Angus Roxburgh - The Strongman: Vladimir Putin and the Struggle for Russia

Angus Roxburgh is a respected British foreign correspondent and Russia specialist. He was the Sunday Times Moscow correspondent in the mid-1980s and the BBCs Moscow correspondent during the Yeltsin years. He is the author of The Second Russian Revolution and Pravda: Inside the Soviet Press Machine.

A sober assessment of the Putin years, illuminated by Angus Roxburghs first-hand experience and long acquaintance with Russia.

Bridget Kendall, BBC diplomatic correspondent

Using his personal experiences and material from new interviews with key figures, Angus Roxburgh lifts the lid on a decade of murky Kremlin politics and points the way towards the new Putin era that is about to dawn. Martin Sixsmith, author of Russia: A 1,000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East

Published in 2012 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
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Copyright 2012 Angus Roxburgh

The right of Angus Roxburgh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 78076 016 2
eISBN: 978 0 85773 036 7

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Typeset in Goudy Old Style by A. & D. Worthington, Newmarket

When you shake hands with Vladimir Putin you scarcely notice whether it is a firm or a weak handshake. It is his eyes that consume you. He lowers his head, tilting his eyes upwards towards you, and fixes you for several seconds, as though memorising every detail, or maybe matching your face to a picture he had memorised earlier ... It is a glowering, piercing, highly unsettling look.

Russias national leader is like no other countrys president or prime minister. The former KGB spy was rather reserved and gauche at first, when he was unexpectedly propelled into high office in 1999. But he has grown into a man with no inhibitions a strongman and a narcissist, who flaunts his physical strength in ever more frequent photo-shoots. In the beginning we saw only a few selected images Putin the judo champion, Putin at the controls of a fighter jet. Later particularly after he moved from the presidents office to that of the prime minister in 2008 he began to invite camera crews on expeditions designed solely to project a film-star image. They showed him putting satellite tracking devices on polar bears, tigers, white whales and snow leopards. He took the cameras along to see him swimming the butterfly stroke in an icy Siberian river, and riding a horse through mountains, with bare chest and dark shades. He personally put out wildfires, drove snowmobiles, motorbikes and Formula One cars, went skiing and scuba-diving, played ice hockey, and even crooned Blueberry Hill in English and played the piano in public unembarrassed by his inability to do either. In August 2011 he had a cameraman on hand when he stripped to the waist for a doctors examination.

What other world leader acts like this? Having muscular policies is one thing; but no one matches Putin for sheer vanity.

In conversation he is attentive, combative and sometimes explosive, when he touches upon sensitive matters. He is exceedingly well-informed, but also surprisingly ignorant about aspects of Western life. He is courteous, but can also be boorish. As president and then as prime minister he has run Russia with a strong, and tightening, grip. In recent years he has taken to dressing down his ministers in public, creating an atmosphere in which most of his subordinates are terrified of contradicting him, or even of voicing an opinion in case it might contradict him. He has created a top-down system the vertical of power which instils fear and stifles initiative.

Russia has become a state contemptuous of its peoples rights: a country in which the head of the electoral commission says his guiding principle is that whatever Putin says must be correct, and the chairman of parliament describes it as no place for discussions. It is a country in which the most important decision about who will become president is effectively taken in private by two individuals, with no reference to the populace. This was what happened in September 2011, when Putins protg and successor as president, Dmitry Medvedev, agreed to retire from the top job after one term to allow Putin to return as president in 2012 for, potentially, another 12 years. The two men cynically admitted what people had suspected but did not know for sure, that this had been the plan ever since Putin had stepped aside from the presidency in 2008: Medvedevs stint in the Kremlin was a mere seat-warming exercise, designed to keep Putin in power for as long as he wished, while paying lip-service to (or, in fact, flouting) the constitutional ban on a president serving more than two consecutive terms.

Putin did not start out like this. Back in 2000 many Western leaders at first welcomed his fresh, new approach, and his willingness to cooperate and seek consensus. It will be the task of this book to try to chronicle and explain how everything changed: why Putin became more and more authoritarian, how he challenged the West and how the West challenged him too; how each side failed to see the others concerns, causing a spiral of mutual mistrust and lost opportunities. On the one hand there is what the Americans and the West observed: Russias political crackdown, the brutal war in Chechnya and murders of journalists, the corrupt mafia state and growing bellicosity, culminating in the invasion of Georgia and the gas wars against Ukraine. On the other, there is Russias view: Americas domineering role in the world, its missile defence plans, the invasion of Iraq, the expansion of NATO, Russias positive gestures that went unanswered, the perceived threat to spread revolutions from Georgia and Ukraine to Russia. And there is each sides failure of vision: Putins inability to see any connection between his own repressions at home and the hostile reaction abroad; George W. Bushs inability to understand Russias age-old fear of encirclement or its fury at his high-handed foreign policy adventures.

At the time of writing Putin remains the most popular politician in Russia, perhaps because of the measure of stability and self-esteem he restored to peoples lives, and because living standards improved during his rule, due largely to high oil prices which benefit Russia. And yet he has failed in many of his stated goals. Having come to power promising to annihilate terrorism, the number of attacks has grown; corruption has soared, and cripples the economy; the population has slumped under his leadership by 2.2 million people; foreign investment has been far lower, as a percentage of Russias economic output, than rival fast-growing emerging markets such as Brazil or China; and, despite the massive inflows of energy revenues in the past decade, Russia has failed to create a dynamic, modern economy. This book looks at the struggle for reform inside Russia, and asks whether Dmitry Medvedev as president was (as it often seemed) a frustrated liberal or mere window-dressing.