MARK GALEOTTI

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT PUTIN

WHY THE WEST GETS HIM WRONG

Contents

1. Putin’s Timeline

2. Cast of Characters

3. Introduction: Why We Need to Talk About Putin

4. Chapter 1: Putin Is a Judoka, Not a Chess Player

5. Chapter 2: Putin Was KGB, But Not as You Know It

6. Chapter 3: Putin’s Not Looking to Revive the USSR, or Tsarism for That Matter

7. Chapter 4: Putin Sees Money as a Means, Not an End

8. Chapter 5: Putin Doesn’t Read Philosophy, and Russia Is Not Mordor

9. Chapter 6: Putin Is Risk-Averse, Not a Macho Adventurer

10. Chapter 7: Putin Is Popular, and Not

11. Chapter 8: Putin Is Loyal to His Own

12. Chapter 9: Putin’s Enemies Don’t Always Die

13. Chapter 10: Putin Is Just One Guy

14. Chapter 11: Does Putin Want Out?

About the Author

Professor Mark Galeotti is one of the foremost Russia-watchers today, who travels there regularly to teach, lecture, talk to his contacts, and generally watch the unfolding story of the Putin era. Based in London, he is Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Institute of International Relations Prague, having previously headed its Centre for European Security, and was before then Professor of Global Affairs at NYU. A prolific author on Russia and security affairs, he frequently acts as consultant to various government, commercial and law-enforcement agencies.

‘Putin is a nicer person than I am.’

Donald Trump, 2015

Putin’s Timeline

7 October 1952

Born in Leningrad (now St Petersburg)

1964

Begins to learn judo

1970–5

Reads Law at Leningrad State University

1975

Joins the KGB

1983

Marries Lyudmila Putina (neé Shkrebneva)

1985–90

Serves in Dresden, East Germany

1990

Returns to Leningrad and moves onto the KGB’s ‘active reserve’ Assigned to work at Leningrad State University

1991–4

Works in Leningrad Mayor’s Office (the name St Petersburg is restored in October 1991)

1991

Formally leaves the KGB

1994–6

First deputy mayor of St Petersburg

1996

Moves to Moscow after the electoral defeat of Mayor Anatoly Sobchak

1996–7

Deputy head of the Presidential Property Management Directorate

1997–8

Deputy head, then first deputy head of the Presidential Administration

1998–9

Director of the Federal Security Service

1999

Prime minister

1999

Start of the Second Chechen War

2000–4

First presidential term

2003

Arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky

2004–8

Second presidential term

2008–12

Serves as prime minister under Dmitry Medvedev

2008

Invasion of Georgia

2011

Medvedev nominates Putin for the presidency

2012–18

Third presidential term

2011–12

Bolotnaya Square protests against election rigging

2014

Sochi Winter Olympics

Annexation of Crimea

Intervention in Donbas

2014

Divorces Lyudmila

2015

Intervention in Syria

2018–24?

Fourth presidential term

Cast of Characters

Andropov, Yuri – The formidable KGB chief and then Soviet leader, whom Putin appears to idolise but not understand.

FSB – The Federal Security Service, the main internal counter-intelligence and security agency that succeeded the KGB.

FSO – The Federal Protection Service, the small army of bodyguards, Kremlin riflemen, food tasters and phone tappers, whose job is to keep Putin and the rest of the government safe and happy.

Gorbachev, Mikhail – The last Soviet leader, who reformed the USSR out of existence and appears in many ways to embody precisely what Putin is not.

GRU – The Main Intelligence Directorate, the military intelligence agency.

Ivanov, Sergei – The urbane KGB veteran who was Putin’s chief of staff and was regarded as a potential successor, but took semi-retirement in 2016.

Kabayeva, Alina – The Olympic gold medal-winning rhythmic gymnast rumoured to be Putin’s current lover.

Kadyrov, Ramzan – An unpredictable and violent man who professes loyalty to Putin while running the Chechen Republic as a virtually independent fiefdom.

KGB – The Committee of State Security, the all-encompassing Soviet domestic security and foreign intelligence service.

Kudrin, Alexei – A long-term associate of Putin’s, once a friend and token economic liberal in his government, now somewhat estranged.

Medvedev, Dmitry – Putin’s long-suffering prime minister, less his colleague and more his gopher.

Navalny, Alexei – The main opposition figure today, an anti-corruption campaigner who uses the Internet to bypass the Kremlin’s efforts to keep him off television.

Patrushev, Nikolai – Secretary of the Security Council, former head of the FSB, and a man who makes Putin look like a moderate.

Presidential Administration – The most powerful institution in Putin’s Russia, in effect his government-above-the-government.

Prigozhin, Yevgeny – A man who has done well by doing whatever Putin needs doing. He is known as ‘Putin’s chef’ because he came to know him when he ran a restaurant in St Petersburg; his companies still provide food for the Kremlin and many government agencies.

Roldugin, Sergei – A cellist and childhood friend of Putin’s who is now thought to be worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

Rotenberg, Arkady and Boris – Childhood friends and judo sparring partners of Putin’s, who have done very well in business under his rule.

Sechin, Igor – Head of the oil firm Rosneft and Putin’s former deputy; the Western media calls him ‘Russia’s Darth Vader’, but no one there would dare.

Shoigu, Sergei – Defence minister since 2012, and perhaps the most powerful and influential figure within the government who didn’t get to that position by being a friend of Putin’s.

Sobchak, Anatoly – Putin’s old professor at law school and the first democratically elected mayor of St Petersburg, who appointed him as his deputy.

Surkov, Vladislav – Putin’s former political technologist and the impresario behind his fake political system, now unofficial boss of south-eastern Ukraine.

SVR – The Foreign Intelligence Service, Russia’s main espionage agency.

Zolotov, Viktor – Putin’s former chief bodyguard, now head of the National Guard, a thuggish loyalist through and through.

Introduction: Why We Need to Talk About Putin

White Rabbit in Moscow is a quintessentially ‘new Russian’ restaurant. Under a glass dome above a glitzy shopping centre close to the Stalinist Gothic tower of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it is the kind of place where special little chairs are placed next to female diners for their handbags, where the (hefty) bill arrives inside a matryoshka nesting doll and where the idea of a fusion of traditional Russian and international cuisine runs to pine-flavoured ice cream. I’m too miserly and too plain in my tastes to be a fan, but it’s flamboyant and prestigious, a place at which to be seen. I shouldn’t have been surprised that, when invited to choose a place for lunch, a former official of the Presidential Administration (Vladimir Putin’s chancery and the most powerful institution in Russia) would pick White Rabbit. Even an overpriced meal and lots of – naturally – Crimean wine was not enough to get him to be really indiscreet, but one of the more revealing parts of the conversation was when he launched into a lengthy and moderately profane diatribe about the West’s continued misunderstanding of ‘the boss’. ‘Seriously, I read some of the shit in your newspapers, that your politicians say, that your “experts” write, and I just don’t know where they get it. No wonder we’ve got into the mess we’re in now. And you know what?’ He waved an almost-empty glass and frowned at me as if I were a representative of the entire Western journalistic, political and pundit class. ‘It made my job harder.’ How? ‘What kind of relations can we have with you all, so long as you don’t really see us, you don’t hear us? So long as you read whatever you want into the president’s every word and his last fart. My job was to try and communicate, but it didn’t matter what we said, what we put into the boss’s speeches, everyone just assumed they knew what we really meant, whatever we actually said. Everyone thinks they know Vladimir Vladimirovich.’

We need to talk about Putin. We really do. Not just because he is, like it or not, one of the most important people on the planet, and nor because of the impact of the geopolitical struggle he is waging with the West, with bluster and bluff, memes and money. It is also because he has become a global symbol, which everyone defines in their own way. As the irate and two-thirds-drunk official suggested, he is like a Rorschach inkblot test used by psychologists: the splash of pigment is deliberately ambiguous; what we read into it says more about what is going on in our heads than what is on the paper.

Because the irony is that, for all that he has been a fixture of global politics for almost twenty years now, for all that there are biographies of his life and calendars of his bare-chested antics and for all that he is a familiar subject of satirists and pundits alike, we still don’t really know who he is. Ruthless autocrat or saviour of a beleaguered nation? KGB veteran or pious Christian? Brooding grandmaster of global geopolitics or self-indulgent kleptocrat? He’s a bit of each of them, but none of these labels truly sum him up – and that’s partly the point. Putin is ferociously private – not just on his own account, but also on behalf of his family, both out of preference and political calculation; his aloofness allows everyone to construct their own personal Putin.

Part of my motivation to write this book is a frustration with the simplistic caricatures so often deployed – and not only in the West – to try and understand him. I remember one newly appointed European ambassador to Moscow blithely asserting that ‘to understand Putin, you simply need to understand his KGB training’. If it is that simple, then why do we keep getting Putin wrong? The main drivers for this process of estrangement with Russia may be elsewhere, but it is also depressingly clear how often Western diplomacy has failed. It left a potential pragmatic ally in the early 2000s sufficiently embittered that by 2007 Putin was squaring up for a confrontation. Its toothless response to Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia was used as evidence in Moscow in 2014 that moving into Ukraine would lead to only brief and token protest. It even managed to convince not just Putin but also many within his political establishment that the West was at once too weak to fear and yet too dangerous to ignore. Above all, it failed to persuade them that we do not hate them, their country and their culture. All this happened in no way only or even mainly because of our poor handling of Putin and Russia – but we have managed to handle both badly, and to a large extent because of a lack of understanding.

In this book, I seek to present a picture of the complexities of Vladimir Putin, and through him of today’s Russia, drawing on more decades of contact with Russia than I’d care to admit – time spent travelling there, talking to everyone from provincial cops to Moscow officials, getting drunk and paying the odd bribe. I don’t for a minute think that I have got everything right, nor that everyone else has got everything wrong. This is not primarily a book for my academic colleagues, and I will beg their indulgence for its tone, brevity and distinct absence of footnotes. Rather, it is for anyone who is curious about who this enigmatic figure may be, and why there is so much hype and hysteria around him. By attacking a collection of the most common and most problematic myths that ‘everyone knows’ about Putin, I hope to try and cut through some of the most unhelpful. Of course, I am, in part, taking on straw man arguments and over-simplifications, and it is not as though every policymaker, scholar or pundit believes all or even most of these. That said, the recent impoverishment of much public discourse about Putin and Russia, with cliché and caricature increasingly mobilised on both sides, has been depressing. As the world gets more complex, the ways we frame and explain it too often seem to be getting simpler and less nuanced. That is something we need to talk about, too – but not before we’ve finished talking about Putin.

A Guide to Further Reading

As I say, this book does not pretend to be the last word on Putin, and nor does it claim that no one else gets it right. Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (Brookings Institution Press, 2013) is a sharp take on the idea of ‘various Putins’ that also manages to win my heart by its use of a Mr Benn motif (for those who grew up watching children’s television in 1970s Britain). Brian Taylor’s The Code of Putinism (Oxford University Press, 2018) draws particularly on official statements to create a good sense of the kind of world view held by Putin and his closest allies. Anna Arutunyan’s The Putin Mystique: Inside Russia’s Power Cult (Skyscraper Publications, 2014) looks at the Russian people, and how far their dreams and fears actually shaped Putin and his regime. Mikhail Zygar’s All The Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin (PublicAffairs, 2016) is a brilliant study less of Putin himself and more of the key figures around him. Indeed, it also seems important to stress that Russia is bigger than Putin – Tony Wood’s Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War (Verso, 2018) does this especially well.

Chapter 1: Putin Is a Judoka, Not a Chess Player

There’s snow, there are bears, there’s vodka – and then there’s chess, one of the irritatingly durable clichés for Russia and Russians. Consider the classic Russian film villains: there’s the brutish thug, of course, but there’s also the unemotional chess player, ten moves ahead of his rival. American politicians seem especially to love this metaphor. During Barack Obama’s presidency, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers complained that ‘Putin is playing chess and I think we are playing marbles.’ More recently, Hillary Clinton asserted that Donald Trump ‘is playing checkers and Putin is playing three-dimensional chess’.

Of course, this is not actually about chess. The prevailing tendency of seeing Putin as a Machiavellian grandmastermind plays to a Western fear that he is behind everything that goes wrong, and that each setback is part of some complex Russian strategy. Donald Trump’s election, Brexit, the rise of populism in Europe, the migrant crisis and even football hooliganism have all at some point been blamed on Moscow; as a result, we run the risk of giving him too much power. As will be discussed in a later chapter, much of Putin’s international adventurism is bluff, a little like the way an animal when confronted by a predator may puff itself up or bristle its fur to look as big and formidable as possible. We have a tendency to not look past the bristle.

There is no denying that Moscow is often trying to manipulate elections and widen social division in the West, although – as we will see later – rarely with anything like the kind of impact that we sometimes fear. But the main point is that this all implies some fiendishly subtle long-term plan to take the world step by step where Putin, the archetypal Bond villain, only without a lair in an extinct volcano, wants it to go.

In fact, there is no evidence that Putin plays chess, and in any case, it is not his sort of game. Chess is a contest of inflexible rules, transparency and of an intellectual competition where the options are strictly constrained. Everyone starts with the same pieces, and everyone knows what a pawn can do and when it’s their turn to move. Putin doesn’t want to limit his options like that. He does know judo, however. A black belt, he has been honing his skills since starting as a teenager, and his approach to statecraft seems to reflect this. A judoka may well have prepared for a rival’s usual moves and worked out countermoves in advance, but much of the art is in using the opponent’s strength against him to seize the moment when it appears. In this respect, in geopolitics as in judo, Putin is an opportunist. He has a sense of what constitutes a win, but no predetermined path towards it. He relies on quickly seizing any advantage he sees, rather than on a careful strategy.

As a result, both he and the Russian state he has shaped are often unpredictable, sometimes even acting in contradictory ways, especially regarding foreign policy. Many apparent short-term ‘successes’ prove to be long-term liabilities, having been neither thought through beforehand or followed through afterwards. But this helps explain why we are so often unable to predict Putin’s moves in advance – he himself doesn’t know what he’ll do next. Instead, he circles us in the ring. He is aware that overall and when united, the West is so much more powerful than Russia, with twenty times its gross domestic product, six times the population, and more than three times as many troops. But he’s waiting for us to make a mistake and give him what looks like a good chance to strike.

Quite what Putin’s goals are I will explore more in Chapter 3. For the moment, it is enough to say that he wants power and stability at home, and recognition abroad. To this end, he needs the country to be quiet, any opposition to be silenced or muzzled, but also for the Russian economy to work, at least after a fashion. That means business with the West, which provides irreplaceable markets for its oil and gas, as well as the investment and technology its modernisation will require. But we are also the main obstacle preventing him from achieving his geopolitical goals, refusing to give Russia the status he demands, and interfering when he tries to assert dominance over neighbours such as Georgia and Ukraine. He realises that the West, when united, is more powerful than Russia on almost any terms, but at the same time believes that our weakness is that we are a constellation of often-fractious democracies. He wants us to be divided, demoralised and distracted to the point where either we are willing to do a deal with him or, more likely, not in a fit state to challenge him.

But Putin doesn’t have any master plan of how to get there. Instead he has, whether by chance or design, stumbled on a way to capitalise on the ambitions and imaginations of all kinds of individuals, institutions and organisations, from journalists and diplomats to spies and businesspeople. On the face of it, Russia looks like any other country. It has all the familiar institutions: a cabinet and ministries, a two-chamber parliament, a constitution, courts and consulates. In practice, things are very different. Putin’s predecessor and patron Boris Yeltsin shelled his own parliament to resolve a constitutional crisis and impose hyper-presidential rule; Putin has gone even further, creating a system that, at least at the top, functions in a similar way to a royal court.

Agencies overlap and compete, formal chains of command are less important than personal relationships, favourites rise and fall, and status and power are defined more by service to the needs of the Kremlin than by any formal institutional or social identity. In this ‘adhocracy’, your job title or even whether you are officially an employee of the state doesn’t necessarily matter. After all, ever since the billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky was almost overnight reduced from the richest man in Russia to a convict (see Chapter 8), even the so-called oligarchs, the richest men in Russia, know that their wealth is subject to the power of the state. Instead, the adhocrats are defined by their loyalty, their relationship with the boss and what they can do for him.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, for example, was a legend in diplomatic circles, but has largely been sidelined since 2014, and was not even invited to attend the meeting at which the decision to annex Crimea was made. He still sits in his office in the foreign ministry, but even his loyal underlings recognise that he is no longer in Putin’s unofficial ‘kitchen cabinet’ and can only put the best spin on policies originated by others. Showing admirable skills in double-talk, one diplomat put it to me that Lavrov had ‘adopted an essentially reactive model, dealing with such situations as arise in a complex and often unpredictable context’. I interpret that as an admission that Lavrov is no longer riding the elephant in the parade, let alone helping to direct it, but is rather following behind it, shovel in hand, cleaning up the mess it leaves.

