The Key to Understanding Vladimir Putin

Let me put it right out there: I believe we Americans have misunderstood  -- or, as George Bush might have said, “misunderestimated” -- Vladimir Putin from the moment he entered our consciousness, at the very start of the present millennium.  Here is how I remember him and what I think of where we are today.

Putin was my guest at a July 4^th reception in St. Petersburg in 1995, when I was serving as the U.S. Consul General there. I recall taking him into my library. We spoke Russian in those days, before he began to learn English.  His wife, still recovering from a bad automobile accident, did not accompany him. On that occasion, he was representing his boss, Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, who was off on a trip.  Of course, I hadn’t the faintest idea that this man was destined to become the President of the Russian Federation--and neither did he.

It seems hundreds of books have been written about Putin, and thousands of articles. More are coming, and each of them will attempt to shed some additional light on this remarkable man, who has risen from humble beginnings to lead one of the world’s great nations, and has now, at the relatively young age of 66, broken the (post-Stalin) record set by Leonid Brezhnev for doing so. If I had had any idea in the mid-nineties that my guest would one day become Russia’s leader, I would have had him over to lunch, to say the least.  But I didn’t, and I am just as glad, because it would have altered the dynamic. We were simply colleagues then.

On one occasion I called Putin for help when some young American investors from California who had set up a Subway fast-food restaurant with Russian partners arrived at the Consulate General pursued by the mob. The Russian side of the 50-50 venture had learned how to make sandwiches and had called in “muscle” from the criminal world in order to evict the Americans and take over the business. I called Putin for assistance. His first reaction was to say that he needed a copy of the contract.  He also assured me that he would order the mob to back off so that our citizens could safely make it to Helsinki, as they feared for their physical safety. The matter would then need to go to court (which it eventually did). That was what Petersburg was like in the 1990s. Some called it the Wild East. I was struck at the time by Putin’s immediate reaction in wanting to see the contract.  It was the reaction of one trained in law, as Putin had been, and intent on seeing that the matter was resolved in accordance with the law.  

Putin is what Russians call a “gosudarstvennik,” a man of the state. He is not motivated primarily by money, although St. Petersburg friends of ours acknowledge that he has not failed to take advantage of opportunities that have come his way. When I and other Americans in St. Petersburg knew Putin, he had the reputation as the only bureaucrat in the city who did not take bribes (this is an exaggeration; there were others).   He was well regarded on the whole, and devoted to his mentor and then-boss, Sobchak, one of the great democrats of the new Russia. A former law professor, Sobchak was a fine writer and orator, but not the most effective manager. Putin largely ran the day-to-day operations of the city, and was credited with bringing some order into the chaotic crime-ridden business world. As Russians said in those days, “if you have crime, isn’t it better that it be organized?” I cannot recall Putin personally saying that, but he might have.

Unlike Yeltsin, Putin was never a heavy drinker. Nor was he a teetotaler. He would deliver a toast when required, which was often, and do it well. Toasts in Russia are a way of communicating, of showing respect, and of honoring people, especially on birthdays and career anniversaries or other milestones. Toasts are offered also (without clinking glasses) to the dead, and there were unfortunately many such occasions in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, not to mention the tragic memories of World War II, in which the city was besieged for 900 days, claiming members of Putin’s own family. The entire city and Consular Corps turns out without fail for the memorial to those who died in the Siege of Leningrad and lie in mass graves at the Pushkaryevskoe Cemetery.

Those of us who knew Putin in the 1990s recall that his formula for the recovery of Russia consisted of three elements: rebuilding the economy, dealing with the crime problem, and reforming the courts. That was a pretty good prescription for what ailed Russia at the time and is still a good basic recipe. Note that he was concerned exclusively with domestic problems: nothing about geopolitics here.

I am not going to attempt to prove it, but I assure you that Putin 1) was not anti-American (although he felt more comfortable with Germans); 2) was not a communist (at least by that time) or hostile to private business; 3) was not anti-Semitic; 4) and was not intolerant of gay people.  I have already noted that he had a legal bent. You may take my word for these assertions or not.  I have concrete examples to back each of them.

I should mention Putin’s favorite sport, judo. Photos of Mr. Putin engaging in this form of martial arts abound, as do theories purporting to explain him by reference to the sport, which is also called “sambo” in Russia.  I have been told that this is an acronym for “samo-oborona bez oruzhiya” (self-defense without weapons) but can not confirm this. Most Western analysts have focused on the fact the sport requires the player to use the strength and weight of his opponent to his own advantage.  That theory conveniently supports the contention that Putin has played Russia’s relatively weak hand well in dealing with stronger adversaries, but there is another aspect that is usually overlooked: the sport comes from the East, Japan, I believe.  Contestants prepare for combat in a friendly, collegial way. They bow to each other as a sign of respect before engaging, and again afterwards. It is a bloodless affair, almost courtly, with strict rules and formalities, although it does require real strength, agility, and skill. Putin has won numerous black belts.  But he is a good sport: memorably, he allowed himself to be thrown by a much younger opponent while visiting Japan. It also requires sobriety, flexibility, and self-control, qualities that Putin exhibits in abundance.

