Putin: The West’s Problem, Russia’s Hero

In a country where cynicism is as deep as the winter is long, the popularity of Putin is notable. Trained as a KGB officer, Putin comes from the elite officer class in St. Petersburg, the old imperial capital and still the jewel of Russian cities, and the least typical.Putin was not a career politician. He was instead a career intelligence officer and a member of the Communist party, from which he is said not to have resigned. As a KGB officer, Putin made it no further than Dresden in communist East Germany. He made major, but he was not a great success–if he had been, he would have been posted outside of the Soviet bloc.Since tsarist times, Russian leaders have been known for their excesses. But Putin has shown the world a more modest face. He does not drink and his favorite recreation is judo. It is tempting to read Putin’s character through judo, in which he holds a black belt. In particular it is tempting to note that judo is the science of leveraging your opponent’s strength. Historians will have a field day with the role of judo in Putin’s governing style.That style is crafty, autocratic, and at times lawless. In Putin’s Kremlin, the law is a malleable thing. It is bent and circumvented to the national interest as defined by Putin and his administration. His team is far more powerful than the Duma, now a rubber-stamp parliament. The reformers of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years have been replaced by the siloviki—veterans of the security and military ranks.

The Putin administration may be weak on economics and slough off legal norms, but it understands power and knows how to project it from Moscow across Russia’s vast and sparsely populated land. The population of 140 million is spread over 11 time zones.

Putin has his problems, including the bloody war in Chechnya, rural poverty, an aging and declining population, and the inefficient legacies of communism But he is also the luckiest Russian ruler in memory. With the world oil price heading toward $100 a barrel, Putin has money. He has a carrot as well as a stick, and he is adept at using both.

With the world’s largest natural gas reserves and second largest oil reserves, Russia is a power in Europe and in Asia. It plays rough and it plays dirty. Russia has violated the terms of nearly every oil and gas contract it has signed with the West; it has imposed gross and confiscatory taxes on Western production, and it has increased environmental restrictions in order to confiscate Western leases on Sakhalin Island, a far eastern Russian territory. Yet the energy hungry in the West have come back for more. Last month, France’s Total S.A. and Norway’s StatoilHydro ASA were both elated to get 25 percent positions in a Barents Sea project. In both cases, Putin is said only to have agreed after receiving calls from the presidents of France and Norway. Homage you might call it.

Russians applaud Putin’s toughness in standing up to the world in general, and the United States in particular. But it is his stand against Russian billionaires that most delights them.

In the breakup of the Soviet Union, immense fortunes were made in the privatization of state assets. The beneficiaries are known as the oligarchs, and they are hated. When Putin, with little legal basis, broke up Yukos Oil Company and imprisoned its founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russians cheered. When a dissident and friend of a refugee oligarch in London was murdered with polonium, Russians shrugged, secure that their leader would brook no nonsense. His popularity rating soared above 80 percent.

The Putin popularity poses some questions: Will he really step down next year as the constitution requires, or will he become prime minister and govern that way? Or will he become head of Gazprom, the Russian energy colossus, and become an oligarch himself? Your move, comrade president.