In some respects, the composition of an update for a book of history initially published at the turn of the millennium has proven more difficult than writing the original work, which covered a thousand years during which Russia underwent major changes in size, economy, and political system. It is extremely hard to write a detailed and accurate account of contemporary developments because the relevant documents, especially the ones drafted by senior government officials, are for the most part classified and therefore not readily available. Moreover, even when journalists and scholars have access to a wide range of information about current economic and political conditions, they are often unable to determine its significance. For example, early in the 1980s, many educated Russians were aware of the severe economic hardships endured by a large percentage of the Soviet population, but no one predicted that this would lead to the collapse of communism. It was widely assumed that the government would introduce reforms to improve the economy and avoid its disintegration.
More recently, very few students of British politics thought that the citizens of the United Kingdom were so disgruntled with the status quo that they would vote to leave the European Union. And even fewer experts on contemporary affairs predicted that discontent in the United States would prompt so many citizens to vote for Donald J. Trump and bring about his election as president.
I was afraid of falling into a similar trap. I would collect a vast amount of information on the recent history of Russia but would then be incapable of drawing correct conclusions about the government’s intentions or likely success in implementing its policies. But after much soul-searching I decided to take the plunge because I sensed that many citizens in the West have a strong interest in succinct accounts of recent economic and political changes in Russia and in analyses of how those changes might affect domestic conditions and, more important, its relations with foreign countries.
It is not simply curiosity that drives these interests. Many people in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere fear that political trends in Russia are moving in a direction that could lead to a new cold war even though President Putin and President Trump have expressed interest in a rapprochement between their two countries. During the Cold War, from 1946 to 1991, there were occasions when a military conflict seemed likely but was avoided by astute statesmen determined to prevent the horrors endured by millions of people during World War II. Contemporary statesmen may not be skillful enough in diplomacy to follow their example.
In May 2008, when Medvedev assumed the office of president, Russian liberals had reason to be pleased with the change in national leadership even though it was known, as indicated above, that Putin had pulled strings to secure the election of his successor and that he planned to play a dominant role in determining government policies.
For one thing, Putin had not violated the constitutional provision that no one may serve more than two consecutive terms of four years in the highest office of the land. Moreover, Medvedev was a lawyer and the son of educated parents who, as far as we know, had no ‘background’ in the Soviet police agencies, which played a critical role in politics from the moment the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917.
Before entering politics at the age of thirty-four, Medvedev had devoted himself to teaching law at the Saint Petersburg State University and to scholarly pursuits; in his publications he had projected, according to Steven Myers, the author of The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin, the most authoritative biography of Russia’s ruler, ‘a gentler image of a Russian politician than Putin’. The new president had expressed approval of the rule of law and had advocated firm measures by the government to eliminate corruption. To committed liberals in Russia, as well as some statesmen in the West, it seemed that the dreams of 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, might at last be within reach. Russia, they thought, would begin to adopt policies that would lead to the transformation of the country into one resembling Western democracies.
But it soon became evident that Putin’s departure from the presidential office was merely a formality. Immediately after Medvedev’s inauguration, Putin assumed the position of prime minister and made clear his intention to retain the powers he had exercised for eight years. It is not known whether Medvedev had agreed to this arrangement before the election of 2008 or whether he was simply too weak to resist Putin’s assertion of superiority. But to senior officials who were in regular contact with both of them, it became evident soon after the election that in their relationship the new president was subordinate. Medvedev continued to address the prime minister with the formal ‘you’ (‘vy’ in Russian) and Putin addressed the president with the informal ‘ty’.
Many senior officials also knew that Putin examined drafts of speeches that Medvedev planned to deliver and that he altered them to reflect his views. During political crises the prime minister took pains to be on hand to make the critical decisions. For example, when Georgia unexpectedly and unwisely attacked South Ossetia during the night of 7 August 2008, in response to artillery fire emanating from that country, Putin rushed to Moscow from Beijing to take charge of formulating a counter-response. The small country of South Ossetia (as well as Abkhazia) had been granted partial independence when the Soviet Union collapsed, but both were placed under the protection of the Russian Federation. Medvedev followed Putin’s advice to send Russian forces into Georgia, a small and weak country, to beat back the invasion. Georgia had deployed an army of ten to eleven thousand soldiers and, once the military struggle began, it became clear that they could not match the better-equipped and better-trained Russian troops. After five days of fighting, the Georgians, who lost 170 soldiers and fourteen policemen, retreated from South Ossetia. Russian losses amounted to forty-eight soldiers. The people of the Russian Federation applauded the victory and Putin received most of the credit for it.
