Winter Is Coming

PRESIDENT FOR LIFE

Putin’s sudden ascent to acting president eliminated any remaining doubts about the result of the election. Not only would he have three months as the most visible and powerful person in Russia, with the full apparatus of the state to promote him, but the election would come three months earlier than the competition had expected. Putin appeared on television constantly in the months before the March 26 vote, with one exception. Continuing a Yeltsin tradition, he declined to participate in any debates with other candidates.

Putin won with 53.4 percent, nearly doubling Zyuganov’s tally and avoiding the runoff that would have been triggered had he failed to reach a majority. On election night I was watching the returns come in on television with several American guests curious to see the beginning of the post-Yeltsin era. One was Chris Cox, the congressman from California who had become a great advocate of Russian democracy and bilateral affairs, and a personal friend. Other guests that evening included James Woolsey, the former CIA director under Bill Clinton, and Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of state. I remember watching Putin’s numbers carefully that night. He was holding steady at around 47 percent when in less than an hour they jumped up to 53 percent and then never fluctuated again. It would have been embarrassing for Putin to have to undergo a second round. He was the chosen one and the time for uncertainty was over.

This is not to suggest Putin would not have won a completely fair election at the time. He would have. People were nervous and craving stability and strength, which is what Putin promised them. The various liberal reform groups, most notably the Yabloko (“Apple”) party of Grigory Yavlinsky, who received my vote, were relegated to bystanders. The idea that greater centralized power could lead to a loss of civil liberties was far from most Russians’ minds. We still had a mostly free media, with programs that openly criticized our politicians and their ideas. The brilliant satirical puppet show Kukly had raked Yeltsin over the coals for years on NTV. The government was not the sacred cow it would soon become.

Terrorism and physical security were not the only voter priorities. The 1998 financial collapse was still on everyone’s mind. Although it was relatively short-lived, and the economy would rebound in 2000 to achieve its highest ever GDP growth of over 10 percent, there were serious concerns about how much we could trust the banks and other financial institutions, especially because of who owned them.

The oligarchs who had gotten unimaginably rich in the 1990s while allying with Yeltsin were the public faces of the corruption that infuriated the average Russian. We saw them on TV and in the papers, saw their ostentatious wealth while their gangsters and bodyguards fought battles in the streets of Moscow. A “law and order” campaign is one of the oldest clichés in the history of elections, but it had real resonance in Russia in 2000.

Another element in the mood on the street in Russia then was Soviet nostalgia. Not for Communism, but the vague sense that something had been lost. It’s difficult to explain, but the 1990s failed to provide a new sense of purpose to fill that feeling of loss and failed to provide enough prosperity to distract Russians from thinking about the past. Putin and his air of regret over the collapse of the USSR were therefore appealing along these lines. It’s a subtle but important distinction. People did not really want to return to the Soviet days; they just didn’t want to feel bad about thinking about it.

Putin arrived mostly untainted by the corruption and financial ruin associated with the Yeltsin administration. The 1998 financial crisis had forced Yeltsin to clean house, and he swept out the good with the bad. The economic team led by Anatoly Chubais was demonized, fairly and unfairly. The purge also caught a young Yeltsinite on Chubais’s team, Boris Nemtsov. Once treated by Yeltsin as a potential successor, Nemtsov would go on to become one of the strongest voices in opposition to Putin’s rollback of democracy in Russia. Boris and I worked closely together for years in the anti-Putin opposition movement and I was horrified, but not surprised, by his assassination in Moscow on February 27, 2015.

Boris Yeltsin’s needs were far more personal. Corruption accusations were rising around him and members of his family, and not just “the Family,” as his closest circle of oligarchs and advisors were known, but his actual relatives. The 1998 government shake-up left Yeltsin rattled and aware of his vulnerability. Impeachment forces in the Duma were rising before he conceded and dropped Chernomyrdin for Primakov as prime minister. Yeltsin needed a presidential successor who would be grateful and loyal to him, without his own constituency, and who would be strong enough to stand up to Yeltsin’s enemies if they came after him.

Yeltsin’s younger daughter, Tatyana, was also his close advisor and was a major power behind the throne in the later years of his administration. She has been credited with influencing her father’s choice of Putin. There is a historical twist here going back to 1933, when ailing German president Paul von Hindenburg was convinced by his son Oskar to name Adolf Hitler chancellor. Hitler seized all state powers for himself within hours of von Hindenburg’s death in 1934. Ironically, in her blog in 2010, Tatyana Yumasheva (her married name) briefly and cautiously attempted to defend her father and his legacy against the Putin regime’s attempts to rewrite the history of the 1990s.

