Skybird
11-15-21, 07:33 AM
An interesting interpretation of the relevance of Putin's character and biography for the course Russian policy has set. The author is Vladislav L. Inozemzew, a well-known Russian economist and the founder and director of the Center for Post-Industrial Studies in Moscow. The text was published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and seems to have been translated from English to German, but I did not find the original English source, so here is a Google translation. Maybe it was not an online publishing, but is part of one of the books the author has written.
https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/kgb-mann-putin-oder-warum-der-westen-russland-verlor-ld.1649576
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Why did the West lose Russia? - Certainly there were strategic mistakes, but the decisive factor was the political nature of KGB man Vladimir Putin
There is still debate about why Russia turned away from the West after 2000. The reformer Boris Yeltsin was still looking for proximity to Europe and the USA; Vladimir Putin, calibrated to loyalty and power, could not do anything with "weak" civilian politicians who were bound by democratic rules of the game.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who turns seventy in 2022, has ruled his country for more than two decades and shows no signs of fatigue, is becoming increasingly anti-Western. It's hard not to keep asking yourself why and when this trend started. Many analysts recall Putin's bold economic reforms in the early 1990s, his speech in the German Bundestag, where he expressed his hope for progress in European integration and denounced Stalinist policies, and his willingness to join the West in its war on terror to support, but also to his sympathetic implementation of the G-8 meeting in St. Petersburg.
What went wrong and when did Russia take a different course? Did it start in 2003 after the US-led invasion of Iraq? At the time, Moscow seemed closely linked to Berlin and Paris. Or in 2004 after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine? But there, too, the gap seemed repairable. What exactly drove Russia, which is a genuine part of European civilization, away from the West?
I may be wrong, but I would argue that the deep reason for this split lies not in geopolitical disagreements, but rather in personal differences between the Russian leader and his Western counterparts. In order to understand the cause of the problem, one has to realize that Putin is not a politician or even a military man, but a spy who believes less in institutions, hierarchies or orders and more in loyalty, trust and networks.
Since Putin not only comes from the KGB, but has also gained experience with organized crime in St. Petersburg, he is used to the cult of power and personal loyalty. If you make friends, you make friends forever (and what else is Russia's new oligarchy made of); if someone promises something, one should keep it; if you cannot control what is accused of someone, that person does not deserve to be trusted. In the end, only the will and the promise count, not procedures and laws.
Putin was quite successful in dealing with Western leaders when he tried to develop close personal relationships with them based on trust, friendship and mutual respect between two strong leaders. It was the time when George W. Bush said that he had seen his soul in Putin's eyes, when a trusting relationship began between Putin and Messrs. Schröder and Berlusconi. Putin believed that the world was run by people, not institutions, as he did in his own country.
The first problems are likely to have arisen when Putin turned to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and asked him to hand over personal enemies such as the Chechen fighter Basayev or the former Russian oligarch Berezovsky to Russia. Blair's negative response, in which he referred to the English judicial system, was seen by Putin simply as a sign of weakness and unwillingness to cooperate. Of course, the betrayal of the principle of sovereignty during the US invasion of Iraq or his fear of "colored revolutions" orchestrated by the West in post-Soviet states such as Georgia and Ukraine fueled alienation, but they only contributed to it and did not create what had already been done before politically cemented.
Vladimir Putin doesn't believe in democracy and human rights - and it's not difficult to explain why. As a young man, he swore the oath on the Soviet regime, which was destroyed by a democratic revolution. He later tried everything to make a career under Anatoly Sobchak, an elected mayor of St. Petersburg - but he was voted out of office in 1996 and the future president was once again unemployed. He later infiltrated a group of liberals around President Boris Yeltsin and was ultimately chosen to succeed his position, even though he had not run for president.
It was difficult for a person unfamiliar with democracy to submit to the principle of institution and procedure - so, having been elected, Putin took full advantage of his position. He did what was in his nature that it is pointless to criticize him for it. The responsibility for the consequences of making him the leader of Russia rests with those who have been blind and stupid enough not to take into account these - rather obvious - features of Putin's personality.