Much has been made of the fact that Putin started his professional life in the KGB, the Soviet Union’s dreaded intelligence service. Senator McCain once said that when he looked into Putin’s eyes he “saw K-G-B.” Well, maybe McCain did, although George Bush had a different reaction on his first meeting with Putin in Ljubljana in 2001. Prior to that meeting, as briefing memoranda were being prepared for the President about what to expect, I took advantage of my position at the time as Director of the section of the State Department’s Office of Intelligence and Research that covered the former Soviet Union and penned a two-page memorandum entitled “Vladimir Putin: A Heterodox View.” In it I tried to convey something of what I knew about Putin the man, as a counterweight to the other memos that derided him as a “provincial politician” and a “lightweight” who “wouldn’t last long.”  I sent the memo to the White House, to Secretary Powell’s office and to the CIA, but it was met by a deafening silence. Then one analyst called me from deep in the bowels of CIA at Langley and said, “John, thank you for writing that; we could never have gotten it cleared out of here.” My guess is that my memo landed in multiple shredders. Surely it never got anywhere near the President.  And yet, after that first meeting in Ljubljana, there were at least two people in the U.S. government who seemed to take Putin seriously: President Bush and me.

In the early 1990s, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington reached out to Mayor Sobchak and set up what became known as the Kissinger-Sobchak Commission, intended to help Northwest Russia adjust to the new conditions. On one visit, Dr. Kissinger was introduced to Putin.  He asked him where he had gotten his start in life. Putin answered: “in foreign intelligence.” Dr. Kissinger reportedly quipped, “all the best people start off in foreign intelligence.” Of course, Kissinger had done exactly that with the U.S. Army in postwar Germany. Over the years Putin and Kissinger have kept up their acquaintance, meeting some twenty times.   

The KGB, for all its fearsome reputation as repressor of free speech and jailer of dissidents, was viewed by the bulk of Soviet citizens as an elite service, especially after Yuriy Andropov came to power in the 1980s and began recruiting some of the “best and the brightest.” It was one of the few avenues for ambitious young men to see the world and have a challenging career. I have heard people in St. Petersburg say, “the KGB was our Harvard.”  Putin saw such service as both patriotic and personally advantageous and worked hard to qualify for it. 

As the Soviet Union was beginning to unravel in the late 1980s, Putin must have been dismayed at first, at his post of assignment in Dresden, but he returned to St. Petersburg, then still Leningrad, and began work at the University. Recruited to the city government by Professor Sobchak, Putin retained connections with the KGB, which has a training academy in the city, but he appears to have cut those ties at the time of the August 1991 attempted putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev. Mayor Sobchak was a true democrat of the new Russia, and he opposed the coup vocally and publicly, holding a huge rally in Palace Square.  Because the central television-based at Ostankino in Moscow had been seized by the coup-plotters, Leningrad’s TV station was the only one that gave voice to those opposing the coup, and it reached audiences throughout European Russia.  Putin stood side-by-side with Sobchak. Both were taking a major risk, had the tide gone the other way. This moment certainly marked Putin’s becoming a politician, although, let it be said (using the popular term for a member of the security services) “once a Chekist, always a Chekist.” 

Putin certainly had come to believe that the old Soviet system had failed and needed to be replaced by a new Russia based on different principles. His commitment to this goal was not incompatible with either his previous service with the KGB or his legal education and self-identification as a “gosudarstvennik.” In fact, as the years would show, he was fully capable of taking on larger roles. It must be said that, faced with the low-trust environment that is Moscow, Putin has chosen to rely on fellow Petersburgers and, increasingly, former members of the KGB, many identifying simultaneously as both.

Nothing in Vladimir Putin’s personality or behavior in St. Petersburg marked him in the minds of those who knew him as destined to rise to the pinnacle of power in the Russian Federation. He was respected by many, no doubt feared by some, but his fortunes took a serious spill in 1996 when he ran the campaign for Mayor Sobchak’s reelection. The mayor was challenged by another one of his deputies, Vladimir Yakovlev, and made some fatal mistakes during the campaign, culminating in a disastrous televised debate. When Sobchak went down to defeat, Putin was left without a position. He managed very narrowly to gain a billet with the Kremlin’s office that dealt with state property, which was mostly being sold off at that point to raise revenue. The rest, one might say, is history, but is certainly beyond my time in St. Petersburg, which ended in 1997.

