NY review
Volume 47, Number 9 ·
May 25, 2000
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Review
The Making of Mr. Putin
by
Russia's President Vladimir Putin, with Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya
Timakova, Andrei Kolesnikov, Translated from the Russian by
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. The Russian original, Ot pervovo litsa,
is available on the website www.vagrius.com.
Public Affairs, 207 pp.,
$15.00 (paper)
At this year's forum in
Davos the question "Who is Putin?" was put to the members of the
Russian delegation. They became confused, looked at one another, and
mumbled something incomprehensible. There was laughter in the hall.
But indeed, who is he?
For a certain group of
Russians—let's call them left liberals—the answer was obvious from
the beginning: Putin is a bloody tyrant and a future dictator. This
point of view requires no detailed evidence. It is enough that Putin
worked in the KGB for many years. For that matter, for this part of
the liberal intelligentsia, which has recently supported Grigory
Yavlinsky and his Yabloko Party, conclusions are obvious in advance
and without any argumentation. In their dogmatism the members of
this group are indistinguishable from their opponents. It's no
accident that this group is called the "liberal gendarmerie." The
opponent of a bad person almost always seems good in their eyes.
Black and white are their basic colors.
By the time of the
election, left liberals had formed their judgments from uneven but
identically repellent components: Putin worked in the KGB; he is
presiding over the war in Chechnya; he hates the Radio Liberty
correspondent Andrei Babitsky and called him a traitor. With this,
the question of trusting Putin became closed and the left liberals
called on everyone to vote for Yavlinsky. (Five percent of the
voters did so.) The logic was the following: "We know that we will
be defeated, but we will take defeat with our heads proudly raised.
We will express our protest against impending dictatorship. We will
lose beautifully."
Yavlinsky himself, asked
for whom would he cast his vote in the case of a second round of
elections—which could only have been between Putin and the Communist
candidate, Gennady Zyuganov—answered that he would vote for no one,
that both were abhorrent to him. This is exactly the way he behaved
during the elections of 1996, when the choice was between Yeltsin
and Zyuganov. Yavlinsky didn't like either of them. By acting this
way, however, in the name of purity, he helped no one with
anything—neither people nor ideas.
The right-wing liberals,
headed by Anatoly Chubais, a former deputy prime minister and
minister of finance, and Sergei Kirienko, who briefly served as one
of Yeltsin's prime ministers, supported Putin. Being political
pragmatists, they were concerned with real change, the necessity of
using all available means in order to get a package of desperately
needed liberal reforms through the Duma, including changes in the
punitive and unworkable tax laws and, most important, measures
providing for the private ownership of land. Both men knew from
firsthand experience what real politics and real struggle were like
in the endlessly complex and confused Russian situation. Both of
them knew what it means to take responsibility and make decisions,
with all the consequences, including falling from the heights of
power at the caprice of Yeltsin and his circle. Both fell and got
back up without wasting time on complaints and pointing to their
wounds.
Their position was as
follows: it is impossible to demand liberal economic reforms from
the President while depriving him of liberal support. If the
liberals hold their noses and turn away (Yavlinsky's solution), then
less fastidious and greedier forces, of which there is a bountiful
supply in Russia today, will be all too happy to rush to power. Yes,
Putin wasn't raised in a democratic garden. But he worked for
approximately six years on the democratic team of Anatoly Sobchak,
the mayor of St. Petersburg who was one of the first reformers to
appear in the post-Gorbachev period. Putin supported Sobchak when he
was attacked, at a time when this support was not popular and even
dangerous.
Putin's program is being
written by a liberal team including German Gref, Aleksei Kudrin, and
other members of the "Petersburg democrats" whose thinking is close
to that of Chubais. Putin recently appointed Andrei Illarionov,
another liberal economist from St. Petersburg, as his adviser. The
right liberals think that there is a chance—let's call it their
political calculation—that things will continue this way. In short,
it seems that the right liberals are trying to push Putin toward
democracy, while the left liberals are throwing rotten tomatoes from
behind the fence they have constructed around their idea of
democracy. This is the main split in Russia's democratic forces, and
it will surely deepen.
