The Problem With Putinology

By most accounts, the Cold War
came to end in 1991. Soviet defeat equaled the victory of the West. The
Washington consensus set the economic terms. Democracies were proliferating
after 1991, and on the horizon a rules-based liberal international order was
more and more clearly emerging, a global analog to the ascendant European
Union with capitals in Brussels, Berlin, Paris, London, and Washington. One day,
Moscow and Beijing would be its capitals as well. Such was the narrative, not
universally admired or embraced, that structured a fair amount of political
discourse and journalism up to 2016.

Catherine Belton, who served as
a Moscow-based journalist for the Financial Times, offers an entirely
different story in her new book, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia
and Then Took on the West. She draws attention to the obscure business
dealings of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when the empire was slowly starting
to unravel. Alert to the impending collapse, KGB officers and their agents drew
upon their financial acumen, knowledge of the West, and access to criminal
networks with which they had long partnered. This helped them transfer pieces
of “the Soviet Union’s vast financial empire” into the West—some of it to offshore
havens, some of it into posh real estate, some of it openly, through Western
banks. On this foundation a new empire would be built, and over time it would,
as Belton puts it, attempt to “subvert the political landscape of the West.” The
Cold War never ended. It continued to be fought, on new terrain, largely out of
public view. 

Through meticulous research into
financial networks, Belton investigates Vladimir Putin’s political ascent via
the KGB ties at the center of her story. She captures the texture of Putin’s
government: its approach to power, its ambition, its cynicism, its desire to
reverse the defeats of 1989 and 1991 and then to translate KGB formulas into a
new international affairs paradigm.

Yet Putin’s People also typifies
the problems that beset so much writing about Russia today. Belton’s recounting
of facts is consistent with Russian and international sources, but her tone is rooted
in a conspiratorial mindset endemic to Western media commentary on Russia, her descriptions
of Russia too often ridden with clichés. Useful in understanding Putin’s rise
to power, Putin’s People is also an impediment to understanding much
else about the country that he rules, not least its ongoing conflicts with
Europe and the United States. 

Much of what Belton writes on
Putin is already familiar. Vladimir Putin’s hardscrabble, World War II–haunted
childhood in Leningrad—from the rats in his communal apartment to his discovery
of judo—has figured in many documentaries and books by now. His career as a KGB
operative in Dresden and his horrified response to the Soviet Union’s implosion
have been exhaustively documented. The same is true of his curious path to the
Kremlin, running at first through the Saint Petersburg mayor’s office (under
the “liberal” Mayor Anatoly Sobchak) and, after 1998, through the headquarters
of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, in Moscow. This diminutive Soviet everyman
worked his connections to the Yeltsin family into a deal: He would not
prosecute them for corruption if Boris Yeltsin would appoint him president in 1999,
after which Putin used the 2000 presidential election to take power for good. 

Belton capably chronicles the ensuing
two decades of Putin’s rule, a tale of authoritarianism gradually consolidated.
There were the “liberal-seeming economic reforms of Putin’s first term” buoyed
by rising oil prices, a recovery from the 1998 financial crisis, and the growth
of a Russian middle class. The reforms were liberal-seeming because,
while Putin was implementing them, he was also maneuvering to bring most of the
Russian news media under state control and to eliminate the independence of
oligarchs, who had acquired massive wealth and considerable political power in
the 1990s. Belton refers to a “social contract” and an “unwritten pact,” in
which Putin gave Russians order and economic opportunity, while Russians gave
him increasingly unconstrained power. 

With the power he gained, the
true colors of Putinism began to show. Here Belton retraces the analysis of
Timothy Snyder (in The Road to Unfreedom), Brian Taylor (in The Code of Putinism), and others, who
regard Putin as a postmodern fascist or as a postmodern Tsar. After 2004, a
reelected Putin added to his inner circles of KGB associates a coterie of White
Russian nationalists, and “relying on the writings of Russia’s imperial
Orthodox past, [he] set a path that subverted what remained of the country’s
democracy, and sought to unite the country by pitting it against the West.” He
had cobbled together an ideology that would serve the security state better
than the discredited husk of communism or the straitjacket of Western-style
liberalism.

