The crisis has contributed to the success of the Russian strongman’s regime more than any measure of economic success, writes Mark Almond
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When Boris Yeltsin suddenly resigned as Russia’s first post-communist president on New Year’s Eve 1999, his country appeared to be descending into a spiral of economic and political disintegration. Few people believed that his largely unknown successor as interim president had much chance of reversing the economic implosion or staying in office for long.
The then prime minister Vladimir Putin’s media operation had already begun to portray the ex-KGB operative in stark contrast to the moribund Yeltsin as an action man. That same year the second Chechen war on the country’s southern border raged. Twenty-five years later, Vladimir Putin is still in the Kremlin but Russia is again in the grip of war on its post-Soviet periphery after last week’s downing of an airliner over Chechen airspace.
Adding to this tension is the fact that Putin’s Russia has been engaged in a secret war against Ukraine since 2014, which escalated into a full-scale invasion in early 2022, a standoff that remains stalled today. For Chechnya, Putin’s stubbornness turned an initial military fiasco into a brutal war of attrition that Russia’s resources could win at enormous cost.
But Putin’s rise over the years owed more to bureaucratic infighting skills than any dark espionage arts, or even the judo skills which he would at one time display in front of loyal cameras.
Born in post-war Leningrad, amid the dark legacy of the Nazi siege, the young Vladimir Putin learned survival skills more appropriate for the chaotic post-Soviet society of the 1990s than for the shiny long-term utopianism promoted through communist propaganda. .
Westerners imbued with the myth of the KGB as anti-James Bond supervillains overlook that it was Putin’s relationship with his law professor at university rather than his time in a dingy office in Dresden that launched his meteoric rise.
Anatoly Sobchak, the classic “agreed” dissident of the bygone Soviet era. Not a member of the Communist Party who was allowed to whisper subversive comments in exchange for discreet cooperation with the KGB against really problematic clients, Sobchak was able to present himself as a new broom once Mikhail Gorbachev allowed genuine elections after 1989.
Upon his return from East Germany, Putin left the KGB and left behind one of Sobchak’s lieutenants, and soon took on the key role of managing the vast real estate portfolio of Leningrad’s new mayor. These paintings brought the new civic bureaucrat into contact with the emerging nouveau riche of post-communism.
People were likely to despise Putin in the 1990s, as they had done with Stalin 70 years earlier. When a comrade ridiculed Stalin as “mediocrity,” Trotsky agreed, but added: “He is not a nonentity. ” He saw that Putin’s wonderful predecessor was actually a kind of living embodiment of entire sectors of the new Soviet society.
It was the West’s inability to perceive that Putin represented entire sections of Russians in the 1990s that allowed him to assert himself in Russian politics. Putin’s ability to serve Yeltsin and his cronies during this decade led them to the fatal mistake of choosing him as their softly manipulated presidential successor.
Putin’s pardoning of Yeltsin for any misdeeds while in office was followed by a ruthless suppression of the oligarchs. He showed state power trumped money power. Military power ground down the Chechen rebels. Oil and gas prices soared as George W Bush’s war on terrorism benefited Putin’s economy. Yet years of economic growth and peace at home did not stabilise Putin’s regime.
In 2011, mass protests shook Moscow. The fact that these took place in a time of peace and relative plenty taught Putin a lesson. Crisis made for regime stability far more than any index of economic success. If people felt secure in their everyday lives, they could get above themselves.
Like so many former Russian leaders, Putin is aware that the relaxation that comes with peace can encourage political dissent.
Putin’s studied indifference to the fate of the crew of the sunken submarine Kursk in 2003 and their families’ trauma as the drama played out below the Barents Sea was one episode of his Stalin-like view of mass death as a matter of statistics.
The West has the idea that the mistakes of the war in Ukraine would weaken Putin. Yet, just as the pro-Assad media used to show a parade of Western leaders who had demanded his downfall and yet left while he was in charge, Putin has survived. many of his Western critics. But it will also have to be haunted by the sudden fall of Assad.
Will his strength crumble so quickly? In July 2023, when his former chef-turned-warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin rebelled against him, no one resisted the march from Rostov in the south to the gates of Moscow. Prigozhin then made a deal with Putin, before his plane crashed with him and his fellow mercenary bosses.
Just as after he triumphed over Hitler in 1945, Stalin did not relax his regime but intensified internal repression, Putin today sees military victory as less essential to his survival in power than continuing international tension. But even as shrewd a political operator and as skilled a propagandist as Vladimir Putin knows, at 72 years of age, that the clock is ticking against him. Stalin died in his bed. Will Vladimir Putin?
Already in 1999, Putin had taken note of the Kremlin’s attempt to subjugate insurgent Chechnya, on its southern border. Just a few days ago, the collateral damage from ongoing fighting in Ukraine, the fatal stalling of an Azeri plane over Chechen airspace through trigger-happy Russian air defenses showed just how far Putin’s reign was over. . . through the war.
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