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Bookforum, DEC/JAN 2017
You're the Puppet
A Russian journalist challenges the standard view of Vladimir Putin as a
supervillain
by TONY WOOD
In the last few years, even as Russia and the West have become bitterly
opposed on one issue after another—Snowden, Ukraine, Crimea, Syria, the
hacking allegations—there has been general agreement between them on at
least one thing: the absolute centrality of Vladimir Putin. In Russia,
he dominates the political stage and the airwaves, and a decade and a
half after he first won the presidency, he still enjoys approval ratings
that would be the envy of most elected leaders: After the annexation of
Crimea, they spiked to over 80 percent, where they have remained ever
since. In the West, he has increasingly been portrayed as the most
implacable foe of the US and its allies, a malevolent puppet master
pulling the strings in a succession of crises and conflicts across the
world. (In February 2014, after Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych
unleashed the security forces against protesters on the Maidan, The
Economist dubbed the ensuing street battles "Putin's inferno"; this past
August, Senator Harry Reid demanded an FBI inquiry into Putin's apparent
plan to tamper with the US elections.) For both sides, this one man has
become all but inseparable from the policies and practices of the
country he leads, receiving credit or blame in quantities usually
reserved for minor deities or superheroes. When one of his advisers
asserted, in October 2014, that "Russia is Putin. Russia exists only if
there is Putin," Western policymakers and mainstream media might have
objected to his sycophancy, but not his reasoning. Where Russia is
concerned, it seems, all roads lead to Putin.
Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar flies in the face of this consensus in
All the Kremlin's Men. "It is widely assumed that decisions in Russia
are made by one man and one man alone," he writes. But for Zygar, "Putin
is not one person. He (or it) is a huge collective mind." In other
words, Putin's decisions reflect not so much the plans or whims of an
individual as the outcome of factional battles among an extensive cast
of characters. Not only is the focus on Putin himself misguided but,
according to Zygar, there is no coherent strategy behind the Kremlin's
actions at all. "It is logic that Putin-era Russia lacks," he writes.
"Everything that happens is a tactical step, a real-time response to
external stimuli devoid of an ultimate objective." Those looking for
cunningly woven conspiracies, then, are in for a disappointment: Putin
is more puppet than puppet master, his moves dictated by events and
people beyond his control.
Click to enlarge
These iconoclastic arguments aren't the only reason All the Kremlin's
Men became a best seller when it appeared in Russia last year: Written
in a rather flat but accessible style, the book is based on the
testimony of an impressive selection of key figures in contemporary
Russian politics. (Zygar mentions at the outset having interviewed
dozens of people over several years, who "as a rule . . . asked not to
be quoted"; this, along with the book's sparse references, makes it hard
to tell for sure where particular pieces of information have come from.)
The level of access he seems to have enjoyed is unusual, given that he
is hardly a Kremlin insider. A reporter for the business newspaper
Kommersant in the 2000s—including spells as a foreign correspondent in
the Middle East, Central Asia, and Ukraine—Zygar became the founding
editor in chief of the liberal TV channel Dozhd ("Rain") in 2010 and
remained there until 2015. The station is best known for its sympathetic
coverage of the 2011–12 protests, in which thousands took to the streets
in cities across Russia to call for fair elections and for a "Russia
without Putin." (Since then Dozhd has come under increasing pressure
from the authorities, being shut out from the country's cable networks
in early 2014 and evicted from its offices that December.) Zygar's own
sympathies are clear: He speaks admiringly of Yeltsin's free-market
reforms, presenting Putin's rule as a sad reversal of much that had been
achieved in the 1990s. But he differs from many of Putin's other liberal
opponents in refusing to see this turn as the inevitable outcome of a
dark KGB-led conspiracy. It was instead, he suggests, a highly
contingent process, and one that Putin himself had not envisaged turning
out this way.
