Dima-RussianArms
05-29-2007, 10:47 AM
Very good article about Putin and modern day Russia in the "Sunday Times"
It is very refreshing that at least some western journalists get it and try to explain what really goes on.
Putin the Terrible, we love you
To the West, Moscow’s strongman is a despot out to crush democracy. That’s just why most Russians like him
Mark Franchetti
Two days after the Crown Prosecution Service announced that Andrei Lugovoi, the former KGB agent, should be charged with the murder of his old colleague Alexan-der Litvinenko and demanded that Russia extradite him to face trial in Britain, I bumped into a Russian friend: worldly, pro-western and a fluent English speaker who has travelled dozens of times abroad.
I asked him who he thought had ordered the murder of Litvinenko, a fierce Kremlin critic who died of a massive polonium210 dose in London six months ago. My friend had no doubts. “Boris Berezovsky of course,” he said forcefully. It was the exiled oligarch and foe of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, who had smuggled polonium into Britain and ordered his protégé’s death. Why? To sully Russia’s image in the West.
However absurd that seems, many Russians would agree. Even in exile Berezovsky, once one of Moscow’s most powerful political players, is regarded as a Machiavellian figure whose influence, they believe, knows no boundaries. Those who do not share that view, including Litvinenko’s first wife, believe he was instead killed by the CIA or MI5, enemies of Russia bent on weakening it just as it is becoming strong again. Few here suspect the FSB, as the KGB is now known, or the Kremlin. Too small a fish for them to get involved, they argue.
The striking difference between public opinion in Russia and back in Britain could easily be overlooked if it concerned only Litvinenko’s cold-blooded killing. It is, however, just the latest example of divisions running between the Russians and the West which, 16 years after the collapse of communism, are set to become only deeper.
Seven years after coming to power, Putin, who served a third of his life in the KGB, has few friends left in Europe and America. West of Moscow he is vilified as an authoritarian despot who has crushed opposition to his rule, turned independent media into a sycophantic tool of the Kremlin and jailed or chased his critics into exile.
In Litvinenko’s case Putin has effectively been branded a murderer by parts of the western press.
In Russia, by contrast, Putin enjoys popularity ratings that must surely be the envy of George W Bush and Tony Blair. Well over 70% of Russians support him, according to the latest polls – by any standards a record for a leader at the end of his tenure.
Listen to the likes of Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster turned fierce Kremlin opponent, who is now the darling of western liberals who berate Putin, and you will be led to believe that the president’s regime “would collapse in two weeks” if Russia had a free media. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Under the current leadership this is an authoritarian country run mostly by a clique of former KGB agents. And yes, the control of the media is so draconian and pervasive that even the launch of a national children’s TV channel has become a political issue. Nor would many dispute that the country’s judiciary is a travesty and that corruption in Russia has become far more endemic than it ever was even during the turbulent years when Boris Yeltsin was in the Kremlin.
But like it or not, Putin is genuinely popular. Ask most Russians and they will tell you that they would happily vote for the constitution to be changed so as to allow him to stay on a third term (he is due to step down in 10 months’ time), a feeling shared by western investors whose primary concern is high returns and political stability rather than democracy and a free press.
Putin’s record is not the only issue on which Russian and western public opinion do not see eye to eye. Europe and America increasingly look to Russia with mistrust but, as always when a relationship sours, both parties feel injured. Most Russians are deeply disillusioned with the West. They believe that it has a vested interest in Russia being weak. There reigns a siege mentality and a conviction that the country is surrounded by opponents. The cold war is over and the West is no longer an enemy but, as most will tell you, it is no friend.
