How Putin Turned Himself Into Russia's New Czar
He just won a fifth term in a land-slide through sham elections against handpicked opponents
Vladimir Putin was just “re-elected” to a fifth term as Russia’s president. While the electoral event that was held from March 15-17 across Russia (and parts of Ukraine) had the trappings of a democratic contest, with voters choosing from among candidates of different parties, this was no real election. The three challengers to Putin who were granted spots on the ballot were token rivals whose participation in the contest was secured by their studied unwillingness to criticize or meaningfully deviate from Kremlin policies; indeed, no one critical of the war in Ukraine was allowed to run.
Boris Nadezhdin, a critic of the war, was disqualified by the Kremlin’s Central Election Commission when only 95,587 of the signatures he submitted were deemed valid, leaving him just short of the required 100,000; Nadezhdin said he had collected over 200,000. For now, Nadezhdin has merely been kept off the ballot—other Putin critics and political rivals have been exiled, imprisoned, poisoned, or wound up dead. Alexei Navalny, Putin’s most renowned rival, was victimized in all four ways.
Russia’s presidential elections are a public spectacle the Putin regime uses to project popular support. They are intended to grant his regime democratic legitimacy. As Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Ekaterina Kurbangaleeva puts it, though elections in Russia are “a simulacrum” whose results are “decided in advance by the authorities,” they are nevertheless “a crucial ritual without which the country’s modern political system could not function.” Indeed, writing in The Atlantic, global politics professor Brian Klaas recommends describing Russian presidential contests as “election-style events” rather than “elections” since they fall short of even being minimally democratic affairs. Since 2000, Putin’s first year as president, he has gradually come to attain totalitarian control over Russia. He has deliberately transformed what was a burgeoning democracy in the 1990s into a repressive dictatorship with major implications for global geo-politics. His ruling model has been authoritarian kleptocracy, and it is worth profiling the man who continues to take Russia further down a dictatorial spiral. His origins are in the KGB, that is, the Soviet secret police, so let’s start there.
The Making of a Dictator
In 1975, after finishing university, Putin joined the KGB. Ten years in, he was assigned a station in Dresden, East Germany, where he worked across the street from, and coordinated with, the KGB’s East German secret police counterpart, the Stasi. Putin was in Dresden when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Douglas Selvage, a Stasi historian, describes that episode as “an important time in his life” that “probably contributed to his sense of how everything could fall apart.”
Although Putin failed to make much of an impression as a KGB officer in East Germany, Navalny said that the Dresden years were important because it was there that he “defined his main life principles … which would later become the basis of the Russian state.” As Navalny explained it, these were:
1. Always say one thing and do another. Lying and hypocrisy are the most effective methods of work.
2. Corruption is the foundation of trust. Your main friends are those who have been stealing and cheating with you for many years.
3. And the most important thing: there is never too much money.
Maria Pevchikh, who ran Navalny’s investigative operation, said that the value of looking into Putin’s years as a KGB officer in Dresden and then his involvement in the St. Petersburg organized crime scene in the early 1990s was “to show that this extreme thirst for money and wealth has always been there. The second he got his hands on a tiny amount of power, he started to steal.”
Though Putin retired from the KGB with the rank of lieutenant colonel, one superior reportedly called him “a mediocre agent”—which explains why he looked to make his mark elsewhere. By 1991, he was back in his native country and firmly ensconced in the political scene of St. Petersburg, renowned in the early 1990s as the crime capital of Russia. Putin became deputy mayor and led the Committee for Foreign Economic Relations, where he dealt extensively with the city’s organized crime elements and had suspicious dealings in real estate and commodity trading. A report by the St. Petersburg legislature recommended his dismissal and that he be investigated further, but under Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, Putin’s mentor, Putin did not face any consequences. Putin continued in St. Petersburg politics until moving to Moscow in 1996, where two years later President Boris Yeltsin would appoint him director of the FSB, the Russian Federation successor to the Soviet-era KGB. Yeltsin appointed Putin prime minister in August of 1999, and just a few months later, after Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned, Putin found himself the leader of Russia.
Putin the Kleptocrat
Putin became president the day before the new millennium dawned—and he has not stopped ruling Russia since. One of his most significant decisions early on was securing full buy-in from Russia’s oligarchs. A Planet Money write-up described the quid pro quo the new president proposed to some of the richest men in Russia just a few months into his presidency:
Putin offered the oligarchs a deal: bend to my authority, stay out of my way, and you can keep your mansions, super-yachts, private jets, and multibillion-dollar corporations (corporations that, just a few years before, had been owned by the Russian government).
During his first two terms, Putin gradually seized control over the big state-owned companies. He did so by first appointing his loyalists as chief executives and board directors and then bringing the companies under state control. For example, in 2001, Putin installed a loyalist from his St. Petersburg days as head of Gazprom, and in just a few years’ time, the Kremlin acquired a controlling stake in the gas giant. Two of Putin’s opposition leaders in those days, Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov, assessed that Putin and his friends funneled no less than $60 billion from Gazprom between the years 2004 to 2007.
