Russian President Vladimir Putin has been playing an aggressive game of chess against the West. What’s he up to?
How powerful is Putin?
In Russia, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin,
64, rules like a czar, with near-total control
of the country. A former KGB agent, he
is a secretive, self-disciplined geopolitical
strategist who, unlike most Russian men,
doesn’t drink at all. He presides over a
cult of personality that seems comical to
outsiders—images of him shirtless on horseback,
tracking down a Siberian tiger, or
diving in the Black Sea to retrieve ancient
artifacts are common in Russian media.
But his macho nationalism resonates with
the many Russians who longed for a strong
leader after the chaos of the Soviet collapse.
Putin’s regime is deeply entangled with the
Russian oil industry and the country’s billionaire
oligarchs; as a result, his personal
fortune is immense, estimated at some $40 billion in palaces,
planes, and stakes in oil companies and banks. His private life is
mysterious: He divorced his wife, Lyudmila, after 31 years and
rarely mentions his two daughters, and rumors have linked him
romantically to an Olympic gymnast and a calendar model.
How did he come to power?
Through the work of the FSB, successor to the Soviet KGB. Putin
was an unknown FSB operative when the agency strong-armed
an ailing President Boris Yeltsin into picking him as prime minister
in August 1999. Putin had spent five years as a spy in East
Germany. Just a month after he took office, a series of apartment
bombings shattered Moscow, killing about 300 people. The FSB
blamed Chechen extremists, although there is strong evidence the
spy agency planted the bombs itself; the carnage served as pretext
for a second ruthless war to put down the restive Muslim province
of Chechnya. Putin became the face of the battle, vowing in
his characteristically crude language to eliminate all the terrorists,
“wherever they hide, even on the crapper.” By the end of the year,
Chechnya had been laid waste, thousands of Chechen civilians
were dead, and Yeltsin had named the now popular Putin as his
successor as president.
How has he governed?
Putin has sought to bolster Russia’s
power against the encroachment of
the West, picking fights with nearby
Georgia and Ukraine and intervening
in Syria as a show of strength. His
proud nationalism has made him very
popular among Russians, although the
international sanctions brought on by
his seizure of Crimea—combined with
a sharp downturn in oil prices—have
badly damaged Russia’s fragile economy.
Russia’s gross domestic product
tumbled from $2.2 trillion in 2013 to
$1.3 trillion in 2015—lower than that
of Italy, Brazil, or Canada. Only 27 percent
of Russians have any savings
at all, and the average Russian now
spends half his or her money on food.
Few Russians, however, complain.
Why is that?
Step by step, Putin has stamped out the
remaining glimmers of democracy and
civil society that emerged in Russia after
the fall of the Soviet Union. He did so
under the guise of reform, by going after
oligarchs who had enriched themselves
through the privatization of former
Soviet state assets—but ultimately he
replaced them with oligarchs loyal only
to him. Independent media has been all
but snuffed out, and the most dogged
critics and journalists have been killed.
(See box.) Regional governors are now
appointed, not elected, and the legislature
is made up of parties loyal to Putin, with
just a few dissidents to give the appearance
of opposition. Putin calls this system
“managed democracy,” and it is essentially a one-man show.
Why did he meddle in a U.S. election?
Several reasons. One of them, U.S. intelligence services say, was to
exact revenge on Hillary Clinton, who as secretary of state made
strong statements condemning the apparent rigging of the 2011
Russian parliamentary elections. Putin blamed her for the demonstrations
against him, saying she had given “a signal” to demonstrators
working “with the support of the U.S. State Department”
to undermine him. To his KGB-trained mind, the U.S. is behind all
threats to his power and Russia’s interests. “We need to safeguard
ourselves from this interference in our internal affairs,” Putin said.
A crackdown on dissent followed, with arrests of protesters and
new laws banning mass gatherings. Putin found the Russian demonstrations
so unsettling because they closely followed the Arab
Spring uprisings, and the toppling of dictators such as Egypt’s
Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi. So he and the
FSB decided to launch a counterattack on democracy itself.
What did it consist of?
A sophisticated cyberwar against Western governments and institutions,
the use of internet trolls
and fake news to sow confusion,
and financial support for
right-wing nationalist parties in
Europe. U.S. intelligence services
have concluded that the Russians
hacked Democratic officials
primarily to undermine faith in
democracy and divide the country,
as well as to hurt Clinton and
help Donald Trump. “His aim is
to discredit the U.S. election process,”
said Russia analyst Arkady
Ostrovsky in TheAtlantic.com. If
the West seemed “as hypocritical,
as cynical as Russia is,” why
would Russians or nearby countries
such as Ukraine or Georgia
want to emulate it? Putin hopes
to build himself and Russia up, in
other words, by dragging the U.S.
and the West down.
Where critics end up dead
Those who cross or criticize Putin have an unfortunate
tendency to get poisoned, shot, or beaten to death
under mysterious circumstances. Anna Politkovskaya,
who documented Putin’s brutal abuses of civilians in
Chechnya, was brazenly gunned down in the streets
of Moscow in 2006. Alexander Litvinenko, an FSB
whistleblower who described how the agency staged
the Moscow bombings to bring Putin to power, was
poisoned with polonium in London; a British inquiry
found that Putin likely personally ordered the hit.
Boris Nemtsov, an opposition leader working on an
exposé of Russian military involvement in Ukraine,
was assassinated in 2015, just steps from the Kremlin.
All told, at least 34 journalists have been murdered
in Russia since 2000, according to the international
Committee to Protect Journalists. When MSNBC host
Joe Scarborough asked Trump last year about Putin’s
record of assassinating journalists, Trump replied, “At
least he’s a leader,” adding, “I think that our country
does plenty of killing, too.”