Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, Part 9 of 14
Putin created the illusion that he was a great reformer, come to save Russia, and yet he was really a parasite, draining away the strength that Russia could have had.
From the book, Mr Putin:
“Working with people” was the hallmark of the KGB under Yury Andropov. The key question for Andropov’s KGB was: Would their targets simply be repressed, imprisoned, or destroyed; or would they be cultivated and recruited? The former approach was fairly straightforward and required no special skill, just brutality. It was also, according to Andropov and others, short–sighted. The latter approach offered much greater potential rewards – but it was a difficult talk requiring skill, delicacy, patience, and, importantly, leverage. “Working with people is the most complicated work on the face of the earth,” Putin once said in a meeting with young Russian law enforcement officials in 2003.
For as long as Putin followed a strategy of "working with people" he was winning. This is especially true if you count all of the disinformation on Twitter and Facebook and Reddit. He had built enormous followings in the USA and Europe. He had a USA President who was completely loyal. In Europe he had Orban, in other countries he had large political movements that were devoted to him. Russian influence was spreading, Russian oligarchs were welcome everywhere, and everywhere they became an influence on local politics. Putin was winning. So why did he give up on this strategy, and switch to the straightforward, brutal methods of war?
From the book:
Soon after taking over the KGB, Andropov announced plans to create an entirely new department, to be designated the “Directorate for the Struggle against Subversive Ideological Activity” – the 5th Directorate. The 5th Directorate set the tone for the KGB that Putin joined as part of the Andropov levy of the 1970s. Putin also may have worked in the 5th Directorate for at least part of his career. Filipp Bobkov, head of the new department, described the background to the new approach in his 1995 memoir. According to Bobkov, the liberalization of the Soviet system that had followed Stalin’s death in 1953, and especially the revelations of Stalin–era crimes that came in Nikita Khrushchev’s famous “secret speech” of 1956, created a different context for the KGB’s work. Pure repression was now seen as counterproductive. By the time Andropov took over the KGB, spontaneous protests had erupted throughout the Soviet Union in response to repression as well as other failings of the system. Andropov himself, who had been the Soviet ambassador to Hungary during the revolt of 1956, knew all too well how far things could go and how difficult they were to stop once protests picked up momentum.
Andropov’s more proactive approach to working with people was frequently put to the test. Bobkov relates one incident that took place in the city of Rubtsovsk in Siberia’s Altai Krai in 1969. A truck driver who had been jailed, apparently for drunken driving, died in custody. Practically the entire town turned out to protest his death. A colonel, I. T. Tsupak, from the KGB 5th Directorate was immediately dispatched to Rubtsovsk to address the situation. By the time Tsupak arrived more than 10,000 people had assembled in the main square, with agitators whipping them up into an increasingly emotional state. Colonel Tsupak went straight to the middle of the crowd. He announced that he had been sent by Andropov to hear their complaints and communicate them to Moscow. He succeeded in calming the mob. Bobkov wrote: “You might ask, was this [that is, going out and responding to complaints] really a job for the KGB? No, not really, But no one else was doing it.” He continued: “[Whenever these protests erupted] Andropov recommended that we pursue a very cautious and flexible policy. Meanwhile, there were many people who were calling for harsh repressive measures….But Andropov...tried to restrain his people from taking risky steps and to refrain from the use of extreme measures.” The Rubtsovsk incident and the intervention of Colonel Tsupak are reminiscent of Putin’s 2009 personal intervention in the factory monotown of Pikalyovo near St. Petersburg to address the local complaints and calm things down.
As a young man, Putin was shaped by this philosophy. It seems evident in his first several years in office, where he tried to create the illusion that he was listening to the public, and he only occasionally resorted to direct, brutal repression (for instance, the murder of Anna Polystskaya in 2006, arguably the war in Chenya, though that was could be seen as a kind of outsourced war that he left to Ramzan Kadyrov).
The idea of the enlightened case officer, who could "work with people" without resorting to naked threats of violence, seems to have been the ideal that Putin initially aimed for. For most of the last 20 years, he has avoided a regime of overt violence. Whereas the Soviet Union had the self-confidence to label someone a traitor, and announce it on the evening news, Putin has had a few enemies assassinated, but he always denies knowledge of the assassination, and typically blames such incidents on Islamic terrorists, or political radicals. For most of the last 20 years, Putin either wanted to avoid overt signs of violence or perhaps he felt that his regime simply lacked the legitimacy that the USSR had enjoyed. Everywhere that the USSR did things in the open, Putin has operated in the shadows. Does he prefer the shadows, or does he feel his hold on power is weak, and so he feels he can only operate in secret?
Over the last year or two Putin has clearly changed. Perhaps this was triggered by the pandemic? Putin has closed most of the remaining NGOs in Russia, and arrested or killed many of his opponents. He has shut down the remnants of the open civil society that began to take shape when Gorvachev announced glasnost in 1985. And this year, once the war started, Russia suddenly resorted to the kind of full repression that it had not been seen in many decades. Every remaining independent newspaper and TV station has been closed, and arrests for dissent have increased dramatically. We now see a regime based on overt violence, to a degree that we have not seen since the days of Stalin. But why now? Why did Putin want to (or felt forced to?) use more subtle methods of governance for 20 years? Is there a strategy to it, or is he simply losing his touch?
