Will Putin Ever Leave? Could He if He Wanted?
A Stalin biographer contemplates Russia’s weakness today, which makes its current ruler such a threat to the West.
By
Tunku Varadarajan
March 9, 2018 5:37 p.m. ET
148 COMMENTS
Russia votes on March 18 in a presidential election that is, let’s agree, lacking in any competitive tension. In fact, says Stephen Kotkin, Vladimir Putin’s re-election is “preordained, a superfluous, if vivid, additional signal of Russia’s debilitating stagnation.”
Few Americans understand Russia better than Mr. Kotkin, who late last year published “ Stalin : Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941,” the second of an intended three-volume biography of the Soviet dictator Mr. Kotkin describes as “the person in world history who accumulated more power than anyone else.”
President Putin, by comparison, is a dictatorial lightweight. “We wouldn’t want to equate Putin with Stalin,” Mr. Kotkin says. The Soviet Union—which Stalin ruled for three hair-raising decades, until his death in 1953—had “one-sixth of the world’s land mass under its control, plus satellites in Eastern Europe and Northeast Asia.” There were also communist parties in scores of countries, which did Russia’s bidding. “We talk about how Russia interferes in our elections today,” says Mr. Kotkin, “but Stalin had a substantial Communist Party in France, and in Italy, inside the Parliament. And when Stalin gave instructions to them, they followed his orders.”
The Soviet economy, at its peak in the 1980s, reached about a third of the size of the U.S. economy. Russia’s economy today, Mr. Kotkin points out, “is one-15th the size of America’s. Russia is very weak, and getting weaker.” Not long ago, Russia was the eighth-largest economy in the world. Today, Mr. Kotkin says, “you’re lucky to get it at 12th or 13th, depending on how you measure things. Another two terms of Putin, and Russia will be out of the top 20.”
But don’t be reassured by Russia’s feebleness. Mr. Kotkin says this weakness is what makes Mr. Putin such a threat to the West.
Mr. Kotkin, a professor at Princeton and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, is the sort of historian who’s gone out of fashion at American universities. He readily admits that the subject that interests him most is power: “Where does power come from, how does it work, how does it accumulate and dissipate?” He is a historian of politics and international relations at a time when history faculties everywhere are recoiling from big themes and grand strategy, embracing instead an increasingly narrow social and cultural historiography.
“We have more than 60 professors in the history department at Princeton,” Mr. Kotkin says. “I consider that a very substantial number. We don’t have a single one whose specialty is U.S. diplomatic history.” He stresses that he’s not against the other types of history being taught at universities, just that he’s saying that there “should be room for straightforward, old-fashioned, political-diplomatic history, about foreign policy and current events.”
ILLUSTRATION: KEN FALLIN
Mr. Kotkin became a historian by messy accident. He was a pre-med student at the University of Rochester, in upstate New York, where he boasts that he had “the highest average in organic chemistry, the most difficult course.” He was in the operating room one day with a professor—“a bit of a showman”—who’d opened a carotid artery in a way that made blood spurt. “I’d never seen anything like this,” says Mr. Kotkin—his face faintly green even in the remembering—“and I began to feel woozy.” The callow Mr. Kotkin threw up and passed out. “That ended my medical career.”
A switch to English literature followed, with a minor in history, which put Mr. Kotkin into contact with the legendary Christopher Lasch. A moralist as well as a historian, Lasch was writing “The Culture of Narcissism” at the time. “He was a kind of Midwestern, prairie populist,” Mr. Kotkin says, “and his critique of American progressivism was something you cannot now hear on American campuses.”
Attracted to history, and away from literature, Mr. Kotkin ended up at the University of California, Berkeley for his doctorate, specializing in Russia. “I started learning the Russian language in the third year of my Ph.D., and then four years later I was assistant professor of Russian history at Princeton.” That was 1988, Mr. Kotkin was 29, and the Soviet state was withering away. There couldn’t have been a better time, one imagines, for a historian of Russia to find a wide and hungry audience.
Mr. Kotkin was drawn to Stalin because “the history of Stalin was a history of the world.” He was also “the gold standard of dictatorship.” With Soviet nostalgia sweeping Russia today alongside a revival of Stalin as a paragon, Mr. Kotkin welcomes my asking him how much of Stalin we should see in Mr. Putin today—and how much of Stalin Mr. Putin sees in himself.
Old-school historian that he is, Mr. Kotkin responds with a narrative. “The way you have to begin with this is with Russia’s place in the world. How do you get a figure like Stalin or Putin in the first place?” The answer lies in Russia’s aspiration “to have a special mission in the world—something that most people attribute to its Byzantine heritage.” Russia, in Russian eyes, is “not a regular country, it’s a providential power that’s ordained by God.”
