Brookings: Experts - Fiona Hill

'Operative in the Kremlin': De-mystifying Putin

Fiona Hill — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's note: In an interview with Russia Beyond the Headlines, Fiona Hill spoke about her new book Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin and the difficulty of de-mystifying Vladimir Putin.

Russia Beyond The Headlines: While working on your book, have you had any new, exclusive information? Have you tried to interview Putin himself?

Fiona Hill: We’ve had an opportunity to essentially interview him, because we have been taking part in Valdai Club discussions since 2004. So we used these expert meetings with the Russian president, in many respects, to kind of interview him. Also, we watched him for hours.

Moreover, we quote a lot of things he said during Valdai Club meetings with foreign experts, and we quote a lot from his presentation speeches.

Since I joined Brookings in 2004, I have spent an enormous amount of time watching Putin’s every presentation on Russian TV and Internet, analyzing his pronunciations and even body language, which also tells you a lot. So I had a lot of open and available material about him at my disposal.

RBTH: Do you have any feedback from the Kremlin on your new book?

Hill: No. Actually, I would be surprised if they did, because it is usual for world leaders to comment when somebody writes something about them. In politics, one of the first lessons is not to directly challenge things that people say, because it seems like giving them validity.

RBTH: When I was reading your book, it caught my eye that you constantly refer to the period of Vladimir Putin’s work in the KGB, which is certainly crucial to understanding his personality. However, it’s well known that Putin, as a college student, studied law. Have you paid attention to this period in his biography, and what kind of conclusions have you drawn from that?

Hill: We had a look at what exactly he was studying at that period. We know a lot about his legal work later on.

Also, we have a section it the book called “The Statist,” on Putin’s kind of legal views that were very much shared by people like Anatoly Sobchak. It’s clear that Putin has appropriated and learned many theories from a strain of liberal-conservative thoughts that originated in the 1990’s and early 2000’s.

From his early days in the Kremlin, and up to the point when he decided to step down and become prime minister, because of the sanctity of Russian Constitution, he made many references to the importance of the law, legislative process and idea of “pravovoye gosudarstvo” (“rule-of-law state”) – which we translated as a law-abiding step where, really, the law is supreme.

The constitution theme may also be very important to Putin, because Anatoly Sobchak was one of the drafters of the [Russian] Constitution. So I think law, for Vladimir Putin, is indeed very important and is part of his personality and identity.

RBTH: In your book you make a rather strong assertion referring to some of Vladimir Putin’s hobbies as “fake identities.” What makes you think so?

Hill: Actually, I think that some of his hobbies – like judo, for example – are not fake. During his younger years he was a pretty accomplished sportsman. For him, sport is important. And we see this reflecting into politics – Sochi Olympics in 2014, Soccer championship in 2018, and so on. He is really trying to lead by example and trying to engage young people in sport.

However, the risky car driver, the deep-sea diver and amphora explorer identities, etc., don’t really belong to Putin. It was even admitted by his staff that Putin assumes these just as a costumes.

But we believe he did all that because he wanted to set an example for people: He wanted people to think about cranes, he wanted people to think about conservation of historical artifacts and archeology, and so on. Our argument is that he has some of these fake guises […] but he has them for a real and political purpose.

Basically, every serious political figure engages in something like this, but he has probably done more than anyone else. So some of these fake identities – or these costumes that he deliberately assumes – are part of his political profile and his agenda.

RBTH: In some Western countries – and especially in Washington, D.C. – there is a strong anti-Putin atmosphere. A lot of Western politicians tend to simplify and even demonize the incumbent Russian president. Do you believe that your book could help these kinds of people to understand what Putin is really about?

Hill: That’s exactly why we wrote this book. To be frank, we didn’t write it for the Russian audience. We wrote it to try to explain that one has to be very careful when it comes to demonizing anybody.
Really, in any of study leadership, you have to go as deep as you possibly can. It doesn’t help to have superficial responses. We have never really thought that designating Putin as “KGB guy,” and “autocrat,” and all these kinds of labels, is useful.

Simply dismissing someone’s significance in global affairs doesn’t serve us well. It leads to mistakes and miscalculations.

Certainly we don’t know the exact mechanism of his rise and his pick up, and we won’t spend [an] endless amount of time trying to figure this out. Even if we were able to go back and interview people like Voloshin and Berezovsky or others, they will tell stories that make them look good. That’s called selective memory.