On the other hand, consider the case of Vladislav Surkov, who was once the choreographer of Russia’s pantomime politics and is now, in effect, Putin’s proconsul in south-eastern Ukraine. In the 2000s, he essentially set up the current Russian political system, with the avowedly pro-Putin United Russia and the two notional opposition parties, the Communists and the Liberal Democrats (who are actually illiberal ultranationalists), which stage protests and grumble in the media but back the government in important votes. The idea was to create a theatrical-but-fake democracy that would keep the people satisfied, without in any way challenging the Kremlin’s grip on power. In 2008, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev succeeded Putin as president, as the constitution barred him from standing for a third consecutive four-year term. Putin became Medvedev’s prime minister, although it was clear that this was largely a formality, and he was still in charge. When Putin’s predictable return to the presidency was met with mass protests, precisely the kind of thing Surkov’s ‘managed democracy’ was supposed to prevent, his star fell. However, in 2014, after Moscow encouraged a proxy civil war in the Donbas region of south-eastern Ukraine, in order to prevent the country from aligning itself with the West, Surkov appears to have been made Putin’s man there, even though it is officially run by the unrecognised Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. The point is that Surkov has, at various times, been the architect of Russia’s constitutional politics and virtual governor of an occupied region, but this was never reflected in his official job title. Until 2011, he was Putin’s deputy chief of staff, then Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Modernisation until 2013, and since then simply a presidential aide. Yet in many ways, because of the trust Putin places in him, Surkov has more muscle in determining foreign policy than the foreign minister himself.

A dependence on personal relationships and unspoken understandings – ponyatiye in Russian and, interestingly enough, a term also much used in the criminal underworld – has become central to Putin’s style of rule. He (and increasingly often his senior people, too) rarely gives direct instructions, but defines broad objectives and hints as to what he might like to happen. As journalist Mikhail Zygar has put it, ‘They would never say, “Please steal those billions of dollars” or “Please murder those journalists.” They [instead] say, “Do what you have to do. You know your obligations; please fulfil them.”’ So the adhocrats become policy entrepreneurs, seeking and seizing opportunities to develop and implement ideas they think will please the boss, based on hints and guesses. If you get it right you are rewarded, but if you fail the Kremlin can disown you. In many ways, the vital skill in Putin’s Russia has become predicting today what the boss will want tomorrow.

Putin the judoka-tsar lords it over an army of smaller judokas, all of whom are looking for a chance to get on. Consider, for example, RT, the infamous foreign-language television network. A strange mix of good journalism, opinionated commentary and toxic propaganda, it is one of the tools Moscow uses to get its message out in the world or, more often, simply to undermine others’. Speaking to people who work there, it is clear that, while the Kremlin sometimes steps in and dictates the official line – typically in the wake of some major embarrassment, such as when Ukrainian rebels shot down a Malaysian Airlines passenger jet with a Russian-supplied missile in 2014 – more often it is a much less direct process. Every Friday, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s inflexible-but-affable press spokesman, sits down with the editors of the main government media platforms to lay out the lines and talking points he would like to see covered in the week ahead. He doesn’t dictate copy or set headlines – he expects them to use their initiative, and they expect the same of their people. When a major event occurs, producers and presenters at RT may well have different ideas how best to frame it, to meet what they think what their bosses – and their bosses’ boss – want. These different ideas may then be played out in various programmes, with everyone hoping that theirs gets noticed and approved. Effort, imagination, enthusiasm and ambition are all harnessed, without the tedious need to micromanage everything from the top.

For example, did Russia back Brexit? RT, its news agency counterpart Sputnik and a number of Russian commentators and diplomats certainly did, in addition to the infamous ‘troll farms’, where smart young Russians working to a script and on the clock, pump out social media posts pretending to be Rob from Ramsgate or Sarah from Swindon. Why on earth would they not? After all, it seems to tick so many boxes on the Kremlin wish list, dividing both Europe and Britain itself and creating a colossal distraction for years to come. But setting aside the question of how far they really affected the result of the referendum, it is hard to say whether or not Putin or the Kremlin specifically backed the campaign. They certainly did nothing to stop it, but a consequence of this bottom-up system is that it can often be hard to know where a specific initiative originated.

Does that really matter, though? Yes, it does. If we think of Putin as the subtle mastermind of the geopolitical chessboard, we will all too often give him more credit than he deserves. If people think you are powerful, you are powerful. Consider a deeply frustrating conversation I had with a Czech journalist in 2017, right before the Russians held a major military exercise called Zapad, or ‘West’, in conjunction with their ally, Belarus. At the time, a massive wave of hysteria was washing over the Western analytic community, partly generated by its own paranoia (and also by some alarmist pundits looking for some media attention), but encouraged by the Russians’ own strategic trolling. It was said that it would involve more than a hundred thousand troops (in reality, the number was not even half that), that it was really a plan to occupy Belarus and replace its president with a Russian puppet (nope), that it was a pretext to invade the Baltic states (again, no), and that it was a dry run for an all-out invasion of northern Europe (really, no). At the height of the frenzy, this Czech journalist asked with a straight face what price Putin would accept for a peace treaty. First of all, I pointed out, as far as I knew we were not officially at war. Secondly, what kind of a price was he talking about? He started a list: recognising Russia’s annexation of Crimea, forcing neutrality on Ukraine, and withdrawing NATO forces from front-line states.

I confess that I was astonished: Putin would not believe his luck if any of those massive and unjustifiable concessions were offered, especially on the basis of a long-scheduled and essentially defensive military exercise and some dramatic television footage of tanks rumbling across the Belarusian plain. This journalist, who was neither a moron nor a rookie, was articulating a minority opinion, but one that can often be encountered across the West: the sense that Putin is so dangerous and powerful that it is best to try and buy him off rather than confront him. In Chapter 6 I will go into more detail as to how wrong this is, but every time we portray Putin as the evil genius behind everything that goes wrong, we play to this tendency. The French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire once wrote that ‘the cleverest ruse of the devil is to persuade you he does not exist’; perhaps Putin’s cleverest ruse is to persuade you that he is behind everything.

If we persist with the idea that Putin is a strategic mastermind we will be looking for a grand design in the chaos that simply isn’t there. If it seems that Russia is moving in all kinds of different directions at once, it’s not a result of misdirection or because we haven’t seen the pattern – it’s because that’s exactly what Russia is doing. We’re looking for a great white shark, a single, murderous killing machine, but while we’re doing that, a shoal of piranhas, individually much less formidable, yet much harder to predict and repel, is eating the flesh from our backs.

Finally, we should not try to predict Russian strategy based purely on Putin himself – his tells and tics, his habits and his hobby horses. In fact, the political entrepreneurs in his Russia are of every sort, from businesspeople to storytellers, computer hackers to gangsters. In October 2016, for example, there was an attempted coup in the small Balkan state of Montenegro that was apparently intended to try and prevent it from joining NATO. Russian intelligence officers were involved, but according to Bulgarian intelligence, the first initiative came from a Russian not-quite-oligarch – let’s call him a minigarch – called Konstantin Malofeyev. A Russian Orthodox zealot and an ultranationalist, Malofeyev came up with the idea and pitched it in Moscow until the government gave it the green light. In some ways the system works in the same way as the start-up economy: lots of people with ideas – some good, some bad, some already being tried on a small scale and others that exist purely in their creators’ imaginations – all try to interest the one big investor in the Kremlin. Trying to predict what ideas will come out of this process based on Putin’s character is a completely futile task.

Instead, Putin’s state generally responds to opportunities. A British prime minister calls for a referendum on leaving the European Union; American Democratic Party officials practise poor computer security; people in the West begin to lose faith in their political systems and elites; opaque financial structures allow ‘dark money’ to distort economies and corrupt politics; social media bypasses the traditional press. Russia created none of these opportunities, but has demonstrably tried to exploit them. In effect, we in the West define what Putin’s state does to us, while he is simply taking advantage of the failures, broken promises and stress points in our systems.

So, rather than looking for a grand and complex strategy, we need to accept that Putin, at least abroad, is in effect following the strategy that Mark Zuckerberg encouraged at Facebook – ‘move fast and break things’. However, instead of Silicon Valley’s goal of ‘disruptive innovation’, Putin is looking for innovative forms of disruption. He encourages his agents and adhocrats to seize opportunities, fully aware that some, and maybe most, will fail. But that doesn’t matter, because the very act of launching these attacks brings chaos and uncertainty, and when they do succeed, the judoka can make his move.

Chapter 2: Putin Was KGB, But Not as You Know It

At the end of 1999, Putin was prime minister, and would soon be elected president. He was attending a party held at the Lubyanka, the nineteenth-century building which had been designed for an insurance company but gained infamy as the headquarters of successive Soviet secret police agencies. Even today, although the main offices of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB’s current successor, are in an anonymous grey block on the other side of the road, it still uses the Lubyanka, and the gala event was being held there to celebrate the founding of the Cheka, the very first Bolshevik political police.

‘Dear comrades,’ Putin toasted, ‘I can report that the group of agents you sent to infiltrate the government has accomplished the first part of its mission.’ He was not entirely joking. Putin had not only been in the KGB, the notorious Soviet intelligence and security agency – he had been a fan of it from an early age. He had wanted to join while still at school, and went to the KGB’s regional headquarters in the so-called Bolshoi Dom – ‘the Big House’ – on Liteyny Avenue, close to the Neva River in Leningrad’s central neighbourhood. This slab-sided building had an infamous reputation, having previously been the offices of Stalin’s secret police, where supposed enemies of the state had been executed in blood-drenched basement rooms and through which a steady flow of victims had passed to the Gulag labour camps. Yet teenage Putin popped by for a chat. One can only guess at the reaction of the KGB officer who spoke to Putin, but he was told to go away and either do his military service or graduate from university first. What degree was best, Putin asked? Any would do, but when pushed the officer suggested law. And so it was: Putin went to Leningrad State University, graduated with a law degree in 1975 and joined the KGB. He would remain in the service for seventeen years, and these were the years that many feel shaped him. ‘I looked into Mr Putin’s eyes,’ US Senator John McCain once said after meeting him, ‘and I saw three things: a K, a G and a B.’

Putin still identifies strongly with the so-called Chekists. Many of his closest allies are veterans of the KGB and its successors, and he retains close connections with the security agencies. He did not coin the phrase ‘There is no such thing as a former KGB officer,’ but he certainly lives it.

Of course, this experience clearly played a role in the development of his world view, but it does not explain it entirely and there are other seminal experiences to examine. There was his hard-knocks childhood in Leningrad, when he lived in a single room in a cramped and crowded communal apartment with neither a bath nor hot water. There young Vladimir got into judo and sambo, the Soviet military martial art, perhaps as a way of protecting himself or of finding a community. His early lessons in the streets and the ring certainly seem to have left a mark, impressing on him a belief that confidence and determination can make up for strength and wealth. In a television interview in 2018, for example, he drew a parallel between geopolitics and martial arts: when trying to explain how Russia could exert more global authority than the West anticipates, he noted that fighters who succeed are not only strong, and those who are defeated are not necessarily physically weak, but ‘something is missing. Either willpower or patience, or commitment or courage. Something wasn’t enough. Something was lacking.’ Childhood friends he made back then, such as the billionaire Rotenberg brothers (with whom he sparred) and the cellist Sergei Roldugin, are still important to him today. Perhaps – dipping into the shallowest of pop psychology – the marginal and insecure nature of his childhood also contributed to a later commitment to ensuring that he was safe and comfortable, and that no one had power over him.

After his time in the KGB, there were the anarchic 1990s, when the new Russia appeared to be spiralling into chaos and nobody knew if tomorrow’s pay cheque would come, and what it would buy. All the old values seemed lost and devalued, and the only new ones seemed to be to seize opportunities and make a fast buck when you could. These were the days when Putin started working at the mayor’s office in St Petersburg – his home city, its pre-Revolutionary name restored – and rose to become deputy mayor, before moving to Moscow. There, he was rapidly promoted, going from deputy head of the Presidential Property Management Directorate (1996–7) to deputy head and then first deputy head of the Presidential Administration (1997–8), head of the FSB (1998–9) and prime minister (1999). If before joining the KGB Putin was the rootless outsider youngster looking for the right gang to join, after it, he was part of a group of insiders who were taking full advantage of every opportunity those unsettled times threw up, notably the so-called Ozero Dacha Cooperative which I will discuss in Chapter 4.

These experiences left their marks on Putin as much as his time in the KGB. However, it is interesting to wonder how far before and after his service he has been chasing and idolising a fantasy image of the spooks rather than the reality. In his autobiography, First Person, he admits that before he joined the KGB, his picture of the agency came from spy stories, films and television programmes. The appeal was less the tradecraft or the nature of the missions as much as the sense that a spy really mattered. As he put it, ‘I was most amazed by how a small force, a single person, really, can accomplish something an entire army cannot. A single intelligence officer could rule over the fates of thousands of people. At least, that’s how I saw it.’

This thought that a single intelligence officer could rule over the fates of thousands., one might suggest, was what gave a scrappy kid from the wrong side of Leningrad an idea of how to get power and a sense of significance. The irony is that while he has, since then, become the lord of the spies, his actual career in the KGB was perhaps less distinguished than he might have liked.

After all, there were KGB officers and KGB officers. For all the artfully crafted mythology built around him, Putin was never some Soviet James Bond. He was at first posted in counter-intelligence, but in 1985, in part a result of his good command of German, he was sent to Dresden, in Communist East Germany. At this point, he transferred to the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, its foreign espionage division, though he never left the German Democratic Republic and seems largely to have been collating records and debriefing Soviet and East German citizens who travelled abroad. He filed reports for others to read, got plump on German beer (he admits to putting on 25 pounds), saved money to buy a car and generally lived a comfortable life. His was not exactly a glittering career, and when Viktor Kryuchkov, who had been head of the First Chief Directorate at the time, was later asked about Putin, he had to admit that he had never heard of him.

As a result of that posting, Putin missed the reformist excitement of the Soviet Union in the later 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev began to peel away the decades of repression and stagnation. Instead, his experience was of the once-disciplined German Democratic Republic falling apart around him, as Moscow essentially allowed the Germans to go their own way. While crowds besieged their offices, the KGB officers burned documents by the armful and pleaded for protection from the local Soviet garrison, but the Chekists were told they could do nothing without orders from Moscow, ‘and Moscow is silent’.

For Putin, the lesson seems not to have been that all empires fall, and the bloodier ones tend to fall harder. Nor even that the Soviet system had proven beyond reform. Rather, that the real problem of the USSR was that, in his own words, ‘it had a terminal disease without cure – a paralysis of power’. As president, he would demonstrate a determination to prove that the state retains both power and the will to use it. He has some of the tradecraft of the trained security service officer, especially when it comes to identifying and exploiting people’s vulnerabilities, but his experiences were from the late KGB, one driven not by dreams of Marxist-Leninist glory but corrupt self-interest. He did not witness the positive side of Gorbachev’s perestroika reform programme, just the cataclysmic outcomes, which he is clearly keen are not repeated.

He was also pretty mediocre at the job, so while he might look to the KGB’s successors as his natural allies and constituents, there is also an element of ‘wannabe-ness’ about this relationship. He has, for example, blessed the growth of what is almost a personality cult around Yuri Andropov, who was head of the KGB from 1967 to 1982 and General Secretary of the Communist Party for fifteen months in 1982–4, before succumbing to kidney failure. In 1999, Putin put flowers on Andropov’s grave to mark the eighty-fifth anniversary of his birth, and a year later he placed a plaque commemorating him on the building where he had lived. In 2004, he even saw that a statue to the man was erected in St Petersburg. Meanwhile, he periodically invokes Andropov’s memory as a brilliant intellect and an unswervingly ruthless patriot, and has encouraged an explosion in the number of articles and books about his life and times.

