At first, Putin had little interest in ideology. Then a vision
emerged of a Eurasian Russian imperium, fending off Western decay. Credit
Illustration by Barry Blitt.
In
January, 2012, Michael McFaul, a tenured political scientist from Stanford and
President Obama’s chief adviser on Russia through the first term, arrived in
Moscow with his wife and two sons to begin work as the United States Ambassador.
In Palo Alto and Washington, D.C., the McFauls had lived in modest houses. In
Moscow they took up residence at Spaso House, a vast neoclassical mansion that
was built by one of the wealthiest industrialists in imperial Russia. Spaso
features a vaulted formal dining room and a chandeliered ballroom, where William
C. Bullitt, the U.S. Ambassador in the thirties, used to throw parties complete
with trained seals serving trays of champagne and, on one memorable occasion, a
menagerie of white roosters, free-flying finches, grumpy mountain goats, and a
rambunctious bear. one guest, Mikhail Bulgakov, wrote about the bash in his
novel “The Master and Margarita.” Another, Karl Radek, a co-author of the 1936
Soviet constitution, got the bear drunk. The bear might have survived the
decade. Radek, who fell out with Stalin, did not.
On his first night in
Spaso, McFaul wearily climbed the stairs, from the stately rooms on the ground
floor to the living quarters on the second, and he noticed along the way a wall
filled with black-and-white photographs of his predecessors, including the “wise
men” of mid-century: W. Averell Harriman, Charles (Chip) Bohlen, George F.
Kennan. Every diplomat and scholar who thinks about Russia thinks about
Kennan—his mastery of the language, his chilly, and chilling, brand of élitism,
and, particularly, his influence on the strategic posture of the West from the
end of the Second World War until the collapse of the Soviet imperium. Kennan,
who lived to be a hundred and one, had been Ambassador for only four months
when, in September of 1952, Stalin declared him persona non grata and ordered
him out of the country.
McFaul had no reason to
expect that sort of hostility from the Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev. As a
policy expert who served on Obama’s National Security Council, McFaul was a
principal architect of the “reset,” a kind of neo-détente with Moscow. When, in
September, 2011, Obama nominated McFaul to be his envoy to Moscow, relations
with the Kremlin were hardly amorous, but a businesslike atmosphere usually
prevailed. Obama and Medvedev did solid work on arms control, antiterrorism
efforts, Iran’s nuclear program, and the war in Afghanistan. To the bitter
outrage of Vladimir Putin, Medvedev’s predecessor and patron, Medvedev even
agreed to abstain from, rather than veto, a U.N. Security Council resolution
approving NATO air strikes in Libya. But a week after McFaul’s
official appointment was announced Putin declared that he would return from the
shadows and run for President again in March, 2012. This high-handed “castling”
maneuver soured spirits in Moscow, sparking a series of demonstrations in
Bolotnaya Square and elsewhere in downtown Moscow. The protesters’ slogan was
“Russia Without Putin.”
In the three months
between McFaul’s appointment and his arrival in Moscow, a great deal changed.
Putin, feeling betrayed by both the urban middle classes and the West, made it
plain that he would go on the offensive against any sign of foreign
interference, real or imagined. A raw and resentful anti-Americanism, unknown
since the seventies, suffused Kremlin policy and the state-run
airwaves.
As a new Ambassador,
McFaul was hardly ignorant of the chill, but he launched into his work with a
characteristic earnestness. “Started with a bang,” he wrote in his official
blog. During the next two years, McFaul would be America’s primary witness to
the rise of an even harsher form of Putinism—and, often enough, he would be its
unwitting target.
William Burns, a former
U.S. Ambassador to Russia and then a deputy to Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, had, coincidentally, come to Moscow that January, and together McFaul
and Burns visited a range of Kremlin officials. McFaul also presented his
diplomatic credentials to the Russian Foreign Ministry. The next day, they were
scheduled to meet at the U.S. Embassy with some of the best-known figures in
human-rights circles and leaders of the opposition. When McFaul saw the
schedule, he knew it was part of a traditional “dual-track” diplomacy—officials
first, then the opposition—but he was also aware of Putin’s darkening mood.
Putin had publicly accused Hillary Clinton of giving “the signal” that sparked
the Bolotnaya demonstrations. He was also familiar with McFaul’s biography—his
long-standing relationships with liberal activists, the shelf of books and
articles he’d published on democratization.
McFaul was nervous about
these meetings, but, he said, “I was the democracy guy, so we went forward.” The
visitors to the Embassy included some of Putin’s fiercest critics, and, after
their session with McFaul and Burns, representatives of state television lobbed
accusatory questions at them as if they had just received marching orders for an
act of high treason.
That night, Channel one,
the biggest television station in Russia, turned its rhetorical howitzer on the
new Ambassador. Mikhail Leontiev, an acid-tongued conservative who hosts a show
called “Odnako” (“However”), declared that McFaul was an expert not on Russia
but on “pure democracy promotion.” In the most withering tone he could summon,
Leontiev said that McFaul had worked for American N.G.O.s backed by American
intelligence; he had palled around with anti-Kremlin activists like the
“Internet Führer,” Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption crusader who had,
damningly, spent some time at Yale. (The listener was meant to interpret “some
time at Yale” as roughly “some time inside the incubator of Russophobic
conspiracy.”) Leontiev also noted that McFaul had written a book about the
Orange Revolution, in Ukraine, and another called “Russia’s Unfinished
Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin.”
“Has Mr. McFaul arrived
in Russia to work in his specialty?” Leontiev said. “That is, to finish
the revolution?”
Like any effective
propagandist, Leontiev had artfully woven the true, the half true, and the
preposterous into a fabric of lurid colors. When I asked him about the broadcast
recently, he smiled and shrugged: “What can I say? It was very convenient.
McFaul made himself vulnerable and we exploited that.”
Andranik Migranyan, a
Putin loyalist who directs a Russian-financed institute in New York, told me,
“You can’t come and start your ambassadorship by seeing the radical opposition.”
He compared it to a Soviet diplomat coming to Washington heading straight for
“the Black Panthers or the Weathermen.”
At first, McFaul took
the attack personally, not yet realizing that he was, for Putin and official
Moscow, a mere foil. “The shit that Leontiev put out on me—this haunted me for
the rest of my time in Russia. I was made out to be the guy who came to Moscow
to foment revolution,” McFaul told me. “Meanwhile, I was feeling really bad
about this fiasco, and in D.C. the mid-level people”—in the Administration—“were
saying, Why is McFaul doing this? It was affirmation of why you don’t send
people like McFaul to Moscow. Like I was the one screwing up the U.S.-Russia
relationship.”
A
generation ago, in 1990, as the Soviet Union was lurching toward implosion—with
the economy cratering, the Communist Party unravelling, the republics rebelling,
the K.G.B. plotting its revenge—McFaul, a graduate student in his mid-twenties,
kept showing up in Moscow’s “pro-democracy” circles, hanging out, asking
questions, offering assistance and advice. McFaul was a sunny, eager guy, with a
wide-open ｅxpression, shaggy blond hair, effortful Russian, and an irrepressible
curiosity. He had grown up rough in a mining town in Montana. His mother was a
secretary, his father a saxophone player in a country-and-Western band. In
Moscow, operating in a culture steeped in fatalism and irony, McFaul was the
most optimistic, least ironical young man you’d ever want to meet. He handed out
instructional manuals translated into Russian with titles like “How to Run for
Office.” He was determined to help establish liberal values and
institutions—civil society, free speech, democratic norms—in a land that, for a
thousand years, had known only absolutism, empire, and the knout. “That’s me,”
he says even now. “Mr. Anti-Cynicism. Mr. It Will All Work Out.”