Many Russian citizens who followed politics now suspected that Putin’s decision not to run for a third term out of respect for the constitution was a sham. That suspicion was reinforced well before Medvedev’s term as president expired in 2012, when Putin announced that he would run again for the presidency. That decision, however, did not violate the constitution, which only prohibited the same person from serving for three consecutive terms.
Before the elections were held, two-thirds of the Duma passed an amendment to the constitution to extend future presidential terms to six years, a measure also approved by regional legislators. At about the same time, Medvedev announced that he would not run for a second term, assuring Putin an easy victory; he won the election with sixty-three percent of the vote, which suggests he could be in a position of power for a long while. If the four years of Medvedev’s period in that office are credited to Putin – as they should be – by 2024 he will have served a total of twenty-four years as the leader of the country, equaling Stalin’s period of rule.
As noted above, during his first few years as the effective leader of the government, Putin was not an advocate of democracy in the sense that he showed little interest in the rule of law. But he was not an autocrat in the mold of Stalin or the tsars who had ruled the country until 1917, and he displayed a degree of pragmatism in domestic and international affairs.
Soon after his third term in office began in 2012, however, Putin revealed traits that suggested he would pursue a much more assertive course in foreign affairs than he had in the years from 2000 to 2008. He indicated that he was not interested in the ‘reset’ of relations towards greater amity with the United States that President Barack Obama proposed. No doubt there had been developments in Russia as well as on the international scene that prompted his new stance, and these will be touched upon below. But it also seems that as early as 2005 he had begun to change his views on some fundamental issues relating to politics and international affairs. He gradually abandoned pragmatism and became more rigid in his outlook – in effect, he adopted an ideology that several commentators have named Putinism. Just as Stalin by the 1930s committed himself to a set of economic and social policies and programs that many scholars have designated as Stalinism, so Putin championed a cluster of ideas that now carries his name, although, as will become clear, those ideas are not original.
In doing so, Putin borrowed from various writers and most notably from Ivan Ilyin, an author whose publications apparently caught the president’s attention during his first term in office. Ilyin, who was born in 1883 in Moscow to an upper-class family, advocated authoritarian rule, fervent nationalism and deep hostility towards the West. He was an intellectual whose work and life can only be described as extraordinarily complicated – his ideas on some issues are so convoluted and unusual that one is tempted to call them weird. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Anton Barbashin and Hannah Thoburn offered the following assessment of Ilyin: ‘Never a deep or clear thinker, he was not truly an academic or philosopher in the classical sense, but rather a publicist, a conspiracy theorist, and a Russian nationalist with a core of fascistic leanings.’1
His writings, amounting to twenty-three volumes, became popular among certain circles of the Russian intelligentsia several decades after he died (in 1954), in large measure because his ideas were lauded by the distinguished novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and by President Putin. Putin was so taken with the views of Ilyin that he played a role in the transfer of his remains in 2005 to the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow, where the president used his own money to pay for a new headstone for Ilyin in his final resting place.
It is not easy to summarize Ilyin’s views because he tended to move in different directions. But he clung tenaciously to several convictions: he despised communism, revered the Russian people and Russian institutions of the pre-Soviet era, and passionately subscribed to the teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church. He considered democracy to be unsuitable for a country the size of Russia. He wanted its leaders to devote themselves to making, in his words, ‘Russia great again’, and he insisted that to achieve that goal the Russian people would have to ‘believe in God and [that] this faith will strengthen their power . . . and make them strong enough to overcome themselves’,2 a contention that appealed to many Russian citizens even though it is not a prediction that is easily substantiated.
Ilyin admired Nazism for having put a hold on the ‘Bolshevization of Germany’, an achievement that he thought deserved the gratitude of all of Europe. Even though he lived in Germany during the 1930s, he never joined the Nazi Party, apparently because it was not a religious movement. Given this deep reservation about Nazism it is hard to understand why he was grateful to Hitler for having resisted the spread of communism.
Putin’s admiration for Ilyin’s philosophy and especially for Ilyin’s stress on the importance of religion marks a radical departure from communism by the president. Lenin, Stalin, and their successors in the years from 1917 to 1991 were atheists who disparaged all religions. (Gorbachev became a practicing Christian only after he left office.) Once Putin took over the reins of power, he demonstrated not only tolerance but also strong approval of the Russian Orthodox Church. He is the first ruler of Russia since 1917 to attend services on religious holidays and to exploit his alleged faith in Christianity to bolster his political aspirations.