Besides the democrats,
there is also the rest of the population, which voted for Putin by a
clear majority over the Communist Gennady Zyuganov. This can be
interpreted as a desire for a "strong hand." But it could also be
seen as a welcome sign of society's recuperation. It could mean that
almost two thirds of Russia's voters do not want to be pulled
backward toward the "bright past" of the Soviet era that Zyuganov's
propaganda offers. It is possible that during ten years of reform
many people have developed a taste for the new freedoms and
opportunities that have appeared in Russia—and this despite mass
impoverishment, the painful collapse of the country, the growth of
crime, and the pervasive corruption. These voters are placing their
hopes on the future, and not on the past, and in Putin they see
someone who they believe will help the country to press forward. Of
course, it may also be possible that people simply wanted something
new and unknown.
Yet is it possible to
objectively answer the question "Who is Putin?" Or, more aptly, "Who
will Putin turn out to be? What can we expect from him?" Watching
Putin on television and listening to his speeches, and especially
reading the ones that are published, is a waste of time: the texts
are written by speechwriters; the video clips are meticulously put
together by image-makers; and everything is vetted by the
presidential administration.
When we see Putin skiing
down a mountain on TV, mixing with the crowd (his bodyguards also
pretend to be red-cheeked skiers), or watch him drop by a little
restaurant, supposedly to eat blinis, you understand that Putin
himself is absent, that you are watching a kind of national
fun-house mirror in which the projected fears, hopes, tastes, and
customs of the electorate are reflected. He's skiing—so he's young
and healthy, no comparison with the old, sick Yeltsin. He's mixing
with the crowd—so he's democratic. He's eating blinis—so he observes
national traditions, especially around Easter—a nod in the direction
of the Russian Orthodox Church. Specialists in PR wouldn't allow him
to eat, say, sushi and sashimi in public before the elections—that
isn't Russian food. What if this faux pas suddenly cost him a couple
of million votes…?
Thus, for example, the
image-makers, preparing Putin's interview on television's Channel
One (controlled by the "oligarch" Boris Berezovsky), tried at first
to hide the candidate's dog from the voters. Putin's dog—a toy
poodle, small, white, fluffy, named Toska—didn't fit the image of
the mysterious, steely, decisive, masculine leader that they were
trying to create. But the press somehow sniffed the dog out and even
published its picture. The dog was forced to come out of hiding
(more accurately, Toska suddenly appeared on the screen, dropped on
Putin's lap from somewhere off camera, obviously thrown into the
picture by some assistant). Then came the following conversation:
"Is this your dog?" "Well, I don't even know whose she is—mine or my
children's…. We used to have another dog, a ferocious dog…. But it
died, and so the kids convinced me to get this one…." He's
disavowing his own dog!—so anti-Putin viewers exclaimed in outrage.
Some light is thrown on
Putin's past by the recently published book by and on him, which is
really a long interview. Three journalists from the newspaper
Kommersant (also controlled by Berezovsky) met with the
presidential candidate six times (altogether for a period of
twenty-four hours). There are many interesting details in the book,
but it's clear that the information in it is carefully doled out,
with Putin keen to make a good impression on his readers.
What if we try to
understand "who Putin is" without relying on those who are molding
his image—since we aren't inclined to believe them? I've heard that
the training program for US Green Berets includes an exercise in
"determining the contents of a box without opening it." Let's try to
apply something of the same approach to the freshly elected
president of Russia as well. Central to understanding the image of
our protagonist is the well-organized and effective Soviet state
machine that found, convinced, educated, and defined Putin during
his youthful, formative years, which coincided with "developed
socialism," that is, the Brezhnev period. At the time, the KGB was
the most efficiently functioning part of the Soviet state machine.
Its strength was founded on the absence of any control by law, on
panic-stricken fear of its omnipotence, and on its immensely
detailed information about what was going on in the country and in
the heads of its citizens.
Putin, according to his
own account, dreamed of joining the secret service from the age of
fifteen, i.e., from an age when ideas about a spy's work are still
colored with "romanticism." While still a schoolboy he tried to
volunteer for the KGB but was turned down because of his age and was
told that they don't take volunteers. First he must receive an
education. "What kind?" asked the boy. "Law school." Putin entered
law school and waited. Eventually he was approached by the agency.
