Comparing Four Russian Rulers: Nicholas II, Lenin, Stalin and Putin

                                    November 8, 2017

 

Class Materials

 

I. Nicholas II: “He would have made a wonderful cobbler”[1]

 

            Nicholas II was born in 1868, reigned as Tsar from 1894 to 1917 and was killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. His father was Tsar Alexander III, and his mother was Princess Dagmar of Denmark. He had scarcely any Russian blood in him. The French ambassador, Maurice Paléologue, calculated that Nicholas was only 1/28^th Russian.[2]

            Harrison Salisbury describes his education thusly: “He was not stupid but his education left much to be desired.”[3] Nicholas had an English tutor and spoke English as well as he spoke Russian. Nicholas and his wife always corresponded in English.[4] His primary education was provided by K.P. Pobedonostsev, chief procurator of the Holy Synod, a particularly reactionary choice. He told his young charge, “Russia was a special country where reforms and a free press would inevitably result in decadence and disorder.”[5]

            The result of his limited education was that when his father died unexpectedly at age 54, Nicholas told a cousin, “I am not ready to be the Tsar.”[6]

            As a young man he joined the Guards, a traditional rite for children of the aristocracy. The Guards did little fighting or training: “Drinking, gypsies, duels—these were the Guards’ gentlemanly occupations.”[7] Prior to his marriage, he had a vibrant social life, including a brief affair with a Jewish lady that his father put a stop to. He then had a more significant affair with the ballerina Mathilde Kschessinka. The affair ended just prior to his marriage to Alix, daughter of the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt. Her father had married a daughter of Queen Victoria, and Alix was a hemophilia carrier.[8]

He had little interest in government. At age 24, two years before he became Tsar, Nicholas wrote in his diary:

            “Two days ago I was made a member of the Finance Committee: much honour but little pleasure. Before the meeting…I received six members of this institution, the existence of which, I must admit, I had never suspected.”[9] (Italics in the original)

            The modernizing minister Sergei Witte told Alexander III that his son’s training would be helped if he were made chairman of the committee for building the Trans-Siberian Railway (built between 1891 and 1916). “What?”, replied the Tsar. “But you know the Tsarevich well. Have you ever had a single serious conversation with him?” “No, sire, I have not had the pleasure of such a conversation with the heir to the throne.” Tsar Alexander responded: “Why he is a mere child. He has only childish notions. How could he preside over that committee?”[10]

            Who was Nicholas II? He was devoted to his wife and the Russian Orthodox Church. He believed in autocracy and his duty to pass this on to his son—with no allowance for any change. As he told an audience in 1895: “Recently at certain meetings of local councils we have heard voices of people carried away by senseless dreams.”[11]

            He was extremely anti-Semitic: he never took action against the pogroms that periodically plagued the Ukraine and other areas.[12] He wrote this to his mother on October 27, 1905, when his granting of a limited constitution had not ended the 1905 Revolution:

“The people are indignant at the insolence and the audacity of the revolutionaries and the socialists and since nine-tenths of them are Jews all the hatred is directed against them.”[13]

            One of his biographers sums up who Nicholas was in this unflattering passage:

 

“His dream had been to be a sailor, to travel to go on voyages around the world. ….As heir to the throne, he liked ceremonies and festivities, first nights at the opera, the life of high society generally….But he avoided all serious talk, and especially talk about the situation in the country: ministers were appointed to see to all that. His only duty was to keep Russia great, and to maintain intact the powers that God had entrusted to him.”[14]

            Nicholas II had expansionist dreams that would make even Vladimir Putin pause. His Minister of War, Kuropatkin, said this to Interior Minister Sergei Witte:

 

“Our Emperor has grandiose plans in his head: to seize Manchuria for Russia and to go on from there to unite Korea with Russia. He dreams of  putting Tibet under his power. He wants to take Persia and occupy not only the Bosporus but also the Dardanelles. When we ministers hold back the Tsar from achieving his dreams he feels in his disappointment all the more certain that he is right and that he understands better than we the glory and the good of Russia.”[15]

 

            Nicholas seemed mild-mannered, but he did not hesitate to authorize violence to protect the autocracy. The late Harvard Professor Richard Pipes described violence in the years before Nicholas II:

“In the decade of the 1880s, there were only seventeen persons executed for political crimes, all of them perpetrators of assassination or assassination attempts. During the reign of Alexander III [1881-1894]—a period of severe repression—a total of four thousand persons were detained and interrogated in connection with political offenses. These are very insignificant figures when one considers Russia’s size and the massiveness of the machinery set up to deal with subversion.”[16]

