Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Imperialist

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Who is Vladimir Putin? What does he want? And what is he willing to risk to get it?

Right now, world leaders are asking themselves these questions and mostly failing. They can’t connect the dots.

The reason, I suspect, is that Putin is nearly unique among world leaders. He’s an imperialist of the old school. He may be more like Napoleon than any modern leader, however authoritarian.

Like Napoleon, Putin is a self-made man. Xi Jinping learned politics and leadership from his father, Xi Zhongxun, who for decades was a high official in the Chinese Communist Party, favoring liberalization and consequently suffering several stages of purging. Kim Jong Un inherited his autocracy from his father, Kim Jong Il. In contrast, Putin rose, all on his own initiative, from an obscure spy in the KGB to leader of Russia’s now-reconstituting empire.

Putin doesn’t appear to believe in systems. He has good reason. The failure of Russia’s Communist economic system destroyed the unity and stability that his country enjoyed in his youth. He considers the Soviet Union’s fall one of the greatest catastrophes of Russian history, if not human history. The failure of America’s ham-handed attempt to convert Russia to capitalism through “shock therapy” in the 1990’s did nothing but create the Russian oligarchs, whom Putin has since done everything to co-opt and suppress.

Putin also doesn’t understand business, except as a golden goose. A must-watch Frontline exposé of his career reports a key turning point in Russian business in the early aughts. The oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky had gathered other oligarchs for a meeting with Putin inside the Kremlin. They proposed that Russia adopt a Western model for the governance of business, with clear rules, fair taxation, transparency and leeway for corporate self-governance.

Putin listened carefully, betraying little of his views. Shortly thereafter, Khodorkovsky was arrested, jailed for ten years and later exiled. Putin’s message was clear: business in Russia was and is not to be an independent center of power. The State, with Putin at the apex, is to be the master of all things.

Putin appears to believe deeply that every system is flawed. He looks for ways to exploit those flaws to achieve his ends, and he’s brilliant at doing so.

In the last few years, his success has been remarkable. He exploited the Demagogue’s financial insecurity and crude ambitions, with the aid of social media, to divide and weaken the United States. Now he’s exploiting German ambivalence and insecurity, after the end of Chancellor Merkel’s wise leadership, so as to divide Germany within itself and from the rest of NATO.

Putin got his college education at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (“MGIMO” in the Russian acronym). That school requires proficiency in two foreign languages for graduation. (I know because I was among the first American professors to teach there, on a Fulbright Fellowship, during the brief Russian Spring, in 1993.) Putin’s first foreign language is German, and his second English. He’s fluent in German but not as fluent in English. Nevertheless, he knows enough English to second-guess his translators when meeting with English-speaking leaders.

Putin’s language proficiency leads to an important point of his individual superiority. He’s a superb judge of character and manipulator of people. He’s skilled at telling people what he thinks they want to hear, and his thoughts on that score are uncannily accurate. No doubt he learned these skills during his decades as a spy. But in these respects he is beyond world class.

I’ll give just three examples. In 2001, in his first term as president, Putin gave a speech before the German Bundestag (Parliament), in fluent German, proposing a peaceful trading zone from the Atlantic to the Urals. It was well received, and today Germany is Russia’s chief trading partner. But that interdependence is, of course, a two-edged sword. Putin is now counting on Germany’s energy dependence on Russia to sideline Germany, Europe’s most powerful economy, as Russia tries by threats and force to extend its empire in the East.

The second example was Putin’s first annual telethon to the Russian people. (I watched this spectacle live in 2001, on a Russian channel transmitted by satellite, in the hope of maintaining my proficiency in Russian.) Putin fielded obviously pre-vetted questions from people in all of Russia’s eleven time zones.

In one clip, an aging Hero of (the Siege of) Leningrad appeared in his army dress uniform, with long rows of medals. He asked why Putin had changed the city’s name back to its old Imperial form, St. Petersburg.

The old soldier was obviously aggrieved. He noted that some 700,000 Russians had died to save the city named “Leningrad” from the Nazis. Wouldn’t the name change devalue their sacrifice?

Putin explained that Communism, a false economic system, had destroyed the Soviet Union and its economy. So the name change was a symbol of Russia’s future under real economics. It signaled that there was no going back. That signal, of course, was heard not just by Russia’s people, but also by Western investors.

