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Chrystia FreelandWhat does Putin wantWhat does Vladimir Putin want? Russia’s President’s annexation of
Crimea in the spring, and continued aggression since then, have made this one
of the world’s most urgent questions. We need to understand what he wants if we
are to figure out how much of a threat he poses and how to contain him. So far,
most efforts to answer this puzzle have taken their cue from the 19th century,
seeking to explain Putin either as a player of Metternich-style realpolitik, or
else as a Greater Russian nationalist. Both versions miss what is new about
Putin and the political problems he is trying to solve. In analyses of what Russia will do next, there is a lot of discussion of
the strategic interests of the Russian state. But to frame the question in that
way is fundamentally to misunderstand political power in Putin’s Russia. Putin
is the ruler of an authoritarian regime, but he has no revolutionary party or
ideology to secure his hold on power—for this KGB apparatchik, it
really is the case that l’état, c’est moi. Putin poses a novel challenge to the world order because his political
objective is new, too. His goal, since he first entered the Kremlin in 2000,
has been to work out how to be an authoritarian ruler in a middle-income country
and in a post-Cold War world in which the technology revolution has wired the
global middle class. This is a project he shares with the world’s other
authoritarian and would-be authoritarian rulers, which is one reason countering
Putin is so important. Looking at Putin through the lens of personal power is unfamiliar partly
because so many foreign policy analysts prefer the abstractions of geopolitical
chess to the messy, complexities of domestic politics. Nor does the Kremlin
encourage us to understand its actions abroad as an exercise in shoring up its
authoritarian regime at home—Moscow’s preferred explanation for its aggression
is a reanimated Russian nationalism, whose emotional punch helps to compensate
for its internal contradictions. (For instance, we are told that Russia should
control Ukraine because there is no difference between Russians and Ukrainians,
and also that Russia should control Ukraine because Ukrainians are fascists
with a genetic animosity towards Russians). But viewing Putin as a
neo-authoritarian ruler whose principal goal is staying in power is the best
way to understand his seemingly erratic course over the past 14 years, and the
necessarily improvised nature of the path he is charting now. Putin rose to power, and began to build the authoritarian regime over which
he now presides, in the wake of the failure of Russia’s experiment with
democratic capitalism. In the 1990s, Russia made progress in that
direction—much more than we often remember today. But the effort ultimately foundered.
The turning point was 1996, when then-President Boris Yeltsin and his team,
panicked by the political strength of the communists, gave the lion’s share of
Russia’s natural resources to a handful of men in exchange for their support in
the upcoming presidential elections. As a result, Yeltsin was re-elected, but
both democracy and capitalism were deeply discredited. As Russians at the time
liked to joke, “Everything Marx told us about communism was false, but
everything he told us about capitalism was true.” Russia’s faltering democracy,
if you could still call it that, was further weakened in 1998, when commodity
prices plunged and an emerging crisis in the financial markets forced the
country to default on its debt and devalue the rouble. Enter Vladimir Putin. By the end of the 1990s, Yeltsin and his
intimates had given up any grand ambitions for the country. Their goal was to
stay alive, to stay out of jail and to stay rich. Putin,
whose KGB background promised toughness and whose political biography
demonstrated loyalty, seemed like a man who could deliver on these objectives.
