Putin’s long rule has ruined Russia

Vladimir Putin’s announcement that he’s running again for president of Russia has put me in a deep funk. Will this guy never retire? Will one never be able to see Russia as just Russia, and not as Putin Russia? Will he really stick around for another two terms, until 2036 — even beating Joseph Stalin’s record of 25 years in power by more than a decade?

Putin became Russia’s leader in 1999, when he was appointed prime minister. Who could have imagined then that the scrappy little KGB agent with the weak chin and ski lift nose would grace the halls of the Kremlin for another three and a half decades?

He came on like gangbusters, declaring that he’d manage democracy and make Russia great again, while establishing the image of a hypermasculine macho who rode horses bare-chested, wielded phallically obvious rifles and knives, practiced judo, drove leggy Russian ladies crazy, and, of course, outwitted the West, ruthlessly pursued Russian interests, and claimed to want to restructure the world.

Very little of that public persona is evident today. His toughguy face is bloated. His former swagger has been replaced with a lumbering gait. He speaks uncertainly. Putin has gotten old and he looks it. He’s changed, for the worse, but his hold on Russia’s throne remains unshaken — even if only more or less.

I wouldn’t be kvetching about this particular dictator’s staying power were it not for three things.

First, he’s dominated Russian politics for almost as long as I’ve studied the place. Frankly, it’s getting boring to wake up to the same inscrutable face and the same kleptocratic tyrant who’s utterly predictable in his quest for ill-gotten lucre and bloody power. Is there really no one in Russia capable of replacing this guy and making Russian studies more interesting for the likes of me?

Second, the man has been a disaster — for Russia, for Ukraine, for the world. He transformed Russia from a respected country that was becoming more or less “normal,” to use a word Russians like, into a brutal and bloodthirsty rogue state feared by everyone and respected only by the North Koreans. In so doing he’s committing genocide and waging war against a country that dared to think of itself as a European democracy — Ukraine. The longer he stays, the worse things will get for everyone.

Third, he’s jaundiced the way

I view Russia. I used to think of the country as one part mysterious, one part fascinating, and one part dangerous. No more. Now, when I view Russia and Russians, I don’t think of Pushkin or Tchaikovsky or Tolstoy. I think only of the Gulag, Ivan the Terrible, and Vladimir the just as Terrible. I don’t hear the music, I don’t see the paintings, I don’t see the novels. Instead, I hear the groans of countless victims of the Russian and Soviet secret police. I see barbed wire and concentration camps and starving peasants and mutilated bodies.

Frankly, when I think of Putin, Adolf Hitler comes to mind, and when I think of Russia, it’s Nazi Germany that comes to mind. And I suspect I feel about Putin Russia the same way many Germans and Jews felt about Germany in the 1930s. Surely the land of “poets and thinkers” couldn’t descend into the savagery Hitler represented. Surely the nation that produced Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe couldn’t unleash war and commit genocide. And yet it did.

None of this absolves Russians of the responsibility they bear for making Putin possible and for tolerating his crimes. Instead, hundreds of thousands have lost their lives fighting a stupid, criminal war in Ukraine. During World War I, Russians deserted from the front en masse. Others risked their lives for various revolutionary causes. Today’s Russians, alas, prefer to pretend there is no war, even as their fathers, brothers, and sons return en masse in body bags.

It’s all, or almost all, Putin’s fault. For more than two decades he’s beaten into Russians that he’s the godlike patriarch, a macho Messiah, and that they are his sheep. Life is easier when you can, as Erich Fromm put it years ago, “escape from freedom.” Criminality becomes normality, evil becomes good, good becomes evil — all sense of right and wrong is dulled, and one expects the Great Leader to resolve all one’s moral issues. And he does — by killing while pretending he’s not killing.

I confess that I’ve disliked Putin since day one: there’s something about the KGB and SS that rubs me the wrong way, I guess. Now, I just pray that, sooner rather than later, his puffy visage will disappear forever.

Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers-Newark.