There is no Who’s Who in Russia so far. But if there were one, the entry for Putin would read approximately like this:
PUTIN, Vladimir Vladimirovich b. Leningrad, October 7, 1952. Father, Vladimir Spiridonovich, d. 1999, served in World War II, severely wounded. Grandfather Spiridon was a chef who on several occasions cooked for Lenin and Stalin. Mother, Maria Ivanovna, was a factory worker. Had two brothers, both of whom died very young. Poor family, lived in a kommunalka (communal apartment shared by several families). We have it on the authority of Vera Gurevich, Putin’s favorite elementary school teacher, to whom he remained attached for many years, that the mother was a “very nice person, kind, selfless, the soul of goodness.” Putin remembers that in the 1990s when on the St. Petersburg City Council, he went to Israel as a member of a delegation. His mother gave him a baptismal cross to get it blessed at the Lord’s tomb: “I did as she said and then put the cross around my neck. I have never taken it off once.” Attended school number 193 in Leningrad; known for rowdy behavior. Demonstrated early interest in sports, mainly judo and sambo. Attended Leningrad State University, graduated 1975 from the Law Department, following completion of thesis on most favored nation in international law. Member of Communist Party since 1972. Joined KGB 1975. Worked first in Counterintelligence Department, later monitoring foreigners and consular officials in Leningrad. Was stationed in Dresden, Saxony, 1985–90. No reliable information about the nature of his job in East Germany. Recalled to St. Petersburg 1991, worked in administration of local university. Resigned from KGB August 1991 with rank of lieutenant colonel. Head of Foreign Relations Department, St. Petersburg Mayor’s Office, 1991–96. Moved to Moscow 1997, various appointments in state apparatus, became first deputy chief of presidential (Yeltsin) staff, May 1998. July 1998, head of FSB, one of several successor organizations to KGB. August 1999, first deputy prime minister, appointed prime minister of Russia seven days later. July 1983, married Lyudmila Shkrebneva; divorced 2013. Two daughters, Masha and Katya; insist on privacy, live under assumed names. Remarried 2014, Olympic gymnast Alina Kabayeva.
So much for the early career of the man who was to become Russia’s ruler for many years. It was a successful career. He had acquired a reputation as an eager, hardworking, reliable official, showing great loyalty to his bosses—first Anatoly Sobchak and later Boris Yeltsin—but was known only in a small circle of bureaucrats. Soon after first meeting him, Yeltsin expressed his wish to see him as his successor. When Putin became prime minister in 1999, even a year later (in May 2000) when he succeeded Yeltsin, he was still not well-known. There is reason to believe that he was not interested in publicity at this stage in his career. Not long after, most of Russia knew a great deal about him—even that the president’s Labrador retriever was named Koni and how he looked and that he was barking whenever Putin’s nickname was used.
Putin’s KGB training had taught him the advantages of facelessness. However, he certainly had opinions of his own and also a working style that have all been described and analyzed over the past ten years in dozens of biographies and political critiques published in Russian, English, and other languages. In addition, the recollections of Putin’s supervisors and teachers in the KGB training school are of interest. One of them, a retired colonel, remembers:
I can’t say he was a careerist. But I do remember I wrote about some negative characteristics in his evaluation. He was somewhat withdrawn and uncommunicative—which could be considered both a positive and a negative trait. I also recall a certain academic tendency. I don’t mean he was dry, he was sharp-witted and always ready with a quip. Putin was a steady student without slips. There were no incidents. There was no reason to doubt his honesty and integrity.
When Putin became president, Russia was in dire trouble. Neither the state nor the economy was functioning. A great deal of personal ambition and/or patriotism was needed to aspire to the leadership of the country in these circumstances. Not being an economist, Putin was probably not fully aware of the gravity of the situation, but he must have known much in view of his senior positions in the years before. For his prime minister, he appointed Mikhail Kasyanov, who later became a sharp critic of his regime. Kasyanov carried out important and successful reforms in the economic field (taxation, fiscal reforms, customs). Inflation was reduced and the economy grew during his term of office by about one-third.
However, he disagreed with Putin’s style of governing, arguing that separation of powers had been abolished and replaced by the “vertical power” principle, which meant that all important decisions were taken by the government; neither parliament nor the judiciary had a say any longer. There were allegations of fraud against Kasyanov, but the same was true with regard to Putin; it is difficult to think of a single Russian politician of that period or in the years after who did not come under suspicion. Kasyanov joined the opposition after his resignation in 2004, but he did not enjoy much popularity, and his political career came to an end.