McFaul was ostensibly in
Moscow to write a doctoral dissertation on Soviet-African relations. He was, in
truth, bored with the quantitative trends in his field of political science—the
stark modellings, ziggy graphs, and game theory that seemed so abstract when all
around him was the nerve-racked excitement of revolt, the intrigue of political
debate and awakening in meeting halls that stank of cheap cigarettes and wet
wool. Moscow at that time was a pageant, irresistible to anyone with even a
trace of democratic idealism and fellow feeling for the Russians. The sense of
historical drama was unmistakable. “Like being in a movie,” McFaul
recalled.
The Eastern and Central
Europeans, with their simpler narrative of liberation from Soviet occupation,
had already sprung the lock of history—or so it seemed—and now the capital of
empire was up for grabs. McFaul was addicted to the excitements of revolution.
You kept seeing him at demonstrations on Manezh Square or at Luzhniki Stadium,
alongside young activists aligned with groups like Democratic Russia and
Memorial; there he was at public forums and meetings where the fevered talk was
all about how Mikhail Gorbachev was finished, Boris Yeltsin was the answer, and
it was only a matter of time before some form of counterattack would come from
the reactionary elements inside the secret services and the Communist Party, the
gray, angry men, who saw their footing in the world—their power, their salaries
and privileges—slipping away.
When McFaul took the
time to read, it was rarely for his dissertation. He lived in a miserable hotel
room and pored over Crane Brinton’s study of the cycles of rebellion and
reaction in “The Anatomy of Revolution,” Trotsky’s account of the Bolshevik
Revolution, and the work of the “transitologists” Guillermo O’Donnell and
Philippe Schmitter, who explored the process by which one political system
transforms into another—anything that might feed his understanding of what he
was seeing on the streets and what he was hearing in his interviews with the
political actors of Moscow: the radicals, the reactionaries, the manifesto
drafters.
McFaul
had first visited the Soviet Union in 1983, when he was an undergraduate at
Stanford. The Palo Alto campus, with its gleam of wealth, had pushed him to the
political left. His summer at Leningrad State University was his first time
abroad. He was at ease there. After classes, he met with dissidents and
consorted with the fartsovshchiki , the young hustlers of bluejeans and
hard currency. There are people who encounter Russia and see nothing but the
merciless weather, the frowns, the complicated language that, in casual
encounters, they hear as rudeness, even menace; and there are those who are
entranced by the literature and the music and the talk—the endless talk about
eternal matters. McFaul was attuned to this particular kind of Russian romance.
But his unusual immersion in politics made him stand out from his
fellow-students. He believed, without reservation, that he could take part in
the transformation of the world.
That was his habit of
mind, a peculiarly American one. He was an idealist, at once ambitious and
determinedly naïve. When McFaul was applying for a Rhodes Scholarship, his
interviewer took note that McFaul, along with an intelligent and rambunctious
classmate named Susan Rice, had helped lead the anti-apartheid movement on the
Stanford campus. They occupied a building, campaigned for divestment. Among
McFaul’s academic interests was the range of liberation movements in
post-colonial Africa: Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. How did McFaul
reconcile his desire to study at Oxford on a Rhodes, the interviewer inquired,
with the fact that its benefactor, Cecil Rhodes, had been a pillar of white
supremacy? What would he do with such “blood money”?
“I will use it to bring
down the regime,” McFaul said. In the event, both he and Rice won the blood
money and went to Oxford.
Over the years, as he
developed as a scholar, McFaul made frequent trips to Moscow, and, because of
his refusal to stay in the library, some Russian officials grew convinced that
he was working for Western intelligence, doing what he could to hasten the fall
of the Kremlin’s authority. They took his openhearted activism to be a cover for
cunning.
In 1991, McFaul was in
St. Petersburg, trying to organize a seminar on local government. He found
himself doing business with a man from the mayor’s office named Igor Sechin. He
and Sechin took an immediate liking to each other. It turned out that, like
McFaul, Sechin was interested in Mozambique. They both spoke Portuguese. Sechin
never actually said that his familiarity with matters Mozambican came from
having been a young Soviet intelligence operative in Maputo, or that he still
was a K.G.B. officer, but McFaul knew the score. What he discovered, as they
talked, was that Sechin assumed that McFaul, too, was an intelligence
agent.
It was an encounter with
a certain historical freight: a generation later, when McFaul became Obama’s
Ambassador to Russia, Sechin became the president of Rosneft, Russia’s
state-owned, hugely profitable energy conglomerate. He would also be the most
important counsellor to the same man he was working for way back in 1991: a
career intelligence officer and deputy mayor named Vladimir Vladimirovich
Putin.
On the day McFaul was
preparing to go home, he went to see his academic supervisor in Moscow, Apollon
Davidson. He thanked Davidson and said he’d had a fantastic time and was hoping
to return in a few months.
“You are never
coming back,” Davidson said.
McFaul was shocked.
There was a taxi outside idling, waiting to take him to the airport.
“You came here to do one
project,” Davidson said, “and you did a lot of other things—and it
isn’t going to happen again.”
“There
is a file on me,” McFaul said. A couple of decades ago, a Russian friend from
perestroika days who is “still in politics” told him, “I just read something
disturbing about you that says you are C.I.A.” McFaul denied it, but he could
see that his friend was impressed. The file, after all, had been marked
“Sovershenno Sekretno”—“Top Secret.”
“In government, I’ve
seen the power of getting a file marked ‘Top Secret,’ ” McFaul said.
In 1996, President
Yeltsin was running for reëlection against Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of what
was left of the Communist Party. After a few years in office, Yeltsin had soiled
his reputation as a reforming democrat. There was his strategy of brutal
overkill in Chechnya and the way he empowered, under the banner of
privatization, a small circle of billionaire oligarchs to soak up Russia’s
resources and help run the country. “Democracy” was roundly known as
dermokratiya —“shitocracy.” Yeltsin’s approval numbers plunged to the
single digits. For months, it seemed entirely possible that Zyuganov, who
attacked the injustices of the Yeltsin regime in favor of the old ideology,
could win. McFaul, who had established an outpost of the Carnegie Center in
Moscow, had attracted attention in Yeltsin’s circles by writing an article about
how Yeltsin could win.
“They know me here.” Buy As Print »
Yeltsin was ailing,
alcoholic, and often out of sight. He left his campaign largely to shadowy
figures like his bodyguard, Aleksandr Korzhakov. In January, McFaul got a call
from “a guy—let’s call him Igor—one of Korzhakov’s guys.” They met at the
President Hotel, Yeltsin’s campaign headquarters. “The people I knew were on the
ninth floor,” McFaul said to me. “He was on the tenth: metal detectors, guys
with guns. And he told me, ‘I am intelligence. I work for Korzhakov. I am in
charge of the analytic center.’ ”
Later that year, Igor
asked to meet with McFaul again. “We need to have a quiet conversation about the
elections,” Igor said. “Let’s go out to Korzhakov’s dacha.”
McFaul was nervous, but
an intermediary from Yeltsin’s team told him, “You are better off going than not
going.” He called his wife, who was in Palo Alto, and told her, “If I am not
back by the end of the day, tell the Embassy.”
McFaul met his contact
at the Kremlin and got in his official car, the standard black Volga sedan. They
reached the dacha, one of Stalin’s old country residences. “The Chechen war was
going hot and heavy, so there was lots of security and guys with guns,” McFaul
recalled.
