Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Imperialist

[To skip to new endnote, click here.]

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.

[To skip to new endnote, click here.]

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.

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.

Permalink to this post