10 μ¢¤³£ ¬μμ¬SUSAN B. GLASSER is a sta writer for The
New Yorker and former Moscow co-bureau chief
for The Washington Post.AUTOCRACY NOW
built that city on the bones o a thousand
serfs to be his country’s “window to the
West.” By that point in his career, Putin
was no Romanov, only an unknown
former lieutenant colonel in the ¶³ who
had masqueraded as a translator, a
diplomat, and a university administrator,
before ending up as the unlikely right-
hand man o St. Petersburg’s ¿rst-ever
democratically elected mayor. Putin had
grown up so poor in the city’s mean
postwar courtyards that his autobiogra-
phy speaks o ¿ghting o “hordes o rats”
in the hallway o the communal apart-
ment where he and his parents lived in a
single room with no hot water or stove.
Peter the Great had no business being
his model, but there he was, and there
he has remained. Earlier this summer, in
a long and boastful interview with the
Financial Times in which he celebrated
the decline o Western-style liberalism
and the West’s “no longer tenable”
embrace o multiculturalism, Putin
answered unhesitatingly when asked
which world leader he admired most.
“Peter the Great,” he replied. “But he is
dead,” the Financial Times’ editor,
Lionel Barber, said. “He will live as long
as his cause is alive,” Putin responded.
No matter how contrived his admira-
tion for Peter the Great, Putin has in
fact styled himsel a tsar as much as a
Soviet general secretary over the course
o his two decades in public life. The
religion he grew up worshiping was not
the Marxist-Leninist ideology he was
force-fed in school but the heroic
displays o superpower might he saw on
television and the imperial grandeur o
his faded but still ambitious hometown,
Peter’s town. Strength was and is his
dogma, whether for countries or men,
and the Russian emperors’ mottoPutin the Great
Russia’s Imperial Impostor
Susan B. Glasser
O
n January 27, 2018, Vladimir
Putin became the longest-
serving leader o Russia since
Joseph Stalin. There were no parades or
¿reworks, no embarrassingly gilded
statues unveiled or unseemly displays o
nuclear missiles in Red Square. After
all, Putin did not want to be compared
with Leonid Brezhnev, the bushy-
browed septuagenarian whose record in
power he had just surpassed. Brezhnev,
who ruled the Soviet Union from 1964
to 1982, was the leader o Putin’s gritty
youth, o the long stagnation that
preceded the empire’s collapse. By the
end, he was the butt o a million jokes,
the doddering grandfather o a dod-
dering state, the conductor o a Russian
train to nowhere. “Stalin proved that
just one person could manage the
country,” went one o those many jokes.
“Brezhnev proved that a country doesn’t
need to be managed at all.”
Putin, a ruler at a time when manage-
ment, or at least the appearance thereof, is
required, prefers other models. The one
he has liked the longest is, immodestly,
Peter the Great. In the obscurity and
criminality o post-Soviet St. Petersburg
in the 1990s, when Putin was deputy
mayor, he chose to hang on his oce wall
a portrait o the modernizing tsar whoReturn to Table of Contents