Winter Is Coming

THE SEARCH FOR PUTIN’S SOUL

Anyone who says they are still uncertain about Putin’s true nature at this point must be joking, a fool, or tricking us. There is no reason to waste time on jokers or fools, however useful they may be in Putin’s marked deck of cards, but tricksters must be watched carefully. For at least a decade now, those who defend Putin either have something to gain from it or they are dangerously ignorant. People can be excused for letting optimism and diplomacy blind them for a while to Putin’s character and ambitions. One of the strengths, and weaknesses, of liberal democratic societies is giving the benefit of the doubt even to one’s enemies. If Putin really was an anti-democratic thug, he was going to have to prove it.

And prove it he did, year after year, as his Western defenders migrated from the “ignorant” camp to the “something to gain” camp one by one. From energy companies trying to get a piece of Russia’s oil reserves to European prime ministers and chancellors willing to sell out their countries’ strategic interests in order to do business on the side, Putin had no trouble expanding his international fan club despite his dictatorial turn in Russia.

As soon as Putin appeared on the international stage, every foreign leader and pundit was obliged to have an opinion about him. Reviewing this literature in news reports and memoirs today is a master class in the art of saying something nice without saying anything at all-while also engaging in that most critical of the political sports: covering one’s posterior. Needless to say, the memoirs written with the benefit of hindsight are far more critical of Putin than the contemporary comments. Only a rare few have the honesty to admit they were mistaken about Putin, or worse, that he fooled them.

The cumulative impression is that everyone knew Putin had troubling autocratic tendencies but didn’t believe it was worth making an effort to challenge those tendencies early on when it would have been much easier to do so. After all, Russia’s relationship with the West was already on the rocks and the Russians were looking for a strongman anyway, went their logic. So why not hope for a fresh start with the new guy?

It was a difficult position for Western leaders to be in. Putin spoke the language of reform and Russia’s post-Soviet difficulties very well and he had none of Yeltsin’s baggage or bluster. When they looked at his actions, however, the picture was very different. I recently asked my friend and US State Department veteran Steve Sestanovich what surprised or worried him most about Putin in the early days. His reply is an excellent introduction to how the West struggled to understand the new Russian leader and what this meant for Russia:

I could essay a few good guesses as to the identity of that Russian visitor to US Secretary of State Albright’s office that day, but there is no point. The guest was quite accurate in his assessment of what Putin was going to do and how the United States should react to what was coming. And you can easily see the dilemma Sestanovich and the entire administration could see forming in front of them, especially if you remember that Bill Clinton was still the president at the time.

Clinton’s last year in office was already a complicated one. He had just survived impeachment related to the Lewinsky sex scandal, which had cost him much of his remaining energy and credibility. The Internet bubble burst in February, taking with it much of the optimism around the US economy. It was also an election year and Vice President Al Gore was battling George W. Bush over Clinton’s legacy.

Foreign policy was also giving Clinton a headache. Every US president attempts to solve the Israel-Palestine problem in his last year in office and Clinton was no exception. After doing little since the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin had halted the Oslo Accords peace process, Clinton arranged the Camp David Summit between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat in July 2000. To the surprise of everyone who knew nothing about history, no agreement was reached. A few months later, the second intifada erupted after Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount. In a relative footnote at the time, al-Qaeda suicide bombers attacked the USS Cole in Yemen, killing seventeen.

In short, Clinton was in no condition to take any strong stands against a tough and complicated new Russian leader. The White House continued to pay lip service to healing the atrocities in Chechnya, always at great pains to emphasize that “Chechnya isn’t Kosovo,” in the infamous phrase of British prime minister Tony Blair. Russia was still pained by the way the United States and NATO had run roughshod over Russian interests with the Serbs in 1999, something Putin would refer back to time and time again.

In Clinton’s last visit to Moscow as president on June 3, 2000, the two leaders went through the usual US-Russia checklist of nuclear issues, trade, and American missile defenses, which would become one of Putin’s favorite subjects over the years. The Clinton administration deserves credit for at least mentioning civil liberties during the trip. Madeleine Albright visited Radio Liberty, whose unvarnished Chechnya coverage had gotten its journalist Andrei Babitsky abducted.

Clinton gave an hour long interview to Echo of Moscow radio, a member of the Media-MOST group then still owned by Vladimir Gusinsky, whose outlets had declined to endorse Putin. Clinton sounded surprised when he was asked if he had ever used police powers against critics or the media. “I have never done anything like that. It’s illegal!” Exactly one polite week after Clinton left Moscow, Gusinsky was arrested.

Most of Europe was also eager to paper over concerns about the bloody mess of Chechnya and embrace Putin with no conditions. Two key European leaders, Tony Blair in the UK and Gerhardt Schroder in Germany, were constitutionally averse to confrontation, especially when there were deals to be made and so much Russian money coming into the markets. (Silvio Berlusconi, who would become Putin’s most eager partner and staunchest defender, would return as Italian prime minister in 2001.) Some praise must go to Jacques Chirac in France, whose government strongly protested atrocities in Chechnya at the time, even receiving a representative of the Chechen president to the National Assembly. But this victory was excruciatingly brief, and by the time Putin visited Paris in October, Chirac was toasting Putin and his wife Lyudmila with, “It’s up to us to write a new page in Franco-Russian relations.” How do you say “press the reset button” in French?

By then Blair had set a high bar for pandering when he performed the bizarre maneuver of making a sudden private visit to Putin in St. Petersburg on the eve of the Russian presidential election in March 2000. Human rights organizations and the British press attacked Blair for essentially endorsing Putin while “mass executions of civilians, arbitrary detention of Chechen males, systematic beatings, torture and, on occasion, rape” were occurring under Putin’s command. Instead of discussing that, Blair and his wife visited the Hermitage Museum, the Tsarist Summer Palace, and “spent a night at the opera, attending with the Putins the premiere of Sergei Prokofiev’s War and Peace.” Blair declined to meet with any other candidates or opposition figures on his visit.

