All illusions lost.
'Discerning Vladimir Putin', Part 2.
(The Kremlin/ Wikimedia Commons.) 7 MARCH—We continue to watch with grave concern as a propaganda operation probably without precedent engulfs Americans (and others) as the Ukraine crisis unfolds. Not in our lifetimes have we witnessed so grotesquely successful an effort to distort events and, most notably, the leader of another nation.
This is Part 2 of “Discerning Vladimir Putin,” an essay we determined to publish in part as a modest counter to the mis– and disinformation published daily in our major newspapers and broadcast on our major networks. We offer these concluding pages in the same spirit.
This essay first appeared in Raritan, the autumn 2018 number of quarterly journal. We have not, once again, updated it or edited out references no longer as pertinent as they were at the time of publication. Certain of the judgments contained in this essay would merit revision. We have not made these. We find it interesting to put the Russian president’s perspectives in 2018 against recent developments, in particular the vision of a new world order Putin shares with Xi Jinping. But we have written no inserts to do so. Our intent is to present a document that conveys a good sense of the Russia’s leader’s thinking and circumstances as they were four years ago, that we might understand him better than we do.
Part 1 of “Discerning Vladimir Putin” can be found here.
——The Editors.
By Patrick Lawrence
SOME YEARS AGO, I took a walk in central Moscow with a new acquaintance. It was my first time in the Russian capital, and I remarked on its dignity, the best of its architecture, the pride people took in their dress. I had not expected to see such things. We were along the Lubyansky Proyezd, not far from the Mayakovsky Museum and the old KGB headquarters. The Bolshoi and Red Square were a little farther on.
My companion asked, “Do you know what you would have seen here when the century turned to 2000?”
I did not and said so.
“Empty bottles, syringes, petty thieves, homeless people. Empty lives everywhere.”
This is a mere snapshot of what Boris Yeltsin handed Vladimir Putin when Yeltsin was effectively chased from office on New Year’s Eve in 1999. Putin won his first presidential election three months later. In the simplest terms, his inheritance was a nation at the edge of collapse for the second time in a decade—the third in less than a century. The facts of the case are well established: Unemployment and poverty rates, while hard to measure, were respectively up to 50 percent and 75 percent. The large middle class of the Soviet era—yes, there was one—was destroyed. There was a “mortality crisis,” as one American scholar put it. Malnutrition, alcohol, drugs, disease, homicide, suicide: These had claimed several million lives, by accepted estimates. Life expectancy dropped by nearly ten years, to less than sixty. Corruption and kleptomania, like the bottles and syringes, were everywhere. The formidable national assets accumulated during the seventy-year Soviet period were—no other word—looted by a combination of local oligarchs and foreign investors.
It is only mildly surprising that most Americans remain dimly aware, if at all, of the Yeltsin years’ tragedies. The wall of nonsense erected to obscure them was high, thick, swiftly in place, and remains so. Michael McFaul, the most brazenly dishonest American ambassador to serve in Moscow during my lifetime, said late in the Yeltsin era, “Basic arrows on all the big issues are pointing in the right direction.” By then Bill Clinton, as president, had already declared, “Yeltsin represents the direction toward the kind of Russia we want.” The Western press was unreservedly complicit in this immense deception. “We edited out the pain,” one correspondent later acknowledged.
With no grasp of this history, we cannot hope to understand the forty-eight-year-old who took office in 2000. And we ought not pretend to. Putin’s immediate imperatives were plain. Highest among them was stabilizing national institutions to counter another threat of collapse. He had to redirect national wealth back to an impoverished citizenry. Reining in the oligarchs, putting millions back to work, reconstituting some form of political process, safeguarding nuclear stockpiles: All this and more was on Putin’s plate.
But his inheritance extended further back than a single decade of post–Soviet misconduct. Yeltsin’s greatest error, apart from his incessant inebriation, was his craven eagerness for acceptance among Western neoliberals. In this essay’s terms, he acquiesced when Bill Clinton, along with legions of economists and investors, told him that to modernize was to Westernize. This left Putin with questions and problems that dated to the later czars. This is so for a simple reason: The Western-centric thesis is fatally wrong. It is crudely ridiculous or ridiculously crude, and I am back and forth as to which.