Kasyanov was succeeded by Mikhail Fradkov as prime minister; this cabinet included two well-known liberal economists, German Gref and Alexei Kudrin. They pursued a sensible policy but did not last long.
The beginning of Putin’s presidency was not auspicious. Three months after his appointment, in August 2000, the Kursk submarine disaster occurred. Kursk was a nuclear-powered cruise missile submarine, and it went down in the Barents Sea. Putin was on holiday at the time but did not immediately return to Moscow or visit the scene, nor did he accept offers of help by foreign countries. But he emerged unscathed from this affair, just as another disaster did not harm him: the 2002 terrorist attack, when 130 people were killed in the ineffectual attempt by Russian Special Forces to release hostages in a Moscow theater. This was an attack by Chechens in the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow. It occurred during the performance of a musical based on Veniamin Kaverin’s The Two Captains. The Special Forces pumped a poisonous agent into the theater’s ventilation system, which caused the deaths of many. Nevertheless, Putin’s popularity did not suffer. Perhaps it was realized that it would be unjust to attribute the blame to him personally. Perhaps it was the feeling that Russia needed a strong hand, a leader, that the authority of the state had to be reestablished, that the country should follow a more assertive, nationalist foreign policy—and that under Putin it would get what was needed.
Above all, it was Putin’s good fortune that the price of oil and gas was rising; without this, none of his policies could have been carried out. The price of a barrel of oil in Yeltsin’s days (1994) had been about $16. In 2002, it was $22; in 2004, $50; and in 2008, $91. It has remained at this level for five years. From 2001 to 2007, the economy grew on average 7 percent a year. By 2006, the Russian GNP was double what it had been at the end of the Yeltsin period. Russia could repay all its debts, a new middle class came into being, pensions were doubled—in brief, almost everyone benefited from this prosperity, which was attributed not to good fortune, but to the wise and efficient leadership of Putin. It was one of the most striking cases of good luck in modern history.
Putin’s outlook on the economy had been formed in all likelihood by his years in Germany—the West German example, to be sure. He was in favor of a market policy within limits, insisted on a great measure of state control and supervision, and firmly resisted any attempt by the oligarchs to wield political power. Those disobeying the new rules, such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky, found themselves in a gulag or in exile. Furthermore, a new group of superrich was emerging, such as Genadi Tymshenko, who were personally known to him and on whose loyalty he could implicitly count.
The new rulers of Russia were not the oligarchs but former colleagues of Putin from St. Petersburg and from his KGB days. They also included some senior military and police officials, some specialists, even a few “liberals” (in the early days), and all people who could be trusted. The leadership style was strictly authoritarian. Perhaps a quarter or a third had a KGB background. Their part in the government may even have been higher, since an organ background was usually not widely publicized. The case of Mikhail Fradkov, Putin’s second prime minister, is of interest in this context. Very little was known about him when he was first appointed except that he had been active in the field of foreign trade. However, after his resignation as prime minister in 2007, he became head of Russian foreign intelligence, and it is unlikely that such a position would have gone to someone without prior experience in the field.
Most of those serving in the highest echelons became wealthy, but to what extent, from what sources, and where their money was eventually located were state secrets of the highest order. There were certain rules—no ostentatious spending, for one (sometimes the wives suddenly became the main breadwinners of the family). A great amount of literature appeared on this subject, some probably exaggerated (Putin was on occasion described as the richest person on earth), but it seems certain that no one left a senior position in the government destitute and in need of social security.
Putin was now the president, yet little was known about his opinions. Was he at heart a reformer, sympathizing with the liberals, or a conservative? Did he want to change the country, or did he see as his main priority calming the country and bringing tranquillity after many years of unrest? It would have been unrealistic to expect from a KGB graduate the democratization of Russian society. But would he accept the changes that had taken place under Gorbachev, or would he reintroduce a strict authoritarian regime moving more and more toward the right, based on a conservative reactionary worldview? Would the emphasis of the new regime be on domestic or foreign policy? These and other basic questions were left open for a considerable time. There were contradictory indications, but by about 2005 the impression gained ground that the conservative and nationalist impulse was strongest. Those working closely with him and willing to share their impressions thought of him as a patriot, very cautious, playing his cards close to his chest, not given to trusting people except perhaps a very few with a background similar to his own. He has apparently never believed in socialism, let alone communism. He certainly seemed not to think that Russia was ready to move fast (if at all) on the road toward democracy.
