[Futurework] Shakespeare's three great leaders -- Bush, Hu and Putin

[Keith Hudson]

"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em." (Twelfth Night)

The three most powerful people in the world, George W. Bush, Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin are, respectively, perfect examples of Shakespeare's epithet.

Despite the fact that the governances of America, China and Russia are hugely different in structure -- as also the way they are elected or selected -- the eons-old alpha male emerges just as strongly in these three modern societies as in hunter-gatherer times. It is true, of course, that each of the presidents concerned has to pay attention to their closest advisors but, to a very considerable extent, all of them have the most tremendous decision-making power that can affect the whole world. Each of them sits upon a nuclear arsenal that can deliver missiles to any point on the earth's surface and obliterate it.

Two of the current presidents are mysterious and few people in the west know much, if anything, about them. Even George W. Bush is ambiguous if we are to believe all the different opinions about him. We know a great deal about his earlier life, particularly of his business history, largely unsuccessful. Some (including the writer), believe that he is just a front man for a small group of powerful people behind him who are manipulating him -- including his father George Herbert Bush, the former president twice removed, vice-president Richard Cheney and two or three other figures with strong views and interests.

In due course, there'll be a sufficient number of biographies written about Bush but, for the time being, it is difficult to reach a considered view. Most of us are inevitably prejudiced one way or the other due to his decision to invade Iraq and, at least for some years to come, opinion is likely to become even more polarised. Perhaps the most objective opinion of Bush so far qua president has come from Fred I. Greenstein, who leads Princeton's Leadership Studies Program and has written a paper, The Leadership Style of George W. Bush, given at a conference earlier this year.

Greenstein has developed a six-fold job-requirement assessment for leadership in big business and governance and the following is a brief summary of his findings by John W. Dean.

"Greenstein gives Bush high grades on emotional intelligence, given the fact that Bush could be (based on his years of alcohol abuse) an 'emotional tinderbox'. Yet as Texas governor, presidential candidate and now as president, Greenstein finds him in good control of his emotions. Bush does not score particularly well on his 'cognitive style'. While he does not find Bush lacking in intelligence, Greenstein also finds him 'not particularly well equipped to reason clearly about the complex trade-offs presidents typically have to make.'

"Our first MBA president  gets high marks for his organisational abilities, but Greenstein says his lack of tolerance for staff disputes during meetings results in 'Bush's deliberative processing' leaves 'something to be desired'. Bush's 'congenitally gregarious nature', Greenstein  believes, puts him in a league of political masters like Lyndon Johnson. Nevertheless, Greenstein suggests that Bush has not lived up to his potential as president because  'there has been a hard edge to his administration's partisanship in Washington that was not evident in Texas.' "

Well, that takes care of Shakespeare's first category because, whatever else may be said about Bush, he was certainly born to leadership. As a young man he helped in his father's own presidential campaigns and acquired a great deal of experience which few others could ever have had. Furthermore, Bush's father rescued him from business disasters more than once, and almost certainly was able to precisely position his son in the Republican hierarchy as a strong presidential candidate.

Shakespeare's second category is filled by Hu Jintao. Yes, he'd been previously tapped as a possible future leader by Deng Xiaoping but, as is the case of all the members of the poliburo from which he was selected, he'd already had vast administrative experience for several decades previously. We know very little about his personality -- much less than we know about Bush or Putin. When we see a photograph of him he looks much the same as all the Chinese poliburo look-alikes -- with the same suits and hairstyles, the same spectacles and the same sort of inscrutable faces.

Hu Jintao's immediate predecessor Jiang Jemin was also considered to be one of these bland, uncharismatic types. But appearances are deceptive. Anthony Lake, president Clinton's senior advisor and negoiator on Chinese matters suddenly discovered him to be very quirky, brilliantly intelligent and widely read. One day when they were about to start negotiations, president Jiang suddenly realised that Lake's name was similar to his own (meaning "river"), and then started expatiating on names and their origins delving deeply into Chinese history, and then into poetry and philosophy and then relating it all to modern technology in a bewildleringly fascinating way that caused Lake to throw away his formal discussion agenda and simply enjoy a fascinating conversation with a man of obviously great.scholarship. They postponed negoitations until the next days.