RBTH: How do you explain Putin’s popularity in Russia?

Hill: When you look at Russian polls, he is indeed pretty popular. We can argue what his percentage was during [the] last elections and keep in mind the fact of limited political competition in Russia, but, if you compare this to other politicians, he would still most likely [have] won the presidency.

So we tried to explain why he does resonate with Russians – not with everyone and, as we know, he doesn’t resonate with a large section of population in Moscow and other places. But, in general: What makes him so popular in Russia? That’s the phenomena we tried to understand.

And the only way to do this, [to] understand this popularity, is to put it in context. For instance: How to explain Berlusconi’s popularity in Italy? From the outside, no one can understand this, and you can only understand Berlusconi in an Italian context. The same is true when it comes to Margaret Thatcher, who was very much a product of the United Kingdom at a particular time or Ronald Reagan of the U.S. in a particular period. These are all leaders who had big impact.

Lastly, we didn’t write these books to make friends with anyone. We used the opportunity of Valdai Club meetings to get as much as we could, and we know that these events were heavily orchestrated to get favorable responses. We even got a lot of criticism in Washington for attending these meetings.

Authors

Fiona Hill

Publication: Russia Beyond the Headlines

Image Source: © RIA Novosti / Reuters

The Limits of U.S. Cooperation with Russia on Counterterrorism

Fiona Hill — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

In the wake of the Boston bombings, some have speculated whether cooperation on counter-terrorism could put the U.S.-Russian relationship back on a more stable footing at a particular tense moment in bilateral relations. This will not be an easy task, even if both President Putin and President Obama are willing to try.

When Vladimir Putin became Russian president in the 2000s, coordination on anti-terrorism efforts was his central idea for Russian-U.S. cooperation. Chechnya was an integral element for Putin. Even before the events of September 11, 2001, Putin repeatedly warned the United States of the connection between Russia’s Chechen insurgency and international terrorism. Now, 12 years later, when terrorists of Chechen ethnicity have struck the United States itself, that connection appears to have been made for him.

On Tuesday April 16, right after the Boston bombings, Putin was quick to extend his condolences to Obama and to try to revitalize Russian-U.S. cooperation on counter-terrorism. In fact, Putin’s message to Obama in response to the Boston bombings is almost identical to his message to President Bush after the 9/11 attacks, when Russia extended similar offers of intelligence-sharing in Afghanistan.

The first question the U.S. intelligence services asked after word of the bombs was: did we pick up any “chatter” from al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups that would hint at this? Now we’re asking, did the Russian FSB (the successor to the KGB) pick up chatter from Chechen groups or other extremist networks in Russia, especially given the FSB’s already-established interest in Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older of the two brothers involved in the Boston bombings?

Read the full article »

Authors

Fiona Hill

Publication: MSNBC

From Chechnya to Boston: Bombing Suspects and a Trail of Homegrown Radicalism and Terror

Fiona Hill — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:00:00 -0400

Two young men—brothers Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev with origins in Russia’s volatile North Caucasus regions—have been connected to this week’s bomb attacks at the Boston Marathon. They lived, for a time, in Dagestan, which is recognized as the epicenter of the Islamic insurgency that spilled over from Chechnya. Senior Fellow Fiona Hill, director of the Center on the United States and Europe, says Chechnya and Russia have spent centuries at war and it isn’t surprising that this conflict, which has spanned generations, would provide fertile ground to incite and radicalize sympathizers wherever they happen to live.

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From Chechnya to Boston: A Trail of Homegrown Radicalism and Terror

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From Chechnya to Boston: A Trail of Homegrown Radicalism and Terror

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Fiona Hill

Scotland as a Good Global Citizen: A Discussion with First Minister Alex Salmond

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:30:00 -0400

Event Information

April 9, 2013
10:30 AM - 12:00 PM EDT

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

In an historic referendum set for autumn 2014, the people of Scotland will vote to determine if Scotland should be an independent country. The decision on Scottish independence will carry with it far-reaching economic, legal, political and security consequences for all of the United Kingdom (UK). The debate about Scottish independence will also be watched closely across the continent of Europe. An independent Scotland would have to review its relationships with the rest of the world, including its priorities in foreign and diplomatic affairs and its memberships of international organizations such as the European Union.

