Putin

He had already demonstrated strength, loyalty, and effectiveness. In addition, he was vigorous, unlike Yeltsin, who was suffering heart attacks and undergoing quintuple bypasses, and had the flushed, puffy look of those who are not long for this world. Putin was tough on Chechnya and knew how to use the security service to neutralize enemies. A bit colorless, a bit ordinary, but that might be just what Russia needed after extravagant Gorbachev and flamboyant Yeltsin.

But most important were Putin’s strength and loyalty to keep the deal Yeltsin would offer—power for immunity.

Yeltsin’s vital interests and Putin’s chief characteristics aligned and clicked. A perfect fit.

And so it was that on December 31, 1999, on the eve of a new century, President Boris Yeltsin, in his annual address to the nation, asked Russians for their “forgiveness for the fact that many of the dreams we shared did not come true and for the fact that what seemed to us so simple turned out to be tormentingly difficult.” And thereupon he handed Russia—its eleven time zones and its nuclear weapons, its thousand-year history and future fate—over to Vladimir Putin.

Lenin had famously said: “Any cook should be able to run the country.” A cook’s grandson would now have the chance.

5 THE RUSSIA PUTIN INHERITED AND ITS SPIRITUAL ILLS

POST-TRAUMATIC POLITICS

Few lamented the demise of the Soviet Union more than Vladimir Putin; none benefited from it more.

The man who in his state-of-the-nation speech on April 25, 2005, called the collapse of the USSR the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century” was propelled from an obscure KGB posting in East Germany to the leadership of twenty-first-century Russia by the very forces unleashed by that collapse. Had the Center held and the Soviet Union remained essentially intact, today Putin would be a KGB retiree with a thickening waist and thinning hair, out fishing on a quiet river or pestering his grandchildren with kisses. Instead, in one capacity or another, he has led the new Russia since the year 2000 and will continue to do so until 2018 at the very least, unless calamity intervenes again, this time not necessarily in his favor.

Though Putin’s fate is singular, in some ways it resembles that of those who were born and grew up under the old Soviet dispensation and were forced to reinvent themselves when their world gave way around them. There was a no-man’s-land between the last Soviet generation and the first real post-Soviet one. A woman who had done well in real estate told me her mother was continually berating her: “You help a fellow human being find a place to live and for that you take money!?”

Both in being nostalgic for the USSR and in facing the need to reinvent himself, Putin is ordinary. Russians sense that ordinariness and are comforted by it. That is of course especially true for Putin’s main electoral demographic, older working-class types who do not live in central Moscow or St. Petersburg but on the outskirts and are strung out across the country’s eleven time zones. A good many of those voters are even more nostalgic for the Soviet Union than Putin. They yearn for the cozy democracy of poverty, for cheap rent, cheap utilities, free schools, and free health care, and find the hurly-burly of the marketplace vulgar, alien, and confusing.

For Putin and everyone else the fall of the USSR came as a shock because no one saw it coming. For most people in the 1980s the USSR had always existed during their lifetime, and the opposition between the USA and the USSR was part of the architecture of reality, even its keystone. The United States and the USSR seemed interlocked, as if MAD stood not only for mutual assured destruction but mutual assured duration. The only likely end to the dynamic impasse of U.S.-Soviet relations was nuclear war. That was certainly easier to imagine than the Marxist fantasy of the withering away of the state or what in fact happened, the soft and largely bloodless implosion of the largest empire the world had ever seen.

The events of 9/11 were formative for the United States, or perhaps deformative is a better word. The Middle Eastern wars, the debate over drone strikes, Guantánomo, surveillance, torture, liberty vs. security, everything that has bedeviled America since 2001, flows directly from that date and those incidents.