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  • Power: The Vladimir Story

    POWER: THE VLADIMIR STORY
    by C.J. Chivers

    Esquire Magazine
    October 1, 2008

    VLADIMIR V. PUTIN stood on the landing of a staircase outside the
    Grand Kremlin Palace. Ceremonial troops paraded before him. Behind
    him was the presidency, which he had left a few minutes before.

    It was May 7, 2008, a milestone in a season of ceremony inside
    the Kremlin's red walls. Beside Putin stood his protege, Dmitry
    A. Medvedev, who had just become the third president of post-Soviet
    Russia.

    Officially, Medvedev was the Kremlin's leader, successor to Yeltsin,
    Gorbachev, and all of the others, back to Stalin, Lenin, and the
    czars. Medvedev was minutes into his term. After the troops filed
    past, he remained in place, waiting. And then, in the full public view
    that live television allows, Vladimir Putin, who at the moment held
    no elected office, shifted his head and said something not audible
    to the rest of us.

    Taking a cue from Russia's boss, Medvedev left the stage.

    It was Medvedev's day. It remained Putin's time.

    I. THE MAN WHO WOULD BE CZAR

    Vladimir Putin is a national savior and hero, a man, sober and
    exceptionally smart, who stepped from shadows to resuscitate a proud
    country that others had run aground, looted, and left for dead. After
    eight years as president, a period marked by a surging economy
    and an unexpectedly victorious war in Chechnya, he surrendered one
    of the most seductively powerful offices on earth voluntarily and
    according to Russia's constitution, with Moscow's influence in the
    world restored and with a large fraction of Russia's citizens better
    off than they ever had been. He has been a bridge from postcommunist
    chaos and hardship to national stability, freer markets, individual
    economic choice, and the possibility of democracy.

    Or, he is a cunning, even diabolical strongman atop a scrum of
    bandit cliques. As a career officer in the KGB, an organization
    its members never leave, he is fundamentally anti-Western and
    undemocratic, and comfortable with conflict, crime, and the company of
    beasts. Moreover, he is nostalgic for empire and covetous of power, and
    he has surrendered only a title. Instead, he has manipulated Russia's
    loose political rules and obedient political class to install a puppet
    successor and transfer the levers to his new post as Russia's premier,
    where he continues to abuse office and direct the spoils of oil-state
    excess to his coterie. His talk of public stewardship and personal
    liberties is farce. The Kremlin has rejected democracy while pretending
    to embrace it, hardening into a kleptocracy with nuclear weapons and
    state-controlled television stations purring that all is well.

    Depending on the point of view of the commentator (and sometimes the
    source of the commentator's paycheck), the standard assessments of
    Putin's nine years in public office reach these rival extremes. What
    makes them interesting, and makes full and accurate descriptions of
    Putin elusive, is that both are largely true.

    Vladimir Putin is one of the central figures of our times, the man
    who presided at the Kremlin as the broken remains of a sprawling
    nation were restored to life, and who used his stature to reorder
    the Russian-speaking world's relations with the West and become the
    de facto spokesman of strongmen everywhere. No recent Western leader
    can claim to have changed a nation and its place in the world so fully.

    During his second term, from 2004 to 2008, as Putin reanimated
    the Kremlin, I lived and roamed in the world where he is supreme,
    working as a newspaper correspondent throughout the former Soviet
    republics. Putin's influence is outsized and everywhere. But fresh
    insights into him are rare. This is because analysis of Putin and his
    Kremlin relies more on deduction than firsthand observation. Access
    to him and the top levels of his government is exceptionally
    limited. The common perceptions of Putin are created indirectly,
    by reflecting on the Kremlin's manufactured images on state-run news,
    by interviewing people in proximity to power or who have suffered from
    it, and by reading cues. Sleuthing informs the picture but is small
    in scale. Russia lacks freedom-of-information laws and practices,
    many interesting archives are closed, and fundamental documents of
    civil affairs-court records and transcripts, for example-are difficult
    to obtain. Requests for meetings with officials or questions about
    government decisions can go unanswered for months. Russian authorities
    also run the equivalent of a counterintelligence operation against
    independent journalists: The entrances to the apartments and offices
    of much of the Moscow press corps are under video surveillance and
    have uniformed guards who check visitors' passports. Phone lines
    are bugged. Almost every journalist who wanders Russia has tales
    of being denied access to regions, of having sources reinterviewed
    by local authorities, or of being stopped for questioning by police
    or intelligence officials. (A Russian colleague and I were detained
    twice while working on a story on the terrorist siege at the public
    school in Beslan.) Putin's Russia is far less restrictive than Soviet
    times, but is a stifling environment in which to trace the motions
    of a nation, and a leader, moving at such speed.

