EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — “Nothing”, Fyodor Dostoevsky observed in Crime and Punishment, “is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.” Since Vladimir Putin launched his assault on Ukraine, I have watched the debate over why the Russian leader is doing what he is doing with some puzzlement, and not a little incredulity. There has been much speculation about his health and state of mind. Dr. Ken Dekleva addressed the challenges inherent in assessing both issues recently in The Cipher Brief. Is Putin crazy?
I can only attest that his statements and actions regarding Ukraine, however alien and abhorrent to us, are fully in keeping with what we knew of the man when he came to power while I oversaw CIA operations in Russia.
On his becoming Acting President of the Russian Federation on 31 December 1999, my office produced a field assessment of the new leader and what could be expected from him. Entitled ‘The Rise of the Chekist State’, we judged therein that Putin’s principal aim would be the restoration of Moscow’s power and influence both in the “near abroad” of former Soviet space and on the world stage. We further assessed that he would surround himself with trusted fellow veterans of the Soviet and Russian intelligence and security apparatus and would rely upon those services as instruments of first resort in his exercise of power.
In our assessment, we wrote of Putin’s oft-stated nostalgia for the Soviet Union, of the shame he felt over the country’s collapse and of his bitter resentment at what he saw as the use of the cudgel of democracy to humiliate and impoverish Russia in the 1990’s. We also highlighted Putin’s deep self-identification with the intelligence organization he served.
Recent events have made clear that the burning anger he felt back then has not abated. In his heart and head, Putin was – and remains – a man of the KGB (Russia’s Committee for State Security). He should be understood as such.
While those who have dealt with him on the world stage over the last two decades, have studied at Oxford, Princeton, Harvard, and other renowned institutions, Putin got an education of quite a different sort. At the KGB’s Yuri Andropov Red Banner Institute, he was initiated into life as a Soviet intelligence officer. That introduction was not limited to learning the tools of the espionage trade. He was also imbued with the ethos of an institution that - as the ‘Sword and Shield’ of the Soviet Communist Party – saw itself as elite and as the proud inheritor of the brutal vestige of its forbearers.
The crimes the KGB and its antecedent organizations committed against millions of innocents were presented as acts necessary to the defense of the Party and the revolution. The culture of the KGB and the Soviet legal system dictated that those victims - to the degree they were spoken of at all - were described as class enemies or enemies of the state. Apart from a brief period in the early 1990’s of limited public access to the archives of the Soviet services, there was no public airing and cleansing of those institutions akin to that which occurred in post-Cold War Eastern Europe. The KGB’s successor services moved with willful blindness to embrace a falsified version of their predecessors’ histories as their own. That stark reality was brought home to me on one particularly memorable occasion.
Several weeks before Putin came to power, I attended a unique party at Moscow’s Hotel National. As it was the residence of Lenin for a short time after the Bolsheviks seized power, the hotel was the appropriate venue for what was sort of a ‘Secret Policeman’s Ball’ attended by representatives of the Russian intelligence and security apparatus and their American counterparts.
During the event, a senior Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officer approached me to convey his theory that Feliks Dzerzhinsky - the founder of the first Soviet intelligence; the notorious All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (Cheka) - had much in common with Jesus Christ. Both appalled and curious, I asked him to explain.
The FSB officer responded that just as Jesus handed down the Ten Commandments, “Iron Feliks” decreed that a good Chekist has a ‘cool head, clean hands and a warm heart’. Not wanting to engage in a pointless debate on his theological knowledge, or lack thereof, I said that I did not think it right to compare the Lord with a man who boasted that his service represented “organized terror”. The agitated FSB man responded by pointing in the direction of the nearby Lubyanka.
The ‘architectural symmetry’ of the square in front of the building that housed the headquarters of the FSB and its KGB predecessor had, he said, been ruined by the 1991 removal of Dzerzhinsky’s Statue. He went on to say that it should be put back in place. Neither my response that I thought it would be better to put a memorial honoring Soviet dissident Andrey Sakarov on the site, nor my termination of the conversation with a remark to the effect that the Lubyanka was dripping in blood and needed to be torn down if Russia was going to come to terms with its past, did anything to calm him down. We parted with mutually insincere best wishes for the coming year.