His hero at the time was Yuri Andropov. But Andropov did not think highly of the Russian nationalists in the organs over which he presided. Putin, on the other hand, while not a member of this faction, was more inclined to listen to them; he was attracted by nationalist political leaders and thinkers of czarist Russia and by some of those who left Russia after 1917. Paradoxically, at this time, support for Putin was weaker in the organs than in other sections of the state and society. It is not known why this should have been the case, and it probably has changed since, particularly with the Second Chechen War. Putin distrusted foreign governments, which is not particularly surprising, since he had been trained for this job.
Much has been written about “the faceless Putin,” his masculinity, his activity in the field of judo and other sports. He has appeared on comic strips and in thrillers, and he has been shown kissing a sleeping tigress and a sturgeon and also as the father of the nation and confronting a major economic crisis. His approval rating has been consistently high, at times skyrocketing to 80 percent and even higher. The state-controlled media played a decisive role in this rise in his popularity.
One could think of some other twentieth-century leaders who reached similarly high approval and even enthusiasm and became the object of a cult. But it is also true that Putin admirably fit the role of a leader as wanted by many Russians at the time. Democratic institutions were not in demand, but the country wanted a leader exuding strength and self-confidence. Most Russians have come to believe that democracy is what happened in their country between 1990 and 2000, and they do not want any more of it. There never was democracy in Russia except perhaps for a few months in 1917, hence the deep-seated distrust and aversion, the belief that democracy is the state of affairs in which a few people get very rich and the rest remain poor or get even poorer.
After many years of uncertainty and chaos, Putin must have appeared like a knight in shining armor, not to the intelligentsia, but to much of the rest of the people. Perhaps he was not the ideal hero. But he was certainly preferable to what they had been exposed to in the recent past. Television was of great importance, but even massive doses of television would have found it impossible to sell to the public the old Leonid Brezhnev or Konstantin Chernenko in the role of a savior. Whether the Putin breakthrough will have a lasting effect, whether it will manage to carry out the basic structural changes that the country needs to survive and be a success in the twenty-first century, remains to be seen.
We shall have to return to this issue when dealing with the prospects of Russia. Kissing the sturgeons and the sleeping tigress may strengthen for a while the mood of optimism in the country; it may induce a feeling that Russia is no longer a weak country surrounded by strong and dangerous beasts, but a strong state surrounded by weaklings. But this optimistic mood will be of limited duration. It will not take Russia any nearer to a democratic order; it may not even be conducive to carrying out the economic reforms so badly needed. It will probably not help Russia to produce more children. If the demand for oil and gas had not grown and the price risen dramatically, Putin would have been a dismal failure. But he was lucky, and given the unfortunate history of the country and the mood of the people, Russia simply was not ready for someone like Alexander Yakovlev or anyone leading it toward an order that was not authoritarian.
The terrorist attacks in the Caucasus and by Chechens in 2003–04 tested the Putin regime. The gravest setbacks were the assassination of Akhmad Kadyrov, Russia’s partner as the Chechen president, in May 2004, and the Beslan siege, when 330 people, mostly children, were killed in North Ossetia, in another botched rescue operation. However, after many more terrorist attacks, Moscow succeeded in imposing its rule on the Northern Caucasus, with the younger Kadyrov succeeding his father. But a high price had to be paid not only by way of financial subsidies; the northern Caucasus largely lost its Russian character and became an Islamic enclave.
In 2004, Putin was elected president for the second time. On the home front, the assets of Yukos, a giant oil company, were seized. Its owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was arrested in 2003 and sentenced to nine years for tax evasion and other crimes. The sentence was extended in a second trial; he was released only after considerable lobbying in 2013. Khodorkovsky had failed to understand the changed balance of power in Russia, arguing publicly and contradicting the president. He had been one of the richest people in the world; according to estimates, after leaving prison and the gulag, he was still left with a fortune on the order of up to $200 million.
The years 2006–07 witnessed tensions with Russia’s neighbors such as Ukraine, Georgia, and the Baltic countries. Dmitry Medvedev became president in 2008, with Putin as prime minister—the beginning of a tandem arrangement that enabled Putin to play a leading role in Russian politics well beyond the two-term presidency stipulated by law. Also in 2008, Russia went to war with Georgia for a few days, resulting in the loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which became “independent.”