Yeltsin’s people engaged
McFaul in a long discussion about the elections. As the conversation developed,
McFaul realized that they were implying two things: that he was a C.I.A. agent
and that the Yeltsin forces might postpone the elections. What they wanted from
Washington, they made clear, was “coöperation.” If the election was postponed,
they said, they wanted Washington to “hold your nose and support us.”
Finally, McFaul broke in
and said, “Hey, I’m just an untenured assistant professor at
Stanford.”
Igor replied, “Stop! I
know who you are! I wouldn’t have brought you here if I didn’t.”
The experience, McFaul
said, “freaked me out.” He told the Embassy about it.
As the election
approached, Yeltsin fired Korzhakov and relied on the largesse, the media
outlets, and the strategic advice of the tight circle of oligarchs, who had met
secretly in Davos and decided that they could not afford to lose their
patron.
On Election Day, “the
good guys won,” as McFaul puts it. Yeltsin prevailed. McFaul’s book on the
subject, “Russia’s 1996 Presidential Election: The End of Polarized Politics,”
is not only dull; it is a whitewash, far too cursory about the shabby nature of
the election. When I conveyed that to McFaul, he did not dispute the point,
instead saying that the book was “an illustration of the tension between being
an advocate and an analyst at the same time.” McFaul said that his academic
friends thought the best outcome would have been a fair election; his friends in
Russian political circles thought a Zyuganov victory would be a catastrophe,
morally worse than a rigged ballot. “I was tormented about that,” he
said.
McFaul
has written and edited many books on Russia and political transition—some of
them useful, some pedestrian, none enduring. From the start, his idealism and
ambition lured him away from the library and toward politics and the powerful.
He began visiting Washington to talk periodically with members of the Bush
Administration, including Bush and Cheney. The Administration’s neoconservatism
and McFaul’s liberal interventionism overlapped in the desire to press the
“democracy agenda” in the former states of the Soviet Union. In 2004, McFaul
counselled the Edwards and the Kerry campaigns.
In late 2006, McFaul got
a call from Anthony Lake, who had been the national-security adviser in the
Clinton Administration. Lake said that he was putting together a foreign-policy
advisory team for “the next President of the United States”—Barack Obama. McFaul
told Lake that he was already committed. He was planning to work with Edwards
again.
A half hour later, Susan
Rice, his old friend from Stanford and Oxford, called him.
“I am part of this
thing, too, so get your shit together and join!” she crooned.
“That’s Susan’s
personality, and so I said, ‘Yes! Of course!’ The stakes for me were low. Susan
had had to defect from the Clintons, and they were tough on her, with all kinds
of nasty-grams about people who aren’t loyal.”
Rice had already put in
place a kind of shadow National Security Council for Democrats, with various
foreign-policy mavens charged with heading up regional directorates. The group
was later dubbed the Phoenix Initiative, a name intended to send the message
that, in the wake of the Iraq War and the Bush Administration’s Vulcans,
American foreign policy, under a Democratic President, would, like the mythical
bird, rise from the ashes. Rice declared that the group’s thinking had broken
free of the traditional clash in American foreign-policy thinking between
realist power politics and liberal idealism. The emphasis was less on big-power
politics than on problems like climate change and terrorism, issues that
emphasized international institutions and coöperation. Around the same time,
Rice and Lake also set up an advisory board for their candidate. McFaul led the
division dedicated to the former Soviet Union.
The 2008
Presidential-election contest between Obama and John McCain was mainly about
domestic issues. Russia was barely on the agenda—until the summer of 2008, when
Russia and Georgia went to war. “McCain wanted more conflict, and we were the
ones pulling back,” McFaul said. “That was the whole analytic frame of the
campaign. . . . We were on defense.” McFaul was among those who pressed Obama to
toughen his language and prevailed.
The episode made an
impression. Benjamin Rhodes, a close adviser to Obama on foreign policy, said
that McFaul’s scholarly background provided “context” that the President
appreciated during the campaign and throughout the first term. They talked about
everything from just-war theory to questions of development, and yet, McFaul
told me, on the “big debate” over realism versus internationalism, he could
never quite figure out Obama. “For Barack Obama, it is essential to end those
two wars”—Iraq and Afghanistan—“and this retrenchment is in the national
interest,” he said. “What I never knew at the time is where he came down on the
question of hard interest versus values.”
During one argument
among aides in the White House, McFaul took the position that nations need not
wait for the development of a middle class before building democratic
institutions. As McFaul recalled, “Somebody said, ‘That’s interesting, but
that’s not what the President thinks.’ And I said, ‘That’s interesting, but if
that is what he thinks he is wrong.’ It was a jarring moment, and I thought I
might even get fired.” He recalled arguing with Tom Donilon, the
national-security adviser, about the issue. “Donilon would tell me, Obama is not
really interested in that stuff. He’s just a realist.” And yet McFaul,
who is not shy about suggesting his own influence, pointed out that Obama gave
speeches in Cairo, Moscow, and Accra, in 2009, “making my arguments about why
democracy is a good thing. . . . Those speeches made me more optimistic, after
all those colleagues telling me he is just a realist.”
McFaul
briefs Obama as N.S.C. senior adviser for Russian affairs, February, 2010. Photograph by Pete Souza/White
House.
“Obama has multiple
interests he is thinking about,” McFaul went on. “He has idealist impulses that
are real, and then impulses about concerns about unintended consequences of
idealism. We were in the Roosevelt Room during the Egypt crisis, and I asked,
‘What do you think?’ He said, ‘What I want is for this to happen
quickly and the Google guy to become President. What I think is that
this will be a long-drawn-out process.’ ”
Obama’s advisers and the
Washington policy establishment have all spent countless hours trying to square
the President’s admiration of George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft—classic
realists—with his appointments of interventionists like McFaul, Rice, and
Samantha Power. In the end, one leading Russia expert, who has worked for two
Administrations, told me, “I think Obama is basically a realist—but he feels bad
about it.”
In his
first two terms in office, from 2000 to 2008, Vladimir Putin made his priority
the reëstablishment of a strong state. He disempowered disloyal regional
governors, crushed the oligarchs who did not heed his insistence that they stay
out of politics, and obliterated the leadership of the separatist uprising in
Chechnya. He took complete control of the main television channels and neutered
any opposition political parties. He established postmodern state symbols and an
anthem that combined features of the imperial and Communist past. But he was
not, foremost, an ideologue. Kleptocracies rarely value theoretical tracts. They
value numbered accounts. They value the stability of their own
arrangements.
In the heart of the
Soviet era, Kremlin leaders, including Lenin and Stalin, wrote scholastic
treatises dictating the ideological course for many aspects of life. At the
heart of the Communist Party Central Committee was the department of ideology,
which laid down the law on everything from the permissible interpretation of
history to the dissidents and artists who had to be suppressed, imprisoned, or
exiled. By the late Soviet period, though, K.G.B. officers like Putinwere nearly
as dismissive of Communist ideology as the dissidents were. “The Chekists in his
time laughed at official Soviet ideology,” Gleb Pavlovsky, a former adviser to
Putin, told me. “They thought it was a joke.” Putin, in 1999, admitted that
Communism had been a “blind alley, far away from the mainstream of
civilization.”
Buoyed by the sharp rise
in energy prices, Putin was able to do what Yeltsin had not: he won enormous
popular support by paying salaries and pensions, eliminating budget deficits,
and creating a growing urban middle class. It was hardly a secret that Putin had
also created his own oligarchy, with old Leningrad pals and colleagues from the
security forces now running, and robbing, the state’s vast energy enterprises.
This almost unimaginably corrupt set of arrangements, which came to be known as
Kremlin, Inc., outraged nearly everyone, but the relative atmosphere of
stability, in which tens of millions of Russians enjoyed a sense of economic
well-being and private liberty, provided Putin with a kind of authoritarian
legitimacy.
