Putin the GreatSeptember/October 2019 13
constitutional niceties, he was greeted
with massive demonstrations. These
shook Putin to the core, and his belie
that street protests can all too easily turn
into regime-threatening revolutions is
the key to understanding his present and
future behavior. On the international
stage, no cause has animated Putin more
than the prospect o another country’s
leader being forced from oce, no matter
how evil the leader or how deserved the
toppling. Early on in his presidency, he
opposed the “color revolutions” sweep-
ing some post-Soviet states: the 2003
Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2004
Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the
2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan.
He condemned the overthrow o Saddam
Hussein in Iraq and Hosni Mubarak in
Egypt and Muammar al-Qadda¿ in
Libya. He went to war after his ally
Viktor Yanukovych, the president o
Ukraine, Çed the country amid a
peaceful street uprising. He is an anti-
revolutionary through and through,
which makes sense when you remember
how it all began.FROM DRESDEN TO THE KREMLIN
The ¿rst revolution Putin experienced
was a trauma that he has never forgot-
ten, the 1989 fall o the Berlin Wall and
the resulting collapse o the communist
regime in East Germany. It happened
when he was a 36-year-old undercover
¶³ operative stationed in Dresden, and
Putin and his men were left on their
own to ¿gure out what to do as angry
East Germans threatened to storm their
oces, burning papers “night and day,”
as he would later recall, while they waited
for help. Putin had already become
disillusioned by the huge disparity
between the higher standard o living inanticorruption activist Alexei Navalny,
despite years o state eorts to shut it
down. Putin has no obvious successor,
and today’s Kremlinologists report an
increase in in¿ghting among the secu-
rity services and the business class,
suggesting that an enormous struggle
for post-Putin Russia has already begun.
At every stage o Putin’s long, event-
ful, and unlikely rule, there have been
similar moments o uncertainty, and often
there has been an enormous gap between
the analysis o those in distant capitals,
who tend to see Putin as a classic dictator,
and those at home, who look at the
president and his government as a far
more slapdash aair, where incompetence
as well as luck, inertia as well as tyranny,
has played a role. “Stagnation,” in fact, is
no longer an automatic reference to
Brezhnev in Russia anymore; increasingly,
it is an epithet used to attack Putin and
the state o the nation, beset as it is by
corruption, sanctions, economic back-
wardness, and an indeterminate program
for doing anything about it all. At the end
o 2018, Putin’s former ¿nance minister,
Alexei Kudrin, said that Russia’s economy
was mired in a “serious stagnation pit.” As
the economist Anders Aslund concludes
in his new book, Russia’s Crony Capitalism,
the country has devolved into “an extreme
form o plutocracy that requires authori-
tarianism to persist,” with Putin joining in
the looting to become a billionaire
many times over himself, even as his
country has grown more isolated because
o his aggressive foreign policy.
Sheer survival—o his regime and o
himself—is often the aim that best
explains many o Putin’s political deci-
sions, at home and abroad. In 2012, when
Putin returned to the presidency after a
hiatus as prime minister so as to observe