The irony is, I doubt Andropov would be as keen on Putin. He was a complex figure and certainly no bleeding heart – he sent dissidents to mental hospitals and presided over the crushing of both Hungary’s 1956 uprising and Czechoslovakia’s ‘Prague Spring’ in 1968 – but he was also an ascetic and a realist. Putin likes to pretend to be tough on corruption, but in practice it has become central to his whole style of rule, as I will discuss in Chapter 4. He also lives a life of opulent comfort, with palaces outside Moscow and on the Black Sea, and even exercises in a £2,500 tracksuit. Andropov, by contrast, lived an austere lifestyle, keeping the same flat even as he rose through the system; as a Russian television documentary put it, he had ‘one suit, one overcoat and his children and grandchildren rode the metro’. He also oversaw a bloody anti-corruption campaign that saw fifteen ministers sacked and embezzlers and profiteers tried and shot. Although he was a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist-Leninist, time and again he demonstrated an unwillingness to swallow propaganda unquestioningly and be satisfied with the comforting lies subordinates would feed their bosses. While he was an outstanding head of the KGB, he came to the agency as an outsider, a Party loyalist who would tame and modernise the thuggish murder machine the Soviets had inherited from Stalin. He never let himself be house-trained, and his experience meant that he knew how his people would attempt to doctor what they told him, even when they thought they were doing it in his own best interests.

By contrast, Putin appears both politically and psychologically dependent on his spooks, even though he never acquired the kind of insider knowledge required to understand how they work (and when they don’t). Russia has a number of intelligence and security services, four of which are the most significant. The FSB, a domestic counter-intelligence agency that seems more devoted to crushing political opposition than anything else, is the closest successor to the old KGB. Although corruption is something of a constant in Russian officialdom, the FSB is especially infamous for it, thanks to its virtual freedom from the law. Putin ran the FSB in 1998–9 and still treats it with the greatest indulgence. The SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service, is essentially the KGB’s First Chief Directorate – it has a different acronym but the same role and even the same headquarters at Yasenevo in southern Moscow. The SVR specialises in human intelligence, planting deep-cover moles abroad and recruiting foreign agents. The GRU, or Main Intelligence Directorate, is military intelligence – technically it has simply been the GU, or Main Directorate, since 2010, but everyone in Moscow still calls it the ‘Gru’ and Putin has suggested restoring the old name. They are a much more gung-ho agency, doing everything from running spies and hacking computers to controlling Russia’s Spetsnaz, or special forces. Finally, there is the Federal Protection Service, the FSO, which is Putin’s Praetorian Guard and includes not just the sunglasses-and-dark-suit-wearing ‘bullet-catchers’ of the presidential security detail, but also the goose-stepping riflemen of the Kremlin Guard.

As with every aspect of the adhocracy, whatever their official roles, in practice the activities of these agencies overlap. The political policemen of the FSB also run missions abroad; the SVR sets up commando teams; the GRU does political intelligence; and the FSO snoops on them all. The result, at least in theory, is that they have an incentive to be aggressive and imaginative, as they compete for Putin’s favour. It should also help him control them by playing them off against each other, and double-check the information from one with that from the others.

Of course, it often doesn’t work like that. Like so many authoritarian leaders, Putin has over time become less and less willing to listen to alternative perspectives. As one former Russian spy told me, the intelligence agencies have learned that ‘you do not bring bad news to the tsar’s table’. As with everything under Putin, politics around intelligence is competitive to the point of cannibalism. In 2003, the Federal Agency of Government Communications and Information (FAPSI), Russia’s electronic snooping agency comparable to Britain’s GCHQ or the US NSA, was eaten up by its rivals, divvied up between the FSB, FSO and GRU. So they all compete to tell Putin what they think he wants to hear, to flatter his prejudices and to reassure him that everything is going well. Officials I have spoken to at the Russian foreign ministry, for example, gloomily admit that Putin turns to FSB assessments of what’s happening abroad before their own – this would be like the British prime minister asking MI5 about the latest news from Germany.

Putin typically starts his workday in the early afternoon (he is late to bed and late to rise) with a trio of leather-bound briefing files: the FSB’s report on domestic affairs, the SVR’s on developments around the world and the FSO’s on what is going on within the Russian elite. In other words, his first and main introduction to each day comes from his spooks. Furthermore, there is a vicious cycle of escalating claims and conspiracy theories, as the various services compete for the boss’s attention with ever-more-lurid allegations. When Putin claims that the West is trying to undermine him, that Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis or that a secret ‘deep state’ conspiracy dominates Washington, is he just posturing, or is he in fact repeating eye-catching nonsense from intelligence briefings that aim to enthral rather than educate him?

Putin is still a spook fanboy, without much fieldwork under his belt and with limited managerial experience in the services. But he likes, trusts and listens to them. At the same time, without meaning to, he is King Lear to his ambitious daughters, apportioning his kingdom based on how well they flatter him. So, of course, they do. While Putin certainly controls Russia’s intelligence agencies, how far do they control or at least influence him in return, through the picture of the world they paint?

Chapter 3: Putin’s Not Looking to Revive the USSR, or Tsarism for That Matter

Back in 2007, I was having a drink with a retired Russian spy, a colonel in the KGB who had chosen to leave the service in 1991. After a few years in what he always vaguely described as ‘corporate intelligence’ – obviously lucrative, as I doubt his government pension would have allowed him to buy that new BMW 7 Series every few years – he retired to read books about the Second World War, dote on his grandchildren, and periodically predict the war to end all wars. Putin had recently given a speech in Munich that had the colonel glowing with apocalyptic glee.

That speech was, in many ways, the start of a new and rather more dangerous chapter in global politics. When Putin had first come to power in 2000, he spoke the language of tough nationalism but was in practice strikingly pragmatic. He was no fan of Western democracy, but he did believe that Russia’s best future depended on developing some kind of positive working relationship with the West. The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the USA gave him a perfect opportunity to build rapport on an issue where there was genuine common interest: he was the first world leader to contact President George W. Bush to express sympathy after the attacks, and followed up with practical support and assistance that ranged from intelligence sharing to allowing Coalition forces deploying to Afghanistan to be supplied through Russia.

Putin’s notions of cooperation proved out of step with the West’s. He expected them to be similarly understanding of his brutal war against Chechen separatists, which he framed as a counter-terrorism operation, and was infuriated when he faced criticism for human rights violations (as his forces pounded cities and interned civilians). When seven Central European nations, including the three Baltic states that had once been part of the USSR, were allowed to join NATO in 2004, Putin regarded this as a direct breach of prior understandings (which NATO denied) and an eastward expansion of an anti-Russian military alliance. The irritants and misunderstandings accumulated, and they burst forth in his speech in Munich. He criticised the USA for trying to create a ‘unipolar’ world under its domination, accusing it of ‘an almost uncontained hyper use of force … that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts’.

This was strong stuff, a genuine cry of anger, frustration and embittered disillusion, which, of course, was music to the ears of my friend, the KGB colonel. ‘Mark my words,’ he chortled, pouring himself another glass of Armenian cognac, ‘within three years there will be war. There will be war.’ Why – because Putin wants to expand Russia’s borders? ‘Oh no,’ he replied, taken aback by my Western paranoia. ‘Because you will have invaded us.’ It is all too easy for us to focus on the undoubted aggression of Putin’s Russia without considering the deep insecurities in which it is rooted.

It’s not as though Putin helps the situation. If you’re the undisputed master of a nation, you should be wary of making offhand statements, especially ones that seem to justify others’ worst fears about you. In a speech in the Kremlin in 2005, Putin said that ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union was the major geopolitical catastrophe of the century’. Never mind that he was focusing on the plight of ethnic Russians who had suddenly found themselves outside their nation’s borders, and on the way that ‘the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself’. Never mind that in the same year he said that ‘those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart, and those who do regret it have no brain’. None of that context matters, and the original line about the ‘geopolitical catastrophe’ has since been endlessly cited as evidence that he hankers after those halcyon Soviet days and wants to restore the USSR.

To be sure, Putin is Homo Sovieticus, a product of Soviet times. He played in a Leningrad scarred by its ferocious defence against the Nazi invaders in a war appropriated by the Party as part of its legitimating mythology. As a schoolboy he studied the heavily politicised versions of history prescribed by the government, in which a jealous and implacably hostile West was portrayed as a perpetual threat. At Leningrad State University, he had to join the Communist Party as a condition of graduation, and this was all the more necessary given his desperation to be a Chekist. But he is not a Communist in any ideological sense, even by the cynical and corrupt standards of late Soviet times, when most within the Party elite simply wrapped their self-interest in a red flag. Rather, he seems to miss the order of those days, and he certainly resents the loss of the Soviet Union’s unquestioned superpower status: witness how he bristled when Barack Obama dismissed Russia as a ‘regional power’ in 2014, snapping that the American president was being ‘disrespectful’. This issue of respect is clearly central to his vision for his country’s future.

Putin has committed himself to restoring both the central authority of the state and also Russia’s status as a great power, but this is not simply an exercise in geopolitical archaeology, rediscovering and restoring ancient glories. Rather, it is envisaged as creating something new. Recreating the old USSR would not only mean a war with NATO over forcing the recalcitrant Baltic states back into the fold; it would also mean taking on responsibility for five unstable, corrupt Central Asian countries. There is no evidence that Putin – let alone the Russian people as a whole – has any interest in that. Even in Ukraine, a country much closer to Moscow’s heart, had he wanted to annex the ethnically Russian Donbas region, he could have done that in 2014. Indeed, when Putin made it clear that this was not going to happen, he disappointed and angered many Russian nationalists who had seen him as their champion.

If he does not want to restore the USSR’s boundaries, what does he want? For a clue, look at the glitzy ‘Russia – My History’ exhibition at Moscow’s VDNKh, the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy. VDNKh was built in Soviet times as a bombastic theme park dedicated to Stalinism, with huge pavilions showcasing the largely mythic successes of the five-year plan. After 1991, it fell into the same shabby decline as the rest of Russia. Pavilions were closed or became indoor markets, where dodgy traders shifted dodgy goods: fake furs, counterfeit cigarettes and smuggled Chinese electronics. Under Putin it has gone through a renaissance; water once again flows from the glittering Friendship of Nations fountain, and the Cosmos Pavilion now includes the Soviet Buran space shuttle. However, beyond reviving what was there, the government has also built a massive new multimedia exhibition, ‘Russia – My History’. It has three main sections; one devoted to the country in medieval times, when it was ruled by the princes of the Rurik dynasty, one about the era of the Romanov tsars, and one focusing on 1917–45, from the Bolshevik Revolution to the end of the Second World War – or, as the exhibition puts it, ‘from the Great Upheaval to a Great Victory’.

The exhibit is modern, fun, and free of pesky nuance and killjoy balance. It is theme-park history, a roller-coaster ride with soaring ascents and terrifying descents, along a government-approved trajectory that sees Russia strong and safe when it is united and ruled by a firm hand. It doesn’t matter if it’s talking about the thirteenth century when, according to the exhibition, Russian princedoms were conquered by the Mongols because they were divided (‘Atomisation!’ screams a headline above a glowing map of different principalities), or the Second World War (the ‘Great Patriotic War’ in Russian parlance) when Stalin’s murderous tyranny is presented as a sad necessity for victory. Whether Marshal Zhukov, the man who broke Berlin in 1945 or Prince Mikhail Kutuzov, who turned back Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, it is all about strong men (and a few women) taking tough decisions and shaping the world, regardless of whether they wore a red star or a tsar’s colours.

This is the essence of Putin’s vision. In his State of the Federation speech in 2012, he said that ‘to revive national consciousness, we need to link historical eras and get back to understanding the simple truth that Russia did not begin in 1917, or even in 1991 … We have a common, continuous history spanning over a thousand years, and we must rely on it to find inner strength and purpose in our national development.’ He wants to cherry-pick the bits of history that fit his narrative of a Russia that has been perennially battered and belittled by foreigners, yet strong when it stands together – so the Soviet victory in 1945 is included, but Communism isn’t, for example. Russian history is strewn with the bodies of defunct empires and heroes of the day; like Dr Frankenstein, Putin wants to create something new from the bits and pieces gathered from those corpses.

But there is also a dangerous flip side to this mish-mash of Russian history: a preoccupation with the country’s insecurity. As a nation at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, it has always been prey to the rising imperialist power of the age, from the raiding Vikings of the ninth century, to the Mongols of the thirteenth, the Swedes in the eighteenth, the French in the nineteenth and the Germans in the twentieth – and, many fear, the Chinese in the twenty-first. It has also often been the victim of other nations’ greater economic or technological strength – in the 1853–6 Crimean War, for example, British rifles could often outrange Russian cannon. The collapse of the Soviet Union was the culmination of a period of slow and painful economic decay, due to a considerable extent to the pressure of excessive defence spending, as the Soviets tried to keep up with the West. It was not simply a matter of too much money going to defence, it affected the whole of the centrally planned economy. The single greatest cause of household fires in the early 1980s was exploding television sets, for example, as the defence firms got to pick the best cathode-ray tube displays for their use, leaving the substandard ones for civilian televisions.

In effect, the Soviet Union lost a war, a political, economic and social one. Gorbachev had tried to reform the Communist Party, but it was too close-minded, corrupt and conservative to change. Public anger grew as the economic situation worsened, and nationalist movements sought to break countries out of a ‘union’ that had always looked more like an empire. On Christmas Day in 1991, Gorbachev resigned as Soviet president and Moscow went from being the capital of an empire to the centre of one country out of fifteen. It is hard to overstate the shocking impact of the 1990s on Russia, a decade when the ruble tumbled, pensions and salaries often seemed not able to buy anything, and pensioners would stand outside metro stations trying desperately to sell whatever possessions they had to get through another week, while the Mercedes and BMWs of the new rich drove past. Privatisation schemes simply transferred public assets into the hands of a few corrupt insiders and wheeler-dealers, and Moscow no longer seemed in charge.

It is perhaps understandable that bewilderment at what had happened shifted to a desire to find someone to blame, someone who had done it to them. The most extreme point of view is that the West had not only deliberately forced the Soviet Union into an arms race that it could not afford, but that its Harvard economists and International Monetary Fund advisers had knowingly encouraged the plunder of the country, an allegation that is not totally without truth. Even more moderate figures note the degree to which Russia was not taken seriously in that decade, when it was treated as a problem rather than a player. As the KGB colonel put it, ‘As soon as we had pulled down the red flag and run up the white, as soon as they knew we were beaten, they lost interest.’

They lost interest. It is striking how far Putin’s foreign ambitions are psychological, about the ideas of power and forms of respect. He certainly seems to believe that the West is trying to keep Russia under its thumb. In 2011 he said, ‘Sometimes it seems to me that America does not need allies, it needs vassals.’ The trouble is that, when viewed from the Kremlin’s narrow windows, and especially when filtered through the conspiracy-theory-laden analyses often peddled by those in Putin’s circle, the world can seem very hostile. Uprisings in the Middle East and other post-Soviet states? Clearly not protests against corrupt, inefficient and unresponsive rulers, but CIA plots to bring down Moscow-friendly regimes. The rise of a new generation of young, middle-class Russians unimpressed with what Putin can offer and willing to protest? Obviously another example of creeping and weaponised Westernisation. After all, as far as Putin is concerned, the decline of Russia’s distinctive cultural values and civilisational uniqueness also affects its place in the world, because ‘without history, without culture, without mentality, nothing works. Those are the things that glue everything together. All those things create a country, ensure its cohesion and determine its position in the international arena.’

This sense of military, political, economic and cultural vulnerability is widely held, and there are those who see it in even starker terms than Putin. When, for example, Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of his Security Council, one of his closest allies and the nearest thing he has to a national security adviser, openly affirms that he knows for a fact that the USA ‘would very much like Russia not to exist at all as a country’, what can one expect? The claims of my colonel friend that the West is just waiting for the chance to invade Russia are not just the whinnies of an old warhorse, they reflect a genuine concern that, however much we may think it perverse and paranoid, continues to inform Moscow’s military planning and policy discussions.

Losing an empire, and with it great-power status, is hard – one could say that Britain and France haven’t really come to terms with this, fifty-plus years on. Putin doesn’t simply want to turn the clock back to past glory days, whether tsarist or Soviet. Instead, he is kicking against Russia’s new place in the world. After all, this is a country with a shrinking population and an economy the size of Spain’s, that is largely dependent on oil and gas. Despite having innovative and creative programmers and designers, it is having trouble adapting to the information age. It has nuclear weapons and a large army, but it can barely afford either, with a third of the federal budget being spent on security, broadly defined. It also has strikingly little ‘soft power’ – there are wannabe strongmen who dream of being like Putin, but not many countries want to be like Russia. On any objective basis, Russia is not a great power. But Putin is determined that Russia matters, matters more than this recitation of moderate strengths and less moderate weaknesses would suggest.