And so, in a deal brokered by one of the oligarchs who was enriched in the 1996
loans-for-shares privatisation pact (in which the government traded control of
the country’s natural resources for political support), Putin was annointed
President. Having arrived in the Kremlin, Putin needed to figure out how to stay
there. He faced some immediate problems. The machinery of the Russian state was
weak. The Russian Federation itself was fraying at the edges, most notably in
the Caucasus, where the Chechen drive for independence had not been fully
quelled. And, while the undisguised handover of power to Putin showed that the
Yeltsin clan had given up on the idea of democracy, not everyone else had. The
educated, westernised middle class had found its economic footing during the
1990s, and it was starting to look for a voice. It had powerful allies in some
of the oligarchs, particularly Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was starting to use some
of his wealth to build up Russia’s nascent civil society. Putin decisively and brutally crushed these threats—he battered Chechnya
into submission, in a war which killed tens of thousands; he brought the
oligarchs to heel, starting with Khodorkovsky, whom he imprisoned and whose
assets he confiscated; and he used some of Russia’s petro-wealth to rebuild the
state. These crackdowns laid the foundations for the soft authoritarianism
which Putin built in the early years of his rule. In a country that had never been a democracy, establishing an authoritarian
regime was the easy part. What was harder was seeing how to ensure that the
regime, and its ruler, endured. In the 21st century, there is no easy answer to
that riddle, and no obvious template. Putin first tried what you might call “authoritarianism-lite.” Mass media,
particularly television, came under his control, as did big business,
especially in the natural resource sector. Foreign travel and private dissent
were permitted, but any critic who seemed to pose an actual political threat
was beaten, arrested or exiled. Putin’s state was firmly in control and no
meaningful challenge was allowed to emerge. But as long as you didn’t threaten
Putin’s monopoly on power, you could live a free personal life. And private
business, outside the industries that the Kremlin deemed strategic, was at
least nominally encouraged. The Russians described this as the Pinochet or Asian model. The hope was
that Putin’s authoritarian state could provide sound macro-economic management
and stable government. These, in turn, would stimulate economic growth. The idea was to offer Russians a trade-off between
democracy and prosperity. A lot of people, including western investors and
western leaders (these were the days when George W Bush gazed into Putin’s eyes
and claimed to have seen his soul), were convinced. The Yeltsin era had been
intermittently democratic, but it had also been chaotic and corrupt. It seemed
plausible, therefore, that a firm hand might be what Russia needed to become
rich. For a while, it seemed to work. Russia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew
by an avergae of more than 5 per cent a year for the first decade of Putin’s
presidency, and the country was named as one of the “Brics,” the four emerging
markets whose explosive growth the investment bank Goldman
Sachs predicted would transform the world economy. But when you looked at those GDP numbers in a little more detail—as, for
example, Mike McFaul, a future United States Ambassador to Russia, did in an influential
2008 essay in the journal Foreign Affairs—you saw that most of that growth came
from high commodity prices. The problem for Putin was that the seemingly
attractive trading of democracy for prosperity contained two large internal
contradictions. The first was that Putin and his inner circle wanted more than unchallenged
political power. They wanted to get extremely rich, too. As the Russians put
it, Putin wanted to rule like Joseph Stalin, but live like Roman Abramovich.
You couldn’t amass that kind of wealth if you ran Russia like Singapore—you had
to build a kleptocracy. The second contradiction was even more troubling. Building an economically
successful Russia in the 21st century both required and created an affluent,
wired and empowered middle-class. The authoritarian-lite regime of the early
Putin years rested on the hope that Russia’s rising middle class would
attribute its prosperity to Putin, and that those who didn’t would leave. For a while, that calculation seemed to work. But in 2012, when Putin, who
had been serving as Prime Minister since May 2008, returned to the Kremlin in
what many saw as a mockery of the very idea of democracy, the urban middle
classes rebelled. Their protests were easily crushed and their leaders
marginalised. But the demonstrations exposed, for Putin and his inner circle,
the fatal flaw in authoritarian capitalism—if your system worked, you were
sowing the seeds of your own destruction. Putin’s economic achievements were
creating exactly the kind of wired middle class that would want to oust him. That realisation was a turning point. If authoritarianism-lite didn’t
guarantee Putin’s survival, the regime would need to find other sources of support. The obvious choice was nationalism. As the
Soviet experience had shown, ideology can help to prop up authoritarian regimes
that don’t deliver the goods economically. Compared to communism, a fully developed social, political and economic
system brought to power in Russia by a disciplined revolutionary party, or to
the religious ideology that has kept the authoritarian regime in Iran in power
for decades, Russian nationalism was a weak tool. But it was all Putin had. And
so, over the past couple of years, the Kremlin propaganda machine strengthened
its already extensive control over Russian mass media and civil society—today,
for example, even bloggers need a government permit. It promoted a sense of
Russian national identity which was at once injured and aggressive, and often
closely tied to a sense of Russian ethnicity and to the Russian Orthodox
Church. By the autumn of 2013, the authoritarian capitalist economic model was
faltering—growth was just 1.3 percent—and the state was promoting an
increasingly strident version of Russian nationalism. Putin’s regime wasn’t
wildly successful, but it was firmly in charge at home and preparing to
celebrate its place on the world stage when it hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics
at Sochi on the Black Sea coast. What upset that fragile balance was Putin’s multiple miscalculations over Ukraine.