From the book:
In his book, Bobkov provided what he considered to be a particularly successful example of the preemptive approach in which he got personally involved. This was the case of dissident historian Roy Medvedev. Medvedev’s articles were being published in the West by anticommunist publishers. Medvedev had already been kicked out of the Communist Party. KGB officers had talked to him and warned him of the consequences of going too far in his criticisms of the system and his foreign publications – but to no avail. When Medvedev began to slander Soviet leader and Communist Party general secretary Leonid Brezhnev personally, the party pushed the KGB to act. The party started a whispering campaign that Andropov was actually protecting Roy Medvedev personally and using him against Brezhnev in the pursuit of some internal power struggle. So Bobkov (by his account) had no choice but to take matters into his own hands. He invited himself to Medvedev’s apartment and, over tea, had a long talk with the dissident:
[During the course of that conversation] I saw both the weaknesses and the strengths of my interlocutor’s logic. I understood where he was right and where he was mistaken. For me it was very useful to know that. I was happy with the result of the meeting: Medvedev stopped his collaboration with publishers who were not linked to [Western] Communist parties. He stopped publishing his journal, Political Diary, altogether. Henceforth, Medvedev dealt only with the Communist Party press and began to lean noticeably towards “pluralism within the framework of socialism.” ...For me the most important thing of all was that Medvedev began working with Western Communists. Now we had other channels through which we could influence his undesirable attacks.
The Medvedev affair, wrote Bobkov, was a prime example of how critical it was to be able “to work with people [rabotat’ s lyud’mi] and use their potential in ideological work.” Bobkov’s descriptions of his intervention with Roy Medvedev is a classic illustration of the work of an “enlightened” secret service like the Andropov–era KGB. In theory, the goal was to persuade the target, in one–on–one exchanges, to give loyalty to your cause. In practice, the persuasion could almost never work without the threat of coercion or some other unpleasant consequences. The actual realization of the coercive threat was generally not desired – just as in the case of Putin and Zubkov’s repository of St. Petersburg financial information and the Russian Financial Monitoring Agency, the preference was to keep damaging information closely held in reserve.
As we've covered in previous essays, when Putin first gained power in 2000, some of his speeches sound surprisingly liberal. For several years, he felt the need to strike a reasonable tone. When he ran for re-election, he boasted that he was the most reasonable man in Russia, and that was why it was important for him to win. He warned the Russians that if he did not win then a fascist like Zhirinovsky would win, and then Russia would be plunged into fascism. But of course, the great irony is that Putin has become Zhirinovsky. All of the warnings eventually came true, but while Putin was still in power. And by a funny historical coincidence, now that the war has begun, and full fascism has come to Russia, just this month Zhirinovsky has died. But his far-right vision lives on in the actions of Putin.
From the book:
These sessions give a whole new definition and dimension to von Benckendorff’s early concept of focus groups. Instead of Fidel Castro–style speeches and monologues before a mass audience, Putin takes the Case Officer approach. He interacts directly and engages in a dialogue with individuals for hours on end. Putin approaches each of these interactions as a hands–on recruiter. He views other individuals as sources of raw intelligence – information. The questions they ask are the information. They provide insight into their state of mind and their concerns. His answers are intended to address the issues people raise and win them over to his point of view. As Putin told Newsweek’s Christian Caryl in June 2001, he takes great pride in selecting the key elements from a huge flood of information, then processing them and using them.
Over the last 20 years I've consulted with more than 100 entrepreneurs, and dozens of graphic designers, writers, videographers, and of course, software engineers. And a pattern I've often seen is that people have 5 or 10 years when they burn bright, and they build their reputation at that time, but I've seen that burnout is very common, and seems to affect almost everyone at some point in time. Few people can burn bright forever — most creative people have good years and then bad years. I wonder if Putin can be diagnosed as a simple case of professional burnout? He was clearly excited about the work, in the early days, but nowadays he seems sad, angry, burned out, and, above all else, living in the past. Indeed, the main cause of the current war is nostalgia. Putin has lost interest in the present. Covid-19 bored him; technological development bores him, dealing with the racial diversity of Russia bores him. Everything that use to excite him now tires him. What interests him is the past: Russia used to be a great empire, and if he can conquer Ukraine, then it will be a great empire again. But of course, he cannot win in Ukraine, and if he was interested in the present, then he would have know this. He thought he still had the army that the USSR had in 1945, the second best army in the world, but in fact he only has the second best army in Ukraine.
One of the few innovations that seems to be original with Putin is his use of television. Whereas the leaders of the Soviet Union had only used television to announce edicts which the population had to obey, Putin made a very public effort to appear to be engaging in conversations with "real Russians." This was extraordinary change from the USSR. This is also, I think, Putin's most important contribution to the evolution of government in the 21st century. He was the first authoritarian leader to make such a populist style of government work within the confines of a not-democratic society. This kind of outreach over television, taking live phone calls from real people, had been pioneered in places like America and Britain, during the 1980s and 1990s, but Putin was the first to bring this style of interaction to a society that was essentially authoritarian.
Putin has, in fact, been explicit about the purpose of these sessions right from the outset of his presidency. During his first official Hot Line in December 2001 he personally identified this format of interacting with the Russian population as the prime example of “communicating the people” and soliciting information. In the course of the December 2001 session one of the callers praised the format of the Hot Line and asked him to comment on it. Putin said:
Indeed, this format of dialogue between the head of state and the population is unprecedented….But, knowing the demand for dialogue, I believe this form of communication is an acceptable form of communication with the people, and the head of state is duty–bound to communicate with his people, to listen to them and hear them, and there should be feedback. I often go to the regions and I see that people have such a need….I must tell you that this is just as important to me as to those who ask these questions, because I can get a feel for what’s happening, get a feel for what is on people’s minds. And I should tell you that our analysis of the incoming information shows that priorities are changing: yesterday or the day before there were one set of priorities, and today they are changing. Of course, I won’t be able to answer all the questions: there are more than half a million of them. When the meeting was announced, 300,000 telephone calls were coming in every day. So it’s hard to answer all the questions. But I would like to thank all those who are taking part because it provides a good sociological base which will be processed 100 percent and will be taken into account in our work.
