How Putin Sees the World

...the news now is that he is willing to repudiate the man who made him president...

...In the light of this national trauma, it is no wonder that Russians deeply resent the foreign forces, especially the United States, that they see behind their whole debacle...

...To be sure, there is nothing new about this...

...Or whether it matters, given his having said in so many words that he intends to remain a political player...

...role in the world...

...The Russians, even when innocent, don’t know not to sound guilty...

...The answer is to be found in Russia’s political culture...

...violation of an implicit deal back in Gorbachev’s time: no Western military push eastward, in return for Soviet acquiescence in German reunification and the anti-Communist revolutions in Eastern Europe...

...All these machinations are excused as “sovereign democracy,” a term invented by Putin’s ideologist, Deputy Chief of Staff Vladislav Y. Surkov...

...The Clinton Administration, eying the East European ethnic vote, chose to ignore the deal and push the expansion of NATO...

...Why do the Russians, who experienced glimmerings of freedom in the late 1980s and early 1990s, put up with these shenanigans...

...ABIG QUESTION hovering o v er the Russian political scene at the moment is whether Putin will jigger the Constitution to allow himself a third four-year term as president...

...Every step he takes carries his government back toward the authoritarian “vertical” of yore: control of the mass media, central appointment of local governors, political intrusion into the administration of justice, and massaging parties and elections to assure a tame majority in Parliament...

...according to one well-known Right-wing editor, Aleksandr Prokhanov, it “positioned Russia at the center of anti-American resistance, together with the Arab world and China...

...Absorption of the Baltic republics into the European Union and NATO has been a bitter pill and, for people who continue to think in old-fashioned military terms, a strategic dagger pointed at Russia’s throat...

...Not so delegation member Senator John McCain (R.-Ariz...

...The fractious groups of a truly democratic persuasion—the oddly named Union of Rightist Forces and the Apple Party—are currently excluded from Parliament because none of them was able to garner the 5 per cent of the total vote required to qualify a party for a share of representation...

...Pensions and health services, starved by Yeltsin budgets, are finally improving, and last year the country’s chronic population loss finally turned around...

...Gates was relatively restrained in his response to Putin, joking as one ex-spy to another...

...Unlike traditional totalitarianism, regimes that are merely authoritarian do not have to censor everything and jail or shoot all the dissenters...

...They may have written off their former satellites in East-Central Europe, but it is a different matter when they see Western influence pushing into the former Soviet republics, the “near abroad” for Russia...

...As for the nominal Prime Minister Mikhail Y. Fradkov, he remains pretty much a nonentity...

...penetration into Central Asia and Transcaucasia, with their oil and gas resources, and the transparently anti-Russian nature of American pipeline politics...

...Early In February RussianAmerican relations plunged to their iciest point since Presidents Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush proclaimed an end to the Cold War at their Malta summit meeting in 1989...

...Uppity businessmen face the same path to Siberia as the former billionaire Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, now indicted on new charges even as he toils in the gulag...

...Does his retrogression today include state-sponsored murder...

...Russian government responsibility at some remove is believable...

...Robert V . D Aniels, a frequent New Leader contributor, is professor emeritus of history at the University of Vermont...

...Russia surrendered a third of its area and half its population, including millions of ethnic Russians who, rather like the French settlers in Algeria, suddenly found themselves displaced where they had long been accustomed to ruling the roost...

...Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov is nevertheless trying valiantly to rally democratic elements in an umbrella organization, The Other Russia...

...The severest shock for the Russians in the collapse of Communism was not the overthrow of the planned economy, which was welcomed nor the vicissitudes of democratic political reform, which has left people cynical and apolitical...

...How far he will get remains to be seen...

...The whole episode highlighted Russia’s determination to claw its way back from an experience of national humiliation over the past 15 years...

...Since 1985, successive Russian leaders have been trying to find a congenial governing paradigm in the country’s past...

...Lands that had been under Russian rule since the time of Peter the Great, or in some cases before, were abruptly cut loose in December 1991 when Yeltsin, as president of the Russian Federation, together with his now forgotten counterparts in Ukraine and Belarus, proclaimed an end to the Union and with it the presidency of Yeltsin’s bitter rival Gorbachev...

