We Need to Talk About Putin: Why the West Gets Him Wrong

Chapter 11: Does Putin Want Out?

In 2017, Putin held a televised meeting with schoolchildren in Sochi. When one of them asked him what he would do when he retires, he replied, ‘I haven’t decided yet if I will leave the presidency.’ In 2018, a question at an investors’ forum about Russia after his reign prompted him to reply, ‘What’s the rush? I’m not going anywhere yet.’ Everyone laughed – some awkwardly, some cheerily.

Certainly the Western assumption is that Putin, having already manipulated the constitutional order to get around term limits once – spending four years as prime minister – is planning on being president for life, and that when his fourth term ends in 2024, he’ll find some way of staying on. If that happens, though, this will reflect failure rather than triumph. After all, at that same gathering in Sochi, he wistfully said, ‘You know, dreams are things that change over time.’

In the 2000s, he was younger, hungrier and, above all, luckier. Since then, everything seems to be getting harder. The challenges he faces are intractable: diversifying a low-productivity economy that is still too dependent on oil and gas while also being increasingly locked away from Western investment and technology, for example, or dealing with a looming demographic crisis as fewer young Russians have to pay for more pensioners. One in eight Russians still lives below the poverty line, and too many of the best and the brightest try to emigrate. His forces are stuck in both Ukraine and Syria, with no clear exit strategy. The Russian people themselves are less grateful, more demanding. There were almost a third more protests in 2018 than in 2017, for example. The Communists, so long content to be a zombie opposition, are now showing signs of life, and organised more than a third of them.

An increasingly bored, disengaged Putin seems to have been looking for a successor for some time, which implies that he is at least contemplating handing over his power – or at least his duties. The insider consensus in Moscow is that he wants to find a new-generation mini-me whom he will be able to trust to protect both himself and his legacy, and also (because trust only gets you so far), to construct a constitutional position to allow him semi-retirement and the chance to interfere in politics without any responsibilities. If he can arrange those, he will likely not even serve his current six-year term. But ‘getting out’ would just mean from the job; Putin will not be the kind of ex-president likely to be hankering after a Caribbean villa, games of golf with other former heads of state and the international speaking circuit.

He is likely to remain in Russia, but here we come to the issue about Putin and money: while he enjoys the good life that wealth allows, it has been power that he has really craved and collected. Even in this day of electronic finance, money is a thing. It can be hidden, sent abroad, willed to your children. Power is active, ephemeral, it must constantly be refreshed and reasserted. Back in the Soviet era, one reason why so many leaders died in office was because they knew that they would become vulnerable as soon as they retired. Everything they had – the cars, the mansions, the summer dachas – could be taken away from them by their successor. The tragedy of modern Russia is that the same is still true: Putin may never feel secure enough to put his future in anyone else’s hands.

Putin made his political career as a loyal bagman. He got his hands dirty for Mayor Sobchak in St Petersburg, and when police investigators were closing in on his boss on embezzlement charges, he arranged for the private plane that took him out of the country. When he worked at the Presidential Property Management Directorate, one of the more infamously corrupt agencies, even by Moscow’s standards, he kept his new boss out of the crosshairs, even while corruption investigations sprung up all around him. As director of the FSB and then prime minister, he looked after Yeltsin’s interests – literally the first thing he did as president was sign a decree guaranteeing his predecessor lifelong immunity from prosecution. So can Putin find himself a Putin of his own?

This makes it all the more important to consider a third key question: just how far is Putin really in charge? I don’t mean that there are sinister string-pullers behind him, as much as that he has to work, find out about the world and issue his orders through others. The amount of power the machine has over its purported operator should not be underestimated. Mikhail Zygar, who always has a nose for a great story, tells of how Putin was persuaded to bid for the 2014 Winter Olympics. The oligarch Vladimir Potanin, a keen skier, had become involved with a project to develop a resort near his dacha at Krasnaya Polyana in Sochi. He was keen to make it part of an Olympic bid in order that the government would foot the bill, but Putin was dismissive when the idea was broached in 2005. At that time, he had not yet warmed to the idea of major sporting events as both national PR and great ways to make the elite compete for your favour (and the lucrative contracts to build facilities and infrastructure you can then dispense). So Potanin turned to Dmitry Peskov, then the deputy press secretary, who explained how to change the boss’s mind. Billboards went up advertising the Sochi bid, but only along roads that the presidential motorcade would be taking. Radio adverts were bought, but only on the stations and at times when Putin might be listening. Peskov arranged for someone in a ‘Direct Line’ to ask Putin when Russia would finally host an Olympics. The idea was to make him believe that the country was crying out for it, and that he could profit from that mood. He was duly convinced, and the whole effort of the state then went into trying to win the bid to stage a Winter Olympics in, of all places, a subtropical region, a city with no airport and minimal infrastructure, which had to be rebuilt pretty much from scratch, making it the most expensive Games to date. And all because Peskov was able to tell Potanin how to manage the boss.