As Andrew Higgins pointed out in the New York Times, Putin is determined to display ‘Russia’s might as a religious power, not just as a military one’. His government has offered to spend a hundred million dollars to establish a ‘spiritual and cultural center’ near the Eiffel Tower, a coveted section of Paris. The former French minister of culture Frédéric Mitterand suggested that the church be named ‘St. Vladimirov’ in honor of the Russian president. Attempts to establish an Orthodox church have also been made in the French city of Nice. Similarly, the leaders in the Kremlin have sought to extend Russia’s religious influence in Moldova, formerly part of the Soviet Union.
In all the new churches the priests espouse social and political views that are in keeping with traditional doctrine. They regularly denounce homosexuality as well as ‘any attempt to put individual rights above those of family, community or nation’.3 Moreover, they make a point of rejecting the moral and political values of the West; in Moldova, they have spoken out strongly against all proposals for the government to join NATO.
Sergei Chapnin, a journalist and former editor of the official Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, made the most explicit statement, reported in the New York Times in 2016, on the Russian Church’s ties to Putin’s government: ‘The Church has become an instrument of the Russian state. It is used to extend and legitimize the interests of the Kremlin.’ In short, President Putin’s positive attitude towards the Orthodox Church is part and parcel of his determination to restore Russia’s role as a world power. One of his most significant steps in advancing that goal has been his attempt to increase Russia’s influence in Ukraine, and it is widely assumed that ultimately he intends to absorb the country into the Russian Federation.
Ukraine is a large country to the west of Russia with a population of about 45 million people. It had been part of the Russian state ever since 1654 with two brief exceptions, during the final period of World War I and for two years after Hitler’s invasion of the country in 1941. Ukraine maintains strong cultural affinities to Russia, but most of its citizens – about 67.5 percent – prefer to live in their own state, and at the time the Soviet Union collapsed, they opted for independence. They contend that their culture is unique even though the Ukrainian language is very similar to Russian. Close to thirty percent of the people speak Russian at home and with friends, and many among that minority want the country to revert to the Russian state.4
For Putin, reunification is highly desirable for two reasons. It would be a major step towards restoring the grandeur of Russia and it would prevent the West from enlarging its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Eight countries that fell under communist control in the post-World War II period have joined NATO, whose purpose ever since its creation in 1949 has been to safeguard countries committed to democracy and to prevent their domination by the Soviet Union and, after 1991, by the Russian Federation. Putin fears that Ukraine might also join that military alliance, which would further hinder his plans to increase Russia’s – and his – influence in international affairs.
His goals did not seem to be beyond reach from 2012 to 2014, when Ukraine was floundering. The economy had declined sharply, as had the standard of living of most citizens; corruption prevailed at all levels of society; and the divisions between citizens who wanted to remain in an independent country and those who yearned for reunification with Russia became increasingly intense. In February 2014, a revolution erupted and the pro-Russian president, Victor Yanukovich, was deposed and replaced in the interim by Oleksandr Valentynovych, who favored Ukraine’s independence. For President Putin it seemed to be the ideal moment to launch a campaign to weaken the country and destabilize that independence.
Putin’s first move, in February 2014, was to engineer the seizure of Crimea, a peninsula in southern Russia that had been handed over to the Ukraine in 1954 by the authorities in Moscow. At that time, the transfer seemed to be merely an administrative measure; Ukraine and Crimea enjoyed close cultural ties, and both areas formed integral parts of the Soviet Union. But with Ukraine an independent state, the union was anathema to Putin.
Without warning, a large contingent of well-armed Russian troops invaded Crimea early in the morning of 27 February 2014, and within hours seized the two airfields on the peninsula and numerous government buildings. Ukrainian troops were ordered by their government not to resist, and by nightfall Crimea was in the hands of the Russians. The invaders had removed the insignia from their uniforms, and officials in Moscow declared that neither they nor their troops had played any role in the military operation, a claim that few believed. The regional parliament in Crimea then held a meeting in secret and announced the following month that the local population would vote on a referendum to grant more autonomy to Crimea – in effect, to allow the people the right to secede from Ukraine and join Russia.
The entire military operation was shrouded in secrecy; even many of Putin’s subordinates were surprised by the audacious maneuver. Political leaders in Europe and the United States were stunned and quickly imposed sanctions on numerous Russian officials who had been involved in planning the invasion; in addition, Russia was expelled from the ‘Group of Eight’ (G8), which meets annually to discuss issues of common concern, such as terrorism, global energy, global supply of food, and climate change. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who generally exercises restraint in her comments on foreign leaders, told then President Obama that in her view Putin was living ‘in another world’. Obama did not disagree.
