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

Chapter 3: Putin’s Not Looking to Revive the USSR, or Tsarism for That Matter

Back in 2007, I was having a drink with a retired Russian spy, a colonel in the KGB who had chosen to leave the service in 1991. After a few years in what he always vaguely described as ‘corporate intelligence’ – obviously lucrative, as I doubt his government pension would have allowed him to buy that new BMW 7 Series every few years – he retired to read books about the Second World War, dote on his grandchildren, and periodically predict the war to end all wars. Putin had recently given a speech in Munich that had the colonel glowing with apocalyptic glee.

That speech was, in many ways, the start of a new and rather more dangerous chapter in global politics. When Putin had first come to power in 2000, he spoke the language of tough nationalism but was in practice strikingly pragmatic. He was no fan of Western democracy, but he did believe that Russia’s best future depended on developing some kind of positive working relationship with the West. The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the USA gave him a perfect opportunity to build rapport on an issue where there was genuine common interest: he was the first world leader to contact President George W. Bush to express sympathy after the attacks, and followed up with practical support and assistance that ranged from intelligence sharing to allowing Coalition forces deploying to Afghanistan to be supplied through Russia.

Putin’s notions of cooperation proved out of step with the West’s. He expected them to be similarly understanding of his brutal war against Chechen separatists, which he framed as a counter-terrorism operation, and was infuriated when he faced criticism for human rights violations (as his forces pounded cities and interned civilians). When seven Central European nations, including the three Baltic states that had once been part of the USSR, were allowed to join NATO in 2004, Putin regarded this as a direct breach of prior understandings (which NATO denied) and an eastward expansion of an anti-Russian military alliance. The irritants and misunderstandings accumulated, and they burst forth in his speech in Munich. He criticised the USA for trying to create a ‘unipolar’ world under its domination, accusing it of ‘an almost uncontained hyper use of force… that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts’.

This was strong stuff, a genuine cry of anger, frustration and embittered disillusion, which, of course, was music to the ears of my friend, the KGB colonel. ‘Mark my words,’ he chortled, pouring himself another glass of Armenian cognac, ‘within three years there will be war. There will be war.’ Why – because Putin wants to expand Russia’s borders? ‘Oh no,’ he replied, taken aback by my Western paranoia. ‘Because you will have invaded us.’ It is all too easy for us to focus on the undoubted aggression of Putin’s Russia without considering the deep insecurities in which it is rooted.

It’s not as though Putin helps the situation. If you’re the undisputed master of a nation, you should be wary of making offhand statements, especially ones that seem to justify others’ worst fears about you. In a speech in the Kremlin in 2005, Putin said that ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union was the major geopolitical catastrophe of the century’. Never mind that he was focusing on the plight of ethnic Russians who had suddenly found themselves outside their nation’s borders, and on the way that ‘the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself’. Never mind that in the same year he said that ‘those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart, and those who do regret it have no brain’. None of that context matters, and the original line about the ‘geopolitical catastrophe’ has since been endlessly cited as evidence that he hankers after those halcyon Soviet days and wants to restore the USSR.

To be sure, Putin is Homo Sovieticus, a product of Soviet times. He played in a Leningrad scarred by its ferocious defence against the Nazi invaders in a war appropriated by the Party as part of its legitimating mythology. As a schoolboy he studied the heavily politicised versions of history prescribed by the government, in which a jealous and implacably hostile West was portrayed as a perpetual threat. At Leningrad State University, he had to join the Communist Party as a condition of graduation, and this was all the more necessary given his desperation to be a Chekist. But he is not a Communist in any ideological sense, even by the cynical and corrupt standards of late Soviet times, when most within the Party elite simply wrapped their self-interest in a red flag. Rather, he seems to miss the order of those days, and he certainly resents the loss of the Soviet Union’s unquestioned superpower status: witness how he bristled when Barack Obama dismissed Russia as a ‘regional power’ in 2014, snapping that the American president was being ‘disrespectful’. This issue of respect is clearly central to his vision for his country’s future.

Putin has committed himself to restoring both the central authority of the state and also Russia’s status as a great power, but this is not simply an exercise in geopolitical archaeology, rediscovering and restoring ancient glories. Rather, it is envisaged as creating something new. Recreating the old USSR would not only mean a war with NATO over forcing the recalcitrant Baltic states back into the fold; it would also mean taking on responsibility for five unstable, corrupt Central Asian countries. There is no evidence that Putin – let alone the Russian people as a whole – has any interest in that. Even in Ukraine, a country much closer to Moscow’s heart, had he wanted to annex the ethnically Russian Donbas region, he could have done that in 2014. Indeed, when Putin made it clear that this was not going to happen, he disappointed and angered many Russian nationalists who had seen him as their champion.

