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| Enigma variations on Putin |
| Kanika Datta / New Delhi May 01, 2009, 01:11 IST |
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In Goldman Sachs’ famous BRIC acronym, Russia is designated to be one of the world’s largest economies by 2050 along with Brazil, India and China. Among the quartet, though, Russia is unique, first, in its geographical location straddling Europe and Asia and, second, in its status as a former world superpower. If the world watches China’s rise and rise with awe, it follows Russia’s post-Soviet politics with apprehension and puzzlement.
Central to the Russian enigma is Vladimir Putin, the man who enjoyed overwhelming popular support, steering the country out of the chaos of the post-Yeltsin years. The Putin years saw a stunning economic revival in Russia, helped mostly by a fortuitous rise in energy prices.
Late last year, the former KGB official dumfounded political analysts — again — by re-designating himself prime minister and appointing a chosen successor in acolyte Dmitry Medvedev. “I shall leave the Kremlin, but not Russia,” he told journalists before his presidential term ended in 2008 — and he kept his promise, though typically not in a way anybody anticipated.
So who is this man who continues to shape the destiny — now as master puppeteer — of the largest country (by area) and, by extension, the future world politics? Is he a modern-day politician with the instincts of a seventeenth-century Tsar? A Stalinist in capitalist disguise? “It is not for the first time in the last two centuries that Russia leaves the world wondering about its destiny,” Michael Stuermer, chief correspondent for Die Welt, writes in the introduction to his book.
Unfortunately, his 228-page book doesn’t come any closer to providing enlightenment. Stuermer must be hamstrung by the Soviet-style restrictions on journalists that endure though the country has jettisoned its Marxist past and transitioned to a robber-baron style state-sponsored capitalism. As a result, like any other Russia watcher, Stuermer’s sources appear to be restricted to Putin’s public appearances and press conferences — there are no one-on-ones — the Russian media, the odd dissident and official.
Stuermer begins by reporting a long speech by Putin at a security conference in Munich in 2007 that, for the first time, laid out his vision of a world order. The speech proved seminal because it articulated Russia’s post-Soviet angst — of western exploitation and fears of encirclement — and its vision of a new world order for the first time — Russia as an equal partner at the high table of world affairs.
“Future historians of world affairs will remember Putin’s speech in Munich as the turning point from uneasy accommodation to measured defiance,” Stuermer writes. “In Munich, the West was put on notice as to what Putin did not want. But did Putin know what he wants instead?” Readers hoping for some answers to that question will be disappointed.
The initial chapters trace Russia’s post-Soviet history and weave in Putin’s rise as the man from nowhere, a story to which Stuermer adds little that is new.
The most interesting chapter in the book is “Putin’s People” in which Stuermer reports on the contents of an interview with a senior Kremlin official, Oleg Shvartsman, in a Russian business paper. The interview provided what Stuermer called “an x-ray picture of the workings of power in today’s Russia”. In it Shvartsman describes the Kremlin’s controversial policy of “re-privatisation”.
The reason the interview reverberated around the world was that Shvartsman was no dissident — quite the opposite. What he described, quite matter-of-factly, came to be known as the “vacuum cleaner method”. “It works like a vacuum cleaner,” he told his interviewer, “that sucks up the assets of companies into a structure which soon turns into a state corporation. Those assets are then passed on to the professional leaders. The measures applied are both voluntary and mandatory….This is today’s guideline — consolidation of assets in the hands of the state.”
Shvartsman’s interview — he was sidelined for his pains — attracted attention because it provided the one stark articulation of Putin’s economic outlook.
For the rest of the book, Stuermer highlights the powers of Gazprom and Russia’s precarious dependence on energy prices for growth. He also discusses the country’s demographic crisis — its men were mostly dying of alcoholism and the population was ageing and growing at a slower pace. There is also a strange discourse on how the Russian population was diminishing but that of its Muslims was rising — as though the religion of Islam is a racial distinction (mind you, Hitler made the same distinction between Jews and Germans).
All told, the book ends up being a more detailed version of, say, a Russia survey by the Financial Times or The Economist. If the book is useful, it is because it provides a handy reckoner of the broad issues that confront Russia today. For a truly insightful look into Putin’s Russia, the murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s book remains a classic.
PUTIN AND THE RISE OF RUSSIA
Michael Stuermer
Hachette India
253 pages; Rs 650
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