Susan B. Glasser
16 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬
outlier. Russia was a declining power,
“Upper Volta with nukes,” as critics used
to call the Soviet Union. Putin’s project o
restoring order was necessary, and at least
not a signi¿cant threat. How could it be
otherwise? On September 9, 2001, I and a
few dozen other Moscow-based corre-
spondents traveled to neighboring Belarus
to observe the rigged elections in which
Alexander Lukashenko was ensuring his
continuation as president. We treated the
story as a Cold War relic; Lukashenko
was “the last dictator in Europe,” as the
headlines called him, a living Soviet
anachronism. It was simply inconceivable
to us that two decades later, both Luka-
shenko and Putin would still be ruling, and
we would be wondering how many more
dictators in Europe might join their club.
History has shown that just because
something is inconceivable does not mean
it won’t happen. But that is an important
reason we got Putin wrong, and why, all
too often, we still do. Putin is only nine
years away from hitting Stalin’s modern
record for Kremlin longevity, which
appears to be more than achievable. But
the West’s long history o misreading
Russia suggests that this outcome is no
more preordained than Putin’s improb-
able path to the Russian presidency
was in the ¿rst place. We may have
misunderestimated him before, but that
doesn’t mean we might not mis-
overestimate him now. The warning
signs are all there: the shrinking
economy, the shrill nationalism as a
distraction from internal decay, an
inward-looking elite feuding over the
division o spoils while taking its
monopoly on power for granted. Will
this be Putin’s undoing? Who knows?
But the ghost o Brezhnev is alive and
well in Putin’s Kremlin.∂power past his constitutionally limited
two terms and engineered his temporary
shift to the Russian premiership. That
would not happen, I was told. Why?
Because Putin had looked the ocial in
the eye and said he wouldn’t do it.
In general, U.S. interpretations o
Putin’s Russia have been determined far
more by the politics o Washington than
by what has actually been happening in
Moscow. Cold Warriors have looked
backward and seen the Soviet Union 2.0.
Others, including Bush and Obama at
the outset o their presidencies and now
Trump, have dreamed o a Russia that
could be a pragmatic partner for the West,
persisting in this despite the rapidly
accumulating evidence o Putin’s aggres-
sively revisionist, inevitably zero-sum
vision o a world in which Russia’s
national revival will succeed only at the
expense o other states.
There are many reasons why the
West misunderestimated Putin, as Bush
might have put it, but one stands out
with the clarity o hindsight: Westerners
simply had no framework for a world in
which autocracy, not democracy, would
be on the rise, for a post–Cold War
geopolitics in which revisionist powers
such as Russia and China would compete
on more equal terms again with the
United States. After the Soviet collapse,
the United States had gotten used to the
idea o itsel as the world’s sole super-
power, and a virtuous one at that. Under-
standing Putin and what he represents
seems a lot easier today than it did then,
now that the number o democracies in
the world, by Freedom House’s count,
has fallen each year for the past 13 years.
When Putin came to power, it seemed
as though the world was going in the
opposite direction. Putin had to be an