Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, independent television stations, funded by the newly rich, sprang up across the airwaves. Three outlets had national reach—RTR, which was always state-controlled; and ORT and NTV, owned, respectively, by oligarchs Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Gusinsky. In a period spanning about five years, Putin hounded both men with trumped-up criminal charges until Berezovsky fled and Gusinsky was convicted of tax evasion and forced to sell his station and his two independent newspapers as well, Itogi (Issues) and Sevodnya (Today).
The Kremlin’s policies toward the independent press were becoming more and more repressive. And journalists were increasingly targeted for harassment and, in some sad and celebrated cases, death.
Anna Politkovskaya, for example, had refused to be intimidated in her efforts to bring the truth about the Chechen wars to the Russian people. She bravely traveled to the war-torn region repeatedly to chronicle the abuses of the Russian military there. Even after she was poisoned in 2004 while reporting on events in Beslan, she refused to quit. “We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance,” she declared after that attack on her life.
On October 7, 2006, she was murdered in her Moscow apartment. Two weeks later, I was in Moscow for diplomatic meetings. I started the day, though, in a hotel conference room where Politkovskaya’s son, Ilya, and several of her colleagues from Novaya Gazeta were gathered. No words seem adequate at times like that. The sense of deep grief and anguish was overwhelming. I promised the support of the U.S. government in pressing the Russian government to find her killer. But of course I knew—as did her colleagues—that the Kremlin had no interest in doing so.
That moment felt to me like a watershed in Russia’s democratic transition. The killing of a celebrated journalist was only part of the story. There was something even more dispiriting—the looks of resignation and desperation on the faces of the mostly young journalists in that room. They had lost faith in a democratic future for Russia. You could feel it.
Still, for a brief time another medium—the Internet—seemed poised to escape the Kremlin’s control. On a subsequent trip to Moscow, I asked our ambassador to arrange a meeting with some of Russia’s young entrepreneurs and businesspeople. Before leaving for Spasso House (the U.S. residence), I was watching television in my hotel room, something that I always did immediately upon touching down in order to activate my “Russian ear.” I knew that the electronic media had been under siege, but I was not prepared for what I saw. The news was mostly a celebration of the exploits of Vladimir Putin, with some favorable economic news thrown in for good measure. Frankly, it looked a great deal like Soviet TV programming when I was a graduate student in 1979. There were, to be sure, popular Western-style programs that would not have been possible in the Soviet era: American shows like The Sopranos and Friends; Klub Vesyólykh i Nakhódchivykh (Club of the Funny and Inventive), a competitive comedy show that had been banned by Soviet censors; singing contests and documentaries about expensive automobiles. But the news was pretty close to pure propaganda.
At the session with the young Russians later that day, I brought up the state of television. One young man stopped me. “Let me tell you what you saw on the news,” he said. “The first story was about the great man [Putin]. The second about whatever successor to the great man is in favor today.” I understood the reference. The presidential “elections” were about a year away and everyone knew that Putin would choose either Dmitry Medvedev or Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov. “The third story,” he continued, “was about whatever innocent people you Americans killed today. And the fourth—the amazingly good state of agriculture.”
“That’s about it. Doesn’t that trouble you?” I asked.
“No,” he replied.
“Who watches television?”
“My friends and I all get our news from the Internet.” Everyone nodded in agreement.
To the degree that the Internet was a safe haven for open expression in 2007, it didn’t last. When Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency in 2012, he completed the extermination of media outlets that might challenge him. Bloggers like Alexei Navalny who used the Web to organize politically were arrested. Other reformist websites first experienced outages and then were shut down altogether. In July 2012 the Duma passed a law allowing the government to create a list of websites that were to be blocked without any mechanism of appeal. While the measure was portrayed as intended to block pornography and extremist content, it silenced legitimate websites. In 2014, Vkontakte (VK), known as the Facebook of Russia, came under the control of Putin’s allies. The sin of VK had been its use as a vehicle to organize anti-Putin rallies during the elections. Its young founder, Pavel Durov, was forced to step down, and in 2015 he left the country.
Step by step, young institutions that might have sustained Russian democracy disappeared—independent regional leaders, the free press, and what was left of a working legislature after Yeltsin’s assault on it. The remnants of an independent judiciary disappeared in the political prosecutions of oligarchs that Putin targeted and laws that brought appointments to the courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, under the Kremlin’s control. The last vestige of an incipient democracy was a civil society that fought the swing toward authoritarianism more valiantly than liberal politicians were ever able to do.
Many of the NGOs were well funded by outside private sources and Western governments, including the United States through USAID. The National Endowment for Democracy is a private organization with a board made up of esteemed citizens but it does receive U.S. government funding. Together with its European counterparts, it helped to sustain these young Russian institutions. The leaders traveled abroad for conferences and their names were well known in the international community that advocated publicly for them.