It seems to me that the time when President Putin was ready, despite all the difficulties, to forge closer ties with the West, ended around 2006 when he realized that there were no heads of state in the Atlantic world with whom he could talk strong man could talk to strong man. There were then three other factors that widened the gap: first, Western expansion to Russia's borders within the framework of NATO and the EU; secondly, the West's “interference” in post-Soviet affairs with regard to Georgia and Ukraine (including the willingness to offer these countries the prospect of joining NATO) and thirdly, a new sense of its own strength when Putin confronted the Russian oligarchs around 2004 subjugated and smashed the opposition and oil revenues tripled. The solemn meeting in St. Petersburg in 2006 was seen as a farewell, while the Munich speech and the dispute at the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008 were preprogrammed.
Still, Putin's later confrontation with the West should not be viewed as something that cannot be reversed. Putin still seems to be more surprised than angry about the actions of the West. At the beginning of his reign he was amazed at the western prosperity; he wanted to become part of this world (for himself personally and for his country). But his past and values were hopelessly alien to most Western politicians. Even later he tried to break the ice: he complained to Obama about George W. Bush; he tried to make good contacts with both Sarkozy and Trump; he even believed, it seems to me, that he could win back Europe for his view of geopolitics during the negotiations in Minsk in 2015. Again and again he tried to find like-minded people here, such as Viktor Orban or Marine Le Pen. But there was actually no room for maneuver.
It would be a mistake to describe Vladimir Putin as an “Asian tyrant” in comparison to the “European enlightened statesmen”. He's a quintessentially European deal maker, but one that would have found his place in the early 19th or mid-20th century. Putin should have participated in the Congress of Vienna in 1815 or in the Munich Conference in 1938, as head of state in a world of integrating countries, a globalized economy and expanding international law, he doesn't really fit.
Under President Putin, Russia has regained its old sovereignty and acquired a new meaning. Russia may not be independent and self-sufficient in an economic sense, but it does have the ability to enforce the ideology it pursues and to exercise political power. Putin doesn't really care about the country's dependence on oil and gas exports and high-tech imports, most of which come from China - above all, he wants to be safe from human rights lawsuits and have all the powers he needs to defeat his enemies destroy.
He looks like the old Novgorod prince Alexander, who defeated the Teutonic knights in his country untouched by the Mongols in 1240 and then went to Karakoram and declared himself a vassal of the great khan, who "only" demanded tribute, but not them Intended to change Russian customs and curtail the power of the Orthodox Church. Later the prince was to be declared ruler over most of the Russian territories and a saint. A few weeks ago, a huge monument in honor of Alexander was inaugurated in Pskov, and President Putin was personally present.
The rift between Putin's Russia and the democratic West did not only emerge when Georgia or Ukraine became more independent from Russia, nor when the EU or NATO expanded eastwards. It broke out when the rulers in the Kremlin realized that the leaders of the Western nations were on the one hand not as "powerful" as they believed, and on the other hand wanted to "impose" values and procedures on Russia that could have destroyed Putin's power himself.
The Western public continues to ask: "Who lost Russia after 1991?" In my opinion, Russia was lost to the West when Putin and his loyal accomplices, made up of college friends, KGB colleagues and criminal buddies, took over Russia by surprise. Russia as a nation was and is predominantly shaped by Europe; the Russian people seem in many ways even more individualistic and rational than the people of the West. The country is easily governed by rulers and decrees and basically does not want to wage war with its neighbors.