Belton prefers the word
feudalism, “a feudal system,” to fascism. Yet it is both a feudalism of Soviet
vintage—“the country [under Putin] was going back to the times of the gulag,”
she declares—as well as a feudalism that relies upon modern finance. Putin has
merged feudalism with “crony state capitalism.” His Christian piety is false,
Belton is sure, though his imperialism real. But Russia’s governing ideology is
most cogently a smoke screen for extracting the nation’s wealth, much of which is
earned by selling gas and oil to the West, and much of which is squirreled away
in Western banks and real estate holdings. Thus are feudalism and crony
capitalism the tributaries of kleptocracy, a form of government diagnosed in
detail by the political scientist Karen Dawisha, in her 2014 book, Putin’s
Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? 

Putin’s People has a
spectacular denouement. A West that had once naïvely expected Russia to adopt
its model of political economy stood by passively while Putin lured it into
adopting Russia’s model of
political economy. The Russian empire that Putin conjured from the ravings of
tsarist reactionaries and Soviet nostalgics struck back in Ukraine first. In
Putin’s regime, “the pursuit of empire was becoming all-consuming,” Belton
writes of Russia in the second decade of the twenty-first century. When Russia was
unable to control Ukraine informally, Moscow chose to assert itself by annexing
Crimea and launching a war in Eastern Ukraine. The conflict with the West
entered a new phase in 2014. Having split Ukraine, an imperialist Kremlin
“found especially fertile ground [for influence and control] in Eastern
Europe.” 

Then this neo-tsarist, neo-Soviet
empire struck back again by bending European and American leaders to its
purpose. Putin and his cronies, Belton avers, “had accurately calculated that,
for the West, money would outweigh all other concerns.” A craven West let
itself be seduced by Russia’s illicit wealth, whether in “Londongrad”—a London
awash in illegally obtained Russian money—or on the European continent. Belton
identifies Silvio Berlusconi, Matteo Salvini, Gerhard Schroeder, and the Czech
Republic’s Milos Zeman as politicians in Putin’s pocket. In the U.S. Congress,
Dana Rohrbacher and Rand Paul developed Russian connections, becoming witting
or unwitting catalysts in a Russian strategy “to undermine Western democracies”
that had its origins in the very break-up of the Soviet Union. At long last,
the KGB, only half vanquished in 1991, could exact its revenge. 

For Belton, proof of a Russia
triumphant is President Donald Trump. Trump first went to Moscow in 1987, and
loved it. At a professional low point in 2003, with most Western banks refusing
him credit, Trump watched happily as various Russia-connected figures poured
money into his properties and business ventures, from Panama City to Florida to
Baku to SoHo. Belton interprets Russia’s 2016 support for Trump as an effort to
compromise him, earning Trump’s “deference to Putin and his circle” once Trump
became president. She places Trump’s decision to “withdraw US troops from
Syria” not in the context of Trump’s appeal to war-weary middle America, but in
the context of a KGB-style Russian influence operation: a White House decision
that suited Russian and not American interests. In Putin’s People, all
roads lead back to the Kremlin—even when equally or more plausible explanations
are left untouched. 

Belton makes two significant
contributions in Putin’s People. She demonstrates the foreign policy
consequences of corruption, of a shadow world of laundered money, organized
(and at times disorganized) crime, and influence peddling or influence
purchasing at high levels of government. Corruption is a terrible vulnerability: All intelligence services trade in it. In the West, rule of law has its
footnotes and loopholes, with no shortage of politicians whose actions could be
guided by non-Western manipulators. Belton is right to depict the West as a
landscape in which Russian intelligence has much to work with; she is right to
sound the alarm.

In addition, Belton provides a
useful portrait of a particular political generation in Russia. For this
generation, the pivotal dichotomy was not Communist versus dissident,
nationalist versus reformer, or liberal versus conservative (whatever these
words mean in Russian politics). It is those who befriended Putin in the 1980s
and 1990s versus those who did not. Many of Putin’s KGB cronies in
Leningrad/Saint Petersburg have risen to high office. They run the country, and
the lessons they learned from 1989 were not the lessons Francis Fukuyama, Bill
Clinton, and Barack Obama learned from 1989. Putin’s people do not want Western-style liberal democracy to
fail, rather they sincerely believe it was failed and false to begin with.

