Vladimir Putin: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

by Jack R. Johnson 05.2022

In Robert Penn Warren’s famous novel, “All The King’s Men”, Jack Burden, the protagonist is charged with digging up dirt on an old judge who opposes Willy Stark’s rise to power. Burden protests that there may be nothing with which to incriminate the judge. Willy Stark laughs and retorts, sententiously, "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.”

That ‘something’ in the case of Vladimir Putin is not difficult to find. Like Sergio Leone’s famous Spaghetti Western, Putin’s got a bit of good, a bit of bad, and a lot of ugly.

Beginning with his first appointment under former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Putin essentially began in corruption. Yetlsin appointed this former KGB agent as acting prime minister of the Government of the Russian Federation. Yeltsin also announced that he wanted to see Putin as his successor. Despite a lot of infighting by rivals in the Dumas, Putin successfully navigated the appointment and when Yeltsin resigned in December 1999, Putin became acting President. His first act as President was to sign a Presidential Decree titled "On guarantees for the former president of the Russian Federation and the members of his family". This ensured that "corruption charges against the outgoing President and his relatives" would not be pursued. A similar pattern developed shortly thereafter with various ‘decrees’ exonerating either himself or other allies in the Dumas. 

According to Richard Sakwa, Putin also managed to win a power struggle with the Russian oligarchs who had grown reckless under Yeltsin’s rudderless leadership.  He achieved what Sakwa describes as a 'grand bargain' that allowed the oligarchs to maintain most of their wealth, in exchange for their explicit support of Putin's government. This was probably necessary for reconstruction of the impoverished Russia state, but it was handled in a typically pugilistic fashion. As David Remnick put it in The New Yorker, “Putin read them the riot act, saying, you can keep your riches, but stay out of politics. Those who kept their nose in politics, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, were punished, sent to prison. Others left the country with as much of their fortune as possible.”

Vladimir Putin won his election to presidency for two more terms, but he was barred from a third consecutive term by the Russian Constitution. He essentially handpicked his replacement, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. According to The New York Times, “In a power-switching operation on May 8th 2008, only a day after handing the presidency to Medvedev, Putin was appointed Prime Minister of Russia, maintaining his political dominance.” 

In terms of foreign relations, Putin has not always acted as erratically as the current Ukrainian invasion might indicate. In fact, on the ‘good’ side, Putin strongly objected to President George W. Bush’s decision in 2001 to abandon the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. In response to the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001, Putin pledged Russia’s cooperation in the U.S.-led campaign against terrorists and their allies, offering the use of Russia’s airspace for humanitarian deliveries and help in search-and-rescue operations. 

Putin also joined German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and French President Jacques Chirac in 2002–03 to oppose U.S. and British plans to use force to oust Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq. Arguably, these actions show a wiser sense of statesmanship than anything on offer from the United States at the time. 

Domestically, Putin was not all bad, either. He restored some nominal economic vitality and stability to Russia. He commemorated the 20th anniversary of the adoption of the post-Soviet Constitution in December 2013 by ordering the release of some 25,000 individuals from Russian prisons. In a separate, somewhat ironic move, he finally granted a pardon to Mikhail Khodorkovsky whom he had imprisoned for more than a decade.

But there was a shift in tone when bordering states started joining NATO.  Foreign policy experts suggest that Putin’s vision of Russia is through a historical lens, a “Russkiy Mir” (Russian World) view. Putin sees Russia as having a sphere of influence that extends to neighbors on her borders, just as the U.S. considers South American nations as its sphere (e.g., “The Monroe Doctrine”). 

Foreign Policy’s Benjamin R. Young makes the case that “Putin believes an invasion of Ukraine is a righteous cause and necessary for the dignity of the Russian civilization, which he sees as being genetically and historically superior to other Eastern European identities.” A statement that curiously makes Putin sound as “Nazi” as he accuses the Ukrainians of being.

In April 2014, groups of unidentified gunmen outfitted with Russian equipment seized government buildings throughout southeastern Ukraine. Putin referred to the region as Novorossiya (“New Russia”), evoking claims from Russia’s imperial past. One might say this moment was the beginning of Putin’s ugly period.

On February 27, 2015, opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was gunned down within sight of the Kremlin, just days after he had spoken out against Russian intervention in Ukraine. Nemtsov was only the latest Putin critic to be assassinated or to die under suspicious circumstances. In January 2016 a British public inquiry officially implicated Putin in the 2006 murder of former Federal Security Service officer Alexander Litvinenko. Litvinenko had spoken out against Russian government ties to organized crime both before and after his defection to the United Kingdom. He was poisoned with polonium-210 while drinking tea in a London hotel bar. 

Aleksey Navalny, an opposition activist who had first achieved prominence as a leader of the 2011 protest movement, has been repeatedly imprisoned. 

In the September 2016 legislative election, voter turnout was just 47.8 percent, the lowest since the collapse of the Soviet Union. According to The Britannica, “voter apathy was attributed to Putin’s steady implementation of so-called ‘managed democracy’, a system whereby the basic structures and procedures of democracy were maintained but the outcome of elections was largely predetermined.”

Apparently, attempts at “managed democracy” was not limited to Russia. “In the months prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a series of high-profile hacking attacks targeted the Democratic Party and its presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Computer security experts tied these attacks to Russian intelligence services, and in July 2016 thousands of private e-mails were published by WikiLeaks. Within days the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a probe into Russian efforts to influence the presidential election—this investigation also examined possible connection to the Trump campaign.”

In February 2022, Russia formally invaded Ukraine, but many think Putin miscalculated. Putin’s popularity has plummeted, at home and abroad. The decadent West has been surprisingly united in its response, with even neutral Switzerland considering sanctions. In fact, Putin’s aggression may very well bring about the very results he feared; a further retreat from the old Soviet Union borders with a newly strengthened NATO thrown into the bargain. 

As Stephen Kockins noted in The New Yorker, “Very few people talk to Putin, either Russians on the inside or foreigners….. [But] he’s getting what he wants to hear. In any case, he believes that he’s superior and smarter. Despotism creates the circumstances of its own undermining. The information gets worse. The sycophants get greater in number. The corrective mechanisms become fewer. And the mistakes become much more consequential.”

If this is true, then here’s hoping Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the very mistake that begins to undo Putin’s 20-year rule. Turns out Willy Stark was right. There is always something.