Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, Part 6 of 14
Putin said agents of the intelligence service could think differently and say things that few normal citizens could, but in 1985 glasnost suddenly allowed the whole public to think differently.
We can say this in two different ways, that another Vladimir Putin could have existed, or that someone else could have become the leader of Russia. The book "Mr Putin" emphasizes how cut off Putin was, how out of touch he was, relative to the great changes of glasnost, the transformation of Soviet culture in the late 1980s. But we should also wonder, if Putin had missed so much, and if he was such an outsider, how did he become the leader of Russia? Was there something about being an outsider that actually helped him in his rise?
From the book:
Andropov was also aware, however, that the entrenched and increasingly enfeebled Soviet system was in dire need or reform. In an effort to bring some new perspectives into the KGB and by extension to create an atmosphere conducive to finding new ideas for dealing with the state’s myriad problems, Andropov implemented a policy to extend the institution’s recruitment of young officers from different societal groups, including the Komsomol. The idea was to bring in a cohort of critical–minded recruits to change things. Andropov moved on from the KGB to become leader of the USSR in 1982. Tensions between this group of recruits, which was widely referred to as the Andropov levy (or Andropov draft), and older KGB insiders increased after Andropov’s sudden death in February 1984. Vladimir Putin’s recruitment to the KGB in 1975 as part of this general group compounded his sense of being of outsider.
It seems Putin had many grievances against different elements of Russian society. He was angry at the older KGB leadership for treating him like an outsider. He was angry with Gorvachev for allowing things to fall apart. He was angry with East Germany for its bad leadership. He was angry with Yelstin for allowing chaos.
Is he still angry with those groups, or has he transferred his sense of grievance to the West?
Also from the book:
If Putin had not been posted to Dresden in 1985, but had joined the KGB at a lower level in Moscow, stayed in Leningrad, or been posted to another Russian province, he would most certainly have had a very different set of experiences and impressions, as well as real–time discussions with colleagues and friends about the unfolding events. Putin’s service in the GDR had a very specific, and quite negative, impact on his world view. Service in the Soviet Union might well have changed his outlook in other appreciable ways. It might conceivably have given him a somewhat more positive perspective on the Russia of the 1990s, which came out of the ferment of the 1980s, not simply out of the decay of the USSR. Russian American scholar Leon Aron – in Roads to the Temple, his in–depth intellectual and political history of this critical period in the USSR – describes how much the country changed in the late 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s championing of the policy of glasnost or political openness turned Soviet political thought and high culture on their heads. Formerly taboo issues, including the myriad state crimes and abuses of individual and human rights in the Soviet period, were given a thorough airing at the urging of the Kremlin and the Soviet leadership. This was an elite project at the very highest levels that took the rest of the population into uncharted territory. Soviet ideological touchstones and myths were widely debunked. Newspapers, magazines, TV screens, and cinemas were filled with often shocking revelations. New publications proliferated.
Yes, but if he was the type of person who could be brought round to seeing the benefit of this cultural ferment, would he still be the person who could end up running Russia? If an appreciation of open debate would be beneficial in the leader of Russia, then why didn't the various elites of the 1990s insist on finding a leader who could appreciate that openness? There must be some reason that none of the liberal forces of the 1980s and 1990s were able to win out. Gorvachev introduced glasnost in 1985, but by 2006 Putin was bringing it to an end. The murder of Anna Politkovskaya, in 2006, marks the end of the open period in Russia. (We will review Anna Politkovskaya's book later this month.)