The nonaggression pact between Putin and the Family has otherwise held up very well. In fact, I think Putin was cautious about completely demolishing Russian democracy up until Yeltsin’s death. Despite his faults and fall from grace while in office, Yeltsin was a true freedom fighter. Had he felt obliged to speak out about Putin’s dictatorial maneuvers it could have had real repercussions going into the 2008 election season. But after he died on April 23, 2007, Putin clearly felt no constraints.

Yeltsin deserves to be remembered for more than his drinking and for sitting atop a tank during the August coup attempt. In December 1991, the Western world watched with grave suspicion as Mikhail Gorbachev was forced to resign from office. Yeltsin got little credit for leading the revolution that finally swept away Communist institutions and broke up the Soviet empire. It was Yeltsin, not Gorbachev, who brought Russia out of the looking glass into the sunlight. During the painful transition period, Russians lost their illusions about a shining future just around the corner. Corruption, poverty, crime, and war in the North Caucasus made daily life in Russia quite ugly, and Yeltsin received most of the blame.

But who could have found an easy way out at the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union had collapsed and the mere survival of the Russian state and its people was the only relevant issue? Yeltsin’s battering-ram power was sufficient to destroy the prison of the past, but he lacked the preparation and creativity to design the palace of the future.

Despite the challenges, by 2000 Russians lived in the same dimension as the rest of the civilized world, and we measured success and failure in our lives by the same standards. As did many of my compatriots, I always supported and voted for Yeltsin—with great expectations from 1989 to 1993, with hard feelings from 1994 to 1996, when his only great virtue was that he was an obstacle to Communist revanchism.

The growing disappointment of his last two years in office was due to Yeltsin’s inability to carry forward necessary reforms and root out corruption from Russia’s political and economic life. But, frankly speaking, we didn’t have any real alternative. In judging the pros and cons of Yeltsin’s rule, one may argue that he failed to root out the Communist and KGB seeds from Russian soil but at least he stopped them from sprouting on his watch.

Lenin still lies in Red Square, and the two bans (in 1991 and 1993) on the Communist Party marching under the banners of Lenin and Stalin were only temporary. As a dedicated anticommunist, I’m the last one to excuse such softness on what’s left of the criminal Soviet state. Yet I understand Yeltsin’s unease about dealing the final blow to the regime that propelled him to the top of the nomenclatura.

Perhaps the most important thing Yeltsin did was something he did not do when he took power. After the blackest pages of post-Communist Russian history had been turned in October 1993, and after several bloody days in Moscow, Yeltsin declined to do what his opponents almost surely would have done: wipe out the other side. For the first time in all of Russian history the new ruler did not eliminate the losers to consolidate control. What’s more, eventually they were integrated into the political process. Yeltsin called for immediate elections and accepted an independent parliament.

Out of nowhere, the career bureaucrat literally leapt to the front lines armed with an instinct for breaking down barriers and opening doors long closed. And yet Yeltsin’s inconsistency was boundless. He allowed regional leaders to have more power but then dived into the tragic war in Chechnya. He waged battle against special privileges for the elites but later opened the floodgates for the oligarchs to loot the country. He promoted free and fair elections, but in the end he couldn’t accept that popular will could decide supreme power.

It was clear Yeltsin couldn’t stay in power with fair elections and the abuses quickly mounted. From that point on the Putin police state was all but predestined. Putin had only to follow his own instincts and carry through what was already in motion. Yeltsin failed the final and most important test. The fragile democratic structures he allowed to form could not survive his own need for power and security. He failed to create lasting institutions. The structure relied on his leadership, and the freedoms that existed were there only because he allowed them. There was no way such a system could withstand the exit of the ruler who created it.

Worst of all, his collapse poisoned the minds of the Russian people against what they saw, incorrectly, as uncontrolled capitalism and democracy. The oligarchs who took power prevailed over the good of the people. Russians saw no benefits from the supposed blessings of elections and the free market. A new ruling elite was formed out of the old bureaucrats and the new technocrats, united in their indifference to the values of liberal democracy. The fights among them at the end of the 1990s to find Yeltsin’s successor could have gone differently, but democracy was sure to be the loser. They quickly recognized that elections and a free media could only threaten their grip on power. It was no coincidence that Yeltsin’s hand-picked successor came from the KGB.

