Vladimir Putin's destiny

Book review of 'PUTIN: His Downfall and Russia's Coming Crash'

PUTIN

His Downfall and Russia’s Coming Crash

Richard Lourie

Pan Macmillan

264 pages; Rs 599

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has never looked more powerful. He has all but “won” – for want of a better term – the civil war for his client dictator in Syria, gaining access to an airbase and a port on the Mediterranean coast, a long-held Czarist dream. His Crimean conquest is intact. He has helped the world’s sole super-power elect his favoured candidate to the White House. He and his patsy, Donald Trump, may be the pantomime villains for the West, sanctions and low oil prices may be pinching the Russian economy but his popularity at home in his 17th year in power remains buoyant.

So does the intriguing subtitle to this book predicting the imminent downfall of Mr Putin and Russia amount to little more than fervent wishful thinking by western foreign policy mavens? In the acknowledgements, Richard Lourie, a Russophile and consultant on Russia to Hillary Clinton during her 2008 presidential run, thanks George Soros for “a valuable idea”. And the Hungarian-American investor’s uncanny geo-political prescience should never be discounted.

Chapter 1 offers some less-publicised facts to support Mr Lourie’s thesis. In April 2016, Mr Putin created by presidential degree praetorian guard. This 400,000 strong National Guard co-opted troops from the interior ministry (including the feared SWAT-riot police units called OMON), nine battle tanks, 35 artillery pieces, 29 aircraft and 70 helicopters and is headed by a thuggish loyalist. This presidential militia is “about half the size of the regular Russian army and among the world’s ten largest,” Mr Lourie writes.   

This personal army has multiple stated functions – does the term Schutzstaffel ring a bell? – but its creation is a symptom of Mr Putin’s sense of vulnerability, Mr Lourie argues. Its primary purpose is “to prevent Putin’s personal nightmare scenario from becoming a reality” — that is, when the interlocking crises that assail Russia today combine to precipitate his overthrow. The core of this book is explaining each of these crises and how they threaten Mr Putin. 

Anyone who has read histories of the Romanovs and Soviet Russia will understand why this sprawling country, one third of it in Asia, struggles to slough off the super-centralisation embedded in its governance structures. Or, how mega-existential crises – from the founding of the Romanovs, through the Russian revolution to the disintegration of the Soviet Union – ensure the eternal popularity of the strongman.   

But Mr Lourie deftly ties the past and present in thought-provoking new perspectives. He reminds us of the chaotic last days of the Soviet empire, when the state literally withered away, and the US put its faith in a maverick, alcoholic upholder of democratic values, Boris Yeltsin. 

He recalls Mr Putin’s innate sense of betrayal when Nato, having promised not to progress one inch, gobbled up unified Germany, the Baltic states and Poland after the fall of the Berlin Wall (Strobe Talbott, from whose book, Russia Hand, Mr Lourie quotes frequently, could have explained that the requests came from these insecure new nations).

And most of all, he reminds us of how Mr Putin, the exemplary KGB man, saved Yeltsin an embarrassing probe into his family’s corruption by implicating the prosecutor in a sex scandal. That explains the abrupt handover of power from Yeltsin to a little-known former intelligence agent in 2000.

Ironically, Mr Putin’s vulnerabilities stem from the things that seemingly make him strong. The dynamics of oil and gas, which powered Russian prosperity in the first eight years of his rule, have weakened as prices languish, renewable energy gains converts, and Russia’s traditional markets dwindle under the weight of sanctions. Exploitation of Arctic reserves are his last great white hope, but Mr Lourie explains the obstacles — technology (available only from western companies) and aggressive competing claims from the four other countries whose land mass falls within the Arctic Circle. 

The cost of failing to diversify the economy is becoming evident in the publicly expressed dissatisfaction of jobless young people, with no memories of 1991 to convince them of Mr Putin’s desirability as a beacon of stability. No wonder his most credible political opponents are conveniently assassinated — Alexei Navalny appears to be the last man standing. 

Mr Putin’s Ukrainian adventure, via support to a “Republic of Random Dudes”, as one journalist described the turbulent east, ensures that this former Soviet republic remains destabilised enough to stay outside the European Union. But it may yet become Russia’s Afghanistan, as could his Syrian entanglement, with Islamic jihad playing out on Russia’s restless borders. 

If the internet is Mr Putin’s new weapon of choice to counter western democracies, Asia is becoming Mr Putin’s new playground. But the rising superpower China remains, as on date, more frenemy, than ally of yesterday’s giant.

This absorbing, fact-packed book was written before North Korea’ leader began his Trump-baiting pyrotechnics. Mr Putin role here is growing in significance as the leader of the free world impotently thunders and blunders. Could this be Mr Putin’s finest hour? 

Or the beginning of his end?