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Introduction
As the time of writing, Russia and Ukraine are in the first twenty-four hours of formally declared war. We had just finished reading The New Tsar as Putin’s pre-recorded announcement of a “special military operation” hit the news. As might be expected in the fog of war, the first few hours of the invasion saw social media fill with conflicting reports.
At this dark hour, we struggle to stay calm and appreciate the subtlety of the situation. No winners will emerge from this tragedy. By all current indications, hundreds are already dead and thousands more may follow. What will still be true as you read this, will be that the man most responsible for this situation is Vladimir Putin. The recent drumbeat toward war over the last several weeks and months led us to expand this mini-series on recent Russian history. We wanted to better understand the prologue to this terrible situation in Ukraine. The selection of The New Tsar for the exploration of Putin’s life was inspired by the strong recommendation of Lex Fridman, the well-known Russian-American scientist and podcaster. He found it to be the most fair and objective biography of Putin, the central figure in today’s Russia and the man who made the final decision to commence this war.
From Struggling in Leningrad to Governing in Moscow
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born to modest circumstances in Leningrad – now St. Petersburg – in 1952. His father was a veteran of the brutal World War II siege of Leningrad, in which the city held out for 872 days against Axis forces while losing nearly one million civilians and Red Army troops. The younger Putin grew up in an austere home environment. As a boy of small physical stature, he found his salvation in martial arts. It helped him develop a sense of discipline, which he then applied to academics as he got older. Putin tended to enthusiastically get into fights as a young man, knowing that he was equipped to deal with men who were taller and heavier than him because of his expertise in martial arts.
The young Putin was also a fan of Soviet spy stories and set the goal of joining the security services himself. He joined the KGB in 1975 and worked in its Second Chief Directorate (counter-intelligence), which involved monitoring foreigners around Leningrad. There is some speculation he might have been involved with the Fifth Chief Directorate, which cracked down on internal dissent, but he has denied this claim. In 1985, the KGB sent Putin and his family to Dresden in East Germany for Soviet Union counter-intelligence purposes. A few key threads in Putin’s life can be traced to this five-year stint in Dresden. Dresden is where he was first noticed by a higher-up – in this case the local KGB station chief - for being a reliable, results-oriented administrator. This reputation, in our opinion, is the most important factor that took Putin from obscurity to Russian high office. The second trend was the morphing of Putin’s world view. Outside of the Soviet Union, Putin learned more about the West and the deficiencies of the Soviet system as his family enjoyed certain luxuries in Germany that weren’t available in their native Russia. He also witnessed the chaos of 1989 with the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the loss of faith in the Soviet system and the abandonment of its operatives abroad by a Moscow apparatus in disarray. Up to the present day, Putin would have one foot in the intelligence world and Soviet milieu – he is still proud of his KGB service and insists he only did honorable things in the service – while also acknowledging that the system was seriously flawed. The difference between Putin and others was that he believed in gradual change – not the radical changes favored by people like Anatoly Chubais which we discussed in our previous post, The Oligarchs.
However, early in his career, Putin was not yet able to influence policy. He was recalled to Leningrad after the Fall of the Berlin Wall in what seemed to be a career dead end: spying on foreign students at the local university. Putin’s career received a spark, however, when he was noticed and brought into the service of Leningrad mayor Anatoly Sobchak. In the early 1990’s, the mayoralties of Russia’s two biggest cities were still more powerful positions than they are today. Putin furthered his reputation for being a loyal and dependable operator in this role. He also gained experience operating the levers of nominally democratic power and interacting with foreign leaders. Finally, Putin’s last stint in the now-renamed St. Petersburg, demonstrated another trend which continues until today: his tendency to rely on old friends from the siloviki - the men of the security services – to get things done and to help in emergencies.
Putin remained loyal to Sobchak through the latter’s volatile career, and while there were some accusations of corruption, his hands publicly remained much cleaner than most in Russia. His performance was noticed in Moscow, and the Yeltsin administration (the first President of the Russian Federation) brought him into the fold in 1996. Putin did such a good job putting out fires without burning his superiors that in 1998, Yeltsin decided to grant him the leadership of the FSB – the successor organization to the KGB, the infamous Soviet security agency. To us, this is a key turning point from which Putin’s career decisively shifted toward high government. Putin brought order to the FSB, put his own faction in charge and deepened connections with siloviki. This is also the period when innuendos began to link him to terrible things happening to people under suspicious circumstances.
Putin in Command
As we discussed in last week’s post on The Oligarchs, Yeltsin was happy with Putin and anointed him as Prime Minister in August 1999. We’ll pause briefly to highlight Putin’s four consequential characteristics that led to his “against all odds” rise to power that we took away from the book:
Reputation for being a competent, reliable administrator – corrupt, but less conspicuously corrupt than his peer group’s average
Divided identity between maintaining pride for the KGB and Soviet legacy on the one hand and the stated desire for gradual, pragmatic reform on the other
Reliance on the siloviki (the “people of force” or “strongmen” in Russia) for getting things done and serving in subordinate positions of power
High risk tolerance and a gambler with political capital – evident from the Second Chechen War up to the current invasion of Ukraine
Putin showed the fourth characteristic: a tendency to take big career risks in his mission to prosecute the Second Chechen War to a successful completion. He publicly staked his political capital, which had taken years to accumulate, on winning a conflict that had destroyed so many other careers and demoralized the Russian public. The gamble paid off as his efforts started to bear fruit. Putin was selected by Yeltsin to succeed him as President of Russia in December 1999, and he easily won reelection four months later. Many were hopeful that Putin would be a new type of more competent leader.
