Photo: Russia's President Vladimir Putin attends a parade marking Navy Day in Saint Petersburg, Russia July 31, 2022. Credit: REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

Life Sentence: 25 Years of Putin

The Russian leader has shaped his country, but outsiders still find him baffling.

August 18, 2024

Twenty-five years ago this month, I was the Moscow bureau chief of The Economist. I called myself the “chaos correspondent,” with good reason. Russia seemed ungovernable, with a terminally unpopular President Boris Yeltsin confronting stroppy regional barons and a population disillusioned by corruption and exhausted by economic upheaval

I arrived in Moscow shortly before the August 1998 financial crisis, in which Russia had devalued and defaulted, leaving its Western cheerleaders flummoxed. Now Boris Yeltsin, the beleaguered president, had chosen his fifth prime minister in less than 18 months: the little-known head of the FSB, Vladimir Putin, who is now marking a quarter-century in power.

Few seemed to know anything about this quiet gray bureaucrat. So foreign observers played “join the dots” — a children’s game where seemingly random points on a page turn into a recognizable picture if connected correctly.

First dot: Russia’s new prime minister was from St Petersburg—a good thing. Russia’s second city was liberal-minded, more “European” than Moscow. Its name-switch from Soviet-era Leningrad to its original Tsarist-era title was exactly the sort of symbolic move that made outsiders feel that the bad old days were over. The mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, was a notable “reformer” (whatever that meant).

Second dot. Putin had worked for the elite foreign intelligence division of the KGB. He spoke German. So he knew something about the way the world worked. A “cosmopolitan” figure, I described him a year earlier on his appointment as head of the FSB.

Third dot: Putin clearly had the trust of the Yeltsin family, battling to stay out of jail amid swirling allegations of corruption and abuse of power. The ailing Yeltsin resigned on New Year’s Eve and made Putin president.

Foreigners rushed to color in this sketchy and misleading picture. Putin was the man to save Russia. someone we could do business with. He promised stability at home, cooperation on counter-terrorism, and a friendly investment climate.

It was tempting to go along with this. The Moscow press corps was bewitched by Putin’s dynamism and seeming openness. After years of Yeltsin’s incoherence and decrepitude, this was a man who could hold a press conference! For hours! With unscripted answers!

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I took the lonely decision to reject what I called the “hurrah chorus” consensus. What Putin really offered was lies and mass murder. not least the staged apartment-block bombings stoked his counter-terrorism crackdown and a zero-to-hero rise in popularity. Yeltsin, for all his faults, stood for media freedom, political competition, and a fundamental break with the Stalinist past. Putin rejected all three.

The main point about Putin, I argued, was that he was an unrepentant servant of the Soviet secret police. We should be as worried about his ascent to power in Russia as we would be about a former Gestapo officer becoming the leader of Germany. Germany had sought to atone for its Nazi-era crimes. Russia showed no sign of similar contrition about the Soviet past.

That seemed at the time a shocking comparison to make. Since 1991, the consensus had been that Russia was a post-imperial country liberated by the collapse of the Soviet empire. The cold war was over.

I disagreed: I had spent the early 1990s living in the Baltic states, which were struggling to regain sovereignty and end the Kremlin’s lingering military and intelligence presence. If the people who knew Russia best were troubled, then so was I.

I was right to call out Putin from the beginning. Those who trusted him were catastrophically wrong. But the bigger point is about Russia. Putin exemplified something he did not create. And it will, I fear, survive his departure.

Edward Lucas is a Non-resident Senior Fellow and Senior Adviser at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.