The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia

290 Pages·2012·3.12 MB·English

by  Angus Roxburgh

Angus Roxburgh is a respected British foreign correspondent and Russia
specialist. He was the Sunday Times Moscow correspondent in the mid-1980s
and the BBC’s Moscow correspondent during the Yeltsin years. He is the author
of The Second Russian Revolution and Pravda: Inside the Soviet Press Machine.
‘A sober assessment of the Putin years, illuminated by Angus Roxburgh’s first-
hand experience and long acquaintance with Russia.’
Bridget Kendall, BBC diplomatic correspondent ‘Using his personal
experiences and material from new interviews with key figures, Angus
Roxburgh lifts the lid on a decade of murky Kremlin politics and points the way
towards the new Putin era that is about to dawn.’ Martin Sixsmith, author of
Russia: A 1,000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East

Published in 2012 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
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Copyright © 2012 Angus Roxburgh
The right of Angus Roxburgh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be
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publisher.
ISBN: 978 1 78076 016 2
eISBN: 978 0 85773 036 7
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Typeset in Goudy Old Style by A. & D. Worthington, Newmarket
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. The Secret Policeman’s Ball
2. Courting the West
3. The Battle for Economic Reform
4. The Darker Side
5. New Europe, Old Europe
6. Putin Mark II
7. Enemies Everywhere
8. A New Cold War
9. Media, Missiles, Medvedev
10. The Descent into War
11. Resetting Relations with the West
12. The Strongman and His Friends
13. Tandemology
Conclusion
Notes
Endnotes
List Of Illustrations
INTRODUCTION
When you shake hands with Vladimir Putin you scarcely notice whether it is a
firm or a weak handshake. It is his eyes that consume you. He lowers his head,
tilting his eyes upwards towards you, and fixes you for several seconds, as
though memorising every detail, or maybe matching your face to a picture he
had memorised earlier ... It is a glowering, piercing, highly unsettling look.
Russia’s ‘national leader’ is like no other country’s president or prime
minister. The former KGB spy was rather reserved and gauche at first, when he
was unexpectedly propelled into high office in 1999. But he has grown into a
man with no inhibitions – a strongman and a narcissist, who flaunts his physical
strength in ever more frequent photo-shoots. In the beginning we saw only a few
selected images – Putin the judo champion, Putin at the controls of a fighter jet.
Later – particularly after he moved from the president’s office to that of the
prime minister in 2008 – he began to invite camera crews on expeditions
designed solely to project a film-star image. They showed him putting satellite
tracking devices on polar bears, tigers, white whales and snow leopards. He took
the cameras along to see him swimming the butterfly stroke in an icy Siberian
river, and riding a horse through mountains, with bare chest and dark shades. He
personally put out wildfires, drove snowmobiles, motorbikes and Formula One
cars, went skiing and scuba-diving, played ice hockey, and even crooned
‘Blueberry Hill’ in English and played the piano in public – unembarrassed by
his inability to do either. In August 2011 he had a cameraman on hand when he
stripped to the waist for a doctor’s examination.
What other world leader acts like this? Having muscular policies is one thing;
but no one matches Putin for sheer vanity.
In conversation he is attentive, combative and sometimes explosive, when he
touches upon sensitive matters. He is exceedingly well-informed, but also
surprisingly ignorant about aspects of Western life. He is courteous, but can also
be boorish. As president and then as prime minister he has run Russia with a
strong, and tightening, grip. In recent years he has taken to dressing down his
ministers in public, creating an atmosphere in which most of his subordinates are
terrified of contradicting him, or even of voicing an opinion in case it might
contradict him. He has created a top-down system – the ‘vertical of power’ –
which instils fear and stifles initiative.
Russia has become a state contemptuous of its people’s rights: a country in
which the head of the electoral commission says his guiding principle is that
whatever Putin says must be correct, and the chairman of parliament describes it
as ‘no place for discussions’. It is a country in which the most important decision
about who will become president is effectively taken in private by two
individuals, with no reference to the populace. This was what happened in
September 2011, when Putin’s protégé and successor as president, Dmitry
Medvedev, agreed to retire from the top job after one term to allow Putin to
return as president in 2012 for, potentially, another 12 years. The two men
cynically admitted what people had suspected but did not know for sure, that this
had been the plan ever since Putin had stepped aside from the presidency in
2008: Medvedev’s stint in the Kremlin was a mere seat-warming exercise,
designed to keep Putin in power for as long as he wished, while paying lip-
service to (or, in fact, flouting) the constitutional ban on a president serving more
than two consecutive terms.