They began with his view that Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych had the
authority to overturn his longstanding promise, which commanded wide domestic
support, to sign a treaty that would formalise political and economic
“association” with the European Union (EU). In exchange for $15bn from Moscow, and possibly additional private
inducements, in the autumn of 2013, Yanukovych announced that instead he would
join Putin’s Eurasian Customs Union. At first, everyone, Putin included, hailed
that volte-face as a Kremlin masterstroke. What no one counted on was the
strength of Ukrainian civil society and its support for the European values
that Ukrainians believed the EU deal upheld. Putin’s next miscalculation was to believe that the “Maidan” uprising could
be repressed by state force. Instead, each escalation of government violence
against the demonstrators in Kiev exponentially increased public support for
them. That dynamic culminated in mass violence in February 2014, when state
snipers killed dozens of protestors in the centre of the Ukrainian capital. The
resulting public revulsion was so great that even Yanukovych’s remaining
supporters in the government abandoned him, and he chose to flee the country. Denied his strategic objective in Ukraine—securing the country as a vassal
state, ruled by a friendly fellow authoritarian—Putin took a strategic gamble
which transformed the political map of Europe, and its geopolitics. He invaded
Crimea by stealth, then formally annexed it. The west imposed economic
sanctions, but not military ones, and strongly discouraged the Ukrainians from
responding with force, too. Rebuffed in his political efforts in Ukraine, but successful in his
military ones, Putin took the obvious next step—he tried to replay the Crimean scenario
throughout the vast swath of land in south and east Ukraine he has taken to
calling Novorossiya. Again, the Ukrainians surprised him, and that effort was
largely scuppered. The Russian-armed separatists only succeeded in taking
control in the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine, and even there, throughout
the spring and summer of 2014, Ukrainian forces steadily pushed back the
insurgents. With Kiev on the verge of winning, Putin again escalated, directly
sending in equipment and what Nato estimated to be around 4,000 Russian troops.
The immediate result was a stalemate—a wobbly ceasefire, with the Russian-armed
insurgents in effective control of about a third of the Donbass. The nationalist underpinning to Putin’s power has grown stronger. He has
expanded Russia’s borders for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet
Union, and has faced down the west. That brought him, at least at the outset of
the campaign in Crimea, a surge of popularity at home. However, aggression against Ukraine has had severe implications for the
Russian economy. Western sanctions started soft and came gradually, but they
are now starting to bite—the European Central Bank estimates that
$221bn in capital fled Russia in the first quarter of 2014, and according to
calculations by UBS, the Swiss financial services company, Russian firms
need to refinance $157bn in debt in the coming months, which will be well nigh
impossible to do in western capital markets. Economists are predicting that, on
current trends, the Russian economy will go into recession next year. The consequence for Putin is that the old formula for shoring up his power
no longer works in a new world of his own making. Previously, Putin had secured
his rule through a combination of coercion, some measure of positive economic
performance and rising nationalism. That equilibrium has been shattered. He
must now decide whether to try to recreate it, or else to seek to build
something else, with the new forces that he has unleashed. In theory, one option would be to try to wind the clock back to February
2014. To do that, Putin would need to keep the peace with Ukraine and work to
restore Russia’s standing as a reliable player in the global economy. And for
all the harsh rhetoric from the west, Putin knows that such a rollback is
achievable. That was the lesson of events in Russia’s smaller southern
neighbour Georgia in 2008. In August that year, in response to a Georgian
attack on separatists in South Ossetia, which had effectively been controlled
by Russian proxies since the early 1990s, Russia blockaded a Georgian port,
openly invaded Georgia and briefly occupied four Georgian cities. The western
rhetorical response was fierce, but the political and economic reaction was
muted. By 2014, Russia was enjoying global attention as the host of the Sochi
Olympics. The western, and particularly the European, response to the invasion of
Ukraine has been much firmer. But after just a couple of months of an
intermittently violated ceasefire, some European leaders are already calling
for sanctions to be softened. The war against Islamic State in the
Middle East and the tentative rapprochement with Iran give western chiefs
another incentive to welcome Russia back into the global community. All of which means that Putin can safely assume Russia and Russian
companies could be reintegrated into the global economy with few, if any,
concessions being demanded of the Kremlin. As long as fighting stops in the
areas of Donetsk and Luhansk currently controlled by the separatists, and
Russian-backed forces make no fresh forays into Ukraine, Putin could expect,
after a decent passage of time, to return to his seat at the G8 table (Russian membership was suspended in March 2014), and Russian companies could start raising finance on western capital markets once again. This choice would mean giving up on most of Ukraine—at least for now.