On April 9, the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings (CUSE) hosted First Minister Alex Salmond, MSP, leader of the Scottish Government, for an address on Scotland’s future as an independent nation. In his remarks, First Minister Salmond discussed the Scottish values and principles that would shape a modern, independent Scotland and the choices and opportunities that would characterize Scotland’s contributions to the world. The Right Honorable Alex Salmond has served as first minister of Scotland since 2007. He first became a member of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 and has served as the leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) since 2004. Salmond was first elected as a member of the UK Parliament in 1987 and served until 2010.

Vice President Martin Indyk, director of Foreign Policy at Brookings, provided introductory remarks, and Fiona Hill, director of CUSE, moderated the discussion.

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The Fear That Drives Russia's Support For Syria's Assad

Fiona Hill — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's note: In an interview with NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Fiona Hill discusses how Vladimir Putin’s fear of state disintegration influences his actions on Syria. Read an excerpt below.

Neal Conan: Repeated American attempts to work with Russia on Syria have floundered on a fundamental difference. Vladimir Putin insists on a deal that includes Bashar al-Assad as part of Syria's future. So the civil war grinds on and the situation of civilians there grows ever more dire. So why? Arms exports? Access to the port of Tartus? Standing up for old allies?

In a recent article in foreign affairs Fiona Hill argues that Putin looks at Syria and sees his old fears of Chechnya brought back to life. Fiona Hill was co-author of "Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin," and joins us now on the phone from Florida near Miami. Good to have you with us today.

Fiona Hill: Hi. Thank you, Neal. Thanks for having me.

Conan: So how can Mr. Putin look at a civil war in Syria and she - a nightmare for him, the old rebellion in Chechnya?

Hill: Well, this is a prism that he's brought to looking at most conflicts like the conflicts in Syria that threatened the sanctity of his state. Mr. Putin actually came in to the presidency if you can recall back in '99, 2000 in Russia, just as the second war in Chechnya was starting off. And he saw that as his biggest challenge of keeping the Russian state together, so it didn't fall down the same path as the Soviet Union into collapse. And Putin was really brutal in pursuing the war in Chechnya. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in that holocaust of conflict including many civilians.

The capital city of Grozny in Chechnya was reduced completely to rubble, and Putin felt that this was worthwhile because it kept the state together. And over the course of the conflict in Chechnya it morphed in the same way that we've actually seen in the war in Syria. It went from a conflict that was mostly focused on political secession from Chechnya, from the Russian Federation and over time, really took on more of an extremist element, more of Sunni extremist groups who moved in to exploit the conflict and also many people who came from outside including from Syria to fight in Chechnya.

And Putin is now pretty much concerned that we're going to see a repetition, the collapse of the states in Syria, knock-on effect for conflicts at home for him as well as (unintelligible) across the hall in the Middle East. And yet again, another collapse of the state, that is something that he would like to see avoided at all costs.

Conan: Now Russia, a state with considerable resources was able to pacify, I think that's probably the right word - Chechnya. It is a completely different situation in Syria.

Hill: Neal, I'm very sorry. I didn't hear that. Could you repeat it, please?

Conan: I was saying that because of its enormous resources, Russia was able to pacify Chechnya, at least for the time being. Syria seems to be a very different situation.

Hill: That's very much the case. Yes. Mr. Putin has a lot of things that he was able to draw upon that Mr. Assad has not. He was able to take out the Chechnyan position, both at home and also abroad. In 2004, the Russians assassinated one of the top leaders of the Chechnyan opposition, Mr. Yandarbiyev, who had been an acting president and he was in Doha in Qatar at the time and was killed in a car bomb explosion.

Also other members of the opposition were picked off in other cities including in Europe. And Mr. Putin brought the full weight of the Russian army against the Chechnyans. And also he was able to perceive the war for such a long time quite ruthlessly because the Chechnyan opposition, generally, because of the number of very high level terrorist attacks and this infiltration of extremists lost any kind of support among the population.

So it was a very different conflict. It was very much confined to one region of Russia although there were terrorist attacks and spillover across the whole of the Russian Federation. But it wasn't at all like Syria where it's a full-blown civil war. And Mr. Assad is actually, at this point, seemingly perhaps not outgunned but certainly outnumbered by the number of opposition that are arrayed against him.

Authors

Fiona Hill

Publication: NPR

Image Source: © Rogan Ward / Reuters

The Real Reason Putin Supports Assad

Fiona Hill — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:00:00 -0400

Editor's note: This article was originally published by Foreign Affairs.