The present president, Hu Jintao, is more than likely to be as gifted and versatile as Jiang Jemin. As a young man Mr Hu qualified as an engineer at Qinghua University in Beijing, the most prestigious university in China, for which millions of young Chinese sit examinations every year for one of 3,000 places. John Thornton, the ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs and who made it into the top investment bank in Europe, teaches there now. This is what he thinks of Qinghua (or Tsinghua) University: "If you were to put Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Chicago, etc, all together you still wouldn't have the concentration of future leaders you do at Tsinghua."  So Hu Jintao is no intellectual slouch! The BBC News item below gives a few more details about him. But since this item, president Hu has already released a raft of radical reforms in almost every aspect of Chinese life -- more freedom for the media, stricter banking regulations and control of corruption, and the further institution of democratic voting procedures in the countryside among many others.
 
Finally, we come to Shakepseare's third category of greatness -- that which comes out of the blue. As the communist system in the Soviet Union was collapsing, Putin, one of hundreds of officers of his rank (major) in the KGB thought that he would have to become a taxi-driver in order to survive. Then he was selected by an old friend, the Mayor of St Petersburg to be his Mr Fix-it and then soon afterwards, even more astonishingly, chosen by Yeltsin as the next president of Russia! This was a man of modest rank in the secret service with absolutely no political or administrative experience becoming the president of a country with the greatest land mass in the world and many of its greatest resources!

I think there's a slight clue in an article written from Der Spiegel by Christian Neef. Although everything we have seen and read about Putin so far -- his oppression of the independent TV channels, his arrest of Khordokovsky, etc -- suggests that he is heading towards being a dictator, ably assisgted by an revivified secret service, there is a clue in the following article as to why Yeltsin chose him. In bringing about the privatisation of Russia as fast as possible in order to prevent any possibility of communism returning, Yeltsin had cut many corners and, strictly speaking, was criminally guity of many acts which, after his retirement, he could have been arrested for. Yeltsin thus needed a successor who would give him absolution and who would not go back on his word. Putin was such a person. There seems to be considerable rigidity in his personality and while this will probably augur badly for Russia as a whole and over the longer term, there are a couple of unexpected instances mentioned which are praiseworthy.

So, to summarise, what is the future of Shakespeare's dramatic personae? Indeed, what is our future in their hands? Both Hu and the newly re-elected Putin have years of power ahead of them, Bush, we don;t know about yet. He faces presidential re-election next November and, at the time of writing, the American political situation is exquisitely poised between the 'super-Patriot' Bush and his attempt to carry a sufficiently large jingoistic electorate with him in the coming months, and the newly rising star, Howard Dean, who has been the only Democratic candidate who has constantly opposed the invasion of Iraq. We will see. Whoever wins will join Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin in possessing awesome power over the rest of us.

Except for one fact of life. Powerful leaders are commensurately afraid of their own people. And they are particularly fearful of new ideas or cultural shifts within their own people which can be their undoing. Hu Jintao, like the rest of his politburo, deeply fears unrest by hundreds of millions of Chinese, particularly those in the countryside, unless he can keep on delivering consumer prosperity. Vladimir Putin, with his secret service backing him up, doesn't fear any sort of uprising, but he has a population which is literally dying on him, due to alcoholism, drug addiction, Aids, fast-declining fertility and sheer despair about the future. And George W.Bush, or Howard Dean, will have to cope with an American electorate, and particularly an intelligentsia, which is becoming more and more deeply cynical of politics and government as a whole -- and thus of the very basis of presidential validity.

Keith Hudson 
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HU JUNTAO

Even close followers of Chinese politics can say little for sure about Hu Jintao, the man who has taken over as China's Communist Party leader and is its new president.

It is 10 years since Deng Xiaoping promoted Mr Hu to the party's ruling Politburo, thereby earmarking him to succeed Jiang Zemin as the "core" of the Communist Party's fourth generation of leaders.

But in all that time he has given little clue as to what sort of leader he will be. "He has played the role of heir apparent brilliantly," says one analyst."He hasn't mistimed a single move -- largely because he hasn't made one."

