A Warning for Those Ready to Capitulate to Trump
A former U.S. ambassador to Russia says powerful Russians were too eager to go along with Vladimir Putin.
By Garry Kasparov
....Kasparov: So you were in Moscow in the period when Putin was reelected and consolidated his power and rule.
McFaul: Yes.
Kasparov: So last week you wrote that many Russian oligarchs didn’t resist Putin’s early autocratic moves because he offered them some kind of deals; he cut their taxes. And then years later they regretted their passivity when they had the power to resist. Can you be just more specific? Describe more about that.
McFaul: Yeah. So when Putin first came in—and he was an accidental president, you know, he wasn’t, he didn’t have some great movement behind him, picked by some of these oligarchs as a way to stop another guy, [Yevgeny] Primakov, from becoming president. There’s a mythology, including here in the United States, that there was this groundswell of support for Putin’s style of illiberal nationalism. And that’s just—it’s just not true. I mean, that’s just not true. He was picked by [Boris] Yeltsin.
Right away, he did two things simultaneously. On the economic side, he brought in those, you know, in Russia they would be called liberal reformers. Here in the United States they would be called conservatives. And in particular, he cut individual income tax to a flat tax at 13 percent. He then cut corporate taxes, and for the business community and the oligarchs, they welcomed that.
At the same time, he went after media very aggressively. And that was the first thing he went after. He wanted to control the media, and he took over the two state-controlled channels pretty easily. And one of the oligarchs had to flee and later died mysteriously in London, who controlled that. Boris Berezovsky.
But the real drama, as you’ll remember, was about NTV, an independent station owned by another oligarch. [Vladimir] Gusinsky was his name. And they did a couple of things. First of all—and this is the echoes of the moment we’re in, in the United States—eventually one of the state-owned enterprises loyal to Putin, Gazprom, and its branch called Gazprom Media, took over NTV. And it was all, Oh, it was just a business interest. Right? You know, that’s what we hear today. It’s just a business interest, just, you know, no big deal. And....
theatlantic.com |