This relative prosperity
and personal freedom was, in fact, unprecedented. For the first time, millions
of Russians took vacations abroad, got mortgages, bought foreign cars,
remodelled their kitchens, acquired iPhones. The state was indifferent to the
way people lived—what they read, where they worshipped, whom they shared a bed
with. A sitcom called “Nasha Rasha” featured a gay factory worker in the Urals.
“For the States or Sweden, it would have been politically incorrect,” Alexander
Baunov, a columnist for the Web site slon.ru, told me. “But for Russia it was a
real improvement! No one killed him!” The state media were under close watch by
the authorities, and there were occasional arrests to show where the limits
were, but there was no return to Sovietism. Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s deputy
chief of staff, called the system “sovereign” democracy.
Nor was Putin
aggressively anti-American in his first years in power. He craved membership in
the world economy and its institutions. He was the first foreign leader to
telephone George W. Bush on 9/11 and offer assistance in Afghanistan. He
abhorred the influence of foreign N.G.O.s, thinking that they undermined Russian
interests, but he wanted membership in the global club. He even talked about
Russia joining NATO . “Russia is part of the European culture,” he
told the BBC, in 2000. “And I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from
Europe and what we often call the civilized world. So it is hard for me to
visualize NATO as an enemy.” The spirit of relative amity did not
last.
In 2009,
after Putin had ceded the Presidency to Medvedev, he hosted Obama at his country
residence and lectured the U.S. President on the history of American deceptions.
It was an hour before Obama managed more than “hello.” McFaul, who was at that
meeting, said, “It was grossly inaccurate, but that is his theory of the world.”
Putin demanded that the U.S. cede to him the former Soviet republics—Ukraine
above all—as a Russian sphere of influence. He felt that the United States had,
in the glow of post-Cold War triumphalism, pushed Russia around, exploiting its
weakness to ignore Yeltsin’s protests and bomb Belgrade and Kosovo. Gorbachev
had always said that the U.S. had promised that, in exchange for his
acquiescence to the reunification of Germany, NATO would not
expand to the east. In 2004, NATO absorbed seven new
countries—Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and the three Baltic states,
which Putin took as a particular offense and a geopolitical threat. And then,
later that year, came the Orange Revolution, in Ukraine, which Putin saw as a
Western project and a foreshadowing of an assault on him.
When, after the Medvedev
interregnum, Putin returned to power, in 2012, he perceived the anti-Kremlin
protests as an echo of Kiev. The demonstrators had no clear ideology, no
leaders. They did not extend much beyond the urban creative and office classes.
They had neither the coherence nor the staying power of the protesters on other
squares—Taksim, Tahrir, Maidan, Wenceslas. All the same, Putin could not
countenance them. What he loathes, his former aide Gleb Pavlovsky told me, is
spontaneity in politics. “Putin is anti-revolutionary to his core,” he said.
“What happened in Kiev”—on Maidan, in 2014—“was for him absolutely
disgusting.”
An avid reader about
tsarist Russia, Putin was forming a more coherent view of history and his place
within it. More and more, he identified personally with the destiny of Russia.
Even if he was not a genuine ideologue, he became an opportunistic one, quoting
Ivan Ilyin, Konstantin Leontiev, Nikolai Berdyayev, and other conservative
philosophers to give his own pronouncements a sense of continuity. one of his
favorite politicians in imperial Russia was Pyotr Stolypin, the Prime Minister
under Nicholas II. “We do not need great upheavals,” Putin said, paraphrasing
Stolypin. “We need a great Russia.” Stolypin had also said, “Give the state
twenty years and you will not recognize Russia.” That was in 1909. Stolypin was
assassinated by a revolutionary in Kiev, in 1911. But Putin was determined that
his opportunity not be truncated: “Give me twenty years,” he said, “and
you will not recognize Russia.”
And so now, instead of
nurturing the business and creative classes in the big cities, he turned on
them. He vilified them on TV; he weakened them with restrictions, searches,
arrests, and selective jail terms. He sided now with the deeply conservative
impulses, prejudices, and habits of mind of the Russian majority. “There was an
idea to gain the support of the majority, to distinguish it from the minority,”
Boris Mezhuev, a conservative columnist at Izvestia and the editor of
the Web site politconservatism.ru, told me. “This was done harshly.”
Putin’s speeches
were full of hostility, lashing out at the West for betraying its promises, for
treating Russia like a defeated “vassal” rather than a great country, for an
inability to distinguish between right and wrong. He denounced the United States
for its behavior in Hiroshima and Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the Balkans and
Libya. He cut off adoptions to America, claiming that “our” babies were being
abused by cruel and heedless foreigners. The West was hypocritical, arrogant,
self-righteous, and dissolute, according to Putin, so he strengthened his
alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church to reëstablish “traditional Russian
values.” He approved new laws on “non-traditional” sexual practices—the
so-called “anti-gay propaganda” laws. When the feminist performance artists and
political activists Pussy Riot burst into the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and
performed their “Punk Prayer” (“Throw Putin Out!”), the system knew what to do:
Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Church, denounced them for “blasphemy,” and
the courts, an utterly dependent instrument of the Kremlin, handed down a
Draconian sentence. More and more, Putin spoke about “traditional Russian
values” and of the uniqueness of Russian “civilization,” a civilization that
crossed borders. “All of my work deals with the theme of
exclusion.” Buy As Print »
An ideology, a world
view, was taking shape: Putin was now putting Russia at the center of an
anti-Western, socially conservative axis—Russia as a bulwark against a menacing
America. “Of course, this is a conservative position,” he said in a speech last
year, “but, speaking in the words of Nikolai Berdyayev, the point of
conservatism is not that it prevents movement forward and upward but that it
prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a
primitive state.”
One
reason that McFaul was surprised by the assault on him is that he thought he was
being careful in his ambassadorial role. He never went to demonstrations. He
steered clear of Alexei Navalny.
Still, he was hardly a
quiet American. Hillary Clinton had called for U.S. diplomats to use social
media, and he was especially ardent, maintaining an active presence, in both
Russian and English, on Facebook and Twitter. The young liberal intelligentsia
loved McFaul for his openness, his availability. Putin’s people thought his
behavior bewildering, adolescent, and hostile.
When Navalny was on
trial for a trumped-up charge of embezzlement, McFaul addressed him directly: “I
am watching.” And when street reporters stalked McFaul and tried to throw him
off his stride, he had a tendency to confront, rather than finesse, his
tormentors. Considering McFaul’s sometimes shaky grasp of the Russian idiom,
this could make him look both volatile and unconfident.
One winter afternoon, he
went to call on the human-rights campaigner Lev Ponomaryov, an old friend from
the nineties, and he made the mistake of getting into an unruly debate with a
“reporter” from NTV, one of the slavishly loyal television channels. He accused
the reporter of somehow knowing his whereabouts through illegal surveillance:
“Aren’t you ashamed?” At one point, he blurted out that his diplomatic rights
had been violated, that Russia “turned out to be a dikaya strana ”—a
wild, an uncivilized, country. Later, on Twitter, he said, “I misspoke in bad
Russian.” He had meant to say that NTV was behaving wildly. “I greatly respect
Russia.” He told a reporter, “I’m not a professional diplomat.” It might not
have helped that Navalny, Putin’s nemesis, stepped in and tweeted, “I don’t
understand McFaul. He’s got diplomatic immunity. He can just lawfully beat up
the NTV journalists. Come on, Mike!”