To see Putin’s predicament properly, it is well to imagine ourselves looking out two windows giving onto present-day Russia. One will be in the Ararat Park Hyatt, not far from where I walked and had my history lesson. The other will be out of any train on a half-day’s journey from Moscow or St. Petersburg.
My point may already be evident. From the former window one will see shops the match of any along the rue du Faubourg Saint–Honoré. There will be bars and restaurants of many varieties. There will be stylish people and people carrying briefcases. These people will be exposed and (in one or another measure) disposed to the ways of the West. Some will be impatient with Putin’s program and altogether with Russia’s pace into the twenty-first century.
In the city… Moscow, 2018. (A.Savin/ Wikimedia Commons.)From the train one will see less picturesque versions of the old, wonderful landscapes hanging in the Tretyakov, Moscow’s Louvre. Out this window will be a country that remains in many ways pre-modern. One will imagine the villages to be slightly updated versions of the obshchina. In the villages there will be churches—Orthodox, of course. There will be people among whom poverty is not uncommon. But they will be people who, in my limited exposure, seem remarkably à l’aise dans leurs peaux, as the French say—at ease in their skins. They want life to improve more than any other Russians, the surveys say. But they want little to do with Western neoliberalism, for they have had a taste of it and it is not, in any case, their idea. They are conservative to their marrow. They value order—the order of custom more than law—above democracy, for they have known disorder too well and do not see that democracy, in its Western manifestations, at any rate, does much to alleviate it.
In all of this I mean to suggest something of the context so assiduously omitted from most Western accounts of Russia and its president. It is not properly described as a Western nation, but neither is it Asian. It has features of both and so is a third thing, unto itself. State and society intersect differently. A divide between city and village, now a century and a half old, persists. Russia has no democratic tradition in the Western sense, and most of its people (not all) are wise enough to understand democracy is desirable but does not travel well as an import item.
■ ■ ■
THERE MUST BE PEOPLE who praise Putin without qualification, but I have not heard of them. This is right: He does not deserve that kind of approbation (as no national leader does, indeed). If he is defined by his record, the record is defined by his multiple obligations, and these are ever conflicting with one another. This requires constant acts of balance. In my view this is a sound basis on which to understand who Putin is and what he does.
Shortly before he was elected for a fourth and final term in March, Putin was asked what he would do were he to lose. “I’ll start working as a combine driver,” he replied. It was a tossed-off remark in a farm-equipment factory, but it was an odd one just as surely and deserves a moment’s thought. We can use it as a mirror, reflecting back to us what a political figure standing for office thought it opportune to say. Putin the modernizer is well aware of what the West’s techno logical advances can do for Russia, but he wanted to tell the majority that elected him that he is also mindful of how Russians live and the pace they can manage into the twenty-first century—which is to say, into the modern.
Another example in this line will be useful for its prominence in the prevailing Western narrative. Five years ago this June, Putin signed what is commonly known as “the anti-gay-propaganda law.” Its official intent is “for the purpose of protecting children from information advocating a denial of traditional family values.” There would seem no way to consider this legislation positively. I cannot think of one. But this excuses none of us from viewing it in context.
What, exactly, was Putin attempting? He did not outlaw homo sexuality. The Kremlin, I am reliably told by a friend who has walked its halls, has many gays in its bureaucracy. Putin and the Duma banned public manifestations. Why did Putin approve of this distinction? What does it suggest? In my read, he is not much concerned with people’s private lives and gender preferences for the simple reason that he has vastly more consequential matters on his mind. Among these are two: To prevent the metropole from getting too far out in front of the village, and to protect his modernization project—which is to the benefit of gays, not least—from the rigid moral conservatisim that is still a powerful current in Russian society.
