Seeking Putin’s Soul
Bush has a flawed view of the Russian leader. Will Condi be able to help the U.S. president be more realistic about Moscow?
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
Updated: 5:01 p.m. ET Dec. 17, 2004
Dec. 17 - Most Americans still have some fear and suspicion of Russia, so they feel assured when George W. Bush travels to Moscow, looks into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and vouches for the Russian president’s soul. Bush never admits a mistake, but his eyesight must be faulty because the cold-eyed Putin has designs on power that are more reminiscent of Stalin’s Kremlin than the new Russia that Bush extols.
The Russian parliament last week voted for a new law that allows Putin to appoint governors in all the provinces, as opposed to having them elected. A draft version of the bill tried to restore some balance by requiring the consent of local legislatures. If lawmakers voted against a nominee three times, Putin would then have to produce another candidate. In the final version, which Putin signed, if lawmakers vote against a nominee three times, that’s the end of them. The legislature is dissolved. “Grotesque and ridiculous as it sounds, it’s true,” says Yuri Maltsev, a professor of economics at Carthage College in Wisconsin.
A stocky, dark-haired man with a taste for irony, Maltsev was one of the last defectors from the Soviet Union before it collapsed. He was an adviser to President Mikhail Gorbachev and for six months worked for Boris Yeltsin, whose occasional moments of greatness were lost among his indulgence for food and drink. Maltsev recalls Yeltsin saying through an alcoholic haze, “I’ve tried to do everything to help Mother Russia recover, but it turned out as usual.”
Maltsev is no kinder toward Putin, whom he says is using the terrorist attack last September on a school in Beslan, Russia, as an excuse to impose authoritarian rule. Hundreds of children died, and images of grieving parents riveted the world’s attention and terrified families everywhere. Still, invoking the attack to eliminate free elections for governors in the provinces is going way overboard. “It’s like Bush saying after 9/11 [that] states shouldn’t elect governors,” says Maltsev. He finds it appalling that Putin, a former KGB agent, could win an election in Russia. “Can you imagine Germany electing an ex-official of the Gestapo to the school board or anywhere,” he exclaims. “It’s completely impossible. But in Russia, 69 percent of the people thought there was nothing wrong with being in the KGB.”
After the Gorbachev regime collapsed on Dec. 24, 1991, military expenditures declined precipitously. Putin reversed the trend. Since taking office in 1999, he has steadily increased spending on the military to where it is now up to cold war levels. He has also taken care of his alma mater, the KGB. Its successor agency, the FSB, has enjoyed a 360 percent rise in its budget since ’99. “Once in the KGB, always in the KGB,” says Maltsev, who doesn’t see any of the positive qualities Bush saw when he looks into Putin’s eyes. He sees an autocratic ruler who has exploited the Russian people’s fear of terrorism to tighten security and crack down on potential rivals. Maltsev notes that 16 of the 19 oligarchs in the country are Jewish, and that Putin refers to them as “ruthless capitalists,” a phrase dangerously close to a slur.
Putin is trying to restore Russia’s greatness, but he’s doing it in the face of enormous obstacles. On the plus side, Russia still has 7,000 nuclear warheads and 1.8 million soldiers in its army. Its oil resources are second only to those in Saudi Arabia. But its economy remains nothing short of pathetic. In Maltsev’s graphic description, the Russian GNP is a little larger than that of the state of Georgia, and smaller than that of Illinois. “There are 19 billionaires and an ocean of have-nots,” he says. “Russia is way more important politically than economically.” The infant mortality rate in some parts of the vast country rival that of Third World nations. Many hospitals in the rural areas lack indoor plumbing. Yet the country is sending people to space and developing nuclear weapons.
Boris Yeltsin, Maltsev’s former boss, disbanded the Communist Party and called for spontaneous privatization. “In the U.S., we call it theft,” says Maltsev. Capitalism can’t survive when all the land belongs to the state, and the privatization did not create sustainable markets. A New York Times editorial observed, “Adam Smith strangled Mother Russia.”
Maltsev has met with Condoleezza Rice, whom he believes brings a more realistic assessment than Bush to what Putin is all about. “She speaks Russian as well as myself, maybe better,” he says. Rice studied Russia during the height of the cold war, and she is likely to push U.S. policy into a more wary posture toward Putin. “We may have a new member of the Axis of Evil,” says Marshall Wittmann, a scholar at the centrist Democratic Leadership Conference. At the very least, the next time Bush looks into Putin’s eyes, he’ll have Rice at his elbow telling him that the window into Putin’s soul can best be found at KGB headquarters.
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