Few issues better illustrate the limits of the Obama administration’s “reset” with Russia than the crisis in Syria. For more than a year, the United States has tried, and failed, to work with Russia to find a solution to end the violence. Moscow has firmly opposed international intervention to remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power, arguing that the conflict must be resolved through negotiations and that Assad must be included in any transitional arrangement leading to a new government. Although the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, reached out recently to the leaders of the Syrian opposition, these talks produced no indication that the Kremlin is seriously recalibrating its positions on Syria. And that’s hardly surprising: the main obstacle to any shift in Russia’s calculations is President Vladimir Putin himself, whose aversion to forcible regime change is intense and unwavering.

Why has Putin offered such steadfast support to Assad? On the surface, Moscow seems to profit from exporting arms to Syria, and it depends on the regime’s good will to maintain Russian access to a naval facility at the Mediterranean port of Tartus. But these are marginal and symbolic interests. Putin is really motivated to support the Assad regime by his fear of state collapse -- a fear he confronted most directly during the secession of Russia’s North Caucasus republic of Chechnya, which he brutally suppressed in a bloody civil war and counterinsurgency operation fought between 1999 and 2009. (In Russia, the republics are semi-autonomous federal units comprising the historic territories of the country’s non-ethnic Russian groups.) In a series of interviews he gave in 2000 for an authorized biography, Putin declared that “the essence of the ... situation in the North Caucasus and in Chechnya ... is the continuation of the collapse of the USSR.... If we did not quickly do something to stop it, Russia as a state in its current form would cease to exist.... I was convinced that if we did not immediately stop the extremists [in Chechnya], then in no time at all we would be facing a second Yugoslavia across the entire territory of the Russian Federation -- the Yugoslavization of Russia.” And we know how Putin feels about the demise of the Soviet Union; in 2005 he called it “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century,” a comment that was meant to bemoan the collapse of the Soviet state rather than the demise of communism.

For Putin, Syria is all too reminiscent of Chechnya. Both conflicts pitted the state against disparate and leaderless opposition forces, which over time came to include extremist Sunni Islamist groups. In Putin’s view -- one that he stresses repeatedly in meetings with his U.S. and European counterparts -- Syria is the latest battleground in a global, multi-decade struggle between secular states and Sunni Islamism, which first began in Afghanistan with the Taliban, then moved to Chechnya, and has torn a number of Arab countries apart. Ever since he took office (first as prime minister in 1999 and then as president in 2000) and was confronted by the Chechen war, Putin has expressed his fear of Sunni Islamist extremism and of the risks that “jihadist” groups pose to Russia, with its large, indigenous, Sunni Muslim population, concentrated in the North Caucasus, the Volga region, and in major cities such as Moscow. A desire to contain extremism is a major reason why Putin offered help to the United States in battling the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11. It is also why Russia maintains close relations with Shia Iran, which acts as a counterweight to Sunni powers.

The conflicts in both Chechnya and Syria pitted the state against disparate and leaderless opposition forces, which over time came to include extremist Sunni Islamist groups.

In the case of Chechnya, Putin made it clear that retaking the republic from its “extremist opposition forces” was worth every sacrifice. In a speech in September 1999, he promised to pursue Chechen rebels and terrorists even into “the outhouse.” He did just that, and some opposition leaders were killed by missile attacks at their most vulnerable moments. The Chechen capital city of Grozny was reduced to rubble. Tens of thousands of civilians were killed, along with jihadist fighters who came into Chechnya with the encouragement of extremist groups from the Arab world, including from Syria. Moscow and other Russian cities endured devastating terrorist attacks. Putin’s treatment of Chechnya became a cautionary tale of what would happen to rebels and terrorists -- and indeed to entire groups of people -- if they threatened the Russian state. They would either be eliminated or brought to their knees -- exactly the fate Putin wishes for today’s Syrian rebels.

After two decades of secessionist strife, Putin has contained Chechnya’s uprising. Ramzan Kadyrov, a former rebel who switched his allegiance to Moscow, now leads the republic. Putin granted Kadyrov and his supporters amnesty and gave them a mandate to go after other militants and political opponents. Kadyrov has rebuilt Grozny (with ample funds from Moscow) and created his own version of an Islamist and Chechen republic that is condemned by human rights organizations for its brutal suppression of dissent.