            In significant contrast, under Nicholas II between 1906 and 1910, 5,735 citizens were sentenced to death for political crimes; of these, 3,741 were actually executed. 37,620 additional citizens were sentenced for political opposition to the Tsar-some sent to forced labor in Siberia, some to prisons, some to disciplinary battalions in the army and some to exile in Siberia (including of course Stalin, Molotov and other Bolsheviks). As Nicholas told one of his ministers, explaining his reluctance to approve a Duma to end the Revolution of 1905 “…I have no right to renounce that which was bequeathed to me by my forefathers and which I must hand down unimpaired to my son.”[17]

            One surely unintended consequence of violence against political opponents was that his successors, the Bolsheviks, learned a great deal. Professor Pipes describes it like this:

“[S]o the techniques of police rule, introduced piecemeal by the Russian imperial regime, were first utilized to their fullest potential by their one-time victims, the revolutionaries. The people who came to power in Russia in October 1917 had grown up under the regime of [imperial police rule]; this was the only Russian constitution they had ever known. All of them had been shadowed, searched, arrested, kept in jail, and sentenced to exile by the political police of the imperial government….Their vision of a proper government was a mirror image of the imperial regime’s to the extent that what the latter called ‘subversion’ they labeled ‘counter-revolution.”[18]

            In World War I’s first year, the Tsar’s army had no success against the Germans and only a little success against the Austrians. The solution, Nicholas thought, was for him to lead the army. He said in August 1915, “At this critical moment, the country’s supreme leader must stand at the army’s head.” One biographer notes, “This decision seemed insane to everyone.”[19]

            At a meeting of the Council of Ministers on August 6, 1915, War Minister Polivanov described disasters at the front and broke the command change news:

“The military situation has ..,worsened. The army is no longer retreating, it is running away….Headquarters have completely lost their head.

“But no matter how terrible things are at the front, there is a far more dreadful event threatening Russia….When I reported to His Majesty this morning he announced to me his intention to dismiss the Grand Duke and to assume, himself, the supreme command of our armies.”[20]

            Nicholas would not back down. God and Rasputin urged him on this course. He later told his ministers: “…When I stood before the great icon of Our Lord in our chapel at Tsarskoe Selo, an inner voice called on me to take the supreme command…independently of all that had been said to me by our Friend [Rasputin].”[21]

            As things deteriorated in late 1916, Sir George Buchanan gave one last warning to the Tsar:

“Your Majesty, if I may be permitted to say so, has but one safe course open to you—namely to break down the barrier that separates you from your people and to regain their confidence.” Nicholas drew himself up and replied, ”Do you mean that I am to regain the confidence of my people or that they are to regain my confidence?”

Of this exchange,  Edward Crankshaw writes: “But he was still Tsar and so long as he was Tsar he would keep his people—and the British Ambassador—in their places.”[22]

As the regime lost control of Petrograd in late February 2017, people remarked on his strange indifference at that terrible time. At army headquarters, he wrote in his diary two days before being told he had to abdicate: “Wrote Alix and walked down the Bobruisky Road to the chapel. The day was clear and frosty. In the evening played dominoes.”[23]

At the end he turned again to violence to stop the February 1917 food riots in Petrograd. On February 26, 1917, Nicholas ordered General Khabalov to stop the riots in Petrograd: “I order that the disorders in the capital, intolerable during these difficult times of war with Germany and Austria, be ended tomorrow, Nicholas.” General Khabalov later said, “The Tsar had given his orders. It was necessary to use force.”[24]

A Yale graduate, Robert Massie, sums up Tsar Nicholas II:

“Essentially, the tragedy of Nicholas II was that he appeared in the wrong place in history. Equipped by education to rule in the nineteenth century, equipped by temperament to reign in England, he lived and reigned in Russia in the twentieth century. There the world he understood was breaking up around him.”[25]

 

 

 

II. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)[26]

 

On April 8, 1887, a 21-year-old natural science student in St. Petersburg was hauled before an imperial court. He was an organizer of a student group called “Terrorists’ Faction of The People’s Will”—an impressive title, but it had only five members. They were all hanged at Shlisselberg Fortress in May, 1887, for planning to bomb Tsar Alexander III, something they admitted they were trying to do.

The student’s mother, herself the widow of a rather high-ranking education official in the Volga provinces, pulled every string she could to prevent the hanging. But her efforts failed. An hour before sunrise the student and his four fellow conspirators were taken to a courtyard and read the sentence of death by hanging. An official noted in his report that each remained calm and that each refused to see a priest.

Thus, young Aleksandr Ulyanov was hanged. No person knows what effect this hanging had on Aleksandr’s 17-year-old brother, Vladimir. In later years, Vladimir did not often refer to Aleksandr. Vladimir in his own career picked up some useful aspects of The People’s Will and its offshoots—the requirement that only dedicated revolutionaries could join the group and the devotion to the conspiratorial craft as opposed to open political activity.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, was born in 1870 in the Volga town of Simbirsk, the second son and third child of the inspector of the public schools in the province of Simbirsk, east of Moscow. His father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, had married his mother, Maria Blank, in 1863. They had six children, five of whom lived to adulthood; of these, all became revolutionaries. Maria was descended from German families invited by Catherine the Great in 1762 to settle on the lower Volga.