Zygar provides a chronological narrative of the years from 2000 to 2015,
structured around a series of individuals, with one personality
dominating each chapter. We get pen portraits of notorious (and less
well-known) members of Putin's inner circle: the former chief of the
presidential staff and close confidant of Putin, ex-spy Sergei Ivanov;
the Kremlin strategist who orchestrated Putin's rise in the first place,
Alexander Voloshin; the Machiavellian manipulator Vladislav Surkov, a
reader of postmodern theory who has fabricated entire political parties
on the Kremlin's behalf; Viktor Medvedchuk, once chief of staff to
Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma, and described here as "the last
Ukrainian to enjoy Putin's trust"; and many others. (The book opens, in
somewhat daunting Tolstoyan fashion, with a twelve-page "list of
characters.") Zygar briefly retells the familiar story of Putin's ascent
to the presidency, from his time as assistant to the mayor of St.
Petersburg in the early 1990s to his astonishingly rapid rise through
the ranks of government in the capital. By July 1998 he had been
appointed head of the FSB, successor agency to the KGB. Over the course
of the following year, Yeltsin's coterie became increasingly anxious
that the incumbent might be prosecuted after leaving office and began to
cast around for a dependable heir. Might Putin—then a gray functionary,
almost entirely unknown to the public—fit the bill? Aside from
competence, the qualities that marked him out for promotion were
precisely his ordinariness and loyalty to his superiors, rather than any
personal authority, vision, or charisma. In August 1999, Yeltsin
surprised everyone by designating him prime minister. Putin's popularity
skyrocketed after he invaded Chechnya, which instantly gave him an air
of menace and gravitas. Still, it came as a shock when Yeltsin resigned
on New Year's Eve, making Putin acting president.
The bulk of the book is devoted to capturing the changing character of
his rule since then. Zygar divides it into four phases, each given a
tongue-in-cheek regal title. "Putin I the Lionheart" covers his first
term in office (2000–2004), in which he attempted to continue the
neoliberal thrust of Yeltsin's administration. As Zygar reminds us, his
efforts met with hearty approval from Western governments at the time,
especially those of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair: The former applauded
his bombardment of Grozny as a "liberation," while the latter rushed to
visit Putin in Russia two weeks before he was actually elected, treating
a campaigning candidate as if he were the established leader. Yet it was
also in this period that Putin definitively subdued the parliament and
began to push the media into line. "Putin II the Magnificent" describes
his second term (2004–2008), which was marked by sustained economic
growth, but also by what many critics saw as a turn away from his
earlier commitment to neoliberal principles—signified above all by the
gradual dismemberment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's oil company, Yukos.
There was also growing mistrust of the West, stirred by NATO's eastward
expansion and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.
A third section is devoted to the four-year presidency of Dmitry
Medvedev ("Prince Dmitry"), characterized on the one hand by a
liberalization of the political climate, and on the other by spreading
economic woes in the wake of the global financial crisis. The first
stirrings of protest had appeared in the mid-2000s, but now small signs
of social discontent began to multiply—with the corruption of the ruling
United Russia party a focal point for popular anger. There was also a
sharp worsening of relations with the West over the August 2008 war with
Georgia—and those tensions only increased with Putin's return to the
presidency in 2012. After a winter that brought the largest
antigovernment demonstrations of the post-Soviet era, he nonetheless
secured an easy victory. The fourth phase of Putin's rule (predictably
labeled "Putin the Terrible") brought a more stridently nationalistic
rhetoric, accompanied by affirmations of Russian Orthodox spirituality;
that new official ideology, emphasizing a "civilizational" difference
between East and West, has hovered in the background of the country's
confrontations with the US and its allies in recent years. It played a
crucial role, for instance, in the persecution of Pussy Riot, whom the
Putin government portrayed not only as blaspheming against the Orthodox
faith, but also (and by the same token) as betraying the motherland.
Those criticizing the government increasingly risked being tagged as a
"fifth column" amid a broader clampdown on dissent, especially from the
radical Left. It was in this already polarized climate that the Ukraine
crisis unfolded, giving another boost to the repressive elements of
Putinism, and narrowing the space for meaningful opposition still further.
