The release of the Russia collusion report by U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller – or rather its summary by Attorney General William Barr – was hailed as a complete exoneration by Donald Trump and his supporters. Mueller found no direct evidence of coordination between Trump or members of his entourage and Russia, confirming what Trump has been saying all along: that the entire investigation had been a “witch hunt” by the Democrats angry at their electoral defeat.
Another group who feel vindicated are – somewhat surprisingly – anti-Putin Russians. Despite mounting evidence of continuous secret contacts between Trump associates and various agents and representatives of the Russian government – and repeated lies about them which already got several people jail sentences – Putin’s critics in Russia maintained that there was no concerted plan by Russian intelligence to penetrate the Trump campaign and work with its members to get Trump elected.
Why? Because in their view Putin and his people lacked the intelligence needed to mount such an operation. In other words, Russian intelligence professionals were not professional enough for such a sophisticated effort.
As Masha Gessen, a writer for The New Yorker and a leading authority in the United States on things Russian, recently said in an interview, it was a bunch of freelancing hustlers who hung around the fringes of a third-rate unprofessional campaign which had no chance of winning, trying to make a quick buck by claiming that they had a direct line to Putin.
In fact, over the past two years I have been living in a schizophrenic world as far as Putin was concerned. The media in the US kept describing him as wily KGB mastermind with a grand plan to undermine Western democracy.
Meanwhile in Russia, Putin is seen as a minor thug from the mean streets of old Leningrad who had a very middling career in the KGB, handling informers in Dresden, in the former German Democratic Republic. He is a man of limited intelligence and few interests beyond maintaining youthful appearance by exercising fanatically and undergoing face lifts.
This view is confirmed whenever he appears in public, for instance in his annual direct line with Russian citizens.
Meanwhile, Russia’s state-sponsored terrorism abroad has distinguished itself by spectacular failures. The 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London was not only solved quickly by British police and laid at the feet of Putin, but the two perpetrators distinguished themselves by their idiotically incompetent in handling radioactive materials.
The attempted assassination of a KGB defector in Salisbury and the story of two gay fitness professionals “Petrov” and “Boshiriv” is still fresh in memory.
At home, Russia is run spectacularly badly and – yes – stupidly. Economic resources are wasted, human capital is fleeing, various programs instituted by the government are the laughingstock of the entire country. The economy is moribund. The investment climate is appalling. China, Russia’s strategic rival, is despoiling its natural resources in exactly the same way it does in Africa, while also colonizing its eastern territories.
All that is true, but the picture changes if you realize that the purpose of the Russian government is not to run the country but to enrich a small coterie of Putin’s associates and to preserve their wealth for generations. Then you’ll see that it is a spectacularly efficient as well as highly sophisticated system.
The purpose of any mafia organization is to leverage its particular skills in order to make money for its bosses. The purpose of the Russian government, which is a mafia organization at the state level, is to make money for Putin and a small number of his associates by transferring Russia’s wealth into their pockets.
It’s a money-making machine and even now, after becoming billionaires many times over, they continue to steal and despoil Russia. They can’t stop, because accumulating wealth is their nature.
But accumulating wealth is less than half of the job. They saw how the privatization of the 1990s created a bunch of Russian oligarchs – the so-called seven bankers, to use the expression popularized by one of them, the late Boris Berezovsky – who imagined that they were the new masters of the country. However, their wealth and their supposed power proved illusory overnight, the moment there was a new Boss in the Kremlin. Putin quickly dispossessed, exiled or jailed some of the 1990s oligarchs while putting others on notice that they were allowed to keep their wealth only if they toed the line.
With that cautionary tale in mind, Putin and his associates have set out not only to enrich themselves but to turn themselves into international robber baron dynasties.
Their first task has been to secure power base at home. Not just by eliminating or coopting all competing political and economic forces, But, more importantly, by turning the entire country into a mafia operation in which every government official at every level is a small rivet in a massive kleptocracy, with a license to enrich themselves within this system.
The system deploys violence selectively – as in the case of Skripal and a few others who died mysteriously both abroad and in Russia – to show that it will not tolerate traitors and whistle-blowers. It also uses the “Justice system” to keep the mafia members on their toes: there has been a wave of arrests for “corruption” hitting some apparently loyal members in the middle rungs of the system.
These are culling operations, and not evidence of the system starting to devour itself as some observers have claimed.
While opposition politicians dream of one day winning power from Putin, dismantling this mafia monster will probably be a massive and bloody task.
There is also an important international component to preserving the mafia family’s wealth and far-reaching business interests. Putin fears the West and believes it could overthrow him. While it may be a wholly irrational fear, there are various investigations into the provenance of his money. Worse, Western security services probably know quite well where Putin and his close associates hold their assets and in what form. The Panama scandal, which trained the unwelcome spotlight on a previously obscure classical musician Sergei Roldugin, was a scary call.
Strong, aggressive, militaristic Russia must therefore be a bulwark against Western interference. Ukraine is a key to Russian imperial ambitions, and it is no coincidence that since annexing Crimea Putin has taken Russia on an increasingly expansionist course – first to Syria and now to Venezuela, not to mention minor forays into places like Central African Republic.
Putin’s successes appear to be impressive – except we are now seeing similar regimes succeed all over the place. It is a global trend.
Indeed, Putin has not created the current drift toward right-wing kleptocracy – when self-serving autocratic rulers declare themselves representatives of the embattled majority ignored by “the elites” to grab power. The bunch of them who have popped up – Viktor Orban in Hungary and Xi in China, Erdogan in Turkey and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Mohammad bin Salman in Saudi Arabia to Matteo Salvini in Italy – resemble Putin in more than one way and are useful for his purposes. Having achieved power and in one way or another rigged their countries’ institutions in their favor, they are starting to build a coalition of mafia states.
Trump fits into this trend perfectly. He shares lots of traits with Putin. Like Putin, he is poorly educated, not especially smart and uninterested in anything but money and self-aggrandizement. Yet, he is remarkably, splendidly successful in achieving those two objectives.
The wind of history is clearly blowing in a way that propitiates Putin and Trump’s plans. That was also the case in the 1930s when a bunch of clowns managed for a time to divide Europe among them. It was also the case after World War II, when fairly gray bureaucrats in Washington and European capitals managed to change centuries of European history and ensure peace, stability and prosperity in the Western world for the past seven decades.
The wind of history is how seemingly incompetent people succeed. Things are currently falling for Putin and Trump. They may not have coordinated their efforts during the 2016 US presidential campaign but they certainly colluded. Yet, even the Mueller investigation, despite clear indications of treason and collusion, cleared them of criminal wrongdoing – or at least this is what the US attorney general claims.
The hope is that the wind of history shifts once more – to blow toward something more decent and less corrupt.