Another time, McFaul
went on Twitter to announce in Russian that he was headed to “Yoburg” for an
event. He intended a slangy way of saying Yekaterinburg. Unfortunately,
yob is the root of the verb for copulation and his tweet came off as “I
am headed to Fucksville.”
These awkward moments
were gifts for Putin and his circle, who wanted nothing more than to keep
McFaul, and, by extension, the Obama Administration, off balance. At one Kremlin
reception, where Putin gave a toast in honor of national independence, a Russian
friend told McFaul that he should “lay low,” and said, “You are really on thin
ice.”
“What do you mean?”
McFaul said.
“I saw Putin and he
said, ‘What’s up with this guy? He seems like a real rabble-rouser.’ Putin’s
message was to be very careful.”
At the Embassy, McFaul
was writing deeply pessimistic memos to the White House about the direction of
Russian-American relations. At night, he would go up the stairs and see Kennan’s
photograph and wonder if he, too, would get expelled from Moscow.
When Obama was
reëlected, in 2012, McFaul was among those who pressed him to visit Moscow, to
see what business there was to do with Putin. “So the trains started rolling, we
got dates, and our job was to develop a substantive agenda to make this
worthwhile,” McFaul said. “This was the last push to try to engage on some of
these issues, and it all struck out—arms control, missile defense. It got to be
where I was having doubts whether the President should come. It looked like
chickenshit to me. And I thought that would be a way worse optic than not coming
at all.”
Then Edward Snowden
arrived in Moscow from Hong Kong. The Russians greeted him with barely concealed
delight. The summit was off. “And suddenly,” McFaul said, “we were in a
different world.”
The
imagery of Putinism, with its ominous warnings against political chaos and
outside interference, has long been in evidence. All you have to do is watch
television. In 2008, state television broadcast a cheesy docudrama called “The
Destruction of an Empire: The Lesson of Byzantium,” which was hosted and
produced by Tikhon Shevkunov, a Russian Orthodox priest whose church, the
Sretensky Monastery, is just down the street from Lubyanka, K.G.B. headquarters.
Shevkunov, who has known Putin for many years, is widely rumored to be the
Russian President’s dukhovnik , his spiritual adviser. The film purports
to be a history of the Byzantine Empire’s fall at the hands of the perfidious
West, and not, as scholars have it, to the Ottoman Turks, who conquered
Constantinople in 1453. The film is a crude allegory, in which, as the Byzantine
historian Sergey Ivanov points out, Emperor Basil is an “obvious prototype of
Putin, the wealthy man Eustathios is a hint at the jailed oligarch Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, while Bessarion of Nicea is easily associated with another tycoon,
Boris Berezovsky,” and so on. Shevkunov’s film was, in effect, about the need to
resist Western influence and to shore up central authority in Russia.
Such phenomena are now
common fare. The airwaves are filled with assaults on the treachery of Russian
liberals and American manipulations. Dmitri Kiselyov, the head of Russia Today,
Putin’s newly created information agency, and the host, on Sunday nights, of the
TV magazine show “News of the Week,” is a masterly, and unapologetic, purveyor
of the Kremlin line. With his theatrical hand gestures and brilliantly
insinuating intonation, he tells his viewers that Russia is the only country in
the world that can turn the U.S. into “radioactive dust,” that the
anti-gay-propaganda laws are insufficiently strict, and that Ukraine is not a
real country but merely “virtual.” When I remarked on his delivery, during a
recent visit to his offices, Kiselyov was pleased: “Gestures go right to the
subconscious without any resistance.”
In 1991, Kiselyov made a
name for himself by refusing to go on the air and broadcast the Kremlin line
about an attack on the Baltic independence movements, but now he is an
enthusiastic, and often vicious, voice in defense of the state.
“I preserved the
capacity to evolve,” he told me. “Back then, we believed we could build a
democracy without a state. . . . People said, ‘So what, we will just be a
collection of little Latvias.’ But society began to change, and I am a
reflection of that change.”
Kiselyov worked as a
broadcaster in Kiev during the Orange Revolution and recalls being sickened by
the upheaval, which he says was sparked by insidious American interference.
“Western journalism, in large part, reproduces values,” Kiselyov said. “When I
saw the horror in Ukraine and I returned to Russia, I realized we need to
produce values. . . . Putin didn’t make me this way. The Orange
Revolution did.” As a master of theatrical sarcasm and apocalyptic rhetoric,
Kiselyov eclipses Bill O’Reilly, and as a theoretician of conspiracy he shames
Glenn Beck. He tells his viewers that, in Ukraine, fascists abound, the U.S.
State Department underwrites revolution, and “life is not worth a single
kopeck.” But he insists, “The presentation of me as a minister of propaganda is
itself a form of propaganda.”
Although Kiselyov denies
that he gets direct instructions from the Kremlin, he was appointed by Putin and
is under no illusions about what is expected of him. When he goes on an
anti-Semitic tirade against an opposition journalist or mocks American
officials, he is doing what he was hired to do. He is a wily, cynical man, and
well briefed. When we met, he quickly wanted me to know that he had somehow seen
a film of a speech I’d given a couple of years ago in Moscow. “You mesmerized
the public, you made them zombies!” he said, delighted with himself. “They
looked at you the way they would a boa constrictor!”
When I noted that
Putin’s tone had changed, he said, “I agree. Putin now talks more about ideology
and about the system of values and the spiritual origins of Russia. In this
sense, he, too, is a person of tardy development. He became President
unexpectedly. He had no preparation for this role. He had to respond to
challenges in the course of things. At first, he had to reconsolidate the state.
Now he has inspired a new energy that can be drawn from the national character
and the system of values that are rooted in our culture.”
Putin, Kiselyov has said
on the air, “is comparable among his predecessors in the twentieth century only
with Stalin.” He meant it as a compliment.
Nearly a
quarter century after the fall of empire, Putin has unleashed an ideology of
ressentiment . It has been chorussed by those who, in 1991, despaired of
the loss not of Communist ideology but of imperial greatness, and who, ever
since, have lived with what Russians so often refer to as “phantom-limb
syndrome”: the pain of missing Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Baltic states;
the pain of diminishment. They want revenge for their humiliation.
“People in the West
twenty-five years ago were surprised by how calmly Russians seemed to absorb the
collapse of the Soviet Union,” Boris Mezhuev, the conservative columnist, said.
“It seemed to them as if we had voted on it! But in no time at all people were
told that everything they had worked for was nonsense. They were told that the
state they lived in was based on an unfair idea, that ideology was a myth, the
West was only a friend—a complete reversal of ideas. The West underestimated the
shock. only now are we facing the consequences.”
There is an air of
defiance, even a heedlessness, to Putin’s behavior. As the conservative
commentator Stanislav Belkovsky put it to me, “It was clear that the actions in
Crimea would lead to sanctions, capital flight, and a deterioration of Russia’s
reputation, but nobody supporting the aggression thought twice. The imperial
horn has been sounded. But we are a Third World kleptocracy hiding behind
imperial symbols. There are no resources for a true imperial
revival.”
Nevertheless, the voices
of neo-imperialism are loud and prominently aired. one evening, I went to see
Aleksandr Prokhanov, a far-right newspaper editor and novelist, whom I’ve known
since the late eighties. In the Soviet period, he was known as the Nightingale
of the General Staff, a writer commissioned to ride and chronicle the glories of
nuclear subs and strategic bombers and to visit the Cold War battlefields of
Kampuchea and Angola. He was a panegyrist of Stalin’s military-industrial state
and the achievements of Sovietism. “No one,” he told me, “could describe a
nuclear reactor like I could.”