Putin has been extremely careful in his choice of associates, which is probably one of his greatest strengths. He selects people that he can really trust, drawing on a narrow circle of people with whom he worked in the KGB or St. Petersburg long ago. The key to advancement has been his personal trust, gained through working closely with him for years early in his career. Trust and loyalty have been of outsized importance, as was the case in the Soviet system. Here’s how a New York Times report from 2012 begins:
Arkady R. Rotenberg, a former judo coach, is now a billionaire industrialist, having made a fortune selling pipe to the state-owned gas monopoly, Gazprom. Yuri V. Kovalchuk owned a minority stake in a small bank in St. Petersburg that in recent years won control of a number of Gazprom subsidiaries. He is now worth $1.5 billion. Gennady N. Timchenko, once the little-known sales manager of a local oil refinery, is now one of the world’s richest men, co-owner of a commodity trading company that moves about $70 billion of crude oil a year, much of it through major contracts with Rosneft, the Russian national oil company.
What these men share, besides staggering wealth and roots in St. Petersburg, is a connection to … Vladimir V. Putin. … The three billionaires are members of a close circle of friends, relatives, associates, colleagues from the security services and longtime advisers who have grown fabulously wealthy during Mr. Putin’s 12 years as Russia’s paramount leader.
Putin the Imperialist
Throughout his first two terms, Putin repeatedly guaranteed the sovereignty and territorial integrity of former Soviet republics, such as Ukraine. Today, Putin rules like an old-style Russian emperor, obsessed with gathering all lands that have ever belonged to the Russian empire. Among past Russian rulers, he singles out Ivan the Terrible (Ivan IV), Peter the Great (Peter I), and Catherine the Great (Catherine II) for special praise since they expanded Russia more than other tsars. In 2017, in a bid to counteract what he considered to be negative historical myths about Russia, Putin attempted to rehabilitate the reputation of Ivan the Terrible (tsar from 1547-84), the most frightful of Russia’s rulers. He proceeded to quote the famous motto of the conservative Alexander III (emperor from 1881-94): “Russia has only two allies: the Army and the Navy,” and that November he unveiled a monument to Alexander III in Crimea.
Putin most resembles Nicholas I, the founder of the tsarist secret police who tightened authoritarian order after the liberal Alexander I and the Decembrist uprising. In 1848-49, Nicholas I culled uprisings all over Eastern Europe. His tragic finale, however, was the Crimean War (1853-56), which dealt a devastating blow to Russia’s rising great power ambitions. Putin’s antithesis might be Alexander II, the comparatively liberal tsar who abolished serfdom in 1861. Putin’s distaste for liberal reforms and his embrace of repression begins in willful forgetting: In his interview book First Person published in 2000, Putin was asked whether he thought of Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror when he agreed to work in the KGB. He responded: “To be honest, I didn’t think about it at all. Not a bit.” Putin’s use of the past is selectively one-dimensional: for him, history serves as a resource he can cynically draw on to justify his expansionist thirst. Troubling episodes from the past don’t concern him; the past is just there to give him license to seize what he wants.
Putin first prominently lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union in his 2005 address to the Federal Assembly. He characterized it as the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century. In February of 2007, he held his first blatantly anti-American speech at the Munich Security Conference, and at the NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008 he first denied the right of Ukraine to exist. The actual turning point in Putin’s foreign policy appears to have been the democratic grassroots Orange Revolution in Ukraine at the end of 2004, where Putin saw how a popular uprising can destabilize authoritarian power.
Putin the Warrior
Putin’s main source of power has been wars. He first rose to popularity and the presidency after the apartment-house bombings in the fall of 1999, which he blamed on Chechens, jumpstarting the bloody Second Chechen War. After President Mikheil Saakashvili had quashed organized crime and corruption in Georgia, Putin launched a five-day war there in 2008. It was an ideal small, victorious war (an oft-quoted line in Russian discourse is: “We need a small, victorious war,” uttered by the tsarist Minister of Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve in 1904 before the disastrous Russo-Japanese War). It raised Putin’s popularity to a new height. In the winter of 2013, a new democratic outbreak occurred in Ukraine, but this time Putin was prepared. That February, he swiftly occupied Crimea and annexed it, before the new Ukrainian government could organize any resistance. In 2022 Putin launched the ongoing full-scale war against Ukraine. He had effectively declared war on Ukraine the prior year, when he published his long essay on the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine, denying Ukraine’s right to exist. While the assault was audacious, it has not been very successful. It has provoked substantial economic sanctions from the U.S., nudged Europe to painfully but meaningfully wean itself off of Russian oil and gas, and hastened Finland and Sweden’s entry into NATO.
For Putin, though, the domestic situation is key. He does not care about economic growth and social development as long as the Russian people stay passive. Values do not seem important to him, while power is. He appeals to the existing values of his chosen electorate as a seasoned politician and draws on arguments that justify his rule. For Putin, a bad war is better than a good peace, because the war allows him far more repression, and more repression allows him more power. At present, Putin appears to have arrived at the conclusion that he needs a permanent war to stay in power.
Every election since 2000, including the one Russia just held, is at bottom nothing more than a public spectacle designed to further consolidate Putin’s power over a nation whose actual sentiments we won’t know until after he is gone. In fact, Putin’s greatest-ever victory is that we may never know them at all.
© The UnPopulist 2024
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"What's Putin every done to me?" - Useful Idiot.
Now do an article on how:
i) Google curbed donations to right wing politicians by pushing many of the right's emails into the spam folders as compared to the left's emails
ii) Most Liberal states in the US don't require ID for Federal elections
iii) Biden interfered with the 2020 elections by suppressing free speech and violating the 1st amendment to suppress negative Hunter Biden stories across social media that would have affected the election
And we can see what REAL democracy looks like in the US! :-)