A year or two later, I watched a news conference on Russia’s then Channel One, in which a female journalist (I think from China’s Xinhua News Agency) interviewed Putin. She asked him what about his country then gave him the most shame and embarrassment. Without skipping a beat, Putin replied, “Poverty in Russia.” He then elaborated, explaining how poor most people outside the centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg had become. It would have been hard to have said anything more touching and attractive both to ordinary Russians and outside investors alike.

One thing more about Putin is useful in analyzing him today. More than any other leader on the world scene, he seems to revel in personal, individual dominance. His black belt in judo, his skiing competitions, and his bare-chested horseback riding all suggest a macho man unlike any other world leader, let alone someone Joe Biden’s age. Winning personally is important to this man, perhaps more so than to any other current world leader.

So far, he has won in Russia hands down. His most credible political competitor, former Moscow Mayor Boris Nemtsov, was murdered on a main street not far from the Kremlin. Nemtsov's gunning down came conveniently just at the moment when a big truck blocked the closest surveillance camera’s view. The freelancer Alexei Navalny is incarcerated and in failing health. Putin controls Russia’s video media, if not all media in Russia, except for a few print publications that no one but intellectuals reads.

Putin is unquestionably top dog in Russia, with no one else even reasonably close. Russia’s chances of developing anything like a Western democracy are receding year by year. So the question of what Russia will do today is really more about Putin’s personal psychology than the Russian “system” or its people. Today’s Russia has no system but Putin.

Putin is 69 years old. That’s an age at which men begin to assess their legacy and come to grips with their mortality. Is his quest to assimilate Ukraine an admission that his legacy to Russia is otherwise quite mixed?

Putin did succeed in putting Communism firmly and finally in Russia’s rear-view mirror. For a time, he opened Russia up to global investment and trade, making considerable improvement in ordinary Russians’ standard of living.

But despite Russia’s achievements in space, Putin appears to know nothing about science and high technology, let alone related business. On my fellowship in Moscow in ‘93, my taxi driver had been a former radio engineer. He drove taxis, he said, because that was the best way to support his family.

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Today, as far as I can tell from abroad, not much has changed. Most of Russia’s significant economic gains since then have come from selling Russia’s natural resources, mostly oil and gas. But these resources are finite and challenged by climate change. The hoped-for transition to a normal, let alone a high-tech, economy has yet to come.

Putin commands immense intelligence, in both senses of that word. He has to know all this. He also has to know that, in Russia’s failed venture in Afghanistan, deaths of Russians dealt by US-supplied Stinger missiles led to a little-known (in the West) letter-writing campaign by Russian mothers that eventually forced Russia’s withdrawal. But he also knows that he succeeded in Chechnya with a Russian puppet and more local troops, and in Georgia/Ossetia and Crimea with abrupt application of overwhelming force. (In this respect Putin may have taken aboard our own Powell Doctrine, which produced our only clear and significant military victory since South Korea, in Gulf I.)

The most important thing to understand about Vladimir Putin is that he is a throwback to the Imperial Age. His own nation, his people, and the world are his chessboard. His personal machismo and personal relationships are all.

He deceives and manipulates his people and other leaders as did kings, queens and their courts centuries ago. He judges his adversaries by the leaders he meets. He appears to believe that he can, with a quick assertion of overwhelming force, prepositioned for that purpose, take over Ukraine or large parts of it, and/or install a puppet government as in Chechnya. He thinks that the rest of the world will act too slowly and too weakly, as with Crimea, even after today’s warning movements of troops and equipment.

If he can do that, Russian history will remember him as the leader who helped restore the grandeur of the old Soviet Union and Imperial Russia. He’ll lie in state with Peter the Great. And Mother Russia will be more secure in the only way that historically has worked for her: with compliant buffer states separating her from her enemies. No mere system of agreements or laws, in Putin’s view, can reach that same end, any more than the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact stopped the Nazis’ invasion.

So there seems to be only one way to forestall the threatened invasion. The West must convince Putin that the price will be too high, not just in rubles, but in blood.

Putin’s attempt to build Russia’s economy has been only a partial success, and then based primarily on the sale of fossil fuels. He understands that, if he invades, Germany and the rest of Europe will try mightily to find substitutes for Russian oil and gas, even as they move away from those fuels to fight global warming.

