The crisis has contributed to the stability of the Russian strongman’s regime more than any index of economic success, writes Mark Almond.
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When Boris Yeltsin suddenly resigned as Russia’s first post-communist president on New Year’s Eve, 1999, his country seemed to be spiralling downhill into economic and political disintegration. Few gave his largely unknown successor as acting president much chance of reversing the economic implosion or remaining in office for long.
The media operation of then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had already begun to present the former KGB agent to the dying Yeltsin as a man of action. That same year, the time when the Chechen war raged on the country’s southern border. Twenty-five years later, Vladimir Putin is still in the Kremlin, but Russia finds itself again in the middle of a war on its post-Soviet outer edge after the crash of a passenger plane over Chechen airspace last week.
Adding to this tension is the fact that Putin’s Russia has been engaged in a secret war against Ukraine since 2014, which escalated into a full-scale invasion in early 2022, a standoff that remains stalled today. For Chechnya, Putin’s stubbornness turned an initial military fiasco into a brutal war of attrition that Russia’s resources could win at enormous cost.
But Putin’s rise over the years owed more to bureaucratic infighting skills than any dark espionage arts, or even the judo skills which he would at one time display in front of loyal cameras.
Born in post-war Leningrad amid the grim legacy of the Nazi siege, the young Vladimir Putin learnt survival arts more appropriate to the chaotic post-Soviet dog-eat-dog society of the 1990s than the shining utopian future promoted by communist propaganda.
Westerners imbued with the myth of the KGB as anti-James Bond supervillains overlook that it was Putin’s relationship with his law professor at university rather than his time in a dingy office in Dresden that launched his meteoric rise.
Anatoly Sobchak was the classic “approved” dissident of the bygone Soviet era. Sobchak, not a member of the Communist Party and who was allowed to whisper subversive comments in exchange for discreet cooperation with the KGB in front of really problematic clients, was able to become a new broom once Mikhail Gorbachev legalized genuine elections after 1989.
On returning from East Germany, Putin left the KGB and became one of Sobchak’s lieutenants, soon in the key role of managing the new mayor of Leningrad’s vast city property portfolio. This job brought the new civic bureaucrat into contact with the emerging post-communism new rich.
People were likely to despise Putin in the 1990s, as they had done with Stalin 70 years earlier. When a comrade ridiculed Stalin as “mediocrity,” Trotsky agreed, but added, “It is not a nullity. “He saw that Putin’s wonderful predecessor was actually a kind of living embodiment of entire sections of the new Soviet society.
It was the West’s inability to perceive that Putin represented entire sections of Russians in the 1990s that allowed him to assert himself in Russian politics. Putin’s ability to serve Yeltsin and his cronies during this decade led them to the fatal mistake of choosing him as their softly manipulated presidential successor.
Putin’s forgiveness of Yeltsin for all misdeeds committed during his time in the workplace was followed by a ruthless crackdown on the oligarchs. He demonstrated that the force of the State prevailed over the force of money. Military power crushed the Chechen rebels. Oil and fuel costs have increased. skyrocketed as the war on terrorism led by George W. However, years of economic expansion and internal peace have not stabilized Putin’s regime.
In 2011, mass protests shook Moscow. The fact that these took place in a time of peace and relative plenty taught Putin a lesson. Crisis made for regime stability far more than any index of economic success. If people felt secure in their everyday lives, they could get above themselves.
Like so many past Russian rulers, Putin is well aware that the relaxation that comes with peace can promote political dissent.
Putin’s studied indifference to the fate of the crew of the sunken submarine Kursk in 2003 and their families’ trauma as the drama played out below the Barents Sea was one episode of his Stalin-like view of mass death as a matter of statistics.
Westerners thought the misfiring of the Ukraine war would undermine Putin. However, rather as pro-Assad media used to show a parade of Western leaders who had demanded his fall and yet had been and gone while he ruled on, Putin has outlived many of his Western critics. Yet he must also be haunted by Assad’s sudden downfall.
Will his power crumble so quickly? Back in July 2023, when his former-chef-turned-warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin rebelled against him, no one resisted the march from Rostov in the south to the gates of Moscow. Then Prigozhin did a deal with Putin – before his plane crashed with him and his fellow mercenary bosses.
Just as after defeating Hitler in 1945, Stalin still did not intensify his regime’s internal repression, Putin now considers the army’s victory to be less essential to its survival in force than the continuation of foreign tensions. But even a political operator as intelligent and as a professional propagandist as Vladimir Putin knows, at 72 years old, that time is against him. Stalin died in his bed. Will Vladimir Putin do it?
Already in 1999, Putin had taken note of the Kremlin’s attempt to subjugate insurgent Chechnya, on its southern border. Just a few days ago, the collateral damage from ongoing fighting in Ukraine, the fatal stalling of an Azeri plane over Chechen airspace through trigger-happy Russian air defenses showed just how far Putin’s reign was over. . . through the war.
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