Putin did not seek the presidency of Russia. He was visibly surprised to be appointed prime minister in the summer of 1999, and reportedly told Yeltsin he did not feel ready to shoulder the responsibility. His immediate challenge was to wage what came to be known as the Second Chechen War, the first having led to an uneasy standoff. Putin waged the war with ferocity and the effort was a success, but it was preceded by one of the many episodes that have been interpreted in the West as indicating that Putin was little more than a criminal. That was the bombing of two residential apartment buildings in Moscow, which was blamed on the Chechens and inflamed Russian public opinion against them. Western observers in the main seized on the idea that Putin had sacrificed the lives of the apartment dwellers to radicalize public opinion. I came to a different conclusion, which I put into a memorandum to Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott.

The Chechens, Sunni Muslims with a history of fiercely resisting the Russians in the 19^th century, under their leader, the Imam Shamil (actually a Dagestani), as the Russian Empire subjugated the Caucasus, were a disturbing presence in European Russia in the 1990s. Chechens ran the Mercedes dealership in Petersburg, where lots of stolen vehicles changed hands, but very few if any new ones. During the first war, they targeted me personally, on account of the position taken by the U.S. Government in support of Russia’s territorial integrity. Right after the bombings of the two apartment buildings, our Defense Attache in Moscow reported that the inhabitants of at least one of the buildings were dependents of military personnel. It seemed to me then, as now, that Vladimir Putin would never had sanctioned the sacrifice of those innocent people in pursuit of political goals. But, in my view, there was one person who just might have, and happened to have a connection to the North Caucasus: Boris Berezovsky, who was then serving as National Security Advisor to Yeltsin, or “the Family,” as Yeltsin’s wife and daughter and son-in-law were then known.  

The Family was concerned by the prospect of parliamentary elections scheduled for December of 1999, and by the potent alliance recently forged between Yevgeniy Primakov and the mayor of Moscow, Yuriy Luzhkov. They were searching for a way of postponing the elections, and it had occurred to them that the Chechen war and attendant terrorism could provide justification for such a move. In the end, Putin’s campaign proved successful; the Chechens were brought to heel, and Yeltsin abdicated in favor of Putin on New Year’s Eve. We may never know for certain how the apartment bombings (and some strange as yet unexplained KGB activities in another building in Ryazan) came to pass, but I am convinced Putin was not the prime mover.   

In his first term, Putin made a number of gestures to the United States that were friendly: he closed the Soviet-era intelligence-collecting station in Lourdes, Cuba; he shut down the naval facility at Cam Ranh Bay; he permitted the U.S. to operate a Northern supply route through Russian territory to resupply our forces in Afghanistan; and, although he frankly opposed the U.S. “war of choice” in Iraq, he assured President Bush that Russia would not seek to undermine the U.S. effort there. French President Chirac and German Chancellor Schroeder also opposed the U.S. action, but were less frank about it, angering Bush and prompting Condoleezza Rice to say, “punish France, ignore Germany, forgive Russia.” As the disaster in Iraq deepened, Russian dissatisfaction with the American actions grew; in particular, there was an incident in which a convoy of Russian diplomats exiting Baghdad was inexplicably fired upon by Allied forces, causing several injuries. 

It is common to ascribe America’s growing difficulties with Russia to President Putin personally, but the sources of Russian discontent predate Putin’s presidency. In particular, the bombing of Belgrade on Orthodox Easter Sunday of 1999, which caused then-Foreign Minister Primakov to do a U-turn while over the Atlantic on his way to Washington was taken as a hostile act, in addition to which it was an out-of-area action by the NATO alliance unsanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. The course of events in the former Yugoslavia had some very dangerous moments that could have led to war, and some more encouraging ones, but the end game, in which Serbia was bereft of its ancient Kosovo province, was anathema to Moscow, which has never recognized its legality.

Perhaps the biggest source of Russian disappointment, even anger, has been NATO’s relentless expansion right up to Russia’s borders. Russians are convinced that President Bush, Secretary Baker and other Western leaders, Chancellor Kohl in particular, in their bid to persuade Gorbachev not to stand in the way of German Reunification, had promised that NATO would not extend its activities “one inch to the East” if Moscow agreed to allow a united Germany to remain in the Alliance. Now there has been a lively debate about this alleged promise, with partisans of NATO saying that there was no such promise, and if there was, it was never written down and anyway it was never officially a consensus of all NATO members. Former President Gorbachev has confirmed that it was never written down, but the historical record is clear: the West made what amounts to a gentlemen’s agreement not to expand, and then went ahead and did so, in two rounds (1999 and 2004). 