But Putin also seems to believe that Europe will eventually accept a fait accompli in Ukraine, just as it did in Georgia/Ossetia and in Crimea, as long the path to that end is not too prolonged or bloody. He seems to have every reason and inclination to roll the dice of Ukrainian and Russian blood, in a gamble for Mother Russia's future security and his own legacy.

Endnote and Update: Why is Putin Waiting? Pundits and analysts appear confused by Russia’s long buildup of forces along Ukraine’s border and inside Belarus. If he really intends to invade, they wonder, why is he waiting? Why not strike now?

The answers are simple and practical. First, it takes time to build up overwhelming conventional force. It took our own great General, Colin Powell, five months. Then he won Gulf I for us in two.

The second reason is something more native to Russia: winter. As much as Russia’s people’s sacrifice, the harsh winters in that part of the world have underlain Russia’s mostly pyrrhic victories in its major wars. Winter helped defeat Napoleon and the Germans—each twice— most recently in the greatest tank battle in human history, on the fields near Stalingrad. Even Russia’s founding legend (immortalized in Sergei Prokofiev’s masterful oratorio, Alexander Nevsky) involved a crucial “Battle on the Ice.” With horses and men laden with heavy body armor, the invading Teutonic Knights broke through the ice and perished.

Snow, sleet, ice and sludge-mud are not easy going, even for tanks with treads, let alone lighter troop transport. Expect the tanks to move when spring comes and the roads, trails and tracks clear. That gives diplomacy and pre-positioning of credible defensive threats at most four months to get convincing.

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How Do You Spell “Hope”? “S-t-a-c-e-y” and “B-e-t-o”

“At cusp, choice is. With choice, spirit grows.” — Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“The darkest hour is just before dawn.” — Folk saying and song line.

There is a lot to fear today. The Demagogue and his lackeys are openly preparing an assault on voting, evidently to lay the ground for a second coup attempt in 2024. Russian troops have massed on Ukraine’s border and have entered Kazakhstan to help its current dictator put down a legitimate popular protest. China is making obvious moves toward Taiwan and the South China Sea. Meanwhile, our nation is divided and weak.

But there is also fertile ground for hope. Real equality and justice could soon break out here at home, as never before. Then we could heal our national wounds, unite, and recapture the promise and power that once were our national birthright.

Outside of Georgia, voters don’t know Stacey Abrams well. But she has, in my view, demonstrated the greatest political brilliance since Barack Obama sat at the Resolute Desk.

When Abrams ran in 2018, she nearly became the first woman, and the very first Black person, to govern Georgia in its tortured history. The state had been the victim of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s infamous Civil-War March to the Sea. So it bears the scars of a long history of regional resentment and racism. To add to all that, Georgia’s then Secretary of State—now its governor—had rigged Georgia’s voting rules to disfavor non-white voters.

Despite these disadvantages, Abrams came within 1.4% of winning the governor’s mansion. After she lost, she had a chance to run for an open Senate seat. Although many experts thought she could win, she declined. Instead, she decided to organize and work for equal access to voting, through her own “Fair Fight” organization. She also worked through her protege, Nse Ufot, and her New Georgia Project.

The brilliance of Abrams’ strategic choice soon became evident. On the same day as the Capitol Insurrection, Reverend Ralph Warnock and Jon Ossoff won Georgia’s two seats in the US Senate. They are, respectively, the first Black man and the first Jew ever to represent Georgia there.

Instead of running herself, Abrams did the hard ground work to give the Dems and progressives narrow control of the US Senate. She gave her backers two US senators for the price of one.

Now Abrams is running for governor of Georgia again. If she wins, further voter suppression in Georgia will stop cold, by virtue of her gubernatorial veto. If she can bring a Democratic Secretary of State with her, voter suppression there may actually be reversed, just in time for the 2024 presidential election.

These are just two signs of Abrams’ strategic brilliance. While leading Georgia’s statehouse minority, she killed a proposal for regressive state-tax changes by quietly putting a numerical analysis of the proposal on every Georgia legislator’s desk. Her analysis showed that the bill would have reduced income taxes but raised net taxes on 82% of Georgians.

Abrams avoids loaded political language. She doesn’t lead with her chin like some progressives. She doesn’t make it easy for demagogues to label her ideas and proposals “socialist.” Instead, she tells voters directly, in simple, concrete terms, how her plans for governing will improve their lives. And her brand of community organizing doesn’t depend on the vagaries (or the expense!) of social media: she uses more durable people-to-people contact with neighbors and friends.

