Putin’s next targets were the oligarchs—the powerful clique of bankers who had enriched themselves through insider privatization deals during Yeltsin’s 1990s leadership. On July 28, 2000, Putin sat down with the most powerful oligarchs and set forth the system’s new reality. As long as the oligarchs paid taxes and did not criticize the Kremlin, Putin pledged to respect their property rights and refrain from prosecuting them for any past (or continuing) corruption. Many complied. But in 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the chairman and CEO of Russia’s largest oil-producing company, began funding opposition parties and independent media critical of the Kremlin. The result was a harsh hammer blow. The lawfare state jailed him, destroyed his oil company and forced most of his family into exile. The message to other oligarchs was clear: follow the rules or face devastating legal consequences.

There is little doubt that Putin’s lawfare state has fostered elite cohesion—and loyalty to Putin. New York University’s Mark Galeotti recently described “a middle-ranking official within the security apparatus” who “was thoroughly disillusioned by Putin but feels he has no alternative but to support him precisely because he has accumulated such wealth through tacitly-sanctioned embezzlement.” Galeotti concludes that “there are whole regional leaderships whose loyal adherence to the Kremlin line is bought and paid for in this manner.”

A FUNCTIONING lawfare state of the kind Putin has built requires two key institutions. First, it must have a sophisticated surveillance operation that has a monopoly on gathering sensitive financial intelligence. Without complete control over compromising information on individuals, the system has no leverage to enforce the informal rules of the game through legal blackmail. Second, a lawfare state must have clear and broad legal prohibitions and a loyal legal elite. This helps ensure the application of strong and efficient legal sanctions against those who violate the informal rules.

Putin began building the surveillance wing of this lawfare state as early as 1997, when he was head of the Kremlin’s Main Control Directorate under Yeltsin. In that job he was responsible for collecting information on the Russian business and political elite. Drawing on his KGB skills, Putin accumulated critical financial intelligence on the illegal dealings of Russia’s power elite. After becoming president, he created a new financial-intelligence unit (Rosfinmonitoring) from the ground up. Putin has kept this agency under his direct control since his emergence as Russia’s top leader thirteen years ago. Before becoming prime minister in 2008, he transferred the agency to the prime minister’s office. Upon resuming the presidency in 2012, he moved it back to the presidential administration.

A month before beginning his first term as president in 2000, Putin turned his attention to building the legal side of his lawfare state. With a strong parliamentary majority, he could push through favorable new laws with little difficulty. But, unlike with his centralized surveillance agency, which he could delegate to a close network of loyal associates, he needed to carefully stock the legal system with loyal members of the elite to ensure that the new laws would be enforced as he wished. To that end, Putin pitched an emotional message to key members of the legal elite disillusioned by the 1990s.

This ardent appeal began in his preelection “Millennium Manifesto,” which declared a new path for Russia on the eve of the new millennium. Putin’s manifesto reasoned that the 1990s demonstrated the failure of “abstract models and schemes taken from foreign textbooks.” Drawing heavily on opposition language from the Yeltsin era, Putin proclaimed that Russia must return to its roots by creating a powerful Russian state with a renewed emphasis on law and, as he described it, “constitutional security.”

In his first month as acting president, Putin delivered four major speeches to key members of the legal elite about the importance of law to his governing philosophy. On January 13, 2000, he accepted an honorary degree from his old law school and described “the influence” of “Russian legal thought” on his own political career: “For people like me who are now engaged in the construction of a new Russian state, we know that this project must be founded on the principles that have for decades been developed within the walls of the Faculty of Law of the University of St. Petersburg.” Eight days later, he delivered a speech to Russia’s equivalent of the FBI, declaring that law enforcement must be central in eliminating two threats to the Russian state: terrorism and economic crime.