Prokhanov loathed
Gorbachev and Yeltsin—Gorbachev for his weakness and lack of regard for the
Soviet system, Yeltsin for “hollowing out the state.” He not only favored the
K.G.B.-led putsch against Gorbachev, in 1991; he was the principal author of an
ominous manifesto, “A Word to the People,” shortly before Gorbachev was put
under house arrest at his vacation home in Crimea and tanks rolled into the
center of Moscow. He began publishing a newspaper called Dyen (the
Day ), which collected the fevered rants of all the forces in opposition
to the democrats: imperial Stalinists, Russia-for-Russians nationalists,
National Bolsheviks, ugly sorts who traced Russia’s troubles to “international
Jewry,” Masonic conspiracy, George Soros, the Council on Foreign Relations, the
Bilderberg Foundation. Somewhere along the line, the paper was relaunched as
Zavtra (Tomorrow ).
Prokhanov is now in his
seventies. In the Yeltsin era, the “democratic” media rarely invited Prokhanov
on the air. These days, the Nightingale sings brightly and nationally; he
appears regularly on talk shows and prime-time debates, a deliberate attempt by
the regime to give voice to ascendant, approved ideas. When a liberal is trotted
out to debate him, viewers invariably vote in overwhelming numbers for
Prokhanov’s arguments.
“I miss the nineties!
They were the best!” he said with mock despair. “I was in the opposition and was
alone battling against the system! Now I am part of the system.”
When I asked him if he
wasn’t being exploited by the regime, he smiled indulgently.
“Everyone is being used,
including yourself,” Prokhanov said. “We give the system a body, a shape. We’ve
explained to the system why it’s great, why it’s in a condition of blooming, and
that it exists because of God’s will. And the system has been enlivened by
this.” Prokhanov admires, above all, Putin’s strength, as a matter of both image
and policy.
Putin came to power
thanks to Yeltsin, but Putin did not hesitate to put some distance between
himself and his ailing patron. Bill Clinton, at the very end of his time in
office, visited Putin at the Kremlin, and at one point in their time together
Putin led Clinton on a tour of the vast and magnificent premises. (Compared with
the Kremlin, the West Wing of the White House is as grand as an Ethan Allen
furniture outlet.) First, they visited a gym, full of state-of-the-art
equipment. “I spend a lot of time here,” Putin said, body-proud even then. They
proceeded down a long hall to another room; this one was gloomy, abandoned, with
a hospital bed, a respirator, a cart filled with medical paraphernalia. Putin
turned to the President. “The previous resident spent a lot of time here,” he
said.
Putin’s displays of
shirtless virility may play as a joke abroad, but to supporters like Prokhanov
strength and its projection are at the center of Putinism. “Putin prevented the
disintegration of Russia,” Prokhanov said, echoing a widely held sentiment. “In
him I saw the traits of a traditional Russian ruler. He struck out at the
oligarchs who had controlled Yeltsin. They would pour some vodka for Yeltsin,
get him drunk, and they ran the country. Putin destroyed the Yeltsin élite and
created a new élite from the siloviki ”—the leaders of the security
services and the military.
During the anti-Putin
protests two years ago, Prokhanov attended counter-demonstrations elsewhere in
Moscow. “These young liberals wanted to get rid of Putin and practically send
him to the fate of Qaddafi. There was an imbalance in political and ideological
forces. The liberals dominated everywhere in mass media, culture, the economy,
and Putin decided to correct this imbalance and so he began to grow the
patriotic forces.”
Prokhanov could read the
signals of encouragement, but he does not pretend to see Putin often. (“My
connection to Putin is mystical. We meet each other in our dreams. Which is the
best place. No one eavesdrops there.”) Together with members of other
institutions associated with the Kremlin—the armed forces, the intelligence
services, and the Russian Orthodox Church—he started an intellectual group
called the Izborsky Club. In the nineties, Yeltsin had called on a group of
intellectuals to help formulate a new “Russian idea,” one that relied largely on
a liberal, Westernized conception of the nation. It went nowhere. Now, with such
notions as “democracy” and “liberalism” in eclipse, groups like the Izborsky
Club, Prokhanov says, are a “defense factory where we create ideological weapons
to resist the West.” He said the group recently organized a branch in eastern
Ukraine, led by the pro-Russian separatists. “The liberals used to be in charge
in all spheres,” Prokhanov said. “Now we are crowding them
out.”
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According to ideologues
like Prokhanov, the thousand-year shape of Russian history is defined by the
rise, fall, and reassertion of empire. “These empires flower and become powerful
and then they fall off a precipice and leave behind a black hole,” he said. “And
in the black hole statehood disappears. But then the state reëmerges as the
result of some sort of mysterious forces.” So far, Prokhanov explained, there
have been four great empires. The first, a confederacy of princedoms with its
center in Kiev, was invaded by the Tatars, in the thirteenth century. Then came
the Moscovy tsardom, which featured the reign of Ivan the Terrible and was
transformed into an empire by Peter the Great at the turn of the eighteenth
century. Then came the three-hundred-year reign of the Romanovs, who gave way to
the Bolsheviks in 1917. Finally, Prokhanov said, Stalin “took Russian statehood
out of that black hole, put the state on its feet, built factories, produced
scholars, and won the Great Patriotic War against Germany and conquered outer
space.” That empire, the Soviet Union, crashed in 1991. Again, there was a
ten-year-long black hole. “Yeltsin is the black hole of modern Russian history,”
Prokhanov said. Under Putin, Russian statehood reëmerged. In his latest book,
which Prokhanov gave me as a gift, he has a set piece addressed to Putin called
“The Symphony of the Fifth Empire.”
Prokhanov is pleased to
conclude that Russia is entering a prolonged war with the West—a cold war,
possibly worse. “There is always danger of worse,” he said, “even worse than
nuclear war—and that is soulless surrender.” Under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, he
insisted, the West was, through its spies and diplomats, through its perfidious
deals with weak Russian leader, able to achieve its objective: the destruction
of the state. The West, he said, “destroyed the Soviet Union without setting off
a single bomb.”
Nothing has lifted the
spirits of intellectuals like Prokhanov—and tens of millions of their
countrymen—quite like Putin’s decision to flout international opinion and annex
Crimea. Prokhanov pronounced himself “ecstatic” about it. one of his favorite
writers for Zavtra , Igor Strelkov, is a former Russian intelligence
agent who is leading the separatists in Donetsk, and is widely believed to be
among those who bear responsibility for the destruction of Malaysia Airlines
Flight 17. on the day of the catastrophe, Prokhanov posted a veritable ode to
Strelkov on the Zavtra Web site, saying that the Russian fight in
eastern Ukraine was a battle for “divine justice” and comparing
Strelkov—“Russian warrior, knight, perfect hero”—to the most fabled generals in
national history. To Prokhanov, this glorification of an armed agent is only
natural, the war for Ukraine a matter of highest principle.
“This is a great country
with only arbitrary borders,” Prokhanov said. “People grabbed up our territory,
chopped it up into bits. Some people got used to this state of affairs and
didn’t notice that their extremities had been chopped off—including the very
pleasant extremity between your legs—and so it was with Ukraine. . . . Russians
had to choose: ruin their relationship with the West, which was the very axe
that chopped Russia into bits in the first place, or act without fear, because
now Russia has an axe of its own.”
“When you see what is
going on in Iraq, you can see that America is powerless to respond,” Prokhanov
went on. “America brought chaos to the Middle East. Al Qaeda has its own state.
And now Obama doesn’t want to send bombers to destroy it. We poor Russians have
to go destroy it. Aren’t you ashamed?”