There was a limited thaw in relations in 2009 with the United States, but it did not last long. Relations with European countries and Russia’s neighbors did not improve, and there was a slow but systematic curtailment of freedoms, of civil and political rights on the domestic front. The state took over or brought pressure on the media, and Putin’s victory in the elections for presidency with 63 percent of the vote for him in March 2012 did not therefore come as a great surprise. Medvedev again served as prime minister. Some Western commentators had believed that Medvedev presented a moderate alternative to Putin in both domestic and foreign policies, but this assumption proved to be mistaken. He had been chosen precisely because he was not pursuing a policy markedly different from Putin’s, nor did he have apparent ambitions to present an alternative.
During Putin’s third presidency, there was a considerable hardening in Russian domestic and foreign policies (such as the incorporation of Crimea in 2014). Demonstrations by members of the new middle class and the intelligentsia against “thieves and crooks” created the mistaken impression of the emergence of a strong opposition, but this was a misreading of the situation. Support for Putin’s nationalist policy resulted in approval rates that were higher than ever. His aggressive anti-Western line strengthened his position at home. As a commentator put it: As long as the price of oil and gas was high, the government was not in serious danger.
The style of the government was autocratic, though officially the term “vertical” was used. It meant that orders were given from above and not to be questioned, let alone contradicted. This ensured that no time was wasted in discussion, but it did not ensure effective government. Promises were made to combat corruption, the plague that has affected Russia since time immemorial.
Various social programs were announced. But in reality, little (if anything) was achieved in the fight against corruption, although occasional use was made of charges of corruption to defeat or at least weaken political enemies. Certain social programs were not carried out or achieved only in part, which led to open complaints on the part of Putin.
Putin had three chiefs of staff during most of this time. The second, Vladislav Surkov, who held this position from 2004 to 2011, was the most talented by far. Surkov began to work for Putin in a lower capacity in 2000. A Chechen from his father’s side, he had grown up in an entirely Russian surrounding. He was the man of ideas, complementing Putin, whose interest in the subject was limited to certain basic attitudes such as patriotism/nationalism. To a large extent, he provided the ideology of the regime, including the idea of limited democracy (sovereign—or managed—democracy). According to insider reports, Putin kept him always at a distance, since Surkov came from the world of business (or public relations, to be precise) and had no organs background.
Surkov also seems to have been slightly more liberal than others in this group, not too enthusiastic about Putin’s harder, more dictatorial line after 2010. At the time of the mass protests in 2012, he went on record as saying that “the protesters included some of the best people in our country,” which cannot have pleased the conservative majority in the leadership. He was less successful trying to establish a youth organization of the ruling party called Nashi (Ours), a job that may have been imposed on him. However, even after his dismissal he continued to work in various capacities and special assignments for the Kremlin. The record shows that Putin was a believer in rotation of this kind, not to leave officials for too long in their job, but not to drop them altogether unless they had been disloyal. He realized the danger of creating a growing group of disgruntled people.
Surkov was too clever, did not hide it, and was therefore somewhat suspect to the bureaucrats who constituted the great majority in the top echelons of the Kremlin. He could make use of Alexander Dugin (with whom he later quarreled) as well as with Gleb Pavlovsky, an erstwhile dissident who had made his peace with the “organs.” But in the end, he seems to have had too many ideas for his boss.
Surkov was preceded by Alexander Voloshin, who later became head of Norilsk Nickel, one of Russia’s leading corporations. Surkov’s successor was Sergei Ivanov, one of Putin’s KGB former colleagues who had also acted as a deputy minister of defense. Putin apparently thought him less erratic.
What is Putinism? A great amount of mental energy has been devoted to finding an accurate definition, as so often happens when a new regime appears. But it has not been a very successful enterprise: Putinism is state capitalism, a liberal economic policy, but also a great amount of state intervention—almost total interference when important issues are concerned. It is an autocracy, but this is nothing new in Russian history and is almost mitigated by inefficiency and corruption. There is a parliament, but the opposition parties are not really in opposition. There is a free press, but the freedom is limited to small newspapers and the criticism must not go too far. There is a constitution, but it is not the best guide for the realities of contemporary Russia. (There was a Stalinist constitution in 1935, allegedly the most democratic in the world, but it had nothing to do with the practice of Stalinism.) It became a matter of sad irony and many jokes. Historians know that each system especially each extreme political system, is different and often unique. The quest for a Russian new political doctrine is particularly unique because there were few transitions from Communism and each was different, be it in China, Vietnam, or Eastern Europe.