Missed opportunities were inevitable considering the magnitude of the changes and problems that confronted Yeltsin. It’s still early to analyze what he could have done better, but it is relatively simple to compare how things have gone since Putin took over in 2000. There was chaos, but Yeltsin never attacked individual freedoms. Putin has built his entire presidency to be the opposite of the Yeltsin years, with a great deal of success. The entire government has been brought under the direct control of the president. The parliament attempted to impeach Yeltsin twice; now it is a puppet show. The corruption of the oligarchs has been moved inside the Kremlin walls where it has expanded to staggering levels. The media, which was free to criticize Yeltsin, is entirely at the service of the Putin administration. The economy is where we see the biggest difference, although most of the credit must go to the simple fact that during Putin’s tenure the price of oil went from $10 a barrel to over $100. And even with those untold energy riches the average Russian is seeing little improvement in his standard of living.

Boris Yeltsin had more than his share of faults, but he was a real person. He had virtues and vices in his flesh and blood. We exchanged him for a shadow of a man who wants only to keep us all in perpetual darkness. The long lines of Russians who waited to view Yeltsin’s coffin and pay their respects at a Moscow cathedral demonstrated that despite his many failures people sensed the possibility for good in what he attempted. This is a stark contrast to what we got in his successor.

Fifteen years into his rule in Russia, there is still an impressively large industry of pundits discussing Vladimir Putin’s true nature. Some guesswork is to be expected considering the lack of documentation about most of his early life and the conflicting reports and biographical portraits about him and about his career. Even his own autobiographical statements and interviews seem designed to obscure and mislead, which of course they are.

Putin’s early life story is not the subject of my interest or this book. Investigating the hardships of his Leningrad childhood and trying to sort fact from fiction in his biography has been done elsewhere by those who find such things more rewarding than I do. I expect there is much to learn that will never be learned until Putin is out of power, if ever. So I will cite a few authors whose opinions and analysis I respect and move ahead to Putin’s time in power. Russian journalist Masha Gessen knows as much as anyone can likely know about Putin and writes with her usual acuity on his character in her excellent 2012 biography, The Man Without a Face:

A new biography I haven’t had a chance to really study is Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin by Hill and Gaddy. This passage near the beginning caught my eye as an insightful explanation of Putin’s behavior during most of his public life. It jibes well with my description of Putin as a poker player who was adept at reading his opponents. Keep this description in mind as we move into discussion of what other world leaders thought of Putin when they met. In all likelihood it was whatever he wanted them to think.

Putin is less interested in presenting a particular version of reality than in seeing how others react to the information. For him, others are participants in a game he directs. He chooses inputs; they react. He judges. Their responses to his input tell him who they think he is—but by responding they also tell him who they are, what they want, what they care about. For his part, Vladimir Putin reveals very little in return. Indeed, he goes to great, often elaborate, lengths to throw other participants off track. As president and prime minister, he has presented himself as a myriad of different personas. Since 2000, Mr. Putin has been the ultimate international political performance artist.

I would add, however, that Putin’s character and his performance have begun to merge under pressure over the last few years. When he was forced to switch from currying favor with the leading democratic nations to raging against them to stoke domestic support, the real Putin came to the surface and the layers of masks could come off. This wasn’t only a matter of Putin acting on his nature, like the scorpion on the frog’s back, but of being allowed to grow into and fulfill his nature.

That is the ultimate answer to the question of dictators being born or raised. As with most nature-nurture questions, it’s both in varying degrees of balance. In 2000, Putin didn’t know he wanted to be a dictator. (Unlike Hitler and Stalin, whose early writings and statements made their dreams all too clear.) Insider stories from 1999 even suggest Putin was alarmed by Yeltsin’s proposal to resign early and thrust him into the presidency early.

Putin’s instinct was to align himself with power and to bring power to himself. Anything he didn’t control was something he couldn’t trust. His solution was to try to control everything. Unlike the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, which handed all control to the system, Putin aimed for the totalitarianism of one person: himself.

When Putin took over the presidency in 2000 he was surrounded by many other potent forces. Various Yeltsin advisors (including his daughter) and oligarchs still wielded power inside and outside of the Kremlin walls. These included Yeltsin’s longtime eminence grise, Boris Berezovsky, and his collaborators Alexander Voloshin and Roman Abramovich. Berezovsky had been acquainted with Putin for years and is credited with lifting him out of the bureaucracy and into the prime minister’s post.