Two thousand wasn’t my best year either. I had a spent much of the latter half of 1999 launching a massive chess website, Kasparov Chess Online, which would arrive in the world just as the dot-com bubble was deflating. It was still an exciting time, and I’m proud of some of the projects we accomplished, but like so many other Internet ventures it flamed out after just a few years. In October, I had my first world championship title defense in five years, against my compatriot Vladimir Kramnik. I arrived in London in great shape, full of ideas and confidence. A month later I had been defeated in a title match for the first time, and without winning a single game. Kramnik had out prepared me and outplayed me and I was a victim of my own complacency after fifteen years at the top. It was a crushing experience and, at thirty-seven, I briefly considered retirement for the first time. But my desire to prove I was still the best player in the world was too strong and I would retain my number one ranking until I retired in 2005.

While licking my wounds and preparing for my comeback, I had plenty of time to survey the results of Putin’s first year in office. Many of the thoughts below on Putin’s first year were included in a January 4, 2001, Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “The Russian President Trades in Fear” which, to my dismay, still holds up very well today. I would much rather be able to admit to having been wrong in that one than in my optimistic article from a year earlier. Putin has the habit of making me into an accurate prophet, but a very disappointed Russian.

Boris Yeltsin’s sudden resignation on December 31, 1999, had caused me to spend New Year’s Eve writing about his role in Russian history. Since the outgoing president had named his successor (which in Russian politics meant guaranteed election), I had tried to predict the parameters of Vladimir Putin’s politics. Unfortunately, my forecast, based on the assumption that a young pragmatic Russian leader would strengthen democratic processes inside the country, fight corruption, and level the curves of Boris Yeltsin’s uneven foreign policy, turned out to have been wishful New Year’s thinking.

I could be more clear-eyed with a year’s hindsight. Putin had had every advantage a new president could wish for. His public-approval rating reminded us of the euphoric early days of the Yeltsin Kremlin—and back then the polls in Russia could still be somewhat trusted, unlike today. The staggering devaluation of the ruble after the default of August 1998 gave a boost to Russia’s heavily export-oriented economy. And high oil prices created a hard-currency cushion not seen by any post-Communist Russian government.

And yet this huge credit was wasted. Putin’s KGB roots sadly informed a style of governance that was neither reformist nor democratic. The common thread throughout his domestic and foreign policies was his effort to trade on fear—the fears of Russians that their country was under attack from hostile external forces (Chechens, NATO, or free marketeers; usually all of the above) and the fears of Westerners that if not for a strong, pragmatic leader, Russia would again become unruly, unstable, and potentially aggressive. Fifteen years later Putin’s fearmongering tactics remain very similar, and equally effective.

Instead of beating down the real hostile forces in Russia—corruption, ignorance, a bloated state—Putin cleverly changed the rules of the game. Beneath the superficial success of Russia’s economy, structural change had yet to take place. Some reforms to the tax code notwithstanding, painful domestic reforms were buried by powerful nomenklatura lobbies, the castes of entrenched bureaucrats and officials whose power depends on powerful patrons. Corruption flourished and the judicial system remained too ineffective to be a stabilizing force. Thousands of Russian soldiers perished in the Chechen conflict, which produced uncounted victims among Chechen civilians, made ruins of Chechen cities and villages, and sent hundreds of thousands of refugees scrambling for survival. Billed as an anti-terrorist operation, Putin’s continuation of the war there turned out to be another business venture for Russian generals and their Chechen counterparts.

Putin’s new policies toward the Russian regions represented a strange mixture of Soviet Politburo and the tsarist ruling of the Russian empire. To preserve the privileges of power, Russia’s governors caved in to central authorities, gaining in exchange enhanced powers over traditionally weak municipal self-rule. Following in their footsteps, nearly all of Russia’s political leaders jumped to the support of any presidential initiative. One example: Putin’s idea to resurrect the old Soviet anthem received the support of more than 80 percent of parliament members. (Typically, Putin acted as though he was only following the will of the people. “The people and I can make mistakes” was his answer when challenged about the appropriateness of bringing back the Soviet song.)

Putin’s foreign policy doctrine was essentially a broader version of the domestic strategy and it showed the opportunistic way he would operate for the next fifteen years. Both could neatly be summed up as “Rogue State Management, Ltd.” Wherever there were trouble spots on the world stage or “threats” to Russia’s domestic tranquility, the new president was there with a lever.

He was everywhere! Worried about the North Korea nuclear program? The Russian president had already established personal relations with Kim Jong-il and was ready to play a broker role on the Korean Peninsula. Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, or Bashar al-Assad—Putin was ready to generously offer his assistance with all of these illustrious leaders. Whether he actually ever provided any assistance of value was another matter entirely.

On the familiar turf of Afghanistan, Putin offered the Russian military machine to assist in the quest for Osama bin Laden. Never mind that this presence allowed Russia’s generals to retain control of the major drug routes from Afghanistan to Europe via the Central Asian states. As the main supplier of its conventional weapons and nuclear technologies, Russia held the keys to Iran’s military ambitions, and Putin would repeatedly dangle those keys just out of the reach of American and European negotiators.

Putin’s early strategy was based on his reading of history. The see-no-evil Western approach to the Russian Civil War in 1919 and Britain’s Munich peace treaty with Hitler in 1938 paved the way for some of the most appalling tragedies of the twentieth century. In 1961, JFK recalled US airplanes from supporting anti-Castro forces, leaving them to be massacred by the Soviet-led Cuban army. Encouraged by this demonstration of weakness, the Soviet Union shipped nuclear missiles to Cuba. The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 brought mankind to the verge of nuclear Armageddon.