These four points are meant to be observations from the book, not endorsements. They describe how Putin got to the heights of power. We’ll briefly discuss how he’s used and kept that power, although these events are more well-known in the public consciousness. As his Presidency began, Putin quickly gained control over key media organs and started to replace the original crop of oligarchs with his own oligarchs of the siloviki, most notably in the case of Gazprom, the Russian energy giant. Skillful use of these resources and of the security state ensured that every presidential election since 2000 has been manipulated and minimally competitive. Members of the press and other rivals have been routinely intimidated or even assassinated. As Putin gradually made himself the indispensable man of the Russian government, without whom it may be paralyzed, he also refined his political philosophy.
In Putin’s early years as President, there was significant tension between liberal reformers and hardliners – often siloviki – in his cabinet. Over time, the latter won out on policy issues. Putin, influenced by traditionalist thinkers like Ivan Ilyin and Aleksandr Dugin, decided on a new mission that he was responsible for achieving. It would be the restoration of Russia to greatness, one closer to the Russia of Peter the Great than anything having to do with the Soviet Union. He viewed the loss of peripheral territory after 1989 as a disaster for Russia’s security, and the rapid economic liberalization of the 1990’s as an economic disaster. Putin wanted to use the commanding heights of the economy, especially energy assets, to drive the economy forward. He also reformed the military in 2008 and took on a more aggressive attitude toward former Soviet and Warsaw Pact nations. On the social front, the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church grew even closer after public outrage with the Pussy Riot protests which began in 2011. These developments were never going to be popular with Western countries, and relations entered a bad feedback loop. Putin would act in a way he felt was in the best interest of the Russian people, the West would get outraged and support his opposition, and his siege mentality would in turn be hardened. The point of no return, in our mind, came from 2012 to 2015. Putin felt that the West was behind protests against his 2012 reelection and was outraged by the passing of the Magnitsky Act. He also blamed the West for the 2014 revolution in Ukraine and covertly invaded the country, setting the stage for the current violence. According to The New Tsar, Obama finally gave up on Russia after Putin crossed him by going into Syria in 2015 days after a diplomatic meeting with Putin trying to spin the use of chemical weapons against civilians.
How Long can this Last?
The author of The New Tsar, Steven Lee Myers, is the NY Times Beijing Bureau Chief who was thrown out of China along with other American journalists amidst rising tension between the US & China during the early days of the COVID pandemic. Before China, Myers was previously posted in Moscow and motivated his work here. The New Tsar is a long and thoroughly enjoyable book, with enough details and nuance to really get a full picture of Putin’s life and reign. We’ve attempted to provide the prologue of who Vladimir Putin is, why he is that way, how he ascended to power and to better understand any implications it has on today’s circumstances in Ukraine.
Our primary concern now is for the safety and liberty of people in Ukraine. We hope that peace breaks out even faster than war has. In the longer term, we think there is a chance that this war backfires on Putin. See below tweet from an experienced and respected geopolitical strategist, Edward Luttwak.
The overthrow of a leader who has made himself indispensable to the functioning of a nuclear-armed Russia could be extremely destabilizing. Anyone who understands Russian politics agrees that a replacement, whether selected democratically or otherwise, could easily take an even harder line than Putin. While many in the West disagree with Putin’s illiberal ideas and tactics, its necessary to deal with him in a pragmatic way. We don’t think he’s a crazed dictator intent on world conquest, as some understandably do. He has a coherent philosophy and strategy, and our failure thus far to find a workable arrangement with it has led to war: the continuation of politics by other means.
We don’t propose to have the fully-baked strategic response. But we can start with eliminating some of the low hanging fruit that are popularly repeated. We’re sick of hearing about Russia’s small GDP. Russia has demonstrated throughout its recent and distant history, a commitment to security that is strong enough to spend a much higher portion of GDP on its military than other peace-loving European NATO members do. The Russian emphasis on security is well understood and yet we still write them off because they’re ostensibly a poor country. There is also no evidence that Russia will be hit with sanctions that are costly enough to change behavior. NATO nations seem to be bending over backward to sanction everything except the core items they care about (like Russian oil and gas and their inclusion in the SWIFT international banking network or Putin’s well-insulated shadow assets). We’ll stop the editorializing here to just beg for seriousness in the thinking about Russia especially with Putin controlling more nuclear weapons than any other nation in the world, including the United States. Russia can not be transformed into Denmark overnight, but perhaps with some sobriety we can find a peaceful arrangement with it. At least forty-four million lives [in Ukraine] currently depend on it.
All the best,
The Citizen Scholar Team
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Discussion #29: The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin, by Steven Lee Myers