Assessing Vladimir Putin: James Bond Supervillain or Misunderstood Reformer?
INTRODUCTION
Whether you like him or not, Vladimir Putin is one of the world's most influential and important leaders, but who is he? For years magazine covers and documentaries complete with scary music and ominous visuals have hyped Putin as a terrifying mastermind bent on global domination through a rebuilt Soviet Empire and the destruction of the west. Hillary Clinton has compared him to Hitler, John McCain called him a "thug" presiding over a "gas station masquerading as a country" and the mainstream media in the US is dominated by Putin fearmongering, yet he has been in power for the better part of two decades and has held a consistent 70-80% popularity rating throughout. Western "experts" scratch their heads over this and pontificate over "Putinism" and what demonic superpower Putin possesses to manipulate the Russian people into supporting him. But these questions decry a lack of understanding of history and considering the past informs the present, history is a crucial piece in the puzzle that is Putin.
CHAOS
"You ask me about the near future and about the last times. I do not speak on my own but give the revelation of the elders. And they have handed down to me the following: the coming of Antichrist draws nigh and is very near. The time separating us from him should be counted a matter of years and at most a matter of some decades. But before the coming of Antichrist, Russia must yet be restored - to be sure, for a short time. And in Russia there must be a Tsar forechosen by the Lord Himself. He will be a man of burning faith, great mind and iron will. This much has been revealed about him." - Archbishop Theophan of Poltava, date unknown
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in 1952 to a family devastated by the war against Hitler. His father was wounded on the front lines, his maternal grandmother killed by the German occupiers of the Tver region, his maternal uncles disappeared at the war front and his younger brother died during the Nazi siege of Leningrad. Growing up as something of a wild child, Putin was well versed in the ways of the streets but developed a strong sense of self-discipline after taking up the martial arts of sambo and judo at the age of 12. During his free time he devoured stories of spies and secret agents. As much as he wanted to be one of them, he ultimately settled on law school at Leningrad State University. In 1975, he joined the KGB and was assigned as a translator to East Germany when the Berlin Wall came down.
In the final days of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev was overthrown in a coup led by Boris Yeltsin, a group of hardline Communists and a number of KGB agents. Disgusted by the part they played in the coup, Putin resigned from the KGB. It was only a matter of months before the Soviet Union was ultimately dissolved. Putin went to work as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg where he developed a reputation as one of the only Russian officials who did not demand bribes for his services. Even this tiny speck of nobility received high praise from entrepreneurs and businessmen as the country slowly collapsed into corruption and transformed into a criminal empire.
Under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin, chaos reigned. Rich businessmen and corporations from the west flooded Russia and began to plunder and pillage the country's natural resources. Russian business owners joined in the ransacking, hoping to claim a piece of the prize, and transferred millions of dollars out of Russia into offshore accounts. These men are known as oligarchs and some of the most notorious are Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Bill Browder, who is still operating today.
As this mass theft was occurring, Boris Yeltsin became the West's favorite drunken goofball and the United States proclaimed that Russia had finally achieved freedom and democracy. Meanwhile, riots and civil war plagued Russia. Tanks and gangsters roamed the streets. Terrorists from Chechnya launched waves of terrorist attacks. Moscow, previously considered one of the safest cities in the world was rocked by 2,000 homicides a year. Yeltsin's popularity rating fell to only 2% but, assisted by election rigging from the United States, nonetheless won another term. By the end of the 1990's employers could no longer afford to pay money and instead paid their employees with household items such as light bulbs and batteries that could be bartered for goods. Food disappeared from the shelves and what remained was often molded and rotten. People died from starvation, disease or from eating rotten food out of desperation. Russia was a dying country and on the verge of disappearing into the dust.
On August 9, 1999 Islamist fighters from Chechnya infiltrated Russia's Dagestan region and declared it an independent state, calling for a jihad until "all unbelievers" had been driven out. The following month four apartment blocks in the cities of Moscow, Buynaksk and Volgodonsk were hit by a series of explosions, killing more than 300 and injuring more than 1000, sparking a second war with Chechnya.
