The crisis has contributed to the stability of the Russian strongman’s regime more than any index 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 gave his largely unknown successor as interim president 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 involved in a secret war against Ukraine since 2014, which escalated into a full-scale invasion in early 2022, a confrontation that remains stalled today. In the war against Chechnya, Putin’s stubbornness turned an initial military fiasco into a brutal war of attrition that Russia’s resources could gain 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 Leningrad after the war, amid the dark legacy of the Nazi siege, the young Vladimir Putin learned survival skills more suited to the chaotic post-Soviet society of the 1990s than to the bright, utopian long term promoted through communist propaganda.
Westerners are immersed in the myth that the KGB is an anti-James Bond supervillain and that it was Putin’s trysts with his university law professor and not his time in a seedy Dresden workplace that sparked his dazzling rise. .
Anatoly Sobchak, the classic “agreed” dissident of the past Soviet era. Not a member of the Communist Party who was allowed to whisper subversive remarks 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.
On returning from East Germany, Putin left the KGB and became one of Sobchak’s lieutenants, soon in the key role of managing the new mayor of Leningrad’s vast city property portfolio. This job brought the new civic bureaucrat into contact with the emerging post-communism new rich.
People were susceptible to despising 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 Putin’s wonderful predecessor in fact, a kind of living embodiment of total 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 past Russian rulers, Putin is well aware that the relaxation that comes with peace can promote political dissent.
Putin’s studied indifference to the fate of the crew of the Kursk submarine sunk in 2003 and the trauma of their families as the drama unfolded beneath the Barents Sea are just one episode in his Stalinist 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 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 give way so quickly? In July 2023, when their former leader turned warlord, Eugene Prigozhin, rebelled against him, no one could simply march from Rostov in the south to the gates of Moscow. Prigozhin reached an agreement with Putin before his plane crashed. on him and his fellow mercenaries.
Just as after Stalin’s triumph over Hitler in 1945 he did not melt his regime but intensified internal repression, Putin considers the army’s victory to be less essential to its survival in force than continued foreign tensions. But even as intelligent a political operator and as skilled a propagandist as Vladimir Putin knows, at 72, that time is running out. Stalin died in his bed. Will Vladimir Putin do it?
Back in 1999, Putin had taken charge of the attempt to force rebellious Chechnya on its southern border back under the Kremlin’s control. Only a few days ago, as collateral damage of today’s Ukraine conflict, the fatal crippling of an Azeri airliner over Chechen airspace by Russia’s trigger-happy air defences brought home how far – a quarter of a century later – Putin’s reign has been so far bookended by war.
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