Why Putin Is Right to Fear for His Life
Roman
Emperor Domitian is remembered for only one joke. “It’s a terrible
thing to be an emperor,” Domitian said, “because everything thinks your
paranoia about being assassinated is groundless—until you’re actually
murdered!” Soon after Domitian was assassinated. Extreme vigilance is
the essential mood of tyranny, which must inhabit that condition not
just first because it is indeed in danger of overthrow and surrounded by
enemies but also because it requires its people to be fearful and
isolated, therefore conditioned for extreme solutions. President
Vladimir Putin is living proof of this conundrum.
The recent drone attack
on the Kremlin may have been the work of Ukrainian or internal Russian
factions, possibly within his own wider security organs, or a ‘false
flag’ operation by the regime itself, but it was inevitable that the
dictatorship would claim it was an assassination attempt on Putin. This
is absurd since everyone knows that the president does not live in the
Kremlin but outside Moscow in his gilded mansion, Novo-Ogaryovo. Yet
Domitian would sympathize because Putin has every reason to fear
assassination.
It is a cliché of the
cliché-ridden Western press on Putin—and his predecessors Stalin, Peter
the Great, Ivan the Terrible—that they are paranoid to the extent of
madness. It is a cliché that ignores and misunderstands the nature of
dictatorship particularly in Russia. All absolute systems in world
history depend on coercion to crush opposition and maintain power,
thereby creating internal enemies who can only use violence to overthrow
the ruler. All such systems deploy war and xenophobia to inspire and
control their own people which creates another legion of enemies. The
Western press always emphasizes the omnipotence of the autocrat in a
system without limits without seeing that a system without limits means
the leader exists in a permanent state of carnivorous chaos without any
real or lasting security. Systems without clear rules of succession
grant enormous power to the ruler but also mean they have no means of
retirement. In Russia—whether under Tsars Ivan IV and Peter I , Stalin
or Putin—rulers could appoint their successors but could never do so
without creating a potential present menace.
In October 2011, during the Arab Spring revolutions, Putin spent hours watching
the gruesome smartphone footage of longterm Russian ally, Colonel
Gadaffi, who was sodomized with a bayonet before being shot. Putin
resolved to save his ally, Bashar al-Assad in Syria. And himself. He no
doubt reflected on the nature of Russian tsardom. He was aware of it
from the start: when Yeltsin offered him the presidency in 1999, Putin
hesitated, asking “how will I protect my family?” The answer? To
establish a dictatorship and keep it for life.
Every
wise tsar knows that his constant poise must be ferocious vigilance.
Peter the Great set the standard of the all-talented emperor and supreme
commander to which Putin—along with every other Russian ruler—aspires
but he faced constant plots against his life which he handled himself by
personally torturing and executing thousands of mutinous musketeers; he
even tortured his own rebellions son Alexei to death. Peter invented
modern Russia—even its name Roosiya was coined by him—as a new empire;
he took the title imperator. The state has never developed from that
vision. But this imperial self-image also sets a perilous standard for
Peter’s admiring successors: the tsar – whether president or
general-secretary—is also a military commander.
If
a Russian ruler cannot dominate the “Russian world,” he will disappoint
history. Peter was overwhelmingly successful in his wars—but even he
was nearly captured and defeated by the Ottomans. Yet the dream of every
Russian ruler is conquest. In 1904, Nicholas II’s Interior Minister
V.K. Plehve, supposedly advised, “What this country needs is a short
victorious war.” Every ruler (even in our democracies) aspires to one of
those. Nicholas II instead faced a disastrous defeat vs Japan; but
Putin built his imperial presidency and garnished his swaggersome
overconfidence with a run of three ‘short victorious wars’ in Chechnya,
Georgia and Syria. But they were minor skirmishes; Ukraine is proving
very different…
Out of the
last twelve Romanov emperors, six died violently. Ivan the Terrible and
Stalin died in their beds by wreaking such havoc around them that no one
dared destroy them. Putin is a killer but not yet a mass killer on
their scale.![Circa 1700, Peter the Great (1672 - 1725), Tsar of Russia, beheading one of the rebel Streltsy (semi-professional musketeers) in front of his nobles. (Hulton Archive-Getty Images)]()
In June 1762, the new young
Emperor Peter III—puny grandson of Great Peter—threw away costly
Russian gains against Prussia. His own Guards and his wife Catherine the
Great overthrew him; the Guards strangled him. The press release
announced he had died of haemorrhoids. When Catherine later invited the
French philosopher d’Alembert to Russia, he joked “I must decline
because I suffer from haemorrhoids which are a fatal disease in Russia.”