Putin assured the caller that he would “try to see to it that this is not the last such event,” and he has since continued with the Hot Line format every year. In each case, as Putin underscored, the telephone lines have been flooded with calls in advance of the event. The Kremlin has deployed veritable armies of receptionists and analysts to take the calls, record the questions, and distill and categorize them to determine what people are thinking. In engaging with a select, representative number of the questions in the live format, Putin assures people that he and the state can solve their problems at the individual as well as the larger group level. The implicit message is that Putin and his team are on top of all the issues. There is no need for people to self–organize to solve their own problems, or to take to the streets to protest. Just call Putin and he will fix it.
Though much of this is simply an illusion, in all of this Putin seems to be following the pattern of the great liberal princes of history, and in particular, he is following the rule that Sarah Chayes emphasized and which we examined in a previous essay:
An anonymous mid–twelfth–century Persian–language mirror called The Sea of Precious Virtues ranks such approachability at the apex of a king’s etiquette: “First, he should not conceal himself from subjects and petitioners; for when the king conceals himself the people are ruined, wrongdoers become powerful, and the sin of that is on his head.”
The sin of that is on his head. Command responsibility, once again.
“The sovereign,” Nizam al–Mulk summed up a string of legends along these lines, “must listen himself, without intermediary, to what his subjects have to say to him.”
It's an open question whether Putin ever thought of himself as one of the great liberal princes of history, or if he merely wanted to use skills as a KGB agent to create the illusion of him being a great liberal prince -- perhaps the illusion of being a great liberal prince was simply another kind of "working with people."
Sarah Chayes also tells a story about the kind of backstabbing dark manipulation that the CIA uses against the other branches of the USA government, and this small struggle in the USA is a worthwhile example to remember when we think about the kinds of power struggles that allowed the FSB to outmaneuver all of other elite elements in Russia, so that a man from the FSB could end up running Russia:
Yet that autumn of 2010, I caught members of Mullen’s own AfPak intelligence task force manipulating information like this to support conclusions downplaying the role of corruption in the Afghan conflict. The CIA put out a product purporting to examine the role of corruption in the outcomes of ten different insurgencies. The conclusion was that it had mattered in the success of only one. I pounced on the pages dealing with Vietnam, wondering how the authors were going to get around that example. Vietnam, they professed, was excluded because the insurgency had not succeeded; the war had ended in a national unity government.
One morning toward the end of September, I was stunned to discover details of the ongoing interagency debate on the anticorruption plan the State Department was still drafting plastered across the pages of several national newspapers.
“The U.S. is planning a concerted campaign against lower-level corruption in Afghanistan thought to be directly feeding the insurgency, and ceding more control to the Afghans of the higher-level investigations that soured relations with President Hamid Karzai,” read the Wall Street Journal, referring to a “shift” in policy.
But no such decision had been made. The most recent version of the State Department’s classified effort was sitting on my desk, the word DRAFT printed across the top. I was in the process of entering tracked changes. The plan had not yet been raised to the level of the Principals Committee for discussion, let alone been seen or approved by the president.
And it never would be.
What was playing out across the front pages of leading newspapers was a classic example of a patented Washington tactic: offensive leaking - providing confidential information to the press as a way to gain leverage in an interagency struggle.
The National Security Staff never would draft that robust plan for addressing the Afghan kleptocracy, which Mullen and Gates had convinced the principals to request. The Joint Staff’s list of leverage and potential courses of action was ignored. The task was simply left to languish. Apparently, in government, you can fail to turn in your homework but still get a passing grade.
To fully appreciate how original Putin was, we should think about two words:
demagogue
demamagos
I'm inventing the latter as a contrast to the former. Magos is Greek for magician, in this case, someone who can remain invisible.
A demagogue is someone who wants attention. They get up in front of a crowd and they say things that stir up the emotion of the crowds. The more attention they get, the more people they can rile up, the more their power increases.
A demamagos is someone who remains invisible, stirring up the crowd by releasing information from the shadows. The story that Sarah Chayes tells is a classic example of the power of the demamagos: someone in the CIA wanted her ideas defeated, and by anonymously leaking some information, the CIA was successful in killing off what she had been working on.
Both demagogues and demamagos' manipulate the public, but one does so by getting maximum attention, and other does so by avoiding all attention.
If we can credit Putin with some real originality, it would be the brilliance with which he used both strategies. As a KGB agent he is of course very comfortable with the power of anonymous whispers, the power of the unsourced rumor. Indeed, he has substantially compromised democracy in the USA using such techniques. But he was also able to transform himself into a populist demagogue, spending much of his time on television, apparently in direct conversation with the "real people" of Russia. I can not think of any other leader who has ever shown so much skill as both a demagogue and a demamagos. And perhaps this is how he has managed to maintain his popularity after 20 years in power.
But of course, most of what Putin does on television is an illusion. He has invented government-as-reality-tv-show, a show that looks real but is still scripted:
The major disadvantage of scaling up to the mass level and dealing with large numbers of people is that it is very difficult to apply the one–on–one approach to an overtly hostile crowd. In this regard, the Tsupak story seems an extraordinary one – and, frankly, hard to believe. Masses or mobs are not easily calmed by quiet, extortionary techniques. Indeed, in the case of Pikalyovo, Putin did not wade into the midst of the crowd to calm the situation. He went to Pikalyovo, but headed to a conference room to berate oligarch Oleg Deripaska and other factory officials. It was a public dressing down, on TV, that addressed the grievances of the Pikalyovo protesters, but it was conducted well away from the maddened crowd. It was also a heavily controlled and staged intervention. Presumably, Putin could have “worked with people” on a mass basis if he had chosen to do so at Pikalyovo. He could have gone out to the streets to meet with the protesters. Instead he focused on a small group. According to Russian media and PR specialists, some of whom had firsthand knowledge of the event, the dressing down was even prearranged by Putin and his PR team with Deripaska, the Pikalyovo plant director, and a representative of the workers’ union. Prime Minister Putin was filmed landing in a helicopter in the town, striding out, and marching into the meeting room, looking tough and businesslike. He presented Deripaska with an agreement that the oligarch had already seen, along with a pen to sign it, in what played out as a dramatic TV scene.
