He accepted from Putin the highest honours of state, which he had refused from the hands of Yeltsin. There in the Kremlin, Solzhenitsyn spoke his mind – ‘Of course Russia is not a democracy yet and it’s only just starting to build a democracy so it’s all too easy to take it to task with a long list of omissions, violations and mistakes.’ His vision of reconstruction was uncannily similar to Putin’s frequent invocation of the nineteenth-century tsarist foreign minister Alexander Gorchakov’s line, ‘Russia is calm, Russia is concentrating’, as the empire built up its forces after humiliation in the Crimean War.
Like Putin, Solzhenitsyn considered the development of a party system ‘irrelevant’ for Russia and believed ‘human duties’ were as important as human rights.7 After traversing the country in 1994, Solzhenitsyn published a pamphlet, republished in millions of copies, titled ‘How to Rebuild Russia’. He argued that Russia needed to rebuild itself around a Slavic-Orthodox core of Ukraine, Belarus and northern Kazakhstan – ‘for we do not have the strength for the periphery’.8 It is a pamphlet that every politician of his generation claims to have read. Trying to integrate with these countries, whilst ignoring the Muslim ex-SSRs yet refusing to let them fall out of a Russian sphere of influence, has dominated Putin’s foreign policy. Like Solzhenitsyn, Putin has a world-view that is old fashioned for his country. He claims to not use the Internet as he thinks, ‘50 per cent is porn material’, believes Russia needs a ‘strong hand’ and that he is beloved by an abstract ‘real Russia’ in the heartland.9 Putin is distrustful of international organizations and liberal Muscovites alike. Solzhenitsyn, of course, due to his post-Soviet politics, is not universally revered in Russia, but mocked for his faux-tsarist diction and as an anti-Semitic sham-sage.
At a dinner in Paris, Putin was asked who his heroes were. He said that in his office he had the portraits of two tsarist legends, Peter the Great and Alexander Pushkin, and a European one – General Charles de Gaulle.10 This point is both flattery and something more. Like de Gaulle, who sought to bridge France’s schizophrenic traditions of revolutionary republicanism and monarchism, Putin sees himself as bringing together both tsarist and Soviet traditions. This is how Putin imagines himself.
Putin’s economic thinking is also an attempt to bridge Soviet and free-market techniques. This is clear from his only piece of book-length political writing. Putin did not in fact write this, his ‘dissertation’. It was partly plagiarized and almost certainly ghost written. The text comes from his unemployed interlude between St Petersburg and Moscow, when Putin was anxious to burnish his credentials and find a new job. After Sobchak’s 1996 election defeat he turned to the St Petersburg Mining Institute. He had engaged in discussions at the institute on the post-Soviet economy with associates throughout the 1990s. He had friends there. So, Putin used his contacts to obtain a ‘candidate’s dissertation’, the equivalent of a PhD.
In the 140-page research paper that bears his name, at least 16 pages are lifted verbatim from the 1978 American textbook Strategic Planning and Policy by William King and David Cleland. Putin’s thesis, entitled ‘The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources and the Formation of Market Relations’, may not be original research, but this point hardly matters in trying to understand his thinking. It is the clearest statement of his economic intentions before assuming power – one to which he has remained remarkably consistent. Putin’s text argues:
Mineral and raw material resources represent the most important potential for the economic developments of the country… In the 21st century, at least in its first half, the Russian economy will preserve its traditional orientation towards raw materials… Given its effective use, the resource potential will become one of the most important pre-conditions for Russia’s entry into the world economy.11
The dissertation suggests that this is not to be achieved using the free-market alone but with state guidance: ‘The development of the extracting complex should be regulated by the state using purely market methods; yet the state has the right to regulate the process of their development and use, acting in the interests of society as a whole.’12 Russia should commit to: ‘comprehensive state support and the creation of large financial–industrial corporations which span several industries [focusing] on the resource-extracting enterprises, which should [then] compete as equals with the transnational corporations of the West’.13 Essentially, the argument Putin puts forward is that:
• Russia will remain a resource-driven economy but a free-market one.
• The state must support the creation of giant raw materials corporations.
• These corporations will compete on the free market with the West.
• These corporations must act in the interests of Russia as a whole.
• Russian capitalism will be raw materials driven and guided by the state.
It represents a crude vision for the Russian economy. ‘Putin has an X axis and a Y axis,’ says Sergei Aleksashenko, the former deputy head of the Russian central bank. ‘You can plot how he will react to a given threat. He operates – even if you don’t agree with them – by values and principles.’ The cardinal of these, is that when challenged by men empowered by gigantic assets, be they TV channels or oil companies, Putin has lashed out and confiscated them. This is how he puts it:
One should never fear such threats. It’s like with a dog, you know. A dog senses when somebody is afraid of it, and bites. If you become jittery, they will think they are stronger. Only one thing works in such circumstances – to go on the offensive.14
The Opposite Man
To become truly president, Putin had to rob Berezovsky. To become the undisputed master of Moscow, he had to destroy Russia’s richest man. Standing in his way, trying to pull the country in another direction, was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and he had more oil than Norway.15 The battle with Gusinsky and Berezovsky determined that Putin, and not businessmen, was the master of TV. The clash with Khodorkovsky determined who had the final say over oil.
Putin believed that booming crude oil should be heavily taxed to fund state power and that whoever pumped it out should follow his orders. Khodorkovsky did not agree and tried to block the Kremlin’s plans to fund a strong state by ‘lobbying’.