Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, Part 4 of 14
Until the Ukraine crisis of 2014, Putin was careful to avoid the conservative and exclusionary elements of the original Uvarov formulation, to distinguish himself from Russian nationalists
In 2000 Putin saw his task as keeping Russia together as a coherent entity. In retrospect, it is surprising how reasonable he was willing to be. At that time, he played a moderating role. None of this is to suggest that he is a moderate, but it might be correct that he had an accurate view of what needed to be done to save Russia from further disintegration. Even if his true instincts were nationalist, he was able to hide those instincts, at least for awhile. Instead, he defined himself in opposition to the ultra-nationalists who wanted to ignore the diversity of Russia and instead establish a racial "Russia for Russians" movement. The angry voices demanding radical change were the enemy Putin wanted to silence. In his Millennium Message of that year, Putin said:
Russia has reached its limits of political and socio–economic earthquakes, cataclysms, radical transformations. Only fanatics or those political forces who are deeply disinterested in the fate of Russia or the people [narod] are calling for another revolution. The state and the people will not support the idea of returning to yet another cycle of completely breaking with everything, no matter what slogan this comes under – communist, national–patriotic, or radical–liberal….Responsible societal–political forces must offer the people a strategy for Russia’s revival and renaissance, which will be based on all the positive things that were created during the economic and democratic reforms [of the 1990s], and which will be achieved exclusively through evolutionary, gradual, well–considered methods. This will be achieved in conditions of political stability and without worsening the Russian people’s living standards, no matter what strata or group [they belong to].
Looking back from 2022, it seems clear that Putin was always a nationalist, and perhaps he was always a fascist, but at that time, in 2000, he was playing with a weak hand, and he seems to have understood what that meant. So he spoke using a language that resembles the language we might expect from a moderate British conservative, talking about organic, evolutionary change.
At that time, Russia was rife with far-right movements that were drawing inspiration from the most reactionary traditions of the past:
In the January 1997 meeting in Moscow between representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church and the interior ministry, explicit reference was made by the participants to the so–called Uvarov doctrine of the Russian imperial idea – or “Official Nationality.” This doctrine, which was based on the trinity of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality” (Pravoslaviye, Samoderzhaviye, Narodnost’), was first propounded by Nicholas I’s minister of education, Sergei Uvarov, in 1833. It was supposed to be a simple formula, or appeal, to rally teachers throughout the Russian Empire to the imperial cause. It was in essence an early version of a slogan – à la Filipp Bobkov – to unify society, but behind old, traditional Russia rather than a new Russia. With his appeal, Uvarov offered the first explicit definition of what many have since viewed as the three pillars of the Russian state: the Orthodox Christian religion and the institution of the Russian Orthodox Church; the tsarist regime in the person of the tsar, the autocrat; and the Russian nation loyal to the tsar. At the January 1997 session, participants referred to the Uvarov doctrine as a possible justification for reestablishing Orthodoxy as both an official Russian state ideology and an instrument of government policy.
Uvarov’s last formulation in the trinity, nationality, is an awkward translation from the Russian word narodnost’, which is rooted in narod or “the people” – the collective Russian people. There is no real counterpart in English, although narod is somewhat similar to the idea of “das Volk” in German. In this period, in the 1830s, the word narod denoted the peasantry. Uvarov meant narodnost’ to convey everything from the spirit and essence of the Russian people to the collective rural life of the peasant. The term was also supposed to provide a link to Russia’s native Slavic traditions and to evoke the perceived historic bonds between the people and the tsar as well as between the “land” and the state. Narodnost’ was a heavily loaded, and uniquely Russian, idea.
Back in 2000, Putin seemed to understand that the aggressively nationalist movements, though they spoke of unity, were actually contributing to the disintegration of Russia. And while we can see how much Putin's thinking was authoritarian at its core, it is interesting that at that time he was able to play the role of unifier, someone above narrow nationalist concerns. What seems clear: Putin in 2022 is now the enemy he was pushing back against in 2000. He has very much become the extremist he was afraid of 22 years ago.
But back then, he seems to have understood how to play the moment, given the weak hand that Russia held. As the authors put it:
In this formulation in the Millennium Message, Putin’s conception of the narod is not confined to the ethnic Russian population of the Russian Federation or any particular political or social group. Putin’s later emphasis on the “All–Russian people’s front” also makes this clear. Putin’s narod is all–encompassing and inclusive in a way that Uvarov’s was not. In one of his speeches to the conference of the United Russia party on November 27, 2011, just before the 2011 Russian parliamentary elections, for example, Putin proclaimed:
We will do everything to uphold civil peace and harmony. At stake is the future of our statehood, the well–being of our citizens, the things that we will cherish and uphold. Let those who proclaim the slogans of social and ethnic intolerance, and are smuggling in all kinds of populist and provocative ideas that actually lead to national betrayal and ultimately to the breakup of our country, know that: we are a multinational society but we are a single Russian nation, a united and indivisible Russia.
