taking the screws in Russia, raising his agenda and organizing youth movements to dominate the streets. Mr. Putin’s brutal Chekist wisdom cannot accept the possibility that Ukrainians are turning to the West—and abandoning it—of their own free will. Convinced that the CIA had paid or betrayed them, he began a spiral of conspiracy that culminated in a new attack. In 2014, in the opinion of Mr. Lee Myers, he has seen a “millennium” mission as a special director of extraordinary power. “The question now is where will Putin’s policy end?”
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Among the chroniclers of the Putin regime, Clifford Gaddy and Fiona Hill consider the answer the most. In “Mr. Putin: Working in the Kremlin” (2015), they see his efforts to make Russia’s economy more efficient, and to suppress domestic opposition, as a long-term preparation for the West’s focus. His bid to destroy Western democracy through fifth columnists, bribery and kompromat was part of the same strategy. Greyness, they write, has always been a strategy: Mr Putin is “the ultimate political actor”, a mercurial public figure with a way of making his enemies moderate.
Mr Gaddy and Ms Hill – who became a top Russia adviser in Donald Trump’s National Security Council – concluded that he was more than a terrorist. His goal is to defeat and defeat his enemies, who, in his view, are also Russia’s enemies; to that end he fought a long, monumental war against the West. He would attack weaknesses, the couple warned, and carry out his threats. “He’s not going to give up, and he’s going to fight dirty.” Yet even these authors judge that, if only for business reasons, Mr. Putin “does not want Russia to end up being a pariah state”.
The ratchet tsar
In retrospect, only the optimists are wrong. As a novice, shuffling in his clothes, aged and plastered into a Botoxed monster—albeit with the same sinister smile—the grayness oozes out of his notebook. Greed and anger take over. What outside observers have missed, though, is how much, over two decades, the silent effects of power will deteriorate these ancient structures.
According to the inexorable philosophy of authoritarianism, Mr Putin’s domestic repression grew more and more severe. He was more isolated, both in politics and among his advisers. He abandoned moral constraints in his military campaigns. A strong nationalist rhetoric against an apocalyptic philosophy, steeped in history and turning Russia into a bulwark against the West has become implacable. His fear of crowds becomes a form of narcissistic paranoia. He harbored resentment—at least, against Ukraine—and stayed with it long enough to avenge them.
Meanwhile the costs to his people—the real Russians, rather than those of the past—are raised. His government has often stolen the country’s resources and lied to its citizens, with a scornful representation of the authorities. As Russian soldiers perish in unnecessary battles, and its citizens face terror, the sadness is growing. Beyond the books about the Kremlin, an understanding of that treatment comes from the school of German philosophers, including Sebastian Haffner, who found a psychological reason for the destruction that Hitler visited Germany: his anger, they finish, often in a partial direction to your own. country. The destruction that Mr. Putin is wreaking on Russia (especially as he fears Ukraine) can be viewed in the same light. He says he loves motherland, but his actions suggest otherwise.
A book that clearly sees where Putinism is going is not history or fiction but a novel. “The Day of the Oprichnik” by Vladimir Sorokin, a Russian writer living in exile, is set in 2028. The Russia he portrays seems to exist in two time frames at once, futuristic technology jostling with barbarity antiquity and obscurantism. The country was exiled from Europe and the tsar was returned. His word is legal, but even he must “submit and bow before China”, which (along with gas exports) supports the economy. The oprichnik of the title is one of his famous henchmen—the name comes from the command of the benevolent commanders under Ivan the Terrible. Their ways are murder and torture, the killing of their group and robbery.
Published in 2006, Mr. Sorokin’s satirical dystopia has come to seem more sentimental than strange. The details are grotesque, but also, sometimes, horribly familiar. In the story, when the wall was built “opponents began crawling out of the cracks like predatory centipedes”—an image that anticipates Mr. Putin’s desecration of his critics as human beings. Unsurprisingly, when the oprichniks gathered for the debauch, one of their toasts was “Hail the Holy Majesty!”
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