At the same time, Putin – who is known to read a lot of history – has a view of what being a great power in the world means that is more rooted in the nineteenth century than the twenty-first: he thinks each great power has a sphere of influence, buffer states and jewels in the crown. For example, when Putin punished Ukraine and Georgia for their temerity in trying to get closer to the West, it was less for practical reasons and more because he could not bear to see them being ‘lost’. Secondly, he sees a great power as having a voice in all global issues of consequence, not because it necessarily has interests at stake but rather because this symbolises its status. Finally, he thinks a great power should get to waive the rules and should not have to consider itself bound by international laws and norms.

This is a pipe dream, especially for a country that is only a great power in its own imagination, but in many ways this is the point: politics and power are all about perception. By acting as if Russia is a great power, Putin hopes to persuade everyone else either that this is true, or at least that it is not worth trying to challenge the idea and that they should stop trying to ‘keep Russia down’. At 1.7 metres tall, Putin is of below average height, but with his over-the-top tough-guy persona, he tries to project a rather more formidable image. As I will discuss in Chapter 6, his persona is precisely that, a piece of purposeful theatricality, and the same is true of much of his foreign policy. He is trying to get us to show respect, to treat Russia as if it still matters in the world, as if it were much more than 1.7 metres tall. In the name of this defensive policy, he is undoubtedly deploying aggressive tactics, but this is not the start of a Soviet revival, nor yet a tsarist one – it is an angry, despairing scream into the void, a last attempt to deny history, to pretend the age of Russian superpower is not over.

Chapter 4: Putin Sees Money as a Means, Not an End

According to Bill Browder, an American-born entrepreneur who made a lot of money in Russia before falling foul of the wrong people and losing a lot of it too, Putin’s total net worth is around $200 billion (£156 billion), which makes him as rich as Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Bill Gates of Microsoft put together. Is Putin truly the world’s richest man? The people who will know are not the kind of people who will talk to me, but this is a question I have asked all sorts, from Western intelligence analysts to Russian journalists. Perhaps the best answer I ever got was from a former tax policeman who was then working in a pretty senior role at Rosfinmonitoring, Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service. At first he looked pained at the usual question from a dumb foreigner, but then he burst out laughing: ‘Listen, you don’t understand. It’s not the 1990s. Putin doesn’t go looking for money – money goes looking for him. He probably doesn’t know how much and where it is – why should he? He’s just …’ He was clearly casting around for a suitable metaphor. ‘Swimming in it,’ he concluded with a smile.

Putin is undeniably rich, and far richer than he admits. Ahead of the 2018 elections, he issued a statement of his assets which said he had earned 38.5 million rubles (£458,000) over the previous six years from his salary, savings and pension, and had some £190,000 in the bank. He also owns a 75-square-metre flat in St Petersburg, two Soviet-era vintage GAZ cars and a little Lada Niva 4x4. His palaces, private jets and so forth can be hand-waved away as perks of the job rather than his own property, but he has, at the same time, been seen sporting a collection of high-end watches that has together been valued at half a million pounds. An old Georgian curse ran, ‘May you live on your wages alone.’ It is hard to believe that this applies to Vladimir, any more than to the rest of the Russian elite. They routinely turn out to have massive mansions, such as Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu’s £14 million pagoda-themed estate and presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov’s £5.5 million home. Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, with characteristic overkill, also has a private zoo with a tiger and an £840,000 Lamborghini Reventón.

So is Putin little more than the ‘embezzler-in-chief’, the godfather of a state-sized mafia? This certainly seemed to be to be the message of the so-called ‘Panama Papers’ leak in 2015, when millions of files from a Panamanian law firm that specialised in representing the obscenely wealthy were revealed. Among many other personal and corporate financial shenanigans, they appeared to show that Putin had stashed away as much as £1.5 billion in various opaque offshore companies and in the accounts of sundry of his cronies, including at least £80 million in the name of his close childhood friend, the cellist Sergei Roldugin.

It would be tempting to see this as proof that Putin is hiding money away for a rainy day or a lavish retirement. Once, during the precarious 1990s when he was trying to maximise a shrinking salary in a time of massive opportunity and risk, this may have been his main motivation. He has been linked to a variety of questionable deals in St Petersburg, such as the exports-for-food agreement that was meant to feed the city and yet which, according to city councillor Marina Salye, saw almost £100 million disappear, or else the £30 million construction budget that former police investigator Andrey Zykov said was spent on Spanish holiday villas for Putin and his friends. Neither case ever went to court, and Putin denies any wrongdoing. Even then, though, there seems to have been a collective and almost coincidental nature to much of the off-the-books enrichment that was going on. It wasn’t only Putin involved – he was just one of a bunch of friends who were making money, lots of money, thanks to their political connections and the business opportunities they opened up, and this all snowballed.

They built dachas, or country houses, on the eastern shore of Lake Komsomolskoye, north of St Petersburg. It appears an idyllic spot, but more striking than the vistas are the stratospheric careers of the members of the so-called Ozero (‘Lake’) Dacha Cooperative. In 2004 Yuri Kovalchuk became the chair of Bank Rossiya, in which role the US Treasury described him as Putin’s ‘personal banker’. In 2005, Vladimir Yakunin became head of Russian Railways, on a £10 million salary. His luxury mansion outside Moscow famously has not just an Olympic-sized swimming pool and a garage with space for 15 cars, but also a special room solely for fur coats. Nikolai Shamalov is a co-owner of Bank Rossiya. Sergei Fursenko became director general of one of the subsidiaries of the state gas corporation Gazprom in 2003, and later of the Gazprom-owned Zenit St Petersburg Football Club. The list continues, but the common denominator is that all these men, who are at least multi-millionaires if not billionaires, rose to high-power, high-paying positions under Putin.

The cooperative’s common bank account is held in Bank Rossiya, which is proof to some that it is Putin’s personal slush fund. However, the truth is more likely that it is a collective account into which many people can put money and that Putin, should he want to, is simply one of those who can dip into it. It is telling that the best parallel seems to be the obshchak, the kitty Russian organised crime gangs used to keep, to fund new operations, to look after members who got sent to prison, and to otherwise to keep the group happy and busy. In the early 1990s, when Putin was horse-trading with St Petersburg’s gangsters on Mayor Sobchak’s behalf, he may have learned a thing or two. He was certainly operating in an environment where corruption was the norm rather than the exception. I once asked a policeman what would have happened had he not taken bribes, and he explained that it wasn’t just that his family would have suffered – no one could live on a policeman’s salary in the 1990s – but also that it would have caused trouble for him with his colleagues. As he said, if you ‘don’t take bribes and you stand out from the rest, you become a problem for them. It’s safer just to do like everyone else.’ Nothing suggests that Putin had any intention of standing out from the rest in this respect.

Of course, the shopkeeper being shaken down by a fire inspector or the driver pulled over by a policeman for speeding have to reach for their wallets, but the real problem for Russia, rather than this individual corruption, is the industrial-scale profiteering at the top of the system that sucks the blood from the country’s veins and the marrow from its bones. According to the INDEM Foundation, one of the few remaining independent think tanks in Russia, corruption devours up to a third of its GDP. To put it another way, whatever the cost of Western sanctions since 2014, Russia’s own political and business elite have cost the country up to six times as much.

The way this corruption works is through favours, access, lucrative contracts and the authorities turning a blind eye to flat-out embezzlement. The Kremlin doesn’t pay people – it simply grants them opportunities that they can milk. In return, rather than handing over suitcases of cash, they invest in projects, donate to charities, grant stakes in businesses and look after friends. This doesn’t only apply to regular businesspeople; officials are also encouraged to take advantage of their positions, which back in tsarist times was called kormleniye, or ‘feeding’, both to ensure their loyalty and also to guarantee that if the government has an excuse if it ever wants to get rid of them. If you’re the person who gets to decide in whose closet to rummage, it is useful if everyone’s is hiding a skeleton.

The same exchange of loyalty for opportunities to get rich even applies to the underworld. Back when he was deputy mayor in St Petersburg, Putin’s job was to act as a ‘liaison’ – essentially, to cut deals with whomever he had to, to keep the city running and the local bigwigs happy. This included powerful crime gangs, especially the Tambovskaya group, an organisation so formidable that its leader, Vladimir Kumarin, became known as the ‘night governor’ – the implication was that by day, the mayor’s office was in charge, but at night, St Petersburg was Tambovskaya’s. He managed to stay ahead of the law until 2007, when he was arrested and sentenced on a range of charges – his continued high-profile status had become a little too embarrassing for Putin. Companies run by the Tambovskaya gang were granted a range of contracts and perks in return for their cooperation, and this same model was applied throughout Russia when Putin became president, in effect offering organised crime a degree of freedom so long as they did not directly challenge the state. In politics, business and crime, three worlds that admittedly do overlap to a depressing degree in Russia, Putin offered wealth in exchange for loyalty. Just as the political entrepreneurs seek to predict and please him with geopolitical mischief abroad, the corrupt entrepreneurs in business shower the boss with gifts, in the hope of winning and keeping his favour.

When Putin wanted to build a lavish palace for himself at Cape Idokopas in the over-the-top, blinged-out style so beloved of the Russian new rich, complete with a private theatre and three helicopter pads, he didn’t pay for it himself. He didn’t even do so out of the state budget. Instead, he demanded that a number of the wealthiest businessmen make ‘voluntary donations’ to fund health care improvements. It was a request you couldn’t refuse. According to a whistle-blower who was involved in the scheme, about a third of the millions collected was diverted into offshore slush funds, with much being used to build the palace. The government denies that it is even an official residence, but this claim became harder to sustain once it was clear that it is garrisoned by Kremlin Guards from the Federal Protection Service, and maintained by the Presidential Property Management Directorate.

After all, those people making fortunes of their own know that they are rich only while they have political power and Putin’s goodwill, which also keeps them suitably anxious and vulnerable to the whims of the Kremlin. The Italian Renaissance politician and philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli once said that while ‘gold by itself will not get you good soldiers, good soldiers will always get you gold’. The corollary for Putin’s Russia is that although money will not necessarily get you power, power will always get you money. Remember that ‘Putin doesn’t go looking for money – money goes looking for him.’ The irony is that these days, when Putin has least need for money, people are most eager to give it to him. The ‘Panama Papers’ revelations reflect that he accumulates money not so much against his will as much as without his working at it and perhaps even – to an extent – without him knowing the details.

In the 1990s, Putin obviously was looking for ways to make the most of his salary, but even then he seems to have been a man with an eye on the main chance, and it is hardly coincidental that the people with whom he forged connections – city officials, gangsters, even his fellow vacationers in the Ozero Dacha Cooperative – could all be useful to him. Now that he has whatever he wants, all Russia as his piggy bank, it is clear that it is power, not money that is his thing – his ever-growing wealth is more a by-product of the corruption and kleptocracy that is at the heart of his system. His gaze is firmly fixed on governing Russia and building his historical legacy. He understands how the promise of wealth – and the fear of losing it – motivates those around him, but it isn’t his drug of choice.

Although some sentimental leftists in the West still cling to the notion that Russia somehow still embodies the egalitarian values of old Soviet ideology, Putin has presided over the transformation of Russia into a hybrid state that is half old-style crony oligarchy and half caricature of the most rapacious form of capitalism. The richest 10 per cent of Russians own almost 90 per cent of the country, more than in any other developed nation. Meanwhile, much of their profits and assets flow out of Russia; they may talk the talk of the new model Putinist nationalist, but they gleefully take advantage of the financial opportunities of globalisation as they plunder the Motherland. This may drive them, but it is probably not, or at least no longer, what motivates the boss.

Let us, by all means, do everything we can to cleanse London and the other financial centres of the West of the dodgy Russian money that has enriched our bankers, driven up our property prices and distorted our politics, but we shouldn’t assume that targeting Putin’s money, or his obshchak, is some sort of magic weapon. If anything, if he loses access to his funds abroad, he will have all the more reason to stay in power at home, while if the oligarchs, minigarchs and corrupt officials are faced with the choice of either bringing their money home, where the state might take it, or leaving it abroad, where we definitely will take or freeze it, then they will probably do the former. And if it’s too late, they will simply become more dependent on the Kremlin for another juicy contract to help replenish their bank accounts. If we want to be able to influence Putin we need to pay attention to what really drives him rather than money, which is what we’ll turn to next.

Chapter 5: Putin Doesn’t Read Philosophy, and Russia Is Not Mordor

‘But what’s his philosophy?’ I’d been answering questions for almost an hour from a collection of intelligence analysts, in a European country with a fairly pressing interest in Russia. So far, the questions had been pretty specific and practical: which institutions had more power, who was on the way up and who might be on the way down, was Moscow going to push further into Ukraine? This last question caught me on the hop. I started to talk about Putin’s vision for Russia and his approach to power, but this was clearly not what the questioner had in mind.

‘No, I mean which philosophical school of thought does he follow? Is he committed to Dugin’s Eurasianism or Prokhanov’s neo-Imperialism? Do you subscribe to the view that his ideas are shaped by Ivan Ilyin’s writings?’ Oh dear, I thought to myself. I had been so close to getting out of there, but it seemed that I was going to be stuck for a while longer.

Having been caught by surprise by him before, people are often looking for the magic answer with Putin, the key that will somehow unlock his plans and secrets. For some, it’s all about following the money, while for others it’s about rebuilding the USSR. Then there are those like that analyst who, in their quest to try and understand how Putin thinks – and thus what he may do next – seek to identify philosophers, dead or alive, whom they can present as explaining his world view.

Consider the names above. Alexander Dugin is a writer, pundit, philosopher and enthusiastic self-publicist who delights in such Western descriptions of him as ‘Putin’s brain’. He espouses ‘Eurasianism’, the idea that Russia should be the heart of an empire spanning Europe and Asia, committed to fighting Western ‘Atlanticism’ and the liberal values it represents. At various times, he has eulogised fascism, Stalin, Neopaganism and then Putin, saying, ‘Putin is everywhere, Putin is everything, Putin is absolute, and Putin is indispensable.’ In early 2014 his views were useful to provide some kind of intellectual rationale for the Crimean land-grab, and when Putin was toying with either creating a puppet pseudo-state of ‘Novorossiya’ (‘New Russia’) in south-eastern Ukraine, or annexing that land, too. But by summer of that year, Putin had backed away from this idea, and Dugin was suddenly no longer useful. His appearances in the media dwindled dramatically, and his contract at Moscow State University was not renewed.

Alexander Prokhanov was an old-school propagandist from Soviet times, who was called ‘the nightingale of the General Staff’ for his sentimental odes to the bravery and decency of the Red Army, portraying them upholding internationalist values and foiling dastardly CIA plots from Afghanistan to Central America. Now he is an ageing ultranationalist, churning out articles and books calling for a new Russian empire, and making occasional trips to the Donbas to pose with a Kalashnikov in his hand. In 2012 he founded the Izborsk Club, a nationalist think tank that some see as a sinister engine powering Russian policy abroad. Yet while it regularly generates lunatic proposals, such as the idea that Ukraine could be divided between Russia, Poland, Hungary and Romania, they are distinctly absent from Kremlin calculations.

Finally, Ivan Ilyin was a White, or anti-Bolshevik, émigré who died in 1954. In The Road to Unfreedom, the historian Timothy Snyder paints him as a man who ‘ignored or despised: individualism, succession, integration, novelty, truth and equality’ and at the same time as an intellectual inspiration for Putin. This characterisation of Ilyin as a ‘fascist’ is pretty questionable – after all, this is a man who believed passionately in the rule of law and wrote that ‘freedom of the will is essential’ and that ‘self-determination in spirit is the deepest law of this life’. But regardless of such philosophical debates, the real issue is whether there is any evidence that Putin reads, let alone follows, Ilyin – or any of his other supposed inspirations. It is true that Ilyin’s writings were among a batch he suggested that regional governors read, back in 2014, and they certainly usefully justify his belief in Russia’s unique place in history, the importance of a strong ruler and the role of the Orthodox Church in defending Russia’s soul and ideals.