    In grappling with Putin and his meanings, I often turned my back on
    him for weeks at a time to survey the Kremlin's old and distant domain,
    trying to understand Putin from vantage points away from the center-in
    the Caucasus and Central Asia, at revolutions, crackdowns, elections,
    and in the Chechen and Georgian wars. Throughout a continent where
    the rule of cliques is secured by manipulated politics and fraudulent
    elections, there was no limit to the seams where Putin's hand-and
    his extraordinary luck-revealed itself. Putin ultimately succeeded
    in running against the 1990s, against separatism, penury, weakness,
    and the crisis of self-confidence that made Russia a laugh line, even
    as official cruelty and crime checkered his political climb. And yet
    when measured off the bottom-against the domestic behavior of other
    leaders who imposed themselves on the union's wreckage-he could often
    seem the softest of the autocrats.

    That unlikely status presents one way of blending the rival arguments:
    Is Putin's Russia a retreat to Soviet practices or a capitalist
    democracy sputtering through early stages of evolution? Putin's
    signature legacy is not Russia's new wealth and confidence, nor the
    subjugation of Chechnya, nor the return of an assertive foreign
    policy, capped by the invasion of Georgia. It is the refinement,
    if that word could ever be used with this phenomenon, of a more
    sophisticated and rational police state than the failed USSR. This
    is no celebration of imaginary virtues; the world of his politics
    remains ugly and unrepaired. It is meant to pose a question. Putin
    has reshaped Russian autocracy under another name. To what end?

    II. THE TALL MAN

    >From the beginning, the experts' forecasts were wrong. When an
    exhausted President Boris Yeltsin introduced Putin to the world in
    the summer of 1999, announcing that Putin was his choice as prime
    minister (Yeltsin's sixth in less than eighteen months), few expected
    him to last. It was not just that Putin, then forty-six, was charged
    with managing a pauper state, a government adrift in disorder,
    and a population soured by the unmet promises of free markets and
    democracy. The brewing unrest in Chechnya had drifted beyond separatism
    and nationalism and become an international Islamic cause. Crime
    and corruption were pandemic, and a circle of billionaire oligarchs
    controlled large fractions of the nation's resources and capital,
    as well as voting blocs in parliament, which was a legislature for
    sale. There was also Yeltsin's lurching style to consider, which
    lent Putin's new job the air of a free-swinging trap-door. Nothing
    that summer suggested that Putin's tenure would end differently from
    those of his predecessors, who were sacked. Vladimir Putin was an
    untested unknown, a stand-in destined to be fired. It hardly helped
    that Yeltsin said he would support him in the presidential election
    in 2000. An endorsement from a man who gave Russia a losing war and
    economic shock therapy at once? Leonid Dobrokhotov, an advisor to
    the Communist party, called it a "kiss of death."

    In retrospect, of course, the early assessments were wrong, albeit for
    understandable reasons. Russia's problems were monumental. Events in
    the recent past predicted little relief. And the available information
    on Putin, a career spy, was beyond scarce. This was a public figure
    schooled in anonymity and deception; so complete was his obscurity that
    one prominent Western newspaper described him as "tall." Putin is a
    martial-arts expert. Light-footed and thick-shouldered, he can emanate
    the self-assuredness of a stocky, muscular cat. But he is not tall. He
    stands, by generous estimate, perhaps five feet six inches high.