For the past two years, Putin has hoped that Assad would be able to do what he did in Chechnya and beat back the opposition. Based on the brutal record of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, in suppressing uprisings, Putin anticipated that the regime would have no problem keeping the state together. But now Assad seems to have failed, and Putin is not one to back a losing horse. He and the rest of the Russian leadership are well aware that their staunch support for Assad has damaged Russia’s standing in the Arab world, but they have no alternative plan to get out of the stalemate. Putin is still not ready to sanction an intervention that could lead to the dismantling of the Syrian state and to risk creating a situation akin to that in Afghanistan in the 1990s, when warring groups of extremists fought each other and created a breeding ground for global jihadism. In Putin’s view, lawless post-Qaddafi Libya, which has become an exporter of guns, fighters, and refugees to its neighbors, only further underscores the dangers of international intervention.

Before abandoning Assad, Putin will need to have answers to some pressing questions: Who will be responsible for the fallout from the regime’s collapse? Who will keep Sunni extremists in check? Who will keep extremists away from the North Caucasus and other Russian regions with large Sunni Muslim populations? And finally, who will ensure the security of Syria’s chemical weapons? Putin certainly does not trust the United States to play this stabilizing role: as he sees it, when the United States pulled out of Iraq, it left behind a Shia strongman, Nouri al-Maliki, to suppress the Sunnis; the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is leaving only uncertainty in its wake. In short, Putin doubts that the United States and the international community can deliver stability to Syria, so he continues to stand by the flailing regime as the only means of avoiding the collapse of the state altogether.

Although Putin looks at Syria and sees Chechnya, the situations are quite different. All of Syria is in the throes of civil war, and Assad does not have the same resources that Putin had in dealing with Chechnya. He cannot eliminate key representatives and supporters of the opposition abroad as Putin did with the Chechens, including by assassinating the former acting Chechen President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev in Qatar in 2004 to stop his fundraising and recruiting activities. Unable to crush or co-opt the opposition, Assad has taken Syria over the precipice. Syria is also bristling with conventional weaponry along with an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that pose a significant threat to neighboring states. Those neighbors -- Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Israel, and Iran farther afield -- have been engulfed in the conflict. In contrast, in spite of the flows of money and men into Chechnya and the spillover of refugees and terrorist acts into the rest of Russia (and sometimes into Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey), there was no similar proliferation threat in the Chechen war, and no outside powers ever became heavily involved. Chechnya is in a bad neighborhood, but Syria is in a terrible neighborhood, and the effects of the Syrian conflict cannot be contained in the way that Chechnya’s were.

Neither these differences nor the scale of the humanitarian tragedy will convince Putin to change his mind on Syria. The Russian president will continue to hold out against intervention and insist that negotiations with Assad must be part of the way forward, until some strongman can be found to restore a semblance of order to Syria’s chaos. If, by some miracle, Syria does not turn into a full-scale regional disaster, Putin will pat himself on the back and say it was thanks to him because he prevented an intervention. If the more likely scenario plays out, Putin will blame Washington. He will hold the United States responsible for destroying Syria and empowering Sunni Islamist extremists by championing democracy and the Arab revolutions. Meanwhile, Putin’s obstinacy is already turning his worst nightmare -- the fracturing of a geopolitically important state -- into a reality.

Authors

Fiona Hill

Publication: Foreign Affairs

Image Source: © Reuters Photographer / Reuters

Putin Personality Disorder

Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's note: This article was originally published by Foreign Policy magazine.

Russia merited just one mention in President Barack Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday night, an offhand remark that his administration will continue to "engage Russia to seek further reductions in our nuclear arsenals." Obama's first term did see some thaw with Moscow -- the "reset," a modest relationship with then President Dmitry Medvedev, and the passage of the New START agreement -- but it's clear that things have become frostier since Vladimir Putin returned to power. It's an indication of an impasse in dealing with the Kremlin -- and perhaps one that is fundamentally about personality. No one in Washington really knows what to make of Russia's famously immodest and opaque leader.

Who is the real Vladimir Putin? This question has never been fully answered. Putin has dominated Russian politics for more than 12 years, but in that time almost no new information has surfaced about his background beyond the material in a few early biographies. Even in the biographies, very little information about the Russian president is definitive, confirmable, or reliable. As a result, some observers have said that Putin has no face, no substance, no soul. He is a man from nowhere, who can appear to be anything to anybody.