While Yeltsin’s reforms had weakened the Duma considerably relative to the presidency, it was still a factor and couldn’t be completely ignored. The media was subjected to considerable government influence, but there were still many alternatives, and political reporting, while biased and vitriolic, was unrestrained.

Since I have often touted my prescience, I should give some time to my mistakes as well. Two days after Putin took office, I eulogized Yeltsin’s tenure and tried to set an optimistic tone for the future under Putin. My January 3, 2000, op-ed in the Wall Street Journal made no mention of Putin’s KGB background or horrific human rights record in Chechnya. My focus was Yeltsin’s legacy and any predictions were difficult since Putin was still mostly an unknown. Plus, like any patriot I wanted the best for my country. Foreign support and investment were still very important for Russia, something I surely had in mind when I took to the pages of the newspaper. I wrote:

Of course it turned out that Yeltsin wanted a strongman in the Kremlin to protect the precious wealth he and his family and associates had accumulated, not democratic reforms. And I simply could not imagine that the constitutional framework itself would be targeted so quickly and so brutally. Like most, I imagined Putin would favor his own friends and be more disciplined, not that he would immediately steer the entire country back toward totalitarianism.

Then we come to the forces outside of Russia, the Western administrations and investors that had practically given up on Russia as the decade came to a close. Instead of using their considerable leverage to back reforms and democratic institutions, the leading free world nations limited their investment to nuclear disarmament and other relatively easy cooperation. While it should already be clear that I do not subscribe to the myth of Russian humiliation, much more could have been done had there been a sincere interest in the West regarding the future of Russia.

George Soros was a participant in and a witness to many of the events around the attempts to reform and rebuild the Russian economy in the post-Soviet years. His investment fund was as important a factor in many ways as the International Monetary Fund. He was also very disappointed in the feeble and hypocritical engagement by the West in the late 1990s. By the time Putin arrived at the presidency, Soros saw the writing on the wall. Much earlier than most observers, he saw where Putin would take the country. In February 2000, the famous investor penned an article in Moskovsky Novosti. Most of it was dedicated to describing the battle royal behind the scenes between Chubais and Berezovsky, and criticizing the West for what he saw as its failure to support Russia adequately. In between, he had this to say about the future of the new Putin regime:

When it comes to getting Putin right, and getting him right early, the highest laurels must go to Andrei Piontkovsky. One of the sharpest minds in political analysis, Andrei also has one of the sharpest tongues. In January 2000, he called Putinism “the highest and final stage of bandit capitalism” and “the coup de grace” to the head of the Russian nation. The article he penned in February 2000 in the Russia Journal deserves immortality for seeing very clearly what most of us only feared. He begins the article in the World Economic Forum in Davos that January, where he was amused to watch a panel of Russian officials attempt to answer the question “Who is Putin?”

The distinguished gentlemen who in the corridors had been busy aggressively pushing their product under the brand-name “Vladimir Putin, next Russian president” were at a loss—none of them wanted to speak out in public, or they dared not to speak out in public. It was as when referring to the deceased—“one either speaks well of them, or says nothing at all.” Only Putin is still very much alive and politically kicking.

He then relates how he answered the question himself on his own panel the next day. As ever, Andrei pulled no punches:

Piontkovsky then referred to the plight of journalist Andrei Babitsky, who had been abducted by Russian military forces in Chechnya and who was later personally accused by Putin of treason for reports he felt were too sympathetic to the Chechen militants. Andrei concluded his article:

In 2005, a bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky was returned to its old place in a courtyard behind the Moscow Police Building at Petrovka 38. The towering statue of him in Lubyanka Square that was pulled down in 1991 still awaits its return.

Putin was inaugurated on May 7, 2000, faced with an array of outside influences, not to mention a shaky economy and an ongoing war in Chechnya. With impressive focus, Putin began work immediately to tame or eliminate everything and everyone that could limit his power. His first decree had been to provide protection to Yeltsin, as had no doubt been promised. Those that followed in quick succession over the next few days were dedicated either to strengthening the military or dismantling Russia’s democratic institutions.