How else, Russians will say, should they interpret the fact that Britain granted political asylum to Berezovsky, Akhmed Zakayev, the former Chechen field commander whom Moscow accuses of terrorism, and several other figures wanted by prosecutors here? Why, Putin’s men ask angrily, did the Kremlin receive so little in return after he defied his generals and opened military bases in central Asia to US troops fighting in Afghanistan after September 11? And why is Washington seeking to install a missile defence shield in the heart of Europe and Nato expanding right up to Russia’s borders? Justified or paranoid, it is partly this strong sense that they were wronged that makes many Russians ****e to believing most conspiracy theories, be it that opposition journalists such as Anna Politkovskaya, who was gunned down last year (the 13th reporter murdered under Putin), were killed by Russia’s enemies. Or that the peaceful revolutions in former Soviet states such as Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan were the work of a CIA bent on installing pro-Nato governments in Russia’s back yard. Western influences did play a part but they weren’t pivotal.
Even the war in Chechnya, some Russians never tire of telling me, was somehow linked to the West. The official in charge of the British press at the Russian foreign ministry once asked me who prepared my questions whenever I travelled to the war-torn region to interview Moscow’s opponents.
It is a deep-seated mistrust I am always confronted with whenever I visit the Lubyanka, the FSB headquarters in Moscow, whose cloak and dagger residents jokingly describe it as the country’s tallest building, “because from here we can see as far as Siberia”.
I have known a couple of people there for years. We chat periodically over cups of strong tea. I probe much and they reveal little. We like each other, but inevitably I feel they think I am an undercover intelligence officer.
From where they look at the world, an Italian working for a British paper in Moscow can only be a spy. There is not much point in trying to prove the contrary, so when they ask how I am I joke: “Not well. They still haven’t promoted me to major.” They laugh, but never without a nod and a wink.
Hardly surprising that even reasonable and affable FSB officers should be suspicious of a foreigner, but the point is they share the same background as Putin and many of his closest aides. Old habits die hard and they, too, see the West through a prism of conspiracy and distrust – not unlike many politicians on our side of the divide who were brought up during the cold war and are still wary of Russia.
Putin’s KGB background was an issue of concern in the West but never in Russia, where informed people are quick to point out that George Bush Sr once headed the CIA.
Russia opened up to the West for a few brief years under Mikhail Gorbachev, the father of glasnost and perestroika that preceded communism’s collapse. People who had been taught for 70 years that communism was the best system suddenly saw the value of democracy, market economy and a free press.
But liberalising the economy was a traumatic business. Millions lost their savings and were plunged into dire poverty while a few insiders became fabulously rich oligarchs who flaunted their wealth. Crime became rampant and Russia, once the heart of an empire feared and respected around the world, was on its knees. For scientists, engineers and state workers who had traded a life of certainties to eke out a living as gypsy cab drivers, or for pensioners forced to survive by collecting empty bottles off the street for a few kopeks, a free press could hardly be much consolation.
As a result, more than 15 years later, for a politician here to be labelled a “democrat” is suicide because so many associate the term with the economic hardships and social upheavals of the early 1990s.
It is true that pro-western democrats have been crushed by Putin’s regime, which has denied them the right to make their views heard, but if they are a spent force it is mainly because most Russians no longer trust them. That explains why, in the West, Gorbachev and Yeltsin are feted but are despised by most in Russia as the two leaders who stopped the clock and engineered the end of the Soviet Union.
My cleaning lady, to give an example from everyday life, was an officer in Soviet military intelligence who served in Afghanistan and Hungary. Her official monthly pension now is £60 and her life has taken quite a turn for the worse in the past two decades – no wonder that in her eyes Gorbachev and Yeltsin are criminals who sold away her country.
Western opinion may have been shocked two years ago when Putin described the end of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, but the Russian president was in tune with most of his people.
Russians who vilify Yeltsin for what he dismantled praise Putin for what he is seen to have rebuilt. While we in the West are up in arms at his authoritarian style and the ruthless-ness with which he has rolled back most of Yeltsin’s democratic reforms, Russians see in him someone who is gradually returning their self-esteem by improving their standard of living and making Russia a player again on the world stage.
Greatly helped by record oil prices, under Putin Russia has gone from being a country that owed billions to one that has paid its international debts and is sitting on a stabilisation fund of more than £50 billion.