Again, it is impossible to read this, in 2022, and ignore the irony. Just this morning I saw videos posted on Reddit, showing shoppers in a Moscow grocery store, fighting over sugar, which is in short supply. And yet, a food crisis almost ended Putin's career, long before anyone had ever heard of him:
Indeed, the internal food supply was soon completely disrupted. Once the USSR finally collapsed, inflation then destroyed the purchasing power of the Soviet ruble even further. The only option left for cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow was to obtain food from outside Russia through barter schemes – using the only product of real value the country had to offer: natural resources. In Leningrad in early 1991, the person designated by the mayor’s office to negotiate agreements to barter resources for food was Vladimir Putin, who became chairman of the city’s Committee for External Relations. The city lacked its own independent mechanisms to execute the barter schemes, so Putin designated several private trading companies to serve as middlemen in facilitating the deals. Putin’s scheme became a spectacular failure, and a political scandal. The companies delivered only a fraction of the initially agreed quantities of food, and in some cases vital food products from abroad were delivered to Moscow instead.
In her book The Man without a Face, Russian American journalist and writer Masha Gessen relates in detail the story of Marina Salye, the chairwoman of the Leningrad City Council’s Committee on Food Supplies, who traveled to Berlin in May 1991 to negotiate a contract for importing meat and potatoes to Leningrad. Salye discovered upon her arrival that the negotiations had already been completed by Vladimir Putin on behalf of the city administration (rather than the council) and a Leningrad trading company, Kontinent. It was Salye who later determined that the deliveries from Germany had been sent to Moscow rather than Leningrad. Leningrad ultimately survived the crisis, but only because the winter turned out not to be as severe as feared. In addition, and perhaps most important, the population’s food stocks from their allotments – the traditional, almost instinctive, survival mechanism that Putin’s parents had instilled in him and that people had turned to in the 1991 growing season – helped relieve the very worst of the shortages. Putin was also personally bailed out of his predicament by an old veteran of the Soviet agricultural elite – Viktor Zubkov. The man with the necessary set of relationships with the Leningrad regional food producers (rather than with private companies), Zubkov was brought into Putin’s team in January 1992. As we will discuss later, Viktor Zubkov has since proven to be one of the most important figures in Mr. Putin’s inner circle.
In retrospect, this early failure in his public career seems to have taught Vladimir Putin two lessons that would influence his model for approaching economic management, a model he would eventually apply to the entire country as Russian president. First, during cataclysmic events, Russia’s ultimate guarantee of survival – and of the country’s wealth and development – is its natural resources. They should, therefore, always be kept in strategic reserve. The second lesson Putin drew from his mismanagement of the resources–for–food schemes was that private companies cannot be trusted, even if (and especially if) there is a lot of money to be made. In an unstable and unpredictable environment, private companies will disregard their obligations to society and act exclusively for their own narrow interest. Consequently, the state – and the person at the top in charge of the state – must always reserve the power to exercise some degree of control.
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. Another example might be Winston Churchill, who could be at times a nakedly racist imperialist, but under the pressure of circumstances he rose to the occasion and offered real leadership during World War II. The British wisely dismissed him from service as soon as World War II was over.
It should leave us asking, how would we think of Putin if he had stepped down in 2008? He would be remembered simply as the man who saved Russia. He would be admired all over the world. Russian children would be taught to sing his praises, even 100 years from now. And the rest of the world would have never had enough time to learn of his vices. Truly, one can stay too long at the party. Putin seems committed to stay on long enough that every person on the planet, both outside Russia and inside of it, should have a good reason to regret the day that Putin was born.
I wonder if perhaps that is Putin's goal? What is the real origin of the rage that gives rise to the self-pity that we call nationalism? Life is difficult and full of sacrifice and loss -- this is true even of those lucky enough to lead happy lives. Perhaps there are those who want revenge, against humanity and against God, for the crime of their birth, born of mortal flesh and therefore doomed to suffer?
The above quotes are from this part of the book:
Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin
Fiona Hill & Clifford G. Gaddy
Copyright © 2013 The Brookings Institution
SEEKING REVANCHE
Gaidar firmly believed that in spite of all the criticisms about the ruinous effects of shock therapy on individual Russians’ savings and of a privatization program that essentially handed state assets to a new class of corrupt oligarchs, he had saved the country from bankruptcy and starvation. He had done what was absolutely necessary to turn things around in an impossibly difficult situation. As Gaidar noted during presentations and private discussions of his book (including with the authors), many of the mistakes and miscalculations of over–centralized Soviet political and economic policy were being repeated in Russia in the 2000s. Gaidar wanted to ensure that Putin and those around him would pay attention to his conclusions and recommendations. Essentially, Gaidar wrote Collapse of an Empire for President Putin and his team. He wanted to pass on the lessons that he had internalized from his own personal experience in state service in the 1990s and his analysis of Russian and Soviet history. For Gaidar, like Putin, the Soviet Union was simply another historical and political manifestation of the Russian state. It was not a separate entity.
