For Vladimir Putin, his yearly trip to a patriotic youth camp on the banks of Lake Seliger north-west of Moscow has the mark of tradition. Russia’s president sheds his suit for jeans. He picks up a microphone and starts casually taking questions from a group of eager young people in hoodies. And then he says something flinty sharp — a comment that shoots around the world.
This year, Putin’s language cut deeper than usual. “Russia is far from being involved in any large-scale conflicts,” he began mildly. “We don’t want that and don’t plan on it. But naturally, we should always be ready to repel any aggression towards Russia.” And then the killer phrases: “Russia’s partners... should understand it’s best not to mess with us... I want to remind you that Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers.” The delivery is always calm.
One writer has described Putin’s classic impassive face as the look of a horse lowering its nose into a bag of oats. Yet the language is explosive. To an outsider looking in, this is the language of North Korea — or a hint of Cold War times and former premier Nikita Khrushchev telling western ambassadors: “We will bury you.” The words Khrushchev used to preface that phrase are just as telling: “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side.”
Everything that Putin does and says today reeks of a struggle for pride and status. Increasingly through his 14 years at the helm, Putin has exuded resentment over the West’s refusal to acknowledge Russia’s greatness — its own path, its own truth, its own “sovereign” democracy and its own cherished past of triumphs, of victories over foreign incursion and duplicity.
Through this prism, the West’s decision to expand Nato, to march into Central Asia after September 11, to boost an insolent Georgia and a recalcitrant Ukraine; these were yet more attempts to deny Moscow’s right as a leader in her own backyard. Inside the motherland, this sense of wounded ego and defiance plays well, to many. Russians have long had an ambivalent attitude to outsiders. In one view, they are knowing sophisticates.
A shopkeeper in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls hung a sign on his door saying “Foreigner” in order to improve his image. In another view, steeped in Soviet times, they are connivers and wreckers. Putin plays well to the second gallery. His masterstroke is to present Russia as a besieged fortress, the cannonballs of western aggression and hypocrisy bouncing off its walls. It was no mistake last week that as Moscow jousted with the US and Europe over the Ukraine crisis, Russian officials announced a nationwide audit of bomb shelters.
A mention of Russia’s coiled might — a few powder kegs in the castle basement— is a useful reassurance amid this paranoia. It also keeps the adversary on edge. The sequence of Putin’s statements seem often designed to keep his opponents on unstable legs, never quite comprehending his true intentions: On Thursday a stony silence as the West accused him of invading Ukraine; on Friday morning a magnanimous request to free encircled Ukrainian troops and “return them to their mothers”; on Friday afternoon, a casual reminder of nuclear threat.
Yet Lilia Shevtsova, a Russian political scientist, says Putin is neither bellicose nor irrational, despite sending troops into a neighbouring country. Instead, having turned containment of the West in Ukraine into a means of mobilising Russians around their leader, he knows a cold fact: Personal disaster looms in case of defeat. “What we have in Ukraine is a battle by a declining but ever more desperately aggressive authoritarianism against a hostile civilisation,” argues Shevtsova. “Retreat,” she wrote this week, “would be tantamount to suicide.”
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2014