There were also more recent examples of the limits of Western involvement at crucial points in the development of a crisis: the initial passive approach to Saddam’s aggressive plans in 1990 and support for Yugoslav territorial integrity in 1991, to name two. In each, the moral of the story was the same: a timely response to such dangerous games instigated by the foes of democracy dramatically reduces the price to be paid for deterrence.

Putin’s December 2000 trip to Cuba to reinvigorate Russia’s friendship with the Castro dictatorship demonstrated his geopolitical strategy and knack for tactics. The year after his visit, having provoked worry in Washington, Putin announced the closure of the Lourdes spy base in Cuba, the largest foreign Russian military base in the world. Putin desperately needed to cut expenses and this was another chance to gain points with the new Bush administration while doing what he needed to do anyway. Putin did the same thing by closing the Cam Ranh Bay base in Vietnam in 2002, a base that annoyed both the US and Russia’s soon to be priority patron, China. (In July 2014, when Putin was looking for a way to antagonize the US over its support for Ukraine, he returned to Cuba to forgive 90 percent of the country’s unpaid Soviet debt and to announce the Lourdes base would reopen.)

Despite Russia’s demonstrable weaknesses, Putin would poke a finger wherever he could, especially in weak spots and old wounds. He regularly made threats and promises no one was sure he could keep, even if he wanted to. Russia still had its seat on the UN Security Council and often found an ally in China when looking to thwart American initiatives. I believe it was Andrew Ryvkin at the Guardian who cleverly referred to this technique of Putin’s as a “photobombing” foreign policy.

Some of Putin’s early maneuvers could simply be seen as shrewdly playing a weak hand, but they also reveal his real priorities in those first years. Foreign policy was secondary, almost irrelevant, to consolidating power at home. Putin couldn’t afford to lose time or influence dealing with external pressure. Making friendly overtures to the powerful leaders bought him the time he needed by exchanging real power abroad for more liberty to crack down at home. Closing the military bases annoyed Russian Communists and nationalists, but they were not yet much of a political factor and Putin soon brought many of them inside the tent. With a shaky domestic economy and a broken-down military there was little more Russia could do at the time, but it was effective in making Russia look and feel like a power on the world stage again.

Nuisances left unattended grow into real problems. The surge in oil prices would continue for seven years, putting trillions of dollars at Putin’s disposal; money he would use to crack down at home, buy influence abroad, and upgrade the armed forces. Strengthened by his friendly association with the leaders of the world’s great democracies, Putin became the de facto leader of nations that had chafed under uncontested US dominance in the 1990s. The window of opportunity to reshape the world order to favor democracy was closing. Putin, left unchecked, consolidated power at home and then graduated from photobombing to real bombing.

The two most significant phone calls of the twenty-first century were made on September 11 and 12, 2001. Both were made by Vladimir Putin to George W. Bush after the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The first call, just a few hours after the attacks, was received by Bush’s national security advisor Condoleezza Rice in a bunker under the White House, since Bush was unreachable on Air Force One. This is Rice’s description of the call from her 2011 memoir, No Higher Honor:

Putin reached Bush the next day. Here is Bush’s description from his 2010 book, Decision Points: “When I talked to Vladimir the next day, he told me he had signed a decree declaring a minute of silence to show solidarity with the United States. He ended by saying, ‘Good will triumph over evil. I want you to know that in this struggle, we will stand together.’”

With two phone calls probably totaling sixty seconds of his time and costing him absolutely nothing, Putin had cemented himself with the Bush 43 administration as a friend and ally. Bush’s comment three months earlier about looking Putin in the eye and getting a sense of his soul had put him in an awkward position rhetorically, but this was real solidarity. Or at least it was accepted as real, and that perception is why it mattered, and mattered more than any actual cooperation ever could.

Putin saw the opportunity for exactly what it was. The first call was the most important despite not having reached the president. It etched Putin into the moment, into Bush’s mind, and forever into history as “the first foreign leader to call Bush on 9/11.” In the second call, the famously cold KGB man also spoke in terms the emotional and sympathetic Bush would most appreciate at the traumatic moment. Solidarity, struggle, a moment of silence, good and evil…. It was a perfect performance and it paid untold dividends over the next seven years.

Contemporary reports of the calls and their supposed significance for the new world order were no less enthusiastic. “The Cold War really was over” and now the historical enemies would unite in this new great war, the war on terror; that was the consensus. Putin was the first to realize how valuable an ill-defined, never-ending war could be, although others would catch on soon enough.

Putin jumped at the chance to portray 9/11 as another front on the war on terror Russia had been fighting in Chechnya for so many years. The fact that there was never evidence that the Chechens were a part of any global jihad didn’t prevent the Kremlin from claiming so routinely. Bush and Rice had both spoken out strongly against human rights abuses in Chechnya previously, but all that ended after 9/11. Mikhail Kasyanov, who was Putin’s prime minister at the time, later said that it was like a magic bullet that made all criticism disappear.

Putin’s promise of aid was real in this case, and Russia had the local expertise and connections to be useful to the American effort against the Taliban. So did several Central Asian autocrats, who were nearly as quick as Putin in realizing that this was a chance to escape US pressure over their own woeful human rights records. As al-Qaeda and the Taliban melted away in Afghanistan and the Bush administration’s eyes turned to Saddam Hussein and Iraq, Putin resumed his usual obstructionism.

What’s so wrong with solidarity and cooperation against a common foe after a horrible disaster? Nothing, of course. Nor do I think the Bush administration was too naive to realize that Putin was always seeking advantages for himself. As the Bush administration suggested at the time—and its members have made this clearer in their high stack of memoirs—it was a matter of priorities. If Putin would help with Afghanistan and provide intelligence that might save American lives, then that was far more important than pressuring him on civil liberties in Russia.

