In this book, I seek to present a picture of the complexities of Vladimir Putin, and through him of today’s Russia, drawing on more decades of contact with Russia than I’d care to admit – time spent travelling there, talking to everyone from provincial cops to Moscow officials, getting drunk and paying the odd bribe. I don’t for a minute think that I have got everything right, nor that everyone else has got everything wrong. This is not primarily a book for my academic colleagues, and I will beg their indulgence for its tone, brevity and distinct absence of footnotes. Rather, it is for anyone who is curious about who this enigmatic figure may be, and why there is so much hype and hysteria around him. By attacking a collection of the most common and most problematic myths that ‘everyone knows’ about Putin, I hope to try and cut through some of the most unhelpful. Of course, I am, in part, taking on straw man arguments and over-simplifications, and it is not as though every policymaker, scholar or pundit believes all or even most of these. That said, the recent impoverishment of much public discourse about Putin and Russia, with cliché and caricature increasingly mobilised on both sides, has been depressing. As the world gets more complex, the ways we frame and explain it too often seem to be getting simpler and less nuanced. That is something we need to talk about, too – but not before we’ve finished talking about Putin.
As I say, this book does not pretend to be the last word on Putin, and nor does it claim that no one else gets it right. Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s
There’s snow, there are bears, there’s vodka – and then there’s chess, one of the irritatingly durable clichés for Russia and Russians. Consider the classic Russian film villains: there’s the brutish thug, of course, but there’s also the unemotional chess player, ten moves ahead of his rival. American politicians seem especially to love this metaphor. During Barack Obama’s presidency, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers complained that ‘Putin is playing chess and I think we are playing marbles.’ More recently, Hillary Clinton asserted that Donald Trump ‘is playing checkers and Putin is playing three-dimensional chess’.
Of course, this is not actually about chess. The prevailing tendency of seeing Putin as a Machiavellian grandmastermind plays to a Western fear that he is behind everything that goes wrong, and that each setback is part of some complex Russian strategy. Donald Trump’s election, Brexit, the rise of populism in Europe, the migrant crisis and even football hooliganism have all at some point been blamed on Moscow; as a result, we run the risk of giving him too much power. As will be discussed in a later chapter, much of Putin’s international adventurism is bluff, a little like the way an animal when confronted by a predator may puff itself up or bristle its fur to look as big and formidable as possible. We have a tendency to not look past the bristle.
There is no denying that Moscow is often trying to manipulate elections and widen social division in the West, although – as we will see later – rarely with anything like the kind of impact that we sometimes fear. But the main point is that this all implies some fiendishly subtle long-term plan to take the world step by step where Putin, the archetypal Bond villain, only without a lair in an extinct volcano, wants it to go.