    Putin swiftly displayed his confrontational self. He directed a
    renewed military campaign in Chechnya, which was foundering under
    the self-rule separatists had gained after fighting the Russian army
    to a standstill a few years before. The war had undermined Russia's
    standing and self-esteem, psychological injuries that Putin seemed to
    understand viscerally. Vladimir Putin did not just promise to restore
    Russian rule. He went beyond the typical language of settling unsettled
    scores. He vowed blood. "We will pursue the terrorists everywhere,"
    he said. "You will forgive me, but if we catch them in the toilet, we
    will wet them even in the outhouse." Earlier Russian premiers had been
    rendered inert by the tenacity of the Chechen fighters and the reliable
    incompetence of Russia's army. (In 1995 Viktor Chernomyrdin had pleaded
    for the release of hostages with Shamil Basayev, the terrorist,
    on live television. "I beg you," he had said.) Putin signaled that
    Russia would not beg. He came from an organization that had used fear
    to bring a vast nation to heel. Violence for him was a governing tool.

    Putin also showed skills as a performer, peppering an understated
    demeanor with prison-slang coarseness. Hunting terrorists to their
    toilets? The Russian idiom "to wet" is inmate jargon for soaking a
    victim in blood. It is a knowing way of saying "to kill" and suggests
    killing at very close range, as with a knife. Underneath his Italian
    suits and aura of sobriety, Putin revealed an icy Eastwood deadpan. An
    ease with crudity simmered beneath what passed for Putin's style. Asked
    if he worried about Russia's columns inflicting civilian casualties,
    Putin made clear that he did not, and would not keep company with
    people who did. "We do not need generals who chew snot," he said.

    Such was the mind behind Russia's new war. Russian troops soon
    leveled much of Grozny, Chechnya's capital, and launched often
    indiscriminate sweeps through the Chechen countryside. Victims and
    human-rights organizations assigned much of the blame for the troops'
    conduct to Putin, whose language seemed to encourage it. Putin was
    undeterred. He had found a persona. He was not just a stern nationalist
    who would restore Russian sovereignty. He was the unblinking fighter,
    untroubled by rules, conscience, or second thought in the pursuit of
    national order. Russia's losing streak had been long. Putin would be
    its fist. RUDEST EVER P.M. WINS OVER RUSSIA, another Western newspaper
    declared. His popularity climbed.

    Late in 1999, Yeltsin resigned, making Putin the front-runner in the
    presidential race. In the spring of 2000, he was elected. His time
    had begun.

    III. THE BOOM

    Eight years on, Russia looks not much like it did then. The value of
    the Russian stock market has soared. Personal incomes have grown. A
    society that suffered the forced austerity of communism and economic
    collapse has entered a carnival of personal spending. Gone are empty
    shelves, replaced by a rollicking consumer culture that buys what it
    wants. French perfumes, Austrian chocolates, Japanese electronics,
    Scandinavian cell phones, Italian handbags, Cuban cigars, Australian
    wines, and single-malt Scotches-malls have opened offering all of
    these. Rates of car ownership have multiplied with access to personal
    credit, and Moscow's roads, cluttered during Yeltsin's time with
    Zhigulis, are jammed with BMWs and Benzes. Extravagant restaurants
    cater to the wealthy. Sushi, in the inland reaches of a northern
    forest, is a minor Russian craze. For people of even modest means,
    stores stock fresh fruits and vegetables year-round. Yes, babushkas
    still sell onions on the streets. And yes, rural areas are deeply
    depressed. But the expanding Russian wealth has grown beyond the
    horizon. Visit tourist destinations in Thailand, the Mediterranean,
    Europe, or the Red Sea and you will hear Russian. Visit a real
    estate office in any Western capital and you will hear tales of
    Russian buyers.

    Such are the signs of the most tangible freedom associated with
    Putin's Russia-the freedom to buy whatever you can afford, except,
    in most cases, power.

