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

Introduction: Why We Need to Talk About Putin

White Rabbit in Moscow is a quintessentially ‘new Russian’ restaurant. Under a glass dome above a glitzy shopping centre close to the Stalinist Gothic tower of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it is the kind of place where special little chairs are placed next to female diners for their handbags, where the (hefty) bill arrives inside a matryoshka nesting doll and where the idea of a fusion of traditional Russian and international cuisine runs to pine-flavoured ice cream. I’m too miserly and too plain in my tastes to be a fan, but it’s flamboyant and prestigious, a place at which to be seen. I shouldn’t have been surprised that, when invited to choose a place for lunch, a former official of the Presidential Administration (Vladimir Putin’s chancery and the most powerful institution in Russia) would pick White Rabbit. Even an overpriced meal and lots of – naturally – Crimean wine was not enough to get him to be really indiscreet, but one of the more revealing parts of the conversation was when he launched into a lengthy and moderately profane diatribe about the West’s continued misunderstanding of ‘the boss’. ‘Seriously, I read some of the shit in your newspapers, that your politicians say, that your “experts” write, and I just don’t know where they get it. No wonder we’ve got into the mess we’re in now. And you know what?’ He waved an almost-empty glass and frowned at me as if I were a representative of the entire Western journalistic, political and pundit class. ‘It made my job harder.’ How? ‘What kind of relations can we have with you all, so long as you don’t really see us, you don’t hear us? So long as you read whatever you want into the president’s every word and his last fart. My job was to try and communicate, but it didn’t matter what we said, what we put into the boss’s speeches, everyone just assumed they knew what we really meant, whatever we actually said. Everyone thinks they know Vladimir Vladimirovich.’

We need to talk about Putin. We really do. Not just because he is, like it or not, one of the most important people on the planet, and nor because of the impact of the geopolitical struggle he is waging with the West, with bluster and bluff, memes and money. It is also because he has become a global symbol, which everyone defines in their own way. As the irate and two-thirds-drunk official suggested, he is like a Rorschach inkblot test used by psychologists: the splash of pigment is deliberately ambiguous; what we read into it says more about what is going on in our heads than what is on the paper.

Because the irony is that, for all that he has been a fixture of global politics for almost twenty years now, for all that there are biographies of his life and calendars of his bare-chested antics and for all that he is a familiar subject of satirists and pundits alike, we still don’t really know who he is. Ruthless autocrat or saviour of a beleaguered nation? KGB veteran or pious Christian? Brooding grandmaster of global geopolitics or self-indulgent kleptocrat? He’s a bit of each of them, but none of these labels truly sum him up – and that’s partly the point. Putin is ferociously private – not just on his own account, but also on behalf of his family, both out of preference and political calculation; his aloofness allows everyone to construct their own personal Putin.

Part of my motivation to write this book is a frustration with the simplistic caricatures so often deployed – and not only in the West – to try and understand him. I remember one newly appointed European ambassador to Moscow blithely asserting that ‘to understand Putin, you simply need to understand his KGB training’. If it is that simple, then why do we keep getting Putin wrong? The main drivers for this process of estrangement with Russia may be elsewhere, but it is also depressingly clear how often Western diplomacy has failed. It left a potential pragmatic ally in the early 2000s sufficiently embittered that by 2007 Putin was squaring up for a confrontation. Its toothless response to Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia was used as evidence in Moscow in 2014 that moving into Ukraine would lead to only brief and token protest. It even managed to convince not just Putin but also many within his political establishment that the West was at once too weak to fear and yet too dangerous to ignore. Above all, it failed to persuade them that we do not hate them, their country and their culture. All this happened in no way only or even mainly because of our poor handling of Putin and Russia – but we have managed to handle both badly, and to a large extent because of a lack of understanding.

In this book, I seek to present a picture of the complexities of Vladimir Putin, and through him of today’s Russia, drawing on more decades of contact with Russia than I’d care to admit – time spent travelling there, talking to everyone from provincial cops to Moscow officials, getting drunk and paying the odd bribe. I don’t for a minute think that I have got everything right, nor that everyone else has got everything wrong. This is not primarily a book for my academic colleagues, and I will beg their indulgence for its tone, brevity and distinct absence of footnotes. Rather, it is for anyone who is curious about who this enigmatic figure may be, and why there is so much hype and hysteria around him. By attacking a collection of the most common and most problematic myths that ‘everyone knows’ about Putin, I hope to try and cut through some of the most unhelpful. Of course, I am, in part, taking on straw man arguments and over-simplifications, and it is not as though every policymaker, scholar or pundit believes all or even most of these. That said, the recent impoverishment of much public discourse about Putin and Russia, with cliché and caricature increasingly mobilised on both sides, has been depressing. As the world gets more complex, the ways we frame and explain it too often seem to be getting simpler and less nuanced. That is something we need to talk about, too – but not before we’ve finished talking about Putin.

As I say, this book does not pretend to be the last word on Putin, and nor does it claim that no one else gets it right. Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (Brookings Institution Press, 2013) is a sharp take on the idea of ‘various Putins’ that also manages to win my heart by its use of a Mr Benn motif (for those who grew up watching children’s television in 1970s Britain). Brian Taylor’s The Code of Putinism (Oxford University Press, 2018) draws particularly on official statements to create a good sense of the kind of world view held by Putin and his closest allies. Anna Arutunyan’s The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (Skyscraper Publications, 2014) looks at the Russian people, and how far their dreams and fears actually shaped Putin and his regime. Mikhail Zygar’s All The Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin (PublicAffairs, 2016) is a brilliant study less of Putin himself and more of the key figures around him. Indeed, it also seems important to stress that Russia is bigger than Putin – Tony Wood’s Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War (Verso, 2018) does this especially well.