Reflections on Vladimir Putin

Reflections on Vladimir Putin

In the United States today it is practically mandatory to despise Russian President Vladimir Putin (unless of course you love authoritarian rulers the way Donald Trump does). For most Americans Putin is simply a bad guy, an authoritarian ruler who suppresses or even murders his political opponents, takes territory from sovereign nations, engages in foreign military activity in support of murderous dictators, and meddles in American presidential elections. I do not mean to suggest by anything I say here that those things aren’t true of Vladimir Putin. They pretty much are true. Yet I think most Americans misunderstand Putin because they approach him only with American understandings of history and of politics. Yet Russia’s history and politics are very different from America’s. If we are going to understand Putin we need to understand him in his Russian context not in our American one. Here I wish to offer an explanation of Putin that takes his Russian context seriously as a way of explaining him a bit better than most Americans can or do. Explain, not justify. Explain, neither approve nor condemn. What I am about here isn’t passing judgment on Putin. It is merely trying to offer a better understanding of him than most Americans have.

The primary reason why so many Americans have so much trouble understanding Vladimir Putin is that they do not understand how different Russian history is from American or western European history. Here are some foundational facts about Russian history that we must understand if we are to understand Putin. We start with the truth that Russia did not participate in most of the major movements in western European history that shaped the western world. In the west great, more or less independent thinkers began to appear at least by the high middle ages. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries gave the west towering geniuses like Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, and Thomas Aquinas. They developed their complex theologies in a context free from political domination. Russia produced nothing like them before its encounter with the west in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries introduced some western thinking to the upper levels of Russian society.

In the west there were always institutions and people who resisted the claims of secular rulers to absolute authority. In particular, the Roman Catholic Church conducted a centuries long struggle against the claims of secular rulers to authority over the church. The Church even functioned like a secular ruler itself. It ruled parts of Italy as a secular power as well as a religious one. Vatican City is a last remaining remnant of what were once much greater papal lands. In its acting as a secular power the Church came into direct conflict with other secular powers. The Roman Catholic Church never submitted willingly to rule by secular governments. There were no, or virtually no, parallel developments in Russia. No institutions independent of the government developed before at least the nineteenth century.¹ The Russian Orthodox Church was always subservient to the Grand Princes of Moscow or to the tsars those princes became. It always saw itself as a bulwark of state power, not a power center in its own right opposed to the state. Indeed, in 1721, Tsar Peter I, known as Peter the Great, abolished the Moscow Patriarchate and replaced it with the Holy Synod, a collective body presided over by an Over Procurator who was appointed by the tsar not the church. That system of institutional subservience of the Church to the state lasted until 1918, after the Bolshevik coup of 1917, when the Church reestablished the Moscow Patriarchate as the highest authority in the church. Any Russians who opposed the tsarist government never had any institutions separate from the state within which to work the way opponents of secular regimes did in the west.

The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries radically transformed the way west Europeans (and Euro-Americans) thought. It emphasized human reason as the source of truth. It led to the development, not always peaceful, of more or less democratic state structures in Great Britain and (eventually) in France and elsewhere in western Europe. It elevated the thinking individual as a primary source of knowledge. It produced documents like the US Constitution with its guarantees of individual rights and freedoms. Nothing like that ever happened in Russia. Yes, Catherine the Great and other Russian rulers toyed with the great philosophers of the Enlightenment. Yes, western Europe’s scientific revolution which was part of the Enlightenment had some effect in Russia. Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1711 – 1765) was the first great Russian scientist. Moscow State University is named after him. Yet Enlightenment rationalism with its emphasis on the individual and modern European science penetrated only the top layer of Russian society. They had no significant effect on the masses of the Russian people.

By the dawn of the twentieth century essentially all of the countries of western Europe, with a few exceptions, had developed at least nominally democratic political systems that provided at least some legal protection for the rights of a citizen. So had the United States regardless of how limited those legal protections of the individual were for Black, Native, female, and other Americans. Nothing even remotely comparable ever developed in Russia. Only in the 1860s did Tsar Alexander II introduce some limited reforms that moved a short distance toward recognizing the rights of the people. He abolished the serfdom that had kept most Russians tied to the land, although he did it in a way that made the emancipation of the serfs burdensome on them financially and less liberating that at first it seemed to be. He introduced the jury system into Russian law. He created local legislative bodies called zemstvos that had some say in local administration without in any way compromising autocracy. None of those reforms created anything like a western political system. The tsar still ruled absolutely. After the Revolution of 1905, the first Russian revolution of the twentieth century but hardly the last, Tsar Nicholas II was forced to create a national Duma, a national legislative body that still hardly impinged upon the autonomous rule of the tsar. When the catastrophe of World War I hit, Russia was so politically and economically backward that the old system collapsed under its own dead weight. Then Lenin and his Bolsheviks took power. They had to fight a civil war to consolidate that power, but by the 1920s Russia was firmly in the grips of Soviet communism.

