VLADIMIR PUTIN – WHERE DID IT ALL GO WRONG? – PART ONE – PUTIN THE REFORMER
One rather tends to disregard oft repeated sayings, or at least to take them with a large pinch of salt, but given how many reformers metamorphose into thoroughly unpleasant tyrants, perhaps Lord Alton was right, and power really does corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Nicolae Ceausescu began as a genuine reformer, intent on turning Romania into a modern state. He eased press censorship, released a number of political prisoners, ceased active participation in the Warsaw Pact and condemned the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Under his leadership Romania joined the IMF and the GATT; he established universities and vastly improved the lot of the ordinary people with enhanced welfare, increased wages and improved hospital care, rated by the WHO as ‘impressive’. His was the only Eastern bloc country to attend the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles and the first to welcome the visit of an American president. And yet, in time he became the most repressive ruler in Eastern Europe and was violently overthrown and executed by firing squad on Christmas Day 1989.
Benito Mussolini who came to power in 1922 privatised government owned industries, liberalised rent laws, reached agreement with the Vatican (something no Italian government since the founding of the Kingdom in 1861 had been able to do) and drained the Pontine marshes (which even the Roman Empire failed to do). And yet, in 1945 he was hanged from a lamp post by the people of his own, repressive police state.
Even Hitler’s Nazi party introduced education reforms and a welfare system better than that in England at the time, built the autobahns and produced a motorcar (the Volkswagen Beetle) which long outlasted the regime. And we all know how that ended - in genocide and defeat in war.
Vladimir Putin was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he was not the son of a party apparatchik. His father, Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin, was a labourer, born in 1911. He completed his compulsory military service in the Soviet submarine service, based in Leningrad (now reverted to its original name of St Petersburg), and returned to labouring. He was recalled to the Naval Infantry in Leningrad on the invasion of the USSR in 1941. His first child, with his wife Maria, died before the war, cause unknown, and his second died of diphtheria during the siege of Leningrad, with two of Maria’s brothers killed in that war. After the war Putin senior worked in a factory making railway engines, where he was a party representative, the equivalent of a minor trade union official. The future president, Vladimir Vladimirovich, was born on 8 October 1952, and baptised in secret into the Russian Orthodox church. The family lived in a one room flat on the fifth floor of a block of flats. It had no hot water and no lift. They shared a one ring cooker in the corridor and a lavatory under the stairs with two other families. When I visited the area a few years ago the only difference was that the block did have a lift and the concrete exterior had been painted.
Young Vladimir did not excel academically at school, but he did qualify for entrance to Leningrad university, where out of forty applicants only one got in. The Putin family had no influence on the selection, but his working class roots and the fact that his father was a party member would have helped him to become the first member of his family to go to university. As a student he was required to join the Communist Party and he graduated with a law degree in 1975. The same year he was recruited into the KGB.
We tend to think of the KGB as being an organisation engaged in espionage and assassination, but it is much more than that. With a staff of 300,000 when Putin joined it was responsible for both domestic and foreign intelligence, border control, customs, VIP protection, the security of government installations and supervision of the various police forces. It also had its own armed section responsible for putting down serious dissent and which could quickly be deployed in support of the armed forces if needed. Vladimir attended the officers’ school and passed out as a lieutenant in 1976 aged twenty-four. The same year his father retired at the age of sixty-five and as an armed forces veteran was entitled to a larger flat, with two rooms this time, and for the first time young Vladimir had his own room.
With the Leningrad KGB Putin’s job was to keep track of foreigners, mainly diplomats and business people with the occasional tourist, in his area. In 1983 he married Lyudmilla Shkrebneva, an air hostess (divorced 2014), and the couple continued to live in his parents flat. In 1984, now a major, Putin attended the Red Banner Institute, the KGB staff college equivalent, and in 1986 as a fluent German speaker, learned at school, was promoted to lieutenant colonel and posted to Dresden in East Germany as liaison officer to the Stasi, the East German equivalent of the KGB. When the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, and it was apparent that Germany would be reunified (which happened in October 1990), Putin was recalled to Leningrad and spent a brief period as the KGB liaison officer with the newly formed city council. The first democratically elected mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, persuaded Putin to resign from the KGB and become a civil servant and one of three deputy mayors. Sobchak and Putin opposed the attempted coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 and when it collapsed Leningrad was renamed St Petersburg and Putin sent a team to chop down the flagpole bearing the flag of the Communist party.