Putin’s people have no qualms
about a predatory Russia because they never stopped believing in a predatory
West—or in power as the stuff of predators. Three decades after the fall of the
Berlin Wall, they have shown the continuity of power and wealth, and the
superficiality of the claim that in 1991 an entirely new chapter in
international affairs had begun.

Extensively researched as Putin’s People is, its authority is limited by its sources. Putin and
the Russian government resist transparency for obvious reasons: They’re good at
covering their tracks, and Belton can do nothing about the partial information
she and all other journalists focused on the Kremlin have at their disposal. Nonetheless,
partial information is partial information. As we are reminded by the former
CIA Russia analyst George Beebe (in The
Russia Trap: How Our Shadow War With Russia Could Spiral Into Nuclear
Catastrophe), explanations of events that cannot be falsified should merit constant
qualification and understatement, of which there is far too little in Putin’s
People.

Though Belton relies on anonymous
sources, even her own characterizations of her sources do not always inspire
confidence. Too often one gets phrases such as: “said one Berezovsky associate,” and “one Russian tycoon who’d been
close to Berezovsky,” and “one insider who said he was involved in the Kremlin
discussions back then.” Some of Belton’s sourcing is even less precise, as in a
political development “many suspected” was the case. Rumors and hearsay cluster
around every center of political power.

A worse problem is the pattern
apparent in Belton’s non-anonymous sources. Belton has drawn most of her
material, in Putin’s People, from interviews with those who became
active opponents of Putin or those who were once close to Putin and in
government but were, for one reason or another, sidelined or forced into exile. Though
these are relevant and important voices, in Belton’s book they are presented too
uncritically. In a study of the KGB’s political manipulations, one worries at
times about a journalist-author taking too often the mood, insights, and anecdotes of her interviewees at face value. (A history of the Obama administration
based on an interview with Ben Rhodes would read one way; a history based on an
interview with Michael Flynn would read quite another way.)

A bizarre omission in a book
about Russian foreign policy—about how the KGB took on the West—is the
larger Russian conversation on Russian foreign policy. One of the few
foreign policy experts who appears in Belton’s pages is Yevgeniy Primakov, who
has been called Russia’s Henry Kissinger, in the sense that he combined academic
work and high-level government service. Yet Primakov’s consequential ideas
about a multipolar international order are never presented or reviewed in Putin’s
People. Primakov himself gets buried in Belton’s reduction of Russian
politics to the KGB or FSB plotline. To her, Primakov is a “mandarin-like
foreign intelligence operative,” “the former spymaster” and “the old-guard KGB
prime minister Yevgeniy Primakov.” His foreign policy thinking is not well
known in the West. These kinds of labels run the risk of keeping it that way.

In place of a three-dimensional
view of Russian foreign policy are too many unneeded clichés in Putin’s
People. The KGB’s preeminence in the narrative, at home and abroad, diminishes
a great many other agenda-setting power centers in Soviet and post-Soviet
Russia. Another cliché is the intractable murkiness and innate malice of
Russian politics—Byzantium redux. Hence, “the Byzantine financing sphere of
Yeltsin’s Kremlin” and financing schemes of Putin that hide themselves “in
Byzantine layers of complexity.” This is the age-old enigma wrapped in mystery
wrapped in obscurity impetus for the cliché of clichés about Russia as a matryoshka:
“It was as if control of the country’s third-largest bank had been transferred through
a set of Russian nesting dolls, or matryoshki, into Bank Rossiya’s
hands,” Belton regrettably writes.

Belton’s treatment of the
Russian Orthodox Church builds on the book’s political clichés. When she writes
that “Russian Orthodoxy saw itself as the one true faith, with everything else
considered heresy,” this is not entirely false. But even with Russian Orthodoxy
enshrined as the national church, the Russian Federation has an old and large
Muslim minority population. Muslims are not ostracized as heretics in Putin’s
Russia. The multiconfessional Russian Federation is neither more nor less
anti-Semitic than the average European country: No one faith is imposed on
Russia. When Belton writes about the Russian Orthodox Church viewing Russia as
“the Third Rome, the next ruling empire of the earth,” this is a (sixteenth-century)
historical fact that likely has nothing to do with the piety of most Orthodox
Christians in Russia or with the attitudes of most clerics.