We previously reviewed the end of Gorvachev:
The only force that proved strong enough to break the military-industry-agriculture coalition that dominated Soviet politics was the collapse of the Communist Party - which in turn caused the dissolution of the Soviet state. Until mid-1991, the three economic lobbies were bound together by interest, ideology, and inertia. Had Gorbachev been able to divide the coalition partners, playing one interest group against the others, he might have had more success in asserting control over the Communist Party and the Soviet state. But a strategy of divide and rule proved impossible. So long as they dominated the Communist Party, and as long as the party controlled the state, these groups’ shared interests overwhelmed any tactical alliance Gorachev could have conceivably offered. In the years after the collapse of 1991, with the military divided and discredited by the failed coup, and with industry and agriculture writhing under the pain of inflation and depression, Russian president Boris Yeltsin finally managed to split the groups, co-opting much industrial support while slashing farm subsidies and cutting military funding. Even though the Soviet Union by then no longer existed, however, Yeltsin still faced several years of resistance in his attempt to break the lobbies’ stranglehold on the federal budget and on the central bank. Only after Yeltsin shelled parliament in 1993, pushing the country to the brink of civil war, was the military-industry-agriculture coalition finally destroyed.
The way the military was discredited by their failure after the coup might perhaps explain why the FSB was able to gain an advantage over the military, but it doesn't explain why the FSB was stronger than the reformers. The FSB had no ideas for reviving the economy, and the reformers did have some ideas. But the reformers "shock therapy" failed also. It is possible that the story of the 1990s is the story whereby all possible competing factions were given time on the stage and then failed: Gorvachev failed, the military failed, the radical libertarian reformers failed, and in the end the FSB was the last group that had some power and had not yet been discredited. It’s possible that Putin benefited from being an outsider, as all the insiders had been disgraced. And perhaps it was sheer coincidence that Putin took power at a time when oil prices began to rise, giving him some way of putting a floor under the Russian economy.
Still left uncertain is the question of why the FSB was more powerful than the oligarchs. It's possible that if the oligarchs had thought of themselves as a social class, with unified class interests, they might have been able to act in concert, and so consolidate their power. But of course, the oligarchs in Russia did not think of themselves as a cohesive social class, they simply thought of themselves as criminals who had stolen a great deal and were lucky enough to get away with it. So they lacked any basis to fight back against the FSB, which could claim whatever remnant of legitimacy still attached to the state.
Again, this appears to be a story where every competing elite faction disgraced itself, and in the end the FSB was the last group left that had not yet embarrassed itself. It is possible that the game of musical chairs, among elite factions, was going to continue until oil prices began to rise, and it was simply a coincidence that someone from the FSB was in charge when those prices began to rise. If this interpretation is correct, then much of the analysis of Putin is incorrect: we should not ask what special talent gave him control of Russia, but rather, we should see him as a man who was chosen by random luck.
The successes that we can attribute to Putin are limited in scope, but would include the commitment to pay down debt, maintain the strength of the currency, and manage the fiscal situation with discipline. Many of these ideas came from the liberal/libertarian reformers, but it is noteworthy that during these early years Putin was willing to defer to the liberal/libertarian reformers. (In a previous essay we noted of Putin, “Some leaders only do well when they are put in a position that forces them to suppress their worst vices and their most natural inclinations.”)
Over the last 20 years I have worked with entrepreneurs who have launched many software startups. Some have a brilliant idea, but they never get any interest from investors. Others have a stupid idea but for whatever reason, they get interest from investors. The ones who never get funded lose confidence. The ones who get money become overconfident, convinced of their genius. And the fate of both groups is mostly determined by random luck. And perhaps this is how we should think of Putin, someone who got lucky, but who decided that such luck meant they were a genius. (On the subject of entrepreneurs, Bo Peabody wrote a good book, "Lucky or Smart?")
At some point in the future, after Putin is gone, it is possible we will see the emergence of free speech in Russia. It is possible that this describes not just the past, but also the future:
In Ot pervogo litsa, Vladimir Putin had stated that those in the intelligence service permitted themselves to think differently and say things that few normal citizens could. But while Putin was in Dresden, glasnost suddenly allowed everyone in the Soviet Union to think differently. Saying things that were not previously permitted became normal. Aron describes how debating clubs sprang up in schools and factories, not just in colleges and scientific institutes, and how factory workers were bowled over by the unexpected freedom of debate. One metalworker talked about how “I was simply unused to a free exchange of opinions. Now I see freedom of thought as something natural.” Other observers commented that even people sitting passively in front of their TV screens were witness to programs “utterly unimaginable in [their] openness, frankness, and the heat of political passions.”
