Masha Gessen writes about Putin and the war in Ukraine

On August 20, 2020, Alexei Navalny fell ill during a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk. Navalny was taken to hospital, then taken to Berlin, where he was in a coma for several weeks, and it took him several months to learn to speak, write and walk again. At the same time, he began working with the investigative journalism group Billingcat to find out what had happened to him. They obtained evidence that he had been poisoned with a variant of the neurotoxin novitjok developed by the Russian military. They were also able to show that the assassination attempt had been carried out by a group of agents from the FSB – the secret police – who followed Navalny for two years. The same group had also overshadowed author Dmitry Bykov, who survived a 2019 assassination attempt, politician Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead in 2015, and at least three activists who died a few years before the poisoning of Navalny.

The FSB had a group tasked with assassinating Putin’s political opponents. Now we had detailed evidence of that – analyzes of Navalny’s blood, the names of the suspected killers and even an acknowledgment from one of them during a telephone conversation with Navalny. Finally, there was irrefutable evidence of what I had shown with clues in my book “The Man Without a Face” a decade earlier: that Putin’s regime was killing its critics, usually with poison.

When I sat point 2011, at the same time as there were mass demonstrations of an unprecedented kind in Russia, got an expression that Navalny found in general circulation. He called the party that controlled the regime a “party of thieves and swindlers”. The epithet gave me an uneasy feeling. It put into words how most people seemed to experience the regime – as meager and completely characterized by corruption and greed – but I thought that the words in a strange way also painted it beautiful. My biggest problem with Putin was not that he stole and amassed wealth, but that he murdered, both by starting a war and by hiring assassins. When Navalny could speak again, I asked him about this in an interview with The New Yorker: Was it not time to stop calling Putin a villain and start calling him a murderer? Navalny said no: “He is killing to protect his wealth.” Navalny thought that greed, not brutality, was what distinguished the regime the most.

Navalny returned to Russia in January 2021, was arrested on arrival and detained on suspicion of fictitious crime. There were demonstrations and the authorities cracked them down. In the spring, Navalny’s closest allies urged them to stop protesting. The risks were too great and the benefits non-existent: Navalny would obviously shake bars while Putin was in power. Meanwhile, Navalny’s organization was banned: all its leading activists either went into exile or were imprisoned. The strict measures continued for the rest of 2021 to an unprecedented extent. Independent media and individual journalists were classified as “foreign agents”, and many of them were forced to flee the country. Protesting in any conventional way became impossible: people could be arrested for writing on social media about the demonstrations or just for gathering, without even shouting slogans or carrying placards.

On February 21, 2022, Putin delivered a long, incoherent televised speech in which he claimed that Ukraine was not a real country – in his version of history it was a fabrication of Vladimir Lenin after the Russian Revolution – and that his government consisted of a bunch of extremist nationalists. puppets who oppressed ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine. Three days later, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian planes bombed Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, Lviv and other cities. Russian tanks and troops stormed and occupied the suburbs of Kherson, Mariupol, Chernihiv and Kiev. When they were forced to withdraw from Kyiv in April 2021, they left behind mass graves and streets strewn with the bodies of people executed from behind.

It said It is clear that the recent repressive measures taken by the Russian regime have been a preparation for what is happening now, in the new war: a week after the start of the full-scale invasion, the last free media were closed, or at least blocked from access in Russia, and in the Duma a law was passed that made it punishable by up to fifteen years in prison to spread “false” information about what the regime called the “special operation” in Ukraine – to call the war “war” could now result in imprisonment. Thousands were arrested for raising their voices against the war, although both “raised” and “votes” are an exaggeration: they were arrested and taken away for just showing up and standing still at night on Pushkin Square in Moscow; they were arrested for standing alone with placards, which was previously a permissible (albeit lonely) way of protesting.

But Putin had not only constantly revealed that his goal was to restore Russia’s lost imperialist greatness, he had also been clear on what means would be required.

