How European will Russia be? The question is not merely academic. In the greater scheme of things, Russia’s place in the world and Russia’s long-term aspirations cannot be dissociated from the cultural currents now under way. Whatever anger was voiced by Putin at Munich, and whatever strategic irritation has occurred between Russia and the West over the last decade, the determining factors for the future relationship are to be found not so much in geostrategic arsenals but in the foundations of identity. On this, Putin tries to strike a Eurasian balance. ‘We are a European nation, but we live both in Europe and in Asia, and we are a multicultural and multireligious society,’ he tends to say. This is a political statement, politically correct and carefully equilibrated. His background may be in the intelligence system, but he seems to know that man does not live on bread alone, and that the Russia of the future needs deeper roots than the glitzy supermarkets lining Moscow’s Leningradskaya Chaussee, and the fashionable boutiques now adorning the old GUM magazine buildings opposite the Kremlin’s brick walls.
Yeltsin’s and now Putin’s alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church is an expression of this cultural confidence-building. The revival of the cultural roots is another one.
A vision of world order?
Driving into Moscow recently from Sheremetyevo airport, when passing the rusty monument where the Wehrmacht’s advance was halted in early December 1941 I noticed a huge billboard greeting visitors from the West and displaying an old man’s familiar face. It was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, once a dissident and enemy of the Soviet system, then a refugee in America and now, in a nostalgic turn-around, a refugee from America, in fact a saintly guide to a spiritual renewal based on Russia’s traditional manners and mores, language and literature. Solzhenitsyn, after his long exile in the US, had finally come back to the motherland and made a kind of reluctant peace with the heirs to the Soviet system. Meanwhile, the Porsches, the BMWs and the Mercedes of the New Russians were racing by on the eight-lane motorway – how better to demonstrate the eternal ambiguity of Russia between the tortured spirituality of the East and the smart materialism of the West?
Future historians of world affairs will remember Putin’s speech in Munich as the turning point from uneasy accommodation to measured defiance. In Munich, the West was put on notice as to what Putin did not want. But did Putin know what he wants instead? The Russian leader, while making it painfully clear that Russia would never be in the orbit of the US and that he resented US dominance and Russia’s exclusion, failed to produce, beyond a rough sketch, a clear vision of world order beyond the post-Cold War and post-9/11 stage. Nor did he suggest how instability and insecurity should be kept at bay in a troubled world while the sun is setting on the Pax Americana.
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On secret service
‘All Russians and all who wish to live in Russia impose on themselves unconditional silence. Here nothing is said while everything is known. Secret conversations should be very interesting; but who permits himself to indulge in them? To think, to discern is to become suspect.’
After Munich, once the shockwaves subsided, it was clear that Russia could no longer be taken for granted, nor Putin counted on as a cooperative opposite number for the leaders of the West. Once again, as in 1999 when he seemed to emerge from nowhere, first being promoted to head the vast machinery of the FSB – the Federal Intelligence Service – and then to be Yeltsin’s prime minister, people wondered what talents and forces brought this man to the Kremlin and then into the unchallenged and unchallengeable position of being the new tsar.
Who is Mr Putin?
While the succession issue loomed large over Russia’s political, economic and security agenda, the question was asked, inevitably: who is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the man who came from almost nowhere just eight years ago and is now, at least in the triangle of power formed by domestic intelligence, state bureaucracy and oligarchs, the chief player? So much so that elections are a mere charade, a post-Soviet kabuki play enacted for the benefit of an incredulous outside world and a stunned domestic audience. KGB agents, active or retired, do not have the habit of giving anything away about themselves, let alone divulging more than the absolutely unavoidable minimum of information.
Breeding shows, and the organization follows the principle of: ‘Once a Chekist always a Chekist.’ This refers to the widely feared revolutionary secret police, acronym Cheka, under Felix Dzerzhinsky, the ruthless heir to the czarist Ohranak but, much more than could ever have been imagined under Russia’s tsarist regime, the very heart of the Soviet system, the innermost elite with a hundred thousand eyes and ears and the means to make everybody, even the most firebrand of revolutionaries, tremble. Its empire stretched from the Lubyanka in the middle of Moscow to the deadliest of Gulag prisons in Siberia’s barren north. But the KGB was also, by virtue of its almost unlimited access to untainted information, the brains of the system. This was the world which attracted the ambition, patriotism and efforts of Vladimir Putin even before he was out of school in Leningrad, today’s St Petersburg. Both his home town, Russia’s most European city, created by an absolutist ruler’s fiat, and his early training within the secret service formed Putin’s way of life, his manners and morals and his view of the world, of loyalties and of the way politics should be conducted. The secret service became his way of life, like that of the priesthood in the Roman Catholic church.
Was he a communist? The answer is yes, up to a point. But above all he grew up as a patriotic young Russian, a Russian nationalist, and when he realized that communist rule had ruined the country he loved he dissociated himself from communism old and new. Human rights, democracy, transparency, opposition? Respect for the dignity of man? If they could deliver a more powerful Russia, fine. If not, he would look for other lode stars, meaning democracy Russian-style, guided from above and controlled by an enlightened elite, what he calls ‘the vertical of power’. His vision is not a Soviet renaissance but an administration that the Prussian philosopher G.F.W Hegel would recognize as akin to a rational, hierarchic system – Hegel even suggested that enlightened absolutism amounted to the end of history – and, therefore, of lasting power.
Putin’s motives and visions come from further away than the inglorious Soviet past, whose rot and graft he had seen at close quarters. His dreams come from the Russian pre-Soviet past, garnished with some aspects of the West’s European enlightenment. If democracy offered the magic wand to reconstruct Russia and bring back lost power and glory – so be it. If, however, democracy for Russia meant weakness, diversity and strife, then autocracy – Putin would probably call it enlightened absolutism, administered by the elite corps of the intelligence service – would fit the bill. And if the West disapproved, what would it matter? In the xenophobic atmosphere of Russia a little alienation might even recommend Putin to his fellow countrymen.
One of Putin’s early biographers, Alexander Rahr, who has followed the career of Putin from childhood, observed two characteristic traits in his character. He is nothing if not a perfectionist, and he cannot stand disorder and lack of discipline. Already as a youth, ‘he shunned spontaneity, risk and improvisation’.
In the sixth grade young Volodya joined the Young Pioneers, but his teachers were less than enthusiastic about his performance: too emotional, talkative and given to foul language. After eight years of standard schooling he was sent by his parents to college number 281, specializing in the training of future chemists. Their son was an assiduous pupil but by no means a model student. He seems to have been the typical ‘nice boy’, with a smile on his face but not given to hard work.