The crisis has contributed to the success of the Russian strongman’s regime more than any measure of economic success, writes Mark Almond
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When Boris Yeltsin suddenly resigned as Russia’s first post-communist president on New Year’s Eve 1999, his country appeared to be descending into a spiral of economic and political disintegration. Few gave his largely unknown successor as interim president much chance of reversing the economic implosion or staying in office for long.
The then prime minister Vladimir Putin’s media operation had already begun to portray the ex-KGB operative in stark contrast to the moribund Yeltsin as an action man. That same year the second Chechen war on the country’s southern border raged. Twenty-five years later, Vladimir Putin is still in the Kremlin but Russia is again in the grip of war on its post-Soviet periphery after last week’s downing of an airliner over Chechen airspace.
Adding to this tension is the fact that Putin’s Russia has been engaged in a covert war against Ukraine since 2014, which it turned into a full-scale invasion in early 2022, a standoff that now remains in a stalemate. Unlike Chechnya, Putin’s stubbornness has turned an initial military fiasco into a brutal war of attrition that Russia’s resources can win at enormous cost.
But Putin’s performance over the years owes more to his skills in bureaucratic infighting than to any dark art of espionage, or even to the judo skills he once displayed on camera.
Born in post-war Leningrad, amid the dark legacy of the Nazi siege, the young Vladimir Putin learned survival skills more appropriate for the chaotic post-Soviet society of the 1990s than for the shiny long-term utopianism promoted through communist propaganda. .
Westerners are immersed in the myth that the KGB is an anti-James Bond supervillain and that it was Putin’s trysts with his university law professor and not his time in a seedy Dresden workplace that sparked his dazzling rise. .
Anatoly Sobchak was the classic “approved” dissident of the bygone Soviet era. Sobchak, not a member of the Communist Party and who was allowed to whisper subversive comments in exchange for discreet cooperation with the KGB in front of really problematic clients, was able to become a new broom once Mikhail Gorbachev legalized genuine elections after 1989.
Upon his return from East Germany, Putin left the KGB and one of Sobchak’s lieutenants, who soon took on the key role of managing the new mayor of Leningrad’s vast real estate portfolio. These paintings brought the new civic bureaucrat into contact with the emerging nouveau riche of post-communism.
People were inclined to be dismissive of Putin in the 1990s, as they had Stalin 70 years before. When a comrade derided Stalin as a “mediocrity”, Trotsky agreed, but added, “Not a non-entity.” He saw that Putin’s great predecessor actually was a kind of living embodiment of huge sections of the new Soviet society.
It was the West’s failure to grasp that Putin represented swathes of Russians in the 1990s that gave him traction in Russian politics. Putin’s ability to serve Yeltsin and his cronies through that decade led them to the fatal error of choosing him as an easily manipulated successor as president.
Putin’s pardon of Yeltsin for all crimes committed during his tenure was followed by a ruthless crackdown on the oligarchs. He showed that the force of the state prevailed over the force of money. Military might crushed the Chechen rebels. Oil and fuel costs have skyrocketed as George W. However, years of economic expansion and internal peace have not stabilized Putin’s regime.
In 2011, large protests rocked Moscow. The fact that those events occurred in a time of peace and relative abundance taught Putin a lesson. The crisis has favored the stability of the regime far more than any index of economic success. If other people felt it in their daily lives, they might just stand out.
Like so many past Russian rulers, Putin is well aware that the relaxation that comes with peace can promote political dissent.
Putin’s studied indifference to the fate of the crew of the sunken submarine Kursk in 2003 and their families’ trauma as the drama played out below the Barents Sea was one episode of his Stalin-like view of mass death as a matter of statistics.
Westerners believed that the mistakes of the war in Ukraine would weaken Putin. However, just as the pro-Assad media used to show a parade of Western leaders who had demanded his downfall and yet left while he ruled, Putin has outlived many of his Western critics. But it will also have to be tormented by the sudden fall of Assad.
Will his strength crumble so quickly? In July 2023, when their former leader turned warlord Eugene Prigozhin rebelled against him, no one resisted the march from Rostov, in the south, to the gates of Moscow. Prigozhin then struck a deal with Putin, before his plane crashed into him and his fellow mercenaries.
Just as after Stalin’s triumph over Hitler in 1945 he did not melt his regime but intensified internal repression, Putin considers the army’s victory to be less essential to its survival in force than continued foreign tensions. But even a political operator as intelligent and a propagandist as skilled as Vladimir Putin knows, at 72 years old, that time is running out. Stalin died in his bed. Will Vladimir Putin do it?
Back in 1999, Putin had taken charge of the attempt to force rebellious Chechnya on its southern border back under the Kremlin’s control. Only a few days ago, as collateral damage of today’s Ukraine conflict, the fatal crippling of an Azeri airliner over Chechen airspace by Russia’s trigger-happy air defences brought home how far – a quarter of a century later – Putin’s reign has been so far bookended by war.
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