Putin did not start out like this. Back in 2000 many Western leaders at first
welcomed his fresh, new approach, and his willingness to cooperate and seek
consensus. It will be the task of this book to try to chronicle and explain how
everything changed: why Putin became more and more authoritarian, how he
challenged the West and how the West challenged him too; how each side failed
to see the other’s concerns, causing a spiral of mutual mistrust and lost
opportunities. On the one hand there is what the Americans and the West
observed: Russia’s political crackdown, the brutal war in Chechnya and murders
of journalists, the corrupt mafia state and growing bellicosity, culminating in the
invasion of Georgia and the gas wars against Ukraine. On the other, there is
Russia’s view: America’s domineering role in the world, its missile defence
plans, the invasion of Iraq, the expansion of NATO, Russia’s positive gestures
that went unanswered, the perceived threat to spread revolutions from Georgia
and Ukraine to Russia. And there is each side’s failure of vision: Putin’s inability
to see any connection between his own repressions at home and the hostile
reaction abroad; George W. Bush’s inability to understand Russia’s age-old fear
of encirclement or its fury at his high-handed foreign policy adventures.
At the time of writing Putin remains the most popular politician in Russia,
perhaps because of the measure of stability and self-esteem he restored to
people’s lives, and because living standards improved during his rule, due
largely to high oil prices which benefit Russia. And yet he has failed in many of
his stated goals. Having come to power promising to annihilate terrorism, the
number of attacks has grown; corruption has soared, and cripples the economy;
the population has slumped under his leadership by 2.2 million people; foreign
investment has been far lower, as a percentage of Russia’s economic output, than
rival fast-growing emerging markets such as Brazil or China; and, despite the
massive inflows of energy revenues in the past decade, Russia has failed to
create a dynamic, modern economy. This book looks at the struggle for reform
inside Russia, and asks whether Dmitry Medvedev as president was (as it often
seemed) a frustrated liberal or mere window-dressing.
Politicians are prone to oversimplify complicated issues, especially if it is in
their interests to do so. This has been especially true of the discussion in recent
years of what is perhaps the trickiest of all international political problems – the
right of small nations to self-determination. Kosovo, Chechnya, South Ossetia,
Abkhazia, Transnistria ... gallons of ink and roomfuls of hot air have been
expended in explaining, usually with categorical assurance, that one small
country’s independence is or is not a precedent for others. Usually it is the big
‘mother country’ that insists all other cases are unique (Russia vis-à-vis
Chechnya, Georgia vis-à-vis South Ossetia and Abkhazia), while the small
nations demand to be treated the same way as those who gained their freedom. It
is an issue of exceptional importance in Russia, a multinational state like no
other, where dozens of nationalities coexist, some with greater or lesser
autonomy, and where the Kremlin has a pathological fear of the state
disintegrating if any one of those nations is allowed to set a precedent by gaining
independence. The issue runs through the history of the last decade, from the
war in Chechnya and the welter of terrorist incidents in Russia, to the short war
between Russia and Georgia in 2008. Usually no side is ‘right’ in any of these
conflicts, and it would be simplistic to pretend otherwise – just as it would be
simplistic to pretend that the West’s decision to recognise Kosovo and NATO’s
decision on future membership for Georgia and Ukraine had no bearing on
relations between Russia and its neighbours. Perceptions and misperceptions of
the other side’s intentions often play a greater – and usually more harmful – role
than reality.
This is my third book about Russia, and I am aware of the presumptuousness
of any foreigner who claims to understand that baffling country. The Russian
political scholar Sergei Karaganov wrote of the ‘feelings of resentment and
rejection that we Russians have when reading unpleasant notes about our
country written by foreigners’. There is much that is unpleasant in Russian
politics today, and it deserves to be written about. Russia is sometimes its own
worst enemy, seeing ill intentions abroad where there are none, and fearing the
spread of democracy rather than welcoming it. But there is also a failure on the
part of the West to understand the processes going on there or to treat Russia
with respect as a country that wants to be part of the world, not shunned by it.
***
This book stems partly from my work as chief consultant on a four-part BBC
television documentary titled ‘Putin, Russia & the West’, made by the Brook
Lapping production company. For the series, we conducted hundreds of hours of
top-level interviews not only in Russia but also in the US, Britain, France,
Germany, Ukraine and Georgia. These original interviews cast fresh light on
many of the events covered, and are at the heart of my narrative.