These bombings remain a point of contention in some circles. A suspicious device resembling the explosives used in the bombings was found and neutralized in an apartment block in Ryazan and three FSB agents arrested for planting the device. The head of the FSB later stated the operation was just an anti-terror exercise and that the device was a non-explosive containing only sugar. The presence of security services agents has led many in the west to proclaim Putin was responsible for the bombings as a means of ushering himself into power. Former US Foreign Service officer John Evans, who knew Putin during his time in St. Petersburg, offered his point of view on this in a memorandum to Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott. In his article, "The Key to Understanding Vladimir Putin", Evans writes:
"The Chechens, Sunni Muslims with a history of fiercely resisting the Russians in the 19th century, under their leader, the Imam Shamil (actually a Dagestani), as the Russian Empire subjugated the Caucasus, were a disturbing presence in European Russia in the 1990s. Chechens ran the Mercedes dealership in Petersburg, where lots of stolen vehicles changed hands, but very few if any new ones. During the first war, they targeted me personally, on account of the position taken by the U.S. Government in support of Russia’s territorial integrity. Right after the bombings of the two apartment buildings, our Defense Attache in Moscow reported that the inhabitants of at least one of the buildings were dependents of military personnel. It seemed to me then, as now, that Vladimir Putin would never have sanctioned the sacrifice of those innocent people in pursuit of political goals. But, in my view, there was one person who just might have, and happened to have a connection to the North Caucasus: (oligarch) Boris Berezovsky, who was then serving as National Security Advisor to Yeltsin, or “the Family,” as Yeltsin’s wife and daughter and son-in-law were then known.
The Family was concerned by the prospect of parliamentary elections scheduled for December of 1999, and by the potent alliance recently forged between Yevgeniy Primakov and the mayor of Moscow, Yuriy Luzhkov. They were searching for a way of postponing the elections, and it had occurred to them that the Chechen war and attendant terrorism could provide justification for such a move."
When St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak lost his re-election campaign, Putin was left without a position. He moved to Moscow and served in several different capacities before being appointed Prime Minister. With Yeltsin's handling of the Second Chechen War under heavy criticism, Putin found himself left with the unenviable task of waging the war. His military campaign was stunningly successful and his approval rating skyrocketed. Yeltsin's time was over. Whether he asked Putin for immunity from criminal charges in exchange for his resignation or that was the offer Putin put on the table largely depends on who you ask, but on December 31, 1999 Boris Yeltsin resigned and handed the presidency to Putin.
Sweeping into power, the west initially saw hopes in Putin's presidency, hopes that he would allow the plunder begun under Yeltsin to continue. But Putin turned out to be nothing like Yeltsin and began a dramatic wave of reforms to rebuild the Russian economy and cut the head off the corrupt system. Top oligarchs Berezovsky and Khodorkovsky were removed from power and others imprisoned or deported. Ultimately Putin struck a deal with the least powerful oligarchs that they could keep their money provided they stayed permanently out of politics.
This realization that Putin was a patriotic nationalist unwilling to sell out his country made him enemy number one in the west. The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff lamented his disappointment that Putin did not turn out to be "a sober Yeltsin".
ASSASSINATIONS
On October 7, 2006, Vladimir Putin's 54th birthday, journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in her Moscow apartment. Working for Novaya Gazeta, an investigative newspaper long known for its criticisms of Russian political affairs, Politkovskaya was critical of the Russian government's handling of the Second Chechen War and subsequent terror attacks, particularly the disastrous Beslan school hostage crisis. While investigating cases of human rights abuses in Chechnaya, provoking a series of death threats, Politkovskaya labeled Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov "the Chechen Stalin of our days". In response, Kadyrov told her "You're an enemy. To be shot." Although many maintain Putin ordered her assassination as a birthday gift to himself, I personally find this take nonsensical. Putin comes across to me as someone far too intelligent to do something so stupid. It is, however, something one might do to try to frame someone else. In either case, Politkovskaya's colleagues at Novaya Gazeta do not believe to this day that Putin or the Russian government were involved in her murder. Putin later commented: "Her influence over political life in Russia was minimal. And in my opinion murdering such a person certainly does much greater damage from the authorities' point of view, authorities that she strongly criticized, than her publications ever did."