Soviet communism of course never allowed the creation of anything like western democracy, and it had no respect for the rights of the individual person. Various Soviet constitutions contained provisions like freedom of the press, freedom of speech, elections for political office, and other democratic institutions and individual freedoms, but those freedoms existed only on paper. A Soviet citizen couldn’t use them as a defense when charged with a crime. They created no effective rein on the power of the Communist Party and the state it controlled. The Soviet Union became one of most brutally repressive regimes known to human history, rivaling Hitler and Nazi Germany in its brutality toward its own citizens.

Enter Mikhail Gorbachev. He became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in March, 1985. He tried to reform the Soviet system in the direction of limited market freedoms and individual rights. His policy of “glasnost” (literally “voiceness”) gave Soviet citizens freedoms they had never had before. Works were published in Russia that previously had been banned, including eventually Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Gorbachev had no desire to destroy the Soviet Union, but his reforms acted like a boy pulling his thumb out of a dike. The personal freedoms he introduced led to widespread opposition not just to Gorbachev but to the whole notion of Communist rule. He failed to reform the economy in ways that benefited ordinary people. On December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. What replaced it came to be Vladimir Putin.

Putin was born in what was then Leningrad (now once again St. Petersburg) in 1952. After graduating from Leningrad State University he joined the KGB (komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopostnosti—The Committee on State Security), the main Soviet intelligence agency and secret police force. From 1985 to 1990 he served as a low ranking KGB officer in Dresden in what was then Soviet controlled East Germany. With the Soviet Union on the verge of collapse he returned to Leningrad and became an important aide to Leningrad mayor Anatoly Sobchak. Sobchak had a reputation as something of a liberal, but he eventually fell from power in Leningrad. Putin wound up in Moscow working for the government of Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first more or less democratically elected president. He rose through the ranks of Yeltsin’s government, and on July 25, 1998, he was appointed Director of the FSB, the successor institution to the KGB in the Russian Federation. On August 9, 1999, Yeltsin appointed Putin Acting Prime Minister of the Russian Federation. Yeltsin announced that he wanted Putin to succeed him as President. Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned on December 31, 1999, and Putin became Acting President. On March 26, 2000, Putin won his first election as President. He has more or less ruled Russia ever since.

Putin’s rise to power in Russia is a bit hard to understand. It seems more like it is something that happened to him than something he brought about himself. It seems probable that Yeltsin chose him as his successor primarily because Putin was seen as a nonentity, essentially a nobody despite the high offices he had held. Nothing I have read about him suggests that he sought the highest office in Russia or that he did much of anything to engineer his reaching that position. He didn’t turn down higher offices when they were offered, but it isn’t clear that he ever sought such offices. He was, and is, very much a Soviet man, a functionary of the old system who became the leader of post-Soviet Russia.

Putin’s rule of Russia is characterized by developments that are firmly grounded in Russian history. Among them are a return to some of the repressive ways of the Soviet Union and an economy dominated by extremely wealthy men whose success they owe almost exclusively to the Kremlin. These two dynamics of contemporary Russia have made Putin both immensely powerful and immensely wealthy. Under Putin the Russian government has cracked down on opposition leaders and movements. Take Aleksei Navalny as an example. He is the most prominent opposition political leader in Russia today. The Kremlin had him convicted on trumped up charges of fraud and thus blocked him from running in the recent presidential election against Putin. Other opposition leaders have been murdered, one on a bridge just outside the Kremlin. The Russian government has cooperated with the Russian Orthodox Church in passing anti-gay laws that make Russia one of the hardest places to be LGBT. Russia today isn’t as oppressive as the Soviet Union was, but it is hardly a model of democracy and freedom.

Under Putin the Russian economy has come to be dominated by a small number of extremely wealthy men. We usually call them the “oligarchs.” They are all close to Putin because you can’t get to be an oligarch without being close to Putin. The Russian government owns substantial portions of the country’s industry, especially the gas and oil industry on which so much of the economy depends. We don’t know exactly how much Putin has enriched himself during his time running Russia, but some estimates make him one of the richest men in the world.