The referendum was held, as Myers put it, ‘under the barrels of Russian guns’ and yielded an overwhelming vote in favor of joining the Russian Federation. Putin announced the annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol, a Ukrainian city, parts of which had been leased to Russia to be used as a port for its navy. According to polls conducted in Russia, a vast majority of Russians hailed the bold seizure of foreign land, and Putin’s approval rating rose dramatically, to over eighty-five percent.
For Putin, the annexation of Crimea was only the first step in his plan to unravel Ukraine. He encouraged Russian-speaking citizens in eastern Ukraine to launch attacks on local authorities to compel them to abandon their country and join the Russian Federation; he claimed that Ukrainian citizens well disposed towards Russia had initiated the violence. But there is overwhelming evidence that the Russian government had shipped weapons to the so-called separatists. Moreover, it is well established that Russian soldiers were sent to Ukraine – without wearing their uniforms – and that they played a major role in the ensuing military conflicts.5
Late in the summer of 2015, the fighting subsided as a result of an agreement to a cease-fire, which remained more or less intact for several months. Putin is widely assumed to have counted on the economic decline of Ukraine, which continued unabated, together with its severe social and political problems, to weaken the country to such an extent that a growing number of its citizens would demand closer ties with Russia.
In fact, local anger at the Russians deepened when information came to light about the 2014 downing of a Malaysian plane flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Everyone on board – 283 passengers and 15 crew – died in the crash. After careful examination of the evidence, an international committee stated categorically in 2016 that Russian officials, responding to a request from Ukrainian separatists, had sent them a surface-to-air missile known as Buk or SA-11 and it had been used to bring down the plane. A few hours after the plane crashed, the weapon was returned to Russia, making it difficult to pinpoint from where it had been fired. Nevertheless, the committee found ample evidence in support of its conclusion.
Before seeing the report, Dmitri S. Peskov, President Putin’s spokesman, issued a statement disparaging ‘speculation’ about the incident. He was sure that if a missile had in fact been fired it must have originated in a territory other than Ukraine. And Putin himself also denied responsibility for the downing of the plane long before the report had even been drafted; he claimed that the accusation leveled at Russia was part and parcel of an elaborate strategy to besmirch the reputation of his country and to weaken him politically.
As noted above, the fighting between the separatists and Ukrainian loyalists had subsided towards the end of the summer in 2015. But a year later, the violence resumed and the number of casualties increased substantially. The reporter Andrew E. Kramer described in detail what he had observed in just one city, Avdiivka, in the province of Donetsk. In the period from 2014 to 2016, its population of 35,000 declined to about 17,500 because many citizens had fled from the violence. According to reliable estimates, during the first twenty-five months of fighting in various areas close to the Russian border, almost ten thousand people lost their lives. Kramer could not discern an end to the conflict in the foreseeable future.
Kramer’s prediction proved to be accurate. On 1 February 2017, he reported that the war in Ukraine had escalated once again, apparently because Putin was confident that the newly elected president of the United States, Donald Trump, would not take any measures to punish the Russians for their aggressions. However, it seemed that the American government may be divided on this issue; it has issued mixed signals. It is true that President Trump frequently said that he is loath to criticize Russia, but Nikki R. Haley, the new US ambassador to the United Nations, declared in her first official statement: ‘We do want to better our relations with Russia. However, the dire situation in eastern Ukraine is one that demands clear and strong condemnation of Russian acts.’
Not surprisingly, the Ukrainian authorities were alarmed by the possibility of a change in US policy under Trump towards the conflict in their country, and they consequently vowed not to cave in to the invaders. Kramer again suggested that a prolonged military conflict was probably in the offing.
Russia’s invasion of Crimea has rattled the nerves of citizens in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, three countries that had been part of the Soviet empire. By late 2016, there were increasing signs that Putin might be preparing to restore control over these countries. In November, Russia deployed nuclear-capable Iskander ballistic missiles in Kaliningrad, a city located between Lithuania and Poland, for the apparent purpose of intimidating not only the Baltic states but also the West, which is committed to protecting that entire region. The Russian government claimed that there was no reason to fear the deployments, which were nothing more than ‘routine drills’.
Neither the governments in the Baltics, the senior officials of NATO, nor the United States authorities were persuaded by the Kremlin’s assurances. It is well known that Russian officials have made extensive efforts to discredit the Lithuanian government by suggesting that its leaders were preparing for some sort of military action. The Kremlin claimed, for example, that the Lithuanians had conducted military exercises with a ship that carried chemical weapons and that five people on the boat ‘had died from the chemicals’. The Russians offered no evidence to support this charge.