From all reports he was a normal child of a happy and economically comfortable, but far from rich, middle class family. He graduated first in his high school class, receiving an excellent in all subjects, including conduct, except for a “very good” in logic. Lenin’s father died early in 1886 prior to Lenin’s high school graduation.

Of some note is the name of Lenin’s high school principal—Fyodor Kerensky, the father of the last head of the Provisional Government of 1917, Alexander Kerensky.

Lenin was admitted as a law student at the University of Kazan, a location close to the family farm where his mother chose to live after her husband’s death. Lenin was expelled from university in his first year, together with 45 other students as the result of the protest of some new policy adopted by the central education ministry. He spent his first two nights in a jail on that occasion.

His petition for readmission was denied; also, his request to study abroad was denied and his name was put on a list of those barred from state employment. “Circumstances,” one historian wrote, “were pushing Lenin toward the one career that remained open, that of a revolutionary.”

His mother, having lost her older son, Alexander, to revolutionary activity in 1887, decided to convert Lenin to the placid life of a gentleman farmer—something this intense man must have hated. Lenin stayed on the farm for three years, taking little interest in farming but encouraging his mother’s continuing petitions to permit him to resume his education. He must have arrived at the farm with a hatred of the Tsarist regime—a regime that had killed his brother and had closed all doors to him for participating one time in a minor student protest.

The excellent student read constantly during his three years as a gentleman farmer and had long conversations with area radicals. He emerged not as the vague socialist terrorist his brother had been but instead as a Marxist.

In 1891, his mother’s petitions were granted. Lenin was allowed a period of self study and then he sat for law examinations in St. Petersburg. He passed with the highest possible grades without attending any classes since his expulsion from the University of Kazan three years earlier. He practiced law briefly in Kazan and moved to St. Petersburg in 1893. Technically, he was a lawyer, but he devoted most of his time to socialist activities. His mother provided enough money for him to ignore law, and, in any event, he lived simply.

From 1893 to 1895, Lenin plunged into and quickly became the leader of the small Marxist contingent in St. Petersburg. His doctrine taught him that the road to revolution was long and laborious—rather than terror, his St. Petersburg life was one of patient indoctrination, organization and agitation among St.Petersburg’s growing industrial worker population.  Lenin made a brief visit abroad in 1895 to meet the exiled leaders of Russian Marxism, Plekhanov and Axelrod. Encouraged by their praise for his work, he returned to St. Petersburg in the fall of 1895 to promote strikes among the city’s notoriously mistreated workers.

The police knew all about him; as with almost all other subversive organizations, they had penetrated the Marxists. In 1895, Lenin was picked up and imprisoned for 15 months while the police investigated his case. There was nothing to investigate—they knew he was an illegal socialist agitator. His 15 months as a guest of the Tsarist government were filled with intensive political activity, primarily writing. In one of those odd quirks of Tsarist Russia, political prisoners were given numerous privileges, including paper, pens, books and regular visitors. This was not due to any liberalism on the part of the government but instead because political prisoners were likely to be gentlemen and often relatives of influential persons.

Lenin was sentenced to three years’ exile in Siberia, from 1897 to 1900. His wife to be, Nadezhda Krupskaya (“Nadezhda” means “hope”) was also exiled; they were required to marry in order to be together in exile. Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya (called “Nadya”) was a Marxist activist who could hold her own in political debate.

Exile under Tsar Nicholas II was not up to Stalin’s later standards. Lenin was free to live in and around his small Siberian town. He filled his time with research and writing his best-known book, The Development of Capitalism in Russia. When his exile ended, he was allowed to return to European Russia but not to a major city. So, in the revolutionary fashion of the day, he picked a small town in the west and in 1900 slipped over the border into Western Europe. Krupskaya joined him when her exile ended the next year. The man who would change Russia was 30; he had lived unimprisoned in the capital for two years; he would stay away from Russia for the next 17 years, except for six months during the 1905 revolution.

Lenin joined the small circle of Marxist Russians living at times in Geneva, Brussels, Zurich and, for the longest period, London. He was a doctrinaire, purposeful polemicist and agitator who quickly overshadowed the leaders Plekhanov and Axelrod. Lenin shortly began publishing a periodical called Iskra, which means “the spark.” The title commemorated a Decembrist poet who wrote, “Out of this spark will come a conflagration.” Iskra was smuggled into Russia to urge the proletariat on to political and economic revolution.

