We Need to Talk About Putin: Why the West Gets Him Wrong полностью

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’.