On the contrary, the Lithuanian authorities are so concerned about the likelihood of an invasion by Russia that they have brought up to date a ‘civil defense booklet’ that gives their citizens detailed instructions on how to resist invaders. The booklet assures readers that it ‘is most important that the civilians are aware and have a will to resist – when these elements are strong, an aggressor has difficulties in creating an environment for military invasion’. More important and more ominous, the United States and its NATO allies have stepped up military exercises in Eastern Europe and, according to the reporter Eric Schmitt, they planned to send ‘battalions to each of the three Baltic states and Poland’.6
The tensions in Eastern Europe are so deep-rooted that Gorbachev, the man who led Russia at the time communism collapsed and who is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, warned in January 2017: ‘The world is preparing for war.’
In his quest to reestablish Russia as a world power, Putin has focused on expanding his country’s influence in areas beyond Eastern Europe. In September 2015, he decided to send military aircraft to bolster Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president who for five years has waged a brutal war against various groups determined to end his authoritarian rule. Putin claimed that Russian pilots had been ordered to unleash bombs only on terrorist organizations such as ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), but in fact most of the targets were Assad’s opponents in the civil war, who are favored by the West. Russia’s military intervention in Syria has led to a further deterioration of relations between Putin and the West.
President Obama and many of his advisers were convinced that Putin would be ‘caught in a quagmire’, but by early August 2016 it seemed to Michael Kofman, a specialist on the Middle East, that ‘Russia has won the proxy war [in Syria], at least for now.’ Russia’s airstrikes, which have numbered ninety a day, and the four thousand Russian military men who serve in Syria, have inflicted far-reaching damage on the opposition to Assad. It is clear that Putin has gone far in achieving his goals in the Middle East. He has strengthened Assad’s position, assured Russia of a naval base in the region, can test Russia’s newest weapons without endangering Russian lives, and perhaps most important, he has demonstrated to the citizens of Russia that their country is once again a key player on the world scene.
The Russian foray into Syria succeeded in part because Putin pursued conflicting policies that tended to confuse foreign statesmen. In the summer of 2016, it seemed that he was on the verge of reaching an agreement with the United States to unleash joint attacks on Islamic State fighters who were besieging the city of Aleppo with its two million inhabitants. But a day after the announcement of the agreement, it turned out that Russia had secured the right to bomb Syrian rebels on its own from a base in Iran. Those rebels were struggling, with the encouragement of the United States and the West in general, to overthrow Assad. In short, Russia had adopted a two-fold strategy designed to support Assad but also to give the impression that it is helping his opponents. In the meantime, the agony of the Syrians has been horrendous. Over 470,000 people have lost their lives, 6.5 million have been displaced within Syria, and 5 million have fled the country.7
Although Putin is solidly entrenched in power, public expression of discontent has been growing in Russia in the form of a series of anti-government demonstrations. The principal causes of the unrest were the decline of the economy brought about mainly by the sharp drop in the price of oil, and the increasing drift towards harsh authoritarianism by the government, which relied on the support of a large number of officials trained in stifling opposition to decisions emanating from the Kremlin. It is estimated that more than twenty-five percent of the officials in senior government positions served at one time in the Committee for State Security (KGB, now known as FSB), an institution that trained its employees to implement the orders of the country’s leaders at all costs.
That the police and judiciary were determined to take a hard line in dealing with critics of the president became clear even before Putin returned to the office in 2012.
Many of the street protests, which began in December 2011, were directed at the flawed and rigged electoral process. Russian and foreign journalists provided extensive coverage of the unrest and stressed the seriousness and dignified conduct of the people voicing their discontent. For example, the British journal The Economist published an article entitled ‘A Russian Awakening’ on a demonstration that had taken place on 4 December. It described an
uplifting display of both dignity and indignation. Citizens were riled not only about the electoral fraud, but at being treated as imbeciles by their leader, Vladimir Putin. There was anger at the Kremlin, calls for “Russia without Putin” and against the ruling United Russia party (“the party of thieves and crooks”), but no aggression. The crowd contained not only liberals but communists, anarchists and some nationalists. But protesters were almost conspicuously polite towards each other.
