Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, Part 1 of 14
The end result of Putin’s misinformation and contradictory information is to create the image that he is unknowable and unpredictable and therefore even dangerous.
From the book:
Mr. Putin
Operative in the Kremlin
Fiona Hill & Clifford G. Gaddy
Copyright © 2013 The Brookings Institution
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Page 7–8
The most obvious reason we cannot take any story or so–called fact at face value when it comes to Vladimir Putin is that we are dealing with someone who is a master at manipulating information, suppressing information, and creating pseudo–information. In the course of studying Putin, and Putin’s Russia, we have learned this the hard way. In today’s world of social media, the public has the impression that we know, or easily can know, everything about everybody. Nothing, it seems, is private or secret. And still, after 15 years, we remain ignorant of some of the most basic facts about a man who is arguably the most powerful individual in the world, the leader of an important nation. When there is no certifiably real and sold information, any tidbit becomes precious.
THE PUTIN BIOGRAPHY
Where then do we start? The basic biographical data, surely, are beyond dispute. Vladimir Putin was born in the Soviet city of Leningrad in October 1952 and was his parents’ only surviving child. His childhood was spent in Leningrad, where his youthful pursuits include training first in sambo (a martial art combining judo and wrestling that was developed by the Red Soviet Army) and then in judo. After school, Putin studied law at Leningrad State University (LGU), graduated in 1975, and immediately joined the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB. He was posted to Dresden in East Germany in 1985, after completing a year of study at the KGB’s academy in Moscow. He was recalled from Dresden to Leningrad in 1990, just as the USSR was on the verge of collapse.
During his time in the KGB, Putin worked as a case officer (the “operative” of our title) and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel. In 1990–91, he moved into the intelligence service’s “active reserve” and returned to Leningrad State University as a deputy to the vice rector. He became an advisor to one of his former law professors, Anatoly Sobchak, who left the university to become chairman of Leningrad’s city soviet, or council. Putin worked with Sobchak during Sobchak’s successful electoral campaign to become the first democratically elected mayor of what was now St. Petersburg. In June 1991, Putin became deputy mayor of St. Petersburg and was put in charge of the city’s Committee for External Relations. He officially resigned from the KGB in August 1991.
In 1996, after Mayor Sochak lost his bid for reelection, Vladimir Putin moved to Moscow to work in the Kremlin in the department that managed presidential property. In March 1997, Putin was elevated to deputy chief of the presidential staff. He assumed a number of other responsibilities within the Kremlin before being appointed head of the Russian Federal Security Service (the FSB, the successor to the KGB) in July 1998. A year later, in August 1999, Vladimir Putin was named, in rapid succession, one of Russia’s first deputy prime ministers and then prime minister by President Boris Yeltsin, who also indicated Putin was his preferred successor as president. Finally, on December 31, 1999, Putin became acting president of Russia after Yeltsin resigned. He was officially elected to the position of president in March 2000. Putin served two terms as Russia’s president from 2000 to 2004 and from 2004 to 2008, before stepping aside – in line with Russia’s constitutional prohibition against three consecutive presidential terms – to assume the position of prime minister. In March 2012, Putin was reelected to serve another term as Russia’s president until 2018, thanks to a constitutional amendment pushed through by then President Dmitry Medvedev in December 2008 extending the presidential term from four to six years.
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Page 10–11
PUTIN’S PERSONAL WEALTH
In the wake of Putin’s action in Ukraine in the spring of 2014 and the search by politicians in the West for effective levers to “punish Putin,” one tempting option was to focus on the Russian president’s personal wealth. Over the years, there have been repeated stories about how Mr. Putin had accumulated a vast fortune thanks to massive corruption within the inner circle of what we call Russia, Inc. Early on, it was rumored that Putin’s net worth was $20 billion. With each retelling, the number grew – $30 billion, $40 billion, $70 billion, up (at last count) to $100 billion. These stories date back to Putin’s time in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office, they implicate his family and close associates, and they have been frequently featured in Russian as well as Western media. There is, however, little hard documentary evidence to back up even the most credible reporting.
Some of the world’s top financial institutions have conducted serious research on how the corrupt hide their stolen assets. We did not have the means to undertake the kind of detailed and laborious technical work necessary to pursue Mr. Putin’s purported ill–gotten gains, nor did we want to engage in further conjecture on this subject. As we indicate in the book, there is notable circumstantial evidence – including expensive watches and suits – of Mr. Putin’s supposedly luxurious lifestyle beyond the official trappings of the Russian presidency. These extravagances on their own do not make the case that he has amassed a fortune in the tens of billions of dollars. There are competing narratives that Putin’s day–to–day lifestyle is ascetic rather than luxurious. It is certainly true that individuals with close and long–standing personal ties to Vladimir Putin now occupy positions of great responsibility within the Russian economy and are some of Russia’s (and the world’s) richest men. In interviews, they are remarkably frank in discussing the links between their political connections, their economic roles, and their money.
