Llewellyn
King
Read Llewellyn's bio and previous columns
November 5, 2007
Putin: The West's
Problem, Russia's Hero
If President Bush were to ask his national security team who is the most
popular elected leader in the world, they would have to tell him it is
Russian President Vladimir Putin. He is Russia's Ronald Reagan, revered
in his own time.
In a country where cynicism is as deep as the winter is long, the
popularity of Putin is notable. Trained as a KGB officer, Putin comes
from the elite officer class in St. Petersburg, the old imperial capital
and still the jewel of Russian cities, and the least typical.
Putin was not a career politician. He was instead a career intelligence
officer and a member of the Communist Party, from which he is said not
to have resigned. As a KGB officer, Putin made it no further than
Dresden in communist East Germany. He made major, but he was not a great
success. If he had been, he would have been posted outside of the Soviet
bloc.
Since tsarist times, Russian leaders have been known for their excesses.
But Putin has shown the world a more modest face. He does not drink and
his favorite recreation is judo. It is tempting to read Putin's
character through judo, in which he holds a black belt. In particular it
is tempting to note that judo is the science of leveraging your
opponent's strength. Historians will have a field day with the role of
judo in Putin's governing style.
That style is crafty, autocratic and at times lawless. In Putin's
Kremlin, the law is a malleable thing. It is bent and circumvented to
the national interest as defined by Putin and his administration. His
team is far more powerful than the Duma, now a rubber-stamp parliament.
The reformers of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years have been replaced by
the siloviki veterans of the security and military ranks.
The Putin Administration may be weak on economics and slough off legal
norms, but it understands power and knows how to project it from Moscow
across Russia's vast and sparsely populated land. The population of 140
million is spread over 11 time zones.
Putin has his problems, including the bloody war in Chechnya, rural
poverty, an aging and declining population and the inefficient legacies
of communism. But he is also the luckiest Russian ruler in memory. With
the world oil price heading toward $100 a barrel, Putin has money. He
has a carrot as well as a stick, and he is adept at using both.
With the world's largest natural gas reserves and second largest oil
reserves, Russia is a power in Europe and in Asia. It plays rough and it
plays dirty. Russia has violated the terms of nearly every oil and gas
contract it has signed with the West. It has imposed gross and
confiscatory taxes on Western production, and it has increased
environmental restrictions in order to confiscate Western leases on
Sakhalin Island, a far eastern Russian territory. Yet the energy hungry
in the West have come back for more. Last month, France's Total S.A. and
Norway's StatoilHydro ASA were both elated to get 25 percent positions
in a Barents Sea project. In both cases, Putin is said only to have
agreed after receiving calls from the presidents of France and Norway.
Homage you might call it.
Russians applaud Putin's toughness in standing up to the world in
general, and the United States in particular. But it is his stand
against Russian billionaires that most delights them.
In the breakup of the Soviet Union, immense fortunes were made in the
privatization of state assets. The beneficiaries are known as the
oligarchs, and they are hated. When Putin, with little legal basis,
broke up Yukos Oil Company and imprisoned its founder Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, the Russians cheered. When a dissident and friend of a
refugee oligarch in London was murdered with polonium, Russians
shrugged, secure that their leader would brook no nonsense. His
popularity rating soared above 80 percent.
The Putin popularity poses some questions: Will he really step down next
year as the constitution requires, or will he become prime minister and
govern that way? Or will he become head of Gazprom, the Russian energy
colossus and become an oligarch himself?
Your move, comrade president.
© 2007 North Star
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