These clichés about Russian
politics and society would be beside the point if they did not reflect the
analytical inaccuracies and overstatements in Putin’s People. In order, these
inaccuracies concern Russia, Ukraine, Europe, and the United States.

Belton is channeling
disgruntled Western politicians when she writes of “how Russia was defining its
global integration in its own interests … rather than adapt[ing] to the rules of
the West.” She seeks to puncture Western naïveté by observing that Putin’s
“attempts at rapprochement with the West” when he first became president “were
made not out of any sense of generosity, but because Putin expected something
in return.” That Russia prefers to write its own rules and that generosity is
not a driving force in Russian foreign policy are anything but shocking. Nor
are they the result of KGB/FSB conspiracies. They are the inevitable attributes
of a Russia that has acquired the military and economic means to pursue its
interests, independent of the West and, at times, in conflict with the West.

Primakov’s written works or
those of current foreign policy thinkers such as Dmitry Trenin, Fyodor Lukyanov, or Sergey Karaganov would suffice to prove the point. Putin’s enactment of an
autonomous Russian foreign policy has followed a strategic logic of its own and helped make him popular domestically. The FSB is an aspect of Russian power
to be sure, but it is very far from the sum total of Russian politics or
Russian foreign policy. 

Whatever the role of the FSB on
the international stage, the last 10 years have not been a march from success
to success for Russian foreign policy either in Ukraine or in Western Europe.
Russia has surely blocked Ukraine from joining NATO for the foreseeable future,
a core Russian aim, and Russia employs its dirty money and its intelligence
services in Ukraine. Yet much has not gone Russia’s way there. Its apparent
success in splitting Ukraine, as Belton puts it, is very much apparent.
Russian tactics have alienated many in Ukraine who are not anti-Russian, and the
separatist entities Moscow has carved out of the Donbas are a burdensome mess.
If Ukraine is the laboratory for the Kremlin’s eventual take-down of the West,
Moscow should be very nervous about its experiments so far. (Belton skims over
Russia’s military actions in Syria, and its operations in Africa and Latin
America, because they concern raw geopolitics and do not fit the model of a monied
FSB masterplan to harm the West.)

Western Europe has not bowed to
Russia since 2014. Its response to the Ukraine crisis has been neither passive nor
pacifist. Far from capitulating on Ukraine, the West has avoided war,
strengthened NATO, supported Kyiv financially, and imposed serious economic
sanctions on Russia for six years running. Europe has many ways to contain
Russia. Many of them are already up and running. Europe is not under siege, and
in the end, only Europeans, not the FSB, can undermine European democracy.

American
democracy is similarly positioned. Belton is right that Putin wanted to stoke
partisanship and disorder in America. She could be right that Putin wanted to
compromise Trump in 2016 and thereby to control him, but of this she offers no
direct proof, and she does not stop there. Instead, she adds to the swirling innuendo around
Trump by implying without evidence that Trump makes decisions to please the
intelligence service that has allegedly compromised him. Trump’s attempt to draw
down U.S. troops in Syria is a case in point: Most likely it stemmed not from
Russian pressure but from campaign promises unrelated to Russia. (Of course, both
the Russian and the non-Russian explanations for Trump’s Syria policy are
speculative.) As for American public opinion, Russia’s capacity to shape it is circumscribed.
The exaggeration of Russia’s capacities is, in fact, a goal of Russian disinformation
and active-measures campaigns. 

The West has everything to gain
from concentrating on the depth of its own problems, and from keeping the scope
and scale of Russia’s hostile interventions in perspective.  

The triumphalist story of the
Cold War has rightly fallen apart. It was a myth to begin with, and it abetted
Western hubris and Western misreading of the rest of the world. Rethinking the
Soviet empire’s break-up in 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union itself in
1991 should elucidate a present in which the West is less and less of a hegemon
and in which China, Russia, and other countries are gaining power. 

As an attempt at this, Putin’s
People obscures more than it clarifies, pointing to the need for a new kind
of writing on Russia, writing that is less preoccupied with Putin, that honors
the complexity of Russian foreign policy—and that does not make disinformation
and espionage the core of Russia’s relationship with the West, and of the
West’s relationship with Russia. The truth of politics is not always
sensational; it is not always devious and hidden. Sometimes it is out in the
open.