    No small part of this turnaround resulted from conditions outside
    Putin's control. Russia's combined oil and natural-gas reserves
    are the world's largest, and with timber and coal and mineral
    deposits, these resources positioned Russia to be a global gas pump,
    lumberyard, and mine long before any of us knew Putin's name. The
    price explosion of oil enriched Russia with head-spinning speed,
    creating a huge transfer of global wealth to Slavic hands. Along the
    way, it transformed parts of dreary Moscow into a northern Vegas and
    allowed the Kremlin-which not long ago could not afford the fuel in its
    fighter jets-to pay down foreign debts ahead of schedule. And yet the
    results cannot be ascribed to sheer chance. It is easy to reduce the
    arrival of Russian wealth to the indifferent bounty of market forces,
    but sound macroeconomics and fiscal restraint supported some of the
    boom. Stephen Kotkin, the professor of Russian history at Princeton,
    said early this year that if surging oil and gas prices automatically
    mean that states rich with hydrocarbons will enjoy instant prosperity,
    ask Nigeria where its boom is.

    While Russia's economy roared, Putin was benefiting from another
    unanticipated success. By 2005, the war in Chechnya had turned. The
    insurgent bands were either being thinned to pockets or, in many cases,
    coerced to join a pro-Kremlin government led by Ramzan Kadyrov, the
    rebel turned Putin loyalist who replaced the chaos of conflict with
    a local dictatorship. Fighting lingers nearby, in Ingushetia and
    sometimes Dagestan, but in scale and intensity it is a fraction of
    the violence of 2004. No one saw this coming. Anyone suggesting four
    years ago, after the school siege in Beslan, that the war would be
    reduced to skirmishes in Ingushetia and Dagestan, and that Grozny
    (think: Mogadishu) would be largely rebuilt in a thousand days,
    would have been dismissed as a fool. But after the school siege
    ended in 2004, with more than 330 victims dead and hundreds more
    injured, Russian counterterrorism was reinvigorated. Two underground
    Chechen presidents were killed, and Basayev died in a mysterious
    explosion. On both sides, the war had been a race for the bottom,
    with horrors trumped by horrors for several years. With Beslan, the
    separatists had gone too far. Chechnya's Sufi nationalists had once
    enjoyed a reputation as underdogs. But killing children was not an
    image-booster; support for them collapsed.

    Then came luck, courtesy of George W. Bush: The influence of foreign
    Islamic fighters declined.

    Foreigners had been a radicalizing presence in the war, and their
    near disappearance during Putin's second term was related to a factor
    out of Putin's hands. For several nights in late 2005, I sat with
    Chechen fighters in Baku, Azerbaijan, just over Russia's border. These
    scarred men dwelt on their hatred of Putin, blaming him alike for
    deaths of relatives and of hostages for whose freedom he would not
    negotiate. They spoke of him as the ugly product of a weakened,
    embarrassed state, and compared him to Hitler, whose rise followed
    Germany's defeat in World War I. (Hitler comparisons are tiresome
    and common in some of the circles that hate Putin most. A more apt
    pejorative for Putin is Putin.) Then they described an underground
    railroad they had used to smuggle Arabs, Turks, and others into
    Chechnya to fight. By bribing Russian guards and using roads that
    pass from Azerbaijan through Dagestan, they said, the separatists
    had shipped in traveling Islamic fighters for years. But by 2005, the
    railroad had all but stopped. "They used to sit in the chair you are
    sitting in and ask us to take them to the jihad," one of my Chechen
    hosts said. "Now they do not come. They are all fighting in Iraq."

    Putin, a student of what is wrong with the United States, had loudly
    opposed the invasion of Iraq. But as the United States bogged down
    along the Tigris and the Euphrates, the war he had stood against
    was making his job easier. George Bush limped toward the end of
    his presidency, facing public unease about his handling of the wars
    in Afghanistan and Iraq. Vladimir Putin's public-approval ratings
    exceeded 70 percent. By this year, with memories of terrorism in
    Moscow streets fading, the Chechen war had slipped from much of
    the national conversation. Putin was even able to raise the subject
    himself to divert uncomfortable questions about his personal life.