Ukraine’s “association” agreement with the EU was ratified in September. The
country has been radicalised by the Maidan revolution and the subsequent
Russian invasion and is firmly behind President Petro Poroshenko’s declared
intention eventually to join the EU. Pro-western parties dominated in October’s
parliamentary elections, while both the far right and communists were routed. Nevertheless, a Kremlin which opted for returning to the status quo now could hope eventually to bring Ukraine to heel. Russia has
an arsenal of soft power tools for undermining Ukraine’s pro-western reformers,
ranging from the time-honoured tactic of cutting off energy supplies, through
blocking imports of manufactured and agricultural goods to transforming the
separatist enclave in the east into a source of chronic destabilisation and
corruption. What is more, the Ukrainians themselves are pretty good at undermining
their own revolutions. The leaders who came to power in the wake of the 2004
Orange Revolution were so ineffective in office that Yanukovych, a pro-Russian
leader who had tried to steal the 2004 ballot, was elected President in 2010 in
a free and fair vote. Today, Ukrainians are united behind Poroshenko,
determined to resist Russia and confident in their decision to throw their lot
in with the EU. But it is all too easy to imagine how a combination of Russian
subversion and Ukrainian incompetence could, as it did in 2010, bring another
pro-Kremlin leader to power in Kiev—particularly given the magnitude of the
economic challenges that Ukraine faces. For Putin, meanwhile, pressing on is the more dangerous route, but it
promises a more substantial dividend. While the Russian upper-middle class is
already feeling the squeeze of the sanctions, these measures are some way from
affecting Putin’s own standard of living. And continued aggression,
particularly when the west’s stomach for the fight is uncertain, offers Putin
the potential prize of a presidency underpinned by nationalist fervour and military victory. If Putin chooses this option, the imperfect calm in the Donbass will be our
generation’s phony war, a period of respite before further aggression. Putin’s
great tactical strength is his fearless opportunism—he pounced on South Ossetia after then-President
Mikheil Saakashvili’s ill-judged campaign; he snatched Crimea before Ukraine’s
post-revolutionary leaders had found their new offices. The outlines of such an aggressive approach are easy to discern. Abroad,
Putin would fan the grievances of ethnic Russians outside the Russian
Federation and look to build their domestic political capacity through his
proxies. This work has, in fact, already begun. In September, Anatoly Makarov,
head of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department for Relations with
Compatriots Abroad, told a Russian-language Baltic publication that Russia
would “do everything possible to defend the rights and interests” of ethnic
Russians in the region. “We are pursuing a policy so that regardless of where
Russian compatriots live they are guaranteed all rights and freedoms,”
Makarovsaid, “and have the chance to preserve the culture and traditions of
their historical motherland.” The Kremlin fired another shot across western bows a few weeks earlier. Two
days after US President Barack Obama visited Tallinn, Russian agents
crossed the border into Estonia and abducted Eston Kohver, an Estonian
counter-intelligence officer. As of this writing, he was still imprisoned in
Russia. The danger is that these are the preludes to a Russian effort to repeat, in
those regions of Latvia and Estonia that are dominated by ethnic Russians, the
hybrid war it fought in Crimea and the Donbass. The Kremlin has a lot to work
with. Ethnic Russians account for a greater share of the population in Latvia
and Estonia than they do in Ukraine, the linguistic and cultural differences
between them and ethnic Estonians and Latvians is much greater, and they are
already politically organised. In October, in parliamentary elections in
