A year ago I wrote a column about the two distinct Vladimir Putins that existed in Russia and in the West.
The former was a Botox-rejuvenated minor thug living in his own reality and presiding over a crumbling, corrupt mafia state.
Meanwhile, the latter was a devious behind-the-scenes puppeteer who influenced the Brexit vote in the UK, placed his agent in the White House and in many other ways manipulated the world order in his favor.
Both were on full display last week.
First, a massive Russian hack of US government agencies was reported, which had gone undetected for months and had caused incalculable damage to national security. Some members of Congress even suggested that it was an act of war. While top-level officials in Washington, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and outgoing Attorney General Bill Barr, accused Russia directly, President Donald Trump, predictably, played down the seriousness of the breach of security and mused that China, and not his friend Vlad, had been responsible.
That was the big bad Putin. At the same time, the bumbling buffoon Putin was revealed in Berlin, where opposition leader Alexey Navalny is recovering from an attempted poisoning by the chemical weapon Novichok. Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, in conjunction with Bellingcat investigators, CNN, Der Spiegel and El Pais, published a report on how FSB agents had tailed him for three years and tried to poison him in the city of Tomsk last August.
A few days later, at his annual press conference, Putin dismissed the investigation as fake news, asserting the innocence of the Federal Security Service (FSB) by the fact that Navalny was still alive. Had they wanted him dead, Putin declared with trademark cannibal laughter, they would’ve surely finished him off.
And then Navalny dropped a stink bomb on Russia’s president. It turns out that before the report was released he had pranked one of the eight FSB agents on the team of his killers and tricked him into recounting exactly how the operation was organized, why it went wrong, and what was done to eliminate traces of Novichok from Navalny’s clothing.
Watching Putin’s denials after listening to the agent’s detailed lowdown of their failed attempt to murder a Russian citizen makes him look like a superannuated circus clown spouting stupid unfunny jokes.
So, which of the two Putins is a real one?
The answer is probably both. Putin does preside over a corporation known variously over the past century as Cheka, GPU, NKVD, MVD, KGB and now FSB, which from its inception has been dedicated to murdering people, spying at home and abroad and making mischief around the world. In some aspects of their activities, the Bolsheviks were highly skillful. This particular organization was remarkably efficient. It murdered and imprisoned tens of millions of Russians and others who had the misfortune to fall under Soviet rule. And it set up an extraordinary network of spies and agents around the world, which functioned well throughout the Soviet era and beyond.
Under Putin, the FSB emerged as a winner in the post-Soviet power struggle. Putin crushed the oligarchs who thought they had come out on top in the 1990s but otherwise incorporated powerful Soviet groups into his massive FSB-led mafia state. They included loyal oligarchs, communist apparatchiks, a rapacious army of bureaucrats and Red Directors of communist-era industrial plants, other siloviki, the military, and career criminals.
Like other organized crime syndicates, the Russian mafia state is a complex feudal structure linked by various personal and group loyalties and torn by rivalries and turf wars. What is different is that this particular syndicate is actually the government of a major country. So rather than stealing clandestinely, the way Don Corleone and friends do in conventional states, in Russia the mafia steals openly. In fact, Putin encourages thievery and corruption at all levels, seeing it as a glue that holds the state together.
The problem is that the mafia has run Russia unchallenged for too long. As Navalny states in relation to the failed attempt to poison him, the episode reveals the degradation of the FSB along with the entire Russian government structure. For 20 years no one in a position of power has been doing their direct job, thinking instead only of ways to stuff their own pockets, ship assets out of the country, and establish foreign residency for themselves and their children.
Security services, operating under conditions of complete secrecy and with total impunity, have suffered an even greater degradation than the rest of the government. The epic fail that was the poisoning of Navalny follows the tragicomic screw up by the GRU in 2018, when two of its agents traveled to Salisbury, England, to poison former KGB officer Sergei Skripal.
What to make then of Russia’s nefarious activities in the West and, specifically, in the United States? Even in their decayed and corrupted condition, its networks managed to hack the 2016 U.S. presidential election to help Trump and to influence voters using troll farms. And now comes this sophisticated, prolonged hacking operation.
Soviet emigre writer Sergei Dovlatov once wrote: “We keep blaming Comrade Stalin, and he certainly deserves it. And yet I would like to ask: who was it who wrote those four million denunciations?”
Indeed, just as Stalin’s terror would not have been possible without cooperation by millions of ordinary Soviets, so too the Russian spying networks wouldn’t have succeeded in undermining America’s democracy and security without the connivance of millions of Americans.
The American government has been weakened over 40 years, since the election of Ronald Reagan who ridiculed the government and claimed that it was the problem, not part of the solution. Thereafter, multiple rounds of tax cuts starved its departments and agencies of money while saddling it with a massive debt burden. Deregulation tied its policy-making hands, leaving the greed of the private sector and of rich individuals to determine the direction of the economy. Most damaging of all, however, has been the falling prestige and remuneration in the public sector, sending the country’s best and brightest to Wall Street and not Washington, DC.
The distrust of the government—and the overall establishment—was probably the reason why so many Americans fell for the Russian disinformation campaign in 2016, and why so many continue to spurn legitimate news sources in favor of fringe propaganda outlets. It was also why America watched with complete indifference while the Trump administration dismantled the U.S. government, leaving a large number of key positions unfilled and eliminating vital agencies and programs. Hence Washington missed the emergence of a new infection in China and mounted a woefully inadequate response when it reached its own shores, so that the U.S. continues to lead the world in per capita infections and deaths.
And yes, this is why America surrendered to Putin’s hackers. Considering how low Russia’s competence has fallen after two decades of Putin’s misrule, this is something the new U.S. administration should think long and hard about.
