Man with a Mission

Vladimir Putin is a man possessed. He wants to rebuild a strong Russia with a powerful presidency and a flourishing economy. He is determined--whatever the cost--to crush separatism in Chechnya or anywhere else within Russia's borders. But first and foremost, he wants to pull Russians out of their decade-long slough of despondency.

These are dramatic and ambitious goals, but they are not new. For centuries, Russia's leaders have come to power dreaming of sweeping reforms. Most have ended up disappointed, thwarted by the country's unwieldiness and its bureaucrats' subtle sabotage. Despite Putin's refusal to offer explicit policies and his aides' admission that their programs are not ready to be implemented, expectations are growing that he will mark the start of his presidency with a series of dramatic gestures--a crackdown, perhaps, on high level corruption. What is not clear is whether this will be a break with the sleazy Yeltsin past, or simply window dressing.

Putin has already made headway in one area--restoring ordinary Russians' faith in themselves. His blunt, occasionally coarse style and energetic demeanor have so galvanized the electorate that he stands a good chance of being elected President in the first round of voting on March 26.

But his KGB background and toughness have dismayed some citizens, who fear that his rule will turn out to be modernized authoritarianism, not a reformist democracy.

His aloofness in the presidential campaign has not dispelled these fears. He has not published a political platform. He has refused to debate--No time, he says. And he has rejected campaign advertising as unworthy--good for selling Tampax and Snickers, he remarked recently, but not candidates for high office. Instead he has retreated behind a wall of carefully crafted "spontaneous" TV opportunities, and has reserved his most detailed revelations for a campaign biography, At First Hand, an extended interview written by two journalists and a member of his press department. Until the elections are over, Putin does not want to offend anyone.

As March 26 approaches, however, Putin has allowed his mask to slip a little, dropping hints about how he views the state of affairs in Russia today. He knows it is in a mess. He pledges loyalty to the man who gave him power, Boris Yeltsin. But asked by his biographer-interviewers to name his heroes, Putin singled out two men who had pulled their countries out of chaos and catastrophe--neither of them Yeltsin. One was Charles de Gaulle, who created a solid, centralized state in France (and quickly pulled his country out of a colonial war in Algeria, a conflict that is often compared with Chechnya); the other was Ludwig Erhard, the architect of West Germany's post-war economic revival. Putin sees obvious parallels with France of the '50s and Germany of the late '40s.

He studiously avoids defining Yeltsin's legacy, but hints broadly in his public appearances that central power under Yeltsin was feeble. Some regional leaders, he claims, even "forgot that there was a President." Until he became Prime Minister, Chechnya was handled with "amateurism," he says, and left to fester to the point that it became a deadly danger, while policy on issues like Kosovo was short-sighted.

Aides and advisers to the Acting President are even less polite. Russia is wallowing in a sense of defeatism, says Gleb Pavlovsky, a Soviet-era dissident and now Putin's highly controversial image adviser. Boris Yeltsin had a narrow view of life, says Alexander Oslon, who polls for the presidential administration. He had two main interests--making sure that no one overshadowed him as boss, and enjoying his food and drink. Putin represents something very different, Oslon believes: total renewal. Dmitry Kozak, Putin's chief of staff, says simply that Putin intends to impose order on this country and reform all areas of state power.

This is easier said than done. Putin is inheriting a sick country, in every sense of the word. Its population declined by 900,000 last year, and male life expectancy, around 60, stands at Third World levels--better than Nigeria but worse than the Philippines--and is about 3.5 years lower than it was a decade ago. (Women here live over 10 years longer.) Alcohol has killed millions of working-age men; now an aids epidemic seems set to take its toll of both genders.

Russia is also beset by other systemic diseases, foremost among them corruption. Few of Russia's 50 richest men could explain how they moved from being minor officials to billionaires in half a decade, several have been investigated for crimes ranging from murder to embezzlement, and at least one is fighting extradition from Hungary. But they are only the tip of the iceberg.