But Putin is a product of his environment -- a man whose past experiences have clearly informed his present outlook. Indeed, Putin is best understood as a composite of multiple identities that stem from those experiences, and which help explain his improbable rise from KGB operative and deputy mayor of St. Petersburg to the pinnacle of Russian power. Of these multiple identities, six are most prominent: Statist, History Man, Survivalist, Outsider, Free Marketeer, and Case Officer. None of the single-word labels people usually attach to Putin -- KGB thug, kleptocrat, autocrat -- offer a satisfactory explanation for the phenomenon of his rule. It is the combination of all his identities that made Putin an effective behind-the-scenes operator in Russian politics and helped propel him into the Kremlin. Today, however, these identities have become a source of weakness. The country has changed since 1999; Putin has not.

Statist: Putin's rise to the Russian presidency in 1999-2000 was partially the result of an elite consensus about the importance of restoring order to the state after a decade of domestic crisis and international humiliation. Reflecting the national mood, Putin used one of his first major political statements -- his so-called "Millennium Message" of December 29, 1999 -- to present himself as a statist. In Russia, individuals exist to serve the state and their rights are therefore secondary. From his earliest days in the Kremlin, Putin has pursued the goal of restoring and strengthening the state -- by rediscovering and taking back Russia's fundamental values, re-energizing its historical traditions, and abandoning the practice of blindly copying abstract Western models. He has stressed communitarianism over Western individualism, promoted the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church, and drawn direct links between the modern Russian presidency and the pre-Revolutionary Russian tsars.

History Man: Putin has flaunted his attachment to Russia's historical traditions. In official biographical materials, he is portrayed as a self-designated student of history. As president, he has tied his personal destiny to that of the Russian state and actively deployed various interpretations of the country's past to reinforce policy positions, frame key events, and cloak himself in the mantle of historical legitimacy. For example, Putin has frequently highlighted parallels with Pyotr Stolypin -- prime minister under Nicholas II, the last tsar of the Romanov dynasty -- who championed far-reaching economic and social reforms. It was not just coincidence that Putin selected the 100th anniversary of Stolypin's death in 1911 to announce his intention to return to the presidency and see his reform program through to completion.

But if history has been a political tool for Putin, it is also very personal. His parents were survivors of the siege of Leningrad, one of the blackest periods of Russian history, when almost one million people died. His family's harrowing tale from World War II fits neatly into the national historical narrative -- one in which Russia constantly battles for survival against a hostile outside world. The critical lesson from centuries of domestic turbulence, invasion, and war, is that the Russian state always survives in one form or another. Every calamity weathered reaffirms Russia's resilience and its special status in history. This has been a rhetorical touchstone for Putin, as well as for many others from his generation.

Survivalist: The collective experience of this dark history has turned the Russian population into survivalists -- people who constantly think of and prepare for the worst. Throughout his presidency, Putin has raised survivalism from the personal to the national level. He made it a priority to pay off the colossal state debts his predecessors, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, racked up over two decades. Putin concluded that these debts brought down the USSR, and almost brought down the fledgling Russian state in the 1990s. For the state to survive, Russia's debts had to be paid off. He also proceeded to build up massive national reserves -- everything from oil, gas, and refined petroleum products, to livestock feed, military uniforms, tents, medications, and generators -- so that Russia would have the resources to withstand any natural disaster or war. Finally, he created huge financial reserves in anticipation of future economic crises (most recently converting some of Russia's substantial but volatile currency reserves into gold bullion).

Outsider: Putin has cultivated an image of himself as an outsider since he was a young man. He was born and raised in Russia's second city of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), the child of a factory worker and sometime janitor, with earlier humble roots in Russia's Ryazan province. In many respects, Putin was even an outsider within the KGB. He was recruited into the institution in the 1970s as part of an effort by KGB Director Yury Andropov to bring in a new generation of operatives from outside normal channels. But Putin did not rise rapidly through the ranks of the KGB, nor did he secure plum postings.

Putin was never part of the leadership structures of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and remained an outsider throughout the 1980s. During the critical reform period of perestroika, the KGB posted Putin to the provincial city of Dresden in East Germany, where he would remain until after the fall of the Berlin Wall. After his tenure as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, in summer 1996, Putin was specifically brought to Moscow as an outsider to help root out entrenched interests in the capital's political and business circles. Putin has made a virtue of this outsider status throughout his presidency, stressing his connections to "ordinary" Russians and distancing himself from Moscow's resented elites.