There is, however, another more telling and more troubling episode that illustrates how interventions can go wrong for Putin when they are not prearranged. This incident was captured by smartphone video and played out in a short clip on YouTube, not on official Russian television channels. During the height of the summer peat bog and forest fires across the Russian heartland in July 2010, Prime Minister Putin went out to meet with people in one of the most affected regions near the city of Nizhny Novgorod. In the preamble to the YouTube clip, the individual who posted it notes that about 22,000 individual fires were raging across Russia at this particular juncture. On July 29, in one of the worst incidents, every house – 340 in total – was destroyed in the village of Verkhnyaya Vereya, with tens of people killed and hundreds made homeless. According to the preamble, the fire had burned for almost two weeks in the surrounding countryside, gradually encroaching on the village. The villagers had repeatedly appealed for outside assistance in extinguishing the blaze, including the dispatch of a firefighting plane. Nizhny Novgorod governor Valery Shantsev had rebuffed their pleas and, reportedly, informed “Moscow” that everything was under control in the region.
Putin was dispatched to the scene immediately after the catastrophe, just like Colonel Tsupak to Rubtsovsk. He was surrounded by a group of angry men and women from Verkhnyaya Vereya – mostly women – furious at the lack of action by the local and central government authorities to tackle the fire as their houses burned to the ground and family members and neighbors perished. Putin’s attempts to calm the crowd down and to respond to their issues, by saying that he and the government would take action to restore their property, were rebuffed. In the video, people in the crowd appear more, rather than less, enraged by the direct engagement with the prime minister, who personifies the authorities in this context. A visibly uncomfortable Putin moves off with several women still shouting after him about the poor performance of the authorities. The author of the video clip, or at least the narrator who posted it, observes that on this occasion Putin’s “PR action clearly did not work: people reacted in disbelief at the premier’s promises. Moreover, some even screamed: ‘You wanted us to burn alive! Our administration functions very badly! They should be put on trial and hung up by the balls.’” (The favorite phrase of Mt. Putin, the boss, thrown right back at him.) Others shouted that there was not much point appearing now the damage was done: “This should have been thought of before! If you’d thought about this [the fire risk], then this wouldn’t have happened.”
In her book, Masha Gessen describes a very similar interaction with a hostile crowd during what was essentially Putin’s first experience of dealing with a crisis and major public relations disaster as president – the so–called Kursk incident. In August 2000, one of Russia’s nuclear submarines, the Kursk, caught fire after an explosion and sank with all hands on board in the northern Barents Sea. Survivors of the blast were trapped underwater for several days as Russia rebuffed international offers of assistance in attempting a rescue. By the time rescuers reached and penetrated the submarine, the group of survivors were long dead. Throughout what became a very public Russian and international vigil for the Kursk sailors, Putin was conspicuously absent. Initially he was on vacation, then he resisted entreaties to go to the site of the disaster. Gessen recounts the story, as told by Russian journalist Andrei Kolesnikov in his book on Putin, Ya Putina videl! (I saw Putin!). Quoting from Kolesnikov, Gessen notes that Putin’s then presidential chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, and others had to work extremely hard to persuade Putin to travel to the Barents region to meet with the Kursk wives, mothers, and families. He finally traveled there ten days after the accident and also arrived four hours late to the designated meeting. Using Kolesnikov’s first–hand account, Gessen relates – just as the narrator posting the July 2010 YouTube video did – that people were screaming at Putin, telling him to “Shut up!” and asking why he took so long to ask for help. Gessen writes: “Putin emerged from the meeting battered and bitter, and unwilling ever again to expose himself to such an audience. After no other disaster – and there would be many in his tenure as president – would Putin allow himself to be pitted publicly against the suffering.
Thereafter Putin doubled down on the strategy of illusions, both the very public ones, as well as the anonymous rumors. Like many corrupt leaders, Putin's goal has to been to hang on to power at any cost. And toward that end he has often posed as a great reformer, a reasonable moderate, the man who listens to regular Russians.
The problem with this kind of leadership is there is no reality to it. Russia is in desperate need of reform, but Putin has no interest in creating reforms in the real world. He is entirely focused on creating the illusion that he is a reformer, he has no interest in actual reform. While it is obvious why he might have no interest in reforming education or the medical system, what is more surprising is that he had no real interest in reforming even the military. Though he certainly boasted, often, that after 2011 he was modernizing the military. The whole world was fooled by his rhetoric. So when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the USA felt that Ukraine would only survive 48 hours.
