Putin the Terrible

The rise of a Russian autocrat Page 13

Where did Putin grow up?

He was born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) in 1952, eight years after the end of the German siege that had devastated the city, and which killed his older brother and nearly starved his mother. During the War, his father, also Vladimir, fought in a special unit of the NKVD, the KGB’S forerunner, and was badly wounded (in later life he is thought have been a KGB informer). Putin grew up with two other families in a communal apartment, with a shared sink and stove, and was – as he puts it – “a real thug”. His official biography describes his fights in great detail. “Fifty years ago the Leningrad street taught me a rule,” Putin has said: “If a fight is inevitable you have to throw the first punch.” Although short and slight, he studied judo and the Soviet martial art sambo, and dreamt of escaping by joining the KGB.

When did he join the KGB?

In 1975, after studying law at Leningrad State University. At the KGB’S spy school in Moscow he was taught German, and in 1985 was sent to Dresden, where, with limited success, he cultivated agents, recruiting foreign students studying in the city. In autumn 1989, he watched in dismay as communist East Germany crumbled. In what some have seen as a crucial formative incident, the KGB headquarters was mobbed by protesters, and when Putin called the local Soviet military command, he was told that they could do nothing because “Moscow is silent” – a silence that he came to regard as symptomatic of a national “paralysis”. He then faced the crowd himself, warning that his soldiers – who were actually unarmed – would fire if protesters tried to enter the building.

How did he get into politics?

He returned to St Petersburg in 1990, where his former law professor Anatoly Sobchak, the city’s first democratically elected mayor, became his mentor. Putin built a reputation as an effective back-room fixer and took a job at city hall before becoming a deputy mayor in 1994. He resigned from the KGB in 1991, but retained close links: he was one of many siloviki – politicians from the security services – who came to dominate the politics of first St Petersburg and then Russia during this chaotic decade. Putin was implicated in corruption from early on in his political career, too. In the early 1990s, an investigation by St Petersburg council found that he had authorised the export of metals worth $100m in return for food aid for the city that never arrived.

How did he rise to the top?

In 1996, he took a job in Moscow, working as deputy to the Kremlin’s chief administrator. And soon he found another leader in need of a reliable deputy: the drunken and erratic President Boris Yeltsin, who in 1998 made him the head of the FSB, successor to the KGB. Putin seems to have been regarded as a malleable figurehead for Yeltsin and his business allies, such as the oligarch Boris Berezovsky: in August 1999 he

was appointed prime minister. Yet he made an immediate impact, launching a brutal campaign against separatists in Chechnya, following a series of terrorist bombings that killed almost 300 people (which some critics, including murdered defector Alexander Litvinenko, have claimed were in fact orchestrated by the FSB to provide a pretext for the war). On New Year’s Eve 1999, Yeltsin stepped down, making Putin acting-president.

Why has he been so successful?

Thanks to Yeltsin’s economic reforms, in the 1990s Russia went into deep recession; incomes declined and savings were decimated by runaway inflation. In his 2000 manifesto, Putin pledged to rebuild the Russian state, to preserve domestic stability and to ensure national security. In the early years, buoyed by high oil prices, he provided strong economic growth. At the same time, he slashed Russia’s freedoms, taking control of the news media and creating a “managed democracy”, with only token opposition movements. He also destroyed those who dared criticise his political order, such as Berezovsky and the oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Putin’s unspoken “social contract” has proved mostly popular, although his blatant gaming of the system – he swapped jobs with prime minister Dmitry Medvedev in 2008, then swapped back in 2012 to get round the presidency’s two-term limit – has caused outbreaks of protest. The rampant corruption of the Putin era precipitated another sizeable wave of demonstrations last year.

Why have relations with the West become so bad?

In the early years, Putin was regarded as a potential Western ally. But he saw the expansion of Nato into eastern Europe, and the pro-western “colour revolutions” in the former Soviet satellite states of Georgia and Ukraine in 2003-04, as a grave threat. Russian influence has since been reasserted by force. In 2008, Putin’s forces invaded Georgia in support of the pro-russian breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia; in 2014, following the ousting of Ukraine’s pro-kremlin president, Viktor Yanukovych, Russian forces annexed Crimea and launched a

covert campaign in eastern Ukraine.

What does Putin believe in?

It’s hard to tell. One political scientist suggests that there is no such thing as Putinism beyond “nationalism accompanied by anti-westernism”. Others say he is a gangster (his private fortune is estimated to be in the billions), a narcissist or a megalomaniac – pointing to his macho, barechested photo opportunities. But though he is no communist, Putin has been consistent in his view that the break-up of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. According to one unnamed aide, he has said that “the greatest criminals in our history were those weaklings who threw the power on the floor – [Tsar] Nicholas II and [Mikhail] Gorbachev – who allowed the power to be picked up by the hysterics and the madmen”. Putin vowed never to do the same.