It’s hard to imagine many people disagreeing with this stance, and if this trade-off were the only possible option I would agree with it myself. The problem is that it is a fallacy to say that any cooperation with despotic regimes requires overlooking human rights. Nor does a moral foreign policy preclude pragmatic action in a time of crisis. A moral foreign policy means your positions on certain matters are clear no matter what, and that you won’t forget about them when it’s convenient. This is essential because otherwise human rights and moral issues become just another chip on the geopolitical gaming table. Not coincidentally, that’s exactly how Putin and other dictatorships treat human rights. They jump at every chance to gain leverage, to be helpful in the short term in order to better consolidate their repressive regimes and escape international censure. The free world must hold itself to a higher standard if it hopes to encourage others to do so.

A related fallacy says that taking human rights off the bargaining table weakens foreign policy, or even imperils national security. To take the bigger picture first, let us agree that the more liberal democracies there are in the world, the safer we all will be. “Never” is a risky word in any argument, but it’s safe to say that healthy democracies almost never make war on each other. In the long run, policies that promote the creation and success of more democracies improve national security. It is fundamentally flawed to believe you can achieve the ends of moral policy with the means of moral compromise. You cannot go north no matter how small the steps you take south.

The year 2014 was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of the great Soviet physicist and human rights beacon Andrei Sakharov. Rediscovering some of his lectures and articles at the time, I was tremendously impressed with his clarity of thinking on this cloudy topic. I knew he was a very brave man, of course, and he spoke as someone who had faced the most difficult moral battles anyone could face. The “father of the Soviet H-bomb” became an important voice for nuclear anti-proliferation. A hero of the Soviet Union became its prisoner and its most effective critic. His premature death in 1989 changed the course of the world, as I very much believe his presence would have guided Russia toward a better path than what we achieved without him. Sakharov was our Mandela figure, and without him it was too easy to pretend we could put the crimes of the Soviet Union behind us without ever truly facing them.

The three years of freedom Sakharov had before his death were largely owed to just the sort of moral stand he advocated. In the October 1986 Reykjavik summit between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, the American president disappointed Gorbachev by staying firm on American commitment to the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). A series of bold proposals and counterproposals to drastically reduce, even completely eliminate, their nuclear arsenals fell apart. Reagan was criticized by many at the time, and was even distraught about the result himself, but as we know in hindsight this refusal to give an inch in Reykjavik was a serious blow to Gorbachev’s hopes to save the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev returned home realizing that if Reagan wasn’t going to throw him a lifeline, dramatic reforms in domestic policies were the only way the USSR could survive. Perestroika began. One of Gorbachev’s first acts, heavy with symbolism, was to call Andrei Sakharov to release him from six years of internal exile and abuse. Sakharov was elected to the new parliament in March 1989, but died of heart failure just nine months later.

Sakharov was not a pie-in-the-sky idealist. He championed universal principles but was well aware of the limitations of trying to influence the Soviet regime. When he wrote a letter entreating the US Congress to pass what ultimately became known as the Jackson-Vanik amendment, in 1973, Sakharov stayed with the matter at hand—Jewish emigration from the USSR—instead of making grand speeches. He was a crafty verbal tactician. Knowing he couldn’t openly call for legislation that was seen as punitive toward his home country, Sakharov wrote that the USSR had been “developing under conditions of intolerable isolation” and made the case that the amendment would alleviate that isolation, and thus was actually beneficial to the USSR.

This was a clever and ironic maneuver, since the Jackson-Vanik amendment was devised to pressure the Soviets into relaxing emigration controls by tying them to trade relations, and was clearly a tool of isolation of the Soviet regime, not engagement. But it engaged the Soviet people and held out the hand of friendship and freedom to them directly, a critical distinction. What could be a more effective criticism of the Soviet Union than millions of its citizens yearning to be free? When discussing the amendment in his memoir, Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin wrote that any demand for emigration was “a reproof to our socialist paradise” and “that anyone should have the temerity to want to leave it was taken as a rank insult!”

Sakharov’s letter to Congress also made use of the dissident tactic of “civil obedience,” demanding that the Soviet government respect its own laws and international laws. “The amendment does not represent interference in the internal affairs of socialist countries, but simply a defense of international law, without which there can be no mutual trust.” The anti-Putin movement adopted this tactic as well. Our protests were often based on demands that the government abide by the Russian constitution, which, in theory, guaranteed rights of assembly and speech that the Putin regime routinely violated.

Sakharov’s letter was published a few days later on a full page in the Washington Post, leading to Leonid Brezhnev’s rage and the bizarre statement that the letter was “not just an anti-State and anti-Soviet deed, but a Trotskyist deed.” Ironically, the administration of Richard Nixon was just as angry about it.

Sakharov was an opponent of detente, a word he and other dissidents accurately saw as a euphemism for appeasement. His fellow dissident and collaborator Natan Sharansky summed up the resistance to their movement from the “realist” camp led by Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, who saw the Soviet dissidents as troublemakers who threatened to derail his carefully balanced realpolitik. Sharansky writes, “Kissinger saw Jackson’s amendment as an attempt to undermine plans to smoothly carve up the geopolitical pie between the superpowers. It was. Jackson believed that the Soviets had to be confronted, not appeased.”

Sharansky, who has himself spoken and written with great eloquence and authority on moral policy, goes on to cite his friend: “One message [Sakharov] would consistently convey to these foreigners was that human rights must never be considered a humanitarian issue alone. For him, it was also a matter of international security. As he succinctly put it: ‘A country that does not respect the rights of its own people will not respect the rights of its neighbors.’” Putin’s Russia is a perfect example of this truth.