This is where the threat from Mr. Putin springs. It’s very difficult to manage the proposition of Russian power in the world, says Mr. Kotkin, when the “capacities of the Russian state today, like the Soviet state before, are not always of the first rank.” They’re economically modest and technologically mediocre, so they “look for ways to compensate,” and subversion of competitors is an obvious, low-cost strategy.
Mr. Kotkin invites us to ponder Mr. Putin’s options. “We have a situation where a desire for a special mission in the world is the overriding organizational framework of Russian national culture, and the Putin regime is the inheritor of this.” Mr. Putin couldn’t possibly abandon Russia’s self-image and decide that his is going to be “just another country,” the way France and Britain did, and Germany and Japan were forced to do. Among major world powers today, Mr. Kotkin says, “those countries that feel they’re destined under God to be special are really only the U.S., China and Russia.”
Russia, it would seem, is providential yet impotent. “That’s why the Russians love the U.N.,” Mr. Kotkin says. “They have a veto on the Security Council.” It is also why Russia today retains a state-led economy: “You use the state to beat your people up, and the state also picks the winners and losers in the marketplace.” Russia is beggaring itself, Mr. Kotkin believes, in relation to China, but it’s staying afloat strategically “vis-à-vis the West because the West itself is in disarray in a way that China is not. The United States is in a period you can describe any way you wish, but it’s not one of vigorous global leadership.”
Russia appears to have resigned itself to China’s inexorable rise. It has therefore turned its competitive focus entirely on the West. “Russia’s grand strategy,” says Mr. Kotkin, “is Western collapse. Just wait it out. If the European Union breaks up, if the U.S. withdraws into itself and gives up all of its alliances around the world, Russia has many fewer problems, and its relative-power gap can narrow substantially.”
Mr. Putin’s modus operandi, Mr. Kotkin suggests, is to “enhance the process of Western collapse. You can try to interfere in Western elections and support disarray in the West, but ultimately only the West can destroy itself.”
Mr. Putin did not “hijack the U.S. election,” Mr. Kotkin says. “He hijacked American public discourse.” Moscow conducted an intelligence operation to discredit Hillary Clinton and U.S. democracy by obtaining compromising material, “of which there was plenty.” This evolved into “an operation to obtain compromising material on Donald Trump as well, with the aim of getting sanctions lifted and a whole lot more.”
Mrs. Clinton and her campaign were, says Mr. Kotkin, “unwilling victims; Trump and his campaign were willing ones.” As a result, “America’s counterintelligence investigation of Russia’s intelligence activities morphed into a criminal investigation of the Trump campaign. And then, sadly, into an attempted manipulation to derail that investigation.” Russia’s actions, Mr. Kotkin says, “failed to decide the election, or to have the sanctions against Russia removed, but succeeded in stealing America’s attention.”
As Mr. Putin bets on Russia’s survival at the expense of the West, one wonders what his own ideology is beyond an obvious belief in Russian exceptionalism. “He is a Russian patriot in his own way,” says Mr. Kotkin, “but I don’t think his version of Russian patriotism is enhancing the long-term interests of that country.” Like other authoritarian rulers, Mr. Putin believes that “the survival of his personal regime and the survival of his country as a great power in the world are the same question.”
That conflation has put Russia “in a downward spiral,” and Mr. Kotkin lists several measures that show how poorly Russia has fared under Mr. Putin. Most striking is the “hemorrhage” of Russia’s human capital. “It’s hard to measure,” as “there’s no census,” says Mr. Kotkin, “but anywhere between five and 10 million Russians are now living beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union.” The brain-drained Russians average about 20% above the mean income in the countries where they live, “which tells you that they’re a talented group, an educated, entrepreneurial, dynamic population. We have them at Princeton University—in our laboratories, our math department. You name it, they’re all over the place.”
With Mr. Putin a shoo-in for re-election, one wonders if he may, like Stalin, have a job for life in the Kremlin. Mr. Kotkin says he has “self-assigned tenure, meaning he can be there as long as he wants unless he’s assassinated in a palace coup.”
He may not have any choice in the matter: “It’s not clear he can leave if he wants to leave, because of the fact that he has narrowed the regime so considerably.” Authoritarian regimes tend to become victims of their own success. “The better they get at surveillance and suppression of dissent,” Mr. Kotkin says, “the less they know about their own society and what the people really think.” When authoritarian rulers first come to power, “they’re kind of like umpires. There are many different powerful groups that have disputes among themselves, and they turn to the leader to adjudicate.”
About to enter his fourth term as president, Mr. Putin is no longer the arbiter over a “scrum of competing interests, but is, instead, the leader of a single faction that controls all the power and all the wealth,” Mr. Kotkin says. This faction needs its protector to stick around so it can stay rich—and stay alive. “There’s really no way for Putin to retire peacefully.”
