Winter is Coming (17 page)

Like most Soviet citizens of his generation, Putin was never a

political idealist. His parents may or may not have believed in

a Communist future for all the world, in the ultimate triumph of justice for the proletariat, or in any of the other ideological clichés that had been worn thin by the time Putin was growing up; he never even considered his relationship to these ideals. . . . Like other members of his generation, Putin replaced belief in communism, which no longer seemed plausible or even possible, with faith in institutions. His loyalty was to the KGB and to the empire it served and protected: the USSR.

A new biography I haven’t had a chance to really study is
Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin
by Hill and Gaddy. This passage near the beginning caught my eye as an insightful explanation of Putin’s behavior during most of his public life. It jibes well with my description of Putin as a poker player who was adept at reading his opponents. Keep this description in mind as we move into discussion of what other world leaders thought of Putin when they met. In all likelihood it was whatever he wanted them to think.

Putin is less interested in presenting a particular version of reality than in seeing how others react to the information. For him, others are participants in a game he directs. He chooses inputs; they react. He judges. Their responses to his input tell him who they think he is—but by responding they also tell him who they are, what they want, what they care about. For his part, Vladimir Putin reveals very little in return. Indeed, he goes to great, often elaborate, lengths to throw other participants off track. As president and prime minister, he has presented himself as a myriad of different personas. Since 2000, Mr. Putin has been the ultimate international political performance artist.

I would add, however, that Putin’s character and his performance have begun to merge under pressure over the last few years. When he was forced to switch from currying favor with the leading democratic nations to raging against them to stoke domestic support, the real Putin came to the surface and the layers of masks could come off. This wasn’t only a matter of Putin acting on his nature, like the scorpion on the frog’s back, but of being allowed to grow into and fulfill his nature.

That is the ultimate answer to the question of dictators being born or raised. As with most nature-nurture questions, it’s both in varying degrees of balance. In 2000, Putin didn’t know he wanted to be a dictator. (Unlike Hitler and Stalin, whose early writings and statements made their dreams all too clear.) Insider stories from 1999 even suggest Putin was alarmed by Yeltsin’s proposal to resign early and thrust him into the presidency early.

Putin’s instinct was to align himself with power and to bring power to himself. Anything he didn’t control was something he couldn’t trust. His solution was to try to control everything. Unlike the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, which handed all control to the system, Putin aimed for the totalitarianism of one person: himself.

When Putin took over the presidency in 2000 he was surrounded by many other potent forces. Various Yeltsin advisors (including his daughter) and oligarchs still wielded power inside and outside of the Kremlin walls. These included Yeltsin’s longtime eminence grise, Boris Berezovsky, and his collaborators Alexander Voloshin and Roman Abramovich. Berezovsky had been acquainted with Putin for years and is credited with lifting him out of the bureaucracy and into the prime minister’s post.

While Yeltsin’s reforms had weakened the Duma considerably relative to the presidency, it was still a factor and couldn’t be completely ignored. The media was subjected to considerable government influence, but there were still many alternatives, and political reporting, while biased and vitriolic, was unrestrained.

Since I have often touted my prescience, I should give some time to my mistakes as well. Two days after Putin took office, I eulogized Yeltsin’s tenure and tried to set an optimistic tone for the future under Putin. My January 3, 2000, op-ed in the
Wall Street Journal
made no mention of Putin’s KGB background or horrific human rights record in Chechnya. My focus was Yeltsin’s legacy and any predictions were difficult since Putin was still mostly an unknown. Plus, like any patriot I wanted the best for my country. Foreign support and investment were still very important for Russia, something I surely had in mind when I took to the pages of the newspaper. I wrote:

I’m convinced Mr. Yeltsin genuinely believed in the necessity of making Russia a full-fledged democracy and wanted to be certain that a new strongman in the Kremlin would be able to protect precious democratic reforms. Only time will tell whether Mr. Putin can be a good president. But today we may state that, under the circumstances, Mr. Yeltsin bet on the right horse. . . . The obvious question is how Mr. Putin’s team will cope with Russia’s mounting economic problems, but undoubtedly they will be looking for a solution within the constitutional framework Mr. Yeltsin drew up. By doing so they will contribute to the final historical triumph of the first president of Russia.

Of course it turned out that Yeltsin wanted a strongman in the Kremlin to protect the precious wealth he and his family and associates had accumulated, not democratic reforms. And I simply could not imagine that the constitutional framework itself would be targeted so quickly and so brutally. Like most, I imagined Putin would favor his own friends and be more disciplined, not that he would immediately steer the entire country back toward totalitarianism.

Then we come to the forces outside of Russia, the Western administrations and investors that had practically given up on Russia as the decade came to a close. Instead of using their considerable leverage to back reforms and democratic institutions, the leading free world nations limited their investment to nuclear disarmament and other relatively easy cooperation. While it should already be clear that I do not subscribe to the myth of Russian humiliation, much more could have been done had there been a sincere interest in the West regarding the future of Russia.