Prokhanov is hardly an outlier on today’s ideological scene in
Russia. Nor is the geopolitical theorist, mystic, and high-minded crackpot
Aleksandr Dugin, who has published in Prokhanov’s newspapers. He was once as
marginal as a Lyndon LaRouche follower with a card table and a stack of
leaflets. He used to appear mainly on SPAS (Salvation), an organ of the Russian
Orthodox Church. Now the state affords him frequent guest spots on official
television.
Dugin is in his
mid-fifties and wears a beard worthy of Dostoyevsky. His father, he says,
“probably” worked for military intelligence. His parents divorced when he was
three. He hated Soviet society. He hated his family. “I hated the world I was
born into,” he said. As a teen-ager, he fell into a circle of eccentric kitchen
intellectuals, young people who despised Communism and the West with equal
fervor. “They were kind of loonies,” Dugin told me. He attended the Moscow
Aviation Institute, but was thrown out for his anti-Soviet, far-right
politics.
Dugin’s intellectual
journey includes dalliances at various times with pagans, priests, monarchists,
fascists, neo-Bolsheviks, and imperialists. He admires far-right European
theorists like the Weimar conservative Carl Schmitt; he admires various strains
of the European New Right. He is a follower of René Guénon, a French mid-century
philosopher who espoused the doctrine that became known as Traditionalism, which
bemoans the decline of man since Creation and rejects modernity and rationalism.
His most powerful influence is the Eurasianists, who envisioned Russia as a
unique civilization, neither European nor Asian, with its own “special destiny”
and grandeur.
The world, for Dugin, is
divided between conservative land powers (Russia) and libertine maritime powers
(the U.S. and the U.K.)—Eternal Rome and Eternal Carthage. The maritime powers
seek to impose their will, and their decadent materialism, on the rest of the
world. This struggle is at the heart of history. For Dugin, Russia must rise
from its prolonged post-Soviet depression and reassert itself, this time as the
center of a Eurasian empire, against the dark forces of America. And this means
war. Dugin rejects the racism of the Nazis, but embraces their sense of
hierarchy, their romance of death. “We need a new party,” he has written. “A
party of death. A party of the total vertical. God’s party, the Russian analogue
to the Hezbollah, which would act according to wholly different rules and
contemplate completely different pictures.”
For all of Dugin’s
extremism, he has, in the past decade, found supporters in the Russian élite.
According to the Israeli scholar Yigal Liverant and other sources, Dugin’s work
is read in the Russian military academy. He has served as an adviser to Gennady
Seleznyov, the former chairman of the Russian parliament. His Eurasia Movement,
which was founded in 2001, included members of the government and the official
media. He declared his “absolute” support for Putin, and when he pressed his
political positions in public it was usually to take the most hard-line
positions possible, particularly on Georgia and Ukraine. In 2008, he was
appointed head of the Center for Conservative Studies at Moscow State
University. Dugin used to brag that “Putin is becoming more and more like
Dugin.” And indeed Putin speaks more and more in terms of Russian vastness,
Russian exceptionalism, of Russia as a moral paradigm.
When I asked Dugin about
his connection to, or influence over, Putin, though, Dugin carefully disavowed
any “personal connection” to the President. “I doubt that he knows who I am,” he
said. “My influence on politics is zero, on government zero. I am working only
on my Platonic vision of things.” Yet the mystic chords of that vision have come
to reverberate widely in Russian society.
Dugin began to visit the
West in 1989. Even though he spent most of his time calling on like-minded
leaders of the European New Right, such as Alain de Benoist, he loathed his time
there. Paris and Berlin were, in 1989, “worse than the Soviet Union.”
Commercialism had obliterated the European culture he loved and reduced its
citizens to a state of profound “loneliness.” As for the Americans, he found
them “honest and clear and pragmatic and very free, and they are not so corrupt
or hypocritical or decadent as Europe—but they are absolutely wrong at the same
time in the metaphysical sense. They have a cult of real evil there. What they
have taken for the most important value—individuality—is absolutely wrong. . . .
I think American society is simply insane.”
The day before I called
on Dugin at his office, he had been mysteriously dismissed from his teaching
post at the university. He had apparently gone too far. on the air, he had
called on Russian forces to attack Ukraine with the full force of the
Army—“Kill! Kill! Kill!”—and made it plain, on social media, that he was deeply
disappointed in Putin’s decision to limit himself to the annexation of
Crimea.
Dugin said that he
conceived of Putin as a man divided within himself—“the solar Putin,” who is a
Russian patriot and a fierce conservative, and “the lunar Putin,” who is
“conformist” and pro-Western. Dugin is a sun worshipper. only the invasion and
annexation of Ukraine will satisfy him.
October 7, 2002 “Melanie, find me a
little pro-bono case to cleanse my palate.” Buy As Print »
In the
Moscow of Putin Redux, Michael McFaul could not hope to make many inroads. And
with every week his and his family’s life in Moscow became more
unnerving.
“They ran all kinds of
operations against me,” McFaul told me when we met this winter at the Olympics,
in Sochi. There were demonstrators outside Spaso and the American Embassy.
Russians, presumably paid stooges, posted on social media that McFaul was
everything from a spy to a pedophile. There were death threats. Russian
intelligence agents occasionally followed McFaul in his car, and even showed up
at his kids’ soccer games. The family felt under siege. “They wanted us to know
they were there,” he said. “They went out of their way to make us feel their
presence, to scare us.”
McFaul was pleased to
see that some of his old friends—human-rights activists like Lev Ponomaryov—had
remained steadfast friends and true to their principles, but many had sold
themselves out for money or Kremlin favor. People he had first met in the
pro-democracy movement more than twenty years ago were now feeding at the trough
of authoritarian power and the various business conglomerates aligned with it:
they were Kremlin officials and advisers, oil and gas magnates, highly obedient
intellectuals. Sergei Markov, one of his closest friends from the old days, and
a co-author with him of a book called “The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy,”
was now a Putin loyalist.
Markov, who speaks
decent English, frequently goes on foreign television to make the Kremlin’s
case. He has accused Blackwater of assassinating innocent Ukrainians at Maidan.
He has said that Russian doctors were devising a “special medicine” to “cure”
gays and lesbians and move them toward “normal sexuality.” He is always on call
to attack Obama.
I knew Markov, too, when
McFaul did, and I had a hard time believing that he had become so reactionary,
so shameless. I asked him about his outlandish remarks about gays on television.
Was it true what he had said—that Russian doctors were working on a “special”
gay-reversal medicine?
“I will speak frankly,”
he said. “Russian medicine is not working on this. But I don’t want to talk
about gays—but every time they ask about gays! I personally believe
homosexuality is part of a human mind’s nature. And I believe homosexuality is
behind every human being’s nature, one per cent, two per cent, and it can
develop under some circumstances. And I am very sorry, but I will make a strong
comparison—it’s like sadism. Sadism is in every human’s psychology. But it can
develop only under some circumstances. If someone becomes gay, it is also, I
believe, bad for him. . . . Someone can say, ‘I am proud that I am gay.’ O.K., I
can believe. But if they say, ‘I am happy I am gay,’ I don’t trust that. It just
isn’t true.”
Markov holds a variety
of academic and governmental advisory posts, and when I paid him a visit at his
office he allowed that he was “a little bit” conspiratorial in his thinking
these days. He said that “the international oligarchy—Soros, the Rockefellers,
the Morgans—all these big, rich families and networks” were backing an attempt
to topple Putin. “They want to take control of Russian gas and oil resources.”
That there is such a conspiracy afoot is also “clear to Putin.”
Putin himself has not
been reluctant to express his sense of such hidden intrigues. When Secretary of
State John Kerry came to town for the first time, he and McFaul went together to
see Putin. At one point, Putin stared at McFaul across the table and said, “We
know that your Embassy is working with the opposition to undermine
me.”