We've since learned that the reform of the military mostly amounted to buying a few expensive new weapons system. Deeper reforms were skipped. For instance, consider the brutalization of conscripts, which contributes to the poor morale:
Over the recent New Year’s holidays, Private Andrei Sychyov’s superiors tied him to a chair and beat him continuously for hours and hours, taking breaks only to sustain their drinking binge. When it was over, Sychyov was told not to say a peep. He didn’t complain, and the doctors who examined him reported that he was fine. A few days later, gangrene appeared in his most badly beaten areas. He was rescued from death only by having both legs and his genitalia amputated. While this example of savage hazing in the Russian army made headlines everywhere, one detail too gruesome yet all too common was left out: The officers also repeatedly raped the shit out of the poor young conscript. The word “hazing” doesn’t come close to capturing the terror of dedovshchina, or the “rule of grandfathers,” in the Russian army. Dedovshchina isn’t some prank where the victims are forced to shotgun cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon until they puke. Dedovshchina is what happens when the officer corps loses authority and 19-year-old conscripts start making the rules for the 17- and 18-year-olds. It is so bad that draftees fear it far more than Chechnya. One former soldier, Vlad, told Vice, “On our first day in the barracks, everybody yelled at us, ‘Hang yourselves now, it’s too much shit to handle.’” Many soldiers sooner or later take that advice: The Russian army averages some 500 suicides a year, or about 45 per 100,000 soldiers. The U.S., by contrast, averages about 17 per 100,000. Military prosecutors say that dedovshchina is the primary reason for suicide. More than 10,000 soldiers desert every year, for the same reason.
And likewise, in the war in Ukraine we’ve seen the shocking fact that the Russian army seems to lack any communication system, or command system, that might allow them to coordinate activity at anything larger than the BTG (about 1,500 troops):
Individual Russian attacks at roughly regiment size reported on March 8 and March 9 may represent the scale of offensive operations Russian forces can likely conduct on this axis at any one time. The possibility of a larger and more coherent general attack either to encircle Kyiv or to assault it in the coming days remains possible, but the continued commitment of groups of two to five battalion tactical groups (BTGs) at a time makes such a large-scale general attack less likely.
That’s why we repeatedly see these sad, pathetic, half-assed attacks that lack the punch and heft to seriously contest strongly defended territory. And in a weird way, this confirms their core strategy, which has nothing to do with complex combined-arms tactical maneuvers to take and occupy ground. Rather, Russia “prepares” the territory ahead with artillery until there’s nothing left standing or living, then simply marches forward to occupy the rubble. It’s not totally ineffective. Russia has made some gains, but it takes time that Russia doesn’t have, damages its international standing as civilians die by the score, and ironically, it gives defenders plenty of rubble to shelter under. And quite frankly, it hasn’t worked in any major city thus far. Much of Russia’s advances have been of the “trade land for blood” variety, allowing Russia to advance forward, stretching out their supply lines, then Ukraine hitting them when they’re over-extended.
So the Russian military lacks any ability to coordinate at the level of the division, which means it is unable to do large scale fighting, or launch a unified attack on a large city. Even when the Russians outnumber the Ukrainians, it does them no good, because one battalion attacks and is defeated by the Ukrainians, then another battalion attacks and is defeated, then another battalion attacks and is defeated. If only they attacked together the Russians could win, but they seem unable to manage that level of coordination.
So Putin has boasted of reforming the military, but there have been no real reforms for the military.
An analogy to biology suggests itself. For a century now, biologists have been aware of promoter genes. There is a good book on the subject, Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements by Austin Burt.
Promoter genes undercut Darwin's theory of Natural Selection. The promoter genes are bad for an organism, so they should eventually be filtered out of the gene pool. However, promoter genes specialize in promoting themselves, so they spread through the gene pool with every new generation, and they make a species weaker as they spread. They act a bit like parasites but they are part of the DNA of the organism, and so they cannot be thought of as something foreign.
Putin is a bit like a promoter gene. He weakens Russia, but he has specialized in the task of promoting himself. He manages to remain popular, despite inflicting stagnation on Russia for at least a decade.
Consider this: the Soviet Union, at its peak, made up 18% of the world economy. Russia now makes up just 1.5% of the world economy. Russia is more than an order of magnitude weaker than the Soviet Union, as an economic power. And Putin did nothing to move Russia back toward the greatness that the Soviet Union achieved. Indeed, by focusing on illusions, and ignoring reality, Putin has made Russia weaker and weaker.
Over the years I've worked with some entrepreneurs who spent all of their money on marketing, but none of their money on product development. Putin is a bit like that. He had plenty of money and could have done a great deal of good for Russia, but instead he has overseen an unprecedented level of corruption. Once the war started, Western governments began seizing the yachts of oligarchs. Some of these yachts are enormous ships and many people have pointed out that the money that bought those yachts could have easily been used to buy more missle-carrying frigates for the Russian navy.
How much corruption has there been? This is Paul Krugman:
Everyone has heard about giant oligarch-owned yachts, sports franchises and incredibly expensive homes in multiple countries; there’s so much highly visible Russian money in Britain that some people talk about “Londongrad.” Well, these aren’t just isolated stories.
Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman have pointed out that Russia has run huge trade surpluses every year since the early 1990s, which should have led to a large accumulation of overseas assets. Yet official statistics show Russia with only moderately more assets than liabilities abroad. How is that possible? The obvious explanation is that wealthy Russians have been skimming off large sums and parking them abroad.
The sums involved are mind-boggling. Novokmet et al. estimate that in 2015 the hidden foreign wealth of rich Russians amounted to around 85 percent of Russia’s G.D.P. To give you some perspective, this is as if a U.S. president’s cronies had managed to hide $20 trillion in overseas accounts. Another paper co-written by Zucman found that in Russia, “the vast majority of wealth at the top is held offshore.” As far as I can tell, the overseas exposure of Russia’s elite has no precedent in history — and it creates a huge vulnerability that the West can exploit.
There is no way to be a great reformer and also allow this much wealth to go missing. There is no way to build a great military while allowing graft on this scale. Likewise, there is no hope of building a great technology sector, or a great medical sector, or a great science sector, when so much money goes missing. $20 trillion was enough to pay for the complete transformation of Russian society, but to lose that much money is a tragedy that Russia will never recover from. The money got wasted on yatchs and expensive apartments in London and New York and Dubai. And some of these years were almost certainly among the final years of the very high oil prices of the era of fossil fuel.
