Putting Putin to the Test

...The Moscow rumor mill seized on the conspiracy theory that Putin was not really in charge, that the action was the work of his chief of staff and the Family...

...He approached this goal in last December's Duma elections, when his new Unity Party, or the "Bear," from its Russian acronym, came in a close second to the Communists...

...Since then his words and his actions have revealed a combination of incisiveness, suppleness, realism, and drive rare in the history of any country's leadership...

...Putin's number one priority is the consolidation of governmental authority in his own hands...

...Putin recovered his momentum in his remarkable state of the nation speech to Parliament early in July...

...on the other, he has unyieldingly opposed perceived threats to Russia's strategic interests, including NATO intervention in the Balkans, American antimissile schemes, and foreign protests over Chechnya...

...His ambiguities allow him plenty of leeway to jab and step back, as in the Gusinsky affair, while keeping his opponents off balance...

...A truce was announced: He agreed to stay within the law, and they agreed to obey it...

...This is the line urged by his shadowy guru, Gleb Pavlovsky...

...No wonder he stole the show at the Okinawa G-8 Summit in July...

...Potanin was suspected of illegalities in acquiring the formerly state-owned Norilsk nickel combine in far northern Siberia...

...A key Putin appointment was the selection of his former KGB colleague Sergei Ivanov as Secretary of the National Security Council...

...Does the truce mean the Yeltsin-era privatizations will stand...

...The Duma, he charged, was "the Kremlin's legal department that obediently follows all orders and instructions...

...Putin thus left no doubt that he was repudiating Yeltsin's mess...

...The political culture's impact was clear in the remarkable coalescence of public sentiment around Putin, even though he is far from a charismatic personality...

...This has meant, to begin with, taming the legislative branch of government...

...Robert V. Damels, a frequent NL contributor, is professor emeritus of history at the University of Vermont...

...Putin is a polished speaker, and his extemporaneous interviews are impressive demonstrations of his mental agility, candor and analytical acuteness, not to mention his grasp of the facts...

...In Russia most people expect to feel the strong hand of authority, whether they like it or not, and the authorities expect submission, whether it is voluntary or coerced...

...Next, Putin took on the provincial governors...

...Under Yeltsin's lax leadership, the governors asserted a wide measure of local independence, legally or de facto, and were often exemplars of despotic or corrupt rule, orboth...

...He would free Russia from dependence on "international loans and favors" by relying instead on "our own uniqueness and our own strength...

...Along this line, in a formal "foreign policy concept" that he promulgated in July, Putin denounced "the growing trend toward the creation of a unipolar structure of the world with the economic and force-based dominance of the USA.' ONCE HE established his international credentials and moved toward the "vertical structure of power" traditional to Russia, Putin was ready to take on his most formidable challenge, the financial oligarchy...

...In late July, taking a small step back after his aggressive leap forward, Putin held a much-touted conclave with 21 leading tycoons (notably excluding both Gusinsky and Berezovsky...

...But Gorbachev himself endorsed Putin as "social-democratic...

...To be sure, he has endorsed the concept of the two-party system, and he reiterates his belief in democracy and the rule of law, but he is happy to exploit the current national mood of submissiveness...

...Putin's approach has been characteristically two-track...

...What we are seeing," said a British analyst after Putin's visit to London in May, "is a Kremlin politician of a younger generation, with the kind of vigor and focus we noticed when Mikhail S. Gorbachev made his first appearances in the West...

...Internationally, he plays boldly from a weak hand, inviting foreign investment as he probes chinks in the Western alliance...

...His very first move as Acting President, after a demonstrative flight to Chechnya in a fighter plane, was to relieve Yeltsin's king-making daughter Tatyana Dyachenko of her official post as presidential image adviser...

...Putin insisted that the Prosecutor was acting independently, and that the raids were legal...

...The tycoons bought state bonds, with stock in state corporations as collateral, then got control of the respective enterprises for a song when the Yeltsin government defaulted on these debts...

...Putin and his staff say yes, if the privatizations were done legally, but of course they were riddled with illegality and conflicts of interest...

...A mere four days after his inauguration, he launched a selective attack on the oligarchy by raiding the headquarters of Vladimir Gusinsky's MediaMOST organization, the holding company for Russia's only major independent television network, NTV...

...He takes for granted the KGB's dedication to the power and glory of the Soviet state, in both its internal and external respects, and this appears to be his own bottom line in the present Russian context...

...One is the institution of the secret police, which set him on his way and now provides him with both personnel and techniques for exerting his power...