    He had long been rumored to keep mistresses, including a relationship
    with a prominent television executive whose career turned for the
    better after they met. In April, a Moscow newspaper dared to publish an
    article about another suspect: Alina Kabayeva, a twenty-four-year-old
    former Olympic gymnast and newly appointed member of parliament. Putin
    decried the story as the intrusive fantasy of a yellow press. But,
    he added, "Thank God people have stopped asking about Chechnya."

    IV. THE BREAKOUT

    In his public appearances, Putin has always displayed a Clintonesque
    command of facts, as if he spent his nights reading the finer points
    of policy proposals. Authentically vulgar, his mind was also swift
    and facile, capable of freewheeling riffs on all manner of public
    affairs. But he had rigged his own reelection in 2004, and by late
    that year he seemed out of stride with powerful currents coursing
    through the old Soviet space. A bloodless revolution in Georgia had
    overturned another falsified election and installed a West-leaning
    government, eroding the Kremlin's influence. The Ukrainian opposition
    was organizing in Kiev. Could the yearning for a new guard, evident
    along Russia's borders, spread to Red Square?

    There are many essential moments in Putin's consolidation of
    power. Most publicly, it began with the arrest of oil oligarch
    Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an act that propelled his long climb to what
    he is now. But his handling of Ukraine, at first bungled, proved to
    be another.

    Putin's Ukraine policy had courted disaster. In the elections of
    2004, he publicly backed a pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovich,
    who had been convicted of robbery but had the support of the sordid
    political machine built by Leonid Kuchma, the much-hated departing
    president. Putin jumped in as if the race were a domestic affair. He
    presided over a Soviet-style military parade in Kiev and committed
    Russia to an energy deal that pledged to sell natural gas to Ukraine
    at a deep discount through 2009. Natural gas is the lubricant of the
    Ukrainian economy. It heats Ukrainian cities and powers electrical
    plants and factories. Putin's deal-to sell gas for less than a quarter
    of the market rate through Yanukovich's first presidential term-was
    a subsidy-for-loyalty exchange, and promised Ukraine's elite ample
    opportunity for graft. (Reselling subsidized Russian gas at high
    profits is a common insiders' swindle.)

    There was only one problem: Yanukovich was not elected. His rival,
    Viktor Yushchenko, survived dioxin poisoning and emerged from
    the hospital as a potent symbol against the enduring nastiness of
    post-Soviet rule. Kuchma's government falsified an election victory
    for Yanukovich, but it was not enough. Hundreds of thousands of
    demonstrators, and then the Ukrainian court, demanded a new vote. Putin
    was scrambling for credibility.

    His retaliation was precise. Russia announced that the gas deal with
    Ukraine was off, and that Ukraine would have to pay market rates,
    now more than five times the previous offer. Gazprom, Russia's state
    gas monopoly, set a deadline for late 2005. The threat's timing
    was carefully chosen and the irony inescapable. Ukraine faced the
    prospect of gas shortages in winter. And Putin, the KGB man who had
    given a Soviet-style energy subsidy to a nation to buy its loyalty,
    was now lecturing Europe about the need for market rates.

    As Yushchenko resisted through the deadline, Russia escalated again,
    reducing pressure in pipelines feeding Ukraine. Pressure quickly began
    to fall in Europe, which receives much of its gas on lines that pass
    through Ukraine. In his anger that Ukraine overturned a falsified
    election, Putin was cutting off gas to the West. European officials
    seethed. Could he be such a neophyte? Was he not getting any better
    advice? Had Putin lost his mind?

    With the din rising, Yushchenko capitulated in a deal to buy gas
    through a mysterious company, Rosukrenergo, at a compromise price. It
    was an utterly nontransparent arrangement, and raised immediate
    suspicion that insiders were profiting. After seeming cornered only
    months before, Putin had won, and been successful in three ways. He
    had forced Ukraine to accept his terms, he had pulled Yushchenko into
    an agreement that sullied his government and image as a reformer, and
    he had shown Europe that he could stand up to it as Yeltsin never did.