Beyond those factors of his rule Putin has undertaken a more aggressive foreign and military policy than post-Soviet Russia had before him (or indeed than the Soviet Union had for quite some time). He occupied the Crimean Peninsula, taking it from Ukraine.² He has engaged the Russian military in the civil war in Syria in support of Russia’s ally Assad. Internally he essentially leveled Chechnya, a semi-autonomous region in southern Russia, to end a militant independence movement there. He has made threatening moves toward the Baltic republics that used to be part of the USSR. He has engaged in military actions in the independent nations of Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova, all former Soviet Socialist Republics.

All of these things about Putin and post-Soviet Russia trouble people in the west. At least some of them are indeed troubling, but before we judge we must understand them in the Russian historical context not the western one. Primarily what we must understand is that it is not at all surprising that the government of post-Soviet Russia is not truly democratic and does not respect what we consider to be the individual rights of its people. History determines much in this world, and Russia has no history of either democratic institutions or governmental respect for individual liberties. Russia flirted with democracy and individual rights immediately after the dissolution of the USSR, but it did that in a context that provides no fertile soil in which they can take root and prosper. Russia has no significant history of institutions that stand in opposition to the state. During the Soviet period that only institution there was whose aims were different from those of the state was the Russian Orthodox Church. As I noted above, the Russian Orthodox Church has a long history of supporting state power not resisting is. That was true even in the Soviet period of Russian history. That the post-Soviet Russian state would oppose the development of political, social, economic, or other institutions that it did not control was virtually a certainty given Russia’s history.

Then there is the loss (or at least the weakening) of Russia’s imperial status. Putin has called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century. Given the enormous scope of the tragedies of the twentieth century most of us find that assertion hard to understand, but the Soviet Union was essentially the old Russian Empire in communist guise. Russia has been at least a regional imperial power since the eighteenth century. The Soviets made it a world power. With the collapse of the Soviet Union Russia was no longer a world power, and it lost much of what had been its empire. All fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics that had made up the USSR became independent nations. Some of them have joined NATO, the western military alliance formed specifically to oppose the Soviet Union. With the end of the Soviet Union Russia suffered a huge loss of prestige and power. One of the main things Putin is about is restoring that prestige and power.³ That the post-Soviet Russian government and most Russian people would want to restore that prestige and power was as virtual a certainty as was the relatively undemocratic nature of that government.

I intend none of this as a justification for anything Putin has done and is doing. He has essentially made himself a new Russian tsar. That status of his is threatened by a term limits provision of the Russian constitution, and it will be interesting to see how he handles that limitation in 2024 when his current term expires. However he handles it, the important point for us westerners to understand is that Putin is acting entirely in accordance with the main outlines of Russian history. Putin is both a Russian man and a Soviet man. That he is Russian is obvious. He was born in Russia to a Russian family and has lived elsewhere only for a few years during his work with the KGB. That he is Soviet is perhaps less obvious; but he was born in the Soviet Union, grew up and was educated in the Soviet Union, and served in the Soviet Union’s primary intelligence agency. As a Soviet man he was indoctrinated into a Marxist-Leninist ideology that condemns western representative democracy as a sham and a tool of economic exploitation. As a Soviet man he served in the government of what he, correctly, knew to be a major world power. He learned how to work and prosper within a system that was undemocratic and oppressive in the extreme. He learned how to manipulate the levers of power in that system for his own purposes. He can hardly be anything other than a Russian Soviet man.

Because he is a Russian Soviet man, nothing about what he has done and is doing should come as a surprise to us. Given his historical context it would be remarkable if he acted much differently than he does. We don’t have to approve of him or his actions, but we do need to understand them. That means we must understand them within the Russian historical context. Putin is an predictable embodiment of that context. We would do well to keep that truth in mind as we seek to deal with him and his Russia.

1With the possible exception of the Old Believers. There was a schism in the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century that created a group called the Old Believers, which was and is an Orthodox sect opposed to the established Russian Orthodox Church. Under the tsars it came into conflict with the tsarist government in a way the established church never did. The Old Believers sect, however, was never big enough to change Russian history in any significant way.

2See my post on this blog “A Historical Perspective on Russia and Ukraine” for a discussion of Russia’s annexation of Crimea set in its proper historical context.

3I once heard President Obama refer to Russia as a “regional power.” I wonder if he said that intentionally as a slap across Putin’s face or if he even understood how that remark would be taken in Russia as an insult, for surely Putin and many other Russians took it as precisely that.