Context: We still leave it out when we cite Churchill’s remark in his 1939 broadcast on BBC radio. He merely meant that one had to look at Russia’s national interests to understand what it would do in the war then just begun—as he made clear in his very next sentence. But his meaning is lost. And it is the same with Putin. Reducing him to a stock character—homophobe, in the case just cited, but there are all the other renderings—leads to no productive place. A powerful man with self-evident appeal among Russians is not a tyrant or dictator if he needs to build a broad consensus—as Putin does—to get anything done. He cannot be termed intolerant of criticism if debates of his program are far livelier and more diverse in the Russian press than in the Anglo–American—as emphatically they are. Ridding Russia of its parasitic oligarchs has required politically connected business allies who can look awfully like mere replacements. But if they did not serve the reconstruction project that is Putin’s Russian Federation, safe to say, they would not be so situated in it. There is little question that Putin has stemmed the tide of boundless plundering and capital flight. Incessant sanctions against Russian institutions and executives, along with sovereign eurobond issues and other official enticements, now combine, indeed, to reverse it: There is mounting evidence in the financial markets now to indicate that Russian capital is beginning to repatriate.
Apart from stabilizing a nation that had veered toward nonexistence—or maybe as a function of this imperative—another of Putin’s pressing pursuits is for a reconstructed idea of national unity. This requires “a consensual history,” as Stephen Cohen, the noted (and unduly vilified) Russianist put it in a recent lecture. It must comprise the czars, the Soviets, and the post–Soviet decades, such that it can be understood in grade-school classrooms, in villages, and in St. Petersburg and Moscow living rooms. It is notable that no new orthodoxy replaces the old as this project proceeds. Critique is more or less explicitly encouraged—as when, for instance, Putin approved a museum dedicated to the Stalin-era gulags three years ago. This goes to a key point: There is authority deriving from power and there is the moral authority found in Russian tradition. Putin can be termed authoritarian (as against dictatorial), insofar as the majority of Russians consider that he acts broadly within Russian tradition. Law as we understand it has little to do with this.
… And in the village. Spasskaya Guba, 2021. (Eniisi Lisika, cc by SA 4.0/ Wikimedia Commons.)“Managed democracy” is the political frame within which Putin advances his national program. It allows for opposition to the governing United Russia (note the party’s name), but there are fence posts, and the perimeter is not generously drawn. One finds this in many non–Western and developing nations—in Singapore, in Iran. (One finds it in the United States, too, but that is another conversation.) Having lived in a few such countries, I do not find the arrangement appealing. It reminds me of the rules of sumo: Often, the object is simply to force opponents out of the circle. At the horizon, managed democracy is an oxymoron, in my view. The democratizing project is to push the boundaries outward, but it is the rare case—South Korea is one—where this is accomplished other than too slowly, if at all.
But again, context.
Some years ago Partha Chatterjee, the noted Bengali scholar, gave us the term “governmental technologies.” His topic was Popular Politics in Most of the World, as the subtitle of an essay collection put it. There we find that legitimacy tends to derive less from participatory political processes than from the provision of security, services, sound infrastructure, and altogether the prospect of well-being within the polity. I confess to disliking this thought as much as any Westerner—or, indeed, non–Westerner—might. I rather hope humanity’s future does not lie with it. But it is the cold soul who cannot understand it. “Most of the world” does not have the privilege of taking for granted all that (most or some) Westerners do, and here we cannot leave out the stability that preoccupies Putin.
Now we come to Russia’s position in the foreign sphere, for there can be little question now—providing one refers to an accurate record—that external forces act repeatedly to threaten the stability that is Putin’s sine qua non.
He began his presidency as an avid pro–Westerner, though more intelligently than the abject Yeltsin. There remains much of neoliberalism in his economics. He still refers to Americans and Europeans as “our partners,” sometimes on the same day they call Russia “our enemy.” But Putin has lost his illusions, as he has remarked several times over the years. He announced this forthrightly at the Munich Security Conference, an annual affair, in 2007, when he spoke bluntly against American unipolarity—blaming it, indeed, for a creeping state of global disorder that must be evident now to anyone who looks out the window.