It’s also a negative process. At the end of 2015, for example, when military intelligence chief General Igor Sergun died of a heart attack, it became clear that Putin wanted to appoint one of his ex-bodyguard favourites, Alexei Dyumin, as a replacement. The GRU wasn’t keen on the idea – as far as they were concerned, Dyumin was a heavy rather than a spymaster. Defence minister Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov concurred. But the problem was that even Shoigu can’t just say no to the boss, or at least not without taking quite a chance. So they played for time, while also leaking stories to the press that Dyumin wasn’t up to the job. Even the FSB, usually if anything a rival of the GRU, didn’t want to see a precedent established that a totally unqualified favourite could be parachuted into running a security service, so they also started muttering against the idea. Eventually, Sergun’s deputy Igor Korobov was appointed, and Dyumin got the consolation prize of the governorship of Tula instead. It is not that, had Putin flatly demanded it, Dyumin would not have been given the job, but there seems to have been a point at which he decided it was not worth the political cost of asserting his authority. Even tsars need to keep their boyars on side.

And the boyars aren’t happy. On the one hand, those closest to him – which also means those who are benefiting most greatly from his rule – are unlikely to want to see him go, because he is their krysha, their protection. One of the reasons why poor old Leonid Brezhnev lasted so long as Soviet leader, even staying in office after several heart attacks and strokes, was because he had people around him who feared the rise of the dangerous and puritanical Yuri Andropov. When Brezhnev finally succumbed to a heart attack in 1982, it was probably a release for him but a terror for them. Obviously one can only draw so many parallels between the sad, senile Brezhnev and the still-vigorous Putin, but it is likely that there are many who will do their utmost to stave off a succession, which would likely sooner or later mean the new president’s favourites would take their places.

Most within the Russian elite, however, are not in this charmed circle. As Putin increasingly focuses on building his historical legacy and his own geopolitical agenda, he seems to be getting out of step with many of them. The majority, after all, are pragmatic kleptocrats; they are happy to proclaim their devoted commitment to Mother Russia, but they want to be able to keep robbing her blind at the same time, and sending their money, and their families, and their mistresses to safety and comfort in the West. The more sanctions bite, as Russian money becomes toxic and visas become harder to get, the less they can truly enjoy the fruits of their embezzlement. They are happy to see Crimea back in the fold, but they would prefer to holiday in the Cap d’Antibes. Times are getting harder, and so long as Putin continues to make sure his closest friends do well, that inevitably comes at the expense of everyone else. That said, they cannot risk challenging him, because one thing he does understand – and will undoubtedly be ruthlessly willing to keep in his grip – is power. His true loyalists control the security forces, which means they can punish whoever steps out of line. So instead the boyars are waiting. They know the tsar can’t, or won’t, be there for ever, and then they will have a chance to salvage something from the situation.

What do we in the West want out of this situation? It is hard to see any substantive improvement in relations with Russia, so long as Putin is in the Kremlin. Any attempt actively to topple him would be tremendously dangerous – we risk appearing to vindicate his claims about Western aggression and, if past experience is anything to go by, regime change never seems to work well for us. The apparent American enthusiasm for President Medvedev, and their willingness to treat him as if he were the real ruler and not a proxy, was meant to encourage a shift to a slightly more liberal politics, but actually contributed to Putin’s decision that he needed to return to the presidency. Any more active and aggressive meddling would likely trigger an active and aggressive backlash and empower the ultranationalists whom Putin has actually contained. He is neither a fanatic nor a lunatic, and a stable Russia is less dangerous than one in chaos. Containing the harm Russia can do to us and minimising his opportunities for mischief is probably the best we can hope for, however depressing and unambitious that may sound.

But what we can do, to restate an earlier point, is remember that ordinary Russians should not all be considered Putin’s ardent followers, but rather his victims, even if they may not think of themselves as such. We need to make sure they realise that we are not their enemy, and not least for the post-Putin future. We need to appreciate the extent to which Russia is driven by emotions, by a sense of threat and abandonment and disrespect that might be hard fully to justify in objective terms, but felt no less strongly for that. Personally, I am still an optimist and believe that Russia is slowly moving towards Europe and European values, as it works its way through the traumas resulting from the end of empire. But this is likely to happen over a matter of generations rather than years.

So we need to talk about Putin also because much of this will still hold true, even when he’s gone. We may face a Putinist Russia even without the man himself. It is not just that he has nurtured a political generation of mini-Putins, but also that one of the fundamental reasons for his continued standing is that he embodies and channels feelings shared by a majority of Russians. It is worth mentioning that even critics such as Alexei Navalny support the annexation of Crimea, and the newly active Communists who stage anti-government marches do so not because they think he is too anti-Western, but because they think his confrontational geopolitics mask a supine acceptance of exploitative neo-liberal market economics. Just as not everyone who supports Putin is our enemy, not everyone who opposes him is necessarily our friend.

Perhaps I should end as I began, with the words of that well-fed Presidential Administration staffer, spoken between bites of expensive boar cutlets at the White Rabbit restaurant. He recalled a story Putin himself would tell about his childhood in ruined Leningrad, when he and his friends would hunt the rats that plagued their block of flats. One day, having come upon an especially large one, he chased it up the stairs and down the hall and into a corner. What do cornered rats do? It turned and leapt at him, and a terrified young Putin fled.

‘Russia thinks it’s Putin, out hunting rats, but we’re actually the rat. Everyone fears us, but we’re just doing what comes naturally. Corner us, though, and we’ll turn.’ He paused, and then added, ‘Actually, that’s Putin – the big rat, the one willing to turn. But there’s always another one, somewhere in the shadows.’

So maybe, even as we look to a future Russia after Putin, that gives us another reason to talk about Putin. Because there could be another Putin, an even bigger one, waiting in the stairwell.