    As the deal closed, an invigorated Putin appeared on national
    television. These appearances have become scripted rituals of
    daily broadcast life in Russia, during which Putin holds contrived
    meetings with subordinates on sets made for state television. Putin
    has many such sets available-in the Kremlin, in Sochi, and on this
    evening he appeared at Novo-Ogaryovo, his suburban residence outside
    Moscow. The office had a desk, a boardroom table, and a Christmas
    tree. A group of us was allowed into the room to observe the faked
    meeting, which would be broadcast around the Russian-speaking world
    as the president receiving a report about the negotiations with
    Ukraine. Putin arrived. Aleksei Miller, Gazprom's chief executive,
    and Viktor Khristenko, Russia's energy minister, took seats before
    him. The show began.

    The president congratulated his men, and then turned to the subject
    of the day. "I am sure that the settlement of the complex issue in
    the gas sector will have a positive effect on the entire set of
    Russian-Ukrainian relations," he said. "It is not only important
    that Russia's approach to calculating the gas price was recognized
    as justified, but that our relations are assuming a new quality and
    becoming a truly transparent market partnership." Nothing about the new
    partnership was transparent, and relations with Ukraine had hardened.

    After he finished talking, his daily TV segment done, he looked over
    at us. For a moment, Putin stared. Then he spoke. "S Novim Godom,"
    he said. This is a Russian holiday greeting, words in Russia that
    carry great cheer. Coming from most any other mouth it would mean
    "Happy New Year." Coming from Putin, it carried another message:
    Get out of my room.

    V. THE CRACKDOWN

    For all of Putin's domestic success, and in spite of his good luck,
    Russia remains bedeviled by problems. Social services are poor, and
    corruption has become total. Russian public services are so wormy
    with dishonesty and dysfunction that patients bribe doctors for care,
    parents buy access to schools for their children and grades for their
    report cards, and the police shake down drivers with a regularity
    resembling taxation. The court system is a sham, vulnerable to bribery
    and political instruction. Racial and ethnic violence is widespread,
    and murders of minorities occur with morbid frequency.

    Russia's army, far behind Western levels of professionalism and
    standards of equipment, is further weakened by high rates of draft
    dodging, which are elevated by traditions of conscript hazing. Its
    record of human-rights violations is appalling. Putin has consolidated
    the Kremlin's control over key economic sectors-oil, gas, pipelines,
    aircraft and vehicle manufacture, arms dealing, banking, and metals-and
    the billionaires have been brought under the Kremlin's sway. But there
    are more oligarchs now than in 2000, suggesting that wealth has not
    been redistributed in ways Putin had pledged, even as inflation and
    a real estate bubble have eroded middle-class spending power.

    All of these are issues that might motivate a growing middle class to
    ask questions about its government. So how did Vladimir Putin build so
    much prestige and muster the strength to assert himself on the world?

    The easy answer, the one you've heard, is that he rolled back civil
    liberties and created a neo-Soviet state, securing his own power by
    limiting everyone else's. Since 2000, Putin's Kremlin has replaced
    independent television with lapdog television, stifled political
    competitors, expelled foreigners and harried nongovernmental
    organizations that criticize the state, abolished the elections
    for governors and replaced them with a system in which the Kremlin
    appoints regional leaders. The effect has been a drought of candor and
    vibrancy in Russia's public conversation. These days, free speech does
    not extend much beyond venting online, a single bold radio station,
    and the work of a few small, rambunctious newspapers.

    But the insistence that Russia is returning to Soviet times is a
    claim resting on omission and exaggeration. This is not the nightmare
    of Soviet rule, and not just because Russians have access to food
    and foreign goods. Putin's Russia is a canny autocracy, a system
    that exerts intensive control over political society but offers
    pressure-release valves in individual life. In Russia, Internet use is
    largely unfettered, cell-phone ownership is profligate, the pursuit of
    money is an organizing ideology, and foreign travel is common. Under
    the old guard, all of these would have been regarded as threats to
    the state.

    So what is this new Russia? A few years ago I sat one cold morning with
    a Western diplomat who was contemplating Putin. Western governments,
    he said, often criticized the Kremlin for not emulating democratic
    systems of government, and accused Putin of backsliding toward
    strongman rule. The diplomat saw the backsliding. But he suggested
    that there was actually a high degree of emulation of the West.

