Ben Judah is a researcher at the Atlantic Council, an American think tank. Journalist and writer, he is the author of Fragile Empire (Yale University Press, untranslated), on Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It deciphers the worrying hardening of the power of the Russian president.
L’Express: Was the invasion of Ukraine decided by Vladimir Putin alone?
Ben Judah: Yes, or almost. Putin planned this attack secretly with a very small group of people, as if it was a conspiracy within the Russian government. There was no consultation with the different levels of the state apparatus. However, at the beginning of his reign, twenty-three years ago, he consulted and negotiated with high officials and businessmen. You could then say that he was at the head of a regime. Before annexing Crimea in 2014, Putin debated it with the country’s elite. But since then, Russia has moved in an increasingly authoritarian direction. With the Covid-19 epidemic, the phenomenon has accelerated considerably: the country has become what political scientists call a “personalist dictatorship”, where all power is in the hands of a single individual.
How to explain this evolution ?
Putin isolated himself for most of 2020, at his residence in Valdai, halfway between Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The highest officials of the regime, including his relatives, former KGB or the team of the mayor of Saint Petersburg met in the 1990s, had to submit to quarantines of two weeks to be able to access him. Even Igor Sechine, head of the state holding company Rosneft, who was supposed to be very close to him, had trouble seeing him. He cut himself off from day-to-day relations with most members of the Russian elite. Unlike Stalin, who liked to spend evenings drinking and watching movies with members of the Politburo at his dacha [résidence], Putin isolated himself from the world. So, in a certain sense, this situation is even scarier than under Stalin.
How has it evolved ideologically?
He lost all interest in the present, gradually lost interest in the management of the state and the economy. He almost only reads history books, mainly on the great tsars of Imperial Russia. Putin has, at the same time, surrounded himself with people representing a neo-imperialist tendency and advocating a nationalist orthodox religion. Over the past decade, he’s started talking like them. Yet when he came to power, he presented himself as a strongman who would defend the interests of the middle class and the economic elite, and maintain good relations with the West…
Who are the people who influenced him?
There was undoubtedly the billionaire Yuri Kovaltchouk, nicknamed Putin’s “personal banker” and who belongs to the collective of dachas founded by him on Lake Komsomolskoye, near Saint Petersburg. Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the security council, also accompanied this collective transformation. But the person who has most influenced this ideological journey is certainly Putin himself. If he had expressed a lack of interest in these theses, all those under his command would have immediately changed their tune. Putin has very deep beliefs.
Has he lost his sense of reality?
What Putin is doing is irrational if one judges as a Westerner living in a democracy, but not if one reasons as a dictator. In the summer of 2020, the popular uprising in Belarus convinced him that because of his proximity and fraternization with the West, the Russian-speaking world was in danger of collapsing. The Kremlin then began a slow – now complete – annexation of Belarus. And as borders closed due to the pandemic, Putin caught on believing that the Russian people would agree to break with the West. For a personalist dictator, it may be logical to enter a period of confrontation, likely to remobilize society.
However, he made mistakes…
As his power increases, the fear he instills increases, and people only tell him what he wants to hear, which impairs his ability to make decisions. Ill-informed, Putin believed that Western leaders would be unable to organize a collective response: a major miscalculation. He was also seriously mistaken about the extent of the sanctions that the latter would be ready to take – in particular against the Russian Central Bank. But when we know the professionalism of the senior officials of the Russian Ministry of Finance, we quickly understand that they were not listened to or that they were afraid to expose their reluctance.
In the military field, the analysis was just as catastrophic. Putin seemed to believe that Sergei Shoigu, Minister of Defense, had modernized the army, only to discover its poor performance on the ground, due to corruption and problems of governance. If the system was functioning normally, and not as a dictatorship, never would a person like Shoigu, who was a minister throughout the post-Soviet period, and acts like a lackey, have been appointed to such a position! But Russia has become a gerontocracy, ruled by influential and powerful people, who all think like Putin.
Finally, the Russians were blinded by their prejudices about Ukraine and completely underestimated its resistance. Believing to know this country because it belonged to the Soviet Union, they have never developed specific expertise there, as they have done for the Middle East or China.
Is Putin, in Russia, in a position of strength?
When a dictator has large-scale hydrocarbons, he does not need to negotiate with the population, because he can run the economy without them. In addition, Putin has the means to oppress society and can, thanks to his financial resources, rely on his security services [siloviki]and more specifically on the National Guard, a military unit responsible for the defense of the Kremlin.
For the past ten years, Putin has spent a lot of time offering “gifts” and political positions to this praetorian guard. Today, the siloviki have a strong hold on the political system. They have become ideologically radicalized. Cut off from the West by the sanctions, they look more and more like the Revolutionary Guards in Iran. Unlike in authoritarian regimes, personalist dictators are more prone to start wars, which makes them dangerous. But they are also more likely to lose them, because they make very bad military decisions…