If he does not want to restore the USSR’s boundaries, what does he want? For a clue, look at the glitzy ‘Russia – My History’ exhibition at Moscow’s VDNKh, the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy. VDNKh was built in Soviet times as a bombastic theme park dedicated to Stalinism, with huge pavilions showcasing the largely mythic successes of the five-year plan. After 1991, it fell into the same shabby decline as the rest of Russia. Pavilions were closed or became indoor markets, where dodgy traders shifted dodgy goods: fake furs, counterfeit cigarettes and smuggled Chinese electronics. Under Putin it has gone through a renaissance; water once again flows from the glittering Friendship of Nations fountain, and the Cosmos Pavilion now includes the Soviet Buran space shuttle. However, beyond reviving what was there, the government has also built a massive new multimedia exhibition, ‘Russia – My History’. It has three main sections; one devoted to the country in medieval times, when it was ruled by the princes of the Rurik dynasty, one about the era of the Romanov tsars, and one focusing on 1917–45, from the Bolshevik Revolution to the end of the Second World War – or, as the exhibition puts it, ‘from the Great Upheaval to a Great Victory’.

The exhibit is modern, fun, and free of pesky nuance and killjoy balance. It is theme-park history, a roller-coaster ride with soaring ascents and terrifying descents, along a government-approved trajectory that sees Russia strong and safe when it is united and ruled by a firm hand. It doesn’t matter if it’s talking about the thirteenth century when, according to the exhibition, Russian princedoms were conquered by the Mongols because they were divided (‘Atomisation!’ screams a headline above a glowing map of different principalities), or the Second World War (the ‘Great Patriotic War’ in Russian parlance) when Stalin’s murderous tyranny is presented as a sad necessity for victory. Whether Marshal Zhukov, the man who broke Berlin in 1945 or Prince Mikhail Kutuzov, who turned back Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, it is all about strong men (and a few women) taking tough decisions and shaping the world, regardless of whether they wore a red star or a tsar’s colours.

This is the essence of Putin’s vision. In his State of the Federation speech in 2012, he said that ‘to revive national consciousness, we need to link historical eras and get back to understanding the simple truth that Russia did not begin in 1917, or even in 1991… We have a common, continuous history spanning over a thousand years, and we must rely on it to find inner strength and purpose in our national development.’ He wants to cherry-pick the bits of history that fit his narrative of a Russia that has been perennially battered and belittled by foreigners, yet strong when it stands together – so the Soviet victory in 1945 is included, but Communism isn’t, for example. Russian history is strewn with the bodies of defunct empires and heroes of the day; like Dr Frankenstein, Putin wants to create something new from the bits and pieces gathered from those corpses.

But there is also a dangerous flip side to this mish-mash of Russian history: a preoccupation with the country’s insecurity. As a nation at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, it has always been prey to the rising imperialist power of the age, from the raiding Vikings of the ninth century, to the Mongols of the thirteenth, the Swedes in the eighteenth, the French in the nineteenth and the Germans in the twentieth – and, many fear, the Chinese in the twenty-first. It has also often been the victim of other nations’ greater economic or technological strength – in the 1853–6 Crimean War, for example, British rifles could often outrange Russian cannon. The collapse of the Soviet Union was the culmination of a period of slow and painful economic decay, due to a considerable extent to the pressure of excessive defence spending, as the Soviets tried to keep up with the West. It was not simply a matter of too much money going to defence, it affected the whole of the centrally planned economy. The single greatest cause of household fires in the early 1980s was exploding television sets, for example, as the defence firms got to pick the best cathode-ray tube displays for their use, leaving the substandard ones for civilian televisions.

In effect, the Soviet Union lost a war, a political, economic and social one. Gorbachev had tried to reform the Communist Party, but it was too close-minded, corrupt and conservative to change. Public anger grew as the economic situation worsened, and nationalist movements sought to break countries out of a ‘union’ that had always looked more like an empire. On Christmas Day in 1991, Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president and Moscow went from being the capital of an empire to the centre of one country out of fifteen. It is hard to overstate the shocking impact of the 1990s on Russia, a decade when the ruble tumbled, pensions and salaries often seemed not able to buy anything, and pensioners would stand outside metro stations trying desperately to sell whatever possessions they had to get through another week, while the Mercedes and BMWs of the new rich drove past. Privatisation schemes simply transferred public assets into the hands of a few corrupt insiders and wheeler-dealers, and Moscow no longer seemed in charge.