The moral policy view was shared by another well-known dissident, exiled author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who used the American founding fathers to illustrate the point. At a lecture in New York City on July 9, 1975, Solzhenitsyn said, “The men who created your country never lost sight of their moral bearings. They did not laugh at the absolute nature of the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ Their practical policies were checked against that moral compass. And how surprising it is that a practical policy computed on the basis of moral considerations turned out to be the most far-sighted and the most salutary.”

If I may take the liberty of boiling Solzhenitsyn’s prose into an aphorism, the most moral policy also turns out to be the most effective policy. Believing otherwise leads to false trade-offs that imperil liberty without enhancing our security.

After discussing it for years, when the United States moved to finally revoke Jackson-Vanik in 2011, I complained about the timing of the move. The borders of Russia were open, so the original purpose of the amendment was obsolete. But to lift this landmark piece of human rights legislation while Vladimir Putin was returning Russia to totalitarian darkness was a terrible idea. More than anything, the measure confronted the USSR instead of appeasing it and said very loudly and clearly that individual freedom mattered. Jackson-Vanik was a relic of a past era, but it was a powerful symbol. To repeal it without putting something in its place would send a message that either the United States no longer cared about these universal rights or that America believed Putin’s Russia was not an authoritarian regime.

In 2011, I joined the global campaign launched by Bill Browder to promote the Magnitsky Act, partly as a way of replacing Jackson-Vanik by once again connecting American (and later European) foreign policy with human rights abuses in Russia. I gave several lectures in DC and wrote op-eds urging Congress and the Obama administration not to reward Putin for destroying Russian civil society and for persecuting those who exposed his crimes.

It was while preparing these speeches that I became a big fan of Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the Washington State senator who was the primary force for a moral American foreign policy in the 1970s. I could happily fill several pages with Jackson’s powerful statements on why America had to live up to its ideals of freedom and democracy by actively promoting and defending them abroad. My favorite is the conclusion of his impassioned September 27, 1972, speech on the Senate floor to advocate for the amendment that would bear his name: “We can, and we must, keep the faith of our own highest traditions. We must not now, as we once did, acquiesce to tyranny while there are those, at greater risk than ourselves, who dare to resist.” Jackson also quoted Solzhenitsyn’s 1972 Nobel Prize-acceptance lecture, “There are no INTERNAL AFFAIRS left on our crowded Earth!”

When I was invited by Hillsdale College to speak about Russia at an event in Jackson’s home state of Washington in 2013 I jumped at the chance. Hillsdale is a very politically conservative institution, the “conservative Harvard,” so I enjoyed playing the contrarian by invoking Jackson as well as his fellow Democrat Harry Truman in my lecture. Both were strong advocates of using American power and moral authority to defend people around the world from dictatorship. Unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions this stance has been completely abandoned by the current generation of Democrats. After my lecture, I was approached by an elderly local woman who had clear memories of supporting Scoop Jackson (and maybe Truman!), calling him “the only Democrat I’ve ever voted for!”

The Bush 43 administration openly promoted a “freedom agenda” (aka the Bush Doctrine), an agenda of which Scoop Jackson would have been proud. It recommended actively promoting liberty abroad—an agenda I supported in nearly every aspect, by the way. But they still fell into the trap of inconsistency and trade-offs when it came to Russia. Rice’s “the Cold War really is over” when getting off the phone with Putin on 9/11 says it all. The Cold War had been over for a decade!

This comment reinforces what Rice once said on the Charlie Rose show, in 2009 I believe, about “Russians being better off than in the USSR,” again making it sound like the 1990s had never happened. Arguing degrees of repression in a theoretical or historical debate is one thing, but doing it when people are being jailed and killed is immoral. Even if the water has receded, a few feet is still enough to drown in, especially if your hands are tied.

Yes, the Cold War was over, but Putin was already fighting the next war and it wasn’t in Chechnya or against terror. Putin’s war was against Russian democracy and anyone who might stand in the way of his mission to destroy it. Those 9/11 phone calls to Bush were preemptive strikes, a targeted maneuver by Putin to undermine potential American influence against his crackdowns at home.

Unfortunately, the tactic worked quite well and it wasn’t until Putin invaded Georgia in 2008 that Bush and his administration admitted as much and stiffened their policies. By then Bush was on his way out, and Russian democracy was on its deathbed and beyond the help that foreign pressure could have provided when Putin was still vulnerable at the start of the decade.

Looking at what happened inside Russia after 9/11 is also a good way to examine one of the most critical patterns of Putin’s rule: the less pressure he felt from the outside, the more dictatorial he became inside Russia. Despite his tough-guy persona and rhetoric, Putin, especially in the first few years in office, was sensitive to external pressure over civil liberties and other abuses. It was only later, when the oil money was rushing in and all his potential domestic rivals had been destroyed, that Putin would go out of his way to flaunt his immunity to outside pressure.

During the dark days of the USSR the world understood that people like Andrei Sakharov, Sergei Kovalev, and Natan Sharansky were heroes for their nonviolent resistance. The modern Putin style of oppression is different and it has many advocates in the West, who refuse to distinguish between Putin’s regime and the Russian people it oppresses. For example, after I appeared on a panel discussion on BBC television in 2006, on a show recorded in Moscow but of course not aired in Russia, a British viewer wrote in amazed at how freely we said things that, he said, would have led to our execution not long ago. This attitude, that Russians are “better off now” and should count our blessings, has been very harmful to our democratic cause. It validates repression with absurd relativism.

The Cold War and the threat of nuclear destruction focused everyone’s attention very well on every move Russia made. As soon as that threat faded, Western leaders preferred to keep their heads in the sand and to pretend everything was fine, especially when they had more urgent and visible problems to deal with after 9/11. It took a generation of an existential threat and the real and imagined menace of Communism to produce an active moral foreign policy constituency in the West. It only took a few years for governments to outsource human rights to NGOs like Amnesty International. Human rights were no longer government business.