At home, these organizations were popular and noted for doing good works. For instance, on one of my trips I met an extraordinary woman, Svetlana Kotova, whose own limited sight led her to appeal to the conscience of the country on behalf of people with disabilities. Everyone knew that in Soviet times, when society idolized the perfect Soviet man, the disabled were treated like trash—literally swept off the streets by the police. Kotova’s compassionate outcry to overcome this history was so popular that even Putin tried to ride her coattails, inviting her to hold a summit on the disabled at the Kremlin in 2005.
But eventually the Duma passed laws requiring NGOs to register and to disclose foreign funding. Soon the law made it illegal to receive resources from abroad under the guise of protecting the national security of the country. Hundreds of the organizations dried up, and the few that remained endured prosecutors’ charges and police raids. Like every authoritarian, Putin knew that allowing citizens to organize in private space had political ramifications no matter how compelling the social good. With the demise of civil society, the destruction of the nascent institutions of democracy was complete.
The events that followed the ascendance of Vladimir Putin and transpired over roughly fifteen years raise a disturbing question: Is it really possible that one man could dismantle the institutional basis for democracy in his country in so short a time span? We have seen how the conditions of the Soviet Union’s collapse and the chaos that unfolded laid the groundwork for the rise of authoritarian government in Russia. But unlike Saddam Hussein or the Kim dynasty in North Korea, Putin does not rule as an absolute tyrant. Rather, he skillfully constructed and nurtured an alternative institutional basis from which to undermine liberal change.
In today’s interconnected world, the creeping and subtle authoritarianism of illiberal elected leaders is a greater threat to democracy than if they were to crush it with tanks in the city square. Vladimir Putin uses just enough repression to cow the population but not too much so that blood runs in the streets. And he enjoys a significant hold on the loyalty of enough of his citizens to sustain his power.
While it is
hard in Putin’s Russia to know how reliable polls are that show him to be popular at the level of 70 percent or better, there is no doubt that he has a loyal base of support. When Putin came to power in 2000, his support was remarkably broad, reflecting roughly the demographics of the country. His supporters spanned all age groups, income brackets, and levels of education. Today, his most ardent support comes from rural voters, older people, the military, and those middle-class citizens who are dependent on the state for their income. And Putin has taken care of them with largesse ranging from enhanced pensions to spending on infrastructure projects outside of the cities in his most reliable districts.
Indeed, he is regarded as the leader who fixed a broken pension system. More than 35 percent of the country’s electorate is composed of pensioners (Russia is an aging country with low birth rates and high morbidity and mortality). In the 1990s, pension income dropped by as much as 40 percent, and simply receiving a check had become an unreliable waiting game. In 2002, Putin set repairing the system as one of his chief goals, and despite economic arguments to the contrary, he refused to raise the generously low retirement age: fifty-five for women and sixty for men. Not surprisingly, this has endeared him to the old.
Additionally, Putin’s opposition is largely based in Moscow. In fact, in the election of 2012, the one district that he did not win was the capital. But rural voters love him, and it is in those districts that his image, burnished by favorable stories on state television, is most heroic. Putin maintains contact with these voters through his selection of presidential envoys to each federal region.
The story of Igor Kholmanskikh illustrates the point. In the span of just a few months, Kholmanskikh went from being an unknown tank factory worker in the Ural Mountains to Putin’s presidential envoy to the region. He first appeared on the national scene during one of Putin’s televised call-in shows in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, ridiculing anti-Putin protesters in Moscow and offering to bring his crew of factory workers to help the police “defend stability.” Putin later featured him at campaign rallies as the epitome of the Russian worker, and Kholmanskikh’s efforts on Putin’s behalf were duly rewarded. After Putin’s return to the presidency, Kholmanskikh was appointed his personal envoy to the Ural Mountain region, becoming the first such envoy to serve without any prior government or political experience.
This story bears a strong resemblance to the folklore of an era long past. Heroic laborers who through hard work and grit industrialized the country and farmed the land have long been admired, whether in Russia or in the Soviet Union. Their towns have changed little in decades—they are rough and polluted rust belts. Their isolated villages and farms would look at home in the late nineteenth century. When the president needs support, his presidential envoys find it easy to arrange it for him far from the glittering streets of the country’s cosmopolitan cities.
While there is a popular base for Putin, his more important political allies are those oligarchs whom he has courted and sometimes coerced into loyalty, and the men of the security services—the siloviki—who share his KGB upbringing and disdain for Russia’s weakness after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Fueled by oil wealth, personal fortunes, and the power of the state, this syndicate really runs Russia. It is hard to tell whether Putin is just first among equals or something more. But slowly, the men who were once members of the prestigious First Directorate of the KGB in Soviet times and served together in espionage across the world have become the dominant personalities in modern-day Russia.
They share too a suspicious, almost xenophobic view of the outside world. And it is this that has served to unify Russia’s authoritarian turn at home with an aggressive foreign policy abroad, aimed at redressing the “tragedy,” as Putin called it, of the Soviet Union’s demise.