Of all the mysterious assassinations for which Putin gets the blame, none is more of a twisted web than that of Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent who blamed Putin for the Moscow apartment bombings and even called him a pedophile before dying of severe radiation poisoning in London in November 2006. Just before his death, Litvinenko named Putin as the man behind his murder. Was he? Obviously one cannot prove or disprove the allegation either way but there are some strange connections and a lot of questions. Aside from the fact that, once again, it would be a really stupid move on Putin's part to assassinate someone who posed no threat to him what are we to make of the fact that Litvinenko's own wife later testified that he had been recruited by and was working for MI6? What are we to make of the fact that Litvinenko had ties to Chechnya, to Khodorkovsky's Yukos Oil, and worked for Boris Berezovsky? Why was Polonium 210, the radioactive substance that killed Litvinenko, found in Berezovsky's office and residence? I don't have an answer but there are certainly questions - and connections - that should be looked at more closely.
Last on our list is politician Boris Nemtsov, gunned down on February 27, 2015 while crossing a bridge over the Moscow River in sight of the Kremlin. Nemtsov was a sharp critic of Russia's reunification of Crimea, believing the western reports that Russia had attacked Ukraine and taken Crimea by force. Nemtsov being a former first deputy prime minister, Putin's ex-boss and a onetime potential successor to Boris Yeltsin, the Kremlin reacted in shock. They had considered Nemtsov to be more of a kindred spirit than an enemy. Putin denounced the murder and disappeared from the public for a significant amount of time, prompting rumors that he now feared for his life. When he finally resurfaced it was with no fewer than fifteen body guards. A number of Chechen suspects were arrested. One confessed to his involvement, others maintained innocence and one blew himself up with a grenade when the police came for him. But, of course, Putin got the blame for the murder. This was yet again someone who posed no threat to Putin and killing him outside the Kremlin walls would have been an incredibly stupid move, so why would he have done it? Could the killing be interpreted as a warning or a threat to Putin? Is the more likely conclusion that Putin is an irrational murderer or that he is still very much battling a system of corruption that wants him gone?
REBIRTH
"There will be a storm. And the Russian ship will be smashed to pieces. But people can be saved even on splinters and fragments. And not everyone will perish. One must pray, everyone must repent and repent fervently. And what happens after a storm? There will be calm. At this everyone said: 'But there is no ship, it is shattered to pieces; it has perished, everything has perished.' It is not so. A great miracle of God will be manifested. And all the splinters and fragments, by the will of God and His power will come together and be united and the ship will be rebuilt in its beauty and will go on its own way as foreordained by God." - St. Anatole the Younger of Optina, 1917.
"I foresee the restoration of a powerful Russia, still stronger and mightier than before. On the bones of these martyrs, remember, as on a strong foundation, will the new Russia be built - according to the old model; strong in her faith in Christ God and in the Holy Trinity! The Church will remain unshaken to the end of the age and a Monarch of Russia, if he remains faithful to the Orthodox Church, will be established on the throne of Russia until the end of the age." - St. John of Kronstadt, date unknown
In the almost two decades since Putin came to power, he has returned Russia from the edge of the abyss. Choking off corrupt money and putting it back into the economy, he payed off not only Russia's IMF debts but also the debts of all the former Soviet countries. The overall quality of life has improved with life expectancy among adults increasing by more than 7 years between 1994 and 2016 while the mortality rate among children under 5 decreased nearly 60%. Premature deaths caused by smoking decreased 34% over the same time period; deaths due to alcoholism decreased 43% between 2000 and 2016. These are monumental feats for a country that appeared at one time to be doomed. And the improvements are continuing.
Massive new infrastructure overhauls are taking place with stunning new international airports being built all around the country. In 2010 Russia was ranked at an abysmal 124 on the Ease of Doing Business scale and in 2019 it skyrocketed to 28. In preparation for the FIFA World Cup, a sweeping system of changes were put into place including overhauls of the metro stations, signs posted in English and Russian and the abolishment of authoritarian legislation such as laws forbidding large public gatherings, resulting in large and loud celebrations in the streets and even soccer games in Red Square. Critics warned that those laws would be put back into effect after the games ended but a year and a half later they are still abolished. US sanctions have done very little to hurt Russia; in fact, they've boosted the economy, forcing the country to stand on its own two feet rather than rely on imports from the west. In late 2018, Resonance, an international consulting company, ranked Moscow as one of the top ten cities with the best living conditions in the world, a long way from the hellhole of 1999. Press freedom has increased with Radio Free Europe, Voice of America and The Moscow Times voicing alternative points of view without interference from the Russian government; in fact, sometimes with partial funding from the Russian government. While western media outlets claim Russia is a dying power and that Putin's days are numbered, Forbes in November 2019 declared the Russian economy to be "bulletproof", probably the only one that could withstand a global recession.