In preparation for the 2^nd Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (the Communist party’s official name), Lenin formulated his approach to the organization of the party. Briefly stated, the party must be a relatively small, tightly disciplined organization of dedicated members. The masses were not to be ignored; they were to be organized and orchestrated; but the show would be run by the small, dedicated party. The opposing view at the Congress was that the party should be organized along broad lines, a mass organization led by those selected by the masses.

Why did Lenin come down on the side of the small, dedicated party? Marxism was made for the patient, even the complacent. Scientific laws, according to Marx, made it inevitable that history would produce a Marxist Russia after the full development of capitalism; and this made for patient party members. But that was foreign to Lenin’s nature. Temperamentally, he wanted to give historical inevitability a push. It did not suit him to wait patiently for the fulfillment promised to the faithful by the Communist doctrine.

The Second Congress convened in Brussels (later in London) in a filthy warehouse, attended by around 45 for the most part equally filthy delegates—refugees from the émigré coffee houses and Russian exile ghettos of the major cities of Western Europe. Lenin’s views in a murky doctrinal dispute prevailed by a small (and contested) margin. The winners took the title “Bolsheviks” (majority), and the losers (including Trotsky), “Mensheviks: (minority).

The dedicated member of the vanguard of revolution was epitomized by Lenin’s response in 1907 when he was asked what would happen when the revolution came. He answered jocularly that people would be asked whether they were for or against the revolution. If against, they would be stood up against a wall and shot. If for the revolution, they would be entitled to work with the Bolsheviks. In the event, that pretty much happened.

[Lenin’s activities in the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions, the Civil War and the New Economic Policy are covered in Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Russian Revolution.]

Some observations and conclusions about Lenin.

Robert Payne: “The lawlessness of Communist rule was of Lenin’s own making. Ordinary human morality never concerned him; from the beginning he was using words like ‘extermination’ and ‘merciless’ as though they were counters in a game….Yet he had, on occasions, the intellectual detachment which permitted him to see that some of his decrees were senseless, and with the New Economic Policy he admitted the error of his ways. Stalin, possessing no intellectual detachment, never admitted the error of is ways, and he went on murdering mercilessly….”

Dmitri Volkogonov: “He saw only class and economic motives, and the only value he was prepared to defend was power. There is no hint in any of the vast array of archival material to suggest that he was troubled by his conscience about any of the long list of destructive measures he took.”

“When he took control of the revolutionary government, Lenin was armed only with theoretical plans, and had never governed anyone other than his wife. He was simply helpless when confronted with the mountain of Russia’s problems. All he could think of was to confiscate, requisition and expropriate everything. To do this he needed only one device, merciless dictatorship.”

Robert Service: “He was in his way a visionary, with the fire of an Old Testament prophet. He genuinely wanted a better (nay, a perfect) world for mankind; and he was convinced that Marxist doctrines provided an unrivalled tool to analyze reality, and predict and determine the future.”

“No less than Elijah and Isaiah, however, he lacked tolerance. His Marxism evinced a fanaticism which was common in varying degrees among Bolsheviks—and it was alloyed with non-Marxist doctrines and impulses which he did not acknowledge.”

 

 

 

III. Stalin

 

            [Stalin’s life is described in the supplemental materials for October 18, and his actions are described in those materials and Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Russian Revolution.]

            Here a repeat of two observations about Stalin:

            Pasternak: “the most terrifying person [I have] ever seen—a crab-like dwarf with a yellow, pockmarked face and a bristling moustache.”

            The late Princeton Professor Robert Tucker:

            “A gifted and unusually sensitive child suffered bad early experiences, including his father’s brutality toward himself and his mother, and emerged as a hardened, vigilant youngster with a self-idealizing tendency, on the one hand, and a vengeful streak and indomitable will to fight and to win, on the other.”

            Additional observations begin with the late Harvard Professor Adam Ulam:

            “[W]e should not make the error of seeing Stalin as an inevitable result of his ideology, his era, or his society. But all of them in varying ways contributed to enabling this extraordinary man to become an unprecedentedly powerful and cruel master of a vast country. One smiles at Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s comment after meeting the dictator: ‘I thought to myself that any American having Stalin’s personality and approach might well reach high public office in my own country.’ But the remark reflects not only Stalin’s capacity to dissimulate but also his genuine ability. He did have gifts valuable to a statesman of any culture: tenacity of purpose, a sense of timing, a ruthless approach to power. But it was the system that he inherited, and to be sure developed, which enabled this ruthlessness to assume a form of criminal cruelty and one man’s obsessions to become a nation’s tragedy. Those obsessions grew and were nourished by years of conspiracy required when in the underground, but they continued when Stalin was in power.”[27]

            More Ulam:

            “[H]e was corrupted by absolute power. Absolute power turned a ruthless politician—but within the Soviet context not unusually ruthless—into a monstrous tyrant. And faith in the creed of Marxism-Leninism endowed him with a sense of his historic mission and enabled him to stifle any scruples and inhibition in protecting that power.

