Non-State: Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation (Part I)

Putin as a youth


PART I: The Rise to Power

Fifteen years ago Vladimir Putin was a rector at Leningrad State University in St. Petersburg, living in the city he had grown up in and working at the university which had given him his law degree in 1975. He had just quit the KGB a few months earlier during their ill-advised support for the 1991 putsch against Gorbachev which brought an end to seven decades of Communist rule in Russia. The Soviet system was in chaos; old guard elites were desperately trying to hold onto whatever influence they had left and a new generation of young entrepreneurs was licking their lips in anticipation of feasting on the carcass of the USSR. Vladimir Putin was afloat in this mess, politically ambitious and well connected in the KGB but with no means of advancement. One can imagine he watched on TV with his wife, Lyudmila, and his two young daughters, Maria and Katya, as Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day 1991 and Yeltin was sworn in. Fifteen years later Putin is no longer a spectator on the world stage. He has become the singular most powerful person in Russia. He has brought stability through autocracy and made Russia a genuine Eurasian power again. Part I of the study of this key world figure will go briefly into his biography to understand how he became so powerful and what forces drove his remarkable rise to power. The upcoming Part II will look at how he consolidated power within Russia and how his reign impacts the rest of the world.

Putin was born in 1952, the only child of a factory foreman. He was a good student, graduating from the law faculty at Leningrad State University at only twenty-three, and was also an excellent martial artist, practicing judo and sambo (a distinct Russian martial art). It was in his studies at Leningrad State University where he first met Anatoly Sobchak, a professor there who was (mildly) critical of the Soviet state. Sobchak had his doctoral thesis rejected for “ideological reasons”. However Sobchak had caught the eye of one up-and-coming Soviet apparatchik: Mikhail Gorbachev. This relationship was to help Sobchak, and consequently Putin, in later years. Putin was recruited into the KGB after finishing his degree, serving in the 1980s in Dresden, East Germany. This, he admitted, had been his dream job ever since watching spy movies as a child. He quit the KGB during their support for the 1991 coup, a politically savvy move in uncertain times. However he continued doing intelligence work while at Leningrad State University. He had evidently not lost touch with some important people in the security services.

Putin’s ambition soon took him away from the rector position and into the administration of Anatoly Sobchak, the new post-Soviet mayor of St. Petersburg. Sobchak had, probably with Gorbachev’s support, become a member of the People’s Congress of Deputies between 1989 and 1991. He became a leading pro-Gorbachev figure and grew to great national prominence during the 1991 coup. He led protests against the coup plotters and persuaded the army not to enter St. Petersburg. After the resignation of Gorbachev, Sobchak was arguably only behind Yeltsin in national popularity. Putin was in a remarkable position, both working for a popular anti-coup leader while retaining his contacts with the security services which had planned the coup. There were also two other ex-KGB agents who Putin brought into the Sobchak administration: Viktor Ivanov and Igor Sechin. These two would stay with him through his rise to power and now form the main part of the powerful group inside of the Kremlin known as the siloviki – originally only members of the security services, but has come to include many allies who were never security agents. Unfortunately Sobchak was caught up in some inappropriate financial transactions and lost his 1996 re-election campaign. Putin and his aides went to work in Moscow for Pavel Borodin, a top-ranking member of Yeltsin’s presidential administration. This appointment is somewhat mysterious; Russian politics at the time point to the conclusion that this was not a meritocratic appointment – someone with some leverage must have wanted Putin to get that job.

Whatever the case may be, Putin soon gained the trust of President Yeltsin. This also must have increased his power within the security service community as one of the only ex-KGB agents at that level of government. In July 1998 he was named deputy head of the presidential administration, and a few weeks later he became the head of the FSB, the successor to the KGB. Again he found himself in a remarkable position with support from Yeltsin and his billionaire backers as well as the shadowy siloviki network. In August 1999 Yeltsin made Putin the Prime Minister. It may not have seemed significant at the time, as Yeltsin had shuffled many bureaucrats through that position, but Putin’s move to Prime Minister was the last major jump in his career. It was Putin’s running of the war in Chechnya that won him support from both Yeltsin and the Russian people. There have been allegations, notably by the recently deceased Alexander Litvinenko, that the FSB was responsible for apartment bombings which precipitated the escalation in Chechnya (Chechen rebels were blamed for the bombs).

A tired Boris Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999, leaving Putin as the acting President. Putin barely needed this political boost. His allies in the Duma had just made strong gains in the recent election. He enjoyed the backing of Boris Berezovsky, the billionaire tycoon who had also backed Yeltsin. He easily won the election on March 26, 2000. One of his main opponents, Yevgeny Primakov, another former Prime Minister, dropped out in February and became an ally and advisor to Putin. He was able to easily defeat Communist leader Gennady Zhuganov; Zhuganov had done very well in the 1996 election but his party weakened as Russia stabilized somewhat in the late 1990's. The Communists had done badly in the same 1999 Duma elections that had seen Putin's allies gain seats.

No one knew what to expect from Vladimir Putin when he assumed the office in 2000. To many he seemed to be just another faceless bureaucrat, in the right place at the right time. Russians hoped he could bring stability to a country still recovering from the violent economic shocks of the 1990s. His powerful supporters, the billionaires and the siloviki, were both sure he was on their side -- that he was their front man who could assure that their vision for Russia would emerge in the new century. But it was only one vision that would matter -- the soberly ambitious vision of Vladimir Putin. He had been an ambitious child who wanted to become an intelligence agent, then an ambitious intelligence agent who wanted to make a place for himself in politics, and finally an ambitious politician who knew his place lay at the top. To fulfill ambitions for himself and for his country Putin would have to consolidate power by crafting political alliances on his terms -- and eliminating anyone who would not join him.