Meanwhile, with nothing more to worry about from the outside, for Putin the coast was clear. He continued to “consolidate” the media by shutting down independent television stations and making it clear to the press that certain topics were off limits. The harassment of the political opposition became increasingly routine. Even for established politicians and successful businesspeople it was no longer possible to oppose Putin’s principles or policies without taking on considerable risk of losing your career, your freedom, or your life.

Any doubts about the Putin regime’s willingness to spill blood were erased in the 2002 hostage crisis at the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow. A small army of Chechen militants took nearly 850 people prisoner for four days in what would become known as the “Nord-Ost” siege, for the name of the Russian musical play that was being performed on the night the attack began, October 23.

There is no need to recount every grisly detail of the siege, especially since nearly every detail is disputed. I especially wish to avoid any appearance of sympathy with the hostage-takers despite my focus on the response of the government. Terrorists are scorpions; we know their character and condemn them for it in good conscience. The true nature of the Putin regime, however, was still somewhat in doubt and is the subject under discussion.

The hostage-takers demanded the immediate withdrawal of all Russian troops from Chechnya and said that they wanted to “bring a taste of what is happening in Chechnya every day to the people of Moscow.” They were heavily armed with machine guns, grenades, and improvised explosive devices. The first night they released a large group of hostages, between 150 and 200, mostly children, women, Muslims, and foreigners. The next day, the terrorists accepted negotiations with quite a few public figures, including opposition politician Boris Nemtsov and journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the long-time war correspondent in Chechnya.

Despite every conversation resulting in the hostage-takers confirming that they were there to die, they released another large group of hostages, mostly foreigners. On the twenty-fifth they accepted food, juice, and medicine from the Red Cross for the hostages. The leader of the terrorists, Movsar Barayev, gave interviews to the press, reiterating their willingness to die and that “we are here with the specific purpose to end the war.” With such a large and well-prepared group of experienced militants and so many hostages, it looked like it was going to be a long standoff.

I was still playing chess professionally then, and at the end of October I was leading the Russian team to the gold medal for the last time at the Chess Olympiad in the Slovakian city of Bled. The news of the hostage crisis at the Dubrovka Theater shocked all of the participants, but most of all, of course, those of us who were born in the Soviet Union, and for whom the word “Chechnya” was more than just an unfamiliar geographical term.

I remember well the heated discussions of this tragic situation in the halls, when, looking one another in the eye, people would express the same hope: “The government won’t decide to use force. They won’t let hundreds of people die.”

On the morning of the twenty-sixth, Russian special forces stormed the theater. Simultaneously, a toxic gas was pumped into the theater. According to survivors and a frantic call from one of the hostages, they and the terrorists were aware of the gas and some of the assailants had gas masks. The terrorists fired at the Russian forces instead of executing the hostages, another fact that only became clear later and that was contrary to initial official reports that most of the dead had been shot.

All 40 hostage-takers were killed in the raid along with over 130 hostages: all but one of the hostages were either killed by the gas directly or indirectly by choking to death while unconscious and failing to receive medical care in time. Local hospitals were flooded with poisoned hostages they didn’t know how to treat because officials refused to identify the type of gas that had been used. Immediately afterward, officials said the attack was provoked by the terrorists beginning to execute hostages. This statement was revealed to be false only a few days later when other officials said the attack had been scheduled and planned since the first day.

Despite controversial reports that at least one of the hostage-takers was a known FSB operative, there is no way to know if the special forces knew that most of the explosives in the theater were fake, meaning the gas wasn’t really necessary before storming the theater. The Russian parliament declined to launch an investigation of the government’s conduct during the siege, which is why there are so many unknowns to this day. The government’s policy after the attack, of stonewalling or spreading misinformation about every facet of the operation, makes it difficult not to think the worst.

It is easy to cynically state that a few hundred innocents killed at the hands of the government is better than seven hundred dead at the hands of the terrorists. The mathematics are unassailable, even in hindsight. There is no way to know what would have happened in the alternate universe where negotiations continued. The only clear conclusions to come out of the horrible tragedy were that the war in Chechnya wasn’t over, no matter what Putin said, and that the Putin regime had no greater regard for human life than the terrorists did—a point it seemed the government wanted to make.

If the goal of the rapid and lethal intervention was partly to send a deterrent message to the Chechens that there would be no negotiations, it was a failure. Two years later, the Beslan school siege would result in an even more violent and catastrophic military intervention against Chechen hostage-takers, resulting in the deaths of nearly 400 people, including 186 children. (One result that can definitely be attributed to the Nord-Ost siege was the end of NTV’s quasi-independence after Putin was displeased by its coverage of the crisis.)

Putin’s Russia does not consider the deaths of its own citizens to be a serious crime worth punishing guilty officials for. And yet, having quietly decorated and promoted many of the organizers of the storming of the Dubrovka, the Putin regime went even further by issuing an indefinite indulgence to carry out any of his immoral orders. Lacking organized pushback from society, the soft authoritarian regime spent the next decade gradually acquiring the sinister traits of a fascist dictatorship.

Sandwiched between the Nord-Ost and Beslan sieges was another landmark event in establishing the reach and grasp of state power in Putin’s Russia. On October 25, 2003, the richest man in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was arrested and charged with fraud. In a scheme that would prove to be a model for future behavior, Khodorkovsky was convicted and his company, the oil giant Yukos, was promptly chopped up. Its assets were handed out to companies controlled by Putin’s closest buddies at bargain prices. By the time he was released in December 2013—after a second conviction that was even more preposterous than the first—Yukos was no more.