            ….The terror was necessary, not only to keep men obedient, but even more to make them believe. Without terror, who would have failed to notice the patent absurdity of Stalin’s rule—the whole Soviet nation and many in foreign parts prostrating themselves before one man; platitudes being worshipped as sublime wisdom; so many people ready to accept a vision of the world in which a Witches’ Sabbath of ‘traitors’, ‘wreckers’, and ‘murderer doctors’ is continuous.”[28]

            Princeton Professor Stephen Kotkin:

            “[T]he determination of this young man of humble origins to make something of himself, his cunning, his honing of organizational talents would help transform the entire structural landscape of the early Bolshevik revolution…Stalin brutally, artfully, indefatigably built a personal dictatorship within the Bolshevik dictatorship.”[29]

            More Kotkin:

            “Stalin made history, rearranging the entire socioeconomic landscape of one-sixth of the earth. Right through mass rebellion, mass starvation, cannibalism, the destruction of the country’s livestock and unprecedented political destabilization, Stalin did not flinch….Stalin was uncommonly skillful in building an awesome personal dictatorship but also a bungler, getting fascism wrong stumbling in foreign policy…History, for better and for worse, is made by those who never give up.”[30]

            Last, leading Soviet scholar Robert Conquest:

            “One of his outstanding characteristics was an ability to give the impression of calm and even benignity, while in fact harbouring plans of massive vengefulness.

….He combined patience with outbursts of capricious rage. He combined a certain heavy ordinariness with the ability to force through quite extraordinary social and political changes. And his inner drives, or demons, never rested.

….Overall Stalin thus gives the impression of a large and crude clay-like figure, a golem, into which a demonic spark has been instilled. It is in this sense that we might broadly sum him up, in Churchill’s phrase, as ‘an unnatural man’.”[31]

           

 

IV. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin[32]

 

            Vladimir Putin (called “Volodya”) was born in 1952 in Leningrad, the third son of Vladimir and Maria Putin. Putin’s father had been wounded fighting to defend Leningrad from the Germans and walked with a limp from his injury. Both of his brothers had been killed during the war. After the war, he worked in the Yegorov Factory, building railway carriages and serving as the factory’s Communist Party representative.  Maria held various menial jobs—cleaning buildings and delivering bread.

            As a result of the immigration from the countryside to the cities during the first two five-year plans, collectivization and the famine of 1933, housing in cities was miserable.  The position as the party’s representative at a major factory in Leningrad gave the couple the right to live in a 180 square foot single room on the walk-up fifth floor of a 19^th century apartment building. Several families shared a kitchen and a toilet; there was no bath—one had to go to the public baths to clean up. A wood-burning stove heated the apartment. By the late 1960s, the Putins also had three-room dacha in Tosno, a small village outside Leningrad. In 1977, as a retired, disabled war veteran Putin’s father was granted a two-bedroom apartment, about 300 square feet; and young Vladimir at age 25 had his own bedroom for the first time.

            When Putin was seven weeks old, his mother and a neighbor took him to Transfiguration Cathedral and had him baptized; they did not tell Putin’s Communist father.

            At school, Putin was a somewhat troublesome student. His misconduct in class initially kept him out of the Pioneers, the Party’s youth organization. But he took to martial arts, turned around his school performance and gained admittance to Leningrad State University to study law—a major recommended by the KGB when he asked what field he should study in order to serve in the KGB. At university, he did not smoke or drink and devoted his spare time to martial arts.

            When he graduated from university in 1975, he joined the KGB, went through training and worked in counter-intelligence in Leningrad. In 1980, he met Lyudmila Shkrebneva, a blue-eyed flight attendant for Aeroflot who lived in Kaliningrad in what formerly was East Prussia and was seized by the Soviet Union after the war. In 1983, they married and took a honeymoon in the Crimea. The couple had two daughters.

            In 1985, Putin was assigned to Dresden, a foreign intelligence officer at last, but in a less-than-important post. In East Germany under Konstantin Chernneko and then Mikhail Gorbachev, the KGB worked with the East German secret police, the Stasi, to control East Germans and to follow Westerners who visited. With Lyudmila he got his first home of his own: a four-room apartment of 700 square feet. Putin stood out among his fellow KGB officers in that he was not anti-Semitic and he expressed admiration for the dissidents Sakarov and Solzhenitsyn.

            When the Soviets permitted the Berlin Wall to fall in 1989, Putin witnessed riots outside KGB and Stasi offices in Dresden and seemed not to think much of what he viewed as mob rule.