Instead of cringing at the sight of a drunken Yeltsin directing a military band as he did in Berlin, most Russians now rub their hands with glee at the sight of Putin taking swipes at Bush, as he did during last year’s G8 summit in St Petersburg – the first hosted by Russia – when the American president clumsily suggested that the Kremlin should take an example from democracy in Iraq.
Most Russians like strong leaders, men who in the tradition of the tsars are seen to rule with an iron hand. For now, at least, the more Russia flexes its muscles and forcefully pursues its interests, the greater the impression that it is regaining some of the influence it lost with the collapse of communism.
Pro-western liberalism is out while nationalism, fierce patriotism and self-assertion are back with a vengeance. And since it is a former superpower that is emerging from very traumatic times of transition, Russia’s bullish stance is fuelled by two conflicting emotions: a sense of superiority over what it once was and one of inferiority over that which it lost.
“During the cold war the West took us very seriously,” said a Kremlin aide. “Once it ended it ceased to do so and for years we felt humiliated. Putin is so popular because he is restoring our national pride and hitting back at all those who can do nothing but criticise us. No one likes to be constantly vilified.
“It’s clear that the West would rather see a weak Russia that bends to all its demands. Those days are over and we don’t see why our president shouldn’t pursue his country’s interests. That what America and Britain do, isn’t it?”
The standoff over Litvinenko’s death and Britain’s efforts to pursue Lugovoi can only worsen relations with Russia, which are already at their lowest since the end of the cold war. But the irony is that for all the criticism of Putin in the West – which is more often justified than not – he is far more liberal than most Russians, not least those who surround him in the Kremlin.
Many years ago, when I first came to work in Moscow, a political pundit close to the Kremlin told me that the problem between Russia and the West is that Russians are white.
“We look like you. We look like Europeans and so the West expects us to think and act like you. As a result, when we don’t you get all upset. Why can’t they be like us, you fret. But you don’t say that about the Chinese, for instance. You don’t expect them to think and act like you. Well, we are white but we are different.”
Having lived here for so long, to me Russia is no “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”, as Winston Churchill famously put it. But Russia is indeed different – and we have to face up to that.
It is very refreshing that at least some western journalists get it and try to explain what really goes on.
Putin the Terrible, we love you
To the West, Moscow’s strongman is a despot out to crush democracy. That’s just why most Russians like him
Mark Franchetti
Two days after the Crown Prosecution Service announced that Andrei Lugovoi, the former KGB agent, should be charged with the murder of his old colleague Alexan-der Litvinenko and demanded that Russia extradite him to face trial in Britain, I bumped into a Russian friend: worldly, pro-western and a fluent English speaker who has travelled dozens of times abroad.
I asked him who he thought had ordered the murder of Litvinenko, a fierce Kremlin critic who died of a massive polonium210 dose in London six months ago. My friend had no doubts. “Boris Berezovsky of course,” he said forcefully. It was the exiled oligarch and foe of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, who had smuggled polonium into Britain and ordered his protégé’s death. Why? To sully Russia’s image in the West.
However absurd that seems, many Russians would agree. Even in exile Berezovsky, once one of Moscow’s most powerful political players, is regarded as a Machiavellian figure whose influence, they believe, knows no boundaries. Those who do not share that view, including Litvinenko’s first wife, believe he was instead killed by the CIA or MI5, enemies of Russia bent on weakening it just as it is becoming strong again. Few here suspect the FSB, as the KGB is now known, or the Kremlin. Too small a fish for them to get involved, they argue.
The striking difference between public opinion in Russia and back in Britain could easily be overlooked if it concerned only Litvinenko’s cold-blooded killing. It is, however, just the latest example of divisions running between the Russians and the West which, 16 years after the collapse of communism, are set to become only deeper.
Seven years after coming to power, Putin, who served a third of his life in the KGB, has few friends left in Europe and America. West of Moscow he is vilified as an authoritarian despot who has crushed opposition to his rule, turned independent media into a sycophantic tool of the Kremlin and jailed or chased his critics into exile.