The above quotes are drawn from these pages of the book:
Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin
Fiona Hill & Clifford G. Gaddy
Copyright © 2013 The Brookings Institution
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Page 109–111
Putin was one of a generation of young recruits, a cohort of outsiders, brought into the KGB by its chairman Yury Andropov in the 1970s. Andropov himself had come into the KGB as an outsider. His career had been made in the CPSU, not the security services. He had spent a considerable period of time as first secretary of the Communist Party youth organization, the Komsomol, in Karelia. Andropov also served as Soviet ambassador to Budapest during the fateful Hungarian uprising of 1956 (an experience that in some respects mirrors Vladimir Putin’s own time in Dresden as the German Democratic Republic fell apart). On his return to Moscow, Andropov was put in charge of relations with other Communist Party representatives in socialist countries. He also became the head of the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU Secretariat. He was appointed to head the KGB in 1967 just before another uprising in the communist bloc, in Czechoslovakia – the Prague Spring of 1968. During his time at the head of the KGB, from 1967 to 1982, these first–hand observations of political unrest (which were followed by revolts in Afghanistan and Poland toward the end of his tenure in 1979–81) shaped Andropov’s approach to running the institution. In the late 1960s, he was closely associated with spearheading the KGB’s efforts to crush political dissent and with creating the notorious network of psychiatric hospitals that prominent dissidents were often dispatched to “for treatment.”
Andropov was also aware, however, that the entrenched and increasingly enfeebled Soviet system was in dire need or reform. In an effort to bring some new perspectives into the KGB and by extension to create an atmosphere conducive to finding new ideas for dealing with the state’s myriad problems, Andropov implemented a policy to extend the institution’s recruitment of young officers from different societal groups, including the Komsomol. The idea was to bring in a cohort of critical–minded recruits to change things. Andropov moved on from the KGB to become leader of the USSR in 1982. Tensions between this group of recruits, which was widely referred to as the Andropov levy (or Andropov draft), and older KGB insiders increased after Andropov’s sudden death in February 1984. Vladimir Putin’s recruitment to the KGB in 1975 as part of this general group compounded his sense of being of outsider.
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OUTSIDER IN DRESDEN
As a foreigner in Dresden from 1985 to 1989, Putin was also an outsider to the system and events in East Germany. This must have been a strange position for Mr. Putin because it undoubtedly reinforced his view of his identity and role as the critical outsider learning from the mistakes of others. When Putin was posted to Dresden, the GDR was supposedly a Soviet ally, but in fact it was also a country where the leadership of Eric Honecker sometimes acted as if its counterparts in Moscow were as much the enemy as the West.
Honecker’s regime was ideologically hardline, inflexible, not in the least bit pragmatic, and very much out of touch with the grassroots politics of East Germany – as well as out of step with the political changes under way in the Soviet Union. In 1985–89, the GDR’s economy was also dysfunctional. Putin’s years in Dresden made him privy to the ultimate controlled experiment in competing economic systems, between East and West Germany – an experience that he directly referred to, much later on, in his final address to parliament as prime minister in April 2012. Honecker was adamant that the GDR would pursue its own economic and political policies. He avoided public references to Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost (openness) as well as “new thinking” (novoye myshleniye) in foreign policy. The feeling in the USSR leadership was mutual. There was no love lost between the East German leader and Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet leader used every occasion, including a public toast to Honecker marking the opening of an East German exhibition in Moscow in September 1988, to remind his German counterpart of the need for political change.
