Putin

The Geneva Freeport, which may be the world’s most valuable storage facility, consists of seven beige warehouses and a large grain silo in La Praille, an industrial zone a short tram ride from the city’s lakeside panorama of banks and expensive hotels…. Iris scanners, magnetic locks, and a security system known as Cerberus guard the freeport’s storerooms, whose contents are said to be insured for a hundred billion dollars…. The freeport is eighty-six percent owned by the local government—and kinship with the opaque traditions of Swiss banking made it a storage facility for the international elite. Under the freeport’s rules, objects could remain in untaxed limbo, in theory, forever. Treasures came and they did not leave. A generation ago, those goods were cars, wine, and gold.

Putin may also be funneling wealth out of the country to his children. In late 2015 there were reports that Putin’s daughter Ekaterina was buying a luxury property in Biarritz, the elegant resort on the Atlantic side of the South of France where Putin was living very modestly in the summer of 1999 when Boris Berezovsky came to convince him to accept the post of prime minister. That would make a nice full circle.

Putin has also maintained close ties with European leaders like former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who could have proved useful in assisting Putin in transferring wealth out of Russia.

But not all scenarios need end as ignominiously as those with Putin scampering away to Biarritz or some such place with bags of cash. A man extremely favored by fortune in his rise to power, he could yet prove favored again. The exploitation of the Arctic could stave off disaster for another generation.

Or a military intervention in Kazakhstan might provide the Kremlin with leverage over China, thereby completing the task of restoring Russia’s greatness by restoring Russia’s power.

Even if these unlikely glories are attained, they will, however, only temporarily obscure the failure at the core of Putin’s reign.

Putin was given a unique opportunity by history, a period of wealth and peace that he could have used to liberate his country from its dependence on oil and on authoritarian rule. He squandered that opportunity to unleash the source of Russia’s true greatness—the still untapped skills and spirit of its people. Was not his own career sufficient proof of how high an ordinary Russian could rise?

But Putin did not trust. He did not trust the world outside Russia, which in the end he could only see as the enemy at the gates. He did not trust the Russian people out of the fear that they would run rampant if given liberty. But it was a handful of well-educated men who looted the country, not ordinary Russians, who at worst filched a few boards or some cable, and proved themselves sober and canny in Russia’s first real elections. And in the end on some level he did not trust himself sufficiently to manage a freer people in a world that might be opposed at times to Russia but was hardly inimical to it.

He did succeed in restoring stability and a measure of self-respect to Russia after the bitter humiliations of the 1990s, no small achievement. At the beginning of his second term, with high oil prices buoying the economy and his popularity solid and high, Putin could have done something daring and transformative. Using his immense top-down power he could have in earnest begun the transformation of Russia from a petrostate to a twenty-first-century knowledge-based economy—not because a knowledge-based economy is “nicer” and “greener,” but because it is a more dependable producer of wealth over the long run and also because it involves larger numbers of people than the gas and oil industries, thereby making them stakeholders in society. In turn, that sense of belonging and connectedness could have served as the matrix for a new culture from which Russia’s new vision of identity would finally emerge.