Many of my friends and at least a quarter of a million other Russians left the country, driven by a sense of shame and fear of not being able to escape if they waited so long. Journalists, leaders of independent organizations, university teachers – those who left had constituted Russia’s civil society, as it turned out.

I had been in Moscow and Kyiv in the weeks before the invasion. In these cities, no one seemed to see this as a possibility – not because they distrusted the evidence that existed, but because it was impossible to believe in a war. It continued to be so while it was going on. My friends in Russia started calling Putin “the madman”. The question I most often heard from colleagues in the West was, “Is Putin crazy?” Like the question that had haunted him in the West during his first decade in power and beyond – “Who is Putin?” – was it incorrect. From the very beginning, Putin had told the world who he was. A large part of my book is about just that, about what we can and should learn by listening to what he has said about himself.

He has also told what he lives in for the universe. It is a universe in which Russia has been constantly humiliated since the fall of the Soviet Union, which Putin called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of our time.” When Estonian President Lennart Meri at an EU meeting in 1994 in Hamburg described the Soviet Union as “occupiers”, Putin, who was a bureaucrat in St. Petersburg at the time, got up and left the room. Twenty-eight years later, as president, he started a war to recapture Ukraine – while his government criminalized the use of words such as “occupation”, “invasion” and “war”. In his universe, Putin is anything but inconsistent.

But not only had Putin constantly revealed that his goal was to restore Russia’s lost imperialist greatness, he had also been clear on what means would be required. My book describes his path to power, to a forefront position and then to even greater power through the war in Chechnya in 1999.

It is also unlikely that the elite will carry out a palace coup because Putin is running his government like a mafia clan.

Since I reported from that war, I expected just the kind of photographs that then came from Butja and shocked the world. I had seen how Russian troops systematically and with brave courage attacked civilians. I had reported disappearances, summary executions and rapes. I had seen towns and villages reduced to concrete skeletons. I had also seen soldiers and officers praised for committing war crimes. That is how Russia waged war.

While Putin prepared the invasion of Ukraine threatened the United States with sanctions. Once the sanctions became a reality, they appeared impressive. In just a few days, Russia was cut off from Western financial systems, and large corporations – from McDonald’s and Coca-Cola to Apple and Ikea and various car, train and aircraft manufacturers – left Russia. Unemployment rose and the ruble plummeted, and despite the regime’s control over the information, panic sales occurred. Most Russians – those who spent most of their income on food – immediately felt the devastating effects of the sanctions: the cost of living skyrocketed immediately and vital medicines disappeared from pharmacies.

But then the ruble seemed to pick up, especially since the regime’s livelihood was gas and oil exports, not multinational business. Western European leaders said it would be impossible to give up Russian gas – which they said would be very expensive. Only very slowly did Western Europeans and the United States begin work to stop imports of Russian energy. At the time of writing, the prospect of such a stop being successful is both unclear and distant. If Russia is forced to stop selling gas and oil to the West, it would mean a huge blow to its economy – but that will not stop Putin. He will continue the war whatever the cost in money and human life. Navalny was wrong: brutality, domination, unlimited power are Putin’s ultimate goals. Wealth is just prey on the road and means to get there.

The rhetoric surrounding Western sanctions against Russia promotes another misconception: that economic pressure could accelerate the fall of the regime. But the Russians will not stand up and overthrow the government because protests are an unlikely response to economic strains in a totalitarian state and because protests would be brutally crushed. And it is also unlikely that the elite will carry out a palace coup because Putin controls his government like a mafia clan, where the rich, if pressured, would rather push each other to get closer to their “don” instead of conspiring for to overthrow him.

None of this is news. Putin has both openly said and shown us who he is and what kind of system he has built. Most Western leaders and media have refused to listen and open their eyes. Now Putin is destroying Ukraine, tearing down the security system that has been in place since World War II and threatening nuclear war.

If all this still seems too incredible to be true, it’s because we refuse to realize what we really already know.

Translation: Peter Samuelsson

The text is a new preface to the forthcoming new edition of Masha Gessen’s book “The Man Without a Face”, about Putin’s path to power.

Read more about the war in Ukraine