            In 1990, Putin was assigned to Leningrad as a KGB watchdog over Leningrad State University. Although the Soviet Union still existed, relatively free local elections were now permitted; and, in Leningrad, the Communist Party’s candidates were defeated. A law professor under whom Putin had studied, Anatoly Sobchak, was elected chair of Leningrad’s city council. He made Putin his liason to the KGB. Putin now worked for the first time for a democratically elected official.

            In August 1991, a putsch led by Gorbachev’s vice president, the ministers of defense and interior and the chairman of the KGB failed when troops in Moscow and Leningrad would not follow orders to arrest various officials (including Boris Yeltsin and Anatoly Sobchak) and to seize government offices. Vladimir and Lyudmila were on vacation in Kaliningrad. He hurried back to Leningrad; for some reason the plotters had allowed normal air service to continue without interruption. The coup was failing, the KGB had helped lead it, there was no future in the KGB it seemed, and so he resigned from the KGB and chose the side of democracy.

            Myers describes Putin’s feelings at this time: “He was, by all accounts, deeply ambivalent. A year and a half  before, he returned from the crumbling Soviet empire in Eastern Europe dismayed by what he considered the abandonment of its comrade nations…and the triumph of NATO, the West and capitalism. Now the Soviet Union itself was coming apart at the seams, its republics, including Russia moving entropically toward independence It meant the dismemberment of his country, and the putsch’s leaders, he would later say, simply aimed to stop that. He considered theirs a noble purpose.”[33]

            And this from Myers: “Not at all by his design, Vladimir Putin landed on the winning side of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And yet he did not share the euphoria that many Russians felt. On the contrary, the experience was for him a difficult one. Lyudmila and his friends described the period as one of the most trying of his life.”[34]

            After defeat of the coup attempt, Putin became Leningrad’s (soon to be St. Petersburg again) head of foreign affairs and later deputy mayor in charge of foreign investment.  As such, he met U. S. Secretary of State, James A. Baker, III, who visited the city. The next week he flew to London with Sobchak to meet the British Prime Minister, John Major. It was Putin’s first trip to the West. He later acted as translator for Sobchak’s meetings with German officials and with Henry Kissinger, who was met at the airport by Putin. On the ride into town they talked about Putin’s KGB past. Kissinger delighted him by saying, “All decent people got their start in intelligence. I did too.” Kissinger had been a sergeant in U.S. Army Intelligence during World War II.

            The  deputy mayor attracted considerable foreign investment: Dresdner Bank, Deutsche Bank, Crédit Lyonnaise, Otis Elevator and Proctor & Gamble. He met several times with Ted Turner and Jane Fonda in 1993 to plan the Goodwill Games for 1994 (which turned out the be an embarrassment for the city).

            Myers sums up Putin by the mid-1990s: “[H]e had a quintessentially Russian understanding that assistance, in crisis or not, came through connections, the exchange of favors. He always remembered acts of loyalty…just as he never forgave betrayals.”[35]

            Putin’s job had little future once Sobchak lost his reelection bid in 1994; and he was fired in the summer of 1996 after Yeltsin’s unexpected reelection as Russia’s President. Vladimir Putin was 42 and jobless. He and some businessmen he met as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg had built homes on a lake 70 miles from town, and he moved there after losing his job. In August, his small home burned due to a faulty heater, and he raced into the house to save his money: $5,000. If he engaged in corrupt activities as deputy mayor, he was not paid very much. But he had helped these friends become owners of Bank Rossiya, an almost defunct bank that had held KGB funds.

            The machinations surrounding Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection and his presidency would put a banana republic to shame. Yeltsin went from having a 3% approval rating in 1995 to victory largely because of financial support of those who had acquired the state’s controlling interest in major industries in exchange for loans to keep the country’s budget afloat: Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Fridman, Vladimir Gusinsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In the event, some St. Petersburg friends arranged for Putin to be legal advisor to Pavel Borodin, new head of the agency in charge of property formerly belonging to the Soviet Union and the Communist Party—about $600 billion in value.

            Within seven months, he was a deputy chief of staff to the President and in charge of all state assets and investigations into corruption relating to them. He quickly went after corruption; and many were impressed with his diligence in seeking to reassert Kremlin authority (though selectively) and replenish coffers. The results were limited because a well-to-do defendant could manipulate the judicial system.

            In the aftermath of the 1998 economic crisis when a drop in oil prices raised questions about the viability of the Russian state, Yeltsin made Putin head of the FSB (Federal Security Service), the successor to the KGB. As the economic turmoil slowed, problems in the Caucasus and objections by some oligarchs to investigations rose up. Yeltsin seemed a clear loser in the 2000 election. He went through a series of Prime Ministers, and to Putin’s great surprise named him Prime Minister in August 1999. Yeltsin hinted that Putin would be his candidate for President in 2000.

