Forum: The Enigmatic Mr. Putin
Taking the pulse of Russia's president and politics
by Timothy J. Colton
Who is Mr. Putin?” The question reverberated in world capitals when Boris Yeltsin called a press conference on August 9, 1999, to introduce Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin as his choice for prime minister of Russia and as his heir when a presidential election rolled around the next summer. Yeltsin accelerated the timetable by resigning on December 31 and decreeing his protégé acting president. On March 26, 2000, Putin won a popular mandate in his own right.
We normally size up a new leader by looking for guidance to his or her biography. In this regard, the Putin story, as lived from his birth in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1952, presented several problems.
For one, he was a late bloomer who had left few tracks in his earlier jobs. Only in 1996 did he relocate to Moscow and only in 1997 did he catch Yeltsin’s attention, one year before being appointed director of the FSB, the successor to the Soviet Union’s security and intelligence agency, the KGB. Putin had not previously headed any organization and had not once run for elective office. And he never aspired to be Russia’s top leader: he was astonished when Yeltsin broached the idea.
Another issue had to do with Putin’s having spent the bulk of his career in the foreign intelligence wing of the KGB, five years of it at the KGB station on Angelikastrasse in Dresden, East Germany. Espionage as a line of work is cloaked in secrecy and oftentimes in deception. It selects for individuals who have the aptitude for these arts and it hones them through training. I have met Putin twice, in hospitable group settings. He shakes hands firmly and makes eye contact, yet blushes slightly and rocks back on his heels as he greets you. The impression telegraphed is of someone disinclined by nature and vocation to give away much about himself.
Extrapolation from his past in 1999 or 2000 would have brought a further discordance—mixed signals. The Putin dossier testified to the KGB entanglement, on the one hand. But on the other, it spoke of a legal education, a credential he shared with Mikhail Gorbachev, and an association with Anatolii Sobchak, one of the better-known Russian democrats of the perestroika era. Sobchak was Putin’s professor at Leningrad State University in the 1970s, and from 1991 to 1996, when Sobchak was the elected mayor of St. Petersburg, Putin was his right-hand man. The reason Putin and his family migrated to Moscow in 1996 was that he was persona non grata in his hometown once his patron lost a bitter reelection battle. When Sobchak then came under attack for alleged but never proven corruption, Putin arranged at considerable personal risk to have him spirited out of the country to Paris in 1997. (Sobchak returned to Russia in 1999 and died in early 2000.)
Once president, Putin soon pursued a public line that, whatever the private yearnings and calculations behind it, set the tone for his administration. Its logic can be summarized in a pair of oft-repeated phrases: ukrepleniye gosudarstva (“strengthening of the state”) and upravlyayemaya demokratiya (“managed democracy”). It obviously was closer in spirit to the demimonde of the security services than to a Sobchak or Gorbachev.
Yeltsin in his day transformed Russia by loosening the apron strings of state control over economic activity, decentralizing, and tolerating criticism in the mass media and a plenitude of organized points of view in the political sphere. The gestalt was closer to what Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace dubs “feckless pluralism” than it was to a textbook democracy. But the liberalizing trend was unmistakable. Yeltsin was content to achieve his breakthrough and leave the next generation to perfect the system. The flip side of the coin was government’s loss of steering power and capacity, faults that were spectacularly on display in two successive crises late in his second term: the financial emergency of August 1998, in which many banks failed and the treasury defaulted on its debts; and the launching of a second war over the breakaway republic of Chechnya in August-September 1999, after Chechen fighters raided a neighboring Russian section. It was the Caucasus war that provided Putin with the golden chance to display his leadership qualities in the winter of 1999-2000.
Right after taking the oath of office, Putin took action on a series of fronts to rectify what he saw as the overindulgence of the Yeltsin era, without ever denigrating Yeltsin personally. Having ousted Chechnya’s suicidal separatist government, he used his army to grind down the guerrillas and refused to negotiate with their remnants. He overlaid seven “federal districts” on the 89 provinces of Russia, each with a Kremlin plenipotentiary, and removed the provincial governors from the upper house of parliament. In 2005 he pushed through the abolition of the direct election of governors, who were henceforth to be nominated by the president and merely confirmed by the provincial legislature.
1 | 2 | 3 | continued >