Mr. Varadarajan is a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
A Stalin biographer contemplates Russia’s weakness today, which makes its current ruler such a threat to the West.
By
Tunku Varadarajan
March 9, 2018 5:37 p.m. ET
148 COMMENTS
Russia votes on March 18 in a presidential election that is, let’s agree, lacking in any competitive tension. In fact, says Stephen Kotkin, Vladimir Putin’s re-election is “preordained, a superfluous, if vivid, additional signal of Russia’s debilitating stagnation.”
Few Americans understand Russia better than Mr. Kotkin, who late last year published “ Stalin : Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941,” the second of an intended three-volume biography of the Soviet dictator Mr. Kotkin describes as “the person in world history who accumulated more power than anyone else.”
President Putin, by comparison, is a dictatorial lightweight. “We wouldn’t want to equate Putin with Stalin,” Mr. Kotkin says. The Soviet Union—which Stalin ruled for three hair-raising decades, until his death in 1953—had “one-sixth of the world’s land mass under its control, plus satellites in Eastern Europe and Northeast Asia.” There were also communist parties in scores of countries, which did Russia’s bidding. “We talk about how Russia interferes in our elections today,” says Mr. Kotkin, “but Stalin had a substantial Communist Party in France, and in Italy, inside the Parliament. And when Stalin gave instructions to them, they followed his orders.”
The Soviet economy, at its peak in the 1980s, reached about a third of the size of the U.S. economy. Russia’s economy today, Mr. Kotkin points out, “is one-15th the size of America’s. Russia is very weak, and getting weaker.” Not long ago, Russia was the eighth-largest economy in the world. Today, Mr. Kotkin says, “you’re lucky to get it at 12th or 13th, depending on how you measure things. Another two terms of Putin, and Russia will be out of the top 20.”
But don’t be reassured by Russia’s feebleness. Mr. Kotkin says this weakness is what makes Mr. Putin such a threat to the West.
Mr. Kotkin, a professor at Princeton and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, is the sort of historian who’s gone out of fashion at American universities. He readily admits that the subject that interests him most is power: “Where does power come from, how does it work, how does it accumulate and dissipate?” He is a historian of politics and international relations at a time when history faculties everywhere are recoiling from big themes and grand strategy, embracing instead an increasingly narrow social and cultural historiography.
“We have more than 60 professors in the history department at Princeton,” Mr. Kotkin says. “I consider that a very substantial number. We don’t have a single one whose specialty is U.S. diplomatic history.” He stresses that he’s not against the other types of history being taught at universities, just that he’s saying that there “should be room for straightforward, old-fashioned, political-diplomatic history, about foreign policy and current events.”
ILLUSTRATION: KEN FALLIN
Mr. Kotkin became a historian by messy accident. He was a pre-med student at the University of Rochester, in upstate New York, where he boasts that he had “the highest average in organic chemistry, the most difficult course.” He was in the operating room one day with a professor—“a bit of a showman”—who’d opened a carotid artery in a way that made blood spurt. “I’d never seen anything like this,” says Mr. Kotkin—his face faintly green even in the remembering—“and I began to feel woozy.” The callow Mr. Kotkin threw up and passed out. “That ended my medical career.”
A switch to English literature followed, with a minor in history, which put Mr. Kotkin into contact with the legendary Christopher Lasch. A moralist as well as a historian, Lasch was writing “The Culture of Narcissism” at the time. “He was a kind of Midwestern, prairie populist,” Mr. Kotkin says, “and his critique of American progressivism was something you cannot now hear on American campuses.”
Attracted to history, and away from literature, Mr. Kotkin ended up at the University of California, Berkeley for his doctorate, specializing in Russia. “I started learning the Russian language in the third year of my Ph.D., and then four years later I was assistant professor of Russian history at Princeton.” That was 1988, Mr. Kotkin was 29, and the Soviet state was withering away. There couldn’t have been a better time, one imagines, for a historian of Russia to find a wide and hungry audience.
Mr. Kotkin was drawn to Stalin because “the history of Stalin was a history of the world.” He was also “the gold standard of dictatorship.” With Soviet nostalgia sweeping Russia today alongside a revival of Stalin as a paragon, Mr. Kotkin welcomes my asking him how much of Stalin we should see in Mr. Putin today—and how much of Stalin Mr. Putin sees in himself.
Old-school historian that he is, Mr. Kotkin responds with a narrative. “The way you have to begin with this is with Russia’s place in the world. How do you get a figure like Stalin or Putin in the first place?” The answer lies in Russia’s aspiration “to have a special mission in the world—something that most people attribute to its Byzantine heritage.” Russia, in Russian eyes, is “not a regular country, it’s a providential power that’s ordained by God.”
