Putin

In Putin’s view, Russia has both external and internal enemies. The external seek to weaken Russia’s society and economy through sanctions, low oil prices, information wars, and pressure on possible weak points like Kaliningrad. The internal enemies—political rivals, opposition leaders, unhappy oligarchs—share a common goal with the external ones: the removal of Putin. It is even possible they will collude. After all, in 1917 Lenin was sent by Russia’s enemy Germany in a sealed train to Petrograd in the calculation that a revolutionary Lenin would not wish to continue Tsarist Russia’s imperialist war. All of these are the sort of moves Putin himself might make if he were on the other side of the chessboard—why shouldn’t he pay his opponent the compliment of considering him equally intelligent and devious?

Putin’s fears may seem extravagant, but when viewed against the backdrop of Russia’s history, many of them do not seem so extravagant at all.

PART TWO BACKGROUND CHECK

…the time is right for fighting in the streets.

—THE ROLLING STONES

2 THE EDUCATION OF V. V. PUTIN

All decent people get their start in intelligence. I did too.

—HENRY KISSINGER TO PUTIN IN CONVERSATION, EARLY NINETIES

Any portrait of Putin must necessarily be streaky, ambiguous, elusive. His KGB training made him duplicitous, poker-faced, and his years in power have airbrushed his past. Besides, Russian psychology and behavior always tend to baffle Westerners. America’s experts know Russia, they just don’t know Russians. This is what Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was getting at when, bemoaning deteriorating U.S.-Russia relations, he said of himself and Condoleezza Rice: “For the first time both the United States secretary of state and secretary of defense have doctorates in Russian studies. A fat lot of good that’s done us.”

Putin’s time in the KGB lends him a sinister charisma that also obscures his true face. The way he views the KGB and the way it is seen by outsiders is one of the true impediments to penetrating his psychology and predicting his behavior. For Putin, membership in the KGB is a source of pride and identity; he’s gone so far as to say that there is no such thing as ex-KGB. For him and many in the KGB, the organization was not evil but heroic. It helped win the revolution, beat the Nazis, and steal U.S. atomic secrets, thus preserving a balance of power in the world. Many KGB veterans, though they will in passing acknowledge their organization’s complicity in Stalin’s crimes and the oppression that continued after his death, are also acutely aware of themselves as victims and martyrs. There was no more dangerous job in Stalin’s USSR than head of the KGB, and when a KGB leader fell, immediate purges of his confederates would decimate the ranks. The principal intelligence school that Putin attended during his training had been established by Stalin’s personal order in 1938 to replace the agents killed in Stalin’s own purges.

In KGB eyes the blame for the crimes committed against innocent civilians and against “innocent” KGB personnel lay with the party. The KGB was only the party’s sword and shield—it did what it was told.

So when someone like John McCain says he looks into Putin’s eyes and sees “KGB” he means thug and oppressor, but when Vladimir Putin says the same word, it has associations of victor, victim, and, at worst, inadvertent villain. This is not the best basis for communication and also violates the cardinal principle: Know thy enemy.

Our image of Russia lacks nuance and perversity. A Westerner might be able to understand why Russians would remain faithful to the original image of the KGB man as bold and valiant. It would, however, be considerably more difficult to understand the nostalgia some former prisoners of the Gulag for their time there. In the Gulag everything was more vivid and real. There was no ambiguity—friendship was friendship, betrayal betrayal. Speaking of some music he had by chance overheard and whose beauty sustained him for days, one Zek (prisoner) said to me: “You hold things dearer in there. Hearing music in there in not like hearing music out here. I would not have missed it for the world.”

But Putin eludes even Russians. A politician who worked closely with Putin in St. Petersburg in the 1990s says: “When he became President I threw open my photo album to see us together—I knew he’d be there next to me at one of so many events we were at together. But he wasn’t in a single one. He’d slipped out of every frame. I sometimes wonder if he even has a reflection in the mirror.”

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