From that moment on, Putin has lived behind a thick curtain of
lifetime secrecy; at that moment he entered a secret order about
whose inner workings we know very little. This was in the middle of
the 1970s.
A few words on this
period in Soviet history. The end of the 1960s brought the USSR's
invasion of Czechoslovakia and a strategic failure in the race for
space: after the Americans landed a man on the moon in 1969, it
became obvious to the Russians that they would forever be in second
place. The beginning of the 1970s saw the flourishing of the
"Andropov" approach to the country's internal life. Dissenters were
pushed out of the country. If that was not possible, it was easy
enough, without resort to any criminal prosecution, to make it
impossible for "inconvenient" people to function: careers could be
cut short, new works banned from publication, and people forbidden
to travel abroad or emigrate for reasons of "state security." And if
such measures failed, the psychiatric hospital could be substituted
for the labor camps. That the economic system had more or less
reached a dead end was largely clear by the middle of the 1970s. At
the same time a colossal military potential was unleashed: the
country began to build its most powerful nuclear rocket systems. It
was also the period of the greatest hypocrisy in the foreign policy
of détente—tensions were created mostly by the USSR itself.
It was at this moment
that Putin passed into the sphere of the secret institution. This
work requires not only the personal desire to do it, but "positive
vetting" by "competent organs." This meant that the candidate must
possess a number of qualities that will guarantee lifetime loyalty
to the system that considers itself the backbone of the state. When
Putin entered the KGB, the candidate had to believe, and not just in
words, that the Soviet system was the most just of all, that
imperialism was truly enemy number one, that the Communist Party was
indeed the vanguard of humanity, that the history of the USSR was a
series of victories, and that the unbearable difficulties on the
path to these victories were caused by the stubbornness and cunning
of its enemies. The regime's foreign and domestic politics had to be
seen as optimal strategies, to be protected by all possible means
from hostile attack. Not many Soviet citizens were prepared forever
to exchange a regular civilian career for the onerous labor and
indissoluble obligations of a KGBofficer.
Putin made this choice.
This means that he was ready to renounce, consciously and for his
entire life, any critical reconsideration of the stereotypes of
Soviet life. It means as well that he agreed that, from then on,
even the slightly significant steps he would take in everyday life
would have to be cleared with his bosses. He would have to renounce
any defense of his "own opinion"—it could harm the cause. He agreed
that the "personal" should yield to the "social." Working in the
foreign service of the KGB he had to remember the cardinal rule:
don't ruin relations with anyone, no matter how bad, who might come
in handy. But at the same time one must not have any close
friendships either: the moral obligations that might arise could
conflict with the duties of service. A good worker should be utterly
convinced that unquestioning fulfillment of orders facilitates the
strengthening of the state that exists.
There is reason to
believe that Putin was a good worker. Therefore, in order to
understand the internal structure of the positions, convictions, and
motivations of our protagonist's behavior, we must understand the
system of priorities, preferences, goals, permissible methods,
ideology, and human relations within the gigantic Corporation that
was the state security system of the USSR and Russia. Putin was an
indivisible part and a reliably working component of this system.
Understanding the basic perspectives of the Corporation, we will
understand better "who Putin is." According to an unspoken
tradition, for example, the work of a state security officer abroad
was considered more prestigious and professional than work in the
KGB "against our own people." (Similarly, regular army officers are
more respected than officers of the internal police, who suppress
disturbances within the country.)
The late 1970s and 1980s
was also a period of the growing senility of the Brezhnev regime and
the "five-year plan of flamboyant funerals." The KGB, as the most
informed organization in the country, was the first to realize the
disastrousness of the gerontocracy's course. It is well known that
Gorbachev's rise to power was Andropov's doing. The KGB was looking
for, and nominated, a man capable both of reformist thought and of
recognizing the limits of permissible change. The KGB would never
have chosen a rebel as leader. It needed a man who was able, and
wanted, "to change without destroying."
