Russian President Vladimir Putin votes at a polling station during the
municipal election in Moscow on September 10, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / Yuri
KADOBNOV
http://time.com/5204733/russia-election-2018-putin-fourth-term/
A few weeks ago, one of the members of the Russian government turned to President Putin
and asked, “Vladimir Vladimirovich, well, what will happen to me after
March 18?” He asked his question in the presence of other ministers, and
the upcoming elections were certainly on all their minds. They were all
worried about whether they would keep their positions after the
election. The rest, however, knew better than to say anything.
According to my sources, Putin smiled his usual sly
smile and replied, “Well, why, even I do not know what will happen to me
after March 18.” Everyone there understood that the minister had made a
terrible mistake. You cannot publicly demonstrate weakness, and you
cannot ask Putin about your future. Not that he would give a straight
answer anyway.
Putin has always known what would happen to him after March 18; his re-election for a fourth term was a given.
But in the months building up to the elections, the Russian political
elite was in a state of tremendous stress, waiting in horror for the day
of the presidential election—not because they had doubts about the
result, but because they were terrified of what would come next. Even
following the attack on former military intelligence agent Sergei Skripal,
the ministers were not particularly afraid of potential conflict with
the West. The fundamental changes to come were far more serious.
Under the current Russian constitution, this should
be Putin’s last six-year term in office. But virtually nobody in the
bureaucratic elite of Russia believes that Putin will step down in 2024.
“There is a misconception that Putin is tired, needs rest and wants to
live the life of a billionaire,” says a former minister who still has
personal access to the president. “But Putin is far from being tired. He
is interested in everything and digs into every matter, paying
attention to all the details. This is his lifestyle, this is who he is.
He can’t imagine life without power.”
From the moment of re-election, Putin will start
devising a complicated scheme of ruling the country in the future.
Perhaps that means finding a loophole in the constitution, or changing
it, or building a new structure of the state. All sources speaking to
TIME from Putin’s inner circle are certain—at least for now—that Putin
will somehow remain in power.
The ruling bureaucracy understands this means an era
of turbulence is coming. The question—as the outspoken minister put
it—is what this means for the rest of us.
The emergence of a new tsar
Putin has changed considerably during his time in
power. He never planned to remain in the president’s office forever.
During his first term as president in 2000–2004, he considered refusing
to run for re-election. As I reported in my book All the Kremlin’s Men,
his friends were future oligarchs amassing great fortunes as
businessmen,such as Yury Kovalchuk and Gennady Timchenko, or the heads
of special services such as Director of the Federal Security Service
Nikolai Patrushev. For them, Putin was the guarantor of omnipotence and
they put tremendous pressure upon him at that time.
During his second term, he started to think about his
contribution to history and how he would be remembered. In 2008, he
yielded the presidential office to Dmitry Medvedev and became prime
minister, exercising control from behind the scenes. But the experience
rankled him—he was particularly annoyed by how Medvedev reacted to the Arab Spring protests in 2011.
The Arab Spring reminded Putin of the so-called “color revolutions”
which took place in the former USSR republics in 2003–2005. Looking at
what was happening with the weakened regime of Muammar Gaddafi, Putin
believed that Russia should in no circumstances support the
international operation against Libya, seeing it as part of a global
conspiracy in which Russia would be the next target.
A
Russian soldier stands in front of poster with portraits of Russian
President-elect Vladimir Putin and outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev
during a rehearsal for the Victory Day parade near Moscow on April 4,
2012. The parade is dedicated to the anniversary of the Soviet victory
over Nazi Germany in World War II.
Sasha Mordovets—Getty Images
But Medvedev backed the international operation in Libya, and declined to veto a U.N. Security Council vote
authorizing it. To Putin, this illustrated how nobody could be trusted
to run the country except him. He would return to the Kremlin in 2012.
From that moment on, Putin’s psychology underwent an
irreversible transformation. He came to believe that he had been chosen
for a special mission—to save Russia. This more than anything inspired
the events of 2014, when he decided to annex the Crimean peninsula
in response to a revolution in Ukraine that he believed to be part of a
global anti-Russia conspiracy. The Western world reacted with dismay,
and the U.S. and Europe imposed steep sanctions
on Russia. But for many Russians the annexation of Crimea signified
that Russia, for the first time after the dissolution of the Soviet
Union, was once again a real superpower.