Since coming to power, Putin has done everything possible to prevent such a reckoning with history. For example, he labeled the PERM-36 museum to the victims of the Gulag system and Memorial – the organization that documented both Stalinist crimes and human rights abuses in Chechnya – as ‘foreign agents’ before ultimately shutting them down altogether. His rule has seen poisonings, assassinations and imprisonments of defectors, political opponents and reporters on a scale and with an audacity that earlier generations of Chekists would have appreciated. At the same time, Putin wholeheartedly embraced the legacy of the KGB and its predecessors, dedicating a memorial plaque to former KGB Chief and Soviet Premier Andropov – the man who oversaw the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian uprising. In an echo of the language Putin uses to describe Ukrainians and their leaders in the present conflict, during Putin’s time as FSB Director, that service’s Museum featured an exhibit honoring the elimination by the officers of Soviet State Security of Ukrainian ‘traitors, Nazis and bandits’ during and after the Second World War. Asserting that “there are no ‘former’ Chekists”, Putin has made regular appearances at annual ceremonies commemorating the December 20, 1917 founding of the Cheka. He has spoken passionately of his pride at being one of the Soviet and Russian intelligence and security officers honored on a day that now bears the Orwellian moniker of ‘Security Service Workers' Day’ but is still colloquially known as “Chekists’ Day”. That atmosphere of veneration for organizations that were responsible for countless deaths exemplifies the environment that shaped Putin and informs his approach to decision-making.
While our assessment did predict that Putin would be ruthless in the pursuit of his goals and the maintenance of his position, it did not envision his reign lasting 22 years. Nor did it speak to the ideological shift Putin himself would undergo as he moved - and moved his country - away from a discredited Communist ideology towards what is an irredentist worldview wherein Russia can lay claim to suzerainty over all lands that are traditionally considered Russian, that are populated by Russian speakers or in which Russian and Russian Orthodox culture predominate.
Cipher Brief Subscriber+Members can access Cipher Brief Expert and former CIA Chief of the Central Eurasia Division, Rob Dannenberg’s assessment, With his only option being escalation, this is How Putin’s War Must End
It is obvious in hindsight, that Putin’s belief in such an expansionist vision of Russian power was always there. He acted on it in 2008 in Georgia, and again in 2014, in Crimea and Donbas, albeit with the application of force on a comparatively limited but progressively escalatory scale. Until the decision to attack Ukraine, however, Putin acted with relative caution, relying heavily on his security services and special operations forces to conduct a hybrid model of warfare that was predicated on gradual and at least nominally-deniable, escalation of force. He could always pull back should he encounter resistance, on the use of relatively small military expeditionary operations (e.g. in Syria), and on private military companies such as the Wagner Group to exert and expand Russian influence. Why, then, did Putin decide to undertake the greatly increased risk of invading Ukraine? Was that decision, from his perspective, rational? And what should we do about it?
Addressing Putin’s Aggression
Simply put, Putin decided to attack Ukraine because he thought he could and must do so. The latter assertion is most easily addressed. Putin believed he had to invade Ukraine to counter the growing extension of Western influence, affluence and military ties into a country he and many of his countrymen still consider Russian borderlands and with which they have close familial, linguistic and cultural ties. After his previous efforts to insure the bacillus of Western democratic values did not jump the border into his country, (his puppet was driven from office by the Maidan protests and repeated rebuffs of his demands for a halt to - and roll-back of - NATO expansion into former Soviet space) Putin became increasingly convinced that he must act decisively to preserve his own hold on power and that he could, consequently, justify that action as self-defense.
That Putin chose this moment to attack is the result of an accumulation of factors that culminated in what must to him, have seemed a unique window of opportunity. In no particular order, those reasons likely included a perceived weakness of American leadership as exemplified by the US debacle in Afghanistan, the concurrent US decision to begin to shift its national security posture away from the War on Terror back towards countering peer competitors, and the presence in the US Administration of many of the same officials who were in office in 2014, when he initially carved off chunks of Ukraine without discernible reaction from Washington; domestic turmoil in the US due to the impact of COVID, heightened racial tensions and the political damage wrought by years of unproven claims that a US President was a Russian stooge; (assertions that Putin’s own intelligence services’ worked to stoke and exploit through their active measures operations) his increasingly close anti-American entente with Xi Jinping’s China; the failure of the US and NATO to respond decisively to Russian military exercises on Ukraine’s borders in 2021; his (ultimately erroneous) belief that the calamitous US decision to forego its own energy independence coupled with European - particularly German - dependence on Russian gas would allow him to wield energy as a lever to split NATO; an apparent (and ironic given Putin’s background) Russian intelligence failure as to the prospects for success of an assault on Ukraine; and a misplaced confidence in the ability of the Russian military to effect a coup de main by quickly toppling the government in Kyiv and easily defeating any Ukrainian resistance.
Putin and many around him are the Cheka’s bastard remnants. They are conducting this conflict in a manner fully in keeping with the bloody-mindedness of their murderous forerunners. Yet, as we now see with stark clarity, the Ukrainian people are giving Putin much more than he bargained for.
The Russian leader knows he is in a war he cannot afford to lose. Consequently, as was the case with Soviet armies in Finland and after the grim first years of the so-called Great Patriotic War, as well as with the Russian army in the first and second wars in Chechnya, Moscow’s response to initial failure in Ukraine has been to apply more firepower more indiscriminately in an attempt to hammer out something the Kremlin can call a victory.