The ultimate symbol of state-sponsored corruption and cynical manipulation of power is the Yeltsin "Family." So-named as a deliberate analogy with the Mafia--the film The Godfather has long been a big hit in business circles here--the Family is made up in the popular mind of a small group of Yeltsin relatives and associates. These include Yeltsin's daughter Tatyana Dyachenko, his one-time chief of staff Valentin Yumashev, and a number of powerful financiers, including Boris Berezovsky, the most controversial of Russia's billionaire power brokers.

The group played a major role in engineering Yeltsin's early retirement and Putin's rise to power. And, though corruption allegations against the Family have disappeared from most front pages, the heat is still on. A Swiss prosecutor made it clear last week in a Russian newspaper interview that relatives and associates of Yeltsin remain under investigation in his country. Putin's first act on becoming interim President was to issue a decree giving Yeltsin immunity from prosecution. The rest of the Family does not, however, have such protection. Putin's treatment of them will be the acid test of his intentions as President. If he sticks with them, both ordinary Russians and Western investors will dismiss him as a weakling and a fake. If he starts to move away from the Family and other corrupt insiders, he will unleash an enormous wave of popularity--and great expectations.

At the moment the jury is out on just how much zeal he has for the fight against corruption. Two prominent members of the Family, Dyachenko and Yumashev, are actively involved in his election campaign. But clouds seem to be thickening over Berezovsky, the most unpopular and pugnacious of the so-called oligarchs.

Russia's political and business elite evince a growing belief that Putin wants to destroy Berezovsky's political power once and for all.

There is less agreement about Putin's motives: whether this will be the start of a campaign against corrupt oligarchs, or simply an effective piece of self-promotion.

Regardless, the first step in the anti-Berezovsky campaign will probably be to undermine his hold on the country's biggest TV network, ort. Insiders predict that Putin will either cancel ort's license, which is up for renewal in May, or give its airwaves to the government-controlled rtr network. This will be a blow, but Berezovsky is unlikely to go without a fight. When the then Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov tried to bring Berezovsky up on corruption charges last year, Yelstin fired him, almost certainly at the Family's instigation. Putin, however, will have an advantage that Primakov lacked: he is President.

In some areas, Putin will probably behave predictably:

Expect him to move early to push through a constitutional amendment extending the presidential term from four to seven years. This would give him 11 years in power. Putin claims he is only thinking about this idea, but aides talk about it as a done deal.

Expect him to be ruthless in his dealings with opposition-minded political heavyweights. Asked whether he thought the sometime presidential hopeful Yuri Luzhkov, mayor of Moscow, would behave "constructively" toward the new administration, Putin answered: "I don't think he will have any way of behaving otherwise."

Expect him to be hard-line on Chechnya. The breakaway republic's warlords do not just want independence, he believes. They want to destroy the Russian Federation. They will not be allowed to do so, he says. He speaks of direct rule over the republic after the elections and threatens to "destroy" anyone who takes up arms against Russian rule. The trouble is that the Chechen gunmen are as determined as he. The end result will probably be many more years of bloodshed.

Above all expect confusion, at least at the beginning. Putin's reform plans are not yet ready. German Gref, a longtime Putin associate and the head of his think tank, says that their blueprint for the future of Russia will be ready in April. A concept of sweeping administrative change is months away. But that is only the start. Invaders are not the only ones who become bogged down in Russia's vast expanses. So do reformers. They are defeated by geography and by the millions of apparatchiks who are past masters at blocking, diverting, distorting, delaying and eventually destroying policies they do not like.

Reforms aim to transform Russia, the country's greatest historian Vasily Klyuchevsky noted wryly, but they end up being transformed by Russia. Putin can cut Berezovsky down to size. He can jail oligarchs, scare governors and level Chechen villages. But can he--even if he wants to--transform Russia?
By YURI ZARAKHOVICH

The closer it gets to election day, the louder the praise of Vladimir Putin. As Russian journalist Sergei Agafonov wrote last month in Noviye Izvestia, a Moscow-based daily, "Officials and TV will help us realize that we cherish everything He loves, and hate everything He scorns." Concluded Agafonov sarcastically: "This is the key mode of life under a strong state."

