#10
Newsweek International
November 19, 2001
America’s New Friend?
Vladimir Putin has long been a mystery.
Is he a democrat or an autocrat, a rival of the West or a partner?
What the war against terror has revealed about Russia’s leader
By Andrew Nagorski
Four days before Vladimir Putin was to meet George W. Bush in Shanghai, he assembled his “power ministers,” the top Kremlin and military brass. The good news, he told them, was that he’d come up with $135 million the military needed to pay its bills through the end of the year. The bad news, he added, was that it’s time to “economize.” He then swiftly confirmed that the Cam Ranh Bay naval base in Vietnam would be closed—along with Russia’s electronic-eavesdropping facility in Cuba, used to monitor phone calls in much of the United States over the past four decades.
“IT WAS A WELL-PREPARED surprise,” says Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the federal Foreign Relations Committee and an ally of Putin’s. “These bases were symbols of the cold war. We wanted to remove those symbols.”
That Oct. 17 meeting at the Defense Ministry did more than set the stage for another soulful Bush-Putin photo op. It was an indication of the Russian president’s growing confidence and latitude as a leader—and a measure of the power he has come to exercise over Russia’s once fractious (and often uncontrollable) government bureaucracy. No less important, it was another sign of Russia’s embrace of the West and, most especially, America. Before September 11, Russia and the United States seemed on a collision course, at odds over high-profile issues from missile defense to human rights. Afterward, the two nations abruptly shared a common priority: the war on terrorism. “Instead of focusing on differences, we’re now focused on shared interests,” says a former U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation. Putin himself clearly sees U.S.-Russian relations at a turning point. “The cold war is over,” he said in Berlin recently. “The world is at a new stage of development.”
Now comes this week’s summit in Crawford, Texas. It’s all but certain that the two presidents will reach at least the outlines of a deal, coupling concessions on U.S. missile defense with massive cuts in U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals. Beyond that, the world is likely to finally get some answers to what has long been an elusive question: who is Vladimir Putin? To date, he has been a shadowy figure, from his KGB origins to his seemingly irreconcilable alter egos. To some, he is the autocratic Putin, cracking down on dissent and the media and fostering, intentionally or not, a quasi cult of personality that some have branded “Soviet Lite.” To others, he is Putin the reformer, the hero of a long-overdue anti-corruption campaign, savior of the economy and apostle of a more promising (even democratic) future, promulgating new laws on everything from a personal-income flat tax to the sale of private land in urban areas.
Where Putin may ultimately settle between these poles is a matter of conjecture. But in the glare of recent public diplomacy, we are getting a fuller view of the man and his modus operandi. For one thing, he has demonstrated a clear willingness to chart a new course on foreign and domestic policy, combining gut instinct with cool geopolitical calculation. Nor does he hesitate to stake out positions that many Russians are not fully prepared for. Among Russia watchers, the current conventional wisdom is that Putin has taken a huge gamble in embracing the West, putting himself far ahead of his own military and the Russian public. A more nuanced view suggests that Putin is emerging as a consummate politician, possessing an uncanny sense of his own people. Far from being out of step, he knows exactly what Russians want: peace and stability, normalcy, a sense of economic progress and the room to rebuild their lives. Many believe he has delivered. Putin’s approval ratings reach 75 percent—and he has cannily used that domestic popularity to drive his new foreign policy.
Again, the October meeting at the Defense Ministry offers a glimpse of Putin’s emerging leadership style. By first placating his brass with cash, then dropping the boom on the Cuban base, Putin was taking a page out of his playbook as a former judo champion. Anatoly Rakhlin, who coached him for 15 years, recalls that Putin’s fighting style was marked by his willingness to take risks and by his unpredictability. “He could throw opponents in both directions,” he says. “Just like a boxer who knows how to use both his right and his left.”
Putin is also indirectly answering questions about his past as an officer of the KGB. Many of Putin’s coterie share that background, among them Margelov, who considers Putin a new breed of Russian leader, almost “a Western-style politician.” “He needs eye contact when he makes a serious decision,” Margelov explains. “He needs feedback. As an intelligence man, he needs to gather information from as many sources as he can.” When Putin called Bush aboard Air Force One on September 11, the first world leader to do so, he acted on his instincts. But when it came time to build his own coalition to support the U.S. president, he summoned a dozen of his most senior political and military officers to the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Sept. 22. He wanted to tell them why it was important to back the United States in the crisis, and how he intended to do so. According to various accounts of the meeting, he wanted to “look in their eyes,” the better to gauge their reactions. During the three-hour meeting, and in subsequent sessions, no one dared to oppose him. “Not a single power minister or military leader objected to the policy,” says Putin’s chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin. In other words, Putin expects—and is getting—obedience.
This is not to say that Putin isn’t making many of his countrymen nervous. In Russia, mistrust of the United States still runs deep. Foreign-policy analyst and TV talk-show host Aleksei Pushkov speaks for many Russians in warning that Putin may fall victim to the “Gorbachev-Yeltsin syndrome,” which he defines as giving away too much without assurances of getting anything in return. “I don’t know what kind of a game Putin is playing,” he worries. “Is it calculated, or is he only trying to prove how generous the Russian soul is?”
Putin has said repeatedly that he is not seeking payback for his support. Yet the U.S. State Department and the White House are working to craft a package of “rewards” to discuss in Crawford, ranging from trade and investment incentives to support for Russia’s efforts to join the World Trade Organization. “Russia is doing more to support the [war on terror] than most members of NATO,” says a senior U.S. diplomat. Beyond opening up Russian airspace to American forces, Putin lobbied the former Soviet republics of Central Asia to cooperate fully with the war effort in Afghanistan, including allowing the use of military bases. And when it comes to the unprecedented sharing of intelligence, the U.S. official notes, “our people are scratching their heads in amazement.”
