Putin: The New Tsar
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.
For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/RL6SWVSWLS0GM/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv
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