Can Putin Put Russia Right?
The new president is a strong man, but he faces daunting problems
A new national leader suddenly and surprisingly emerges from relative obscurity. In months he soars in the polls from 2 percent approval to 53 percent. He swears that he will remove the corrupting role of money from politics. The people are voting for him and not just voting against his opponents. It's not John McCain. It's Vladimir Putin. The difference is that Putin won, and he is now the president of Russia.
Is Putin a new strongman who will rescue Russia from its decadence? A nation that has endured Lenin and Stalin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev may seem entitled to relief from strongmen, but the accelerated descent into chaos under Yeltsin has transformed the mood in Russia. The country cries out for leadership. The intriguing thing is that nobody here really knows just how Putin will deliver it. In a series of interviews with the political establishment, I found agreement on only one point: Everyone is astonished at Putin's rise to the pinnacle of power. The elite, no less than the Russian people who voted for him, do not really know who he is, what he stands for, or whom he will appoint into his government. In their conversations with him, they report, he listens and he asks questions, yet afterward they still do not know what he thinks.
In a relatively closed and complex country like Russia, a leader's character is the best guide to how he will govern. In Putin's case, his biography gives clues, though they may be hard to read accurately in the West. The man who rose from a midlevel intelligence agent in East Germany to become the head of the renamed KGB inevitably carries an aura of clandestine menace. Indeed, one of Putin's strengths, if it can be rightly called that, is that he knows where the bodies are buried and what is in everybody's personnel file.
To be fair, though, it should be noted that Putin came of age in the KGB in the late '70s, when the KGB was pushing for action to address the decline in the Soviet Union. Putin was part of what is probably the best-educated, best-traveled, and most sophisticated group in the old Soviet Union. He is the first Russian leader since Lenin to have lived abroad. He saw firsthand how his country had fallen behind. The KGB knew better than anyone else how corruption, inefficiency, and cynicism had gripped the Soviet Union and then flowered in post-Communist Russia, and it was the KGB that pressed hard to end this national degradation. He also has experience of how hard it is to achieve reform in post-Communist Russia. In an interim period in his security career, he served a number of years as the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, assisting one of the leading post-Communist reformers, Anatoli Sobchak. Those who dealt with Putin then recall him as an effective executive, more interested in getting things done than in enriching himself, which put him in contrast with many of those who worked with him. His honesty was matched by a capacity for loyalty. He stuck by the side of Sobchak, even after the mayor had fallen from grace. It was Putin's reputation for loyalty and incorruptibility that prompted Yeltsin to select him as a successor last fall.
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