Ever since, making Russia great again has become a
new ideology for Putin. State propaganda started to spread the idea that
Putin is the only one who can restore the greatness of Russia. This
concept was articulated in the most detailed way in the build-up to the
presidential election, in a documentary broadcast on the state-owned TV channel Rossiya 1. The film, Valaam,
about a once-neglected monastery that has been rebuilt since the
collapse of the USSR with Putin’s support, conveyed the idea that Putin
is a unique historical leader of Russia—able to unite fervent advocates
of the Communist-era Soviet Union with those who dream of Russia’s
pre-revolutionary empire, built on Orthodox Christianity.
In the most symbolic episode of the film, Putin says
that there is almost no difference between the Orthodox Christianity and
Communism, and that the Bolsheviks in fact reproduced the traditional
dogmas that dominated the Russian Orthodox Church for centuries. He even
compared the preserved corpse of Lenin, which lies in a mausoleum in
Moscow’s Red Square, to the relics of the orthodox saints, demonstrating
that he managed to overcome the longstanding division.
As his former propaganda chief, Vyacheslav Volodin, once put it: “Without Putin, there is no Russia.”
All the President’s men
Putin is preparing for a new era. In the past year,
he has begun a process of clearing house. He has fired a number of older
governors and installed young and little-known bureaucrats in their
place. The most typical appointees of 2017 were the governors of Samara
and Nizhny Novgorod. They are virtually indistinguishable, so much so
that Russian media compare them to Agent Smith from The Matrix—the self-cloning agent of the all-powerful central computer.
These Agent Smiths represent an archetype of Putin’s
new staff. They all are roughly the same age, 40 years old or a little
younger; they don’t have any particular political beliefs or opinions;
they are merely “technocrats” personally loyal to Putin. The president
is slowly building a new generation of Russian bureaucrats in his own
image. He too was once a faceless official with no ambition—until he was
eventually appointed prime minister and stepped into the role of
president after Boris Yeltsin’s abrupt resignation.
However, Putin’s entourage also includes true
believers, so-called “orthodox Chekists” who—again like Putin—came from
the KGB and built their careers under Brezhnev. Among them are Igor Sechin,
chief executive of the Rosneft energy company and considered the leader
of this group, and the governor of Saint Petersburg Georgy
Poltavchenko.
By and large, these figures never believed in
Communism, but have now come to believe in God. And if Russia is God’s
chosen nation, it follows that Putin is God’s chosen leader. The
president himself naturally subscribes to this view.
Together, the new technocrats and older Chekists
present an existential challenge to the Russian political elite. It may
surprise some, but the upper ranks of Russian politics are filled with
what might be called “sleeping liberals.” These are people who came to
prominence in the 1990s, during the presidency of Yeltsin. Many of them
were members of the teams of democrats and reformers like former Prime
Minister Yegor Gaidar or Anatoly Sobchak, one of the most prominent
Russian democrats of the early 1990s. Almost all of these people are
very wealthy. Their families own property abroad. They are either
oligarchs themselves, or friends of oligarchs.
Many of them are convinced that Russia needs
democracy, market economy, freedom of speech, fair elections and good
relations with the West. They would of course never say that out loud,
aware that it contradicts Putin’s stance. And while they remain silent,
Putin’s coalition of young technocrats and orthodox Chekhists has been
gathering enough power to keep the president in power for a generation
still to come.
Members of this “sleeping” faction insist they are
ready to wake up as soon as the right moment comes—but some say that
time has come and gone. “It is strange that we haven’t even noticed the
moment when we lost everything,” says one socially active Russian
oligarch. “We didn’t start the fight for our beliefs when it was
possible. Now we can do nothing. We can only watch silently as
everything is falling apart.”
What Putin wants
You don’t have to look far to find evidence of what
Putin will do with his next term in power. Two weeks before the
presidential elections, he spoke about a new generation of Russian nuclear missiles that can overcome any kind of defense.