However, does occasionally quoting from the writing of Ilyin and others truly mean that Putin considers them his lodestars? Moreover, it is impossible to know if these are his or his speechwriters’ words. Instead of shaping policy, this is all about managing the public narrative; when some figures’ ideas are politically convenient they are hyped, and when they become liabilities they fade from view. Even when the ideas seem to chime with Putin’s own instincts, he is enough of a politician to put pragmatism first. Dugin, for example, has called for the Internet to be banned, and given that Putin has in the past described it as a CIA plot, one might think that this at least would get a positive hearing. However, with more than three-quarters of all Russians now using the Internet it is clearly a non-starter, and when the idea has been raised, Putin has shot it back down.

There is, after all, always another grand thesis or eccentric philosophy on which to draw, and a whole gallery of pundits, scholars, authors and know-it-alls are trying to influence Putin – or at least to give the impression that they do. In many ways, we can consider them as philosophical entrepreneurs akin to the political and economic varieties – they pitch their ideas to the Kremlin, locked in a rhetorical arms race with each other for attention and relevance, often by being more strident and striking than the last. But just as there is no one figure who is the power behind Putin’s throne, nor is there any one philosophy or philosopher that shapes his thinking. So, I had to disappoint that eager analyst and tell him that there was no key to this particular lock – or rather, that the answer was at once simpler and more complex.

In the same way as there is no single detailed strategy behind his attempts to elevate Russia internationally, nor is there is an explicit, coherent ideology in his domestic policy. Instead, within his unemotional exterior there bubbles a mix of very human motivations that generate his policies and responses. In what does Putin believe? As explored in previous chapters, he is a gut-level patriot who believes that Russia should be considered a great power not because of its military strength, its economy or for any other specific index, but because it’s Russia. This kind of primordial nationalism is hardly unique to him, or to Russia, but it bites especially sharply given that he and his generation still remember being a superpower. To an extent, this is about security – the idea that Russia must protect itself in a scary and unpredictable world – but it is also about respect and honour. Outsiders ought to treat Russia right, treat it better than they have previously.

To Putin, security and respect are based on strength, and a strong country needs strong state power. Like his fears about Russia being weak and his resentment at it being disrespected, this feeling is to a large degree rooted in the formative post-Soviet chaos of the 1990s. One of his first priorities on assuming power – and, to be honest, one of his real achievements – was to stop Russia sliding further into near collapse and assert the ‘power vertical’, a system of top-down personal control. However, the details seem to matter less to him. He grew up and lived in a state socialist economy, and though he had practical complaints about day-to-day inefficiencies and shortages, as far as we know he didn’t object to it philosophically. Now he runs a capitalist state, albeit one warped out of shape by corruption and oligarchic monopolies, and again, while he may sometimes be unhappy about some of the details, he shows no signs of wanting fundamental systemic reform.

Putin will go for what works. He is happy to read writers like Ilyin and enjoy the sense that his innate bias towards a strong, powerful and centrifugal state has a rich cultural pedigree, to quote the soundbites that work today. But he believes in power and pragmatism rather than in philosophy. As long as he can get what he wants from the existing system, he’s content.

The same utilitarianism applies to Putin’s foreign policy. He is increasingly presented as a leader who is committed to overturning the existing world order and its liberal democratic norms. He will certainly criticise what is, after all, an order largely created by the West, in the West’s image, and for the West’s advantage. He also plays with the role as champion of traditional social values, of a bygone age where men were men, women knew their place, and no one had even heard of transgenderism. But again, this is more instrumental than ideological. He believes that the West is essentially hypocritical and that a mark of a great power – like the USA – is its exceptionalism, the idea that it can ignore the pesky rules when it wants to, which is what he wants for Russia. He is happy to exploit the current fractures within the West, presenting the EU as prey to degenerate ultra-liberalism; if you watch Russian television coverage about Europe – or ‘Gayropa’, as some spiteful propagandists put it – you’d believe that children there are being forcibly ripped from their families and given to gay couples, and that every spare bedroom has to house a jihadist Muslim migrant, by law. Ultimately, this is because these are ways in which Putin can persuade Russians that they don’t want to be more like us, while also dividing, distracting and demoralising us. Above all, though, he is trying to assert Russia’s great power status de facto and to get us to accept that vision. But it’s all politics. If the price of securing Russia a great power get-out-of-jail-free card were to be to bless non-traditional marriages in Europe and gender-neutral bathrooms in the American Midwest, I imagine he’d accept that deal in a heartbeat.

The disappointing truth for the alt-right fanboys in the West who see Putin as their ideal patriarch is that he is nothing of the sort. Yes, he is a tough, even ruthless leader, but in social terms he is hardly the champion of conservatism they think. He upholds gun control and abortion rights, and while he went along with small-minded laws against so-called ‘gay propaganda’ – which can be stretched to almost anything normalising gay relationships – it was not an initiative that came from the Kremlin. He is a confirmed Russian Orthodox Christian, but has demonstrated no hint of anti-Semitism, notable in a country with a dark history of its relations with its Jews. If anything, the opposite is true: he has encouraged the revival of synagogues at home and forged a close alliance with Israel abroad. Although he is happy to engage in horrifyingly sexist ‘banter’ – as such language is so often normalised – including joking about rape, he is again unusual by the standards of many Russians of his generation in listening to, and sometimes even empowering, women. For example, Elvira Nabiullina has been chair of the Central Bank since 2013. She has been carrying out a ruthless campaign to try and clean out toxic and criminal banks. In the process she often comes up against powerful vested interests, but Putin has backed her time and again against men who might have been useful new cronies for him.

This is one of the abiding themes of Putin’s politics: he is happy to play many roles to many audiences, as seems useful, but beyond those primal bedrock issues of power, security and respect, they are simply performances. The same pragmatism applies at home. According to some more hostile foreign commentators, Russia is near enough an earthly Mordor, North Korea with balalaikas. However, walk the streets of Moscow, and you’d find yourself in a modern, dynamic and frankly fun European city. Even out in the provinces, where money is tighter and the new middle class are rather thinner on the ground, there is ample evidence of change. By this I don’t just mean coffee houses, Wi-Fi and branches of Marks & Spencer (thirty-six in Russia so far), but also real debate, investigative journalism and even civil society.

Putin has no ideological commitment to anything, really, and so has no reason to try to impose totalitarianism. Ideologists are, after all, the scariest kinds of rulers, because they want to dictate what goes on inside their people’s heads. Putin is, of course, willing to use propaganda and media control to mobilise support and squeeze out alternative perspectives, but he doesn’t really care what people think – so long as they do what they are told. As I’ll consider in Chapter 9, this creates interesting spaces for unexpected freedoms and even a ‘resistance that dare not speak its name’ inside his Russia. Putin is not a philosopher – and that is something for which we, and Russians, should be thankful.

Chapter 6: Putin Is Risk-Averse, Not a Macho Adventurer

Being one of Putin’s bodyguards can make your career. The head of his security detail, Viktor Zolotov, was appointed in 2016 to lead the newly formed National Guard – a domestic security force more than twice the size of the entire British armed forces – and has also amassed a property portfolio worth millions of pounds on an annual salary of just over £70,000. Another of Putin’s security team, Yevgeny Zinichev, became first governor of the Kaliningrad Region and then Minister of Emergency Situations. A third, Alexei Dyumin, is now governor of the Tula Region. This is in part because, as his circle has shrunk, increasingly the only people Putin knows are his guards, drivers, aides and umbrella-carriers. In fairness to them, they also earn it by the way they have to balance the need to indulge the boss’s taste for macho theatrics – diving for archaeological remains off the coast of Greece, tranquilising a Siberian tiger, riding with a motorcycle gang, taking to the rink for a high-octane game of ice hockey – with the massive behind-the-scenes preparation and choreography that ensures nothing poses the slightest real danger for ‘The Body’, as he is known in his inner circle.

In many ways this paradox is a metaphor for Putin, the man of many masks. At home he poses as the tough-love, details-oriented chief executive, even though he clearly leaves much of the minutiae of government to others and is increasingly less actively involved in managing the country. Abroad, he poses as the devil-may-care adventurer, a bad boy not worth tangling with because he is so unpredictable and resolute. In practice, though, he is cautious and risk-averse. He is only happy to play the maverick when he thinks he can predict the outcomes. We previously saw a great deal more brazen pressure on the United States, for example, with Russian jets routinely ‘buzzing’, or flying intimidatingly close to, American planes and warships. This was technically risky, but Moscow considered it politically safe, because they trusted the professionalism of American soldiers and the maturity of the American government not to get spooked and turn a piece of geopolitical gamesmanship into a shooting war.

When Donald Trump was elected, the scale and tempo of such challenges diminished dramatically. The Kremlin – like the rest of us – really didn’t know what to expect. I would go into meetings with Russian foreign ministry officials, expecting to pump them for information and would find them somehow hoping I could tell them about the new American president, simply because I had lived in New York for seven years. In April 2017, the US launched cruise missile strikes on Syria, in response to a chemical weapons attack by government forces, seemingly because Trump was affected by coverage he saw on Fox News. The following day I happened to meet with one of those Russian officials – he was at his wits’ end, caught between an unpredictable American president and higher-ups who were demanding firm predictions.

Because Putin wants clarity, he wants safe choices and guaranteed successes, and when he doesn’t have them, the tough-guy president, the man who’s happy to throw out gangster slang and warn countries challenging him that they may become military targets, the man who once said, ‘Even fifty years ago, the streets of Leningrad taught me one thing: if a fight is inevitable, go and fight first,’ that man has a signature move: he hides.

On the night of 27 February 2015, for example, Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and regional governor who was at the time the highest-profile democratic opposition leader in Russia, was walking over the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge, literally right by the Kremlin walls. Four shots were fired into his back, fatally injuring him. To some, this was a state-sanctioned hit, but it soon became clear that the murderers were security officers working for Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic. Kadyrov had helped Putin win the bloody Second Chechen War between 1999 and 2002. The irony is that in the name of preventing Chechnya from becoming independent, Putin allowed Kadyrov to establish himself as a virtually autonomous local warlord, paying off the local elite and bankrolling vanity projects in the Chechen capital Grozny at Moscow’s expense. Kadyrov has repeatedly faced allegations of murdering his enemies with impunity, even in Moscow, and there was a great deal of bad blood between him and Nemtsov.

We still don’t know whether Kadyrov ordered the hit directly or retrospectively blessed it, but he certainly made it clear that he was standing behind his guys: he described the man who confessed to carrying out the actual shooting as ‘a true patriot’. He wanted the case to go away, for a few scapegoats to be found and punished and a line to be drawn under the incident. Kadyrov’s enemies – which included the FSB and other elements of the security apparatus, who were angry at how he had locked them out of Chechnya and replaced their people with his own henchmen – saw this as an opportunity to take him down. A Russian journalist with good contacts in the FSB told me that ‘they had been waiting for something like this, for Kadyrov to do something stupid and shit on Putin’s doorstep’ – they believed that this time he had gone too far.

Putin was in the middle of this behind-the-scenes tug of war. And he hid. He disappeared for a fortnight while he fretted about what to do. If he exonerated Kadyrov, he would look weak and effectively be admitting that he couldn’t control Moscow. If he took on Kadyrov, he feared that the Chechen leader’s personal security forces, the so-called Kadyrovtsy, ‘Kadyrovites’, would avenge him, plunging Russia into a third vicious war in the region. Unsure which was the safest option, he withdrew from sight. Rumours abounded: there had been a coup, Putin was ill, he was dead, he had sneaked off to Switzerland for the birth of his love child. He would not even take Kadyrov’s calls, and the Chechen strongman surreally took to posting odes to his loyalty to Putin on Instagram, in the hope of getting through to the Kremlin.

What eventually emerged was not a decisive result but rather a mutually unsatisfying compromise worthy of any democratic deal-maker. Kadyrov received a tacit slap on the wrist, and was warned not to do it again. He also agreed to send some of his Kadyrovites to Syria as ‘military police’. But the hawks who wanted him brought down were told to cool it; the investigation was limited to the actual trigger-pullers, and no attempt was made to follow their chain of command. Kadyrov could continue to be Kadyrov.

Time and again, Putin either backs away from a tough decision, ducks out while he agonises, or hopes that with time, the need to make a decision will disappear. His ostensible acts of daring – such as the time he tranquilised a supposed wild tiger that turned out be a sedated animal from Khabarovsk Zoo – tend to be ones he thinks are actually safe.

In 2014, after Ukraine’s corrupt President Yanukovych had been toppled in the ‘Maidan Revolution’, Putin sent in his notorious ‘little green men’ to seize Crimea. These Russian special forces, their uniforms stripped of identifying badges, took the peninsula in a few days, almost without a shot being fired. It was hailed as an act of swashbuckling piracy, but the truth is that Crimea fell into his lap. The Ukrainian government had all but collapsed, its military high command was full of Moscow’s agents and sympathisers (the commander of the Ukrainian navy even switched sides), the Russian Black Sea Fleet was already based in Crimea because of an old treaty so the soldiers were already there, and many Crimeans, resentful of their own government’s neglect and aware of the higher living standards in Russia, were happy to support the annexation. After all, Crimea had been part of Russia until 1954 when (Ukrainian-born) General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev gifted it to Ukraine. The overwhelming majority of Russians, even those who were critics of Putin’s rule, felt it was rightfully theirs. So while he had taken a chance, not knowing how the West would respond, this was as safe an adventure as one could imagine.

After Crimea, Putin stirred up a proxy war in Ukraine’s south-eastern Donbas region that, four years on, is stalemated and has cost Russia dearly in terms of international credibility, economic sanctions and the need secretly to bankroll two pseudo-states there. But I was in Moscow in March 2014, when this undeclared war began, and what struck me then was that everyone I spoke to – government insiders, military types, think-tankers – was sure that this would be a short and limited intervention. Within six months, I was told, Ukraine would have got the message, have realised that it would be destabilised if it tried to break away from Moscow, and come back into the fold. The Russian troops, spooks and saboteurs in the Donbas would be home, and the West would have forgotten all about it. This was not too ridiculous an assumption, as it is what essentially happened after Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, but the point is that there seems to have been a consensus that it would be another easy win. It didn’t work out that way, but Putin had presumably believed what everyone told him. This was Putin the badly advised, not Putin the bold.

He is, of course, willing to take chances when he must, but he will do everything he can to minimise the risks. For example, Russia’s intervention in Syria in September 2015 risked conflict with the Americans or their proxy forces or else embarrassing losses. So serious thought went in to avoiding foreseeable dangers. A relatively small number of aircraft was deployed, every effort was made to avoid hitting Western forces on the ground, and when they needed to send in ground troops to stiffen Syria’s wavering army, instead of regular forces they sent ‘mercenaries’ working for the Wagner Group, a front organisation set up by military intelligence. Even though most of Wagner’s soldiers were Russian, it meant that the Kremlin could reassure ordinary Russians that their boys would not be coming home from the Middle East in body bags, and that, if any did die at the hands of the Americans (as happened in 2018), Moscow could pretend it had nothing to do with them.

When it is time for tough decisions, Putin tends to fudge and hedge. In March 2016, he announced that Russian troops would be withdrawn from Syria, and many within the military command – many of whom had served as junior officers in the Soviet Union’s bitter war in Afghanistan in 1979–88 – were jubilant. ‘We’ve done something the West never managed,’ one told me. ‘Intervened in the Middle East without getting bogged down.’ He shouldn’t have tempted fate, because Putin then seems to have changed his mind, disconcerted by different opinions about the likely outcome, turning the supposed withdrawal into a simple rotation of forces. Two and a half years later, Russia is still in Syria, and while things are currently going Damascus’s way, the longer you stay in a war, the more chance there is of painful surprises.

One such struck in November 2016, when a Russian Su-24M attack aircraft cut briefly into Turkish airspace during a bombing mission in northern Syria. In what appears to have been a deliberate ambush, Turkish F-16 fighters popped up from low altitude and shot it down; having ejected, one of the crew was rescued but the other was shot and killed by rebels while still in the air. Putin was visibly furious, calling it a ‘stab in the back’, placing sanctions on Turkey and threatening more serious retaliation. But Turkey’s President Erdoğan snarled back and it was eventually the Russians who backed down, after the Turks had provided a face-saving statement of regret – though not an apology.