Hu Jintao, aged 60, is the first leader whose party career began after the Communist takeover in 1949. Official biographies say he was born in eastern Anhui province, and joined the party at the height of the Cultural Revolution in 1964 when he was studying hydroelectric engineering at Beijing's prestigious Qinghua University.

One entry -- excised after he took over as Party chief -- mentioned his liking for table tennis and ballroom dancing. He is also said to have a photographic memory. After graduating, he worked his way up through the ranks in the Ministry of Water Conservancy and Power. This background -- which he shares with outgoing hardline premier Li Peng -- suggests he is likely to be a champion of such major projects as the Three Gorges Dam, despite opposition from environmentalists and others.

Mr Hu's party career began to take off after Deng's rise to power in the late 1970s. He was one of several young administrators promoted rapidly because of their performance or patrons.

Secret reformer?
Hu Jintao has served in key posts in some of China's poorest and most remote provinces. He headed the Communist Youth League in Gansu and became party chief in Tibet and Guizhou.In Tibet, he demonstrated his toughness when he responded to separatist protests by declaring martial law. It paved the way for similarly harsh measures to be used to end the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in Beijing.

Many Tibetans even believe Mr Hu had a hand in the unexpected death of the Panchen Lama, their second highest spiritual leader. They also criticised him for spending little time in Tibet -- the apparent reason being that he suffered from altitude sickness.

When Mr Hu returned to Beijing as a member of the Politburo's seven-man Standing Committee in 1992, he took over key tasks such as handling personnel matters and supervising the ideological training of top officials.The courses he introduced on market economics and good governance have led some to speculate that he is at heart a reformer. But he has always been a faithful follower of the party line.
 
One of his few ventures into international affairs was in 1999 when, as vice-president, he authorised anti-US demonstrations after the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was mistakenly hit in a US bombing raid. One of Mr Hu's few recorded sayings is that success in life "requires resolve, attention to concrete matters and courage in making decisions".

BBC News -- 3 May 2003
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A COMPLETE CONFORMIST
Christian Neef

Until now, it was unclear what exactly Vladimir Putin did as a KGB officer in Dresden. Now his former offlcemate is talking about their shared days of espionage. In a new book, he presents a character analysis of his former colleague, who since then has managed to become the Russian president.

[KH: I've deleted some descriptions of the work of the KGB in Dresden, East Germany at about the time that Putin was transferred there in 1985. Christian Neef now largely takes up the story of Vladimir Ussolzev, who sat in the same office as Putin and got to know him well and is now writing Putin's biography.]

"Soslushivez" is what Ussolzev, now 56, calls his manuscript about his erstwhile fellow spy, and it is scheduled to be published as a book in Russia soon. Loosely translated, the word means "professional colleague" or "comrade," and it suggests closeness. In fact, Ussolzev was something like Putin's counterpart for an extended period of time. The man from Leningrad, nicknamed "little Volodya" in Dresden, sat across from Ussolzev in a two-man office at Angelikastrasse 4. Ussolzev had the opportunity to observe Putin day after day, from one desk to another.

With his book, he intends to shed light on some of the fabricated and romanticized notions Putin biographers have expressed in recent years. One of these, according to Ussolzev, is the theory, put forth by German author Alexander Rahr, that Putin's dizzying career was not really that surprising, because it had been planned for a long time. In fact, there are two questions that have yet to be completely resolved: Who is the real Vladimir Putin, this man whose persona is as charming as it is difficult to fathom, and what did the current president really do in Dresden? Insider Ussolzev provides answers to these questions by illuminating the small world of those six officers who manned the KGB office in the East German district of Dresden, just 100 meters away from the local headquarters of the Stasi, the former East German secret police.

It was an isolated life, like the life of an astronaut on an extended mission. A microcosm in which graduates of the secret service school rubbed shoulders with embittered former Chekists. A world filled with pointless filing work, party lectures and human intrigues.

