Our Putin
Don’t worry too much about whether Trump and the Russian leader are working together.
Worry about what they have in common.
By SUSAN B. GLASSER FEB. 18, 2017
WASHINGTON — On June 18, 2001, I attended Vladimir V. Putin’s first meeting
with the American news media. We were seated at a large round table in the wood paneled
Kremlin Library. It was still early in Mr. Putin’s presidency, and we weren’t
sure what to expect of this ex-*K.G.B. spy fresh off the famous summit meeting where
President George W. Bush had gotten “a sense of his soul” and pronounced him
“trustworthy.” After we were kept waiting for what felt like hours, Mr. Putin finally
arrived a little after 8 p.m., sat down and took questions until nearly midnight.
When it was my turn, I asked about the brutal war against separatists in the
southern province of Chechnya. His long answer makes for striking reading all these
years later: It combined media*bashing (we were failing to sufficiently cover
atrocities committed by the separatists, he said); anti*Islamic sentiment (“What do
you suggest we should do? Talk with them about biblical values?”); and the
insistence that he had to attack in Chechnya to keep the rest of Russia safe. As the
night went on, he proposed American*-Russian operations against the real threat in
the world, Islamic terrorists, and proclaimed his patriotic plan to restore the country
after the economic reverses of the previous decade.
Sound familiar? Mr. Putin’s slogan back in 2001 might as well have been Make
Russia Great Again.
We are four weeks into Donald J. Trump’s presidency, and Mr. Putin, in power
17 years and not going anywhere anytime soon, is everywhere in American politics. A
shirtless Mr. Putin is a regular figure of parody on “Saturday Night Live,” portrayed
as a character witness (or is that handler?) for the president of the United States. His
hackers’ meddling haunted the American general election. A leaked dossier
purporting to contain possible Russian blackmail material on Mr. Trump dominated
headlines for weeks.
And last week, Russian entanglements resulted in the quick dumping of the
national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn (although Mr. Flynn was ultimately cut
loose not for his apparent discussion with the Russian ambassador about lifting
American sanctions, but for lying about it to the vice president). A day later, news
emerged that associates of Mr. Trump had been in contact with Russian intelligence
in the year before the election.
Mr. Trump has made clear for months that he doesn’t just admire the Russian
president’s macho persona but considers him, as he said during the campaign, more
of a “leader” than President Barack Obama. As recently as this month, in a pre-*Super
Bowl interview on Fox, Mr. Trump refused to condemn Mr. Putin’s repressive
government. No surprise then that Mr. Trump’s unseemly embrace of the Russian
tough guy has given rise to a million conspiracy theories. But we no longer have to speculate about conspiracies or engage in armchair
psychoanalysis. Since the inauguration, we have accumulated some hard facts, too:
Both Mr. Trump’s rhetoric and actions as president bear more than a passing
resemblance to those of Mr. Putin during his first years consolidating power. Having
spent those years in Moscow as a foreign correspondent — and the rest of my career
as a journalist in Washington in four previous presidencies — I can tell you the
similarities are striking enough that they should not be easily dismissed.
Of course, in personality these two are very different: Mr. Trump is impulsive
where Mr. Putin is controlled, with temper tantrums and public rants contrasting
with the Russian’s cold calculation and memorized briefing books. But their oddly
similar political views and approach to running their (very different) countries may
turn out to be just as important as the Russia-related scandals now erupting around
Mr. Trump. You don’t have to think he is some kind of agent of Russia to worry
about the course he’s taking us down.
The media *bashing and outrageous statements. The attacks on rival power
centers, whether stubborn federal judges or corporations refusing to get in line. The
warnings, some of them downright panic *inducing, that the country is not safe —
and we must go to war with Islamic extremists because they are threatening our way
of life. These are the techniques that Mr. Putin used to great effect in his first years
in power, and they are very much the same tactics and clash *of* civilizations ideology
being deployed by Mr. Trump today.