            But first Putin had to deal with Chechnya and its border war with Dagestan. To Putin this looked like a continuation of the dissolution of the country that had begun in 1991. So far Russia’s leaders had acted timidly in the Caucasus, but Putin thought differently. In the Caucasus, he said he was going “to bang the hell out of those bandits.” After some apartment house bombs killed Moscow residents, Putin’s forceful put down of the Chechens was popular among the masses. In three months, he rose in the presidential polls from 2% to 27%. By December 1999, he polled at 40%. Yeltsin then called him to his dacha and told him he wanted to step down prior to the 2000 election.

            On December 31, 1999, Yeltsin resigned as President of Russia. Under the Constitution, the Prime Minister became acting President until a special election to be held in 90 days. His opponents had been preparing leisurely for the regularly scheduled election in June 2000. Putin’s first act was a decree protecting Yeltsin from prosecution for corruption and from any searches or seizures.

            In the election, Putin, helped by his strong stand in the Caucasus, won 53% of the vote, well ahead of the Communist Party candidate’s 29%. He was not harmed by rumors that one or more of the terrorist bombings or attempted bombings in Russia had been staged by him or his supporters.

            There promptly began a now 17-year era of unexplained killings, arrests of rich oligarchs, financial machinations, somewhat or totally rigged elections and foreign military adventures. His popularity in the early years was greatly aided by increases in the price of oil (the major export). The GDP grew 10% in Putin’s first year in office and averaged 6% growth for the first seven years.

These materials conclude with a sampling (certainly not exhaustive) of these events.

            Four days after Putin’s inauguration FSB officers executed search warrants on the media company that owned NTV, a popular television network owned by one Vladimir Gusinsky. That summer, Gusinsky arrived late for a scheduled meeting with the police; he was immediately arrested. Released on bail, he fled to Spain. Putin was then outraged over negative coverage of the loss of the nuclear submarine Kursk in the Barents Sea. The head of the ORT network, Boris Berezovsky, who also owned Aeroflot, was summoned to testify in an investigation of Aeroflot. Instead, he fled the country. Within a year after becoming President, Putin controlled all the main television networks in Russia.

            In a comment that might remind some of another leader, Putin roared, “Lying! Lying!” when asked about television news report that he had rejected offers of help for the Kursk from other countries.

            In 2003, in a periodic meeting Putin held with the leading bankers and businessmen, one Mikhail Khodorkovsky, owner of banks and Yukos Oil, delivered a report on the negative effects on economic growth of corruption in Russia. Khodorkovsky had gained control of Yukos Oil in the typically murky way that oligarchs gained control of state-owned industries under Boris Yeltsin. In his report, he questioned the purchase by the state-owned oil company, Rosneft, of a small oil company for $600 million—far more than any analyst or investor thought it was worth. Alas, Putin friends were involved in the transaction. Friends advised Khodorksovsky to leave the country. He did not; poor decision. Several Yukos Oil officials were arrested, one being charged with murder. Later in 2003, Khodorkovsky was arrested and ultimately sentenced to prison for ten years, though he only ended up serving seven. Putin’s view was clear; about Khodorkovsky he said to the head of British Petroleum, “I have eaten more dirt that I need to from that man.”

            In September 2004, Putin abolished the elections of governors, mayors and regional presidents; he would now appoint them. This was a control over governmental apparatus that was reminiscent of Stalin and Nicholas II. His appointments were subject to approval by regional parliaments, but if they rejected his nominees he had the power to abolish the regional parliaments.

            In the fall of 2004, Viktor Yushchenko felt ill; his head and spine hurt. An opposition candidate for President of Ukraine, he did not trust local hospitals. So he went to Austria for treatment. Doctors concluded he had ingested at a meal one of the highest doses ever recorded in a human of a highly toxic compound known as 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (or TCDD). Putin went to the Crimea twice during the election campaign to meet with the outgoing, pro-Russia, President, Leonid Kuchma, and his favored candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, to urge them to stay away from NATO. Russian oligarchs poured money into Ukraine in support of Yanukovych. The courts threw out the first runoff results in which Putin’s candidate had won 49% to 46%. In the Donetsk region, close to the Russian border, 96.7% of voters had turned out in the first runoff and had voted overwhelmingly for Yanukovych. A fleet of buses had transported Yanukovych supporters into the countryside to vote after having voted in Kiev. Yushchenko won the second runoff; and, still ill from poisoning, took office. Many, without clear proof, believed Putin was behind the poisoning. (Yanukovych won a fair election in 2010.)

            On October 7, 2006, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot to death with four bullets while standing in her Moscow apartment building’s elevator. She had relentlessly covered the war in Chechnya, including stories about Russian torture of locals and other wrongdoing. She would from time to time visit London and meet with another dissident, Aleksandr Litvinenko. Litvinenko had left Russia in 2000 after exposing the give away of state industries under Boris Yeltsin. Since then, he had, among other things, written a book about the Kremlin’s role in the apartment bombings around the time of Putin’s first election and about alleged ties between the Kremlin and organized crime.

