TIME EUROPE
September 4, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 10
The Real Mr. Putin
The Kursk tragedy reveals Russia's President as a man of the State, not of the people
By PAUL QUINN-JUDGE Moscow
When he emerged from the shadows last year to dominate Russian politics, Vladimir Putin provoked a lively debate about his character, plans and motivations. Who was Mr. Putin? Was he, as his own staffers whispered, a cautious reformer who had learned his stuff in St. Petersburg during the early years of perestroika? Or was he the product of his training and times — a middle-level kgb officer whose views were formed during a period when the Soviet Union, on the surface at least, seemed a mighty power? In other words, a gosudarstvennik — a believer in a strong state.
The answer to these questions has puzzled both Russians and Western observers ever since President Putin began his four-year term in May. They became clearer last week in the grief and handwringing following the Kursk submarine disaster, which cost 118 lives. The tragedy has confirmed that the second assessment of Putin is closer to the truth.
The claims of some Western analysts that the disaster has changed Russia in general and Putin in particular are wrong. Opinion polls indicate that he has suffered little damage from the botched rescue operation, and public opinion here will probably subside as fast as it blew up. What the Kursk has done, however, is confirm what makes Vladimir Putin tick.
Putin believes above all in the State and the need to protect its prestige. He trusts and supports the men — especially in uniform — who serve it. He accepts that they have a right to juggle with the truth if necessary — and is willing to do it himself if the need arises. He also believes, as do many kgb men of his generation, that any criticism of the state is by definition the product of base, perhaps even sinister motives.
The interview Putin gave to state-controlled TV last week provided an eloquent illustration of his world-view. After expressing a sense of responsibility and guilt for the loss of the Kursk, he quickly shifted to an attack on critics of the operation. The main "defenders of the sailors," Putin noted with irony, were those "who had assisted in the destruction of the Army, the Fleet and the State," people with villas in Spain and the south of France. This was an unsubtle jab at two tycoons, political wheeler-dealer Boris Berezovsky and media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky.
Instead of taking the "easy way out" and immediately firing commanders, Putin told viewers, he would work to restore "the Army, the Fleet and the Country." He then laid out his own credo: "I will be with the Army, I will be with the Fleet. I will be with the people." The order was probably not coincidental.
Putin's missteps during the Kursk affair — his silence, and the fact that he stayed on vacation throughout the first week of the crisis — point to a disastrously weak staff and total absence of feedback. Boris Yeltsin's Kremlin was usually surrounded by a network of former advisers or ministers who could always phone a key figure on the Yeltsin staff or a family member and warn them when a policy was going badly wrong. Putin, who seems only to trust a tiny group of intimates, clearly does not have such back-channels.
But it is unsurprising that Putin does not think that he mishandled the Kursk sinking. He has behaved in much the same way several times in the past six months, without anything like the repercussions he faced last week. The submarine casualty figure is roughly the number of soldiers who die every month in Chechnya, often under horrific circumstances. The Russian defense establishment follows the same information policy in that war — postpone the news as long as possible, then admit the details as gradually as the situation allows.
This approach has usually worked. Putin has also quite often denied knowledge of an embarrassing event, or subtly hinted that it was the responsibility of subordinates. He did this in February, when the Radio Liberty journalist Andrei Babitsky was handed over by the security services to spurious Chechen guerrillas. In June, when media tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky was arrested, he told a press conference in Germany that he had been unable to find out why Gusinsky was in prison: he had not been able to phone the Prosecutor General. Today, Chechnya, once Putin's abiding policy passion, is mentioned rarely now that the military effort there is firmly bogged down.
The picture that has emerged of Vladimir Putin during the Kursk crisis is of a leader profoundly imbued with the political culture that has marked centuries of Russian history: the needs of the state always come first, individual concerns come a distant second. When forced by events — an election campaign or a televised tragedy — Putin will don a human face and show concern for the ordinary people. But left to himself, he is far happier in the embrace of his great love. The Russian State.
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