In the early 1990s, Gaidar saw his mission as trying to “shock” the state into reviving, thus reversing the domestic catastrophe created by the demise of the Soviet Union. In 1999, Putin set out to restore the state’s guiding and regulating role in society by bringing an end to shocks and creating stability. Former presidential adviser Gleb Pavlovsky in his January 2012 interview with The Guardian gave Putin credit for doing this over the course of the 2000s:
Putin in fact achieved the task of revanche. The risk of collapse of the country was averted. Despite all the corruption there, the [North] Caucasus no longer has a threat of separatism and a consensus appeared around a united state which didn’t exist before in the 1990s. No one in the regions wanted to break away and create a separate state. That disappeared. Putin created a legitimate presidency, there was stabilization….People no longer had the desire to rebuild the Soviet Union. Although, of course, I think Putin wanted to create a great state, and he continues to want that.
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Page 64–65
In the January 1997 meeting in Moscow between representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church and the interior ministry, explicit reference was made by the participants to the so–called Uvarov doctrine of the Russian imperial idea – or “Official Nationality.” This doctrine, which was based on the trinity of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality” (Pravoslaviye, Samoderzhaviye, Narodnost’), was first propounded by Nicholas I’s minister of education, Sergei Uvarov, in 1833. It was supposed to be a simple formula, or appeal, to rally teachers throughout the Russian Empire to the imperial cause. It was in essence an early version of a slogan – à la Filipp Bobkov – to unify society, but behind old, traditional Russia rather than a new Russia. With his appeal, Uvarov offered the first explicit definition of what many have since viewed as the three pillars of the Russian state: the Orthodox Christian religion and the institution of the Russian Orthodox Church; the tsarist regime in the person of the tsar, the autocrat; and the Russian nation loyal to the tsar. At the January 1997 session, participants referred to the Uvarov doctrine as a possible justification for reestablishing Orthodoxy as both an official Russian state ideology and an instrument of government policy.
Uvarov’s last formulation in the trinity, nationality, is an awkward translation from the Russian word narodnost’, which is rooted in narod or “the people” – the collective Russian people. There is no real counterpart in English, although narod is somewhat similar to the idea of “das Volk” in German. In this period, in the 1830s, the word narod denoted the peasantry. Uvarov meant narodnost’ to convey everything from the spirit and essence of the Russian people to the collective rural life of the peasant. The term was also supposed to provide a link to Russia’s native Slavic traditions and to evoke the perceived historic bonds between the people and the tsar as well as between the “land” and the state. Narodnost’ was a heavily loaded, and uniquely Russian, idea.
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Page 69–70
Until the Ukraine crisis of 2014, Putin was very careful, however, to avoid the conservative and exclusionary elements of the original Uvarov formulation, to distinguish himself from Russian nationalists like Zhirinovsky and Rogozin, and in keeping with his own admonitions in the Millennium Message. He set out to create something for the diverse population of modern Russia – not the old Russia of the 1830s or early 1900s. In this regard, Putin seemed to have picked up again on the ideas of the KGB’s Filipp Bobkov who, in his 1995 book, cautioned against championing the cause of ethnic Russians or of Russian–speakers in building a new Russian state and urged a more inclusive approach. In the Millennium Message, in his section entitled “Lessons for Russia” (Uroki dlya Rossii), Putin noted:
Russia has reached its limits of political, and socio–economic earthquakes, cataclysms, radical transformations. Only fanatics or those political forces who are deeply disinterested in the fate of Russia or the people [narod] are calling for another revolution. The state and the people will not support the idea of returning to yet another cycle of completely breaking with everything, no matter what slogan this comes under – communist, national–patriotic, or radical–liberal….Responsible societal–political forces must offer the people a strategy for Russia’s revival and renaissance, which will be based on all the positive things that were created during the economic and democratic reforms [of the 1990s], and which will be achieved exclusively through evolutionary, gradual, well–considered methods. This will be achieved in conditions of political stability and without worsening the Russian people’s living standards, no matter what strata or group [they belong to].
