The Worst Leader

Who is the worst leader of a major power today? With the weekend’s series of surprises now behind us, the results are in. The “winner,” by unanimous consent, is . . . Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Over his twenty-three years in power, Putin has proved himself competent at only three things: deception, intimidation, and assassination. Let’s look at the record.

In 2001 Putin gave a speech before the German Bundestag (Parliament), in fluent German. He promised a peaceful trading zone from the Atlantic to the Urals. He later deceived virtually everyone, from German Chancellor Angela Merkel to yours truly, by embarking on a policy of paranoia and enmity toward the US and Europe and supporting butchers like Assad in the Middle East. Worse yet, he weaponized gas and oil—among modern Russia’s few genuine assets—thereby destroying Russian business’ reputation for reliability as a business partner.

Putin similarly deceived his own most competent and internationally focused business leaders, including Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In 2003, he summoned them to a meeting in the Kremlin, ostensibly to figure out how to convert Russia’s economy into an engine of private entrepreneurship like China’s. When Khodorkovsky and others complained of corruption, Putin turned on them, later jailing and exiling Khodorkovsky as an example.

Putin also deceived our own (admittedly not too bright) forty-third president, Dubya, by the simple expedient of wearing a crucifix to their first meeting. That and a few proper words helped convince Dubya that he could see into Putin’s “soul.”

For all his faults—and they were many—Bill Clinton reportedly saw through Putin in their first meeting [Set the timer at 7:40]. He warned the then-declining leader Boris Yeltsin that Putin would lead Russia away from the democracy that Yeltsin appeared to be trying to establish. Whether Yeltsin rejected the advice, or whether the processes of succession and Yeltsin’s personal decline were already too far along, is unknown. Our former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, described Putin as “almost reptilian.”

On intimidation and assassination, the record is clear. Putin or his minions reportedly assassinated Alexander Litvinenko and tried to kill Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Britain, using radioactive polonium. He or they likely maimed Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian president and democrat, with dioxin, and evidently poisoned the now-jailed Russian liberal democrat Alexei Navalny with a nerve agent. Boris Nemtsov—the able and extremely popular Mayor of Moscow, and perhaps Putin’s most credible political rival ever—was gunned down on a major highway within sight of the Kremlin, at the very moment when a passing snowplow blocked the view of a surveillance camera.

As for journalists, their regular demise from violence in Russia is a global disgrace. During Putin’s first two terms alone, 88 journalists were reportedly murdered in Russia. That appalling number included the famed Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment building after publishing numerous reports and several books about Russian atrocities in Chechnya.

The modern Russian Constitution is a fine legal document, filled with the collective democratic wisdom of our age. Even after Putin changed it to keep himself in power, it has some features that other nations could well adopt. They include a provision—notably absent from our own Constitution—making Russia’s foreign treaties automatically enforceable under domestic law.

But the many assassinations and attempts on dissenting voices, both at home and abroad, make clear that the Russian Constitution is not the supreme law of Putin’s Russian Federation. That place belongs to The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli, written over five centuries ago. That, in practice, is what rules Russia today. You displease the prince: you suffer or die and are lucky to survive in exile.

By no other country on Earth today have so many politicians, democrats, and journalists—let alone outside the country’s own borders—been assassinated or maimed in assassination attempts. Not China, not North Korea, and not even Saudi Arabia can compare. One can only conclude that Russia under Vladimir Putin has become a poster child for medieval brutality in the twenty-first century. The closest Russian analog to Putin is Ivan the Terrible, who is said to have put out the eyes of the architect of St. Basil’s Cathedral so he could never again create anything as beautiful.

Now let’s look at results. According to the World Bank [Click top of GDP per capita column to see rankings], Russia ranks 65th in the world for GDP per capita, behind all of the G-7 nations. Russia has barely more than one-third of the GDP per capita of Italy, which has the lowest of the G-7.

More galling yet, the principal losers in World War II, Germany and Japan, have vastly outstripped their pyrrhic victor, Russia. They have, respectively, over 4 and 3.5 times Russia’s GDP per capita.