    The Kremlin's political apparatus routinely falsified elections. It
    compelled laborers, students, and government employees to vote for
    its candidates. It doctored voter lists. It used tax in-spectors and
    police to harass opposition members. It manipulated media coverage
    and released invented vote results. In the daily administration of
    government affairs, the state perched atop a sprawling machinery of
    graft that spirited away money from all manner of public works. And
    the state's penetration of the strategic industries extended the graft
    throughout the economy. Although checks and balances existed in the
    law, in practice they had been subverted. The Kremlin controlled
    the legislature and courts. Law-enforcement agencies-from the tax
    police to the successors of the KGB-worked at its bidding. No new face
    could stand against Putin or his men. "We keep urging them to embrace
    and practice democracy," the diplomat said. "But actually, when you
    look at it, the Kremlin has done a pretty good job of copying the
    state of democracy in American urban machines of the early twentieth
    century. It's not that far from Tammany Hall."

    Put another way, Putin's autocracy is a cunning blend of ruling
    ideas from the old Soviet regime with many of the material pleasures
    of capitalist life, a form of government for strongmen who did
    their homework. And just as they accept that freer markets are more
    efficient than planned economies, and that pining for foreign goods
    is not treason, Putin and his circle understand that Russia's people
    can say what they wish in their kitchens without endangering the
    state. This allows for democratic pretenses with centralized rule
    and insider access to the profits of governing. The Kremlin today
    does not control everything. It does not try to. Putin's circle
    exerts control over the profits of the most lucrative industries, and
    bares its teeth at actual threats to power. Repression is no longer
    total. It is precise, and its weight is brought down, often publicly,
    on the few who stand up to the state.

    Putin will be remembered for many things, but to the list should be
    added his government's skills at mimicry. Throughout his second term,
    he smothered foes by creating obedient duplicates of them. These
    are the Kremlin's Stepford Wives. Western journalists have covered
    Russia critically? Putin launches Russia Today, a twenty-four-hour,
    state-controlled English-language television station that acts less
    as a news agency than as a sycophant with a British accent. Opposition
    youth groups-Otpor! ("Resistance!"), Kmara! ("Enough!"), Pora! ("It's
    time!")-helped topple tired postcommunist governments in Serbia,
    Georgia, and Ukraine? The Kremlin creates Nashi, or "Ours," a youth
    organization whose demonstrations praise the power and whose ranks
    serve as an unofficial reserve of street loyalty to be mobilized at
    will. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which
    leads the region's most credible election-observation missions, was
    publicly documenting election-rigging in the old Soviet space? The
    Kremlin deploys its own observers to declare rigged elections free
    and fair.

    To all the world, these duplicates are crude Orwellian inventions,
    calling things the opposite of what they are. To Putin, they are
    accoutrements of power. He has seemed pleased to watch his subjects
    disgrace themselves in the service of his needs.

    VI. A KINDER, GENTLER POLICE STATE

    For years after the Soviet Union's collapse, Russia's liberals and
    Westerners alike hoped that the freed people and new republics would
    form law-abiding and democratic states. Putin's rule has labored to
    prevent that from happening, and the old Soviet world has hardened
    to its new shape. Across the rolling expanse of steppe, forest, and
    mountain range formerly under Kremlin rule, every single government
    unfailingly declares itself democratic. But aside from in the Baltic
    states, few in the region can speak candidly on television or the
    radio, or watch a free and independent news broadcast of local origin,
    or enjoy unmolested public assembly that criticizes the government,
    or have a fair hearing before an impartial judge in a court where
    the law is the highest authority, or select leaders from a slate
    of candidates who have been allowed to campaign openly and without
    restriction. This is the state of the Russian-speaking world nearly
    two decades after the wall came down.

    This is his world. When Moscow proved too opaque, this is where I
    would go to see Vladimir Putin's reflection.