After midnight, on 11th March 1801, Russian Emperor, Paul, son of
Catherine and Peter III, was awakened by footsteps on the stairs of his
Mikhailovsky Castle; he hid behind a tapestry as the
conspirators—slightly drunk after a pre-homicidal champagne—burst into
his bedroom.
The conspirators
were let in by trusted servant; they were led by his chief minister
& top generals; and backed by his own son, who waited downstairs.
What happened next was history’s most savage liquidation of a Russian
autocrat.
Paul, inconsistent and menacing, was
destroyed by war , capricious foreign policy—including sending an army
to attack British India. The conspirators saw his feet peeping out of
the wallhanging and dragged him out; conspirators hit him with a golden
snuffbox, knocking out an eye, then threw themselves onto him,
shattering his head on the floor, strangling him with his sash, then
drunkenly stomping his head to pulp.
Just over a
century later Nicholas II was not killed by his generals but he was
overthrown by them. Yes the crisis was accelerated by hungry crowds in
the capital Petrograd but contrary to popular history, he was forced to
abdicate by his generals when he was isolated in his railway carriage on
his way to put down the revolution.
Putin knows
all this history. “How will history remember me?” he kept asking
historians in recent years. His isolation during Covid made him one of
history’s most dangerous creatures: the omnipotent history-buff. Stalin
read history obsessively and collected a huge library—half of which is
in Putin’s Kremlin office. Before the war, Putin liked to ask visitors
to chose a book then together they would examine Stalin’s pungent
marginalia. He is not an intellectual like Stalin but he reads
historical biographies—including a famous Russian biography of Paul and my own biography
of Catherine the Great and Potemkin. History matters to him; he has
always been obsessed by eighteenth century Russian leaders, Peter,
Catherine and Prince Potemkin. They were the trio who dominated Ukraine;
all subsequent Russian-Soviet leaders including Lenin and Stalin
regarded the possession of Ukraine as essential to their vision of
Russian statehood.
It was
Peter who founded St Petersburg and won the Baltic. It was Catherine in
partnership with her brilliant lover, co-ruler and secret husband,
Prince Potemkin, who conquered Crimea in 1783 and south Ukraine 1787-91,
founding the cities Sebastopol, Odessa, Kherson that form today’s
battlefield. When I wrote that first book in 2ooo, Putin, waiting for it
to be translated, asked for a one-pager on Potemkin’s conquests and
cities. In his speeches and essays before invading Ukraine, he cited
Catherine and Potemkin. When his troops took Kherson, they captured
Potemkin’s tomb and when they retreated late last year, they stole the
Prince’s body. I predict that Putin will create a splendid tomb for
Potemkin in Moscow to prove the Russian claim to Ukraine.
But
the history also shows what happens when tsars fail. In 1964,
Khrushchev was fortunate that he was only overthrown and retired after
he risked nuclear war and delivered an unprecedented national
humiliation in the Cuba Missile Crisis—though his successor Brezhnev did
propose his assassination.
Victory makes a
Russian ruler invulnerable, almost sacred. Defeat places a Russian ruler
in danger from his closest courtiers, ministers and generals. While one
thinks of tsars overthrown by crowds, most are actually destroyed by
their closest colleagues deep within their own palaces. The modern
prototype would be another secret-policeman-aspiring- to-rule, Lavrenti
Beria, overthrown in June 1953 by his trusted, somewhat inferior
comrades, Khrushchev and Malenkov (whose house at Novo-Ogorovo is now
Putin’s home—what a small world) at a surprise meeting. He was shot.
When
Russian leaders fall, nemesis usually comes from those closest. “When
you walk down the corridors,” mused Stalin, “you never go when it’s
going to come.” Putin is not paranoid; he has ever reason to be
vigilant.
Domitian would sympathize.