“What do you mean?”
Kerry said.
“We know this,” Putin
said.
“Putin didn’t want to go
into details,” McFaul continued. “He stared right at me. . . . That kind of
threatening, we-will-prevail look.”
On
February 4th, McFaul announced that he would step down as Ambassador following
the Sochi Olympics. Angered by the anti-gay-propaganda laws, the Obama
Administration had scaled back its delegation to the event. They sent no top
officials and made sure that the most prominent figures were gay athletes. When
I had breakfast with McFaul in Sochi, he made it clear that he was keeping a low
profile and leaving after just a few days. His family was waiting for him in
Palo Alto. For such an easygoing guy, McFaul can show surprising flashes of
temper and irritation. In Sochi, he just seemed sombre. He had lasted two years
in Moscow, hardly a truncated term, and he had poured his heart into the job,
but his ambassadorship had not been a success. It couldn’t have been, not when,
in McFaul’s words, the U.S.-Russia relationship was “at its lowest point since
the post-Soviet period began, in 1991.”
In March, after Putin
annexed Crimea, McFaul wrote what he saw as his “Kennan” manifesto for the
Times ’ Op-Ed page. He endorsed the Administration’s policy—sanctions,
isolation, expulsion from international organizations like the G-8—but he also
admitted that the U.S. “does not have the same moral authority as it did in the
last century.” He recalled that when he was Ambassador and challenged his
Russian interlocutors on issues of international law and a commitment to
sovereignty, he was met with “What about Iraq?” And, in a subtle jab at Obama,
he wrote, “We are enduring a drift of disengagement in world affairs. After two
wars, this was inevitable, but we cannot swing too far. As we pull back, Russia
is pushing forward.”
A few months after our
meeting in Sochi, I went to see McFaul in Palo Alto. We rode around town in his
car. It smelled as if he had bought it last week. His offices—he has three of
them, for various bureaucratic reasons—overflowed with books that now seem
superfluous: endless volumes on the perestroika years, books about transitions
to democratic governance. I glanced at the book McFaul had published with Sergei
Markov and remarked on how much Markov had changed.
“When I met him, he was
against the status quo, he was for change,” McFaul said. “He was for social
democracy. But, remember, they hadn’t had decades to discuss ideas. They were
against the regime—that was the main thing, being against . This happens
in lots of transitions: a coalition against Them. And then what they are
for gets worked out in the post-revolutionary phase. That’s natural and
normal. What’s a little more depressing are those others who get bought out and
co-opted for financial reasons.”
Although McFaul feels a
deep sense of outrage about Putin, he also understood the mind-set of resentment
and conspiracy. “I didn’t go to foment revolution,” he said. “I went to take the
reset to the next stage. That was my mandate.” He added, “Obama people don’t
sponsor color revolutions. Other Administrations had done this. Has the U.S.
used covert operations to foment regime change? The answer is yes. I don’t want
to get in trouble or go to jail, but has the U.S. supported the opposition to
bring about political change? Serbia is a paradigmatic case: direct money to the
opposition to destabilize things, and it was successful.” He also cited the
overthrow of Mossadegh, in 1953, in Iran, and the support for the Nicaraguan
Contras.
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“Putin has a theory of
American power that has some empirical basis,” McFaul went on. “He strongly
believes this is a major component of U.S. foreign policy. He has said it to the
President, to Secretary Kerry. He even believes we sparked the Arab Spring as a
C.I.A. operation. He believes we use force against regimes we don’t like. . . .
By the way, he damn well knows that the government of the Soviet Union used
covert support. He worked for one of the instruments of that policy. He really
does kind of superimpose the way his system works onto the way he thinks our
system works. He grossly exaggerates the role of the C.I.A. in the making of our
foreign policy. He just doesn’t get it. Or maybe he does get it and doesn’t
portray it that way. I struggle with that: is he really super-clever and this is
his psych op, or does he believe it? I think he does believe that we are out to
get him.”
Last
month, Obama named a new Ambassador to Moscow: John Tefft, a career diplomat who
has been Ambassador to Ukraine, Lithuania, and Georgia. This is a geography that
will not necessarily enamor Tefft to the Kremlin.
On July 4th, I went with
some Russian friends to Spaso House for the annual Independence Day party. The
place was filled with hundreds of guests, diplomats from the other embassies,
Russian officials, members of the downtrodden opposition. McFaul loved throwing
these parties. He loved the jazz and blues bands he got to play in the back
yard, the talk over the buffet tables, the intrigue, the conversation, the
promise of it all. I sent McFaul an e-mail saying I’d somehow never been to
Spaso and found the scale of the place shocking.
“The scale is shocking
indeed,” he wrote back from Palo Alto. “Big downgrade to our place here at
Stanford. I saw photos and got emails from people at July 4th, which made me
very nostalgic.”
On July 17th, a
surface-to-air missile shot Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 out of the air over the
Donetsk region of Ukraine, killing almost three hundred men, women, and
children. Western and Ukrainian intelligence agencies agree that the evidence
implicates pro-Russian separatist forces in the region, which are funded,
directed, and supported by Vladimir Putin, in Moscow.
Prokhanov and Dugin were
entirely in tune with the reigning propaganda. All blame lay with Obama and the
“illegal regime” in Kiev. “America did this—with a hand from Ukraine,” Prokhanov
told me. “How could it be otherwise? A catastrophe like this helps America, not
Russia. It serves to demonize Novorossiya and the forces there. It demonizes
them to look like Al Qaeda. It brings us back to the sort of moment when Ronald
Reagan called us the ‘evil empire.’ It tightens the international noose on
Russia and it brings powerful pressure to bear on Putin, pressure designed to
break his will. And, by blaming this on us, it helps our liberal intelligentsia
consolidate their forces, the way the Orange Revolution and the Bolotnaya
demonstrations did. There is a history to such conspiracies. Or have you
forgotten your General Colin Powell at the U.N. with his ‘evidence’ and his
theories about Saddam Hussein?”
McFaul is trying to
enjoy his return to paradisal Palo Alto. His wife, Donna, is happier now that
the family is no longer followed by spies and hostile reporters. The boys are
spending long summer days at leisure. But McFaul can’t fully escape the tragic
course of things.
“Just when I thought
relations between the U.S. and Russia couldn’t get any lower, this tragedy
happened,” McFaul said. “Of course, Putin could use this
tragedy/accident/terrorist attack to distance himself from the insurgents that
he has been supporting. It gives him a face-saving out. He could say, ‘They went
too far, enough is enough. Time now to get serious about deëscalation and
negotiation.’ I assign this possible outcome a small probability. More likely is
that he will not change his course, the U.S. will then increase sanctions, and
the war will continue. Neither scenario, however, offers a way to reverse this
negative trajectory in U.S.-Russia relations. I really don’t see a serious
opening until after Putin retires, and I have no idea when that will
be.”
“In the long run,
I am still very optimistic about Russia and Russians,” he went on. “In my two
years as Ambassador, I just met too many young, smart, talented people who want
to be connected to the world, not isolated from it. They also want a say in the
government. They are scared now, and therefore not demonstrating, but they have
not changed their preferences about the future they want. Instead, they are just
hiding these preferences, but there will be a day when they will express them
again. Putin’s regime cannot hold these people down forever. I do worry about
the new nationalism that Putin has unleashed, and understand that many young
Russians also embrace these extremist ideas. I see it on Twitter every day. But,
in the long run, I see the Westernizers winning out. I just don’t know how long
is the long run.” ♦
David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since
1998 and a staff writer since 1992.