While Putin still professes certainty that military operations are going ‘according to plan’ and that his objective remains a demilitarized and neutral Ukraine, it is surely evident to him that he is in a race to bring his war to a successful conclusion before seemingly growing Ukrainian resolve, an ongoing influx of western weaponry onto the battlefield, and the impact of sanctions and international isolation on his own people and economy, make the cost in lives and treasure inherent in seizing and occupying all of Ukraine prohibitive. Retreat and consequent defeat being impossible if he is to keep his job, at some point soon in the not-too distant future, Putin will be confronted with a stark choice between further escalation or modification of his war aims.
The latter might involve a ceasefire – likely pushed by China – once Russian forces have seized Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, completed their capture of Kyiv and Ukraine’s major eastern cities and reached a defensible line of contact; perhaps along the Dniepr river. Putin would then foreswear his assertions that he would not grab additional Ukrainian territory, leaving a rump, weak western Ukrainian state to either accept the new status quo or mount an insurgency to recapture its lost lands.
To paraphrase Lenin, what is to be done by the US and its allies? The way forward is fraught with peril. But it also presents us with potential opportunity.
Moscow’s threats to expand the war outside Ukraine’s borders either in response to what it sees as belligerent acts by another power (e.g. efforts to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine) or because of events that spin out of control (e.g. a Russian attempt to interdict possible arms shipments into the country) should not be discounted. Nor should its warnings about the use of nuclear weapons in response to Western actions or to intractable Ukrainian defiance, particularly if Putin feels his back is to the wall. We must avoid actions that could precipitate a general war between Russia and the West. At the same time, there is an imperative that the US fulfill its obligations to defend its NATO allies while doing all it prudently can to assist Ukraine in confronting this Russian threat to its liberty and independence. Failure to do so will embolden Moscow and other aggressors in Beijing and Tehran and will further erode Washington’s position as the leader of the free world. To do so means the clandestine (i.e. without sanctioned leaks for political reasons) provision to Kyiv of weapons, other military equipment, intelligence and training assistance to allow them to bleed the aggressor white, will help Ukraine hold out long enough to allow sanctions to begin to undermine Russia’s capacity to wage war.
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At the same time, we must seize upon this opportunity to mount a concerted overt and covert campaign designed to undermine the popular acquiescence - if not support – that Putin requires to continue this conflict and remain in office. That campaign should seek to expose the Russian people to the aggression and atrocities being committed in their name and to link those actions to the history of similar actions by Putin’s fellow Chekists past and present.
This is important because the latter are the very same people charged with suppressing any public manifestation of opposition to Putin’s war, and ensuring his continued grip on power. As was the case in Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War, the surest sign that a repressive regime is losing its grip on power is when the ‘organs of state repression’ (as they were known in Stalin’s day) refuse to use force against their own people. Putin will, as always, seek to identify himself with the state by portraying western assistance to Ukraine - and appeals to the Russian people to oppose his rule - as attacks on the Motherland.
There is, of course, risk in encouraging regime change. Even if Putin holds onto power, it is possible that a weakened Russia would be driven into an ever closer alliance with China. Or Putin could seize upon support for his opponents as a casus belli, although should it come to that, he will surely have many other excuses to expand the war.
There is also the possibility, albeit hard to imagine given what we are seeing in Ukraine, that someone worse could emerge if Putin were toppled. Finally, there is the possibility, even probability given past Kremlin success in suppressing its opponents, that even with increasing casualties and growing economic hardship, not enough Russians will have the courage to take to the streets to demand change. But there is also the prospect that the Russian people, many of whom (surely including members of the army and security services) have little memory of the 20th century, and none of the Soviet Union, are ready to look to the future by putting an end to the rule of their country by homo Sovieticus.
Even if the Russian people do not seize this occasion to force Putin out of power, or if no one close to him should, as some have suggested, pull out a Makarov and put it to good use, the Russian leader knows his time to fulfill his goals is limited. Just as an actuarial imperative must have influenced his decision to launch his war, he must also be all too aware of the actuarial certainty that the end of his reign is in sight, whatever the outcome in Ukraine. It is, of course possible that another aged KGB veteran, such as FSB Director Aleksandr Bortnikov, or former FSB Director and current Secretary of the Russian National Security Council Nikolai Patrushev, might follow a deposed Putin in the Kremlin, though that person’s rein is likely to be short, given that they are both 71 years old. The question is whether, whenever and by whatever means, Putin’s rule ends, the Russian people have the will to seize that opportunity to put an end to the Chekist State.
“I think”, Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamozov, “the devil does not exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness”. To call Putin crazy is intellectually lazy and absolves him to some degree, of responsibility for his actions. Nor should we caricature him as the devil. It should suffice that we rightly identify Putin and the Chekist State he embodies as evil and act accordingly.
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