Book Excerpt: Is Vladimir Putin’s Leadership Of Russia A Pointer For India?

The Russian president was in India. In a book depicting the regime’s crushing of independent institutions and silencing of critics, a senior journalist looks at Putin’s achievements in his early days in power in this excerpt.

So by 2000 Mr Putin had the media and business under his thumb. But other strands of power remained outside the Kremlin's grip. The elected chiefs of Russia's regions and republics could still cite their own electoral mandate in disputes with the “centre”. Their clout dated from the 1990s, when Yeltsin had once promised Russia's provinces “as much sovereignty as you can swallow”.

That experiment in ultra federalism had been a disaster: in a strong Western country such as Canada or Germany, powerful regions such as uebec or Bavaria may reasonably run their own affairs. But Russian officialdom's desire for extra revenues, private and official, multiplied with each layer of government. The single market became balkanised, with each region passing its own laws and regulations.

At times of crisis, such as after the 199 crash, some regions even restricted “exports” to the rest of Russia. In the Urals, there was even talk of a separate currency, supposedly to be more reliable than the rouble. The bigger and more powerful provinces, such as Tatarstan, started opening “embassies” abroad.

Mr Putin had witnessed this – and disliked it intensely – while working in the Yeltsin Kremlin. As president, he moved swiftly to re establish the centre's political authority, thickening the sinews of power: the prosecutors, FSB, tax police and interior ministry troops.

After 2002 no regional leader challenged Mr Putin head on. But they could still ignore him. “Russia is big, and the Czar is far away” is an old Russian proverb. Only under totalitarianism, it seemed, could the Kremlin reasonably hope to control life in the provinces tightly.

But that changed in September 2004, when Russia suffered one of its worst terrorist attacks. Fighters proclaiming support for Chechen independence took hostage hundreds of children, parents and teachers at a school in Beslan, North Ossetia. An anti terrorist operation killed 334 of the hostages, including 186 children.

In some countries, that would have prompted a bout of anguished official soul searching. Chechnya clearly had not been 'pacified' as the Kremlin claimed. And why had the authorities proved so incompetent? They were unable, for example, even to cordon the school off properly. Many witnesses say they saw tanks fire shells into the school, contributing to the massacre; the hostage takers' own explosives did not seem to explain the damage caused.

The authorities seemed unprepared to put out the fires that raged through the building after it was stormed. Most puzzling of all, the attack was launched a ter agreement had been reached between the then Chechen rebel leader, Aslan Maskhadov, and the North Ossetian authorities, on negotiations to end the siege.

Those questions, posed only by the muffled voices of the liberal opposition, and lone journalists such as Politkovskaya, never gained a hearing.

An icily angry Mr Putin gave one of his most revealing speeches.

It started with a bout of nostalgia: We live in a time that follows the collapse of a vast and great state, a state that, unfortunately, proved unable to survive in a rapidly changing world. But despite all the difficulties, we were able to preserve the core of what was once the vast Soviet Union, and we named this new country the Russian Federation.

It continued by equating the terrorists with Russia's external 'enemies', not only in the east, but - for the first time - the West - Our country, formerly protected by the most powerful defence system along the length of its external frontiers overnight found itself defenceless both from the east and the west . . . We showed ourselves to be weak. And the weak get beaten. Some would like to tear from us a “juicy piece of pie”. Others help them. They help, reasoning that Russia still remains one of the world's major nuclear powers, and as such still represents a threat to them. And so they reason that this threat should be removed.

Shortly afterwards he announced new centralising measures planned some time before - under which regional leaders would no longer be elected directly, but appointed by him and then endorsed by local assemblies. Every one of the special deals that Yeltsin had signed with forty of Russia's eighty nine regions was cancelled.

The Kremlin is particularly nervous about the twenty odd republics that are the nominal homelands of the country's indigenous non Slavic peoples. It remembers how "nationalism" in the Baltic states and elsewhere broke up the Soviet Union. A decade of separatist conflict in Chechnya raises the spectre of the same in other parts of the Russian Federation.

As in Soviet times, Russians see their language as the gateway to world culture for those unfortunate enough to grow up speaking gobbledegook from the boondocks. Few remember the genocidal effect of Russian rule as it spread east two centuries ago; nor do they remember the especial severity of Stalinist repressions on the Soviet Union's minorities.

Such historical amnesia is a hallmark of Mr Putin's approach and part of the secret of its appeal.

It pleases both the "new Russians" of the emergent middle class, and the 'old Russians' from the parts of society left behind by the wrenching changes of the past two decades. Though Mr Putin's nostalgia for the Soviet Union strikes many outside Russia as bafflingly offensive, many Russians feel that the Soviet Union was a time of great national achievement, and are baffled that anyone would object to it (even among young Russians, more than 60 per cent agreed with their president that its collapse was a catastrophe). When they see their president being tough with the West, they feel proud.

It was possible to argue that all this was necessary. Only a tough leader could run Russia.

After the anarchy of the Yeltsin years, it was time for discipline. The Russian people needed time to get used to a market economy and it was vital that they equated it with rising living standards and stability, not the looting and chaos of the 1990s. On foreign policy, the West could not expect Russia to be perpetually friendly and accommodating. 

Mr Putin needed to act tough, at least for internal consumption, but this could be set aside as mere posturing: on all vitally important questions, such as in dealing with Islamic extremism or nuclear proliferation, the West and Russia were on the same side. In short, if Mr Putin cut some corners, it was in a good cause.

Excerpted with permission from The New Cold War: Putin's Threat to Russia and the West, Edward Lucas, Bloomsbury.