In a previous essay we looked at Putin’s boast that he was a gosudarstvennik:
The first key to Vladimir Putin’s personality is his view of himself as a man of the state, his identity as a statist (gosudarstvennik in Russian). Putin sees himself as someone who belongs to a large cohort of people demanding the restoration of the state.
And yet this was, in many ways, a hollow idea. Anyone who wants to build up the state doesn’t allow $20 trillion to go missing. Anyone actually fighting to rebuild the state would have fought jealously to regain control over that money. Putin’s failure to control the money raises a lot of questions:
Did he have the power to stop the theft? Did he regard the outflow of cash as a way of keeping people loyal? But who did he need to keep loyal? Was he afraid of the oligarchs? They seem to be afraid of him. If he wasn’t afraid of the oligarchs, then why didn’t he crack down a bit harder? He could have bribed everyone with a few billion, he doesn’t need to allow $20 trillion to go missing just to secure the loyalty of a few oligarchs. Of course, it is widely assumed that Putin was the biggest thief of all, but I don’t think anyone thinks he took trillions.
Why doesn’t Putin do more to strengthen Russia? Masha Gessen has described him as intellectually incurious. Is it possible that he has no idea how to rebuild Russia, and he has no serious interest in learning anything on this subject? Is it possible that he began to play a role on the television, he was the lead actor in his reality show, and he was surprised to learn that he was good at it, and then he decided to simply stick with what was working for him? I’ve known entrepreneurs who run their businesses with a strong bias towards activities that are within their comfort zone. Even when the company is facing a life-or-death crisis, the entrepreneurs refuse to go out of their comfort zone, or try to shore up their weaknesses, or even hire someone who could help cover those weaknesses. Perhaps Putin is like this. Certainly, the craving for control, above all else, fits in with his authoritarian mindset.
There will always be the question: does Putin believe his own propaganda? Does he himself believe that he is a great reformer? There are certain people who associate strength with a very particular performance of masculinity — strength as a kind of exaggerated performance of traditional masculine traits such as dominance, loudness, confidence, and arrogance. Is it possible Putin confuses such a performance for real progress in rebuilding Russia?
In previous essays we've talked about the early years, when Putin often gave speeches that sounded liberal, perhaps because he had not yet consolidated his own power, and so he was trying to placate the more liberal elements in the Russian government. And during the era 2000-2008 and 2010-2011 he was lucky that oil prices were rising, so he had more and more money coming in, which allowed him to raise the standard of living for the urban middle class. This graph probably shows exactly how long the "good Putin" lasted, and also, exactly where many Russians began to see the "bad Putin":
This weblog, Demodexio, is focused on this issue, of how to make democracy stronger in an era of populists. More than most, Putin shows how many powerful tools the modern era grants to those who want to undermine democracy. Television offers a powerful medium for demagogues who want to rile people up with divisive and grievance-based messages. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and other online forums are an incredible gift to the demamagos who wish to manipulate the public by spreading anonymous rumors full of explosive accusations. Combined, these communication platforms offer unparalleled opportunities for aspiring dictators to manipulate the public into give up on the "checks and balances" that protect the rule of law, and a system of accountability that eventually traces back to the input of the public.
It's crucial to think about why Putin has been so successful, how he managed to maintain his popularity, despite his 20 years of theft and broken promises. He's shown that it is possible to delude the public for much of 20 years. That indicates exactly how much danger now threatens democracy.
Quotes drawn from this book:
Mr. Putin
Operative in the Kremlin
Fiona Hill & Clifford G. Gaddy
Copyright © 2013 The Brookings Institution
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Page 168–169
ANDROPOV’S NEW KGB: WORKING WITH THE CONCRETE INDIVIDUAL
“Working with people” was the hallmark of the KGB under Yury Andropov. The key question for Andropov’s KGB was: Would their targets simply be repressed, imprisoned, or destroyed; or would they be cultivated and recruited? The former approach was fairly straightforward and required no special skill, just brutality. It was also, according to Andropov and others, short–sighted. The latter approach offered much greater potential rewards – but it was a difficult talk requiring skill, delicacy, patience, and, importantly, leverage. “Working with people is the most complicated work on the face of the earth,” Putin once said in a meeting with young Russian law enforcement officials in 2003.
Soon after taking over the KGB, Andropov announced plans to create an entirely new department, to be designated the “Directorate for the Struggle against Subversive Ideological Activity” – the 5th Directorate. The 5th Directorate set the tone for the KGB that Putin joined as part of the Andropov levy of the 1970s. Putin also may have worked in the 5th Directorate for at least part of his career. Filipp Bobkov, head of the new department, described the background to the new approach in his 1995 memoir. According to Bobkov, the liberalization of the Soviet system that had followed Stalin’s death in 1953, and especially the revelations of Stalin–era crimes that came in Nikita Khrushchev’s famous “secret speech” of 1956, created a different context for the KGB’s work. Pure repression was now seen as counterproductive. By the time Andropov took over the KGB, spontaneous protests had erupted throughout the Soviet Union in response to repression as well as other failings of the system. Andropov himself, who had been the Soviet ambassador to Hungary during the revolt of 1956, knew all too well how far things could go and how difficult they were to stop once protests picked up momentum.
