The Economist March 26th 2022 Culture 83will eventually clash”, he predicted. But he
judged this “liberal Chekist” to be more re
liable than his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.
The comparison was widespread: out
siders’ sanguine views of Mr Putin were
initially coloured by a feeling that things
had been worse, and could yet be again. He
seemed caught in a familiar Russian alter
nation between embracing and rejecting
the West. The question seemed to be how
useful or obstructive he would prove to
Western plans—not whether he might try
to remake the world.
Darkness and the don
David Satter was among the first Anglo
phone analysts to gauge the evil in the sys
tem. In “Darkness at Dawn” he accused the
fsbof orchestrating a string of bombings
in Russia in 1999 that killed around 300
people and ignited the second Chechen
war—thus helping Mr Putin, who oversaw
the fighting, to secure the presidency. Few
were ready to digest that theory; several
Russians who pursued it came to a sticky
end. (Swap the word “Ukraine” for
“Chechnya”, and Mr Putin’s comments on
the war in “First Person” eerily fit today’s
carnage and lies. His “historical mission”
was to prevent Russia’s collapse, he
claimed; what might look like aggression
was really selfdefence.)
In time writers understood that all of
Mr Putin’s Russia, not just Chechnya, was
ruled through power rather than by the
law. As the rackets and redistribution of
wealth became brazen, and the lifestyles of
insiders pharaonic, greed ousted greyness
as the main motif in commentary. The
mafia became the preferred analogy for Mr
Putin’s clique of siloviki, or strongmen.
In “The Man Without a Face” (2012), for
instance, Masha Gessen characterised Mr
Putin, then set to reclaim the presidency
after a proforma stint as prime minister,
as a killer and extortionist. This version of
him—a kgbthug turned mafia godfather—
had been “hidden in plain sight”, but ob
scured by wishful thinking and that grey
veneer. Death and terror were politically
useful to Mr Putin, the author wrote. He
made no distinction between the state’s
interests and his own.
The gangster network was definitively
elaborated in “Putin’s People” (2020). In
the system of “kgbcapitalism” that Cather
ine Belton described, government in Rus
sia was a machine for extracting rents and
expropriating assets, politics a squabble
over who got them, and the president its
referee. The silovikiwere bound together by
a regime of mutual blackmail, in which se
crets were both weapons and liabilities; for
his part, Mr Putin had spilled too much
blood and made too many enemies to re
tire. Besides selfenrichment, the spoils
were used to undermine the West, black
cash sloshing around the world to fund
“active measures” and the “restoration of
the country’s global position”.
The third characteristic—grievance—
was always visible too. Notoriously, in
2005 Mr Putin described the fall of the
Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical
catastrophe of the 20th century”. After an
nexing Crimea in 2014, he said the Soviet
collapse had left Russia pillaged and
shamed. But the fact that his imperial
bluster was much more than camouflage
for graft, and where it might lead, took far
too long to sink in.
In “The New Tsar” (2015), Steven Lee
Myers perceptively identified the Orange
revolution in Ukraine in 2004 as a break
ingpoint. Huge protests overturned the
result of an election rigged in favour of Mr
Putin’s candidate. The reversal combined
personal humiliation with a geopolitical
rebuff; his fear of crowds, and sense of the
jeopardy of democracy, were inflamed.
He “nursed the experience like a
grudge”, Mr Lee Myers wrote, tightening
the screws in Russia, ramping up his pro
paganda and setting up tame youth move
ments to dominate the streets. Mr Putin’s
bleak Chekist mindset could not admit the
possibility that Ukrainians were turning
West—and rejecting him—of their own vo
lition. Convinced that the ciahad paid or
cajoled them, he embarked on a spiral of
meddling that culminated in the latest in
vasion. By 2014, thought Mr Lee Myers, he
had found a “millenarian” mission as the
indispensable leader of an exceptional
power. “The question now was where
would Putin’s policy stop?”
Among chroniclers of the Putin imperi
um, Clifford Gaddy and Fiona Hill best
guessed the answer. In “Mr Putin: Opera
tive in the Kremlin” (2015), they saw his
efforts to make Russia’s economy more
resilient, and to eliminate domestic opposition, as a longhaul preparation for con
fronting the West. His bid to undermine
Western democracies through fifth colum
nists, bribery and kompromatwas part of
the same strategy. The greyness, they
wrote, had always been tactical: Mr Putin
was “the ultimate political performance
artist”, his mercurial public persona a way
to keep his adversaries offbalance.
Mr Gaddy and Ms Hill—who became the
top Russia adviser in Donald Trump’s Na
tional Security Council—concluded that
he was more than an avaricious gangster.
His objective was to survive and overcome
his foes, who, in his view, were Russia’s en
emies too; to that end he was waging a
long, hybrid war against the West. He
would pounce on weaknesses, the pair
warned, and fulfil his threats. “He won’t
give up, and he will fight dirty.” Yet even
these authors judged that, if only for
reasons of trade, Mr Putin “does not want
Russia to end up being a pariah state”. The tsar’s ratchet
In retrospect, only the optimists got it
wrong. As the novice president, squirming
in his suit, aged and ossified into a Botoxed
monster—if with the same villainous
smile—the greyness faded out of his bibli
ography. Greed and grievance took over.
What outside observers missed, though,
was how much, over two decades, the
ratcheting effects of power would exacer
bate these old features.
According to the inexorable logic of
authoritarianism, Mr Putin’s domestic re
pression grew ever more severe. He be
came more isolated, both diplomatically
and among his advisers. He threw off mor
al constraints in his military campaigns.
The nationalist rhetoric hardened into an
apocalyptic ideology, which reached deep
into history and cast Russia as a bulwark
against the decadent West. His fear of
crowds became a sort of narcissistic para
noia. He accumulated grudges—not least,
against Ukraine—and stuck around long
enough to avenge them.
Meanwhile the costs to his people—real
Russians, rather than those of a stylised
past—have mounted. His regime has al
ways looted the country’s resources and
lied to its citizens, with a contempt typical
of authoritarians. As Russia’s soldiers per
ish on a needless battlefield and its civil
ians face ostracism, the callousness has
become starker. Beyond books about the
Kremlin, one insight into that treatment
comes from the school of German histori
ans, including Sebastian Haffner, who
found a psychological rationale for the
devastation Hitler visited on Germany: his
rage, they concluded, had always been
partly directed at his own country. The ruin
Mr Putin is inflicting on Russia (even as he
terrorises Ukraine) can be viewed in the
Voting like it’s 1999 same light. He says he loves the mother