In Litvinenko’s case Putin has effectively been branded a murderer by parts of the western press.
In Russia, by contrast, Putin enjoys popularity ratings that must surely be the envy of George W Bush and Tony Blair. Well over 70% of Russians support him, according to the latest polls – by any standards a record for a leader at the end of his tenure.
Listen to the likes of Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster turned fierce Kremlin opponent, who is now the darling of western liberals who berate Putin, and you will be led to believe that the president’s regime “would collapse in two weeks” if Russia had a free media. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Under the current leadership this is an authoritarian country run mostly by a clique of former KGB agents. And yes, the control of the media is so draconian and pervasive that even the launch of a national children’s TV channel has become a political issue. Nor would many dispute that the country’s judiciary is a travesty and that corruption in Russia has become far more endemic than it ever was even during the turbulent years when Boris Yeltsin was in the Kremlin.
But like it or not, Putin is genuinely popular. Ask most Russians and they will tell you that they would happily vote for the constitution to be changed so as to allow him to stay on a third term (he is due to step down in 10 months’ time), a feeling shared by western investors whose primary concern is high returns and political stability rather than democracy and a free press.
Putin’s record is not the only issue on which Russian and western public opinion do not see eye to eye. Europe and America increasingly look to Russia with mistrust but, as always when a relationship sours, both parties feel injured. Most Russians are deeply disillusioned with the West. They believe that it has a vested interest in Russia being weak. There reigns a siege mentality and a conviction that the country is surrounded by opponents. The cold war is over and the West is no longer an enemy but, as most will tell you, it is no friend.
How else, Russians will say, should they interpret the fact that Britain granted political asylum to Berezovsky, Akhmed Zakayev, the former Chechen field commander whom Moscow accuses of terrorism, and several other figures wanted by prosecutors here? Why, Putin’s men ask angrily, did the Kremlin receive so little in return after he defied his generals and opened military bases in central Asia to US troops fighting in Afghanistan after September 11? And why is Washington seeking to install a missile defence shield in the heart of Europe and Nato expanding right up to Russia’s borders? Justified or paranoid, it is partly this strong sense that they were wronged that makes many Russians ****e to believing most conspiracy theories, be it that opposition journalists such as Anna Politkovskaya, who was gunned down last year (the 13th reporter murdered under Putin), were killed by Russia’s enemies. Or that the peaceful revolutions in former Soviet states such as Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan were the work of a CIA bent on installing pro-Nato governments in Russia’s back yard. Western influences did play a part but they weren’t pivotal.
Even the war in Chechnya, some Russians never tire of telling me, was somehow linked to the West. The official in charge of the British press at the Russian foreign ministry once asked me who prepared my questions whenever I travelled to the war-torn region to interview Moscow’s opponents.
It is a deep-seated mistrust I am always confronted with whenever I visit the Lubyanka, the FSB headquarters in Moscow, whose cloak and dagger residents jokingly describe it as the country’s tallest building, “because from here we can see as far as Siberia”.
I have known a couple of people there for years. We chat periodically over cups of strong tea. I probe much and they reveal little. We like each other, but inevitably I feel they think I am an undercover intelligence officer.
From where they look at the world, an Italian working for a British paper in Moscow can only be a spy. There is not much point in trying to prove the contrary, so when they ask how I am I joke: “Not well. They still haven’t promoted me to major.” They laugh, but never without a nod and a wink.
Hardly surprising that even reasonable and affable FSB officers should be suspicious of a foreigner, but the point is they share the same background as Putin and many of his closest aides. Old habits die hard and they, too, see the West through a prism of conspiracy and distrust – not unlike many politicians on our side of the divide who were brought up during the cold war and are still wary of Russia.
Putin’s KGB background was an issue of concern in the West but never in Russia, where informed people are quick to point out that George Bush Sr once headed the CIA.
Russia opened up to the West for a few brief years under Mikhail Gorbachev, the father of glasnost and perestroika that preceded communism’s collapse. People who had been taught for 70 years that communism was the best system suddenly saw the value of democracy, market economy and a free press.