I also draw, particularly for Chapter 9 of the book, on my personal experiences
while working for three years as an adviser to President Putin’s press secretary,
Dmitry Peskov. When the Kremlin decided in 2006 to take on a New York
public-relations company, Ketchum, and its Brussels-based partner, GPlus, I
found myself making an unexpected detour from my career as a journalist.
Neither Ketchum nor GPlus had anyone on their staff who knew much about
Russia, and suddenly they needed someone and offered me a job. After eight
years covering the European Union, the idea of immersing myself in Russia
again was appealing. Most of my career had revolved around it: I had studied
and taught Russian, worked as a translator in Moscow and for the BBC
Monitoring Service, been Moscow correspondent of the Sunday Times and later
the BBC.
There was one piquant moment in my biography that made the offer even
more tempting. Back in 1989, when Putin was a KGB spy in Dresden, his bosses
deported me from Moscow in retaliation for Margaret Thatcher’s expulsion of
Soviet spies from London. I was then the Sunday Times correspondent and was
one of three journalists and eight diplomats who were kicked out in the last big
spy scandal of the Cold War. How ironic, I thought, to return to Moscow as
Putin’s adviser! I accepted, and became a Kremlin media consultant, based in
Brussels but travelling regularly to Moscow. I was part of a team of some 20–30
people worldwide, but the only full-time consultant. I came to know Peskov and
his team very well, and although they always kept up their guard, I was as close
as any foreigner in those years to the corridors of power. My personal
observations form the basis for much of what I describe during the years 2006–
2009.
Our main task as media advisers to the Kremlin was to persuade them to open
up to the press, on the rather obvious premise that the more you speak the more
your views will be heard. The Russian political class proved remarkably resistant
to this idea, and remained so long after I left the PR world and returned to
journalism – as I discovered while working on the BBC television series.
Persuading senior Russian politicians to give interviews was immensely
difficult, and several key figures refused altogether. Others agreed, but only after
many months of obstruction by their subordinates who seemed unwilling or
afraid even to pass on our request. President Medvedev’s spokeswoman, Natalia
Timakova, refused point-blank even to speak to us. Ironically it was easier to
gain top-level access to the Kremlin in the final years of communism, when I
worked on the BBC series The Second Russian Revolution, than it is now. Our
task became even harder as political uncertainty crept in during the year prior to
the 2012 presidential elections. The entire administration was in limbo, as Putin
and his president, Dmitry Medvedev, refused to reveal which of them would run
for re-election. Suddenly we found that interviews that had been promised were
declined. It became clear that canny politicians and functionaries did not dare to
stick their necks out in such a time of flux.
Nonetheless we did interview more than a hundred people (either on or off the
record) for the TV series and this book. They include heads of government,
foreign ministers and senior advisers in eight countries. In Russia we spoke to
Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Anatoly Antonov, Stanislav Belkovsky, Vladimir Chizhov,
Boris Chochiev, Arkady Dvorkovich, Viktor Gerashchenko, German Gref,
Alexei Gromov, Sergei Guriev, Andrei Illarionov, Igor Ivanov, Sergei Ivanov,
Grigory Karasin, Mikhail Kasyanov, Viktor Khristenko, Yevgeny Kiselyov,
Eduard Kokoity, Andrei Kolesnikov, Konstantin Kosachev, Alexander
Kramarenko, Alexei Kudrin, General Marat Kulakhmetov, Sergei Kupriyanov,
Sergei Lavrov, Fyodor Lukyanov, Mikhail Margelov, Sergei Markov, Vladimir
Milov, Oleg Mitvol, Dmitry Muratov, Gleb Pavlovsky, Dmitry Peskov, Sergei
Prikhodko, Yevgeny Primakov, Dmitry Rogozin, Sergei Ryabkov, Vladimir
Ryzhkov, Viktor Shenderovich, Dmitry Trenin, Yuri Ushakov, Alexander
Voloshin and Igor Yurgens.
In the USA we interviewed Matthew Bryza, Bill Burns, Nicholas Burns, Eric
Edelman, Daniel Fata, Daniel Fried, Philip Gordon, Rose Gottemoeller, Thomas
Graham, Stephen Hadley, Lt-Col Robert Hamilton, John Herbst, Fiona Hill,
General James Jones, David Kramer, Michael McFaul, General Trey Obering,
Stephen Pifer, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Sestanovich, Dean
Wilkening and Damon Wilson.