But the ultimate proof of Abrams’ strategic vision will come early next year. If she becomes Georgia’s governor, voter suppression there will subside. And Georgia will change from purple to blue, perhaps for a while.

Both Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams attended Yale Law School. But Clinton remained a lawyers’ lawyer, eventually rising to Secretary of State and a presidential candidate. Abrams soon became a state legislator, with side trips into for-profit and non-profit corporate leadership. After losing her bid for the presidency, Clinton confessed that she didn’t fully understand politics. Abrams has shown by her acts that she not only understands it: she has mastered it. I hope to live long enough to see her become the first female president. (Since I don’t plan to move to Georgia, that’ll be the only chance I’ll have to vote for her—something I will do with great enthusiasm.)

Abrams may have gone to law school. But she seems to think like an engineer. Remember those professionals, who once designed our industries, highways, cars, airplanes, computers and smart phones? They don’t ask how to best serve some vague and fuzzy abstraction, how to pander to or delude the people, or how to aggrandize their own personal power. They ask how best to get a job done well and quickly. If only Abrams could somehow clone herself—one for every state!

I don’t know nearly as much about Beto O’Rourke as I do about Stacey Abrams. But what I know impresses me. He’s an experienced pol, with six years on the El Paso City Council and six years in the US House. Before politics, he had a checkered career in music, Internet publishing, and website design. His undergraduate degree is in English literature, and he’s fluent in Spanish. He’s not a lawyer, which is probably a good thing. We have too many of them in government. Besides, Texas loves buccaneers, not lawyers.

O’Rourke’s greatest claim to fame is nearly toppling the brilliant demagogue Ted Cruz from his US Senate perch in 2018. O’Rourke lost by 2.6%, but he had gained more votes than anyone expected and apparently helped down-ballot Democrats win. He made a name for himself, and he raised progressives’ hopes, by visiting every one of Texas’ 254 counties in his trademark battered pickup truck.

Let’s be honest. O’Rourke has not yet demonstrated a brilliant strategic mind like Abrams’. But he’s a solid progressive, an incredibly hard worker, and a man who understands the unmet needs of his state. He’s also running at a perfect time. The current Governor, Greg Abbott, has a terrible record, having presiding over: (1) the big Texas Polar Vortex Power Calamity and (2) the anti-vax, anti-mask, anti-health Texas Covid Debacle.

The demographics of Texas are changing rapidly. Voters are moving there from all over in search of a warmer climate, cheaper homes, and lower taxes. The North is coming South, bringing with it wealth, education and progressive ideas.

If O’Rourke can retire Abbott this year, he would make a political earthquake that would shake Texas and the nation. And he has a good chance to pull it off. After all, the last Democratic governor of Texas—a woman, Ann Richards—left office only 27 years ago.

How much difference would it make if Abrams becomes governor of Georgia and O’Rourke becomes governor of Texas? Both would stop voter suppression in their states dead in its tracks. Both could reverse suppression if they brought other Democrats into state government. In presidential elections thereafter, the current battleground states would pale in importance.

Here are the numbers:

Georgia-Texas Electoral Votes in 2024
Georgia	16
Texas	40
Total	56

Non-Southern Battleground-State Electoral Votes in 2024
Arizona	11
Michigan	15
Pennsylvania	19
Wisconsin	10
Total	55

In other words, if Abrams can turn Georgia blue and O’Rourke can do the same for Texas, Democrats would need to win none of today’s non-Southern battleground states to take the White House for the foreseeable future. If that doesn’t give you hope in this dreary winter of spreading Omicron, nothing will.


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Retiring the Demagogue: A Strategy for Spring

The best time to beat the Demagogue and remove him from contention is not in the runup to the 2024 presidential election. It’s not in the general congressional elections this November. It’s this spring, and it begins now. Here’s why and how.

The Demagogue has little power over Democrats or Independents. Even his still-astonishing power over Republicans is contingent. It depends on his ability to select and endorse winning primary challengers to sitting members of Congress—for House members every two years. To a lesser extent, it depends on his power to raise money through his fanatically loyal base.

The money should not trouble us. Although a lot in a political off-year, it’s a pittance by business standards, let alone for oligarchs. The Demagogue reportedly raised an early-2021 record amount of $3.5 million in a single day, after his speech before the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) last year. But any one of our richest oligarchs could donate $1 billion to defeat him. That’s almost the same amount for every day until the 2022 general election.