As I said earlier, it was difficult to find many Russians willing to express sympathy for the oligarchs who had made their vast fortunes in the early days of privatization. If the saying “Behind every great fortune is a great crime” is valid in the relatively transparent market economies of the West, it was doubly the case in the Wild, Wild East of 1990s Russia and the other post-Soviet republics. They were considered unscrupulous entrepreneurs at best and predatory criminals at worst, people who had used political connections to amass untold fortunes while average Russians struggled. And, well, this was largely true, with the caveat that it’s not constructive to blame the winners for breaking the rules in a game that had barely any rules at all.

Many of the persecuted oligarchs were also Jewish, and anti-Semitism, usually subtle and coded in the media and unsubtle and blatant from the nationalists, played a part in the political and public campaigns against them. That a few of Putin’s most loyal oligarchs were also Jewish blunted this line of criticism of his purges, but there is no question their Jewishness was used against those who came under state attack.

This revival of another wretched Soviet tradition hardly surprised me. Despite my many sporting successes for the glory of the motherland, my ethnicity occasionally appeared in questions about my loyalty during my rivalry with Karpov, who was of “respectable stock” from the Russian heartland while I was an “explosive combination.” And ever since I became active in the anti-Putin movement there has been a dramatic increase in the number of times I have been called “Weinstein,” my father’s name, which was exchanged for my mother’s Armenian family name not long after my father died when I was seven.

I’m not sure if it’s ironic or just disgusting that the anti-Semitic chorus has again raised its voice beyond the gutters of the Russian Internet since Putin began his war on Ukraine in 2014. According the Kremlin propaganda, the new democratic government in Kyiv is full of fascists and Nazis, as is required of anyone declared an enemy by Russia, and Russia had to intervene to protect not just ethnic Russians, but the poor Jews! In response, the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine responded with an open letter saying that President Putin’s assertions about the rise of anti-Semitism in their country “did not match reality” and “might have confused Ukraine with Russia where Jewish organizations registered a rise of anti-Semitism last year.” Ukraine also has a lower rate of anti-Semitic incidents than nearly every other country in Europe where statistics are recorded, including France and Germany. At the same time, stories about Jewish oligarchs “running Ukraine” have also been part of the Kremlin information war, apparently in an attempt to provoke Russia’s fellow Slavs in Ukraine to rise against them, or perhaps to let Putin do the job.

These perverse accusations led to a good joke that I heard when I visited Ukraine in December 2014. A Russian watches the TV news and calls his Jewish friend in Ukraine in a panic: “Moishe, is it true your country has been taken over by fascists and ultranationalists?” “Yes,” his friend replies, “our synagogue is full of them!”

Returning to 2003 and Khodorkovsky’s arrest, it was presented as a blow for justice, reform, and as retribution for the common people. In fact, it was exactly the opposite on all three counts. At the time there weren’t many questions as to why it was happening in 2003 if the crimes he was accused of had supposedly taken place in the 1990s. A look at Khodorkovsky’s activities both inside and outside of Yukos at the time reveal the true motives behind his captivity.

Gusinsky and Berezovsky had been chased off two years before Khodorkovsky’s arrest. They were both clear and present dangers to Putin due to their media holdings and political influence. In contrast, Khodorkovsky and his oil company had thrived in the first years of the Putin government. Yukos was ready to exploit the skyrocketing price of oil to modernize the aging Soviet equipment it had inherited and to explore international partnerships on its way to becoming the first big Russian company to become a true multinational. That was a threat in Putin’s mind. He intended to ensure that the oil and gas giants, the “national champions,” were brought under firm Kremlin control.

Khodorkovsky also committed the sin of getting personally involved in politics and civil society, but wasn’t interested in swearing loyalty to Putin or trying to compete with him directly in the rigged electoral game. Khodorkovsky founded the Open Russia foundation and used it to sponsor dozens of programs and charities across the country, all while refusing to seek approval for these activities from the Kremlin. He even publicly declared he would support opposition candidates, while other oligarchs brought briefcases of cash to support Putin’s political causes.

Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH) is very big in Moscow and they signed a contract with Yukos to receive $100 million in educational grants. After Khodorkovsky was arrested, there was suddenly new leadership in RSUH, and the new rector refused to take the money from Yukos. Khodorkovsky wasn’t using his wealth to buy a soccer club in England, as Putin’s buddy Roman Abramovich had done with Chelsea in June that year. Even if he was doing it partly to bolster his reputation, Khodorkovsky was investing in Russia and those activities made him a legitimate threat to Putin; legitimate in all ways. He wasn’t a man Putin could control.

Khodorkovsky was also brave to the point of foolhardiness in 2003. His close business partner, Platon Lebedev, was arrested in July and there was no doubt who was next on the list. Another partner, Leonid Nevzlin, did the sensible thing and moved to Israel that summer. Instead of leaving or shutting up, Khodorkovsky spoke up even more, publicly condemning the state and corporate corruption that was holding Russia back. The consequences were swift.

Khodorkovsky was indicted on multiple charges of fraud and tax evasion, the usual Kremlin recipe. His trial was all the proof one needed to demonstrate that in the Putin regime, no proof was needed. Ironically, Yukos had paid more taxes per barrel than any other oil company. I’m not going to claim to be an expert on all the financial and legal chicanery that went on during the 1990s a few dozen people into billionaires in record time. But obviously there were few clean hands by the standards of the rest of the world. Khodorkovsky wasn’t much different from all the others at the start. But his vision of the future was so radical that he scared not only Putin but the other oligarchs as well. Had every oligarch been audited and held accountable, it could have been a healthy result for law and order in Russia.

Instead we got a show trial against someone Putin considered a personal enemy. If the ad hoc nature of the trial itself wasn’t enough to confirm this, it’s worth noting that many other people connected to Yukos and the trial itself were also persecuted and prosecuted. Lebedev was convicted and abused in prison despite his serious illnesses. Many other Yukos employees were harassed and indicted. Even Khodorkovsky’s defense lawyer, Karinna Moskalenko, was threatened with disbarment by the prosecutor’s office. This became Putin’s mafioso calling card: if you challenged the power vertical, he wouldn’t just go after you and your assets, but also your employees, friends, family, and anyone who dared to defend you.