Early Putin was positively Trumpian, his presidency a blitz of convention defying
that conjured up the image of a leader on the march after President Boris
Yeltsin’s drunken stumbles and the economic uncertainties of the late 1990s. He had
the state take over the first independent national TV network, he turned the state
Duma into a pocket parliament, he went after uppity oligarchs. He said things that
politicians didn’t normally say, like vowing to rub out the Chechen opposition “in the
outhouse” and threatening to castrate a French reporter who asked a question he
didn’t like.
Despite the evidence, Kremlin watchers in the early 2000s took a long time to
see Mr. Putin for the autocrat he would become. At the time, many people believed
Russia, after the turmoil of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, was finally headed for a
few decades of stability. Where some, correctly, saw a hard*line former K.G.B. spy
determined to restore a strong state, others persisted in seeing a would *be Western style
reformer. “Who is Mr. Putin?” a foreign reporter famously asked early in his
tenure.
In retrospect, the best guide to his actions should have been his statements. Mr.
Putin did exactly what he said he would do. I’ve thought a lot about that over the last
year, as Americans have puzzled over Mr. Trump’s surprising rise, and whether he
really means all those outrageous things he says and plans to follow through with the
policy shifts he promises.
Like Mr. Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan today, Mr. Putin’s version
nationalism basically summed up the Putin plan for making a weakened and
demoralized superpower feel better about itself. Mr. Putin considered the 1991
breakup of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th
century, and even if we Americans didn’t always understand what he was up to, he
never deviated from his real goal: consolidating authority in the Kremlin.
This may be precisely what Mr. Trump admires the most about Mr. Putin. In a
March 1990 interview with Playboy, Mr. Trump, who had been hoping to build a
luxury hotel in Moscow, described his impression of the last days of the Soviet Union
under Mikhail Gorbachev. “Russia is out of control and the leadership knows it,” the
future American president said. “That’s my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm
enough hand.”
Mr. Putin’s hand has clearly been much tougher. Despite all the apparent
reverses, confusion, corruption, lies and economic setbacks in Russia, he remains in
control 17 years after his unbelievably unlikely ascent from obscure K.G.B. lieutenant
colonel to president of Russia. And that, too, may be part of what Mr. Trump,
another unlikely president still so insecure about his rise to the White House that he
constantly brings up his election, sees in Mr. Putin and authoritarian rulers like him.
He views them as tough guys who speak of strength more than freedom and often
seem to judge their success by their own ability to stay in power.
I recently asked Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, why he thinks Mr. Trump has such apparent affinity for Mr. Putin. He
shook his head. “I do think there is a degree of admiration for a strongman, I’m
sorry,” he said. His other theory was that Mr. Trump sees himself as a sort of
superhero who would forge a strong bond with Mr. Putin “to show he has the ability
to do things that no other president has been able to do.” And this is a Republican who
hopes to do business with the Trump administration.
America is not burdened with the history of tyranny and totalitarianism that
haunts Russia. We have a 229*year record of success with constitutional democracy
that should long outlive the Trump era. And while the trappings and powers
since the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. popularized that phrase during the
Nixon era, we also have robust counterbalancing institutions, like a free and
independent press and a federal judiciary, that are already demonstrating a deep
resistance to the kind of political steamroller techniques that Mr. Putin deployed so
effectively in Russia.
Still, as I report from Washington now, it’s hard not to worry. When I moved to
Moscow the year Mr. Putin became president, it was only a decade after the Soviet
Union’s collapse. Many Russians still hoped their country would become more like
the Western countries they had so recently been barred from even visiting. For all
the popularity of Mr. Putin’s battle against what he belittled as the chaotic freedoms
of the 1990s, I met many people in Russia who yearned for the time when they
would take their place at the table of “normal,” stable democracies.
Who would have thought that, 17 years later, the question is not about Russia’s
no *longe r*existing democracy, but America’s?
Susan B. Glasser, Politico’s chief international affairs columnist, was a co-*chief of The
Washington Post’s Moscow bureau from 2001 to 2004 and is a co*author of “Kremlin
Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution.”
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A version of this op*ed appears in print on February 19, 2017, on Page SR1 of the New York edition with
the headline: Our Putin.