“Ukraine Is a Made-Up Country”
It had been a difficult NATO summit in Bucharest. In President Bush’s last year in office, we hoped to solidify the commitment of the alliance to Eastern Europe. The expansion of NATO to Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and then all the way to the Baltic states had been relatively seamless—a joint project of the Clinton and Bush administrations. The new members were energetic, devoted to the principles on which the alliance had been founded—the defense of democracy and liberty in Europe and beyond. For most of Europe and even the United States, the other purpose of NATO—keeping the Soviet Union or now Russia at bay—had long since lost salience. We had really come to believe that the Cold War was over, Europe was whole, free, and at peace, and even if they didn’t like the outcome, the men in the Kremlin were resigned to it. It turns out they were not.
With every round of NATO enlargement, Moscow felt the pain of lost influence. NATO tried to extend a hand of friendship to Russia. The creation of a NATO-Russia Council in 2002 was intended to show the Kremlin that the alliance was no longer trapped in Cold War thinking.
Russia’s first ambassador to the council spoke neither English nor French. He was apparently not unpleasant, but he was worthless as a diplomatic link between East and West. A few years later the Russians sent one of their most disagreeable officials, the head of a nationalist political party, to be ambassador to NATO. Dmitry Rogozin made it clear that he had no desire to be in Brussels nor any plans to cooperate on just about anything. One had to conclude that Moscow had no intention of making the council work.
To be fair, the personal dynamics in the meetings of the council were complicated and often hard. After years of resentment of their treatment at the hands of Moscow, the new Central European members didn’t hesitate to remind the Russians that they had lost the Cold War. “Welcome to NATO, Sergei,” the Polish foreign minister said to the Russian foreign minister. “Yes, you are always welcome to visit the alliance,” the Czech or Romanian would say, in a tone dripping with sarcasm. I always found myself a little embarrassed by the whole thing, but forty-five years of pent-up resentment is hard to wash away.
Russia’s tolerance for NATO expansion—and, it turns out, Germany’s—finally reached its limit at the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008. The elected and pro-Western governments of Ukraine and Georgia wanted to be admitted to the Membership Action Plan (MAP). MAP was not membership but a kind of incubator status for countries that needed to make major political and military reforms in order to fulfill the requirements of NATO membership. There was nothing automatic about acceptance in the alliance, and it took a long time. Albania had waited ten years after being accepted into MAP to join the alliance.
Still, for several members of NATO, particularly Germany, launching Ukraine and Georgia on this path was unacceptable. They argued that the alliance should not take on the defense of corrupt, unstable new governments whose territory was riddled with ethnic conflicts and border disputes. The United States and the new East European members argued that the purpose of MAP was to overcome these difficulties. Nothing was guaranteed for membership.
After difficult negotiations—at one point among Chancellor Angela Merkel, the East Europeans, and me—we came up with a communiqué that affirmed NATO’s open door and said that Ukraine and Georgia would become members someday. They were denied MAP for the moment, but it kept their hopes alive. The East Europeans were unhappy but resigned to the decision. A key fissure was exposed nonetheless. Poland, the Czech Republic, the Balts, and others reasoned that Moscow still needed to be deterred. A day would come, they believed, when the alliance would again have to resist Russian aggression. That was not the view of Germany.
Though President Bush wanted Ukraine and Georgia to be granted MAP, we were all aware that it would have created an awkward situation. Vladimir Putin had been invited to a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council on the last day of the summit. He had been outspoken in his opposition to any further “expansion” of NATO by any means, including MAP. The Russians had begun to talk in the language of the past about encirclement and threats to their security. The communiqué allowed Putin to come to the meeting (he would likely not have co
me had MAP been granted). It also allowed President Bush to go ahead with the visit to Sochi for his last meeting with Putin, who was stepping down as president as well. It was one of those moments when you breathed a sigh of relief, even if the outcome didn’t feel quite right.
Putin walked into the room, greeted everyone, and sat down. At the beginning, his speech sounded almost perfunctory and a bit valedictory. I was listening in Russian because I always found that interpreters didn’t quite get Putin’s harsh and combative tone. All of a sudden, I thought that my Russian was failing, and so I started going back and forth between the English translation and the Russian. Did he really just say that Ukraine was a made-up country? Yes, he did. There it was, a declaration that was so Soviet, or actually tsarist, that I couldn’t believe my ears.
We know now that from the time of the Soviet Union’s breakup, Vladimir Putin mourned the collapse of empire and looked for an opportunity to return the Russian people to greatness. When he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century (quite a statement for a country that lost twenty-five million people in World War II) he added a rationale: because twenty-five million Russians had been “orphaned” in other newly independent countries. There were ethnic Russians in the Baltic states, Poland, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Georgia. Putin has taken it as his historic duty to unite them and “protect” them.
This historical messianism is dangerous. Already in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia, one of the justifications was protection of the Russian populations in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Of course the real cause was Putin’s disdain for the pro-Western democratically elected government of Mikheil Saakashvili. This was followed by the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the creeping occupation of eastern Ukraine, setting Putin’s Russia against Europe and the United States.16 But these acts of aggression have solidified his popularity at home. In 2013, Putin’s standing was at a low point—still well above 60 percent, but headed downward. His expensive Sochi Olympic adventure had turned out to be not very popular.
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