Andropov’s more proactive approach to working with people was frequently put to the test. Bobkov relates one incident that took place in the city of Rubtsovsk in Siberia’s Altai Krai in 1969. A truck driver who had been jailed, apparently for drunken driving, died in custody. Practically the entire town turned out to protest his death. A colonel, I. T. Tsupak, from the KGB 5th Directorate was immediately dispatched to Rubtsovsk to address the situation. By the time Tsupak arrived more than 10,000 people had assembled in the main square, with agitators whipping them up into an increasingly emotional state. Colonel Tsupak went straight to the middle of the crowd. He announced that he had been sent by Andropov to hear their complaints and communicate them to Moscow. He succeeded in calming the mob. Bobkov wrote: “You might ask, was this [that is, going out and responding to complaints] really a job for the KGB? No, not really, But no one else was doing it.” He continued: “[Whenever these protests erupted] Andropov recommended that we pursue a very cautious and flexible policy. Meanwhile, there were many people who were calling for harsh repressive measures….But Andropov...tried to restrain his people from taking risky steps and to refrain from the use of extreme measures.” The Rubtsovsk incident and the intervention of Colonel Tsupak are reminiscent of Putin’s 2009 personal intervention in the factory monotown of Pikalyovo near St. Petersburg to address the local complaints and calm things down.
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Page 170–171
In his book, Bobkov provided what he considered to be a particularly successful example of the preemptive approach in which he got personally involved. This was the case of dissident historian Roy Medvedev. Medvedev’s articles were being published in the West by anticommunist publishers. Medvedev had already been kicked out of the Communist Party. KGB officers had talked to him and warned him of the consequences of going too far in his criticisms of the system and his foreign publications – but to no avail. When Medvedev began to slander Soviet leader and Communist Party general secretary Leonid Brezhnev personally, the party pushed the KGB to act. The party started a whispering campaign that Andropov was actually protecting Roy Medvedev personally and using him against Brezhnev in the pursuit of some internal power struggle. So Bobkov (by his account) had no choice but to take matters into his own hands. He invited himself to Medvedev’s apartment and, over tea, had a long talk with the dissident:
[During the course of that conversation] I saw both the weaknesses and the strengths of my interlocutor’s logic. I understood where he was right and where he was mistaken. For me it was very useful to know that. I was happy with the result of the meeting: Medvedev stopped his collaboration with publishers who were not linked to [Western] Communist parties. He stopped publishing his journal, Political Diary, altogether. Henceforth, Medvedev dealt only with the Communist Party press and began to lean noticeably towards “pluralism within the framework of socialism.” ...For me the most important thing of all was that Medvedev began working with Western Communists. Now we had other channels through which we could influence his undesirable attacks.
The Medvedev affair, wrote Bobkov, was a prime example of how critical it was to be able “to work with people [rabotat’ s lyud’mi] and use their potential in ideological work.” Bobkov’s descriptions of his intervention with Roy Medvedev is a classic illustration of the work of an “enlightened” secret service like the Andropov–era KGB. In theory, the goal was to persuade the target, in one–on–one exchanges, to give loyalty to your cause. In practice, the persuasion could almost never work without the threat of coercion or some other unpleasant consequences. The actual realization of the coercive threat was generally not desired – just as in the case of Putin and Zubkov’s repository of St. Petersburg financial information and the Russian Financial Monitoring Agency, the preference was to keep damaging information closely held in reserve.
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Page 175–178
These sessions give a whole new definition and dimension to von Benckendorff’s early concept of focus groups. Instead of Fidel Castro–style speeches and monologues before a mass audience, Putin takes the Case Officer approach. He interacts directly and engages in a dialogue with individuals for hours on end. Putin approaches each of these interactions as a hands–on recruiter. He views other individuals as sources of raw intelligence – information. The questions they ask are the information. They provide insight into their state of mind and their concerns. His answers are intended to address the issues people raise and win them over to his point of view. As Putin told Newsweek’s Christian Caryl in June 2001, he takes great pride in selecting the key elements from a huge flood of information, then processing them and using them.
Putin has, in fact, been explicit about the purpose of these sessions right from the outset of his presidency. During his first official Hot Line in December 2001 he personally identified this format of interacting with the Russian population as the prime example of “communicating the people” and soliciting information. In the course of the December 2001 session one of the callers praised the format of the Hot Line and asked him to comment on it. Putin said:
Indeed, this format of dialogue between the head of state and the population is unprecedented….But, knowing the demand for dialogue, I believe this form of communication is an acceptable form of communication with the people, and the head of state is duty–bound to communicate with his people, to listen to them and hear them, and there should be feedback. I often go to the regions and I see that people have such a need….I must tell you that this is just as important to me as to those who ask these questions, because I can get a feel for what’s happening, get a feel for what is on people’s minds. And I should tell you that our analysis of the incoming information shows that priorities are changing: yesterday or the day before there were one set of priorities, and today they are changing. Of course, I won’t be able to answer all the questions: there are more than half a million of them. When the meeting was announced, 300,000 telephone calls were coming in every day. So it’s hard to answer all the questions. But I would like to thank all those who are taking part because it provides a good sociological base which will be processed 100 percent and will be taken into account in our work.
Putin assured the caller that he would “try to see to it that this is not the last such event,” and he has since continued with the Hot Line format every year. In each case, as Putin underscored, the telephone lines have been flooded with calls in advance of the event. The Kremlin has deployed veritable armies of receptionists and analysts to take the calls, record the questions, and distill and categorize them to determine what people are thinking. In engaging with a select, representative number of the questions in the live format, Putin assures people that he and the state can solve their problems at the individual as well as the larger group level. The implicit message is that Putin and his team are on top of all the issues. There is no need for people to self–organize to solve their own problems, or to take to the streets to protest. Just call Putin and he will fix it.
