Former National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill and Brookings foreign policy fellow Clifford Grady have written a deeply researched very important and very dense book profiling Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is America’s loss that Fiona Hill left the National Security Council only a few weeks ago. The one very critical lesson to be learned from this book is that Donald Trump should not be allowed to be alone in a room with Putin. Simply put, Trump is short-term and transactional while Putin is long-term and strategic.
The authors trace Putin’s life from growing up in the deprivation of postwar Leningrad to his rise to power in Moscow via his work as a KGB operative in East Germany. Putin comes into his own working for Anatoly Sobchak, a reform minded mayor of now Saint Petersburg in the early 1990s. From there he goes to Moscow where he has a ringside seat into the disintegration of the Yeltsin government and the economic failure of post-Soviet Russia. In succeeding Yeltsin Putin’s mandate is to restore order and to restore the economy.
Putin sees himself as the CEO of Russia and as an heir to the early 20th Century Russian reformer Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin. What they have in common is that they both viewed themselves as modernizers within the context of authoritarian capitalism. Although Putin may view himself as a free marketer, he really runs a crony capitalist society where he has leverage over the oligarchs by having the ability to throw them in jail for tax law violations.
Above all else Putin is a statist. Everything has to be done in service of the state. He is critical of the Bolsheviks in that they betrayed the Russian state by fomenting revolution while its soldiers were dying in World War I. As an heir to the Tsars Putin sees Russia as a bulwark against western liberalism and he has allied himself with the Russian Orthodox Church against the perceived licentiousness of the West.
In thinking strategically Putin first had to put Russia’s fiscal house in order. In doing that he was aided by one of his Leningrad buddies, Alexie Kudrin who served as his finance minister. Widely respected in the West, Kudrin paid off Russia’s foreign debt and thereby removed a major leverage point the West had over Russia. Putin learned that from the forced withdrawal of Russian troops from the Baltic States in 1994 when the West threatened to withhold funding for Yeltsin’s government. He learns from history.
With respect to foreign policy Putin’s goal is to restore Russian greatness and to gradually prevail in the independent states that were formed after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Hence that annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine.
The book ends in 2014 so there is no discussion of Russian involvement in our 2016 presidential election. But is seems to me that involvement is part in parcel to the very patient long game that Putin is playing against the West and thus far he appears to be winning.
As I said at the outset this book is a hard read, but if you want to get great insights into how Putin thinks and Russia’s role in the world it is well worth the slog.
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