George Soros was a participant in and a witness to many of the events around the attempts to reform and rebuild the Russian economy in the post-Soviet years. His investment fund was as important a factor in many ways as the International Monetary Fund. He was also very disappointed in the feeble and hypocritical engagement by the West in the late 1990s. By the time Putin arrived at the presidency, Soros saw the writing on the wall. Much earlier than most observers, he saw where Putin would take the country. In February 2000, the famous investor penned an article in
Moskovsky Novosti.
Most of it was dedicated to describing the battle royal behind the scenes between Chubais and Berezovsky, and criticizing the West for what he saw as its failure to support Russia adequately. In between, he had this to say about the future of the new Putin regime:

But the state built by Putin will hardly be based on the principles of the open society. It will continue to use the feeling of fear that emerged after the apartment explosions. This state will try to establish its power over private life and it will struggle for the world superiority of Russia. It will be authoritarian and nationalistic. It is impossible to predict the development of events, but it is also clear that this perspective is emerging, and that it could have been avoided if the Western free society followed the principles of free society.

When it comes to getting Putin right, and getting him right early, the highest laurels must go to Andrei Piontkovsky. One of the sharpest minds in political analysis, Andrei also has one of the sharpest tongues. In January 2000, he called Putinism “the highest and final stage of bandit capitalism” and “the coup de grace” to the head of the Russian nation. The article he penned in February 2000 in the
Russia Journal
deserves immortality for seeing very clearly what most of us only feared. He begins the article in the World Economic Forum in Davos that January, where he was amused to watch a panel of Russian officials attempt to answer the question “Who is Putin?”

The distinguished gentlemen who in the corridors had been busy aggressively pushing their product under the brand-name “Vladimir Putin, next Russian president” were at a loss—none of them wanted to speak out in public, or they dared not to speak out in public. It was as when referring to the deceased—“one either speaks well of them, or says nothing at all.” Only Putin is still very much alive and politically kicking.

He then relates how he answered the question himself on his own panel the next day. As ever, Andrei pulled no punches:

“Don’t pretend you don’t know who Putin is,” was my answer. You are just not prepared to face the truth. I have no more knowledge about Putin than you have. But what I do know is enough for me to make my personal judgement as an ordinary Russian voter about this contender for the post of president—that this man is dangerous for my country and for the world.

This is a man who has shown a complete disregard for human life, cynicism and hypocrisy, and a willingness to use war and the deaths of thousands of Russian soldiers and innocent civilians as a PR instrument in his election campaign. This is a man who raised a toast on the anniversary of Stalin’s birth, had the plaque commemorating former KGB head Yury Andropov restored to its place on the wall of the Lubyanka—Federal Security Service headquarters—and dreams of seeing the statue of butcher Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, stand once again in the center of Moscow.

Piontkovsky then referred to the plight of journalist Andrei Babitsky, who had been abducted by Russian military forces in Chechnya and who was later personally accused by Putin of treason for reports he felt were too sympathetic to the Chechen militants. Andrei concluded his article:

This game is also full of political significance. It is not only Babitsky who is being tortured in filtration camps. We are all being held in one huge filtration camp outside the gates to the Brave New Putin-Stasi World. They are testing our fitness for this world that awaits. How much can we swallow in silence? How quick and how easy is it to break us? Those who don’t make the grade will be ruthlessly cast off as rejects.

Don’t ask me who Putin is. And don’t ask me for whom Putin tolls. He tolls for thee.

In 2005, a bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky was returned to its old place in a courtyard behind the Moscow Police Building at Petro-vka 38. The towering statue of him in Lubyanka Square that was pulled down in 1991 still awaits its return.

Putin was inaugurated on May 7, 2000, faced with an array of outside influences, not to mention a shaky economy and an ongoing war in Chechnya. With impressive focus, Putin began work immediately to tame or eliminate everything and everyone that could limit his power. His first decree had been to provide protection to Yeltsin, as had no doubt been promised. Those that followed in quick succession over the next few days were dedicated either to strengthening the military or dismantling Russia’s democratic institutions.

Oligarchs who had been on the wrong side of the power struggles quickly found out what it meant to lose to Putin. Vladimir Gusinsky, the media baron whose NTV had been the first independent channel in Russia, was considered too close to Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, whose presidential ambitions Gusinsky had funded. Gusinsky was deemed untrustworthy and potentially dangerous by Putin and the consequences were swift. Within days of Putin’s taking office, Gusinsky’s media company was raided by police. In June he was arrested on a bizarre charge and spent three days in jail. After being released on bail he left for Spain, where later in the year he was briefly arrested due to an Interpol warrant filed by the Russian government. (An early example of this tactic, abusing international institutions for political persecution.) Gusinsky’s media assets were eventually consumed by the state, a punitive form of renationalization that would also become a familiar pattern.

Berezovsky himself didn’t last much longer. Now also a member of the Duma, he published a letter protesting Putin’s proposed legislation that would demote regional governors and subject them to the authority of the central government, saying it was a threat to Russian democracy, which of course was the entire point. Six weeks later, on July 17, Berezovsky resigned from parliament, supposedly in protest over Putin’s onslaught of anti-democratic legislation. After the two exchanged criticism and threats in the media, an old fraud investigation against Berezovsky was revived by federal investigators in October. That was the only hint he needed to stay out of the country, which he did, eventually settling in London. As with Gusinsky, Berezovsky’s remaining Russian assets were stripped or he was forced to sell to oligarchs with higher loyalty ratings.

Putin may have simply deemed Berezovsky too powerful and too knowledgeable to keep around. The oligarch knew where lots of bodies were buried because he had buried many of them himself. He also controlled several very high-value targets, the oil company Sibneft and the TV channel ORT, later known as Channel One. Putin quickly realized that it was more effective to control the media completely than to censor it, so he cut out the middlemen.