On January 24, Putin urged the heads of regional federal court systems to end their dependency on regional power structures and work closely with the Kremlin. He linked this centralizing mission with Czar Alexander II’s period of “Great Reforms.” Finally, in a January 31 speech to the Ministry of Justice, Putin asked officials to work with him to unify the Russian legal system by striking down regional laws that conflicted with the federal constitution. He argued that this legal reform would reflect Russia’s commitment to “legality and the state” and explained that “our traditional approach to law and the Russian state were not born in 1917 or even in 1991. And therefore, whatever we may be doing today—judicial reform or nation building—we must remember the age-old Russian tradition of fairness and justice.”

By harking back to czarist traditions, Putin sought to link his own governing philosophy to the nonrevolutionary but reformist “conservative liberals” of pre-Soviet history. Led by Boris Chicherin, the intellectual founder of conservative liberalism and a strong supporter of the liberal Czar Alexander II, the conservative liberals argued that Russia should chart its own path between the lawless absolutism of the traditional Russian autocracy and revolutionary socialist ideas drawn from the West. This special path envisioned gradual reform of the Russian political system anchored in a law-based state. In advising Czar Alexander II to follow a policy of “liberal measures and a strong state,” the conservative liberals were proposing a kind of authoritarian, German-style rechtsstaat for Russia.

Putin repeatedly has sought to link himself to the most prominent statesman from this tradition: Pyotr Stolypin, the prime minister under Czar Nicholas II who ruthlessly worked to strengthen the Russian state against revolutionaries while building a legal framework for individual property rights amid Russia’s vast peasantry. Putin, who invokes Stolypin’s approach to government as a model, even rigged a contest so that Stolypin would be named Russia’s second most important historical figure. Furthermore, in a meeting devoted to organizing a celebration for Stolypin’s birthday, Putin warmly described how Stolypin’s “strong and effective government . . . could ensure progressive development and guarantee tranquillity and stability in a large multinational country and the inviolability of its borders.”

MANY MEMBERS of the legal elite enthusiastically supported Putin’s attention to formal legal reform and his decision to turn the lawfare state against the regional governors and the business oligarchs. For many, this was a matter of self-interest, as Putin’s formulation served to increase their salaries and personal prestige.

For others, these reforms were an important step in overcoming the legal anarchy that reigned during the 1990s. Perhaps the clearest and most vocal representative of this school of thought is the current chairman of the Russian Constitutional Court, Valery Zorkin. A religious believer, Zorkin spent his student days at Moscow State University studying the political ideas of the czarist conservative liberals. In 1984, after taking a teaching job at a KGB-affiliated think tank, Zorkin published a book on Boris Chicherin, the pioneer political thinker in the time of Alexander II.

After the Soviet collapse, Zorkin rocketed to prominence as chairman of the newly created Russian Constitutional Court. Described as “Russia’s answer to Chief Justice John Marshall,” Zorkin worked to preserve constitutional legality during the struggle for power between Yeltsin and the Russian Parliament. In 1992, Zorkin complained that Russian authorities were not paying sufficient attention to law and therefore were endangering the strength of the Russian state: “If the government issues decrees, and not one of those decrees is implemented—this is a sign of catastrophe. . . . We are suffering from a deficit of power. Not any power, just capable and effective power.”

Zorkin’s attempt to keep the conflict between Yeltsin and Parliament on a “legal plane” ultimately failed amid open warfare in the streets of central Moscow. After losing his position as chairman of the court, which itself was disbanded, Zorkin became the leading member of an embittered legal elite and dabbled in opposition politics. Returning to the newly reopened court in 1995, he became one of a handful of judges who openly criticized Yeltsin for his neglect of law and order.

With Putin’s rise to the presidency, Zorkin quickly reemerged as part of the legal elite. In March 2000, Putin gave Zorkin a formal award for his “multi-year service to the Russian state.” A year later, he endorsed the Zorkin court’s decision to declare Yeltsin’s 1993 decree disbanding Parliament unconstitutional, commenting that the court had “responsibly” struggled against “politicians who appeal to political expediency rather than the standards of law.”