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Page 116
If Putin had not been posted to Dresden in 1985, but had joined the KGB at a lower level in Moscow, stayed in Leningrad, or been posted to another Russian province, he would most certainly have had a very different set of experiences and impressions, as well as real–time discussions with colleagues and friends about the unfolding events. Putin’s service in the GDR had a very specific, and quite negative, impact on his world view. Service in the Soviet Union might well have changed his outlook in other appreciable ways. It might conceivably have given him a somewhat more positive perspective on the Russia of the 1990s, which came out of the ferment of the 1980s, not simply out of the decay of the USSR. Russian American scholar Leon Aron – in Roads to the Temple, his in–depth intellectual and political history of this critical period in the USSR – describes how much the country changed in the late 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev’s championing of the policy of glasnost or political openness turned Soviet political thought and high culture on their heads. Formerly taboo issues, including the myriad state crimes and abuses of individual and human rights in the Soviet period, were given a thorough airing at the urging of the Kremlin and the Soviet leadership. This was an elite project at the very highest levels that took the rest of the population into uncharted territory. Soviet ideological touchstones and myths were widely debunked. Newspapers, magazines, TV screens, and cinemas were filled with often shocking revelations. New publications proliferated.
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Page 117
In Ot pervogo litsa, Vladimir Putin had stated that those in the intelligence service permitted themselves to think differently and say things that few normal citizens could. But while Putin was in Dresden, glasnost suddenly allowed everyone in the Soviet Union to think differently. Saying things that were not previously permitted became normal. Aron describes how debating clubs sprang up in schools and factories, not just in colleges and scientific institutes, and how factory workers were bowled over by the unexpected freedom of debate. One metalworker talked about how “I was simply unused to a free exchange of opinions. Now I see freedom of thought as something natural.” Other observers commented that even people sitting passively in front of their TV screens were witness to programs “utterly unimaginable in [their] openness, frankness, and the heat of political passions.”
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Pge 119–120
Leningrad, Tsoi’s birthplace, was in the thick of this pioneering phase in popular culture in the late 1980s. It was the center of a counter–cultural scene that openly criticized and mocked old Soviet mores. Young people, fans of the new Soviet rock groups, in striking Western–style clothing with their own twists, turned heads as they strutted along the main streets. They collected to hang out in mass tusovki (gatherings) in city squares.
Because Vladimir Putin did not evolve through all the stages of late Soviet and Russian development from the 1980s through 2000s that would have otherwise linked him to his peers, part of his “Russian DNA” was, and still is, missing. He could not have recaptured this lost time in Dresden’s “valley of the clueless.” This is notable in Putin’s cultural and political references. The 1970s and early 1980s feature heavily in his allusions to Soviet movies and humor – especially the period when he was in his twenties and still a civilian, going to the cinema, watching TV, and sharing and telling jokes. Lyudmila Putina notes in Ot pervogo litsa, when talking about their time socializing in Dresden, that “Volodya” (Vladimir) always liked and knew how to tell a good joke. The 1990s are the constant touchstone for Putin’s political discussions, although much less a source of jokes than the 1970s. The pluralistic, creative part of the late 1980s, the Gorbachev era of optimism, is the missing link.
Vladimir Putin generally has a black view of the late USSR, of Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. When he returned to Leningrad, the state and the Soviet system immediately plunged off the precipice into the abyss. As he noted at the time, this meant that “all the ideals, all the goals that I had had when I went to work for the KGB, collapsed.” This situation “tore my life apart.” This great personal rupture with the collapse of the Soviet Union was followed by what was, in Putin’s view, the unseemly chaos of Yeltsin’s Russia and the 1990s. Mr. Putin’s outlook is not tempered in any way by the more positive developments, the signs of a new and different Russia that could have emerged in the late 1980s – the Russia that Leon Aron recounts in his book. Others in Putin’s inner circle, including most obviously Dmitry Medvedev, would have experienced and seen this period differently. This experience may have colored their own outlook on the future restoration of the state. Medvedev, during his presidency from 2008 to 2012, certainly appeared open to promoting a more pluralistic public debate about Russia’s future and hinted at the possibility that the government would embark upon a new period of perestroika. Putin, the outsider to the late 1980s, is much more concerned with personally setting the agenda for debate, and with dostroika – finishing what he, Mr. Putin, set out to do when he came into office in 2000.