Free Marketeer: Putin's outsider status and his pragmatism enabled him to reject two of the central tenets of Communism: state ownership and central planning. History taught him that the Soviet economic system failed. Private property, free enterprise, and the market were superior. But Putin's understanding of capitalism was limited. The business practices he was exposed to during his time as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg did not have a primary emphasis on entrepreneurship, production, management, or marketing. In the 1990s, capitalism in St. Petersburg was more about personal connections to the city government than relations with workers and customers. As such, Putin seems to have emerged from his St. Petersburg experience with the view that winners in the market system are those who are best able to exploit the vulnerabilities of others, not necessarily those who provide the best goods and services at the most favorable prices. This perspective set him up to exploit the vulnerabilities of others, including Russian businessmen, to manipulate them and ensure that they followed the directives of the Kremlin.

Case Officer: As much as Putin appreciated the virtues of private ownership, when he became president he faced an important dilemma: how to reconcile private ownership of key sectors of the economy with meeting the statist goals he had set for Russia's development. How could he control and direct industry without reverting back to the total state ownership of the Soviet period? Putin found the answer through his most important identity -- the case officer. During his time in St. Petersburg as deputy mayor -- a position he was initially encouraged to take by the KGB -- businessmen were Putin's targets, not his partners. In order to ensure that they delivered on their promises to the city government, he collected compromising financial and personal information and leveraged it against them. When he got to Moscow in 1996, he used these same tactics against another set of businessmen -- Russian oligarchs --who were preying on each other and the Russian state.

As a case officer in the KGB, Putin had learned how to identify, recruit, and run agents, and acquired the patience to cultivate sources. He also learned how to collect, synthesize and use information. These tools proved invaluable in bringing Russia's oligarchs to heel. In a televised roundtable meeting with Russia's oligarchs in July 2000, for example, Putin deployed textbook KGB tactics. He explained that the businessmen would retain their extensive assets, but they would have to agree to a new tax regime that would give the federal government more resources. He told them that they must also actively consider Russian national interests, as defined by Putin and the state, when engaging in economic activities abroad. This was private enterprise with strings attached. The property rights of business magnates were ultimately dependent on the goodwill of the Kremlin.

These six identities form the man Putin is today. They help us better understand his conception of the Russian state and the way he rules it. But the same strengths that enabled Putin to climb the rungs of power and rein in Russia's oligarchs have now become sources of vulnerability. The country's rapid development has exposed the tensions between Putin's different identities. Putin the Survivalist, for instance, is in conflict with Putin the Free Marketeer. Policies oriented toward Russia's survival -- constantly building up reserves and preparing for worst-case scenarios -- are costly, diverting resources and reducing economic efficiency. Putin the Free Marketeer also runs afoul of Putin the Case Officer. Manipulation and blackmail do not help to create a new generation of good entrepreneurs. Putin knows the free market economy is superior to a centrally planned economy, but he does not fully understand how to move beyond deal-making and cronyism toward full liberalization.

Simply put, Putin is the operative in the Kremlin who was suddenly asked to be its master. His unique experiences, born of a specific place and time in Russian history, have not prepared him to be the national political leader of an advanced, developed country -- a politician who is accountable to his electorate. When Putin first became president he had no prior experience with direct responsibility, having always been the No. 2 man in St. Petersburg. In 2000, when Putin was made acting president and anointed as Boris Yeltsin's successor, the resources of the Kremlin were deployed in full-force to secure his formal election. He did not campaign for the position himself. Although his identities combined to put him in a position to be selected by Yeltsin's team, nothing in his history and identities especially suited Putin for his new role of president.

As a result, Putin is now on the defensive. His primary concern is domestic politics and ensuring regime survival. When he made the announcement in September 2011 that he was returning to the presidency, Putin did not anticipate election protests and the rise of a new opposition movement among Russia's urban elite. In many respects, Putin is the victim of his own success. The long period of prosperity and stability he has presided over in Russia helped create the new urban middle class, which consumes at Western levels and now wants Western-style political rights.

Putin is trapped in a dilemma that will persist throughout his current presidency. His long-term goal is to rebuild and restore Russia. To succeed, he needs human capital -- including the members of what is often called the "creative class," many of whom have joined the opposition. But he does not understand this new urban middle class and he lacks the ability to connect with its members. His base of support comes from Russia's "silent majority" of industrial workers, public sector employees, pensioners, and rural residents, all of whom are heavily dependent on state subsidies. As such, Putin remains distrustful of the very people he needs to power Russia's revival.

