On June 18, 2001, I attended Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first meeting with the United States news media. We were seated at a large round table in the wood-panelled Kremlin Library. It was still early in Putin’s presidency, and we weren’t sure what to expect of this ex-KGB spy fresh off the famous summit meeting where the then US president George W. Bush had got “a sense of his soul” and pronounced him “trustworthy”. After we were kept waiting for what felt like hours, Putin finally arrived a little after 8pm, sat down and took questions until nearly midnight.
When it was my turn, I asked about the brutal war against separatists in the southern province of Chechnya. His long answer makes for striking reading all these years later: It combined media-bashing (we were failing to sufficiently cover atrocities committed by the separatists, he said); anti-Islamic sentiment (“What do you suggest we should do? Talk with them about biblical values?”); and the insistence that he had to attack in Chechnya to keep the rest of Russia safe. As the night went on, he proposed US-Russia operations against the real threat in the world — terrorists — and proclaimed his patriotic plan to restore the country after the economic reverses of the previous decade.
Sound familiar? Putin’s slogan back in 2001 might as well have been ‘Make Russia Great Again’.
We are four weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency, and Putin, in power 17 years and not going anywhere anytime soon, is everywhere in US politics. A shirtless Putin is a regular figure of parody on Saturday Night Live, portrayed as a character witness (or is that handler?) for the president of the United States. His hackers’ meddling haunted the US general election. A leaked dossier purporting to contain possible Russian blackmail material on Trump dominated headlines for weeks.
And last week, Russian entanglements resulted in the quick dumping of the national security adviser, Michael Flynn (although Flynn was ultimately cut loose not for his apparent discussion with the Russian ambassador about lifting US sanctions, but for lying about it to the vice-president). A day later, news emerged that associates of Trump had been in contact with Russian intelligence in the year before the election.
Trump has made clear for months that he doesn’t just admire the Russian president’s macho persona, but considers him, as he said during the campaign, more of a “leader” than former US president Barack Obama. As recently as this month, in a pre-Super Bowl interview on Fox, Trump refused to condemn Putin’s government. No surprise then that Trump’s unseemly embrace of the Russian tough guy has given rise to a million conspiracy theories.
But we no longer have to speculate about conspiracies or engage in armchair psychoanalysis. Since the inauguration, we have accumulated some hard facts, too: Both Trump’s rhetoric and actions as president bear more than a passing resemblance to those of Putin during his first years in consolidating power. Having spent those years in Moscow as a foreign correspondent — and the rest of my career as a journalist in Washington in four previous presidencies — I can tell you the similarities are striking enough that they should not be easily dismissed.
Of course, in personality these two are very different: Trump is impulsive where Putin is controlled, with temper tantrums and public rants contrasting with the Russian’s cold calculation and memorised briefing books. But their oddly similar political views and approach to running their (very different) countries may turn out to be just as important as the Russia-related scandals now erupting around Trump. You don’t have to think he is some kind of an agent of Russia to worry about the course he’s taking us down.
The media-bashing and outrageous statements. The attacks on rival power centres, whether stubborn federal judges or corporations refusing to get in line. The warnings, some of them downright panic-inducing, that the country is not safe — and we must go to war with extremists because they are threatening our way of life. These are the techniques that Putin used to great effect in his first years in power, and they are very much the same tactics and clash-of-civilisations ideology being deployed by Trump today.
Early Putin was positively Trumpian, his presidency a blitz of convention-defying that conjured up the image of a leader on the march after former Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s drunken stumbles and the economic uncertainties of the late 1990s. He had the state take over the first independent national TV network, he turned the state Duma into a pocket parliament, he went after uppity oligarchs.
Despite the evidence, Kremlin watchers in the early 2000s took a long time to see Putin for the autocrat he would become. At the time, many people believed Russia, after the turmoil of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, was finally headed for a few decades of stability. Where some, correctly, saw a hard-line former KGB spy determined to restore a strong state, others persisted in seeing a would-be western-style reformer. “Who is Mr Putin?” a foreign reporter famously asked early in his tenure.
In retrospect, the best guide to his actions should have been his statements. Putin did exactly what he said he would do. I’ve thought a lot about that over the past year, as Americans have puzzled over Trump’s surprising rise, and whether he really means all those outrageous things he says and plans to follow through with the policy shifts he promises.
Like Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan today, Putin’s version of making Russia great again wasn’t particularly ideological, but its gauzy patriotic nationalism basically summed up the Putin plan for making a weakened and demoralised superpower feel better about itself. Putin considered the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, and even if Americans didn’t always understand what he was up to, he never deviated from his real goal: Consolidating authority in the Kremlin.
This may be precisely what Trump admires the most about Putin. In a March 1990 interview with Playboy, Trump, who had been hoping to build a luxury hotel in Moscow, described his impression of the last days of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev. “Russia is out of control and the leadership knows it,” the future US president said. “That’s my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.”
Putin’s hand has clearly been much tougher. Despite all the apparent reverses, confusion, corruption, lies and economic setbacks in Russia, he remains in control 17 years after his unbelievably unlikely ascent from obscure KGB lieutenant colonel to president of Russia. And that, too, may be part of what Trump, another unlikely president still so insecure about his rise to the White House that he constantly brings up his election, sees in Putin and authoritarian rulers like him. He views them as tough guys who speak of strength more than freedom and often seem to judge their success by their own ability to stay in power.
I recently asked Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, why he thinks Trump has such apparent affinity for Putin. He shook his head. “I do think there is a degree of admiration for a strongman, I’m sorry,” he said. His other theory was that Trump sees himself as a sort of superhero who would forge a strong bond with Putin “to show he has the ability to do things that no other president has been able to do.”
And this is a Republican who hopes to do business with the Trump administration.
America is not burdened with the history of tyranny and totalitarianism that haunts Russia. We have a 229-year record of success with constitutional democracy that should long outlive the Trump era. And while the trappings and powers attached to the “imperial presidency” Trump now wields have been growing ever since historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr popularised that phrase during the Nixon era, we also have robust counterbalancing institutions, like a free and independent press and a federal judiciary, that are already demonstrating a deep resistance to the kind of political steamroller techniques that Putin deployed so effectively in Russia.
Still, as I report from Washington now, it’s hard not to worry. When I moved to Moscow the year Putin became President, it was only a decade after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Many Russians still hoped their country would become more like the western countries they had so recently been barred from even visiting. For all the popularity of Putin’s battle against what he belittled as the chaotic freedoms of the 1990s, I met many people in Russia who yearned for the time when they would take their place at the table of “normal,” stable democracies.
Who would have thought that, 17 years later, the question is not about Russia’s no-longer-existing democracy, but America’s?
— New York Times News Service
Susan B. Glasser, Politico’s chief international affairs columnist, was a co-chief of the Washington Post’s Moscow bureau from 2001 to 2004 and is a co-author of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution.