Since those first days following the attacks, Bush has talked with Putin at least once a week, and Colin Powell has been phoning Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov two or three times weekly. (On one occasion, Powell didn’t get through until 2 a.m., but Ivanov insisted no apology was needed. “I’m sitting here reading a book, waiting to take your call,” he told Powell.) Putin has even been diligently taking English lessons, the better to make small talk with Bush and ease relations onto a more personal plane.
Yet Putin’s motives for casting his lot with America are complex. Part of the draw is economic. Another part is geopolitical, heavily weighted by Chechnya. He launched the war in the breakaway province and has been stung by Western criticism of what he billed as a battle against terrorism. Now he takes evident I-told-you-so satisfaction in Washington’s pronouncement that the Chechens should “disassociate themselves from terrorist groups.” Putin’s broader calculation, though, is that the greatest threats to Russia in the future lie with rising Islam in the south and, longer term, in the Far East, with Chinese pressures on Russia’s borders and potential instability in Korea. In that context, Putin’s strategists believe, it was well worth giving up a listening post in Cuba to strengthen ties with the United States. Besides, they add, both Cam Ranh Bay and the Cuban base were sopping up funds badly needed elsewhere.
If the secret of Putin’s domestic power is his ability to sense what ordinary Russians really want, that knack is also a key to his foreign policy. Unquestionably, Russians want a more stable country with a healthy economy, especially after the turbulent decade that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. “But if you ask ordinary Russians what would they prefer—to have a living standard like Canada’s or for the country to be a great power—most would choose the latter,” argues novelist Nikolai Pyregov. Few Russians care about NATO expansion, or whether the Baltic states join the alliance. But they care deeply about whether Russia is consulted, and they hate the feeling of recent years that their country has been ignored, dismissed from the world’s stage as no longer a serious international actor. “Russia is a serious player,” says Sergei Karaganov, chairman of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. “We are more important than our economy or even our nuclear weapons would indicate.”
Now that Putin has put himself at center stage with Bush and other Western leaders, he is again giving Russians the respectability and sense of national importance that they crave. It is a need that he himself also deeply feels. Putin shares the sense of humiliation that many of his countrymen have felt during the past decade. A self-described “pure and utterly successful product of Soviet patriotic education,” he tells interviewers how, as a youth, he was fascinated by “romantic spy stories” about the KGB—and how he came to set his sights early on a career in an organization that others loathed and feared. He served in East Germany in the 1980s, and later recalled the panic that set in as that puppet state collapsed. He and his colleagues burned their files in a furnace that finally burst. When he asked for instructions as angry East Germans filled the streets around the KGB offices, he was told, “Moscow is silent.” “I got the feeling the country no longer existed,” he bitterly recalls, and he still expresses the ambivalence of many Russians about subsequent events at home. “You would need to be heartless not to regret the disintegration of the Soviet Union,” he said. “You’d need to be brainless to want to restore it.”
Few would accuse Putin of wanting to simply turn back the clock. Yet his drive to regain central control over the government, and Russian society in general, has raised understandable concern. Some decry his crackdown, bespeaking an inability to tolerate criticism or dissent—or fully appreciate the fundamentals of democracy. Others worry about his manner of governing, apart from its broader social effect. Grigory Yavlinsky, a liberal parliamentarian, argues that the president’s professed openness has distinct limits. Two days after the Sochi strategy session, where he laid out instructions to the power ministers, he met with legislators in the Kremlin. “Putin comes in. He asks people what they think. Then he gives his own speech. Thus, he has the final word and the meeting is over,” says Yavlinsky, adding that Putin doesn’t like it any other way. Sergei Grigoryants, president of the Glasnost Foundation and a former political prisoner, notes that new governmental-secrecy laws have been used to silence environmentalists and punish scholars who have undesirable contacts with the West. What Putin really wants from his new relationship with Washington, he says, is a free hand, not only in Chechnya but also in dealing with domestic critics.
Opposing voices can still be heard in the media, but they are decidedly muted. “In Soviet times, the only debate was whether life is good or better,” notes one Moscow journalist sardonically. “Now it’s whether Putin is smart or brilliant.” A bit of hyperbole, to be sure. But there are unmistakable signs that Putin-mania could veer toward old-guard Soviet-style adulation. A factory in the Chelyabinsk region in the Urals is about to launch production of cast-iron busts of Putin. Factory director Sergei Dedyadev says orders for the busts, which will cost about $1,600 each, are rolling in, even though the formal promotional campaign begins only this week. Mikhail Kozhokin, editor of the daily Izvestia, calls Putin “a politician ideally suited to this society.” He explains: “Traditionally, Russia wants to see a leader with a strong hand and respect for the secret services. But at the same time, it wants this person to have some democratic convictions.”
For now Russia seems to have weathered the worst of the post-communist economic storm and seems poised for a new era of unaccustomed growth. A newer generation of Russians looks increasingly to themselves for their well-being, rather than the state. And under Putin, that state seems to be regaining a measure of confidence and responsibility to its people, albeit with diminished resources and still far too many arbitrary powers. The hope is that all this eventually coalesces into the makings of a stable, more democratic society, a Russia not only at peace with its neighbors but itself. How ironic that an act of international terrorism could seemingly set so much of this in motion.
With Roy Gutman in Washington and Eve Conant in Moscow
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