Oligarchs who had been on the wrong side of the power struggles quickly found out what it meant to lose to Putin. Vladimir Gusinsky, the media baron whose NTV had been the first independent channel in Russia, was considered too close to Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, whose presidential ambitions Gusinsky had funded. Gusinsky was deemed untrustworthy and potentially dangerous by Putin and the consequences were swift. Within days of Putin’s taking office, Gusinsky’s media company was raided by police. In June he was arrested on a bizarre charge and spent three days in jail. After being released on bail he left for Spain, where later in the year he was briefly arrested due to an Interpol warrant filed by the Russian government. (An early example of this tactic, abusing international institutions for political persecution.) Gusinsky’s media assets were eventually consumed by the state, a punitive form of renationalization that would also become a familiar pattern.

Berezovsky himself didn’t last much longer. Now also a member of the Duma, he published a letter protesting Putin’s proposed legislation that would demote regional governors and subject them to the authority of the central government, saying it was a threat to Russian democracy, which of course was the entire point. Six weeks later, on July 17, Berezovsky resigned from parliament, supposedly in protest over Putin’s onslaught of anti-democratic legislation. After the two exchanged criticism and threats in the media, an old fraud investigation against Berezovsky was revived by federal investigators in October. That was the only hint he needed to stay out of the country, which he did, eventually settling in London. As with Gusinsky, Berezovsky’s remaining Russian assets were stripped or he was forced to sell to oligarchs with higher loyalty ratings.

Putin may have simply deemed Berezovsky too powerful and too knowledgeable to keep around. The oligarch knew where lots of bodies were buried because he had buried many of them himself. He also controlled several very high-value targets, the oil company Sibneft and the TV channel ORT, later known as Channel One. Putin quickly realized that it was more effective to control the media completely than to censor it, so he cut out the middlemen.

Media outlets were taken over by forces friendly to Putin and his closest associates. This “takeover censorship” was accompanied by the more conventional kind, with its lists of non grata names and verboten topics. Media power was centralized in the same fashion as political power, and with the same purpose: looting the country without causing a popular revolt. The corruption of the Yeltsin era is burned into Russia’s collective memory only because we learned about it in the press at the time. In the 1990s, the competing oligarchs waged war against one another in their media outlets. It was not a fight fought fairly or decently, but a preponderance of facts came to light and thousands of honest journalists worked to bring the truth to the Russian public.

Putin’s obsession with the media boiled over after the accident that sank the Kursk nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea in August. One hundred eighteen sailors died, twenty-three of them after escaping the initial explosions and surviving for hours, maybe longer, in an isolated compartment awaiting a rescue that only arrived days later. The Kursk was the pride of the Russian fleet, launched in 1994 and deemed, like the Titanic, “unsinkable.” Due to budgetary cutbacks the sub had seen very little activity and not much maintenance, just like the rest of the military at that point in time. Poor training and corroded equipment led to disaster when an old practice torpedo exploded on board, sinking the submarine in one hundred meters of freezing water.

Putin was on vacation in Sochi at the time and decided to stay there during the crisis. There was likely nothing he could have done to save the trapped men on the Kursk; there is no way he could have known that at the time. He accepted the navy’s statement that a rescue was in motion with no debate. He admitted later that it looked very bad for him to be seen relaxing on the Black Sea while the disaster unfolded. For nearly a week no one was sure if there were survivors. The television reports switched back and forth between images of distraught families at the Vidyayevo Naval Base and the president’s barbecues in Sochi. The Russian Navy rejected offers of help that came immediately from the United States, France, Germany, Norway, and others.

Only five days and many failed Russian rescue attempts after the disaster did Putin accept international aid. A Norwegian ship arrived on the nineteenth, a full week after the Kursk had sunk. It took two more days to penetrate the submarine and confirm that there were no survivors. The navy, including several of its highest officers, had begun to spin stories about the cause of the disaster almost immediately. Their favorite was that it was the result of a collision with a NATO submarine, a conspiracy theory for which there was not a shred of evidence. Officials continued to suggest the collision theory even after evidence of two internal explosions was confirmed beyond any doubt. (Russian state-controlled media sources still mention it as a valid theory today even though the 2002 official report verified that the explosion of a faulty torpedo was the cause.)

Russian media, especially Boris Berezovsky’s television station, heavily criticized the response of the government as callous and bumbling, which was nothing more than the truth. Video of Putin and other unsympathetic officials being berated by grieving family members made Putin realize what a threat the media could be to his early popularity. Revealing that his totalitarian instincts were far stronger than any he had for reform, instead of reorganizing the military that had caused the horrible accident and botched the rescue, or publicly punishing the incompetent officers, Putin went after the media that reported on it.