...Within a week of his formal inauguration as President on May 7, he decreed the establishment of seven superregions, each under an administrator appointed by him to exercise Federal authority and ride herd on the governors in their respective areas...

...The probable reality is simpler: Putin was maintaining "plausible deniability" as he poked at the oligarchy and tested foreign and domestic reactions...

...Putin may be willing to live with the oligarchs and use them as instruments of economic control, provided they quit meddling in politics...

...Russians have no natural sense of loyal opposition, so when the President surged to supraconstitutional dominance everyone scrambled to get out of his way...

...The biggest nickel producer in the world, Norilsk was part of the "loans-for-shares" scheme masterminded by Yeltsin's privatization chief, Anatoly E. Chubais...

...In league with Gorbachev's former sidekick, Alexander Yakovlev, plus sundry intellectual luminaries, he announced a new political opposition with himself as leader and boldly resigned his recently-won Duma seat...

...His most recent book is Russia's Transformation...

...All would observe a "level playing field" for Russian business, though these seemed hollow words after years of asset-grabbing by the moguls...

...Three days later, the Prosecutor's agents and the tax police launched a new series of raids...

...Vladimir Putin knows what he wants...

...He also launched a double-barreled attack on the governors' prerogatives by inviting the Duma to abolish their ex officio status in the upper house, the Council of the Federation, and to give him authority to oust governors and dissolve provincial legislatures if he deemed their actions in violation of the Federal Constitution...

...By the time of the presidential election last March, he had no serious opposition, apart from the pro forma candidacy of Communist leader Gennadi A. Zyuganov, and easily gained an absolute majority that precluded a runoff...

...On the one hand, he has given foreigners broad assurances about Russia's peaceable, democratic and freemarket intentions...

...Amy W. Knight, the leading Western expert on the Soviet and Russian secret police, speaks of "a KGB mind-set penetrating Kremlin politics...

...The Duma complied, and overrode a vote by the upper house against its political emasculation...

...In addition, polls suggest that he continues to enjoy the submissive reflex of the political culture: "Russians," says Izvestia commentator Yevgeny Krutikov, "prefer not to exert pressure on the authorities and do not demand from them a full accounting of their actions...

...Though these people were instrumental in placing him in power, he had made it clear from the day he moved into the Kremlin that he would not be their tool...

...Here there are fishermen who have already caught a lot and want to keep the situation as it is...

...His clearest concern is their domination of the media...

...In any event, Putin quickly recovered from the fallout of the Kursk disaster by apologizing and turning the whole episode against his oligarch critics for allegedly having stolen the resources that should have gone to the military...

...And if they push us away, then we will be forced to find allies and reinforce ourselves...

...In both quarters they were quick and negative, so he backed away, calling Gusinsky's arrest "excessive," and then releasing him...

...Russia's Political Culture - 1 Putting Putin to the Test By Robert V. Daniels Barely a year has passed since Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, a man hardly known to anyone outside the Kremlin's inner circle, was named Russia's Prime Minister and the designated successor to President Boris N. Yeltsin...

...Russian political culture showed here in every way—in presidential domination of the elected Duma, in distrust of the Judiciary to decide issues of Federal-provincial relations, and in the lack of broad resistance to these incursions by the Kremlin...

...The President was out of the country at that moment and claimed ignorance of the Prosecutor General's intention to arrest Gusinsky...

...The third factor is the inertia of Russia's political culture...

...But in the wake of his meteoric rise he now confronts challenges to his authority that are testing his respect for Russia's new democratic institutions...

...But if I am sure that my actions are substantiated, I act very energetically...

...Alternatively, he may squeeze the oligarchs by selective legal action...

...He issues broad reassurances to the oligarchs, to the Russian media, to foreign investors, but does not flinch from tough, targeted actions that contradict his promises...

...It was the centerpiece of the campaign biography he released in the form of a marathon interview just before the March election (published in English as First Person by Public Affairs Press...

...Without free media Russia will not survive," he said in his state of the nation speech, but "journalistic freedom has become a tasty morsel for politicians and weighty financial groups" who could "turn them into mass misinformation outlets and a means of struggle against the state...

...authoritarian and nationalistic in its deepest instincts, it has enabled Putin to aspire to total control of the country...

...Putin is unreflective about the implications of his KGB service...

...He also immediately shook up the presidential administration, which had become virtually a fourth branch of government, superseding the Legislature and the nominal Executive under the Prime Minister...

...Another is the Family and the financial oligarchy, who elevated him in the expectation that he would protect their interests...