But Russia is not a modern European society: it is a former empire that was never a nation-state; it is a trading state owned by the rulers, not a democratic republic - all of these should be taken into account when dealing with the country. The West should not be under the illusion that some geopolitical concessions and (or) an end to sanctions policies could appease Russia. He'd better wait until Russian society, which is at least a hundred years behind European societies, matures and realizes that freedom and prosperity are more helpful than “imperial glory”. It will take time for the Russians to catch up - and this time should be used to develop a strategy for integrating Russia into the West, a strategy that simply did not exist in either the late 1980s or the early 1990s was.
https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/kgb-mann-putin-oder-warum-der-westen-russland-verlor-ld.1649576
--------------------------------------------
Why did the West lose Russia? - Certainly there were strategic mistakes, but the decisive factor was the political nature of KGB man Vladimir Putin
There is still debate about why Russia turned away from the West after 2000. The reformer Boris Yeltsin was still looking for proximity to Europe and the USA; Vladimir Putin, calibrated to loyalty and power, could not do anything with "weak" civilian politicians who were bound by democratic rules of the game.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who turns seventy in 2022, has ruled his country for more than two decades and shows no signs of fatigue, is becoming increasingly anti-Western. It's hard not to keep asking yourself why and when this trend started. Many analysts recall Putin's bold economic reforms in the early 1990s, his speech in the German Bundestag, where he expressed his hope for progress in European integration and denounced Stalinist policies, and his willingness to join the West in its war on terror to support, but also to his sympathetic implementation of the G-8 meeting in St. Petersburg.
What went wrong and when did Russia take a different course? Did it start in 2003 after the US-led invasion of Iraq? At the time, Moscow seemed closely linked to Berlin and Paris. Or in 2004 after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine? But there, too, the gap seemed repairable. What exactly drove Russia, which is a genuine part of European civilization, away from the West?
I may be wrong, but I would argue that the deep reason for this split lies not in geopolitical disagreements, but rather in personal differences between the Russian leader and his Western counterparts. In order to understand the cause of the problem, one has to realize that Putin is not a politician or even a military man, but a spy who believes less in institutions, hierarchies or orders and more in loyalty, trust and networks.
Since Putin not only comes from the KGB, but has also gained experience with organized crime in St. Petersburg, he is used to the cult of power and personal loyalty. If you make friends, you make friends forever (and what else is Russia's new oligarchy made of); if someone promises something, one should keep it; if you cannot control what is accused of someone, that person does not deserve to be trusted. In the end, only the will and the promise count, not procedures and laws.
Putin was quite successful in dealing with Western leaders when he tried to develop close personal relationships with them based on trust, friendship and mutual respect between two strong leaders. It was the time when George W. Bush said that he had seen his soul in Putin's eyes, when a trusting relationship began between Putin and Messrs. Schröder and Berlusconi. Putin believed that the world was run by people, not institutions, as he did in his own country.
The first problems are likely to have arisen when Putin turned to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and asked him to hand over personal enemies such as the Chechen fighter Basayev or the former Russian oligarch Berezovsky to Russia. Blair's negative response, in which he referred to the English judicial system, was seen by Putin simply as a sign of weakness and unwillingness to cooperate. Of course, the betrayal of the principle of sovereignty during the US invasion of Iraq or his fear of "colored revolutions" orchestrated by the West in post-Soviet states such as Georgia and Ukraine fueled alienation, but they only contributed to it and did not create what had already been done before politically cemented.
Vladimir Putin doesn't believe in democracy and human rights - and it's not difficult to explain why. As a young man, he swore the oath on the Soviet regime, which was destroyed by a democratic revolution. He later tried everything to make a career under Anatoly Sobchak, an elected mayor of St. Petersburg - but he was voted out of office in 1996 and the future president was once again unemployed. He later infiltrated a group of liberals around President Boris Yeltsin and was ultimately chosen to succeed his position, even though he had not run for president.
It was difficult for a person unfamiliar with democracy to submit to the principle of institution and procedure - so, having been elected, Putin took full advantage of his position. He did what was in his nature that it is pointless to criticize him for it. The responsibility for the consequences of making him the leader of Russia rests with those who have been blind and stupid enough not to take into account these - rather obvious - features of Putin's personality.
