While the Russian president has all but rehabilitated Stalin, he has above all drawn inspiration from Andropov and Primakov, at the head of a Russia that will not accept it lost the Cold War, just as Hitler’s Germany did not accept the defeat of 1918.
When we think of what Vladimir Putin does to and for Russia, we most often think of the figure of Joseph Stalin, whom he has rescued from the opprobrium into which he had fallen since the Khrushchev Report, communicated behind closed doors on February 24, 1956 to the 1,436 delegates of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Yet, while the Russian president reveres the Father of Nations as the man with the strong hand everyone feared, his methods are more akin to those of Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB from 1967 to 1982, before he succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU.
Vladimir Putin joined the KGB in the late 1970s, and trained under him. Andropov was no soft touch, quite the contrary. He led the crackdown on Soviet dissidents with cool, targeted terror, far removed from the massive, murderous purges of the Stalinist era. Putin has followed in his footsteps, methodically reducing the expression of dissenting opinions to almost nothing. His war in Ukraine has led to a draconian tightening of the screws but he did not wait until 2022 to do so. His presidency began with a crackdown on Russia’s major broadcast media and oligarchs. Nor did he shy away from the occasional physical elimination of those who did not bend over backwards or “betrayed” him, taking up a tradition dating back to Lenin and his famous “poison laboratory.”
Wielding the stick was not Andropov’s only talent. He was also a master of seduction and disinformation. For the West, he had built up an image of a modernist, a man of refinement and a lover of jazz. From the outset of his reign, Putin took his cue from him. True, he presented himself to Russian public opinion as a kind of repentant thug who was not averse to the use of force, but at first he sold the West the image of a man who wanted to be a reformer, but who was also tough. A sort of post-Soviet Stolypin.
Strengthening the hold of the siloviki
Andropov was, above all, the first senior Soviet leader to understand the irretrievable decline of the USSR1 and, from that moment on, to devise a strategy for rebuilding the power of the siloviki caste, the men of the “power structures” (army, police, security services, etc.), both in Russia and abroad. In the early 1980s, the former head of the KGB doubted that the Communist Party was capable of recovering from the stagnation into which it had plunged the country under Brezhnev. In fact, what happened with his protégé Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he had promoted in the belief that he could lead reforms, showed that the CPSU was no more than a dead star. On the other hand, it was under Gorbachev that the tools were developed – cooperatives and “private” banks – which, under the nose of the West, gave the “services” abroad the means to pursue and extend their intelligence and influence activities. From this came the oligarchs, who then learned the cost of not being “loyal” to their protector.
Since his return from Dresden in the then GDR, Putin has followed in Andropov’s footsteps to strengthen the hold of the siloviki, both in Russia and beyond its borders. He first did this methodically in Saint Petersburg, building up a network of contacts there from 1991 onward, which led to his appointment to the Kremlin administration in 1997. With the support of this network, he was then able to impose himself on Boris Yeltsin, first becoming head of the FSB in 1998, then Prime Minister in 1999, before acting as President of the Russian Federation and being elected in 2000.
In line with the Primakov doctrine
He was inspired by another man, also a senior KGB official: Yevgeny Primakov. Primakov, a great connoisseur of the Middle East in Soviet times, director of the prestigious Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO) from 1985 to 1989, and head of Russian foreign intelligence since 1991, succeeded the very Westernist Andrey Kozyrev as Foreign Minister in 1996, marking a real turning point in Russian diplomacy. Kozyrev was an “Atlanticist”: he believed that Russia’s future lay in cooperation with the United States.
The former spy Primakov was convinced that the reconstruction of Russian power – a “poor power,” to quote French economist Georges Sokoloff – depended on the creation of partnerships with countries that wanted to free themselves from or oppose American domination, in Asia, the Near and Middle East, Africa and Latin America. It is true that Putin saw to it that he was ousted in May 1999, because the latter, then Prime Minister, had become a serious rival, capable of successfully running for the Russian presidency. But the geopolitical action of Russia, which since 2007 has explicitly aimed to oppose the West with a “Global South”, of which the Kremlin’s host claims to be the leader, is in line with the Primakov doctrine. Moreover, even if this cannot be achieved without China, it was Moscow that initiated the creation of the BRICs, (Brazil, Russia, India and China) whose first summit was held in Yekaterinburg in 2009.
The two men had shared the same indignation in March 1999, on learning of NATO’s intervention against Yugoslavia, due to the deteriorating situation in Kosovo. At the time, Primakov was flying to the United States, where he was expected to make an official visit. Informed by US Vice-President Al Gore of the imminence of air strikes, he ordered his plane to turn back. Putin has repeatedly invoked this moment to denounce the “unipolar world” and American hegemony.
Russia’s German syndrome
Andropov and Primakov thus served as a model, both internally and externally, for restoring the strength of a Russia no longer confused with the will of the Party, but with the interests and projects of the “services.” From the outset of his reign, he has been determined to demonstrate his implacable resolve. From August 1999 onward, there was the Second Chechen War, with all its horrors, but there was also the chilling episode of the abandonment of the crew of the Kursk, the submarine that sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000, when these men could probably have been saved if he had accepted the help offered by the British and Norwegians in time. The Russian president’s intention was to send a clear signal that, from now on, Russia would distance itself from the West, whatever the cost. It was the pride of a regime that had not accepted the collapse of Soviet power, a regime that considered that Russia had not lost the Cold War, a regime that did not accept that NATO had survived after the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact.
This denial leads us to draw a parallel between post-1991 Russia and Germany in the aftermath of the First World War. For the Germans, the defeat of 1918 was not a defeat at all: the country had remained intact and had not experienced war on its own soil. The Treaty of Versailles was seen as an injustice, a historical lie and, what is more, the cause of the economic collapse of the Weimar Republic. Hitler presented himself as the man of German recovery. The rest is history. Since 1999, Vladimir Putin has presented himself as the man who intends to restore both the collective power and honor of Russia and Russians.Today, the question for the West is whether, like the Führer, Vladimir Vladimirovich is definitively locked into a monomaniacal logic, unaware of the damage his war is doing to his own country, ruining it economically and demographically. In which case, there is no choice but to oppose him in the most determined manner, to the bitter end. Nor is there any other choice but to give ourselves the means to make the Russians understand that their President is leading them toward the abyss. That means not backing down and showing that you are prepared to hold out for the long haul. Perhaps then, Putin will be inspired one last time by Andropov. Paradoxically, this implacable man, who had succeeded in mobilizing huge crowds of pacifists in the West behind the slogan “Rather red than dead,” was able to temper the siloviki ‘s will to power on the brink of the abyss with solid realism: Aware that the arm-wrestling match with the West at the end of the 1970s was leading the USSR into a dead end, he put an end to the Euromissile crisis by dismantling the SS20 and reopening the way for negotiations. This led to the signing of the START 1 treaty in July 1991, by George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev. If there is still time for Putin to come to his senses, there is no sign yet that he will. In the coming weeks, any sign of weakness on the part of the West can only convince him that, despite Russia’s hecatomb to destroy Ukraine, he still has a chance of winning.
Jean-François Bouthors is a journalist and essayist, contributing to the magazine Esprit and serving as an editorialist for Ouest-France. He is the author of several books, including Comment Poutine change le monde published by Editions Nouvelles François Bourin in 2016.
Footnotes
- It was he who commissioned the famous Novosibirsk report, written by Tatiana Zaslavskaya (with the support of economist Abel Aganbegian), which drew up the conclusions of a catastrophic situation. He seems to have organized its leak to The Washington Post in 1983, to circumvent internal resistance from the Communist Party apparatus and the conservative fringe of the KGB.