That speech was the birthday of the new iteration of Western animosity toward Russia, in my view. Putin’s perspective has evolved gradually since Munich, always in the same direction. Georgia in 2008, when Washington tacitly (or otherwise) encouraged Georgians to begin hostilities with Russia; Libya three years later, when NATO ignored a U.S. pledge to limit bombing to humanitarian purposes; Ukraine in 2014, when the United States actively cultivated the 21 February coup: These are among the mile markers, each either a provocation or a betrayal.
“Aggressor” is among the previously listed epithets commonly invoked to characterize Putin. My favorite in this line came when NATO began expanding its presence in Poland and the Baltics after the U.S.–backed coup in Kiev four years ago. That autumn the State and Defense Departments complained that Russia had drawn too close to the West—“on NATO’s doorstep,” as Chuck Hagel, defense secretary at the time, put it. The assertion is ridiculous even by grade-school standards: Hardly can Russia move itself eastward to accommodate NATO’s eastward advance, and at this time it was positioning weapons within its own borders to counter “NATO’s doorstep.” Hagel’s formulation is extreme but perfectly illustrative of the Western habit of reversing cause and effect, American action and Russian reaction. This dates at least to the late 1940s, if not earlier.
When Putin decided to reclaim sovereignty in Crimea, it was the morning after the coup in Kiev—an event that instantly jeopardized the Russian navy’s Black Sea base and its only warm-water port. Russians applauded the move (as did Crimeans via a referendum that is not seriously questioned even by those most skeptical of its propriety). But before and since, Putin’s most persistent foreign policy critics at home complain he is too slow in protecting Russia’s interests against the West’s repeated challenges to them. These internal complaints are part of the domestic politics Putin must manage—nationalists vs. Westernizers and accommodationists. One need neither agree nor dis- agree with those critical of Putin to see their point.
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PUTIN’S STATE OF THE NATION speech a few weeks before the March 2018 election was a revealing presentation in ways most of us missed. While our press focused on Putin’s description of new-generation weaponry—another case of Russian reaction following American action—the guts of it concerned where he thought Russia was in its own story and where he wants to take it during his final six-year term. It is nothing if not ambitious—and inclusive. The villages and provincial cities are to share the effort and projected benefits as much as the large urban centers. Putin proposes to increase per capita GDP by 50 percent. This implies a very high annual growth rate in years to come: 4 percent to 6 percent. It would put Russia “among the five largest global economies,” as Putin reckons it. Measured by purchasing power parity, Russia would be ahead of Germany and on the way to challenging Japan. “This is a very difficult task,” he acknowledged. “I am confident we can accomplish it.”
The difficulty is beyond question. But having witnessed other such moments at close range, I am wary of judging it impossible. In my read, Putin puts Russia at the brink of its “take-off” phase—where Japan was in 1960, when it announced its “Income Doubling Plan” (which succeeded several years ahead of schedule), and where Xi Jinping placed China in his noted speech to the Nineteenth Party Congress last year. “We are ready for a genuine breakthrough,” Putin asserted. He is a technocrat, do not forget. He loves numbers—his speech was filled with them. How much of what he forecasts will be achieved, it is no one’s now to say. We will have to see, but this could prove out, wholly, or in considerable part.
I conclude by noting something Antony Blinken published in response to Putin’s speech, as I found it nearly as striking as anything the Russian leader had to say. It appeared on The New York Times opinion page. “Mr. Putin is a masterful painter of façades,” this high functionary during the Obama administration wrote. “But his Russian village looks increasingly less Putin and more Potemkin.”
I wondered for some days where Blinken drew his confidence. Raw statistics—historical, leaving aside prospective—contradict it. Then I considered the matter differently: There is no confidence to find in Blinken’s assertions. The more I thought about them the more stunningly hollow they seemed. I find anxiety rather than certainty in his argument, fear even, and in this it is pithily expressive of the current national orthodoxy. I detect an inability (or refusal) to see, along with a concomitant need to believe, rather than think. And if Vladimir Putin’s Russia obliges us in one way above any other, it is to look intently, and then to consider carefully, all it is we see. It is to discern.