Dresden was no dream job. Those assigned to Dresden had been passed over for the well-paid positions at the KGB residences in Bonn and Hamburg. They had to make do with a salary of 1800 East German marks (plus a little extra paid into a Russian ruble account back home), the merchandise in the military store of the First Guard Tank Division (where bananas could be had, among other things), and the chance to flip through the pages of Otto, Neckermann and Quelle mail-order catalogues circulated clandestinely among the KGB offices. As Ussolzev recalls, Putin was able to get most of the catalogues through his contacts. Later on, the agents were paid the princely bonus of about a hundred dollars in cash, to be spent in the diplomats' store in Berlin-Marzahn.

For Moscow, even the most remote East German province represented an important front in terms of class struggle, and NATO was its primary target, even in Dresden. Moscow was especially interested in the Green Berets, the special forces of the US Army stationed in the Bavarian town of Bad Tolz, as well as the military training areas in Wildflecken and Minister. The representatives of the third division ("Illegal Reconnaissance") were the ones responsible for these target areas, and Vladimir Putin was their man in Dresden.

Ussolzev claims that the East German KGB was unable to station truly productive agents near these bases. The Stasi passed on to the KGB all applications filed by citizens of Dresden to obtain official approval for visits by relatives from the West. According to Ussolzev, Putin combed through tens of thousands of these documents in an effort to find contacts who lived near the US bases of interest. The KGB was more successful in recruiting East German citizens willing to emigrate. Although they opposed Honecker, Ussolzev writes that they were not necessarily against Gorbachev. After all, it was the era of Perestroika. According to Ussolzev, "the argument we used to tempt them was that if the Americans were to leave West Germany, the Russians would also withdraw from the eastern portion." The new West German citizens reported important US troop movements to their contacts in the east, claims Ussolzev.

How many agents did the East German division of the KGB have in West Germany at the time? "Hardly more than 20," says the former secret agent. "We paid them miserably, sometimes as little as 50 marks." Sometimes they were discarded Stasi informers, hand-me-down people who had no idea that suddenly they were working for the KGB. Ussolzev is certain that "many of them were also on the payroll of the BND (the German federal intelligence service) or the Verfassungsschutz (the German federal agency responsible for defending the constitution)," and goes on to say that "we were under tremendous pressure to succeed, and any new recruitment increased our chances of getting a promotion."
Putin's real job was discovering potential KGB agents among the foreign students at the Technical University. He looked for people whose families were part of the political elite at home, and who could become valuable informants after returning to their native countries. Two of the four KGB agents in Dresden were responsible for establishing contact and supervising the informants. On paper they were employees of the criminal investigation division of the East German police, but in reality they worked exclusively for the Soviets. They met with Putin in cars and in remote rural areas near Dresden.

One of them, Rainer M., with whom Putin had an "almost family-like relationship," was arrested and charged with espionage after the fall of the German Democratic Republic, or GDR. M.'s primary responsibility had been to recruit Latin American students, who apparently then provided the Dresden KGB office with "extremely useful" information from people in Fidel Castro's environment.

Was Putin also involved in the secret "Lutsch" (the Beam) operation, in which the KGB observed its own friends, i.e., the East German leadership? Yes, says Ussolzev. However, he also says that "Lutsch" was not an "elite group of spies," as Putin biographer Rahr has claimed, nor was its objective the replacement of Erich Honecker, General Secretary of the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the state party of the GDR). Everyone, claims Ussolzev, had to work for "Lutsch," because Moscow routinely requested information on the domestic political situation in the GDR, so that it could remove dissatisfied party functionaries, critical employees of the Stasi district administration, and church members.

The operation gained in importance when Honecker began to distance himself from Moscow. The Kremlin was clearly irritated when, in February 1985, Honecker invited former American and British pilots, men who had bombed Dresden 40 years earlier, to the official opening of the Semper Opera House, which had been destroyed in World War II. From Moscow's perspective, Honecker's move had the appearance of unwanted reconciliation and enhanced the status of the former Anglo-American war allies. In response, the KGB posted its men, equipped with microphones, on Dresden's Theaterplatz and immediately transmitted Honecker's speech to the Kremlin. "It was really a ridiculous game," says Ussolzev today.