...Ye t instead of winning any gratitude, the Kremlin only manages to annoy the West and antagonize its beneficiaries—even Stalinist Belarus—when it threatens to withhold supplies or charge world market prices...

...To that he added “One state . . . the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way,” thereby upsetting the whole order of international law...

...Gorbachev wanted to return to a sanitized version of the October Revolution—his “Socialist choice”—plus the semi-Socialist New Economic Policy of the 1920s...

...plots by the government’s enemies or rogue agents pursuing their own vendettas are also plausible...

...Permitting himself “to say what I really think,” Putin launched into an exaggerated if understandable, attack on the “unipolar world,” identifying it with America’s “unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions” and “an almost uncontained hyper use of force, military force...

...Geopolitically, the breakup of the Union along with the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the reunification of Germany was a disaster of epochal proportions for Russia, knocking the country down from its superpower status and, arguably, out of the ranks of the major powers...

...Joint Chiefs Chairman General Peter Pace warned: “We should be ready for a traditional war, because we don’t know what might happen in places like Russia or China, North Korea or Iran...

...Meanwh ile, “nongovernmental organizations” of a humanitarian and human rights nature, dependent in part on foreign support because the native tradition is weak in those areas, are suspect as agents of outside influence and subjected to ever closer regulation...

...Communism may have collapsed but Russian goverments since 1991 have not ceased to flout democratic norms, though Washington turned a blind eye on transgressions by its junior partner Boris Yeltsin...

...That has been the fond dream of Americans since the heady days of the 1990s, when President Boris N. Yeltsin ran things in Moscow and Western advisers trekked there to tell the Russians how to convert their country into a “market democracy...

...Theories abound, and we may never learn the truth...

...The trail of unsolved killings in the last couple of years—literally as well as politically radioactive—runs all over Moscow and as far off as London...

...Leaders from Putin on down are calling for a new national ideology, as they did under Yeltsin, suggesting that Russia is not comfortable without an official credo to fill the void left by Marxism and the Orthodox Church before it...

...Hopes for a converging partnership with a democratic and capitalist Russia have proven to be a figment of the neoliberal imagination...

...Not surprisingly, Russian nationalists loved the Putin speech...

...Thus after the turmoil of the Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras, polls have shown that a majority of Russians— the educated and affluent aside—are nostalgic for Leonid I. Brezhnev or even for Josef Stalin...

...That stems from a totally different historical tradition, where authoritarianism and centralism were accepted as the price of national survival...

...It tries to win influence through its oil and gas exports, for example, and has actually been subsidizing Belarus, Ukraine and Georgia with low energy costs...

...who saw the Russians as trying to start the Cold War up again, after “we won...

...With television and the electoral machinery under their control, they can simply drown out the opposition and marginalize it...

...The parallel even extends to an alliance with a private economic oligarchy (then agrarian, now oil) and trumping law by force in political matters...

...The country is waiting for him to anoint his successor, a step he has hinted he will take when the presidential campaign opens next year...

...A “textbook” he recently composed defines democracy as “moving from coercion toward the techniques of persuasion,” to get the masses to accept “as far as possible, voluntarily” the decisions already made on high...

...First, Russian commentators took umbrage at remarks Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates made on February 7 before the House Armed Services Committee...

...But in mid-February, just to keep everyone guessing, Putin promoted his hawkish defense minister, Sergei B. Ivanov, to be another first deputy prime minister (yes, two first deputies, an old Soviet practice...

...Thanks to the oil revenues (still in the hands of the oligarchs, but at present reasonably taxed), the rising economic tide under Putin, averaging 6 per cent annually, is indeed lifting most boats...

...Sounding more aggrieved than belligerent about Western pressure and lecturing directed against Russia, Putin aimed to regain international respect for his nation: “Russia is a country with a history that spans more than a thousand years and practically always used the privilege to carry out an independent foreign policy...

...We are not going to change this tradition today...

...In particular, he bracketed “the danger posed by Iran and North Korea’s nuclear ambitions” with “the uncertain paths of China and Russia, which are both pursuing sophisticated military modernization programs...

...They are both from Putin’s St...

