In fact, there is no evidence that Putin plays chess, and in any case, it is not his sort of game. Chess is a contest of inflexible rules, transparency and of an intellectual competition where the options are strictly constrained. Everyone starts with the same pieces, and everyone knows what a pawn can do and when it’s their turn to move. Putin doesn’t want to limit his options like that. He does know judo, however. A black belt, he has been honing his skills since starting as a teenager, and his approach to statecraft seems to reflect this. A judoka may well have prepared for a rival’s usual moves and worked out countermoves in advance, but much of the art is in using the opponent’s strength against him to seize the moment when it appears. In this respect, in geopolitics as in judo, Putin is an opportunist. He has a sense of what constitutes a win, but no predetermined path towards it. He relies on quickly seizing any advantage he sees, rather than on a careful strategy.
As a result, both he and the Russian state he has shaped are often unpredictable, sometimes even acting in contradictory ways, especially regarding foreign policy. Many apparent short-term ‘successes’ prove to be long-term liabilities, having been neither thought through beforehand or followed through afterwards. But this helps explain why we are so often unable to predict Putin’s moves in advance – he himself doesn’t know what he’ll do next. Instead, he circles us in the ring. He is aware that overall and when united, the West is so much more powerful than Russia, with twenty times its gross domestic product, six times the population, and more than three times as many troops. But he’s waiting for us to make a mistake and give him what looks like a good chance to strike.
Quite what Putin’s goals are I will explore more in Chapter 3. For the moment, it is enough to say that he wants power and stability at home, and recognition abroad. To this end, he needs the country to be quiet, any opposition to be silenced or muzzled, but also for the Russian economy to work, at least after a fashion. That means business with the West, which provides irreplaceable markets for its oil and gas, as well as the investment and technology its modernisation will require. But we are also the main obstacle preventing him from achieving his geopolitical goals, refusing to give Russia the status he demands, and interfering when he tries to assert dominance over neighbours such as Georgia and Ukraine. He realises that the West, when united, is more powerful than Russia on almost any terms, but at the same time believes that our weakness is that we are a constellation of often-fractious democracies. He wants us to be divided, demoralised and distracted to the point where either we are willing to do a deal with him or, more likely, not in a fit state to challenge him.
But Putin doesn’t have any master plan of how to get there. Instead he has, whether by chance or design, stumbled on a way to capitalise on the ambitions and imaginations of all kinds of individuals, institutions and organisations, from journalists and diplomats to spies and businesspeople. On the face of it, Russia looks like any other country. It has all the familiar institutions: a cabinet and ministries, a two-chamber parliament, a constitution, courts and consulates. In practice, things are very different. Putin’s predecessor and patron Boris Yeltsin shelled his own parliament to resolve a constitutional crisis and impose hyper-presidential rule; Putin has gone even further, creating a system that, at least at the top, functions in a similar way to a royal court.
Agencies overlap and compete, formal chains of command are less important than personal relationships, favourites rise and fall, and status and power are defined more by service to the needs of the Kremlin than by any formal institutional or social identity. In this ‘adhocracy’, your job title or even whether you are officially an employee of the state doesn’t necessarily matter. After all, ever since the billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky was almost overnight reduced from the richest man in Russia to a convict (see Chapter 8), even the so-called oligarchs, the richest men in Russia, know that their wealth is subject to the power of the state. Instead, the adhocrats are defined by their loyalty, their relationship with the boss and what they can do for him.