The germ of mistrust also began to spread within the Stasi administration in Dresden, headed by General Horst Bohm, an especially zealous friend of Honecker. The "great hypocrite" (in Ussolzev's words) prohibited the KGB's people from entering the Stasi complex on Bautzner Strasse, a place to which they had had unrestricted access in the past. "Even in our minds, the MfS (East German Ministry for State Security) seemed like a product of an Orwellian fantasy world, a leftover from the Stalin era," says Putin's former colleague, adding that the Stasi employed more people in the Dresden district alone than did the KGB in all of White Russia.

Much of the work done at the Angelikastrasse office was routine and often represented additional work for Putin's Department 3: obtaining cover addresses for agents in other countries, forging passports with the assistance of contacts at the Dresden registration offices, but also extensive "scientific theft." West German dissertations mailed to GDR scientists were confiscated by the customs office and, instead of being forwarded to the correct addressees, were passed on to the Stasi and the KGB. Ussolzev says that "anything relating to computer or laser technology was copied for Moscow, and then forwarded by the KGB to Soviet scientists for further analysis. In many cases, the Soviet scientists simply incorporated the data into their own dissertations."

What were some ofUssolzev's personal impressions of his colleague Putin? "He was a pragmatist," says the former KGB officer, "someone who thinks one thing and says something else." Someone who was a "complete conformist" and did not believe in any changes in his native country, who played the role of the committed Communist to keep up appearances, and who called his colleague an "idiot" because of his "provincial openness." According to Ussolzev, Putin told him to restrain his criticism of conditions in the Soviet Union and think about his family.

But then there were the office conversations between two men and the regular Friday sauna evenings in the basement of the KGB mansion. "In small groups," says Ussolzev, "Putin surprised us with his political views." On the one hand, Ussolzev claims, Putin refused to believe that under Stalin the KGB indiscriminately shot people for the sole purpose of fulfilling a plan dictated by Moscow. On the other hand, he says that Putin, a lawyer, was visibly upset about the abuse of justice in the Soviet Union and sympathized with the Kremlin's most important critics, such as dissident Andrej Sacharov, whom he respected for his consistency.

Even more surprising was the diminutive KGB major's tolerance for Jews in an organization that was deeply anti-Semitic, that saw a Jewish role in everything it considered anti-Soviet, and had Soviet Jews watched in the belief that they represented security risks. According to Ussolzev, Putin never agreed with this stance, and told Ussolzev that he believed Jews were "completely normal people." In fact, Putin grew up among Jews in the Leningrad athletic clubs, where many of the trainers and top athletes were Jewish. Ussolzev also debunks a few myths: that Putin spoke perfect German, for example, and was even in command of several dialects ("he spoke fluently, but not easily"), and that it had already been evident then that he was destined for great things ("his intellectual abilities were good, but not outstanding; he was no great speaker").

But he was persistent, a "nachalnik" type (which means chief or boss in Russian), and even tried to pursue activities after it had become apparent that they had become pointless. One of his early successes, according to Ussolzev, was the rescue of the dossier that contained all KGB contacts. A copy of the dossier was on file at the Stasi administration in Dresden. Putin was able to remove the dossier at the last minute, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

According to Ussolzev, Putin concealed his energy behind a studied air of politeness and courtesy. When interacting with his superiors, he gave the impression of being extremely obedient, even dependent. This, says Ussolzev, made him the constant favorite of his superiors, in Dresden, at headquarters in Karlshorst, and probably later on with his political mentor Boris Yeltsin.

But did he have the makings of a statesman? This would never have occurred to any of his Dresden colleagues, says Ussolzev. Toward the end, Putin also seemed to have distanced himself from the KGB. By 1990, during the swan song of the Soviet Union, he had already resigned himself to working as a taxi driver in Leningrad. But then he suddenly reappeared as the right-hand man of Leningrad's mayor. Today, Ussolzev is convinced that Putin served under the mayor as an officer on special assignment. And now, as president? Now, like none of his predecessors, he has placed a large share of the Kremlin's power onto the shoulders of the secret services, at least according to Ussolzev. "To me," says Ussolzev, "that is the biggest mystery. That is his tragedy."

Translated by Christopher Sultan
Der Spiegel -- 20 October 2003
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Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>