Domestic dissent and Putin's efforts to counter it will be a permanent feature of his current presidential term. Paradoxically, the more progress he makes toward modernizing Russia, the more people will demand greater political openness and, ultimately, Putin's removal from power. The rise of Russia's middle class, then, will continue to pit Putin against himself in the years ahead.

Authors

Publication: Foreign Policy

How the 1980s Explains Vladimir Putin

Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

In 1996, Vladimir Putin and a group of friends and acquaintances from St. Petersburg would gather in an idyllic lakeside setting—barely an hour and a half north of the city. The location, on the Karelian Isthmus between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga, was only an hour and 20 minute's drive to the Finnish border, in an area that has variously been part of the Swedish Empire, the tsarist Russian empire, independent Finland, the Soviet Union, and now Russia. This was a wonderful place for Mr. Putin to reflect on the twists and turns of fate and Russia's evolving borders over the centuries. It also put Mr. Putin far away from the Russian center, Moscow.

Putin had built a dacha, a weekend house, in this locale not long after he returned to St. Petersburg from his KGB service in Dresden, East Germany, but it had burned down in 1996. He had a new one built identical to the original and was joined by a group of seven friends who built dachas beside his. In the fall of 1996, the group formally registered their fraternity, calling it Ozero (Lake) and turning it into a gated community. Reportedly, the group members were so close that they often carpooled out from St. Petersburg to the dachas.

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Authors

Publication: The Atlantic

Europe's Foreign Policy: Emerging from the Crisis

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 11:00:00 -0500

Event Information

February 12, 2013
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM EST

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and the Brookings Institution recently released the 2013 edition of the European Foreign Policy Scorecard, an annual assessment of Europe's performance in dealing with the rest of the world, in particular China, Russia, the U.S. and the Middle East. The systematic report, conducted by a team of more than 35 researchers, has been described by Foreign Affairs as "a pioneering experiment in foreign policy analysis." In spite of the euro crisis, this edition of the Scorecard shows timid signs of stabilization and even resilience in Europe's foreign policy over the last year. From greater assertiveness vis-à-vis Russia on energy issues to the slow but steady development of the European External Action Service, Europe fared better externally than internally. Massive challenges remain, however, before Europe reaches the role it aspires to, and its internal divisions—including a possible exit by the United Kingdom—put these results in question for the future.

On February 12, the Center on the United States and Europe (CUSE) at Brookings and the Heinrich Boell Foundation hosted a discussion of the results of the latest Scorecard and Europe's place in the world. Panelists included Kristen Silverberg, former U.S. ambassador to the European Union; Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations; and Ana Palacio, former foreign minister of Spain. Senior Fellow Justin Vaïsse, CUSE director of research, presented the findings. Senior Fellow Fiona Hill, director of CUSE, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.

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Europe's Foreign Policy: Emerging from the Crisis

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Event Materials

20130212_Europe_foreign_policy_transcript

Why Putin Is Invested in the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi

Fiona Hill — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Editor’s Note: In an interview with Brook Silva-Braga, host of the Washington Post’s "The Take," Fiona Hill outlines why Vladamir Putin has invested time and money into hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia and what it implies about Putin’s leadership style. An excerpt of the interview is transcribed below.

Fiona Hill: In many respects, Sochi is kind of unusual. Olympic projects are not usually… they’re very good for the state or the government, you know, they are pursued for different kinds of reasons. But they’re not usually a personal project.

What’s interesting about Sochi is it’s personally very important for Vladimir Putin. So this is really putting Putin himself on the line, it really also underscores how much the leadership of this current government is personalized in the man himself. That also heightens the risk -- when you tie yourself personally up so much with an individual project.

Brook Silva-Braga: And why would he do it? Why is it personally important to him?

Hill: There’s an interesting angle to this. Mr. Putin is an outsider to Moscow. The new urban elite, the new middle class, has no great love for Mr. Putin. He’s from Leningrad, from St. Petersburg, the second city. He’s done a number of projects there, but Sochi is his personal city. He’s associated with it. He’s had masses of state meetings there. He’s flown people from all over the place; they think they’re meeting him in Moscow – next thing they know they’re going down to Sochi. He has made this his project. In many respects the way Peter the Great made St. Petersburg his own imperial project, Putin has made Sochi this. It’s really kind of put his stamp on Russia.

Watch the interview with Fiona Hill on the Washington Post website >>

Authors

Fiona Hill

Publication: Washington Post