Zygar's is a conventional enough account of the past fifteen years of
Russia's history, albeit one enlivened by some unusual details. (For
example, many of the Kremlin's inner circle apparently refer to Putin as
telo, "the body"—perhaps a reference to the president's obsession with
his physique, though there's also the embalmed corpse of Lenin lying
just the other side of the Kremlin wall; either way, the metaphor seems
to illustrate Zygar's claim that Putin is not the all-powerful autocrat
he may appear to be.) There are moments when the reader might wonder how
much trust she is supposed to place in Zygar's sources: Are the various
snippets of dialogue between Putin and his entourage included here being
reproduced verbatim? But perhaps even more problematic than the way he
presents his material is his emphasis on the contingent, improvised
nature of developments under Putin, his insistence that they did not
unfold according to any underlying logic or cause. One difficulty here
is that the impression of contingency is to some extent a product of
Zygar's own preoccupation with a collection of individuals at the top of
Russia's political hierarchy. Keeping a close eye on the Byzantine
intrigues of rival Kremlin factions makes it that much harder to bring
the larger picture into focus.
Given the challenge Zygar presents to the standard image of Putin as
puppet master, it's ironic that he should then offer no credible sense
of who or what might be pulling the strings instead. This crucial bigger
picture is what's missing from Zygar's book: an understanding of the
system over which Putin presides, one that could actually help us make
sense of the Russian leadership's actions, both individual and
collective. The figures Zygar interviews may plot and scheme in all
manner of complicated ways, but they are not doing so for the fun of it,
nor is it all that difficult to trace a logical pattern in their
machinations: They are fighting to defend the material interests,
assets, and privileges they have acquired over time. In that respect,
their motivations are little different from those of elites in other
countries, even if the specific methods they use may be cruder. (Among
Russian biznesmeny, for instance, "hostile takeovers" have sometimes
involved actual private armies facing off against each other.) What's
particular to Russia is the closeness of the relationship between
private wealth and the state. That relationship, often depicted as one
of domination by the Kremlin over capital, is in reality closer to a
symbiosis, in which political and economic power are intertwined—and
mostly concentrated within the same small group of people. After the
fall of Communism, the Yeltsin administration rushed to privatize large
chunks of the economy, transferring factories, mines, oil fields,
banking licenses, and so on to a select few individuals. The state
played the decisive role in creating this new class, as the
beneficiaries have readily acknowledged. Banker Pyotr Aven—currently
ranked No. 317 on the Forbes list of billionaires—once observed that "to
become a millionaire in our country it is not at all necessary to have a
good head or specialized knowledge. Often it is enough to have active
support in the government, the parliament, local power structures and
law enforcement agencies. . . . In other words, you are appointed a
millionaire." For most of the 1990s, the oligarchs created by the state
seemed to have the upper hand, with figures such as Boris Berezovsky all
but dictating government policy. But the 1998 ruble collapse and ensuing
economic crisis weakened the oligarchs' position, while the rise in
global commodities prices from 1999 onward suddenly sent floods of tax
revenues into state coffers, strengthening the hand of the government.
The tide now turned the other way, and state officials began to exert
more pressure on business. The 2003 attack on Khodorkovsky confirmed the
shift, and sent a signal to the other oligarchs that new rules were
going to apply. But in neither phase did the idea of private
profit-making as the governing principle come into question—only the
distribution of the rewards.
Though Zygar, like many others, depicts him as having undone the
free-market reforms of the Yeltsin years, Putin has in fact worked to
consolidate the system that was put in place, providing continuity and
stability at its center so that the business of business can keep going.
The state controls strategic sectors such as oil and gas, but a large
proportion of the economy is left to the play of market forces, allowing
the elite to keep piling up substantial fortunes. In 2000, Putin
famously boasted that the oligarchs would "cease to exist as a class,"
and yet the actual effect of his rule has been to multiply them: When he
took office there were no Russians on the Forbes list, but today—despite
Western sanctions and a steep economic downturn—there are seventy-seven.
Putin's role throughout has been to stand as guarantor of this system,
and in that sense, Zygar is partly right to describe him as constrained
by wider forces. But those forces are far from random: They are rooted
in the specific form capitalism has taken in post-Soviet Russia, of
which Putin is the domineering figurehead.
Tony Wood is a writer living in New York and a member of the editorial
board of New Left Review.
--
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