Putin often shows a similar unwillingness to face direct challenges in domestic politics. For example, when unexpectedly strong protests greeted unpopular pension reforms in 2018, Putin – who had in 2005 publicly promised that the pension age would not be raised on his watch – at first tried to ignore them, and then rather weakly allowed his spokesman to say that it was a matter for the government in which ‘the president is not taking part’. This excuse would not wash, and he eventually offered a watered-down version of the reforms that, like so many compromises, pleased no one.

One can legitimately ask how far Putin’s macho antics reflect not an alpha male in his prime, but a leader using them to mask a lack of confidence, to mask a lack of strength. What, one might wonder, is the man who cannot seem to walk past a fighter plane without a photo opportunity – despite not having completed national service himself – trying to prove? None of this is to say that he is a coward, but rather that he is a rational actor, and even a cautious one. He can, of course, get things wrong, but his aggressive antics and bombastic bluster tend to be carefully judged and calibrated. He has concluded, not without grounds, that Western countries, and especially most European ones, are deeply uncomfortable with confrontation. By playing the role of the unpredictable troublemaker, he hopes that they West will find it easier to make a deal with him than take a stand against him. But that does not mean that his policy comes from below the waist and that we should take his postures and rhetoric at face value.

Chapter 7: Putin Is Popular, and Not

The odds of popping into a British bookshop and coming out with a framed portrait of the prime minister are, I think it’s fair to say, pretty slim. Yet go to the big Moskovsky Dom Knigi (or Moscow House of Books) on New Arbat Street and upstairs you can get your pick of pictures – a Medvedev maybe, probably a Shoigu, usually one of Moscow mayor Sobyanin, but above all, there will be Putins. Then, head to one of the souvenir kiosks and pick up a Putin T-shirt, or perhaps a fridge magnet calling him ‘the most polite of people’ – a play on the Russian term for the ‘little green men’ who took Crimea. If that’s not enough, why not splash out 232,000 rubles – or £2,800, almost eight times the average Russian monthly wage – on a limited edition Supremo Putin Damascus iPhone? Made from white gold and Damascus steel, it’s decorated with a picture of the man himself, the Russian coat of arms and one of his less-than-snappy catchphrases: ‘We will respond to all challenges!’

Some of this is for tourists, and some of it is for those who feel they need ostentatiously to demonstrate their loyalty. Yet it also reflects Putin’s very real – but also paradoxical – popularity in his country. As of late 2018, his personal approval ratings have plummeted to a mere 66 per cent because of his lacklustre handling of pension reform, when he had previously been in the eighties. Yet even this ‘low’ figure is the kind of level that Western politicians would kill to achieve: at the same time, for example, British prime minister Theresa May’s is at 25 per cent, French president Emanuel Macron’s is 32 per cent and US president Donald Trump’s is a highly polarised 42 per cent.

So Russians are happy? It’s not quite that simple, as Putin’s personal popularity ratings are only part of the story. Even setting aside the problems of polling in a fairly authoritarian state, Putin is not being benchmarked against any rival. Who, after all, did he stand against in the 2018 presidential elections? Well, there was Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the seventy-two-year-old caricature ultranationalist, who has written longingly about an imperial push southwards until ‘Russian soldiers can wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean’. There was Pavel Grudinin, a millionaire who was standing for the Communist Party, even though he had never been a member. Then there were other candidates who stood no chance of getting onto the second ballot, including Ksenia Sobchak, daughter of Anatoly Sobchak, Putin’s patron from the St Petersburg days. Best known as a socialite and reality television host, she was standing on an ‘against everyone’ platform.

Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democrats receive a lot of Kremlin money for advertising, and the Communists still have the remnants of their old organisation and a near-inexhaustible army of Stalinist grannies volunteeering to push leaflets through letterboxes. But the leadership of both parties seem to have effectively accepted their role as the fake opposition. The only figure who might have had the will and ability to give Putin a run for his money, if not beat him, was anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, but thanks to a distinctly dubious court case, he was barred from standing.

Navalny’s boyish charm, quick wit and detailed accounts of the dodgy deals and luxurious homes of the elite have made his Internet-distributed videos popular as devastating indictments of the open-mawed corruption of late Putinism. His 2017 video ‘Don’t Call Him Dimon’ blew away Dmitry Medvedev’s image as a relatively clean member of the government, claiming that he had embezzled almost a billion pounds through fake charities. A 2018 video about the alleged corruption of Viktor Zolotov, commander of the National Guard, provoked him into challenging Navalny to a duel and promising to ‘pound him into a juicy steak’.

It is a mark of the concern that the Kremlin has about Navalny that on the one hand they keep throwing him into prison for thirty days here, a few months there, but at the same time they hold back from treating him more seriously – as will be discussed in Chapter 9, the idea that this is a regime that disposes of enemies without a second thought is actually very wrong. Navalny is essentially banned from television (where even mentioning his name is taboo), but he is a savvy and effective political operator on the Internet, which remains his main method of mobilising support. ‘Don’t Call Him Dimon’ was viewed 1.5 million times in its first day alone. The Kremlin is keenly aware that his message is potentially dangerous, not least as every Russian from a neurologist in Novosibirsk to a street-cleaner in Stavropol has their own experiences of corruption and knows full well that the great and the not-so-good enjoy privileged lives at their expense.

Despite trying to muzzle Navalny, despite having ensured that the alternatives to Putin were unelectable and unappetising, the government still rigged the 2018 elections. There were numerous cases of soldiers and factory workers being told for whom to vote, of people being bussed to multiple polling stations to vote at each, and of station staff openly stuffing handfuls of fake ballots into the boxes, in full view of the cameras that had been installed to stop precisely that kind of behaviour. This was due less to any Kremlin directive so much as the momentum of the system: local officials, terrified that a bad result for the boss from their district would reflect badly on them, or who thought they had received a signal from Moscow, went ahead and rigged things as usual, sometimes to the Kremlin’s embarrassment.

However, the electoral corruption was also a product of a clear sense from Putin and his political technologists that it is not enough just to be in charge – it is important to be able to claim an overwhelming popular mandate. The purpose of elections in Russia is not to determine who will get to run the country – that is a foregone conclusion, and no incumbent has ever lost power through the ballot box – but to demonstrate why it is right that they do.

Furthermore, it is clear that the Kremlin does not feel wholly confident and comfortable, despite those seemingly strong approval figures. Putin and his political managers in the Presidential Administration may not have had a direct role in the rigging of the 2018 poll (though even if they did not, they certainly were involved in rewriting later local election results), but they certainly bombarded the country with propaganda beforehand. It says something that they kept not just Navalny but other politically awkward figures, such as the ultra-leftist firebrand Sergei Udaltsov (who has spent most of the time since 2012 either in prison or under house arrest), off-screen. It says something that the government continues to maintain its grip on television and that it continues to explore ways in which it could control the Internet. It may not be able to replicate’s Beijing’s draconian ‘Great Firewall of China’, but by arresting and imprisoning people who post or retweet even mildly anti-government messages, it is able to create a climate in which people don’t dare to share such views. It says something that Putin created the National Guard – an independent force dedicated to domestic security, with some 180,000 armed troops and as many security guards – in 2016, and put his loyal henchman Zolotov in charge. It says something that the Kremlin is trying to squeeze non-government organisations that tackle issues such as corruption, police brutality and electoral fraud, closing them down, blocking their funding and harassing their workers.

These actions all attest to the Kremlin’s deep concerns about just how firm its grip on the hearts and minds of the Russian people may be. After all, what do people mean when they support Putin? They are not necessarily saying that they like the idea of their sons dying in Syria, or of Putin’s cronies enriching themselves through their taxes. Indeed, when polled about their overall confidence in the direction the country is going and what kind of Russia they want for their children, people show a much more nuanced understanding of the political situation. According to the data compiled by the Levada Center, arguably the best remaining independent polling agency in Russia, only a small majority of people are still willing to believe their country is on the right track.

Russians can be unhappy, yet still loyal. Putin is to a large extent being rated not as a man, not even as a politician, but as an icon of Russia. To vote for him is not to endorse a programme, but to express patriotism. By ascending into the heavens as a symbol of the country, the blessed son of the Motherland, has Putin become more or less powerful? A bit of both. On the one hand, it grants him a special, almost mystical status, which separates him from any rival. But at the same time, it means that we should not assume that those approval ratings, whether they are in the sixties or the eighties, mean anything like that much support for his regime, his policies or even Putin-the-man.

The Russian people are as much Putin’s first victims as his devoted supporters. His election in 2000 was won as a result of not just massive state pressure and the absence of a viable alternative, but also of real public relief. Whatever their affection for Boris Yeltsin, his increasingly erratic antics, as pills and alcohol turned him into a caricature and a punchline, were plain for all to see. Besides which, war was brewing in the North Caucasus and a series of mysterious terrorist bombings – which many believe were arranged by Putin’s supporters to terrify the public into backing a ‘security first’ candidate – left people looking for a credible (and sober) defender of the nation. When, in 2002, a girl band sang that they wanted ‘A Man Like Putin’ (‘I want a man like Putin, who’s full of strength. I want a man like Putin, who doesn’t drink’) it was not only a little tongue-in-cheek, it could just as easily have been titled ‘I Want Someone Nothing Like Yeltsin’.

Putin is not a natural campaigner: he is often uncomfortable in public and, if anything, has withdrawn more and more from his own people. Aside from the carefully constructed action-man photo opportunities, he is intensely private. For a long time, there was not even confirmation of the identities of his two children, Katerina and Mariya, and his alleged relationship with Olympic gold medal-winning rhythmic gymnast Alina Kabaeva is still very much off-limits.

However, Putin was tremendously lucky in his first two terms. With the West distracted by the ‘Global War on Terror’ and oil and gas prices high, he had free rein at home. He had enough money to ensure that ordinary Russians could enjoy a better quality of life than ever before, as well as to pour into the military and buy off the elite by turning a blind eye to their own self-enrichment. Life got better, the streets became safer and the fear of collapse and fragmentation receded. Of course, at the same time he set up his sock-puppet opposition parties, reasserted state control of television and suppressed any viable alternatives, but the irony is that he could probably have held free and fair elections and still won.

Won rather than triumphed, though, and he clearly wanted overwhelming statements of support to silence any doubting voices, a coronation more than a mere victory, so from the first Putin’s democracy was so-called ‘managed democracy’. Besides, you can only campaign on not being Boris Yeltsin and this not being the terrible 1990s for so long. Worse yet, over time, international hydrocarbon prices would wobble and the corruption at the heart of the system ensured that it was the masses rather than the masters who paid the price. Despite the temporary patriotic boost provided by the annexation of Crimea, Putin has increasingly had to rely on propaganda and coercion to retain his grip.

Many Russians still revere Putin for making them feel that their country matters in the world again. A diminishing number of others still feel grateful to him for the good times of the 2000s. The feelings of many others, though, seem to represent a country-wide case of Stockholm syndrome, the perverse sympathy that kidnap victims can feel for their captors. This does not mean they will always back him, especially if they come to believe that he cannot offer them and their children the kind of lives they expect. Consider what happened in Britain in 1945. Winston Churchill was widely regarded with colossal respect and enthusiasm by the British people, as the architect of survival and victory through the harrowing years of the Second World War. Yet they still voted him out of office, being able to balance respect for Churchill as a person with a sense that he and above all his Conservative Party did not offer the future they wanted. While the prospect of Putin leaving office because he loses an election is so minuscule as to be near-invisible, we must still remember that the Russian people are no less capable of political nuance.

In 2017, the Levada Center polled Russians about reform in their country. There were massive differences in opinion about what kind they wanted, how quickly it should come, and how far it should go, and the Kremlin is able to capitalise on this lack of any consensus. But at the same time it must also be deeply concerned, as while 42 per cent wanted dramatic reform and 41 per cent preferred incremental change, only 11 per cent wanted to retain the status quo. So 60–80 per cent approve Putin-the-man, but even most of his supporters want to see Putinism-the-system reformed or done away with altogether. They can respect Putin, without endorsing all or even most of his policies; they can want to see statues raised in his name, but someone else in his office.

This duality is what scares Putin and his cronies: it is the reason they feel they cannot afford to let Navalny on prime-time television and it is why they have all those armed National Guard officers deployed across the country. We may still be beguiled by his sky-high approval ratings, but the Kremlin is less easily fooled.

Chapter 8: Putin Is Loyal to His Own

On a cold night in November 2016, Alexei Ulyukayev, the minister for economic development, was paying a visit to Igor Sechin, head of the massive Rosneft oil company. Ulyukayev had publicly opposed Rosneft’s takeover of their rival Bashneft, but the dispute appeared to have been ironed out, and the meeting was an opportunity to bury the hatchet. Unfortunately for Ulyukaev, he didn’t know where Sechin was planning on burying it. According to his own account, after an amicable chat, Sechin gave him a bag. Then, as Ulyukayev left the Rosneft offices, he was confronted by FSB officers who arrested him; it turned out that the bag contained cash, lots of it.

Sechin claimed that the minister had demanded $2 million to approve the Bashneft takeover, while Ulyukayev claimed that he had been framed, and that he had thought the bag contained a relatively trivial thank-you gift, whether sausages (Sechin, a keen hunter, is known for gifting products made from his kills) or fine wine. The truth of the matter is hard to ascertain. Russian business culture does extend to such gifting, which can often mean cash, too – ministers and other high-status officials certainly live lifestyles that are vastly more lavish than their relatively moderate salaries would allow.

On the other hand, Sechin is one of the most fearsome beasts in Moscow, a man whose thuggish looks accurately reflect his raw-knuckled business tactics. He also has a formidable krysha – ‘roof’, the worryingly common Russian term for protection – having been Putin’s former aide, bagman and general strong right hand, back in his days at the St Petersburg mayor’s office. He is hardly the kind of person you’d think a bespectacled economic liberal would try to shake down for a bribe, and the prosecution never bothered to make a strong case. Sechin had worn a wire, but his conversation with Ulyukayev was ambiguous, and he also repeatedly failed to show up to be cross-examined in court. Much of the case relied on the testimony of Oleg Feoktistov, a former FSB officer and old friend of Sechin’s, whom he had just hired to be his security chief.

Many people, seemingly including Ulyukayev, thought Putin would step in to save him. After all, this was a shocking and controversial case, especially for the Russian elite: Sechin seemed to be using his connections in the security apparatus to prosecute a personal feud and to demonstrate that he was not to be messed with, while Ulyukayev had been doing nothing that any of the rest hadn’t. The business elite were worried that Sechin was getting too powerful, too dangerous; the administrative elite were alarmed that they could be the targets of such vendettas; investors were spooked. Common sense would suggest that Putin step in to signal a reprieve for Ulyukayev and a reproof for Sechin.

Instead, Ulyukayev was found guilty and fined 130 million rubles (£1.6 million). The sixty-one-year-old was sentenced to eight years in a tough-regime prison colony for bribery, making him the first minister sent to prison for over sixty years.

The case was flimsy, the political and economic calculus definitely in Ulyukayev’s favour, but when it came down to it, he was just a minister, with no backstory with Putin, while Sechin was one of the president’s guys. He was Putin’s aide back in St Petersburg, the man who met him whenever he returned from a business trip, the man who carried his bags and prepared his briefings, the man who sharpened his pencils, and also the man who kept tabs on who owed what and who was asking for which favours. The man who knew where the bodies are buried (possibly literally). With his own underlings, the ruthless, workaholic Sechin is a notorious terror; with the boss, he is the model of discretion and loyalty.

Putin has a very personal approach to politics, and the real currency in Russia at the top level is not the ruble, nor even the dollar or the euro, but access to, and a relationship with, the boss. Putin is considered ruthless, and he certainly is to those he does not know. After they had half achieved independence under Yeltsin, the Chechens were subjugated by a vicious military campaign during Putin’s first term in office; up to a quarter of a million people may have died. The Ukrainians are suffering now because of his refusal to accept that their country has the right to determine its own fate, or even that it is a proper country at all. And ordinary Russians are seeing their pensions raided and their quality of life eroded to pay for his adventures abroad and the embezzlement by the elite.

But the paradox is that on an individual level, Putin, a man who doesn’t seem to make close friends easily, is actually very loyal to his own. This does not just mean turning a blind eye to their corruption – although he certainly does this to buy loyalty – it also means that when he has to sack or discipline those in his ‘gang’, he tends to make sure they get a soft landing.