    In Belarus, the opposition to President Aleksandr Lukashenko was
    portrayed on state television news (the only broadcast news in the
    country) as homosexual, drug-abusing, and in the pay of spies. Campaign
    managers were jailed, as were the protestors against electoral
    abuses. Both opposition candidates that stood against Lukashenko
    were arrested during and after the race, and one, Aleksandr Kazulin,
    was sentenced to five and a half years in jail for leading a protest
    march. He was released this year to attend the funeral of his wife,
    who died of cancer, and then led back to his cell.

    Kazulin's fate has been less harsh than others. In Tajikistan in 2005,
    Makhmadrouzi Iskandarov, an opposition leader who said he would run
    for president, was convicted of terrorism and other charges. He was
    sentenced to twenty-three years in jail at a closed trial.

    In Kazakhstan that year, a newspaper editor who published court
    documents from the United States detailing the corruption of President
    Nursultan Nazarbayev was mugged by men who carved a censor's X across
    his chest. Two prominent opposition politicians died of gunshot wounds
    around election time. One, Zamanbek Nurkadilov, was found shot twice
    in the chest and once in the head. (The police suggested the death
    was a suicide, the three shots apparently evidence of resolve.) The
    other, Altynbek Sarsenbaiuly, was bound at the wrists and murdered
    in early 2006 by officers from Kazakhstan's former KGB.

    In Uzbekistan, protestors, many chanting "Freedom," were dispersed
    by government machine-gun fire in 2005. No outsider knows how many
    people died, and President Islam Karimov blocked all independent
    reviews. Blocked is euphemism here: Two survivors who were interviewed
    by me and two colleagues were later dragged from a refugee camp
    by Uzbek intelligence officers and imprisoned after show trials;
    a local journalist who assisted us had a bounty placed on his head
    by the Uzbek government for his own writings. Soon after, he was shot.

    In Azerbaijan, after the last parliamentary election, demonstrators
    and candidates were clubbed by phalanxes of riot police and chased
    by trucks with water cannons after protesting the intimidation,
    vote stuffing, and rigged counts that accompanied the ruling party's
    overwhelming official victory.

    In Turkmenistan, after the dictator Saparmurat Niyazov died, the
    man in line to be acting president was arrested, securing another
    insider's path to power.

    In Armenia, the government declared a state of emergency amid street
    protests to a flawed vote, and sent tanks to disperse the crowds.

    During Putin's second term, I traveled to each of these former Soviet
    nations and observed their political machines. In Russia, where I
    lived, control of elections is almost total. But across the region,
    there are shades in the palette of repression and official crime, and
    the Kremlin's election-season repression was less crude and violent
    than in many former Soviet states. Putin, who had the opportunity to
    be a democrat, instead chose to lead this club. At a time when he was
    popular and powerful, he never trusted Russia's people or politics
    enough to allow a free vote. He dashed his chance at legitimacy and
    surrendered the possibility that Russia might wield moral weight.

    Instead, as he became Russia's preeminent man, he pulled the
    levers of a reinvigorated state to suit himself. And this year when
    Russia invaded Georgia, Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili was
    instantly assigned the role of criminal on Russian TV, just as Mikhail
    Khodorkovsky had been before him.

    VII. TO WHAT END?

    Early this year, Putin was challenged by a reporter at a news
    conference over the continued vote fabrications in Chechnya. There,
    according to the government's figures for the parliamentary election
    last year, 99 percent of the voters had cast ballots, and 99 percent
    of the ballots were for the political party Putin leads. Such election
    figures have been rivaled only in Kim Jong-il's North Korea, Mao's
    China, Niyazov's Turkmenistan, and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. They were
    especially absurd for a vote in Chechnya, a land shaped by cycles of
    resistance to Russian rule, and that had been brought back to yoke by
    force. The correspondent wanted to know: Did the president of Russia
    find these numbers credible?

    Putin declined to answer. Instead, he asked a state journalist from
    Chechnya to answer for him. The young Chechen quickly stood. "These
    are absolutely realistic figures," he said, grinning obsequiously. And
    Vladimir Putin watched with a mix of satisfaction and boredom, the
    face of unchecked power itself.
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