Putin seems to fit at
least part of this description. It is true that for most of his
career, he was never a leader. His work in East Germany between 1985
and 1990 was by KGBstandards a bureaucratic job in a relatively
predictable, tightly controlled place, nothing like West Germany.
The fall of the Berlin wall meant a change of work and position for
Putin; and such an event would necessarily be reflected in the
Corporation's strategy. In 1990 Putin became the international
liaison assistant to the president of Leningrad State University
(LGU)—again not a leader and not a director. But he was a loyal,
reliable person in a hotbed of dissent and badly controlled contacts
with foreigners.
The state was collapsing;
another state was being born. Which state's security should be
guarded at this time and place? This decision was not within Putin's
jurisdiction. Only the Corporation could answer that. That Putin was
working at LGU meant the KGB had sent him, and in fact, as he says
in First Person, the KGB continued to pay him. During the
period of confusion, of shifting loyalties, of free elections, the
rise of Yeltsin, the popularity of Sobchak, Putin neither welcomed
nor criticized anything; he didn't get distracted, he didn't look
for popularity—he wasn't like Oleg Kalugin, the KGB major general
who wrote a self-dramatizing memoir and left Russia for the US in
1994. At a time when everyone was in a rush to declare his changed
views, Putin remained true to the discipline of the Corporation. One
can only think that his unprecedented rise to the position of deputy
mayor under Sobchak meant the Corporation trusted him with this high
position, anticipating that the inexperienced democrats were likely
to botch things up.
Putin has had no
experience in concocting slogans or in popularizing ideas formulated
during open debate with ideological opponents. He has no experience
in speaking at meetings and demonstrations where the audience might
be either indifferent or hostile, and where one has to quickly turn
the mood in one's own favor with a strong speech. In short, he
doesn't have the experience of a politician—he has no record of
public success or bitter defeat. Broadly speaking, he has experience
in implementing the idea of strengthening the state, which has
involved, among other things, implicitly trusting people whom he
considers to have authority. In particular, this means that, on
joining Yeltsin's team, having won Yeltsin's trust and been named
his heir, he again found himself in the position of serving a
"Corporation," serving an idea, serving a system.
But this time, it's
another Corporation—the Russian State Machine. This machine has its
own system of priorities, its own view of Russia's development, its
own permissible methods, its own strategic friends and enemies. If
we can correctly identify the circle of people who control this new
corporation—its brain center—we can find another key to the enigma
of Putin. At the moment it appears that the team Putin is putting
together is heavily weighted toward advisers and economists from the
liberal right, i.e., colleagues of Anatoly Chubais. But it is also
widely thought that the oligarch Boris Berezovsky—the sworn enemy of
this group, and of Chubais in particular—is currently controlling,
or trying to control, most of Putin's important moves.
We still don't know what
the real balance of power is in Putin's entourage, and this will
become apparent only as events unfold and as Putin appoints his
government. Another indication will probably be the May elections
for governor of St. Petersburg, a city whose complex politics have
great influence on the national scene not only because it is
Russia's "second capital" but because many of the government's
important players—including Putin himself, Chubais, Stepashin,
Kudrin, Gref, and Illa-rionov—have ties to that city. It was
generally assumed right after Putin's victory on March 26 that one
of his priorities would be to see that the current governor,
Vladimir Yakovlev, would not be reelected in May. Yakovlev and Putin
both served as deputy mayors under Anatoly Sobchak, an outstanding
democrat who was at one time thought to have a chance at becoming
president of Russia.
In 1996, amid charges of
corruption, Sobchak lost the election to Yakovlev, a man who has
since become closely associated with the criminal world and who is
now accused of being responsible for St. Petersburg's having
acquired the title of "the crime capital" of Russia (there have been
numerous political assassinations in St. Petersburg in recent
years). Yakovlev headed the campaign against Sobchak, which was
conducted on all fronts, and at the time Putin publicly called
Ya-kovlev a Judas. In the event, Sobchak lost not only the election,
but his former popularity; he became persona non grata, a persecuted
politician and citizen, and was obliged to move to France for
several years out of fear for his life.