When he first came to power, he sat down with eighteen of the country’s oligarchs, the business leaders who had become so politically powerful in the 1990s, and made it clear that, while he was not going to unpick the rigged privatisation deals which had made so many of them so fantastically rich, he would not accept any more interference in politics. As one aide to a senior banker later told me, ‘Everyone understood what was being offered: be quiet, be loyal, do what the Kremlin wants, or Putin’s guys would screw you good.’ Two of the most politically active and least willing to toe the new line, Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, whether they jumped or were pushed, soon ended up in exile in London. A third, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, seemed not to get the memo, and continued funding liberal and anti-government causes. So, Putin’s guys screwed him good. In 2003, even though he was the richest man in Russia, he was arrested and charged with tax fraud. He was unlikely to have been completely clean – no one who made their money in 1990s Russia was – but he did nothing in business that his peers didn’t. However, his behaviour in the sphere of politics was another matter: he openly criticised government policy, most daringly complaining to Putin about governmental corruption at a televised meeting in the Kremlin. This made him an inconvenience, an embarrassment, an enemy, and a suitable example. His oil company, Yukos, was broken up and he was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2005, eventually being pardoned in 2013.

However, Khodorkovsky was never one of Putin’s guys. Those who are enjoy rather different fates. There are some who were never part of his inner clique of friends and confidants but who nonetheless kept their noses clean and did Putin’s bidding – for example, Anatoly Serdyukov, a former tax chief who was made minister of defence in 2007. He was hated by the generals, who called him the ‘furniture salesman’ because he had once run a furniture company. Above all, they despised him because he presided over a long-overdue programme of military reform that saw many of them sacked or nudged into early retirement. However, it didn’t matter what the top brass thought, because it was what Putin wanted of him. And nor did it matter that he was also accused of using his position to enrich himself and his friends, conspiring with Yevgeniya Vasilyeva, whom he had appointed to head the economic arm of the ministry, to sell off military property at bargain prices, in return for bribes. Nor even that he was said to have arranged for army engineers to build a road to a holiday resort owned by his brother-in-law. That’s just how today’s Russian officials operate.

What did matter was the fact that Vasilyeva had also become Serdyukov’s mistress. His father-in-law was former prime minister Viktor Zubkov, one of Putin’s inner circle, another colleague from the St Petersburg days, and someone he had relied on to intimidate his enemies through financial investigations. When an incensed Zubkov reached out to Putin, Serdyukov’s fate was sealed, and Vasilyeva was convicted and sent to a penal colony for five years. Serdyukov had to go, because crony trumps servant, but as tends to be the case with those Putin regards as having been loyal, he didn’t do badly in the end. Serdyukov was sacked, but his conviction was for a lesser change of negligence, and his sentence was commuted by presidential pardon. After a necessary period in the wilderness, he was appointed to a comfortable sinecure as industrial director of the Rostec state arms corporation.

For those in his trusted inner circle, Putin will move heaven and earth to look after them. It’s not just Sechin. Sergei Chemezov, CEO of Rostec, was a fellow KGB officer in Dresden in the 1980s, living in the same building, and is now also a trustee of Innopraktika, a technology incubation project run by Putin’s younger daughter Katerina. Another couple of examples are Arkady and Boris Rotenberg. The brothers have known Putin since childhood: they were in the same judo club, and worked closely with him when he was deputy mayor of St Petersburg. They have done tremendously well out of contracts from Putin’s government, including much of the overpriced construction for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, and they also print the majority of school textbooks. In 2015, a new truck toll system called Platon was introduced on Russia’s roads and proved massively controversial. Drivers organised protests, blocked roads and petitioned the president, to no avail; it transpired that the Rotenbergs have a 50 per cent stake in the system. Admittedly, this is a two-way street for Putin: loyalty is earned by loyalty. After the annexation of Crimea, the Rotenbergs were put under international sanctions because of how they jumped into redeveloping the peninsula, so keen were they to help make good on Putin’s promises. But they were rewarded for taking this hit; Arkady Rotenberg’s Stroygazmontazh corporation was awarded the contract worth nearly £3 billion to build the 18-kilometre bridge connecting the peninsula to the Russian mainland. It is impossible to know for sure how far this is a result of favouritism, but that is certainly the assumption of many within Moscow, whether liberal critics or loyal businesspeople.

These intimates are the few people for whom the icy president is willing to thaw, the people with whom he can, if only for an evening, again be a person rather than an icon. These are the people with whom he can fish, ski or watch and sometimes play his beloved ice hockey. He has his own team, packed out with his bodyguards, who typically take on one drawn from Medvedev’s protection officers. Everyone might know who is going to win in advance, but nonetheless it is a chance for Putin to play perhaps his rarest role, that of an ordinary guy.

Even when friends stray from the party line, Putin remains loyal to them. Former finance minister Alexei Kudrin was once very close to him, but has over time become increasingly critical of the direction of his policy and especially the economic implications of the new, assertive foreign policy. As a result, he is no longer in the president’s unofficial kitchen cabinet, but at the same time the freedom he has to criticise is striking. In part, this can be seen as a result of pragmatism, that Putin is keeping Kudrin around in case he needs to bring him back to work on the economy, but it is more than that. As one security officer put it to me, ‘Putin is sentimental. Once you’ve been brought into the family, you’re in the family.’

Naturally, not everyone fits so neatly into the category of either friend or flunky. For instance, Putin relied on his long-time chief of staff Sergei Ivanov, but they were never truly friends. Defence minister Sergei Shoigu has forged a personal bond with Putin by taking him hunting, while carefully allowing the president to hog the limelight in the obligatory fishing and shooting photo opportunities, but he remains a trusted associate and adviser, rather than a mate. Dmitry Medvedev is another in this grey zone – or maybe it is more that he is the flunky-in-chief. When he was acting as Putin’s presidential chair-warmer between 2008 and 2012, he was tempted to run against his predecessor (or at least, there were people in his circle pushing him to show that he could be a real president). However, Putin had picked the right man – when he faced Medvedev down, the stand-in had to swallow a sizeable helping of humble pie and nominate the boss for the presidency in 2011 in his place, admitting that Putin ‘is definitely the most authoritative politician in our country and his rating is somewhat higher [than mine]’. Before and after this, Medvedev also acts as the loyal scapegoat – whatever goes right is thanks to Putin, whatever goes wrong is the fault of Medvedev’s government – and also the manager of the cabinet. In return for that, he continues to be Putin’s prime minister and, if Navalny’s video exposé is accurate (see Chapter 7), he is still doing well enough for himself.

As discussed in Chapter 1, this is an adhocracy in which everyone is constantly trying to second-guess and please the boss. In part that is simply because of a fear of what would happen if they don’t, or an immediate pay-off if they get it right. But at the top of the system, it also reflects a primal loyalty between Putin and his guys. He had nothing against Ulyukayev; indeed, he seemed a little uncomfortable with how things turned out, but he let Sechin have his revenge, because he is one of Putin’s guys. He has their backs, even if it means letting the rest of Russia burn.

Chapter 9: Putin’s Enemies Don’t Always Die

On 12 August 2000, torpedo propellant exploded inside the K-141 Kursk nuclear submarine while it was on exercises in the icy waters of the Barents Sea. Most of the crew were killed instantly, but twenty-three were still alive as the boat sank to the seabed. The Russians lacked the necessary rescue submarines, but when the British and Norwegian navies offered to help, rather than run the risk of allowing foreigners to take a peek at one of his most advanced vessels, Putin let the sailors die.

On 13 February 2004, Chechen rebel president-in-exile Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev was driving home from his mosque in Doha, Qatar, with his son and two bodyguards, when a massive bomb tore through his 4x4. Yandarbiyev died in hospital, and several GRU officers were later convicted of the killing.

On 1 November 2006, former FSB officer and then whistle-blower and defector Alexander Litvinenko fell ill in London. Over the next twenty-two days highly radioactive polonium-210 ate him to death. The British government’s view is that this was a state execution carried out by the FSB.

On 27 February 2015, as discussed earlier, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down in Moscow by Chechen security officers. Although there is no evidence that Putin either wanted or welcomed the assassination, it is hard not to conclude that the toxic language the Kremlin had recently adopted, calling the opposition ‘a fifth column’ and even a ‘bunch of national traitors’, as well as the tolerance shown to Chechen leader Kadyrov when he had had people killed or beaten in the past, had created an environment conducive to such outrages.

On 4 March 2018, Sergei Skripal, a GRU officer turned MI6 agent who was then living in Salisbury, fell ill from exposure to what turned out to be a nerve agent called Novichok, dispensed by two Russian agents. He and his daughter survived, but an innocent woman who found the perfume bottle in which the Novichok had been hidden later died.

And so the list continues; from Chechen civilians whose cities were blasted with fireballs from thermobaric rockets during the Second Chechen War, to journalists and critics who knew or said too much falling mysteriously ill, this is a Kremlin that kills. Through direct action or indirect encouragement, stubborn inaction (as with the Kursk), or through creating an environment in which officials and oligarchs feel they can get away with murder.

For all this, though, Putin is not an indiscriminately murderous tyrant, and whatever the press may suggest, personal or wholesale murder is certainly not his regime’s tool of choice. The trouble is that these days it is all too easy to see the Kremlin’s bloody hand in the death of every prominent Russian. Sometimes, it might be the Kremlin, but more likely it is the result of some private feud – Russians are far more likely to be killed as a result of business and criminal rivalries than anything to do with the regime. As with Nemtsov’s murder, and many others, people die not because Putin wants them dead, but because some other powerful figure does, and Putin doesn’t care enough to stop them. (And more likely still, it is because the Russian was overweight, in poor health and in his sixties, with a bad diet and too much alcohol having taken their toll; the life expectancy of a Russian man is just sixty-seven, compared with seventy-nine in the UK.)

Putin does not see everyone who is not for him as being actively against him. The flip side of his very personal approach to his friends and his henchmen is visible in how he treats those who fall foul of him. In 2001, while speaking to the liberal journalist Alexei Venediktov, he drew a clear contrast between enemies and traitors: ‘Enemies are right in front of you, you are at war with them, then you make an armistice with them, and all is clear. A traitor must be destroyed, crushed.’ Disarmingly, he added, ‘You know, Alexei, you are not a traitor. You are an enemy.’ He expects foreign journalists and liberal ones at home to write nasty things about him, and while they may sometimes find themselves being harassed, on the whole the Kremlin simply treats it as par for the course – after all, that is what they expect enemies to do.

Putin’s particular venom is directed towards those he considers traitors, those who were once insiders but who changed sides. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, for instance, had become vastly wealthy within the system and was offered the chance to retain his position, but chose to challenge the Kremlin. The Chechens were Russian citizens who were trying to break free, so they had to be crushed. The Ukrainians are, to Putin, essentially Russian subjects, so cannot be allowed to turn their backs on Moscow. This may even explain the attempted assassination of Skripal: it is not simply that he was a Chekist who betrayed the Motherland – and for money, at that – but that he had been pardoned, as part of a spy swap in 2010. As far as the Russians are concerned, the unspoken agreement is that if you are pardoned, your slate is wiped clean, but in return, you’re out of the spying game. You will, of course, be debriefed, and you may give the odd lecture about how things were in your day, but that’s it. As it has become clear that Skripal was rather more active than that, travelling around Europe to advise security services and maybe even identifying former colleagues for surveillance or recruitment, to Putin he was breaking the rules. Although he has denied any Russian role in the assassination attempt, Putin has not shown any regret, describing Skripal as ‘simply a scumbag’ and a ‘traitor to the Motherland’.

And as we know, Putin feels a traitor must be destroyed, crushed. Or, as he put it in 2010, ‘Traitors will kick the bucket. These people betrayed their friends, their brothers-in-arms. Whatever they get in exchange for it, those thirty pieces of silver they were given, they will choke on them.’

Most enemies are not traitors, though. Putin doesn’t want to be a tyrant if he can avoid it, and as we have already seen, there is a surprising amount of room in his Russia for a sort of limited freedom. Television, with the exception of the plucky Dozhd Internet channel, is either state-controlled or state-dominated, but there is a great deal of intelligent questioning and even genuinely investigative journalism in the print and online media. Russia is a dangerous place to be in the media – being a local journalist there is as risky as being a war correspondent elsewhere – but still people are willing to poke into the dark corners and shine a light on them. When the real identities of the two GRU assassins who went after Skripal were announced, although much of the international attention was on Bellingcat, the Western investigative website which outed them, they couldn’t have followed the clues without the involvement of Russian investigative journalists.

Just as there is still real journalism, there is a lot of real politics – so long as you don’t call it politics. When non-governmental organisations start to pose a challenge to the state, they face pressure or outright closure, but on a local level Russia is full of parents’ and residents’ associations, pressure groups, environmental lobbies and other expressions of grassroots civil society. Sometimes they are ignored, sometimes they are squashed, but they often bring about real change. The secret seems to be to focus on specific outcomes and always, always use every opportunity to make it clear that they are not political or complaining about the government as such, whether local or national, just this one issue here or that one problem there.

Again, it’s all about the ponyatiye, the unspoken understandings. If you follow the unspoken rules, you should be OK. It’s when you cross them that you become not an enemy, but a traitor. Putin is a merciful autocrat. He doesn’t want to kill you – unless you force him to.

Chapter 10: Putin Is Just One Guy

In late 2015 and early 2016, I lived for a while in Kotelniki, an outer suburb of south-east Moscow, at the very end of the metro system. It was still being built all around me – the metro station had only opened a few months earlier, and there wasn’t even yet an asphalt path to it – and almost everyone else there seemed to be couples in their late twenties with young children. Typically, they were not well-heeled yuppies, but rather shop and office workers who had needed more space when their first baby came along, yet weren’t able to afford anywhere more central during the time of rocketing property prices. Having bought themselves a slice of high-rise commuter-belt suburbia, they found themselves after 2014 squeezed between their mortgages (many of which had been negotiated in euros, rather than rubles, when the exchange rate was favourable) and falling real wages. They were hurting: hunting for bargains, postponing making repairs to their flats, moonlighting as Uber drivers.

And they were complaining. The mayor’s office was backsliding on promised new amenities for Kotelniki. The banks were being inflexible about their mortgages. Child benefit was too low and the nearest kindergarten wasn’t ready yet. Thugs from the North Caucasus were hanging around the communal garages and the police weren’t doing anything about it. Someone from the next block had had a heart attack last week, and an ambulance had taken almost an hour to get there. They would complain about anyone and everyone – passionately, vitriolically and exhaustively – except for the president, the man notionally on top of this pyramidal ‘power vertical’. When I cautiously broached this, the response was an indifferent shrug. Eh, what could he do?

This is pretty sharply at odds with the usual Western image of Putin as the unchallenged and all-powerful master of his country. Putinism. Putin’s Russia. The temptation – as in this book – is to consider him to be the motive force behind the whole country, all eleven time zones and 144 million people of it. However, Putin is a synecdoche, as much as anything else a symbol, a figurehead for an often-varied collection of people and institutions. Indeed, it is a myth that he contributes to himself – in his autobiography, he wrote that in comparison to his previous jobs, ‘In the Kremlin I have a different position. Nobody controls me here. I control everybody myself.’

However, there is a big difference between being the man in charge, and actually exerting that power. After the Kursk submarine disaster in 2000, he went on television and admitted, ‘You know our country is in a difficult situation and that our armed forces are in a difficult situation – but I never imagined that it was in quite such a state.’ Since then, Putin has had to deal with a stream of disasters, both natural and man-made: air crashes, mine explosions, collapsing buildings, fires and floods. What is striking is how similar their causes and his responses. It is not that Putin doesn’t care; eyewitnesses at a meeting he had with the general director of the company that owned the Raspadskaya coal mine after two methane explosions had killed sixty-six people in 2010 saw him fly off the handle, slap him with a folder of documents, and lay into him in such obscene language that even the hardened presidential bodyguards seemed uncomfortable. But the circumstances were almost exactly the same as at a blast in Novokuznetsk in 2007 that killed 106, and one at Vorkuta in 2016 that would kill thirty-five.

In 2009, Putin publicly scolded oligarch Oleg Deripaska for the state of his plant in Pikalevo (‘Why has your factory been so neglected? They’ve turned it into a rubbish dump!’) and demanded that he settle £830,000 of wage arrears by the end of the day. In 2018, though, he was demanding that all ministries take seriously the problem of wage arrears, which had reached a nationwide total of £40 million. The fact that Putin keeps complaining about so many of the same issues, promising solutions, and losing face when they repeat themselves, suggests we should not take the myths of his hyper-presidential power at face value.

