Putin the GreatSeptember/October 2019 15
approaching it, but the absence o
something—namely, the upheaval that
preceded him. “Ultimately,” he said in the
same interview, “the well-being o the
people depends, possibly primarily, on
stability.” It might as well have been his
slogan for the last 20 years. Where once
there was chaos and collapse, he claims to
oer Russia con¿dence, self-suciency,
and a “stable, normal, safe and predict-
able life.” Not a good life, or even a better
one, not world domination or anything
too grand, but a Russia that is reliable,
stolid, intact. This may or may not
continue to resonate with Russians as the
collapse o the Soviet Union recedes
further and further from living memory.
It is the promise o a Brezhnev, or at
least his modern heir.MISUNDERESTIMATING PUTIN
Today, Putin is no more a man o mystery
than he was when he took power two
decades ago. What’s most remarkable,
knowing what we know now, is that so
many thought he was.
There are many reasons for the
mistake. Outsiders have always judged
Russia on their own terms, and Ameri-
cans are particularly myopic when it
comes to understanding other coun-
tries. Putin’s rise from nowhere received
more attention than where he intended
to take the country. Many failed to take
Putin either seriously or literally until it
was too late, or decided that what he
was doing did not matter all that much
in a country that U.S. President Barack
Obama characterized as a “regional
power.” Often, Western policymakers
simply believed his lies. I will never
forget one encounter with a senior Bush
administration ocial in the months
just before Putin decided to stay inSt. Petersburg. He also, in 2004, arrested
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia’s richest
man, and seized his oil company in a
politically charged prosecution that had
the intended eect o scaring Russia’s
wealthy robber barons into subservience.
These actions, even at the time, were
not dicult to read. Putin was a ¶³
man in full, an authoritarian modernizer,
a believer in order and stability. And yet
he was called a mystery, a cipher, an
ideological blank slate—“Mr. Nobody,”
the Kremlinologist Lilia Shevtsova
dubbed him. Perhaps only U.S. Presi-
dent George W. Bush found Putin to be
“very straightforward and trustworthy”
after getting “a sense o his soul,” as he
announced after their initial 2001
summit meeting in Slovenia, but Bush
was not alone in considering Putin a
Western-oriented reformer who, although
certainly no democrat, might prove to be
a reliable partner after Yeltsin’s embarrass-
ing stumbles. At the World Economic
Forum in Davos a year earlier, an Ameri-
can journalist had asked the new Russian
president point-blank, “Who is Mr.
Putin?” But o course, it was the wrong
question. Everyone already knew, or
should have.
In many ways, Putin has been strik-
ingly consistent. The president who
made headlines in 2004 by calling the
breakup o the Soviet Union “the great-
est geopolitical catastrophe o the
twentieth century” is the same president
o today, the one who told the Financial
Times earlier this year that “as for the
tragedy related to the dissolution o the
Soviet Union, that is something obvi-
ous.” For Putin, the goal o the state
remains what it was when he came to
oce two decades ago. It is not a policy
program, not democracy or anything