It is perhaps understandable that bewilderment at what had happened shifted to a desire to find someone to blame, someone who had done it to them. The most extreme point of view is that the West had not only deliberately forced the Soviet Union into an arms race that it could not afford, but that its Harvard economists and International Monetary Fund advisers had knowingly encouraged the plunder of the country, an allegation that is not totally without truth. Even more moderate figures note the degree to which Russia was not taken seriously in that decade, when it was treated as a problem rather than a player. As the KGB colonel put it, ‘As soon as we had pulled down the red flag and run up the white, as soon as they knew we were beaten, they lost interest.’

They lost interest. It is striking how far Putin’s foreign ambitions are psychological, about the ideas of power and forms of respect. He certainly seems to believe that the West is trying to keep Russia under its thumb. In 2011 he said, ‘Sometimes it seems to me that America does not need allies, it needs vassals.’ The trouble is that, when viewed from the Kremlin’s narrow windows, and especially when filtered through the conspiracy-theory-laden analyses often peddled by those in Putin’s circle, the world can seem very hostile. Uprisings in the Middle East and other post-Soviet states? Clearly not protests against corrupt, inefficient and unresponsive rulers, but CIA plots to bring down Moscow-friendly regimes. The rise of a new generation of young, middle-class Russians unimpressed with what Putin can offer and willing to protest? Obviously another example of creeping and weaponised Westernisation. After all, as far as Putin is concerned, the decline of Russia’s distinctive cultural values and civilisational uniqueness also affects its place in the world, because ‘without history, without culture, without mentality, nothing works. Those are the things that glue everything together. All those things create a country, ensure its cohesion and determine its position in the international arena.’

This sense of military, political, economic and cultural vulnerability is widely held, and there are those who see it in even starker terms than Putin. When, for example, Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of his Security Council, one of his closest allies and the nearest thing he has to a national security adviser, openly affirms that he knows for a fact that the USA ‘would very much like Russia not to exist at all as a country’, what can one expect? The claims of my colonel friend that the West is just waiting for the chance to invade Russia are not just the whinnies of an old warhorse, they reflect a genuine concern that, however much we may think it perverse and paranoid, continues to inform Moscow’s military planning and policy discussions.

Losing an empire, and with it great-power status, is hard – one could say that Britain and France haven’t really come to terms with this, fifty-plus years on. Putin doesn’t simply want to turn the clock back to past glory days, whether tsarist or Soviet. Instead, he is kicking against Russia’s new place in the world. After all, this is a country with a shrinking population and an economy the size of Spain’s, that is largely dependent on oil and gas. Despite having innovative and creative programmers and designers, it is having trouble adapting to the information age. It has nuclear weapons and a large army, but it can barely afford either, with a third of the federal budget being spent on security, broadly defined. It also has strikingly little ‘soft power’ – there are wannabe strongmen who dream of being like Putin, but not many countries want to be like Russia. On any objective basis, Russia is not a great power. But Putin is determined that Russia matters, matters more than this recitation of moderate strengths and less moderate weaknesses would suggest.

At the same time, Putin – who is known to read a lot of history – has a view of what being a great power in the world means that is more rooted in the nineteenth century than the twenty-first: he thinks each great power has a sphere of influence, buffer states and jewels in the crown. For example, when Putin punished Ukraine and Georgia for their temerity in trying to get closer to the West, it was less for practical reasons and more because he could not bear to see them being ‘lost’. Secondly, he sees a great power as having a voice in all global issues of consequence, not because it necessarily has interests at stake but rather because this symbolises its status. Finally, he thinks a great power should get to waive the rules and should not have to consider itself bound by international laws and norms.

This is a pipe dream, especially for a country that is only a great power in its own imagination, but in many ways this is the point: politics and power are all about perception. By acting as if Russia is a great power, Putin hopes to persuade everyone else either that this is true, or at least that it is not worth trying to challenge the idea and that they should stop trying to ‘keep Russia down’. At 1.7 metres tall, Putin is of below average height, but with his over-the-top tough-guy persona, he tries to project a rather more formidable image. As I will discuss in Chapter 6, his persona is precisely that, a piece of purposeful theatricality, and the same is true of much of his foreign policy. He is trying to get us to show respect, to treat Russia as if it still matters in the world, as if it were much more than 1.7 metres tall. In the name of this defensive policy, he is undoubtedly deploying aggressive tactics, but this is not the start of a Soviet revival, nor yet a tsarist one – it is an angry, despairing scream into the void, a last attempt to deny history, to pretend the age of Russian superpower is not over.