Many close observers of the Russian scene believe there is no great demand at present for a new ideology and very little interest in the subject. If people quarrel, it is about finances—about their income, their investments and profits, and how best to improve their interests—not about ideological questions or dialectical materialism.
This is not to say that those who run the country care only about their investments. The fact that they have become billionaires does not disqualify them from acting as patriots and desiring to live in a powerful country that is a major player in world politics. Patriotism may be modified but does not necessarily disappear with wealth and a high income. To paraphrase Karl Marx, the financial infrastructure may still have an impact on the ideological superstructure and the policy pursued. The new nobility has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and patriotism can be quite useful in this context.
As indicated by Andranik Migranyan, a spokesman of the new regime, they want strong state power, not chaos. Under Putin, the state has regained its traditional function, recovered its effectiveness over its own resources, and become the largest corporation responsible for establishing the rules of the game. It may be an autocratic regime, but it needs the assent of its citizens.
There might be no elaborate Putinist ideology, but there is a document that was prepared by a think tank established by German Gref in 1999, just prior to Gref’s appointment as minister for economic development. Approved by Putin, it constituted a platform for Putin’s election campaign and has been quoted since on various occasions. It opened by saying that Russia is passing through the greatest crisis in its history and that all its resources, political, economic, and moral, have to be enlisted so that a united country will be able to overcome it. The country needs a new feeling of mission, a new Russian idea. This new Russian idea should be the basis of the state policy—of gosudarstvenost and of solidarity.
The country did not become Fascist, even though it moved in that direction. There is a parliament and several political parties, but they constitute a loyal opposition, voting with the government on all important issues. There was a parliament, it should be recalled, also in Germany after 1933 and also in most Communist countries. Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that democracy is possible even in the absence of opposition parties, but not many students of politics would agree with him.
There is also a free press, as long as the writers do not go too far criticizing the authorities, and the newspapers (or television stations) reach only a small audience. If opposition newspapers or radio or TV stations become too influential, they are closed down or their ownership changes hands. In this way, a façade of democracy is maintained.
The most important component in the new ideology is nationalism accompanied by anti-Westernism. The origins of this intense anti-Westernism are not entirely clear; anti-Americanism did not exist before the Cold War to any significant degree. But from an eminently practical perspective, it has to do with the necessity of the FSB, the successor organization to the KGB, to justify its existence, budget, and policy. For unless Russia is protected against its dangerous, powerful, and devious enemies, the country will be destroyed again. Hence the need to maintain this enormous and costly security apparatus headed by the new nobility of the country. These in briefest outline are the basic tenets of belief in the thinking of this new class.
What of the Putin cult? It is not really a permanent feature in Russian history—after all, no czarist minister ever became the object of such adulation. A vodka was named Putin, as were a milkshake, a lollypop, ice cream, a brand of kebab, and a frost-resistant tomato. Perhaps he had asked for it with his bare-chested adventures in Siberia and Tuva. Perhaps it happened because he was looking so much younger and moving faster than Brezhnev and his immediate successors. The country obviously needed such a person. In the city of Yaroslavl not far from Moscow, a group of women had to be detained in a psychiatric clinic because of their uncontrollable passion for the man in white overalls (so as to resemble a bird) flying in a hang glider with the cranes in Siberia. It would not have happened to Stalin, Khrushchev, or Brezhnev.
Who will succeed Putin one day? Half a dozen names have been mentioned. Obviously the successor will have to belong to the new “nobility.” He will have to be capable but not too much so in order to avoid outshining his predecessor. He will have to be considered loyal to the leader who appointed him and trusted to pursue his policy. Among those mentioned, Sergei Shoigu is perhaps the most popular. He is not an ethnic Russian (but neither was Stalin), and his religious background is Buddhist, but he is believed to be a hawk in foreign politics. Dmitry Medvedev has served as a stand-in for Putin in the past; he is not believed to be a very forceful leader, but this circumstance could work in his favor inasmuch as he will not be suspected or feared. Others mentioned in this context include Sergey Sobyanin, the Moscow mayor. However, if Putin should postpone his retirement by years, a younger candidate may emerge with greater chances than any of those mentioned.