            On November 1, 2006, Litvinenko ingested a radioactive substance, polonium-210, in the bar of the Mayfair Millenium Hotel while meeting with two Russians, Andrei Lugovi and Dmitri Kovtun. The former was a ex-KGB agent, and the latter was a former Red Army intelligence officer in East Germany. Litvinenko died on November 23 after writing a statement that accused Putin of poisoning him. British authorities found traces of  the radioactive element everywhere the three men had been and on the British Airways jets that brought the two Russians to London.

            The uproar reached across the Atlantic because Politkovskaya had been born of Russian diplomats in the United States and had an American passport. The American Ambassador, William Burns, demanded a thorough investigation of her death. The officials with whom he met claimed to be shocked at her murder. Nothing happened.

            Sergei Magnitsky died in a Moscow prison in November 2009. He had been in prison for a year without a trial on charges involving a tax fraud that he had uncovered. His “crime” was exposing the officials who had diverted over $230 million of government tax revenues to companies owned by friends of the Kremlin. He had been brutally treated while in prison. Magnitsky had uncovered the tax fraud at the request of Bill Browder, head of Hermitage Capital Management, a major investor in Russia. Browder, an American by birth but a British citizen, had had his visa revoked in 2005 on alleged national security grounds; and, in 2007, the offices of his company in Moscow were raided by the FSB, with all records seized.[36]

            The Russian government responded with an investigation headed by Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev that resulted in the firing of some twenty officials in faraway regions who in fact had nothing to do with Magnitsky’s death.

            Over the opposition of Obama’s administration, the outraged Browder in 2012 convinced Congress to pass overwhelmingly the Magnitsky Act, which bars around 60 Russian officials from coming to the United States or using its banks. The passage of the law, by all accounts, enraged Vladimir Putin. The June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump, Jr. and certain Russians included a Russian lawyer who had become Russia’s point person for getting rid of the Magnitsky Act.

The New York Times on October 23, 2017, reported an even more bizarre twist to the story. Russian prosecutors are now investigating Bill Browder with a view towards charging him with the murder of his tax lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. In Russia, Browder had previously been convicted in absentia of fraud. Russian prosecutors contend that Browder colluded (that word again!) with a British MI6 foreign intelligence agent to cause Magnitsky’s death in prison by persuading Russian prison doctors to withhold medical care. Prosecutors say the scheme went by the code name “Operation Quake.”    

            No truncated exposition of Putin’s rule would be complete without a mention of the seizing of the Crimea and the attempted seizure of the Eastern Ukraine. As the Sochi Winter Olympics were ending in February 2014, demonstrations broke out in Kiev against the corruption that was rampant in the pro-Russia administration of Viktor Yanukovych. A compromise was negotiated over Putin’s objections: Yanukovych would step aside and new elections would be held. As his palatial life style was exposed, Yanukovych fled to Southern Russia. In Moscow, the turmoil in Ukraine confirmed Putin’s worst fears. Myers writes Putin said this in an interview: “what was happening was not a popular uprising against a weak, discredited leader, but a revolution hijacked by Ukrainian nationalists and radicals he compared to the Nazi storm trooper Ernst Röhm, and supported by the enemies of Russia, the Europeans and the Americans.”

            On February 27, Putin seized the Ukraine and then started a war for Eastern Ukraine.

            Some observations. Karen Dawisha: “Putin and his circle could have passed and upheld laws to protect, promote, cement and sustain democratic institutions, but they chose not to. On the contrary, they have established what they themselves internally call a sistema that undermines, mocks and mimics democracy but that actually serves the purpose of creating a unified and stable authoritarian state that allows individuals close to Putin and his associates to benefit personally from the unparalleled despoliation of Russia’s vast natural resources.”[37]

            Myers quotes the novelist Vladimir Sorokin who wrote after seizure of the Crimea that Russia had become “hostage to the psychosomatic quirks of its leader. All his fears, passions, weaknesses and complexes become state policy. If he is paranoid, the whole country must fear enemies and spies; if he has insomnia, all the ministries must work at night; if he’s a teetotaler, everyone must stop drinking; if he’s a drunk, everyone should booze it up; if he doesn’t like America, which his beloved DGB fought against, the whole population must dislike the United States.”[38]

            Myers again: “He faced no obvious challenge to his power before the presidential election scheduled for 2018. He by law could serve six more years after that….He might then hand power to a new leader…It would be ultimately up to him. The fate of Russia was now entwined with his own, rushing forward as the troika in Gogol’s Dead Souls to an unknown destiny….’the air rumbles, shattered to pieces and turns to wind’, Gogol wrote of the troika, ‘Everything on earth flies by, and, looking askance, other nations and states step aside to make way.’”