Fearful of the spread of protests, in February 2012, the government called on its supporters to take to the streets – within a few days, about 130,000 marched in Moscow in support of Putin. But this did not put an end to the anti-government demonstrations. During that same month, approximately thirty thousand citizens marched again in the streets of Moscow, and soon the unrest spread to St. Petersburg and to Astrakhan, a city 790 miles from the capital. The police resorted to severe measures to clear the demonstrators from the streets; they arrested many and charged them with misdemeanors; judges imposed large fines on them. The last time Russia had witnessed such an outpouring of street demonstrations was in the early 1990s, at the time of the demise of communism.
The government’s harshest response to peaceful expressions of protest occurred on 12 February 2012, when five young women, members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot, entered the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the main Russian Orthodox church in Moscow, walked up to the altar, and sang a song critical of Putin. It was an unnecessarily provocative but rather amusing form of protest, and it can be argued that the women could have chosen a more appropriate place to voice their opposition to the government’s conduct of affairs. But their imprudent behavior was hardly a crime that deserved extraordinarily severe punishment.
The police seized three of the singers and handed them over to the legal authorities, who charged them with ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’. All three were found guilty. The judge sentenced two of the singers to two years in prison and imposed a suspended sentence on the third. The criticism of the harsh penalties was so widespread that the two women were released after serving twenty-two months, not a very generous reduction of the sentence. Most probably, officials were willing, and even eager, to shorten the sentences because the Winter Olympics were to begin shortly in Sochi, Russia, and foreign media were about to show up to cover the sports festival. It seemed wise to remove a likely source of criticism by foreigners. Interestingly, at about the same time, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, mentioned above, was released after serving ten years of a sentence arbitrarily extended in 2010 for crimes most observers believe he had not committed.
The two singers visited the United States shortly after their release and, during a meeting with the editorial board of the New York Times early in February 2014, one of them, Maria, described the horrors of prison life in Russia: ‘We were constantly watched . . . and the more they watch you, the harder your life is.’ Maria’s bandmate, Nadezhda, revealed that some inmates were forced to work twenty hours a day and that ‘prisoners were sometimes locked outdoors, even in the cold and the rain for eight hours a day.’ Upon their return to Russia the young women vowed to campaign for reform in Russia’s prisons.
In large measure, Putin’s popularity in the years from 2000 to 2008 can be attributed to the improvement in the economy, which was a direct result of the high price of oil, by far the country’s most profitable product. Unexpectedly, in June 2014, the worldwide glut of oil caused a precipitous decline in its price, from $115 per barrel to $35. The dramatic downturn called for drastic changes in the economy, but the government made no effort to promote alternative sources of income or to reform the economy established in 1990. It still operates as a free market under the control of a small number of oligarchs who are beholden to the government for their success. The result is a society in which a very small number of people live luxuriously and the vast majority can barely make ends meet. In its Global Wealth Report, the bank Credit Suisse said, ‘Russia has the highest level of wealth inequality in the world apart from small Caribbean nations with resident billionaires.’ The historian Walter Laqueur expands on this in Putinism: Russia and Its Future with the West: ‘About 110 Russian citizens are reported to control thirty-five percent of household wealth, largely comprising money made in the natural resources sector over the last twenty-five to thirty years. This has become not only a major political problem, but a very serious economic issue.’ According to Credit Suisse, the thirty-five percent of wealth that 110 Russian billionaires own is equivalent to $420 billion.8 The privatization of the economy, begun in the 1990s, has failed to spread the country’s wealth, and has not given rise to a sizable middle class.
Corruption is rampant and one reason for the wide disparity in income. To succeed in the economy a person must kowtow to the authorities in Moscow, and that includes generous distribution of bribes; those who refuse to abide by these rules face the wrath of the rigged judicial system and often land in jail. A fair number of oligarchs – according to some estimates, half of them – have escaped Putin’s control by sending their wealth abroad and by taking up residence in foreign countries. For many, London is the city of choice. Putin himself has taken advantage of this corrupt system; he is said to have amassed a fortune worth forty billion dollars. In 2014, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project awarded him the ‘Person of the Year Award for furthering corruption and organized crime’.
In 2016, President Putin’s hostility towards the West took a new and unexpected turn. In the summer and fall of that year, when the Republican and Democratic candidates were campaigning in the election for the presidency, American intelligence agencies in Washington concluded, after extensive investigations, that they had ‘high confidence’ that the Russian government had sponsored efforts to obtain information harmful to senior officials of the Democratic Party; the aim of the Russians appeared to be to influence the outcome of the election.9 The private emails of various campaign staff working for Hillary Clinton, the then Democratic candidate for president, were obtained and released by Wikileaks, an organization that publishes documents from anonymous sources, for the most part embarrassing to government authorities or institutions.