Latvia, where Russian speakers make up more than a third of the population, a
pro-Russian party supported chiefly by Russian speakers won more seats than any
other party. Its leader is the Mayor of Riga, the Latvian capital. Toomas
Ilves, the Estonian President, told me that Russian speakers in his country
tend to accept the Kremlin version of events in Ukraine, because they get their
news from Russian state television. Ethnic Russians make up about a quarter of
Estonia’s population, and about 75 percent in one eastern county. It is all too easy to imagine the Kremlin sending its “little green
men”—the non-uniformed Russian armed forces seen in Crimea and the Donbass—into
these communities and using them to break-up and destabilise Estonia and
Latvia, as it has already done in Ukraine and Georgia. The beauty of this
approach, from the Kremlin’s point of view, is that it disguises a Russian
invasion as a domestic ethnic conflict. That sleight of hand, which helped to
confuse the western reaction in Ukraine, would be even more significant in the
Baltic states, which belong to Nato. In September in Estonia, Obama promised
that Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius were as secure as London, Paris and Berlin. But
would the west invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty and come to the
defence of the Baltic states if ethnic Russians living in Latvia or Estonia
demanded autonomy and took up arms to achieve it? Putin is already courting the allies in Europe who would take his side of
that argument. Europe’s resurgent far-right parties are naturally sympathetic
to his authoritarian politics, his emphasis on ethnicity as an organising
political principle and his social conservatism. They also share his goal of
weakening the EU. Russia has close ties, in some cases financial ones, with
far-right parties in Europe. And far-right European politicians, including
Marine Le Pen in France, supported Putin’s annexation of Crimea and sent
observers to the referendum staged there in March. Most importantly, Putin is tightening political control at home. He began
his presidency by restricting the freedom and independence of the media,
suppressing political opposition and making political loyalty a precondition
for doing business in Russia. Things got worse in 2012, when Putin returned to
the Kremlin and brutally repressed the Russians who protested that
anti-democratic move. But it was still possible to hope that Putin’s ambition was to be the kind
of authoritarian ruler that the economist Mancur Olson has termed a “stationary
bandit”—a tyrant who sought a monopoly on political power, but who also had an
incentive to maximise national economic success because his own wealth depended
on it. The release in December 2013 of Khodorkovsky, the oligarch who
challenged Putin early in his presidency and was imprisoned, was one sign that
the President might have decided he was politically secure enough to declare
Russia open for business. Another was the Sochi Olympics, which were partly
staged as a vast advertisement to attract foreign investment. The Maidan changed all of that. The increase in political repression inside
Russia was predictable—Putin’s first and biggest fear was democratic contagion.
More surprising was his reaction to western economic sanctions. Since they were
imposed, Putin has signalled two things—that his personal control over the
Russian economy will be greater than ever, and that he wants Russia to become
less connected to the economies of the G7 and more dependent on its
own resources and its relationships with other authoritarian regimes,
especially China. Putin let Russia’s business leaders know they were on a tighter leash by
ordering the arrest in September of Vladimir Yevtushenkov, one of the country’s
richest men and the head of Sistema, a conglomerate with interests in oil and
telecommunications. Yevtushenkov isn’t part of Putin’s inner circle: he made
his fortune through his connections with Yuri Luzhkov, the Mayor of Moscow in
the Yeltsin era. But his political loyalty had previously never been in doubt.