Giving membership to the Baltic States, which potentially put NATO forces only eighty miles from St Petersburg, with its memories of the Siege, was risky enough (although understandable; we had never recognized them as part of the USSR), but at the NATO Summit in Bucharest in 2008, the Americans proposed that Georgia and Ukraine, two former Soviet republics, be brought in. Putin was in Bucharest for a side meeting of the NATO-Russia Council, and inveighed against the move, which was eventually checked by Germany and France, although it continued to be spoken about as an aspiration: “Georgia and Ukraine will become members.” It is still part of the NATO litany, although nearly everyone realizes that “now is not the time.” I will not go into the details here, but the reckless expansion of NATO to the East was very much a factor, not the only one, of course, in both the four-day war with Georgia and the conflict with Ukraine, including the annexation of Crimea.

I could go on at some length describing the many things that have driven Russia into its present defensive crouch against the West and especially the United States. Our wars in the Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya), which have seriously destabilized that region; the “color revolutions” (Rose in Georgia, Orange in Ukraine, Tulip in Kyrgyzstan); and, perhaps most devastating of all, the full-court press to brand Russia as an aggressor nation not included in the new European security architecture – all these things are resented by Russians. And we cannot say we were not warned. George Kennan F. wrote in 1996 that expanding NATO was a “strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.” And Vladimir Putin, in his much-mocked intervention at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, gave voice to Russia’s growing concerns about Washington’s imperious ways.   

One issue on which President Putin may well have exercised outsized influence, it seems to me, was in reacting to the events in Ukraine, right on the heels of the Sochi Olympics, which Putin had planned as a spectacle confirming Russia’s return to the world stage. Another may have been Georgia, especially the decision to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which Putin may have seen as “pay-back” for the dismemberment of Serbia. Of course, all of these (and Crimea) are in the so-called – and so-imagined – Near Abroad, where Moscow claims special rights. While the West disputes this claim, it is not so different from France’s assertion of special responsibility for countries that were previously part of her colonial empire.

Putin's rise to preeminent power in the Kremlin was a reversion to the norm for Russia, not a step backward on the inevitable trajectory that we in the West had imagined for her. What we need to do now is pull our collective selves together in the Euro-Atlantic community, think afresh about the challenge Russia's alienation from us poses, and set about mending the damage, starting most urgently with Ukraine.  

The election of Volodymyr Zelensky may provide an opening. Almost by definition, given the situation in Washington (and London), European leaders will have to take the lead on this.  French president Emmanuel Macron has already staked out a role. We should let them do their best. We must reckon with the fact that Crimea will not return to Ukrainian jurisdiction, and that Ukraine's joining NATO would cross a Russian red line.  Amb. Steve Pifer's formula, “not now but not never,” may provide a face-saving way out for all sides. Ukrainians and Russians themselves, with moral support from the rest of us, will have to figure out exactly what they can agree on concerning the Donbass. Is some form of federalization such an improper concept for a country so enormously diverse as Ukraine? It works for Canada, with its historically deep division, and for the United States and the Russian Federation. It ought at least to be considered.

As for Crimea, we should remember that the process of reaching the “Big Agreement” regarding Crimea was very lengthy and difficult, and it would have expired this year had it not been renounced by Poroshenko. Ukraine leased naval facilities to Russia in return for concessions involving gas; those conditions no longer exist. Ukraine may have the upper hand in terms of international legalities and diplomatic support, but Russia holds the power cards, and physical possession is at least nine-tenths of international law. Moscow will simply refuse to discuss the question of Crimea’s return to Ukrainian jurisdiction, but Russia needs cooperation on such issues as transportation and securing the water supply, while Ukraine needs cooperation on navigation and other matters; thus there is something to talk about. First of all, and most urgently, the armed conflict in the Donbass needs to be ended. Without a plausible diplomatic way forward, it will be hard, if not impossible, to stop the fighting. Even with such a diplomatic process in view, it may still be unattainable. Ukraine and Russia may be estranged for a generation or more. 

In my view, Putin is no demon and that we may have misunderstood him. That does not make him an angel.  But imputing evil to Russia – or to any country – on the basis of its leader’s imagined personality is a dangerous game.  Russia inherited a formidable military and diplomatic elite, has a well-developed sense of her history and role in the world, and, aside from the street theater that so captivates Western audiences, has real politics and public opinion that must be taken seriously by any leader. Imagining, as some do, that Putin is “the problem,” and that when he leaves the scene all will be well, is a naïve delusion. As the leading Russia scholar and diplomat Tom Graham once put it, “we don’t have a Putin problem, we have a Russia problem.” And it is a problem in part of our own making -- but blaming Putin is so much easier than reckoning with our own shortcomings.

John Evans was U.S. Consul General in St. Petersburg from 1994 to 1997.

Image: Reuters