In May 2005, Khodorkovsky and Lebedev received nine-year convictions and were shipped off to prison camps. The response from the rest of the world was the typical mush about “concerns” over the independence of the Russian judiciary and “urging” the Russian government to observe certain standards. By that point I’m pretty sure the US State Department had a form letter expressing such concerns so it could just change the names and dates each time. That letter, usually issued quietly by a low-level functionary, would get a lot of use in the coming years as Putin’s abuses in Russia piled up while the leaders of the free world insisted on embracing him warmly on the international stage.

The arrest led to a revealing comment from America’s ambassador, Alexander Vershbow: “We hope there will be a fair trial, by Russian legal standards” (italics added). When a Financial Times article criticized the practices of the Russian attorney general’s office, the Russian minister of finance, Vice Prime Minister Alexei Kudrin, waved it off, saying there were “some irregularities."

For American and Western European ears, I should enumerate some of these “irregularities”: searching the offices of lawyers who had visited their clients in jail; searching the offices of members of parliament; and refusing to allow members of parliament to visit Khodorkovsky in prison, which is a violation of Russian law. No court in the West would have accepted the case for trial because the evidence was obtained by illegal means, but these are “Russian legal standards.” As with two of Putin’s favorite expressions, “managed democracy” and “the dictatorship of law,” it’s a revealing oxymoron.

Along with removing a critic and rival from the scene, Khodorkovsky’s jailing was a warning to the rest of the Russian business world: play by the Kremlin’s rules and don’t get into politics. It was a turning point in Russia where the government officially gave up pursuing lawbreakers and instead became one itself. It changed from rogue elements with connections in high places abusing government power to steal into a state-run initiative of harassment, incarceration, and looting that targeted anyone disloyal to the center.

The Khodorkovsky-Yukos case represented how Putin’s regime established ties between property rights and power. Unless you were in power you couldn’t control your property. This in turn signaled the end of democracy. The elections were doomed to be rigged by those in power because if they lost political authority they would lose their assets. By the time 2004’s presidential election came around, Putin and his cronies had far too much to lose to risk getting kicked out of the Kremlin by something as easily fixed as a vote.

The end of Russian democracy and total centralization of power in the Kremlin were in some ways only side effects of the mundane primary objective of theft. The attack on Yukos was aimed at redistributing property in favor of the oil companies owned by Putin’s cronies. Instead of old-fashioned socialist redistribution it was “take from the rich and give to the richer.” The entire vast nation was turned into an asset vacuum cleaner that used the power of the state to pull everything to Moscow, where it was portioned out to well-connected allies and companies with just enough invested in the government to keep people out of the streets and the country from falling apart. There was always plenty in the budget for propaganda and internal security forces.

The brutally efficient way Yukos was broken up and plundered made the rigged auctions and shell company tricks of the 1990s look amateurish. The Putin regime would soon expand its consolidation operation to the rights of the average citizen. If the Russian people had been robbed in the 1990s, the 2000s showed us that we hadn’t seen anything yet.

In 2009, with Khodorkovsky’s scheduled release on the horizon, Russian prosecutors filed new charges against him, even more absurd than the original ones. He was essentially charged with stealing all the oil he was accused of not paying taxes on the first time. Cases like this are why Russians and other people living under totalitarian regimes do not see the writings of Gogol, Kafka, and Bulgakov as fantasy, or even surrealism. The state doesn’t have to be logical or reasonable, it just has to achieve its ends.

Dictatorships feel the perverse need to fulfill protocol, to have elections and trials even though the conclusions are foregone. The free world often rewards these charades with willing suspension of disbelief. Russia pretends to have elections and a justice system; the free world pretends right along with it, occasionally expressing their token concerns, citing irregularities, and attempting to shame the shameless. The dictators take all these background noises as the pathetic appeasement they are, and go on about their business. In the words of that keen observer of the totalitarian mindset, the Polish writer Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, “Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?”

The conclusion of the new trial in November 2010 gave Khodorkovsky the opportunity to present a powerful closing statement on the state and future of Russia. It stands as an indictment of its own, an important document for the moment and for history. I will quote only a few parts of it here, but please find and read the entire document.

The words and dreams of a great man, regardless of his past sins or future activities. Five weeks later the judge extended the sentences of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev to 2017, which was later reduced to 2016 and then to 2014 on appeal. But of course Putin had yet more tricks up his sleeve.

Three years later Putin surprised everyone, including Khodorkovsky, by announcing he would release him, which he did on December 20, 2013. It was likely due to a combination of German pressure—Khodorkovsky thanked former German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher for helping get him released—and Putin’s desire to tidy up loose ends before the Winter Olympics began in Sochi in February 2014. Khodorkovsky was drawing too much attention, having been declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, and the Olympic spotlight would have found him a tempting subject. It was also an opportunity for Putin to play his favorite role of the “good tsar,” showing mercy to a fallen foe and a chance to get something in exchange for the small cost of releasing him eleven months early. It also avoided the hassle of starting a third trial that would have to have escalated to crimes no less than murder to justify keeping Khodorkovsky imprisoned.

Khodorkovsky left for Germany on the day of his release to visit his ailing mother. He kept a fairly low profile upon his release, but soon he began to speak against the Putin regime and has reopened his Open Russia program.

There is no epilogue to Khodorkovsky’s story yet. As with so many Russian stories it cannot be written as long as Putin is still in power. As for Khodorkovsky’s ambitions, when I spoke with him not long after his release he said to me, quietly but confidently, “If I were Putin, I wouldn’t have let me go.”