But liberalising the economy was a traumatic business. Millions lost their savings and were plunged into dire poverty while a few insiders became fabulously rich oligarchs who flaunted their wealth. Crime became rampant and Russia, once the heart of an empire feared and respected around the world, was on its knees. For scientists, engineers and state workers who had traded a life of certainties to eke out a living as gypsy cab drivers, or for pensioners forced to survive by collecting empty bottles off the street for a few kopeks, a free press could hardly be much consolation.
As a result, more than 15 years later, for a politician here to be labelled a “democrat” is suicide because so many associate the term with the economic hardships and social upheavals of the early 1990s.
It is true that pro-western democrats have been crushed by Putin’s regime, which has denied them the right to make their views heard, but if they are a spent force it is mainly because most Russians no longer trust them. That explains why, in the West, Gorbachev and Yeltsin are feted but are despised by most in Russia as the two leaders who stopped the clock and engineered the end of the Soviet Union.
My cleaning lady, to give an example from everyday life, was an officer in Soviet military intelligence who served in Afghanistan and Hungary. Her official monthly pension now is £60 and her life has taken quite a turn for the worse in the past two decades – no wonder that in her eyes Gorbachev and Yeltsin are criminals who sold away her country.
Western opinion may have been shocked two years ago when Putin described the end of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, but the Russian president was in tune with most of his people.
Russians who vilify Yeltsin for what he dismantled praise Putin for what he is seen to have rebuilt. While we in the West are up in arms at his authoritarian style and the ruthless-ness with which he has rolled back most of Yeltsin’s democratic reforms, Russians see in him someone who is gradually returning their self-esteem by improving their standard of living and making Russia a player again on the world stage.
Greatly helped by record oil prices, under Putin Russia has gone from being a country that owed billions to one that has paid its international debts and is sitting on a stabilisation fund of more than £50 billion.
Instead of cringing at the sight of a drunken Yeltsin directing a military band as he did in Berlin, most Russians now rub their hands with glee at the sight of Putin taking swipes at Bush, as he did during last year’s G8 summit in St Petersburg – the first hosted by Russia – when the American president clumsily suggested that the Kremlin should take an example from democracy in Iraq.
Most Russians like strong leaders, men who in the tradition of the tsars are seen to rule with an iron hand. For now, at least, the more Russia flexes its muscles and forcefully pursues its interests, the greater the impression that it is regaining some of the influence it lost with the collapse of communism.
Pro-western liberalism is out while nationalism, fierce patriotism and self-assertion are back with a vengeance. And since it is a former superpower that is emerging from very traumatic times of transition, Russia’s bullish stance is fuelled by two conflicting emotions: a sense of superiority over what it once was and one of inferiority over that which it lost.
“During the cold war the West took us very seriously,” said a Kremlin aide. “Once it ended it ceased to do so and for years we felt humiliated. Putin is so popular because he is restoring our national pride and hitting back at all those who can do nothing but criticise us. No one likes to be constantly vilified.
“It’s clear that the West would rather see a weak Russia that bends to all its demands. Those days are over and we don’t see why our president shouldn’t pursue his country’s interests. That what America and Britain do, isn’t it?”
The standoff over Litvinenko’s death and Britain’s efforts to pursue Lugovoi can only worsen relations with Russia, which are already at their lowest since the end of the cold war. But the irony is that for all the criticism of Putin in the West – which is more often justified than not – he is far more liberal than most Russians, not least those who surround him in the Kremlin.
Many years ago, when I first came to work in Moscow, a political pundit close to the Kremlin told me that the problem between Russia and the West is that Russians are white.
“We look like you. We look like Europeans and so the West expects us to think and act like you. As a result, when we don’t you get all upset. Why can’t they be like us, you fret. But you don’t say that about the Chinese, for instance. You don’t expect them to think and act like you. Well, we are white but we are different.”
Having lived here for so long, to me Russia is no “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”, as Winston Churchill famously put it. But Russia is indeed different – and we have to face up to that.