Ignoring tradition, the president made his address from the gigantic Moscow Manege conference center
rather than the Kremlin so that Putin could proudly show his video
presentation—an illustration with missiles flying toward the U.S.—to
applause from Russian officials.
It was hailed around the world as a return to the
Cold War, which was exactly Putin’s intention. Russia can’t pretend to
be an economic superpower, but it has another asset: nuclear weapons.
Putin believes there is no other way to make the West respect Russia.
From his point of view, he exhausted all the possible
methods of establishing friendly relationships with Western leaders
during the first 15 years of his rule—and still didn’t win their
respect. He hoped that George W. Bush, Tony Blair and their successors
would consider him their equal. Putin felt insulted by Bush’s attitude
toward Russia, feeling he treated it as a ‘big Finland’—or as a large,
but secondary European country. A return to the rhetoric of the Cold War
is an opportunity to have a completely different dialog, he believes.
The Americans will respect him as they did Brezhnev, and other Soviet
leaders.
At the same time, Putin also hopes that the relations
with the West will improve. Putin doesn’t dream of world war. He dreams
of the new Yalta Conference, the peace conference that took place in
Crimea in 1944 and brought Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill together.
Back then the leaders of the countries that won World War II divided the
world into zones of influence. Putin wants new zones of influence and
new clear rules of the game. He wants the West to admit that territory
that once belonged to the USSR (probably including nearby countries)
should be areas of Russian responsibility. He wants to get guarantees
and suitable honors.
Western leaders like Chancellor Angela Merkel and
former President Barack Obama have argued that these spheres of
influence no longer exist in the modern world. Putin rejects that as
hypocrisy. He just needs Western leaders who are more ready to
negotiate.
Supporters
of Russian President Vladimir Putin gather for a rally to celebrate the
fourth anniversary of Russia's annexation of Crimea at Sevastopol's
Nakhimov Square on March 14, 2018.
Yuri Kadobnov—AFP/Getty Images
Putin wants to look like a peacemaker. To do that,
he’ll have to look beyond Syria. Nobody in the Kremlin believes that the
U.S. will agree to have a large-scale conference about resolving Syria
and be ready to meet Putin’s conditions. But his administration is ready
to set other tasks for itself, closer to home.
During Putin’s next term he is prepared to resolve the problem of the Donbas,
the area of Eastern Ukraine where Russia’s army has fueled a civil war
since 2014. Sources in the Russian Foreign Ministry tell TIME that Putin
is ready to make Eastern Ukraine an area controlled by an interim
international administration—as was the case in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
or Kosovo.
However, he is not ready to make concessions on the
Crimean issue. “It’s only fair,” Putin responds to all foreign partners
when they ask about Crimea. As far as he is concerned, the population of
Crimea is satisfied with the annexation by the Russian Federation, and
that means that justice has been served. Nothing needs to change.
“It’s only fair” has become Putin’s new maxim. Ten
years ago, Putin would brag that he is a lawyer by training, insisting
that an unconditional adherence to the letter of the law is paramount to
him. He didn’t change the Russian constitution in order to be elected
for a third term, yielding the presidential office to another lawyer,
Medvedev, before returning to the presidential office himself. After
annexing Crimea, Putin assured in a TV interview that everything was done “by the book.”
But now, Putin has changed. What he perceives as
“justice” seems more important for him than the law—and that means that
he can change any laws if he considers the outcome to be fair.
How exactly Putin might remain in power is not yet
clear. He has six more years to do that and will not start putting any
plans into action immediately—at least not until after the World Cup,
which Russia is hosting this summer. And he would not hurry to share his
plan with his entourage; rather, he likes surprises so the later
everybody finds out, the better.
But there is no doubt that he will find a way to stay
in control; he thinks it’s only fair. And time at least is on his side.
In 2024, when his fourth term ends, Putin will be 72 years old. That’s
the same age Donald Trump will reach this year.
Mikhail Zygar is a journalist and writer who was
editor-in-chief of Dozhd, Russia’s only independent news channel. His
books include All the Kremlin’s Men (2015) and The Empire Must Die
(2017).
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