In this formulation in the Millennium Message, Putin’s conception of the narod is not confined to the ethnic Russian population of the Russian Federation or any particular political or social group. Putin’s later emphasis on the “All–Russian people’s front” also makes this clear. Putin’s narod is all–encompassing and inclusive in a way that Uvarov’s was not. In one of his speeches to the conference of the United Russia party on November 27, 2011, just before the 2011 Russian parliamentary elections, for example, Putin proclaimed:
We will do everything to uphold civil peace and harmony. At stake is the future of our statehood, the well–being of our citizens, the things that we will cherish and uphold. Let those who proclaim the slogans of social and ethnic intolerance, and are smuggling in all kinds of populist and provocative ideas that actually lead to national betrayal and ultimately to the breakup of our country, know that: we are a multinational society but we are a single Russian nation, a united and indivisible Russia.
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Page 78–80
A TALE OF POLITICAL SURVIVAL: PUTIN AND THE ST. PETERSBURG FOOD CRISIS
The test of how well Putin had learned the importance of basic food security came unexpectedly with the breakup of the Soviet Union, itself an unexpected event. The winter of 1991–92 was Russia’s first under the free market. It marked the end of the Soviet–era practice of requisitioning food from the countryside to supply Russian cities. Links between the countryside and cities that had been maintained in the Soviet command economy failed. Collective farms kept food for themselves. They deprived the industrial and administrative centers of the supplies they had grown accustomed to in the post–war decades. Russia’s large cities, especially Moscow and St. Petersburg, found themselves on the brink of hunger that winter.
The weakened Russian state was of no help. In the three previous years, as Yegor Gaidar described in considerable detail in Collapse of an Empire, the Soviet government had run out of hard currency. It was torn between using its limited remaining funds to import grain or to stabilize the supply of consumer goods. Even before the Soviet Union finally disintegrated, there were chronic shortages of everything from meat, baked goods, sugar and tea, flour, grain, vegetables, fruit, and fish, to fabric, shoes, children’s clothes, construction materials, and matches. By the fall of 1990, the supply of food and consumer goods across the entire country was in a precarious position. Regional leaders, observing “lines of a hundred, a thousand people” outside stores, feared imminent revolution and that they would not “be able to save the country.”
~~
Indeed, the internal food supply was soon completely disrupted. Once the USSR finally collapsed, inflation then destroyed the purchasing power of the Soviet ruble even further. The only option left for cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow was to obtain food from outside Russia through barter schemes – using the only product of real value the country had to offer: natural resources. In Leningrad in early 1991, the person designated by the mayor’s office to negotiate agreements to barter resources for food was Vladimir Putin, who became chairman of the city’s Committee for External Relations. The city lacked its own independent mechanisms to execute the barter schemes, so Putin designated several private trading companies to serve as middlemen in facilitating the deals. Putin’s scheme became a spectacular failure, and a political scandal. The companies delivered only a fraction of the initially agreed quantities of food, and in some cases vital food products from abroad were delivered to Moscow instead.
In her book The Man without a Face, Russian American journalist and writer Masha Gessen relates in detail the story of Marina Salye, the chairwoman of the Leningrad City Council’s Committee on Food Supplies, who traveled to Berlin in May 1991 to negotiate a contract for importing meat and potatoes to Leningrad. Salye discovered upon her arrival that the negotiations had already been completed by Vladimir Putin on behalf of the city administration (rather than the council) and a Leningrad trading company, Kontinent. It was Salye who later determined that the deliveries from Germany had been sent to Moscow rather than Leningrad. Leningrad ultimately survived the crisis, but only because the winter turned out not to be as severe as feared. In addition, and perhaps most important, the population’s food stocks from their allotments – the traditional, almost instinctive, survival mechanism that Putin’s parents had instilled in him and that people had turned to in the 1991 growing season – helped relieve the very worst of the shortages. Putin was also personally bailed out of his predicament by an old veteran of the Soviet agricultural elite – Viktor Zubkov. The man with the necessary set of relationships with the Leningrad regional food producers (rather than with private companies), Zubkov was brought into Putin’s team in January 1992. As we will discuss later, Viktor Zubkov has since proven to be one of the most important figures in Mr. Putin’s inner circle.
In retrospect, this early failure in his public career seems to have taught Vladimir Putin two lessons that would influence his model for approaching economic management, a model he would eventually apply to the entire country as Russian president. First, during cataclysmic events, Russia’s ultimate guarantee of survival – and of the country’s wealth and development – is its natural resources. They should, therefore, always be kept in strategic reserve. The second lesson Putin drew from his mismanagement of the resources–for–food schemes was that private companies cannot be trusted, even if (and especially if) there is a lot of money to be made. In an unstable and unpredictable environment, private companies will disregard their obligations to society and act exclusively for their own narrow interest. Consequently, the state – and the person at the top in charge of the state – must always reserve the power to exercise some degree of control. These are both “lessons learned” for survival to which we will return later.