This is where the threat from Mr. Putin springs. It’s very difficult to manage the proposition of Russian power in the world, says Mr. Kotkin, when the “capacities of the Russian state today, like the Soviet state before, are not always of the first rank.” They’re economically modest and technologically mediocre, so they “look for ways to compensate,” and subversion of competitors is an obvious, low-cost strategy.
Mr. Kotkin invites us to ponder Mr. Putin’s options. “We have a situation where a desire for a special mission in the world is the overriding organizational framework of Russian national culture, and the Putin regime is the inheritor of this.” Mr. Putin couldn’t possibly abandon Russia’s self-image and decide that his is going to be “just another country,” the way France and Britain did, and Germany and Japan were forced to do. Among major world powers today, Mr. Kotkin says, “those countries that feel they’re destined under God to be special are really only the U.S., China and Russia.”
Russia, it would seem, is providential yet impotent. “That’s why the Russians love the U.N.,” Mr. Kotkin says. “They have a veto on the Security Council.” It is also why Russia today retains a state-led economy: “You use the state to beat your people up, and the state also picks the winners and losers in the marketplace.” Russia is beggaring itself, Mr. Kotkin believes, in relation to China, but it’s staying afloat strategically “vis-à-vis the West because the West itself is in disarray in a way that China is not. The United States is in a period you can describe any way you wish, but it’s not one of vigorous global leadership.”
Russia appears to have resigned itself to China’s inexorable rise. It has therefore turned its competitive focus entirely on the West. “Russia’s grand strategy,” says Mr. Kotkin, “is Western collapse. Just wait it out. If the European Union breaks up, if the U.S. withdraws into itself and gives up all of its alliances around the world, Russia has many fewer problems, and its relative-power gap can narrow substantially.”
Mr. Putin’s modus operandi, Mr. Kotkin suggests, is to “enhance the process of Western collapse. You can try to interfere in Western elections and support disarray in the West, but ultimately only the West can destroy itself.”
Mr. Putin did not “hijack the U.S. election,” Mr. Kotkin says. “He hijacked American public discourse.” Moscow conducted an intelligence operation to discredit Hillary Clinton and U.S. democracy by obtaining compromising material, “of which there was plenty.” This evolved into “an operation to obtain compromising material on Donald Trump as well, with the aim of getting sanctions lifted and a whole lot more.”
Mrs. Clinton and her campaign were, says Mr. Kotkin, “unwilling victims; Trump and his campaign were willing ones.” As a result, “America’s counterintelligence investigation of Russia’s intelligence activities morphed into a criminal investigation of the Trump campaign. And then, sadly, into an attempted manipulation to derail that investigation.” Russia’s actions, Mr. Kotkin says, “failed to decide the election, or to have the sanctions against Russia removed, but succeeded in stealing America’s attention.”
As Mr. Putin bets on Russia’s survival at the expense of the West, one wonders what his own ideology is beyond an obvious belief in Russian exceptionalism. “He is a Russian patriot in his own way,” says Mr. Kotkin, “but I don’t think his version of Russian patriotism is enhancing the long-term interests of that country.” Like other authoritarian rulers, Mr. Putin believes that “the survival of his personal regime and the survival of his country as a great power in the world are the same question.”
That conflation has put Russia “in a downward spiral,” and Mr. Kotkin lists several measures that show how poorly Russia has fared under Mr. Putin. Most striking is the “hemorrhage” of Russia’s human capital. “It’s hard to measure,” as “there’s no census,” says Mr. Kotkin, “but anywhere between five and 10 million Russians are now living beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union.” The brain-drained Russians average about 20% above the mean income in the countries where they live, “which tells you that they’re a talented group, an educated, entrepreneurial, dynamic population. We have them at Princeton University—in our laboratories, our math department. You name it, they’re all over the place.”
With Mr. Putin a shoo-in for re-election, one wonders if he may, like Stalin, have a job for life in the Kremlin. Mr. Kotkin says he has “self-assigned tenure, meaning he can be there as long as he wants unless he’s assassinated in a palace coup.”
He may not have any choice in the matter: “It’s not clear he can leave if he wants to leave, because of the fact that he has narrowed the regime so considerably.” Authoritarian regimes tend to become victims of their own success. “The better they get at surveillance and suppression of dissent,” Mr. Kotkin says, “the less they know about their own society and what the people really think.” When authoritarian rulers first come to power, “they’re kind of like umpires. There are many different powerful groups that have disputes among themselves, and they turn to the leader to adjudicate.”
About to enter his fourth term as president, Mr. Putin is no longer the arbiter over a “scrum of competing interests, but is, instead, the leader of a single faction that controls all the power and all the wealth,” Mr. Kotkin says. This faction needs its protector to stick around so it can stay rich—and stay alive. “There’s really no way for Putin to retire peacefully.”
Mr. Varadarajan is a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