Putin is notoriously leery of being managed by his staff, but how can it be otherwise, especially when he is increasingly disengaged from government and his own country? In the early years, he would frequently travel and drop in, often unannounced, on a factory here and a city there. This was a terror for many local officials, as he would generally appear when some problem had emerged, precisely to present the image of the stern tsar defending his subjects from the corrupt or clumsy boyars, the aristocrats. He would give the factory owner, governor or minister a stern, finger-wagging dressing down on television, and money would suddenly be available to address the immediate crisis. Then there were also the marathon annual ‘Direct Line’ television sessions, in which the president would for hours answer calls from members of the public or selected guests. Of course, these were all stage-managed and pre-prepared, so he could avoid nasty surprises and impress the viewers by having all necessary facts and figures at his fingertips, but they had the symbolic function of connecting the shepherd of the nation with his flock.

These days, though, as the Russian proverb has it, ‘God is in his heaven, and the tsar is far away.’ Putin only goes to the Kremlin when he has to, preferring to stay at his palace at Odintsovo outside Moscow. He spends his mornings swimming and working out, and gets round to paperwork in the afternoon. If he wants to talk to anyone, he summons them to his presence. As for ‘Direct Line’, which he once seemed to enjoy, it increasingly appears a painful chore, as he listlessly responds to another question about whether Yelena’s husband Boris should let her have a dog, whether Putin should be cloned or whether it is illegal for Russian farmers to put Chinese-made GPS trackers on cows. (I didn’t make these up, by the way, and the answers were ‘yes’, ‘no’, and ‘I don’t know’, respectively.)

There are also whole areas of policy about which he doesn’t really care any more, instead largely leaving them to be handled by others, if they get handled at all. This may have been the case with the recent pensions issue that aroused such public anger. Similarly, I heard from someone in the Health Ministry that while Putin had clearly never been that engaged in health care (why should he, when he has the elite Central Clinical Hospital of the Presidential Administration at his disposal?), in his first two terms he had at least been dutiful – he would take the meetings, have read his briefing materials and ask good questions. These days, he is simply not interested, and if the minister himself wants a one-to-one meeting with the president, it can take months to schedule. Russia, meanwhile, has been rated as having the least efficient national health care system of any developed country, and its budget has actually fallen.

There are three questions that are worth asking here. The first is, has Putin run out of ideas? To the West, he looks active, assertive, aggressive, a warrior-tsar at the top of his game; we may see many of his gambits and adventures as failing, but we very much feel on the defensive. But if one steps back slightly, it is much harder to see any real endgame. Does he really believe that the West will cave in and give Russia the kind of status he craves, or even that it will implode? Or is it rather that he has no way back that would not mean, in effect, admitting defeat, something he is politically and personally unable to do? Besides, how much of this activity comes directly from his office and how much is generated by the political entrepreneurs who think it’s what he wants? One could almost see this as a science-fiction scenario in which the robots continue the war long after their builders are gone. Certainly my reading of the current mood in Moscow is that everyone is glumly digging in for the long haul, feeling that they face neither victory nor defeat, but a long and miserable geopolitical winter.

This sense of gloomy hopelessness applies as much to domestic as foreign policy. Just as Russia has long mastered the theatre of fake politics, with Kremlin loyalists jostling with a Kremlin-run opposition in empty ritual, so too is there increasingly a feel of fake government. Ministers minister, advisers advise, spin doctors spin, decrees are decreed and memos are minuted. The television news excitedly reports the latest law, the coming debate, but what actually gets done, beyond coping with the day’s crises? In some ways this is unfair, as there has been real progress in some areas, from the measures applied to minimise the impact of Western sanctions to the reconstruction of Moscow into a glittering hipster capital. However, in most spheres of policy, there is much more bark than bite, form not substance. Action for its own sake is not governance, but there is nonetheless a sense that this is the best that Russia can expect these days.

The Russians have a strong tradition of subversive political humour that dates back to Soviet times. A more modern one of these anekdoty has Stalin appearing to Putin in a dream and asking him whether there is anything he can do to help. Putin replies, ‘Why is everything here so bad? What should I do?’

‘Execute the entire government and paint the Kremlin blue.’

‘Why blue?’ replies a perplexed Putin.

‘I had a feeling you would only want to discuss the second part.’

Joking apart, Putin cannot ‘execute the government’, or, in less dramatic terms, do without the oppos, officials and oligarchs with whom he has surrounded himself. So maybe all that is left is spectacle and pageantry – or ‘painting the Kremlin blue’.

In some ways there is a parallel with Leonid Brezhnev, the bushy-eyebrowed General Secretary of the Communist Party between 1964 and 1982. If he is remembered at all these days, it is of how he was in his final years when, almost senile, he slurred scarcely understood speeches that had been written for him, as his country slid towards economic, social and political collapse. The irony is that he had originally risen to power as a tough, effective manager, and the first half of his reign was full of significant achievement, from matching America’s nuclear might to seeing the economy grow. Over time, though, things got harder and his only answer seems to have been adventurism abroad – including embroiling the USSR in a ten-year war in Afghanistan – to distract from stagnation at home. Does this sound at all familiar?

Brezhnev was ill and dying, but is Putin tired? In 2008, he said that he had ‘worked like a galley slave throughout these eight years, morning till night, and I have given all I could to this work’. Despite recurring rumours about back problems (and a personal vanity that seems at the very least to have led to his using Botox), he seems in good health physically, but what about emotionally? For his fascinating book Fragile Empire, Ben Judah spoke to people who had worked on Putin’s staff; one of his interpreters painted a picture of a man now entombed in his position and his legend: ‘He looks emotionless, as if nothing really touches him, as if he is hardly aware of what happens around him. As if he is paying little attention to these people. As if he is worn out … He has spent so long as an icon he is not used to anyone penetrating … He is isolated, trapped.’ The real question is thus whether he still wants the job – and that deserves a chapter all of its own.

Chapter 11: Does Putin Want Out?

In 2017, Putin held a televised meeting with schoolchildren in Sochi. When one of them asked him what he would do when he retires, he replied, ‘I haven’t decided yet if I will leave the presidency.’ In 2018, a question at an investors’ forum about Russia after his reign prompted him to reply, ‘What’s the rush? I’m not going anywhere yet.’ Everyone laughed – some awkwardly, some cheerily.

Certainly the Western assumption is that Putin, having already manipulated the constitutional order to get around term limits once – spending four years as prime minister – is planning on being president for life, and that when his fourth term ends in 2024, he’ll find some way of staying on. If that happens, though, this will reflect failure rather than triumph. After all, at that same gathering in Sochi, he wistfully said, ‘You know, dreams are things that change over time.’

In the 2000s, he was younger, hungrier and, above all, luckier. Since then, everything seems to be getting harder. The challenges he faces are intractable: diversifying a low-productivity economy that is still too dependent on oil and gas while also being increasingly locked away from Western investment and technology, for example, or dealing with a looming demographic crisis as fewer young Russians have to pay for more pensioners. One in eight Russians still lives below the poverty line, and too many of the best and the brightest try to emigrate. His forces are stuck in both Ukraine and Syria, with no clear exit strategy. The Russian people themselves are less grateful, more demanding. There were almost a third more protests in 2018 than in 2017, for example. The Communists, so long content to be a zombie opposition, are now showing signs of life, and organised more than a third of them.

An increasingly bored, disengaged Putin seems to have been looking for a successor for some time, which implies that he is at least contemplating handing over his power – or at least his duties. The insider consensus in Moscow is that he wants to find a new-generation mini-me whom he will be able to trust to protect both himself and his legacy, and also (because trust only gets you so far), to construct a constitutional position to allow him semi-retirement and the chance to interfere in politics without any responsibilities. If he can arrange those, he will likely not even serve his current six-year term. But ‘getting out’ would just mean from the job; Putin will not be the kind of ex-president likely to be hankering after a Caribbean villa, games of golf with other former heads of state and the international speaking circuit.

He is likely to remain in Russia, but here we come to the issue about Putin and money: while he enjoys the good life that wealth allows, it has been power that he has really craved and collected. Even in this day of electronic finance, money is a thing. It can be hidden, sent abroad, willed to your children. Power is active, ephemeral, it must constantly be refreshed and reasserted. Back in the Soviet era, one reason why so many leaders died in office was because they knew that they would become vulnerable as soon as they retired. Everything they had – the cars, the mansions, the summer dachas – could be taken away from them by their successor. The tragedy of modern Russia is that the same is still true: Putin may never feel secure enough to put his future in anyone else’s hands.

Putin made his political career as a loyal bagman. He got his hands dirty for Mayor Sobchak in St Petersburg, and when police investigators were closing in on his boss on embezzlement charges, he arranged for the private plane that took him out of the country. When he worked at the Presidential Property Management Directorate, one of the more infamously corrupt agencies, even by Moscow’s standards, he kept his new boss out of the crosshairs, even while corruption investigations sprung up all around him. As director of the FSB and then prime minister, he looked after Yeltsin’s interests – literally the first thing he did as president was sign a decree guaranteeing his predecessor lifelong immunity from prosecution. So can Putin find himself a Putin of his own?

This makes it all the more important to consider a third key question: just how far is Putin really in charge? I don’t mean that there are sinister string-pullers behind him, as much as that he has to work, find out about the world and issue his orders through others. The amount of power the machine has over its purported operator should not be underestimated. Mikhail Zygar, who always has a nose for a great story, tells of how Putin was persuaded to bid for the 2014 Winter Olympics. The oligarch Vladimir Potanin, a keen skier, had become involved with a project to develop a resort near his dacha at Krasnaya Polyana in Sochi. He was keen to make it part of an Olympic bid in order that the government would foot the bill, but Putin was dismissive when the idea was broached in 2005. At that time, he had not yet warmed to the idea of major sporting events as both national PR and great ways to make the elite compete for your favour (and the lucrative contracts to build facilities and infrastructure you can then dispense). So Potanin turned to Dmitry Peskov, then the deputy press secretary, who explained how to change the boss’s mind. Billboards went up advertising the Sochi bid, but only along roads that the presidential motorcade would be taking. Radio adverts were bought, but only on the stations and at times when Putin might be listening. Peskov arranged for someone in a ‘Direct Line’ to ask Putin when Russia would finally host an Olympics. The idea was to make him believe that the country was crying out for it, and that he could profit from that mood. He was duly convinced, and the whole effort of the state then went into trying to win the bid to stage a Winter Olympics in, of all places, a subtropical region, a city with no airport and minimal infrastructure, which had to be rebuilt pretty much from scratch, making it the most expensive Games to date. And all because Peskov was able to tell Potanin how to manage the boss.

It’s also a negative process. At the end of 2015, for example, when military intelligence chief General Igor Sergun died of a heart attack, it became clear that Putin wanted to appoint one of his ex-bodyguard favourites, Alexei Dyumin, as a replacement. The GRU wasn’t keen on the idea – as far as they were concerned, Dyumin was a heavy rather than a spymaster. Defence minister Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Gerasimov concurred. But the problem was that even Shoigu can’t just say no to the boss, or at least not without taking quite a chance. So they played for time, while also leaking stories to the press that Dyumin wasn’t up to the job. Even the FSB, usually if anything a rival of the GRU, didn’t want to see a precedent established that a totally unqualified favourite could be parachuted into running a security service, so they also started muttering against the idea. Eventually, Sergun’s deputy Igor Korobov was appointed, and Dyumin got the consolation prize of the governorship of Tula instead. It is not that, had Putin flatly demanded it, Dyumin would not have been given the job, but there seems to have been a point at which he decided it was not worth the political cost of asserting his authority. Even tsars need to keep their boyars on side.

And the boyars aren’t happy. On the one hand, those closest to him – which also means those who are benefiting most greatly from his rule – are unlikely to want to see him go, because he is their krysha, their protection. One of the reasons why poor old Leonid Brezhnev lasted so long as Soviet leader, even staying in office after several heart attacks and strokes, was because he had people around him who feared the rise of the dangerous and puritanical Yuri Andropov. When Brezhnev finally succumbed to a heart attack in 1982, it was probably a release for him but a terror for them. Obviously one can only draw so many parallels between the sad, senile Brezhnev and the still-vigorous Putin, but it is likely that there are many who will do their utmost to stave off a succession, which would likely sooner or later mean the new president’s favourites would take their places.

Most within the Russian elite, however, are not in this charmed circle. As Putin increasingly focuses on building his historical legacy and his own geopolitical agenda, he seems to be getting out of step with many of them. The majority, after all, are pragmatic kleptocrats; they are happy to proclaim their devoted commitment to Mother Russia, but they want to be able to keep robbing her blind at the same time, and sending their money, and their families, and their mistresses to safety and comfort in the West. The more sanctions bite, as Russian money becomes toxic and visas become harder to get, the less they can truly enjoy the fruits of their embezzlement. They are happy to see Crimea back in the fold, but they would prefer to holiday in the Cap d’Antibes. Times are getting harder, and so long as Putin continues to make sure his closest friends do well, that inevitably comes at the expense of everyone else. That said, they cannot risk challenging him, because one thing he does understand – and will undoubtedly be ruthlessly willing to keep in his grip – is power. His true loyalists control the security forces, which means they can punish whoever steps out of line. So instead the boyars are waiting. They know the tsar can’t, or won’t, be there for ever, and then they will have a chance to salvage something from the situation.

What do we in the West want out of this situation? It is hard to see any substantive improvement in relations with Russia, so long as Putin is in the Kremlin. Any attempt actively to topple him would be tremendously dangerous – we risk appearing to vindicate his claims about Western aggression and, if past experience is anything to go by, regime change never seems to work well for us. The apparent American enthusiasm for President Medvedev, and their willingness to treat him as if he were the real ruler and not a proxy, was meant to encourage a shift to a slightly more liberal politics, but actually contributed to Putin’s decision that he needed to return to the presidency. Any more active and aggressive meddling would likely trigger an active and aggressive backlash and empower the ultranationalists whom Putin has actually contained. He is neither a fanatic nor a lunatic, and a stable Russia is less dangerous than one in chaos. Containing the harm Russia can do to us and minimising his opportunities for mischief is probably the best we can hope for, however depressing and unambitious that may sound.

But what we can do, to restate an earlier point, is remember that ordinary Russians should not all be considered Putin’s ardent followers, but rather his victims, even if they may not think of themselves as such. We need to make sure they realise that we are not their enemy, and not least for the post-Putin future. We need to appreciate the extent to which Russia is driven by emotions, by a sense of threat and abandonment and disrespect that might be hard fully to justify in objective terms, but felt no less strongly for that. Personally, I am still an optimist and believe that Russia is slowly moving towards Europe and European values, as it works its way through the traumas resulting from the end of empire. But this is likely to happen over a matter of generations rather than years.

So we need to talk about Putin also because much of this will still hold true, even when he’s gone. We may face a Putinist Russia even without the man himself. It is not just that he has nurtured a political generation of mini-Putins, but also that one of the fundamental reasons for his continued standing is that he embodies and channels feelings shared by a majority of Russians. It is worth mentioning that even critics such as Alexei Navalny support the annexation of Crimea, and the newly active Communists who stage anti-government marches do so not because they think he is too anti-Western, but because they think his confrontational geopolitics mask a supine acceptance of exploitative neo-liberal market economics. Just as not everyone who supports Putin is our enemy, not everyone who opposes him is necessarily our friend.

Perhaps I should end as I began, with the words of that well-fed Presidential Administration staffer, spoken between bites of expensive boar cutlets at the White Rabbit restaurant. He recalled a story Putin himself would tell about his childhood in ruined Leningrad, when he and his friends would hunt the rats that plagued their block of flats. One day, having come upon an especially large one, he chased it up the stairs and down the hall and into a corner. What do cornered rats do? It turned and leapt at him, and a terrified young Putin fled.

‘Russia thinks it’s Putin, out hunting rats, but we’re actually the rat. Everyone fears us, but we’re just doing what comes naturally. Corner us, though, and we’ll turn.’ He paused, and then added, ‘Actually, that’s Putin – the big rat, the one willing to turn. But there’s always another one, somewhere in the shadows.’

So maybe, even as we look to a future Russia after Putin, that gives us another reason to talk about Putin. Because there could be another Putin, an even bigger one, waiting in the stairwell.

THE BEGINNING

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First published by Ebury Press in 2019

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ISBN 9781473566026