After Clinton’s nomination, information was leaked, seemingly to weaken her campaign against the Republican candidate, Donald Trump. The finger of blame has been pointed at Putin; as Secretary of State, Clinton gradually became very critical of Putin’s policies, and it did seem as if a Trump presidency would treat him with more respect. During the presidential campaign, Trump frequently made favorable comments about the Russian leader, and insisted that he would have no difficulty in reaching agreements with him on issues that had previously caused rifts between the United States and Russia.
When the initial rumours of Russian meddling in the American election appeared in the press, President Obama did not, at first, take any retaliatory measures.
But several weeks after the election, Obama decided he could no longer remain silent. A new study by all three American intelligence services (the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation) had concluded that there was no doubt about Russia’s intervention in the election.10 Their investigation pointed to hacking of leading US political officials by a Russian intelligence unit known as the GRU (the foreign military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the armed forces of the Russian Federation).
A few days after newspapers divulged the findings, a Moscow newspaper disclosed that Sergei Mikhailov, ‘a senior officer of the Federal Security, or FSB’, had been arrested, as had Ruslan Styanov, ‘the head of computer incident response investigations at Kapersky Lab, which makes antivirus programs’. So far, all that is known about these arrests is that Mikhailov was charged with treason, the first time since the breakup of the Soviet Union that so senior an official of the FSB has been accused of such a serious a crime. Could it be that these two senior government officials were suspected of having leaked information to foreign, that is, American, agents? Or, as a reporter for the New York Times speculated, on 27 January 2017, were the arrests a ‘good-will gesture to the United States, which has penalized Russia for the electoral meddling’?
President Obama, whose term in office ended in January 2017, had imposed a series of penalties on Russia for hacking American computers. Obama ordered the ejection from the United States of thirty-five ‘suspected Russian intelligence operatives’ and imposed sanctions on four senior officers of the GRU.The president also ordered the closing of two waterfront estates in the US that Russian officials had used for ‘intelligence activities’.
The response of the Russian government to the sanctions was interesting and once again demonstrated that Putin is a clever politician who knows how to turn a potential embarrassment into a public relations triumph. He rejected the advice of the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who urged the president to retaliate by expelling thirty-five US diplomats and closing two American facilities in Russia. Putin knew that Trump, soon to be the president of the United States, had criticized Obama’s conduct of foreign policy and, as already noted, had a rather favorable opinion of Putin. And to demonstrate that he was a man of good intentions, the Russian president decided to apply the carrot rather than the stick. ‘We will not create problems for the US diplomats,’ he announced. ‘We won’t expel anyone. We won’t forbid their families and children to use their usual recreation places during the New Year celebrations.’ He also invited the children of US diplomats to various holiday functions at the Kremlin. He ended his response to Obama’s sanctions by declaring: ‘We will not resort to irresponsible “kitchen” diplomacy . . . We will not expel anyone.’11
Since 2000, Putin has been remarkably successful not only in holding on to power but also in increasing his sway as an authoritarian ruler. Russian and American journalists attribute his ability to retain his position as the country’s absolute leader to three factors: he is extraordinarily clever in formulating policies that appeal to the masses; he has surrounded himself with officials too insecure to question his decisions; he has not hesitated to engage in ‘targeted killings’ of ambitious individuals he views as threats to his authority, and often his subordinates have carried out the murders abroad if the president’s enemies have succeeded in escaping from Russia. According to Andrew Kramer, ‘No other power employs murder as systematically and ruthlessly as Russia does against those seen as betraying its interests abroad.’ In 2006, killings outside Russia of citizens considered traitors were given legal sanction by the national parliament.12
Several months after he was reelected president early in 2016, Putin faced a political challenge of sorts, the vote for a new Duma. The outcome of that election was important to the president because it may have a bearing on Russia’s future domestic and foreign policies, although it should be noted that just about all commentators on Russian affairs predicted that Putin’s political dominance made it unlikely that he would lose his majority in the chamber of 450 representatives.
But the president took no chances. Initially, the elections were scheduled for December 2016, but he insisted they be held three months earlier, in September. Putin was still profoundly angry over the public display of disapproval of his rule in 2011 and 2012. So cynics would argue that this decision was to move the campaigning to August, when many citizens were on vacation and would therefore not be available for political demonstrations.
Ahead of the vote, Putin also persuaded the Duma to adopt legislation increasing the penalties for violations of the elaborate laws against dissent. In addition, legislators adopted a law broadening the latitude for agents of the FSB to use their weapons against protesters found to be violating existing laws against public displays of opposition to the government. More specifically, agents of the FSB were now permitted to shoot demonstrators ‘without any warnings of their intention to use weapons, special means or physical force’.