In September Putin accompanied Sobchak to London in a mission to persuade western companies to invest in St Petersburg and he was with the mayor when they met Prime minster Major in Downing Street. Thanks to the pair’s efforts German and French banks, Otis lifts, Procter and Gamble, Heineken Beer, Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, Ford Motors and Wrigley’s chewing gum all opened subsidiaries in St Petersburg (not all of a market economy is good!). In December 1991 the USSR became fifteen separate countries when each Soviet republic was granted the power to become independent, and Boris Yeltsin became the first president of the Russian Federation. Although Sobchak was defeated in the election for governor of St Petersburg District, Putin’s efforts had not gone unnoticed by the Yeltsin team and he was summoned to Moscow, firstly to the legal department of the Property Management Directorate – actually an organisation tasked with rooting out corruption – and then to the Main Control Directorate, the financial arm of the central government, with a brief to re-assert government authority, replenish the national coffers and stop ministers and officials granting licences to companies that they owned. The head of Aeroflot, the national airline, said that Putin was the only official ever to refuse a bribe. In May 1997, as a result of Putin’s investigations, 260 officials were arrested and charged with corruption, and in September another 450.
Yeltsin was concerned that the loyalty of the KGB, now renamed as the FSB, was in doubt, and he wanted his own man there, so Putin was appointed head of the FSB, to the extreme annoyance of the generals and other senior officers of that organisation, who remembered that Putin had resigned as a mere lieutenant colonel. It was shortly after Putin’s appointment that Alexander Litvinenko, an official of the FSB’s Organised Crime Unit, held a press conference in which he alleged corruption in the organisation and that it ordered assassinations. Putin sacked him, not because of what he said but because he said it at a press conference rather than raising his concerns through the chain of command. Litvinenko was arrested, released, rearrested and released again. He fled to UK with a suitcase of secrets and was murdered in 2000, possibly at Putin’s instructions, although as yet there is no evidence to prove that. The logic, of course, in Russian eyes, would have been that Litvinenko had betrayed his country and had to be punished as an example to other potential traitors.
Yeltsin’s grip on power was weakened, partly by the economic crisis of 1998 when Russia defaulted on her foreign debts and the rouble was devalued, and partly by the seemingly endless war in Chechnya, a largely moslem province. Yeltsin appointed Putin as prime minister and ordered him to resolve the war, which he brought to an end by a swift reinforcement of 93,000 troops from next door Dagestan. This was wildly popular with the Russian population as a whole and increasingly Putin was being recognised as the coming man. In the 1999 elections for the Duma (parliament) Putin endorsed the Unity Party which got 23 percent of the vote. The Communists got 24 percent, the Alliance (of anti-Yeltsin radicals) 13 percent, assorted pro-Yeltsin parties 12 percent and various minor groupings 40 percent. The result was a coalition government led by Unity. On 31 December 1999 Yeltsin resigned and appointed Putin as acting president. The constitution stipulated that in that case presidential elections had to take place within ninety days. There were eleven candidates. Putin did not campaign but got 53 percent of the vote. The Communist candidate got thirty percent with rest nowhere, and Putin was duly sworn in as president on 26 March 2000.
Putin’s first task was to bring Russia in from the cold and normalise relations with the West. He met the US President Clinton, the UK’s Prime Minister Blair and began negotiations to resolve the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) arms race. After the Al Qaeda attack on the twin towers in New York in September 2001 he offered his full support. He cancelled a major military exercise, withdrew Russian military outposts in Cuba and Vietnam, put pressure on ex-soviet republics in Central Asia to allow American and British, and later NATO, troops airfield access to Afghanistan. He even opened a liaison office in NATO’s military headquarters in Mons, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe, SHAPE, or known irreverently to the rest of us as Sleeping Holidays at Public Expense. Domestically he reduced corporation tax from 35 to 24 percent in order to encourage investment, and income tax to a flat rate of 13 percent, with the caveat that, unlike in the past, all who were eligible would pay it. Elements of the Armed forces, still a repository of soviet style corruption, bullying, and bureaucracy, opposed his reforms, so Putin sacked the Minister of Defence, Marshal Igor Sergeyev, and replaced him with the first ever civilian in that role with instructions to reform and reduce the bloated services, particularly the army, and to make them less reliant on conscription.
So far, then, Russia looked like becoming a modern, democratic country ready to take her place amongst the family of nations, led by a (relatively) liberal and reform minded Putin. Where, then, did it all go wrong? More next week.
Next Week: Where it all went wrong.
2006 was the Litvinenko murder.