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Wwhen Boris Yeltsin suddenly resigned as RussiaAs the first post-communist president on New Year’s Eve 1999, his country appeared to be spiraling downhill into economic and political disintegration. There are few who gave his, mostly unknown, successor as acting president a great chance reversing the economic implosion or staying in office for a long time.
The then Russian Prime Minister Vladimir PutinA media operation has already begun to portray the former KGB operative in stark contrast to the dying Yeltsin as shareholder. In the same year, the second Chechen war raged on the country’s southern border. Twenty-five years later, Vladimir Putin is still in the Kremlin, but Russia is once again in the grip of war on its post-Soviet periphery after last week’s shooting down a plane over Chechen airspace.
Add to the tensions that Putin’s Russia was engaged in a secret war against Ukraine since 2014, which he turned into a full-scale invasion in early 2022 – a conflict that remains deadlocked today. As with his earlier war against ChechnyaPutin’s stubbornness has turned an initial military fiasco into a brutal war of attrition that could come at a huge cost to Russia’s resources.
But Putin’s rise over the years owes more to bureaucratic fighting skills than to any dark espionage skills, or even judo skills he would show off at some point in front of loyal cameras.
Born in post-war Leningrad amid the dark legacy of the Nazi siege, the young Vladimir Putin learned survival skills better suited to the chaotic dog-and-dog post-Soviet society of the 1990s than the bright utopian future promoted by communist propaganda.
Westerners steeped in the myth of the KGB while anti-James Bond supervillains ignore that his meteoric rise was sparked by Putin’s relationship with his university law professor, not his time in a dingy office in Dresden.
Anatoly Sobchak he was a classic “licensed” dissident in the late Soviet era. A non-party member who was allowed to whisper subversive comments in exchange for quiet cooperation with the KGB against truly inconvenient customers, Sobchak was in a position to present himself as the new broom when Mikhail Gorbachev allowed real elections after 1989.
Upon his return from East Germany, Putin left the KGB and became one of Sobchak’s lieutenants, soon in the key role of managing the new mayor’s large city property portfolio of Leningrad. This job brought the new bourgeois bureaucrat into contact with the new post-communist rich.
People were as inclined to reject Putin in the 1990s as they had been to Stalin seventy years earlier. When a comrade derided Stalin as “mediocrity,” Trotsky agreed, but added, “He is not a non-entity.” He saw it Putin’s great predecessor in fact, it was a kind of living embodiment of huge parts of the new Soviet society.
The failure of the West to realize that Putin represented parts of Russia during the 1990s gave him a role in Russian politics. Putin’s ability to serve Yeltsin and his cronies during that decade led them to make the fatal mistake of selecting him as the successor to an easily manipulated president.
Putin’s pardon of Yeltsin for any misdeeds while in office was followed by a relentless crackdown on the oligarch. Putin has shown that state power surpasses the power of money. Military power crushed the Chechen rebels. Oil and gas prices rose as George W. Bush’s war on terror benefited Putin’s economy. Yet years of economic growth and peace at home have not stabilized Putin’s regime.
In 2011, mass protests rocked Moscow. The fact that these events took place in a time of peace and relative abundance taught Putin a lesson. The crisis has made regime stability far more important than any index of economic success. If people felt safe in their daily lives, they could outdo each other.
Like many past Russian rulers, Putin is well aware that the relaxation that comes with peace can promote political dissent.
Putin studied indifference to the fate of the crew sunken Kursk submarine in 2003 and the trauma of their families as the drama played out beneath the Barents Sea was one episode of his Stalinist view of mass death as a matter of statistics.
Westerners thought that failure in the Ukraine war would undermine Putin. However, before the pro-Assad media showed a parade of Western leaders who called for his downfall and yet came and went while he ruled, Putin outlived many of his Western critics. However, he must also be haunted by Assad’s sudden fall.
Will his power crumble so quickly? Back in July 2023, when his former cook-turned-warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin rebelled against him, no one resisted his march from Rostov in the south to the gates of Moscow. Then Prigozhin made a deal with Putin – before his plane crashed with him and his fellow mercenary bosses.
As after the triumph over Hitler in 1945, Stalin did not relax his regime but intensified internal repression. Today, Putin sees a military victory as less important for his survival in power than the continuation of international tensions. But even such a shrewd political operator and skilled propagandist as Vladimir Putin knows, at the age of 72, that the clock is ticking against him. Stalin died in his bed. Will Vladimir Putin?
Back in 1999, Putin took control of an attempt to return rebel Chechnya to its southern border under Kremlin control. Just a few days ago, as collateral damage of today’s Ukrainian conflict, fatal shooting down of Azerbaijani jet over Chechen airspace by trigger-happy Russian air defenses discover just how far – a quarter of a century later – Putin’s reign has so far been plagued by war.