It is not known whether these precautionary measures were effective in discouraging potential demonstrators. But we do know the elections proceeded without any significant unrest, and there were few reports of voting irregularities. Putin’s party scored a decisive victory by winning 343 of 450 seats in the new Duma, an increase of 105, which is enough support to secure passage of amendments to the constitution. Four small parties, all of them supporters of Putin, won all but one of the remaining seats. Dmitry G. Gudkov, the only liberal in the outgoing parliament, was not reelected.
However, there was one indication that a sizable number of citizens were less than enthusiastic about the ruler in Moscow: ‘turnout’, according to a BBC report, ‘was a record low of 47.8 percent.’13 In Moscow and St. Petersburg, the two largest cities, only about thirty percent bothered to vote.
The low turnout could suggest widespread despair about the possibility of liberal change in the near future. But it should also be kept in mind that any reservations about President Putin’s leadership are overshadowed by admiration for his successes. Aleksandr Gremin, a political journalist and editor of Ponedel’nik, offered a plausible explanation for this: ‘People liked what happened in foreign policy in recent years; people like it that we can bomb Syria. People like that the candidates in the US elections say that Putin can influence the vote there. We feel that we are a superpower again that reaches beyond its immediate borders.’14 If Gremin is right, which is very likely, as long as Putin is president no fundamental change in government polices can be expected.
During his years as leader of Russia, President Putin has gone from being an advocate of friendly relations with the West and supporter of some modest democratic reforms to a champion of Russia’s greatness as a world power and the reestablishment of an autocratic system of rule. If he has any lingering attachment to the ideals of socialism as propounded by Lenin and Stalin, which he probably had supported as a young man in the Soviet Union’s main security agency (KGB), he keeps that hidden. Economically and socially, Russia is home to unbridled capitalism, a system that has greatly benefited Putin, who is reputed to be a very rich man. The president has also discarded atheism and secularism, cardinal principles of communism.
But he has not abandoned all of Stalin’s political goals. He is as determined as Stalin was in the post-World War II period to expand Russia’s influence in Europe and in other parts of the world. Deep down, Putin appears to be a fervent believer in the greatness of Russia and will resort to all means at his disposal to revive the country as a superpower, even if that requires military action. Of course, in doing so, he is also vastly increasing his own power and stature, another goal to which he has devoted himself. It is a risky goal, whose pursuit has already involved the country in military conflict in Eastern Europe and the Middle East and may eventually lead to a new cold war.
It boggles the mind to recall that only one century ago Russia underwent a revolution designed to transform the autocratic system of tsarism into a social and political order based on the principle of egalitarianism. Many Russians, including Putin, now recognize the critical flaws in the political and economic program of the Bolsheviks. In a fascinating article in the New York Times, the journalist Neil MacFarquhar pointed out that there is a fairly widespread sense that the country took a fundamentally wrong turn; the upheaval in 1917 ‘wrecked the country’ because Lenin ‘fomented appalling bloodshed and destroyed the Russian Orthodox Church, a pillar of Mr. Putin’s support’. Even Putin, eager to preserve his position as dictator, ‘loathes the very idea of revolution’, and on one occasion said that ‘we didn’t need the world revolution.’15 Consequently, he decided not to make any pronouncement on the centenary of the resignation of Tsar Nicholas II, which occurred on 15 March 1917, three days after the turmoil that led to Lenin’s seizure of power.16
The official reason for ignoring the centenary of the 1917 revolution is that the Kremlin wanted to avoid domestic discord between those who still revere Lenin, and the liberals. ‘We can’t allow splits, animosity, insults and the bitterness of the past to be dragged into our lives today,’ Putin warned.17 But the liberals warn that a government that pays no attention to the vast inequality of income and that makes no effort to protect the civil rights of citizens should be concerned about an upheaval from below. To be sure, the likelihood of a successful revolution similar to that of 1917 in the foreseeable future is slight. But there are enough signs of discontent, such as protest marches, that have rattled the authorities in the Kremlin.
Does the fact that today’s Russia bears little resemblance to the goal of the 1917 revolutionaries mean, as I suggested in the preface to this edition, that the dreams of Lenin and his colleagues were based on a misunderstanding of human nature or perhaps on wishful thinking? Could it be that the doctrines of Marx and the founders of Bolshevism were so unrealistic that they could never have been implemented? If that is the case, the history of communism may be a prime example of how a misreading of human beings can lead to unspeakable disasters.