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.
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.