In Russia, his arrest was widely seen as a warning to the country’s oligarchs
that no criticism, however tempered or private, about the impact of the
economic sanctions, and the foreign policy that had provoked them, would be
tolerated. Even more striking is the broader shift in economic strategy. Putin
abandoned Yeltsin’s policy of pell-mell democratisation early on, but he
largely stuck with his predecessor’s haphazard effort to transform Russia into
a capitalist economy integrated into the global market. Since March, however,
Putin has been moving in a different direction. He wants Russia to do business
with China, instead of trading with the west, and has done an energy deal with
Beijing. Instead of growing by becoming more integrated in the world economy,
he wants Russia to become more reliant on domestic producers—Putin responded to
western sanctions by banning imports of many western foods. Russians, he says,
must again learn to feed themselves. This shift in economic policy matters because it marks the end of Putin’s
pre-Crimea model for governing. His deal with the Russian people had been that
they would suffer political repression, but in exchange enjoy economic
prosperity. Western sanctions have made that unsustainable. But instead of backing
down, Putin has chosen a new economic path. The country’s past experience shows that it will make Russians poorer. That means Putin needs
a different source of political power. Part of the answer is repression—witness
Yevtushenkov’s arrest. Another is nationalist fervour, which is why Russia’s
neighbours should be nervous. As a Russian saying has it, eating increases the
appetite. Part of what makes Putin’s expansionist pivot so hard for the west to
grapple with is that the values on which it is based are more or less
unfathomable to those of us raised in the postwar era of peace and prosperity.
That bafflement was evident this September at the Yalta European Strategy
conference, an annual gathering which has become Ukraine’s equivalent of
the World Economic Forum at Davos and which this year, for obvious
reasons, was held in Kiev rather than its usual venue, the historic Levada
Palace outside Yalta, on the Crimean peninsula. In an onstage interview with me
there, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair explained that while Europe was
certainly very keen to sign an association agreement with Ukraine, it would
never have occurred to European leaders to compel Ukraine to join. “We don’t
force countries to be our friends,” Blair said with an awkward chuckle. “That
would be absurd.” A few weeks later, the Scottish referendum, and the option it
offered Scots to peacefully dissolve their centuries old union with England,
showed that Blair’s point wasn’t just rhetoric. When it emerged from the ashes of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia seemed
to be about to join the European mainstream, alongside countries which had
decided, for better or worse, that their political alliances would be
consensual and that their borders inviolable. Putin has now made it clear that
these are no longer the rules that Russia will be playing by. Putin’s macho posturing can be so crude and his double-speak so transparent
that it is easy to lose sight of how effective the Kremlin’s foreign
communication strategy has been. All the talk of a mystic Slavic brotherhood,
of feelings of national humiliation, of responding to the threat posed by Nato
and standing up for a multi-polar world has done its job. It has also obscured what it is that Putin really wants. That is quite
simple. He is a dictator whose thirst for power has eroded the economic
prosperity his rule had hitherto partly rested upon. Foreign conquest is an
obvious distraction and substitute. At a time when the west is grappling with the distinctive challenges of the
21st century—“secular” economic stagnation and the threat of climate change to
name only two—this can all feel somehow less urgent than it should. That is
what Putin is counting on. He is hoping that we will be too preoccupied with
the unprecedented problems of a globalised, post-industrial world to challenge
his attempt to return Russia and its environs to the 1950s. Obama may have thought his description of Russia as a mere regional power
that poses a purely regional threat was a clever snub. In fact, that is exactly
how the Kremlin is seeking to frame its aggression in Ukraine—as a dispute
among Slavic nations, of little consequence to the rest of us. Unfortunately,
it is much more than that. Angela Merkel, the western leader who
understands Putin best, appreciates this, and has begun to say so. In Australia
for the G20 meeting in November, she insisted: “All of a sudden, we see
ourselves confronted with a conflict that seems to be an attack against the
very heart of our values. We have to prove that we’ve learned something from
the past.” After nearly a decade and a half of zigzags, Putin’s Russia has chosen its
path. Today it is an authoritarian state, with expansionist ambitions, that
does not consider itself bound by international treaties and norms. To secure
his power at home, Putin has decided to test its limits abroad. Whether it is
in Ukraine, or elsewhere, one day we will have to stop him. Prospect Publishing Ltd http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/what-does-putin-want |