Even with Russia’s larger population, Germany’s and Japan’s total GDP outstrips Russia’s by more than three times in Germany’s case and four times in Japan’s. In 2017, Russia ranked 11th in total GDP in the world, even before its atrocity in Ukraine, despite its huge land mass and enormous natural resources.

And then there is Putin’s incompetence in war. Not only did he start his brutal war in Ukraine on delusional pretexts. He self-evidently failed to prepare and plan competently for it. The Russian juggernaut that had beaten back the formidable Nazis and had broken the Siege of Leningrad over eighty years ago was nowhere to be seen. Instead, a one-time cook and previously jailed felon named Prigozhin was tasked to lead a suicide assault by 20,000 recruited convicts merely to take ostensible control of one small town (Bakhmut) near the border of previously Russian occupied territory. And even he complained of running out of ammunition.

None of this is the Russian people’s fault. Over the history of post-enlightenment Europe, Russians have held their own in virtually every field of human endeavor. Mendeleyev invented the periodic table. Pavlov’s name is synonymous with conditioned reflexes. Andrei Sakharov, a Soviet nuclear physicist, won the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting human rights. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature, in part for describing the dismal features of Soviet life. My American graduate school in physics used to assign a text by three Russians on basic nuclear physics and quantum mechanics. And the names of immortal Russian writers (Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Nekrasov, and Tolstoy) and composers (Mussorgsky, Skriabin, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky) are so well known as hardly to require mention.

I know the Russian people better than most Americans, for I spent four months in Moscow as a Fulbright Fellow in the spring of 1993. During the promising “spring” of “glasnost’ and perestroika” (openness and restructuring), I was the first American law professor to teach in the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (Russian acronym MGIMO), at which Putin had studied years before. The hat-check babushki made sure that I, a California native then living in Hawaii, put on my hat when going out in the cold. My Russian colleagues accepted me readily, and I formed a friendship with one. I attended a conference on “Power, law and the Press” with twenty Russians and two Germans, where the yearning of educated Russians to join the civilized world of modern commerce and free interchange was palpable.

All that, it seems, has vanished under the brutal, kleptocratic, Machiavellian rule of one man.

But it’s not for us outside Russia to provide a solution. Putin has portrayed and will portray every outside countermeasure to his brutal kleptocracy as an assault on Russia. And Russia, which is the most battered nation in modern history, will respond by closing ranks. So the antidote to this incompetent, monstrous, modern counterpart to Ivan the Terrible has to come from the Russian people themselves.

We outside Russia must be patient, wise and strategic. Russians came late to freedom: the vast majority of Russia’s people were serfs until freed in 1861. That was a mere four years earlier than we “freed” our slaves, whose descendants today comprise only one-eighth of our population.

Yet even today, 148 years later, our descendants of “freed” slaves are still not fully free. Russia’s serfs, in contrast to our slaves, were the vast majority of Russia’s people. So of all people, we Americans ought to be patient; we ought to know how hard freeing a whole people is.

At the end of the day, the Russian people are cautious. At least the so-far “peaceful” resolution of the standoff between Putin and his warlord-vassal Prigozhin so suggests. After all, the Russian Revolution was perhaps the most brutal of its kind in human history. Maybe in that cold country it takes a lot to make the blood hot, but when it heats, it boils over. Maybe that’s what ordinary Russians fear most.

Perhaps Russia’s best hope—and the world’s—lies in the self-exiled Russian oligarchs and young people who have fled this brutal tyrant’s rule, not just to escape his ghastly war, but also to escape his medieval tyranny as it grew over the last two decades. This self-exiled group, no doubt, includes many of the best and brightest Russians.

The most recent Ukraine-war exiles also include some of the youngest. Large numbers of recent emigres—both Russians and Ukrainians—appear to have settled in Bali, where both sides seem to get along, perhaps because both abhor the war and sought to flee it.

It’s such people, I hope, who will eventually find a relatively peaceful way to “fire” Putin and put Russia back on the track to peace, prosperity and modernity. Only they can insure that the next Russian “revolution” bears little resemblance to the one that was “Red” in both ideology and human blood.

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