Would Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, who each have pledged $30 billion to charity, step up to save our democracy? I hope so. Maybe Jeff Bezos and/or Elon Musk would chip in. A broken democracy, national dissolution or a second civil war would be bad for business; yet that’s exactly what would follow a second “win” by the Demagogue resulting from electoral fraud or trickery or open subversion of the popular vote.

The real problem—and the source of the Demagogue’s enduring power over Republican leaders—is credible threats. A number of Republicans who tried to break free have gotten death threats from the Demagogue’s extremist followers. More directly, he has threatened to remove sitting Republican members of Congress from office by “primarying” them if they oppose him.

So far, all but a few have knuckled under or announced their retirement. Some of the intimidated have privately expressed a desire to break free, but all are afraid. Break that fear, and the Demagogue’s power over the party he commandeered vanishes. But how?

The earliest and best chance is this spring’s Republican primaries. If most or all of the Demagogue’s anointed loyalists lose, normal Republicans may examine their backsides and discover they had spines all along. They could save their party and, with it, our democracy.

Defeating the Demagogues’ primary champions will require unusual cooperation among traditional Republicans and Independents. Instead of staying home on primary day, ordinary Republicans will have to turn out in record numbers and vote to preserve their party and their democracy. Independents and Democrats can cross-register as Republicans and vote for moderate Republican candidates, unallied with the Demagogue. (They can re-register later as they choose, before the general election or later.)

Some Democrats might think this strategy is self-defeating. If too successful, it might elect more Republicans to Congress, even flip the House. But that view ignores the Demagogue’s existential threat to American Democracy. Getting rid of him is Job One. After that, voters can pick up the pieces of the Republican Party and make a new start. Who knows? No longer fearing the Demagogue’s wrath, moderate Republicans might even try to get some bipartisan things done.

The key to making all this work is a simple statistical fact. Only about one-third of eligible voters generally participate in party primaries. That fact underlies almost all the extremism, divisiveness and antagonism of American politics today. True believers turn out in primaries to select the champions of each party. By the time the general election rolls around, hapless party regulars are faced with a Hobson’s choice: voting for their own extremist or for the other side’s.

This simple fact is responsible for much of today’s political division and dysfunction. But it also offers a simple arithmetic solution: get just one-half of the refraining moderates to turn out in primaries, and you have a jump ball. Get a few more of them to vote, and/or some Independents and Democrats to cross-register, and moderate (aka “normal”) Republicans can win the party nomination. A small cohort of re-registered Dems and Independents can help Republicans save their party and the nation.

There are other reasons for striking early, this spring. The more time lapses, the more time the Demagogue has to downplay the Insurrection and his part in it and get voters to forget. The more time he and his followers have to intimidate resistant Republicans. And this spring is also a time when the Demagogue is likely to be preoccupied with criminal indictments, civil suits, and a possible criminal referral from the House committee investigating the Insurrection. So it’s a good time to strike.

No one should expect gratitude for making all this happen, even if it saves the Republican party from itself. Republicans are not known for gratitude, but for seizing every opportunity, fair and unfair, that comes their way. Saving the nation from authoritarian government, loss of democracy, dissolution of the Union, or civil war should be its own reward.

All it would take is a little organization and fund-raising by experienced operatives to get started. I’m not an organizer, but I’m ready to contribute right now.

Endnote: There is one dark source of the Demagogue’s power that voters alone can’t fight. It’s death threats and other personal intimidation aimed at Republican pols and their families. Republicans who fail to tow the Demagogue’s line have reportedly suffered both. (For a former Republican insider’s view of the depths to which the Demagogue’s loyalists have sunk, watch the Deutsche Welle feature “Is the US on the Brink of Civil War?” available on YouTube.)

Here the Justice Department and FBI can help. They can make the crime of threatening a politician or a pol’s family with death or bodily harm a top priority for prosecution. They can publicize indictments and convictions widely. They can set up (and publicize) special units for investigating and prosecuting these crimes.

Congress also can help by beefing up existing criminal law as necessary, allowing for private civil suits, and generously funding the special investigation and prosecution units. Since Republican pols are apparently the main recipients of these threats, beefed-up laws might pass with truly bipartisan support.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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