But there is more to the propaganda-induced lionization of Putin than meets the eye. It is a very Russian trait: loving the boss just for the virtue of being the boss, for as long as he is the boss. The incumbent Czar or commissar is always supposed to be good and above the fray and beyond reproach--the nation's Little Father, tragically unaware of how shamefully his bad officials treat the people. But once the incumbent is gone, we Russians switch abruptly to a mixture of hatred for him and hope that his successor will finally prove worthy of our love. Each time, we grumble about having been deceived once again, but fail to recognize our own shortcomings. "It is not hard to deceive me, I'm only too happy to be deceived," as Alexander Pushkin wrote about delusions of love.

The Russians loved their Czars for the grandeur of their Empire. They loved Lenin for destroying the hated Czarist Empire. They loved Stalin for restoring the national Empire, and purging the hated Lenin Bolsheviks who had abused Russia for the benefit of the world revolution. They loved Khrushchev for ending the hated Stalinist yoke and mass terror. They loved Brezhnev for ending the hated Khrushchev follies and arbitrariness. They loved Gorbachev for putting an end to the hated Brezhnev stagnation, and replacing totalitarianism with a semblance of freedom. They loved Yeltsin for putting an end to the hated Gorbachev vacillations and for launching long-awaited reforms.

Today, the nation hates Yeltsin for his decade of humiliation, chaos and poverty, and loves Putin for his promise of an orderly strong state to restore wounded national pride. The nation knows nothing about how Putin is going to deliver on his promise, but loves him anyway, just on his say-so, just as the nation has loved all his predecessors--voluntarily and eagerly. This love brings to mind the argument that Leon Trotsky invoked back in 1917 to convince the irresolute Bolshevik Party comrades of the inevitable success of their coming revolution: "The petty bourgeois mass is looking for a force it must submit to. He who does not understand this, does not understand anything at all."

The love for such a force is invariably tainted with fear. Now, fear hangs over St. Petersburg, Putin's home. "I subconsciously control myself, lest I get punished for saying something negative about Putin," explains a local intellectual. This fear is spreading all over the country to complement the popular love. It is not the fear of a rollback to the past. It is the fear of a future that might prove even worse.

Over the last 15 years, the officials who in reality rule Russia have been busy converting their political power into financial and economic clout. The Gulag, the Iron Curtain and state-owned property do not mix with that, and will hardly re-emerge. But now they are busy reconverting their new might into uncontested political power by taking back the few bones they had to toss to the people over the last decade. Free travel has become a joke. They do not need an Iron Curtain now. How can ordinary Russians travel to Paris, if they can't even afford the fare from Suzdal to Moscow?

Free speech is the next victim. No mass reprisals will be needed. Individuals who speak out against the regime will simply get beaten up or jailed or, worst of all, disappear without a trace. A small-scale prototype of a strong state la Putin has been test-run in the neighboring Belarus for six years now under President Alexander Lukashenko. Run on a Russian scale, this modernized, "enlightened" Stalinism can prove quite appalling. "We did not pay a high enough price for our democratic revolution 10 years ago," muses Yuli Rybakov, one of the few democrats still in the Duma. "We'll have to pay that price now under the emerging oppressive regime."

Rybakov does not, however, believe the regime will last all that long, because it can't be efficient. And once Putin is gone, the hate which inevitably follows will be proportionate to this current love of him--and just as blind. With our illusions once again shattered, we will see the objects of our erstwhile affection for what they really are--cynical, deceitful, ineffectual demagogues. Then, we come to loathe them for the violence, fear and destruction they bring into our lives.

It was none other than Stalin who said knowingly: "The Russians are a Czarist people ... They need a Czar to worship, to live and work for." Only if we give up both our illusions about good Czars as well as our fears of punishment for not having such illusions will we move beyond our need to find yet another con man to deliver us. That will in turn help us avoid the self-loathing which follows from permitting ourselves to be swindled once more. Then, nobody will be able to make us "cherish everything He loves, and hate everything He scorns" ever again.