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It is important to note that Filipp Bobkov’s stories – just like many of Putin’s autobiographical statements – are mainly after–the–fact anecdotes, and possibly even myths. We cannot know for sure if any of the events Bobkov relates actually happened, or happened the way Bobkov says they did. But these are the kinds of stories that Bobkov, as the head of the 5th Directorate, would have passed on to his young KGF recruits in the 1970s and that a young officer like Vladimir Putin would have internalized. There are traces of these same kinds of stories throughout Putin’s own remarks and references. Another key aspect of the Bobkov stories and of Putin’s own stories is that they are very much one–sided. The stories stress the skills of the KGB recruiter, the Case Officer, as a communicator and persuader. They deliberately and most obviously omit the fact that none of these alleged skills would be effective without the person on the other side of the dialogue – the target of the recruiter – knowing that the alternative to an amicable arrangement with the recruiter could be an extended period in the cellar of KGB headquarters, the Lubyanka, or in one of the KGB prison camps like Perm–36, or in the psychiatric hospital, a favorite KGB destination under Andropov.
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DEALING WITH THE MADDENED CROWD
The major disadvantage of scaling up to the mass level and dealing with large numbers of people is that it is very difficult to apply the one–on–one approach to an overtly hostile crowd. In this regard, the Tsupak story seems an extraordinary one – and, frankly, hard to believe. Masses or mobs are not easily calmed by quiet, extortionary techniques. Indeed, in the case of Pikalyovo, Putin did not wade into the midst of the crowd to calm the situation. He went to Pikalyovo, but headed to a conference room to berate oligarch Oleg Deripaska and other factory officials. It was a public dressing down, on TV, that addressed the grievances of the Pikalyovo protesters, but it was conducted well away from the maddened crowd. It was also a heavily controlled and staged intervention. Presumably, Putin could have “worked with people” on a mass basis if he had chosen to do so at Pikalyovo. He could have gone out to the streets to meet with the protesters. Instead he focused on a small group. According to Russian media and PR specialists, some of whom had firsthand knowledge of the event, the dressing down was even prearranged by Putin and his PR team with Deripaska, the Pikalyovo plant director, and a representative of the workers’ union. Prime Minister Putin was filmed landing in a helicopter in the town, striding out, and marching into the meeting room, looking tough and businesslike. He presented Deripaska with an agreement that the oligarch had already seen, along with a pen to sign it, in what played out as a dramatic TV scene.
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Page 179–180
There is, however, another more telling and more troubling episode that illustrates how interventions can go wrong for Putin when they are not prearranged. This incident was captured by smartphone video and played out in a short clip on YouTube, not on official Russian television channels. During the height of the summer peat bog and forest fires across the Russian heartland in July 2010, Prime Minister Putin went out to meet with people in one of the most affected regions near the city of Nizhny Novgorod. In the preamble to the YouTube clip, the individual who posted it notes that about 22,000 individual fires were raging across Russia at this particular juncture. On July 29, in one of the worst incidents, every house – 340 in total – was destroyed in the village of Verkhnyaya Vereya, with tens of people killed and hundreds made homeless. According to the preamble, the fire had burned for almost two weeks in the surrounding countryside, gradually encroaching on the village. The villagers had repeatedly appealed for outside assistance in extinguishing the blaze, including the dispatch of a firefighting plane. Nizhny Novgorod governor Valery Shantsev had rebuffed their pleas and, reportedly, informed “Moscow” that everything was under control in the region.
Putin was dispatched to the scene immediately after the catastrophe, just like Colonel Tsupak to Rubtsovsk. He was surrounded by a group of angry men and women from Verkhnyaya Vereya – mostly women – furious at the lack of action by the local and central government authorities to tackle the fire as their houses burned to the ground and family members and neighbors perished. Putin’s attempts to calm the crowd down and to respond to their issues, by saying that he and the government would take action to restore their property, were rebuffed. In the video, people in the crowd appear more, rather than less, enraged by the direct engagement with the prime minister, who personifies the authorities in this context. A visibly uncomfortable Putin moves off with several women still shouting after him about the poor performance of the authorities. The author of the video clip, or at least the narrator who posted it, observes that on this occasion Putin’s “PR action clearly did not work: people reacted in disbelief at the premier’s promises. Moreover, some even screamed: ‘You wanted us to burn alive! Our administration functions very badly! They should be put on trial and hung up by the balls.’” (The favorite phrase of Mr. Putin, the boss, thrown right back at him.) Others shouted that there was not much point appearing now the damage was done: “This should have been thought of before! If you’d thought about this [the fire risk], then this wouldn’t have happened.”
In her book, Masha Gessen describes a very similar interaction with a hostile crowd during what was essentially Putin’s first experience of dealing with a crisis and major public relations disaster as president – the so–called Kursk incident. In August 2000, one of Russia’s nuclear submarines, the Kursk, caught fire after an explosion and sank with all hands on board in the northern Barents Sea. Survivors of the blast were trapped underwater for several days as Russia rebuffed international offers of assistance in attempting a rescue. By the time rescuers reached and penetrated the submarine, the group of survivors were long dead. Throughout what became a very public Russian and international vigil for the Kursk sailors, Putin was conspicuously absent. Initially he was on vacation, then he resisted entreaties to go to the site of the disaster. Gessen recounts the story, as told by Russian journalist Andrei Kolesnikov in his book on Putin, Ya Putina videl! (I saw Putin!). Quoting from Kolesnikov, Gessen notes that Putin’s then presidential chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, and others had to work extremely hard to persuade Putin to travel to the Barents region to meet with the Kursk wives, mothers, and families. He finally traveled there ten days after the accident and also arrived four hours late to the designated meeting. Using Kolesnikov’s first–hand account, Gessen relates – just as the narrator posting the July 2010 YouTube video did – that people were screaming at Putin, telling him to “Shut up!” and asking why he took so long to ask for help. Gessen writes: “Putin emerged from the meeting battered and bitter, and unwilling ever again to expose himself to such an audience. After no other disaster – and there would be many in his tenure as president – would Putin allow himself to be pitted publicly against the suffering.