For many, Putin's
relations with Sobchak remain a mystery. It is usually claimed that
Sobchak trusted only spineless flatterers. But this clearly doesn't
describe Putin. It is possible that Putin's successful relations
with Sobchak were based on the fact that Putin's true bosses were in
the Corporation, that Sobchak was only his nominal superior. Gaining
Sobchak's trust gave Putin the op-portunity of controlling an
emotional politician. Thus, in this interpretation Putin's ability
to get along with Sobchak was simply a reflection of his
professional competence as an intelligence officer.
If so, however, then
another enigma arises. Sobchak's fall was precipitous and
devastating to both his local and national reputation. As a tough
intelligence officer turned politician, Putin, according to all
calculations, should have crossed his former boss off his accounts.
Instead, after becoming acting president, Putin unexpectedly brought
Sobchak back from "exile" into his inner circle, and made him a
trusted official in his election campaign. Before Sobchak suddenly
died of a heart attack in late February, it was widely expected that
he would be appointed to one of the key posts in the government.
Why such loyalty to
Sobchak? The answer lies in the same place—in the system of Putin's
values. As a professional who needs to be careful in choosing the
most reliable people for important tasks, Putin understood who
Sobchak was. Sobchak had evident personal weaknesses, which his
opponents have gladly exploited—such as his poor mastery of the
details of municipal management and his love of expensive,
flamboyant festivals in a city with a broken economy. Nevertheless
he was a man who proved that his political commitments and moral
values not only remained steady over the years of perestroika, years
of disappointed hopes, but, on the contrary, were strengthened.
Putin chose Sobchak, for whom honor and conscience were dearer than
public opinion of himself. Only his sudden death prevented Sobchak
from resuming their interesting partnership on a national level.
The state for Putin is
unified and indivisible; it has its clear interests, which cannot be
compromised either in foreign or in domestic policies, no matter how
strong the objections of human rights advocates in Russia or abroad.
The Chechen rebels don't take Russia's interests into account—so
Putin isn't going to take Chechnya's interests into account. The
opinion of foreign powers must be taken seriously as long as the
interests of foreign powers don't interfere with the government's
domestic policies. This would not necessarily preclude a pragmatic
response to international protests against conditions in Chechnya.
As a nuclear power Russia should be treated as an equal partner with
other nuclear powers, and not be ashamed of its small budget. If
Russia has renounced the ideas of an iron curtain and of personal
and party dictatorship, then its leaders have to be consistent.
Putin's first political demands were for "the dictatorship of law"
and "the defense of the rights of property holders."
At present Putin's policy
is based on the idea of strengthening the state, raising the army's
morale, making Russia's incoherent economic reforms consistent with
one another, bringing about order in Russia's vertical ruling
structures, and taking a pragmatic approach to foreign policy. Who
will Putin rely on in his new role, in the role of the director of
the new Corporation? It seems to me that the answer is clear: on
those forces that genuinely support him, regardless of their
political affiliation. And he will respond to their support from the
point of view of his understanding of "benefit for the country," and
not benefit for individuals or parties. It would be naive, if not
silly, to think that Putin's policies can be influenced by accusing
him in advance of all possible sins (as the left liberals are
doing). And on the contrary, for a Russian who genuinely believes
that his economic initiatives will enrich the state and the
population, then the only place to seek support for these
initiatives now is from Putin (as the right-wing liberals are
doing). Now as never before there is a historic chance to carry out
systemic reforms in Russia. It would be a great mistake not to try
to make use of it.
"…We had a dog, true it was a different one, a ferocious dog…" [Putin
tells his interviewers.] "Unfortunately, it died, run over by a
car…. But the kids wanted a little dog, and they finally convinced
me. Now it's not clear whose dog it is more—mine, my wife's, the
kids'…. The dog just sort of lives here on its own…."
INTERVIEWER (jokingly): "…like a cat."
PUTIN (not laughing at the joke, coldly): "No, no, don't insult our
dog. It doesn't work as a cat. A dog is a dog. We really love it."
No, he's not disavowing
his dog. It's just a completely different dog. And he won't let
anyone offend it. In his own way he loves this dog. Just as he loved
the previous one.
—Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell
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