...I don't think this is acceptable to the Russian people or to our partners abroad...

...In mid-June Gusinsky was arrested on charges of fraud and tax evasion...

...In a politically popular strategy, Putin called into question Yeltsin's privatizing the formerly Socialist economy by turning it over to the robber barons...

...He would secure freedom through a strong democratic, "Federal" (not "decentralized") state, and would welcome a stronger civil society as well as political opposition...

...Putin's taking on separatists in Chechnya, coupled with his tough talk and unblinking use of the media placed at his disposal by business friends like Boris Berezovsky, made him the unchallenged master of Russia's political scene...

...For the time being, he appointed free-marketeers to the key economic posts, notably Herman Gref, a young ethnic German with whom he had worked in St...

...WHAT MADE Putin's housecleaning possible was hisperfectfitwith the political culture...

...ButtheRussianpress saw them as a "declaration of war" against the oligarchs...

...some say he is the second most powerful man in Russia...

...If I doubt something, I am prepared to look not just seven but 70 times before leaping," he said at a recent press conference...

...One is reminded of the banality of evil...

...The Speaker of the victimized upper house acquiesced: "A bad law or a weak law is better than the absence of any power or any government at all " While tightening his grip on the levers of political power, the President has worked assiduously to restore Russia's respectability in the international community...

...Petersburg in the early 1990s...

...He also pointedly denounced the oligarchy as a main source of Russia's troubles...

...Responding to Putin's new pressure, Berezovsky accused the President of slipping back toward totalitarianism...

...He kept his options open when it came to choosing between the free-market doctrine that had been pressed by Yeltsin's entourage and resorting to state intervention...

...We are part of Western European culture," he asserts, but "we will fight to preserve our geographic and spiritual position...

...The strength of Putin's personality is apparent in his initiatives...

...After Putin stumbled last month in his mishandling of the Kursk nuclear submarine disaster, what he really fears turned up on Russia's biggest television network, ORT, when it featured family members of the crew sharply criticizing the government's handling of rescue efforts...

...It is whether he will get it by democratic or authoritarian means that is still an open question...

...Putin's relations with the Family have been more complicated...

...Putin insists thatRussia must be "a single economic and legal space...

...Although Gusinsky's enterprises were targeted again, the net was spread to Vladimir Potanin, the biggest (and quietest) of the oligarchs...

...He told the oligarchs: "We have a saying about catching fish in muddy waters...

...Putin can appear to be all things to all people, and at the same time blast away the business-as-usual cobwebs...

...Initially, Putin was widely believed to be the pliant creature of the "Family," the entourage of kin, cronies and financial magnates (or "oligarchs") who, it is now universally recognized, were guiding Russia's "first democratically elected President" in the latter years of his administration...

...His hero is Charles de Gaulle, who felt the same way about France...

...But he quickly showed, as Prime Minister and then as Acting President following Yeltsin's New Year's Eve resignation, that he could be independent and decisive...

...Most spectacularly, he has begun to tangle with the financial oligarchs who put him in office...

...He would, he said, fight Russia's economic ills of corruption and capital outflow, enforce the law, and "ensure the work of the market," but eschew "populist policies...

...As I write, Berezovsky has countered with an offer to transfer his shares to a group of trustees drawn from the media and the arts...

...For all practical purposes, he won a mandate to do whatever he thought necessary to rescue the country's floundering economy and restore Russia's greatness in the family of nations...

...Putin's extraordinary authority as President derives from three compelling forces, none of them a product of the Constitution...

...The longtime dissident historian Roy Medvedev praises his "simplicity and naturalness," and finds his popularity "fully deserved" as "an independent political figure...

...Significantly, police methods have steadily reappeared in the President's dealings with the press and the oligarchs...

...Coming out of the gray background of the KGB and the splotchy foreground of Kremlin intrigue, Putin had no occasion to display his political talent before he was moved to the top...

...However, pressure continued on Gusinsky to sell his media interests to representatives of the state...

...Then he added, "I never have any regrets...

...He makes no bones about his KGB background...

...This did not deter Putin from his next bold step, though, but in his mind, justified it...

...Then he maneuvered to co-opt the Communists and isolate his main rival, ex-Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov...

...He has undertaken to restore the centralized state, using the compliant Duma as a legal weapon to bludgeon the nation's 89 provincial governors into submission...

...Berezovsky is ORT's controlling stockholder, and on September 4 he released a letter to the President revealing that the Kremlin had ordered him to turn over his 49 per cent holdings to the state or suffer the fate of Gusinsky...