While some of the Russian people are ready for someone new they also know there is no one else. The Communist Party is the second largest political power in Russia after Putin's and they've managed to score some seats in the Duma giving them more influence, all the while staging protests and riots in the streets. This is why Putin wins every election and why his approval rating remains so high. His consistent thumbing of the nose to the globalist movement in favor of Russia's independence and sovereignty has made him one of the top populist leaders on the planet. The globalist powers in the world hate him for this and make him the phantom bogeyman of all their ills. But they don't dare directly challenge him. At least not yet. For all those who lament that they've only ever known Putin in power, they also fear the day he's gone.
As for me, after starting my exploration of this subject following a series of horrifying dreams about nuclear war, I fell for the propaganda about Putin. I believed he was Hitler and Stalin or worse and that he intended to conquer what he could and destroy what he couldn't. I thought there was no one in the world more frightening than him. It was Oliver Stone's excellent series The Putin Interviews that began to change my mind. Here was a well-educated, well-spoken, rational, thoughtful statesman who did not fit the image he had been given and that sent me down the rabbit hole. Now I've done a complete 180 on my view of Putin. No longer fearing him, I now wonder if he might be one of the last hopes left in the world. Despite his own military and members of his own government demanding he launch a strike against the western powers, he refuses. Regardless of the provocations, regardless of the threats and slander he holds his ground and shrugs it off as "just politics." For whatever else he is, he may be the only adult in the room keeping things from completely falling apart.
For thousands of years Russia has existed under either authoritarianism or outright dictatorship. The shock therapy of the 1990s to convert the government into a democratic system overnight was a nightmare. While Putin has reintroduced some brand of old authoritarianism he has also been slowly whittling that down into a more democratic system, despite the opposition he faces from within. A full assessment of Putin can only be done from a point in the future looking back but with the opening up of Russia to the world for the FIFA World Cup and the gushing, enthusiastic responses from the fans who attended - many of whom were initially terrified to go to Russia - history may just find that Russia needed a firm hand on the wheel to guide her through the storm.
Sources and further reading:
"The Key to Understanding Vladimir Putin" by John Evans: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/key-understanding-vladimir-putin-82391
"For Wall Street, Russia Has Become 'Bulletproof'" by Kenneth Rapoza: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2019/11/18/for-wall-street-russia-has-become-bullet-proof/#7eb05bd26ffd
"Russia: Increases in Life Expectancy, Decreases in Child Deaths, Use of Alcohol, Tobacco" by Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-08-russia-life-decreases-child-deaths.html
"Russians Sober Up Under Health-Conscious Vladimir Putin" by Henry Foy: https://www.ft.com/content/78eaa2d6-0b9f-11ea-bb52-34c8d9dc6d84
"Manufacturing War With Russia" by Chris Hedges: https://www.opednews.com/articles/Manufacturing-War-With-Rus-by-Chris-Hedges-Election_Gorbachev_Intelligence_Putin-190603-404.html
"Army Document: US Strategy to 'Dethrone' Putin For Oil Pipelines Might Provoke WW3" by Nafeez Ahmed: https://off-guardian.org/2018/03/11/army-document-us-strategy-to-dethrone-putin-for-oil-pipelines-might-provoke-ww3/?
"Rethinking Putin: A Talk by Professor Stephen F. Cohen": https://www.thenation.com/article/rethinking-putin-a-talk-by-professor-stephen-f-cohen/
"Russia Isn't Getting the Recognition It Deserves on Syria" by Scott Ritter: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/11/02/russia-isnt-getting-recognition-deserves-syria/
"Putin: Russia's Choice" by Richard Sakwa
"Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft" by Alan C. Lynch
"First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait" by Vladimir Putin, Nataliya Gevorkyan and Natalya Timakova
"The Power of Impossible Ideas: Ordinary Citizens' Extraordinary Efforts to Avert International Crisis" by Sharon Tennison
The Putin Interviews - Showtime Films