...To Moscow’s question about the reason for the NATO push, the Wall Street Journal responded candidly, “the answer, of course, is you...

...One likely Putin favorite is First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev, apparently probusiness and a foreignpolicy dove...

...Realistically, this gambit seems to be just another political gesture for America’s anti-Russian allies in Eastern Europe...

...On the European side, Eberhard Sandschneider of the German Council on Foreign Relations chided his colleagues for overreacting when Putin punctured their complacency: “People are certainly not accustomed any more to being told by Russian leaders what the flaws in their own policies are...

...The American delegation was led by Secretary Gates...

...Petersburg clique, though, so perhaps it does not make much difference...

...Russia blames everyone except itself for its neighbors’ distrust...

...The Bush Administration then went on to take in the Baltic states—a “historical blunder,” as the Los Angeles Times editorialized...

...On its part, the United States has undercut any chance of partnership by engaging in a contest for influence not only among the former satellite countries but in the former Soviet republics as well...

...Yeltsin, going further back, chose the tsarism of the period between the two revolutions of 1905 and 1917—with an elected Parliament, the original Duma, overshadowed by a strong executive (modeled not on the flabby Nicholas II but on his tough Prime Minister Pyotr A. Stolypin...

...For the time being, Russia seems destined to go its own way...

...Yeltsin’s anointed successor, Vladimir V. Putin, looks more and more like a cross between a Communist Party general secretary and a born-again tsar...

...That the so-called “oligarchs” who made off with vast public assets in the Yeltsin giveaway years do not quite deserve the level of sympathy they get in the West is another matter...

...Deputy Chief of Staff Surkov was there to deliver a panegyric comparing FDR and Putin as leaders who guided their respective countries out of great depressions and fought the business oligarchs...

...That’s how Putin’s neotsarism works...

...Equally galling has been the U.S...

...Somehow it did not stick...

...It ostensibly offers an alternative to the ruling United Russia Party, but is equally pro-Putin...

...Naturally, all countries pursue their national interest, but Moscow does not understand how to do this with any subtlety...

...He especially singled out the American aim of “expanding its economic, political and military presence in Russia’s traditional zones of influence...

...Putin is perhaps emulating Tsar Alexander III, quite tough enough in his own right...

...The Russians have never gotten over what they regard as the U.S...

...In preparation for legislative elections this coming December, the Kremlin has merged a series of fragmentary political movements into one dummy opposition party, A Just Russia...

...There has been much concern of late in the Russian media, however, about rising nationalism and where the country is heading on the global scene...

...they scream “provokatsiya” (setup) at the least provocation...

...While Foreign Minister Sergei V . Lavrov disavowed recourse to “a new arms race,” Russian Chief of Staff General Yuri Baluevsky, a longtime hawk, saw more danger to Russia now than during the Cold War...

...They are still in quest of the “Russian Idea,” as the émigré philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev put it in his book of that title some 80 years ago...

...A majority of Russians now believe their country is not European, but some sort of special “civilization...

...He did actually lead Russia out of the depression into which Yeltsin and his shock-therapy advisers had drawn it...

...For the past 300 years Russians have been debating what Russia is, where it is going, where it should go, and what its message should be to the outside world...

...See also New Books by NL Writers...

...Currently the Russians cite the American plan to situate missile defenses in P o land and the Czech Republic as further military pressure, dismissing claims that the installations are for protection against Iran or North Korea...

...Putin is finally pushing back: In his view, no partnership is better than a junior partnership...

...Some Russian commentators think a clue to Putin’s intentions was offered early in February when the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (the diplomatic training school) held a conference to mark the 125th birthday of Franklin D. Roosevelt (who of course happened to break the two-term tradition in America...

...It was the breakup of the Soviet Union, or to put it more accurately, the decolonization of the Russian Empire...

...Surkov’s greatest compliment to his boss: “Putin is the Roosevelt of our time...

...Then came the Munich Conference on Security Policy, a little-noticed annual event until President Putin used it this year as his platform for a blunt attack on the U.S...

...There are opposition parties—the Communists and the quasi-fascist Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia—and the more obnoxious the better because they will repel the majority of voters and assure formal power to United Russia and its housebroken allies...