I read a biography of Putin that scrutinizes his rise to power in the late 1990s. It’s been one of my obsessions these days: reading anything about the Russia-Ukraine standoff.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
The book is titled The Man Without a Faceby Masha Gessen (French version: Putin – The Faceless Man, Fayard). Masha Gessen worked for a Russian magazine in the Roaring Twenties just before and just after the fall of the USSR. This is a terrifying and fascinating book.
Fascinating: Putin was in the right place at the right time to embed himself in the orbit of a corrupt and unstable power. Unknown to all, deputy mayor of Leningrad who played on all fronts of the nascent democracy. Before becoming prime minister of the largest country in the world, Putin had virtually no great qualifications.
Terrifying: Putin has almost never been involved in politics, an environment that has its share of alliances and compromises. He’s a bully, just a bully. Who uses power like a brute. An ordinary dictator, like the world has produced a slew of for a century, a Pinochet, a Shah of Iran, a Duvalier…
But at the head of the largest country in the world.
Fascinating, again: Russia is a country of lies and myths. Journalist Gessen tells the story of Putin’s rise, but it is the absence of facts and objective truths in this vast country that is the backstory of the book. The Soviet Union is dead, but the de-Sovietization of Russian society has not been achieved.
Much has been made of Putin, the former KGB; ah, Putin, the great spy! It’s part of the myth of the Russian dictator: he was an officer of the KGB, the great secret police of the USSR, the mythical KGB, God he must be cunning, devious, skilful…
Not really, actually.
Putin’s career in the KGB was lackluster.
It wasn’t Comrade Vladimir controlling double agents or tricking Western engineers into compromising positions with goats to extract secrets about new radar systems. A pencil pusher unable to express himself – but very good at judo – nostalgic for the time when the USSR was a colossus in the world, who has clung since 1991 to the myth of the humiliation-of-the -Russia-after-the-fall-of-the-USSR…
A once without panache cop who was sent to Germany in 1985, “but not in West Germany, not even in Berlin”, where the KGB did real spy work, writes Masha Gessen. No, Putin was sent to communist East Germany, Dresden, “another uneventful posting” for Lt. Col. Putin, who was “cutting newspaper headlines, contributing to the mountains of useless information produced by the KGB »…
Basically: Putin would never have inspired John Le Carré with a character from his Cold War novels.
And it is this guy who has become another Russian despot, as Russia has been producing despots for five centuries, according to Stephen Kotkin, a great specialist in Russia, author of a remarkable and acclaimed biography of Joseph Stalin. Kotkin is brilliantly interviewed in the New Yorker by David Remnick, who was once a correspondent in the USSR. I tell you: drop everything (after this column, anyway) and go read this luminous and instructive interview.1.
It’s about Putin, yes, but it’s mostly about Russia, about the idea that Russia has always had of itself, about the myths it tells itself – the truth, again… –, it, the superpower which is not so powerful as that, out of the said myths that it makes itself believe, with blows of legends and propaganda.
Kotkin explains that a dictatorship inevitably produces incompetence, at all levels of society. And the Russians have pretty much known only states dominated by one or another of the dictators that the era has assigned to Russia for 500 years. Now, the problem with despots is that they rule by terror, so no one wants to contradict them, or even provide them with unpleasant information, even if it is… true.
Kotkin: “That is why despotism, or just authoritarianism, is all-powerful and fragile at the same time. Despotism creates the circumstances of its destruction. The information is unreliable. The sycophants are more and more numerous. Correction mechanisms are shrinking. And the errors become more serious. »
Like that Ukrainian mistake…
The Russia of 2022 is not Tsarist Russia, or that of Stalin, agrees Stephen Kotkin. Russia is more educated, more developed than ever. “But the shock is there: so many things have changed, and they are still prisoners of this scheme”, that of the autocrat who makes all the decisions, alone…
From Masha Gessen to Stephen Kotkin, always the theme of Russian incompetence: Putin is an incompetent at the head of a traditionally incompetent state.
In Russia, therefore, no one contradicted Putin when he denied the existence of a Ukrainian state, of a Ukrainian culture. No independent agency has investigated the real capacity of its army, so disorganized in Ukraine2. And no one seems to have told the despot that his super economic contingency plan to resist sanctions in the event of an attack from Ukraine was as crumbly as the paper from German newspapers he cut up for the KGB archives in the old days.
Conversely, explains Stephen Kotkin, the beauty of a functional democracy is that states generally learn from their mistakes: “Our political systems punish mistakes […], poorly functioning administrations can learn and improve, which is not the case in China or Russia. »
I was reading Kotkin and he was putting into words what I’ve been guessing for two weeks: the idea that democracy is a strength – not a weakness – is coming back into fashion in a thousand and one ways.3courtesy of that incompetent Putin.