It seems to me that the time when President Putin was ready, despite all the difficulties, to forge closer ties with the West, ended around 2006 when he realized that there were no heads of state in the Atlantic world with whom he could talk strong man could talk to strong man. There were then three other factors that widened the gap: first, Western expansion to Russia's borders within the framework of NATO and the EU; secondly, the West's “interference” in post-Soviet affairs with regard to Georgia and Ukraine (including the willingness to offer these countries the prospect of joining NATO) and thirdly, a new sense of its own strength when Putin confronted the Russian oligarchs around 2004 subjugated and smashed the opposition and oil revenues tripled. The solemn meeting in St. Petersburg in 2006 was seen as a farewell, while the Munich speech and the dispute at the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008 were preprogrammed.
Still, Putin's later confrontation with the West should not be viewed as something that cannot be reversed. Putin still seems to be more surprised than angry about the actions of the West. At the beginning of his reign he was amazed at the western prosperity; he wanted to become part of this world (for himself personally and for his country). But his past and values were hopelessly alien to most Western politicians. Even later he tried to break the ice: he complained to Obama about George W. Bush; he tried to make good contacts with both Sarkozy and Trump; he even believed, it seems to me, that he could win back Europe for his view of geopolitics during the negotiations in Minsk in 2015. Again and again he tried to find like-minded people here, such as Viktor Orban or Marine Le Pen. But there was actually no room for maneuver.
It would be a mistake to describe Vladimir Putin as an “Asian tyrant” in comparison to the “European enlightened statesmen”. He's a quintessentially European deal maker, but one that would have found his place in the early 19th or mid-20th century. Putin should have participated in the Congress of Vienna in 1815 or in the Munich Conference in 1938, as head of state in a world of integrating countries, a globalized economy and expanding international law, he doesn't really fit.
Under President Putin, Russia has regained its old sovereignty and acquired a new meaning. Russia may not be independent and self-sufficient in an economic sense, but it does have the ability to enforce the ideology it pursues and to exercise political power. Putin doesn't really care about the country's dependence on oil and gas exports and high-tech imports, most of which come from China - above all, he wants to be safe from human rights lawsuits and have all the powers he needs to defeat his enemies destroy.
He looks like the old Novgorod prince Alexander, who defeated the Teutonic knights in his country untouched by the Mongols in 1240 and then went to Karakoram and declared himself a vassal of the great khan, who "only" demanded tribute, but not them Intended to change Russian customs and curtail the power of the Orthodox Church. Later the prince was to be declared ruler over most of the Russian territories and a saint. A few weeks ago, a huge monument in honor of Alexander was inaugurated in Pskov, and President Putin was personally present.
The rift between Putin's Russia and the democratic West did not only emerge when Georgia or Ukraine became more independent from Russia, nor when the EU or NATO expanded eastwards. It broke out when the rulers in the Kremlin realized that the leaders of the Western nations were on the one hand not as "powerful" as they believed, and on the other hand wanted to "impose" values and procedures on Russia that could have destroyed Putin's power himself.
The Western public continues to ask: "Who lost Russia after 1991?" In my opinion, Russia was lost to the West when Putin and his loyal accomplices, made up of college friends, KGB colleagues and criminal buddies, took over Russia by surprise. Russia as a nation was and is predominantly shaped by Europe; the Russian people seem in many ways even more individualistic and rational than the people of the West. The country is easily governed by rulers and decrees and basically does not want to wage war with its neighbors.
But Russia is not a modern European society: it is a former empire that was never a nation-state; it is a trading state owned by the rulers, not a democratic republic - all of these should be taken into account when dealing with the country. The West should not be under the illusion that some geopolitical concessions and (or) an end to sanctions policies could appease Russia. He'd better wait until Russian society, which is at least a hundred years behind European societies, matures and realizes that freedom and prosperity are more helpful than “imperial glory”. It will take time for the Russians to catch up - and this time should be used to develop a strategy for integrating Russia into the West, a strategy that simply did not exist in either the late 1980s or the early 1990s was.