The Russia Conundrum

The combination of Vladimir Putin as president and Nikolai Patrushev as FSB director created an echo chamber of self-amplifying paranoia, with each of them reinforcing the fears and prejudices of the other. In his years at the head of the FSB and then as secretary of the State Security Council, Patrushev has displayed a longstanding distrust of the West, opposing integration and cooperation, encouraging Putin to rely on the security services by feeding him lurid ‘intelligence’ of alleged American hostility. In 2014, Patrushev declared that it was ‘the Americans who brought down the Soviet Union’ and that the same CIA operation was still being actively pursued, with the goal now of dismembering Russia. The West had deliberately provoked the war in Chechnya, he reported, with ‘extremists and their adherents being supported by US and British intelligence services, as well as by their allies in Europe’. Meanwhile, in his view, Washington had spent the quarter-century since the collapse of the USSR laying the groundwork for the crisis in Ukraine. ‘A whole generation of Ukrainians,’ Patrushev claimed, ‘has been poisoned by the West with hatred for Russia and with the mythology of so-called “European” values … the calamity in Ukraine is another means for them [the West] to intensify their policy of “containing” our country. They have continued unfailingly to follow this course, with only the forms and tactics of its execution changing.’ Other claims by the FSB chairman included the assertion that ISIS had been created by the policies of the United States, that the governments of the Baltic countries were supporting neo-Nazis and that Madeleine Albright believed that Siberia should not belong to Russia. When evidence was sought for this surprising assertion, FSB General Boris Ratnikov revealed that it was based on the work of his mind-reading agent who had ‘intercepted Albright’s thoughts’ and discovered that she had a ‘pathological hatred of Slavs’.

Joe Biden’s assertion in 2021 that Putin is a ‘killer’ was grist to Patrushev’s anti-Westernism. It was, he said, the signal for another Cold War, just as Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech had signalled the start of the first one. ‘Even Truman and Reagan, the most fanatical opponents of our country, accepted that there were limits on what should be declared in public … no matter how extreme their Russophobia behind closed doors.’

In Soviet times, the KGB would regularly stoke confrontation with the West, but its aggression would be softened by the Foreign Ministry, whose diplomats had direct contact with colleagues in Europe and North America. The unprecedented dominance of today’s FSB, with its exclusive access to the ear of the president, means that the old mediating forces no longer exist. Wild theories of encirclement, danger and Western aggression, propounded by Patrushev and his associates, have become increasingly dominant and influential in the president’s circle. The February 2022 invasion of Ukraine was at least in part the result of the Kremlin’s distorted view of reality, stoked by this echo chamber of self-reinforcing paranoia.

As for the promises of continuing liberty and democracy made by Putin in his New Year address of 1999, few if any have been kept. The political freedoms of the 1990s have disappeared, and have been replaced by the autocratic control of a small group of crony gangsters clustered around the president and the similarly bandit-like Siloviki, supported by the loyal apparatus of the FSB. Alternative centres of power, including opposition parties, prominent individuals who challenged Putin’s divine right to rule, environmental organisations, human rights groups, foreigners, critics and the media have been repressed. The ‘group of FSB men despatched to work undercover in the national government’ in December 1999 has achieved its goal. Few of us back then foresaw the toxic consequences that would unfold as a result.

PART TWO

ENTER THE STRONGMAN

CHAPTER 6

ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN

When Boris Yeltsin stepped down and Vladimir Putin came to power on the eve of the millennium, everything changed in Russia. In the runup to Yeltsin’s resignation, I heard whispers that Putin would be shooed in as president, but I didn’t say anything. I neither supported him nor spoke out against him. I just accepted that Putin had been chosen by Yeltsin, and that Yeltsin must have known what he was doing; that he knew better than I did what sort of person Putin was.