There might also be political reasons for Putin to accumulate and flaunt personal wealth. Indeed, some of the stories in the Russian press, and some related to us by Russian colleagues, suggest that Mr. Putin himself might even encourage rumors that he is the richest of the rich to curb political ambitions among Russia’s billionaire businessmen, the so–called oligarchs. They cannot even compete in the realm of personal wealth with Vladimir Putin, and it is he who has supreme power in Russia. But this is all speculation about facts that remain, for now, unproven.
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Page 12–13
One idea that gained currency during the crisis in Ukraine is that Putin is a reckless gambler who takes dangerous risks. This argument is based on the alleged fact that Putin’s KGB trainers deemed that he suffered from a “diminished sense of danger” (ponizhennoye chuvstvo opasnosti). Although presented in a couple of recent books about Putin as if it were a new revelation, this is a story familiar to anyone who has read Putin’s 2000 book, Ot pervogo litsa. There, Putin describes how, when he was studying at the KGB academy, one characteristic ascribed to him as a “negative trait” was a “diminished” or “lowered sense of danger” – a deficiency that was considered very serious, he noted.
In fact, the Putin book turns out to be the only source for this story, something that ought to have set off alarm bells. Ot pervogo litsa was intended to be a campaign biography, or “semi–autobiography.” The publication of the book was orchestrated by Putin’s staff in the spring of 2000 based on a series of one–on–one interviews with a carefully selected troika of Russian journalists. Putin’s team’s task was to stage–manage the initial presentation, to all of Russia, of this relatively unknown person who was now standing for election as president of the country. It was crafted as a set of conversations with Putin himself, his wife, and other people close to him in his childhood and early life. Every vignette, every new fact presented in the book was chosen for a specific political purpose. The journalists who interviewed Putin also used some of the material for articles in their own newspapers and other publications.
What, then, could Putin’s purpose have been in revealing such a character flaw? The answer becomes evident when one reflects on the curious ending of the book. Ot pervogo litsa ends with the interviewers noting that Putin seems, after all the episodes in his life that they have gone through, to be a predictable and rather boring person. Had he never done anything on a whim perhaps? Putin responded by recounting an incident when he risked his own life and that of his passenger, his martial arts coach, while driving on a road outside Leningrad (in fact when he was at university). He tried to grab a piece of hay through his open car window from a passing truck and very nearly lost control of the car. At the end of the harrowing ride, his white–faced (and presumably furious) coach turned to Putin and said, “You take risks.” Why did Putin do that? “I guess I thought the hay smelled good” (Navernoye, seno vkusno pakhlo), said Putin. This is the last line in the book. The reader clearly is meant to identify with Putin’s coach and ask: “Wait! What was that all about? Just who is this guy?”
This story offers a classic case of Putin and his team imparting and spinning information in a confusing manner so that it can be interpreted in multiple ways. Putin tells contradictory versions of the story in the same passages of his book. Immediately after stating that the characteristic was ascribed to him during his KGB studies, Putin then suggests that his “lowered sense of danger” was well–known to him and all his friends already in his university days (that is, before he was ever in the KGB). Putin wants people to see him in certain ways, and yet be confused. He promotes the idea of himself both as a risk–taker and as someone who takes calculated risks and always has a fallback option. Which version is the real one? Both have a certain power and useful effect. The end result of Putin’s misinformation and contradictory information is to create the image that he is unknowable and unpredictable and therefore even dangerous. It is part of his play in the domestic and international political game – to keep everyone guessing about, and in some cases fearing, how he might react.
Putin is hardly the first world leader to engage in this sort of conscious image manipulation to create doubts about their rationality or even sanity. Richard Nixon’s notorious “Madman Theory” during the Vietnam War is a case in point. In 1972, believing he had a chance to bluff the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table to end the war, Nixon instructed his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, to convey the message to the North Vietnamese, via their Soviet backers, that Nixon was prepared to use a nuclear weapon. As James Rosen and Luke Nichter write in a recent article, “Nixon wanted to impress upon the Soviets that the president of the United States was, in a word, mad: unstable, erratic in his decision–making, and capable of anything.” In a memoir, former White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman wrote that Nixon had carefully scripted it all.