So in less than six months after Putin’s taking office, two of the most influential oligarchs in Russia were in exile, the constitutional power structure of the country had been shifted dramatically toward Moscow, and free media outlets were falling like dominoes. Six months! The main myth that was built up around these events was that Putin was just cleaning up the town like a good sheriff. The Russian people despised the oligarchs and viewed them as criminals who were above the law. And here was Putin, a strong man from the security services, showing everyone that this was no longer the case. Not bad! Even if he pushed the limits of legality to do it, what else could he do, went the refrain.

Never mind that Putin was taking the private assets of Gusinsky and Berezovsky and putting them in the hands of other, more loyal, oligarchs or putting them under direct state control. The Putin government wasn’t cracking down on corruption, it was sanctifying it. It was a unique method of cleaning up the town that involved deputizing one set of “entrepreneurs” while demonizing another.

Make no mistake, I have little sympathy for the first generation of oligarchs that looted Russia as the USSR collapsed. They and their political and mafioso partners exploited Yeltsin’s lack of control and combined to derail the best chance Russia had at a market economy and democracy. The epic levels of corruption made the already difficult job of reform impossible and pushed the minimum standard of living needed for economic stability out of reach just long enough for Putin, or someone like Putin, to be welcomed with open arms.

What I reject is the mythologizing by those looking to praise Putin relative to Yeltsin on grounds of progress on corruption, institutional economic reforms, and growth. When it comes to Putin fighting corruption, I don’t think that legalizing theft and then boasting of a drop in crime should be considered progress. The actual crime rate in Russia kept increasing until 2002, when the revenue from skyrocketing oil prices began to have a broader impact. Putin would rely on a similar pacification maneuver in Chechnya when he gave official status and huge payoffs to a prominent warlord, Akhmad Kadyrov.

There is a practical argument to be made for these appeasement schemes, but I find it cynical and immoral, as well as harmful to the national interest in the long run. Reducing street violence and conflict by adopting one clan of the mafia while wiping out the others came at a huge cost. With no free media, no justice system to worry about, and no competition, Putin’s preferred oligarchs were like vermin whose natural predators had been eradicated. The chosen winners had the full power of the state behind them and the Russian treasury opened wide.

Had Putin come in and threatened to do to all that he selectively did to a few—that is, had he applied the rule of law properly—it would have been a very different story. He could have ended the looting, told his friends and foes alike that the party at the expense of the Russian people was over. At first it looked like he might be making an example of Gusinsky and Berezovsky for just this purpose. After all, if he could kick out two of the most influential and wealthy oligarchs so quickly, the others would surely fall into line. Instead, Putin’s message to the rest turned out to be that of a mafia don. Either you swore loyalty to the capo to steal within his system or your freedom and your assets could disappear overnight. As became increasingly clear during Putin’s first year in office, what was good for Putin and his friends was far more important than what was good for Russia. That is still very much the case today.

The many business-related reforms that were passed were never applied as envisioned. The assertion that there were successful institutional reforms in the 2000s is inherently false, although this remains a fundamental legend of the systemic liberals to this day—many of whom, remarkably, are still in government. They tell us that important laws were passed that lowered taxes, made it easier to start up a business, and so on. However, in my view, “institutional reforms” are not simply paper documents: the Duma rubber-stamped whatever decisions came down from on high. In a dictatorship, the formal content of the law is not important. What is important is how the law is applied. Reforms are only institutional if they have a real effect on how people live.

And just in case it wasn’t completely clear where Putin was steering the country, we come to one of those symbolic moments that can say as much as the legislation and persecution. In the fall of 2000, supposedly in response to complaints from Russian athletes that the new Russian anthem from 1990 was embarrassing them because it had no words for them to sing, Putin restored the old Soviet anthem. Not with the old original Stalinist lyrics, of course, or the updated ones from 1977 I remembered all too well. That is, instead of writing new lyrics for the Russian anthem, the old Soviet song was brought back and new lyrics were commissioned for it, and from the same author. And while I surely prefer the new “Our loyalty to the Motherland gives us strength” over “Barbarian invaders we’ll swiftly strike down” from 1944 or “The victory of Communism’s deathless ideal,” in 1977, the symbolism of bringing back the Soviet music was both obvious and shocking. The words change, but the song remains the same.