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Originally, Vladimir Putin was chosen as the future puppet because he fit the bill. By breaking away from his protectors, he retained his strongman character and the power he had accumulated, writes Aleksandar Đokić.
As Russia prepares for presidential elections scheduled for March next year, Vladimir Putin is playing the “want, won’t” game and has yet to announce his candidacy.
Yet the outgoing president’s apparent hesitation is nothing more than a charade and, barring an unexpected upheaval, he is ready to lead Russia for another six-year term. And, as illogical as it may seem to outside observers, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has only strengthened its grip on power.
In reality, Vladimir Putin’s entire carefully crafted political image in Russia is based on the idea that he is a masculine god of war, unwavering and able to withstand assaults that no one but him can. endure.
This is the heart of his political persona. Its other social appearances are reserved for the different levels of power in Russia, the inner and outer circle, as well as foreign heads of state, whether adversaries or partners (in crime).
This face, however, is the one that Vladimir Putin presents specifically to the Russian public, who seem ready to support him wholeheartedly once again, without question.
The result of periods of chaos
The very fact that Vladimir Putin did not choose to base his political personality on his personal charisma, his administrative sagacity or his intellectual prowess was partly determined by the era of Boris Yeltsin, during which he managed to rise the ranks of corrupt politics using stabs in the back.
It was an era of chaos, not because of liberal and market reforms, but because the reformers themselves stopped the changes halfway, once they were convinced that political and economic power was firmly within their reach.
The changes taking place in Russia at the time were decided by decree at the highest level and there was no grassroots, large opposition political movement in favor of democracy that could have imposed reforms.
Thus, once political power was distributed and economic wealth acquired, it was not the opponents, but the initial promoters of the reforms who stopped them in their tracks.
On the other hand, this period was not that of an idealistic democracy in Russia, but that of the weakness of the center of federal power. Freedom, a by-product of this state of affairs, was never truly desired, it simply had to be tolerated.
The Chechen cause becomes an existential threat
The two Chechen wars gave a purpose to Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. From their point of view, Russia was in danger and they were going to fight to protect it.
In reality, during the Soviet era, the Chechen people were victims of one of the most horrific state crimes: they were forcibly and en masse displaced to Central Asia.
Elderly people and newborns were herded onto cattle trains and shipped far to the East. Many people in the most vulnerable categories lost their lives during the journey.
It was only with the fall of central power in Moscow that Chechens were able to return to the land of their ancestors. The struggle for Chechen independence was a logical consequence of Russian domination of the territory after the final demise of the Soviet Union.
But Moscow’s specimen overlords Yeltsin and Putin chose to turn the Chechen cause into an existential threat to Russia itself, much as was done with Ukraine almost two decades later.
And so, by the very nature of the war path already laid out, the political persona of Vladimir Putin was rationalized into the wartime dictator we know and hate today.
The strong man character of one who should have been a simple puppet
The September 1999 apartment bombings, attributed to the Grozny government, which justified the second Chechen war in the eyes of Russian public opinion, are the subject of much speculation, which will continue long after Vladimir Putin will have left this world.
The fact is that the Russian central government had already chosen war as a political instrument promoting cohesion with the aim of achieving total control and stifling the nascent Russian federalism even before Vladimir Putin was in the spotlight.
And whether or not the terrorist attacks were a set-up, Vladimir Putin had already been chosen by the Yeltsin clan and the few oligarchs who held enough power to choose Russia’s next president, among them Boris Berezovsky (who was assassinated later in Britain) and Boris Yeltsin’s son-in-law, Valentin Yumashev (who remained loyal).
Boris Yeltsin’s war strategy once again reinvigorated the heavily damaged security apparatus that terrorized the country during the Soviet era.
Vladimir Putin was chosen to play the role of future puppet because he fit the bill – the strongman persona was exactly what was needed.
And he wasn’t the only one who needed a war, the resurgent Russian autocracy needed one too. Perhaps it was the FSB itself that staged the coup, or it was Chechen Islamic extremists, who are not under the control of the government in Grozny, who provided the necessary casus belli. In any case, the difference would not be very significant in the eyes of Russian public opinion, already committed to the cause.
The need for war as an instrument of domination was already in place. The Second Chechen War shaped Vladimir Putin’s political image to such an extent that he could never free himself from it, even if he wanted to.
From Chechnya to Transnistria, then to Syria
Ultimately, the story was very effective and restored to the impoverished Russian masses a sense of collective power.
With the terrorist attacks perpetrated in Russian cities for years, in the context of the Chechen wars, the Kremlin’s discourse also helped to rally the population around the paternalistic and harsh figure that Vladimir Putin had become.
In the meantime, the man ended up detaching himself from his protectors, keeping this character and the power he had accumulated for himself.
Then, in 2008, the Georgian War occurred. It ended in a small and quick victory for the Russian forces which eclipsed the Georgian army several times over. It was a turning point because it was a foreign war, much more direct and more important than Boris Yeltsin’s interference in Transnistria, in Moldova, a few years earlier.
Russia officially became an empire again. Encouraged by the stability of oil prices, which regularly filled the coffers of the Russian state, Vladimir Putin was at the height of his real popularity – and not the hollow one he has today, when any alternative is practically banned -.
It is the Syrian adventure, like the colonial interventions of European powers in the region in the 19th century, which put Russia back on the world stage. With the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and military aggression in the Donbass region, it revitalized Russia’s image as a military superpower.
The mask may have cracked, but the image of the war dictator will endure
In the most recent period, Vladimir Putin’s image has begun to crack, and not only because he was unable to achieve a decisive victory against Ukraine in 2014.
He had been in power too long, rapid economic growth was over, and the semblance of basic political freedoms was beginning to disappear. In the meantime, Kiev became a double danger for Vladimir Putin: it was seen as a threat to the stability of the regime in Moscow if left unchecked, but it also offered an excellent opportunity to strengthen Vladimir Putin’s power if she was quickly brought under control.
A new war, a “great war”, which would enter Russian history, would mark the legacy of Vladimir Putin and consolidate his power during his lifetime.
After nineteen months of war, victory never came. Despite this, the regime has found a new way to stay in power: a lower-intensity eternal war. In some ways, this is now a war fought with just enough resources to continue it, but not enough to cause civil unrest.
From their point of view, Western leaders consider that this is a strategy of containment: it involves denying victory to Russia, emptying it of its resources, but not attempting to provide to Ukraine, enough aid to defeat it, for fear of what might follow: a chaotic breakup of Russia, all-out war, even a nuclear holocaust, are all realistic possibilities.
At the same time, Vladimir Putin and his inner circle see in all this an opportunity to reestablish a totalitarian regime in Russia itself, thereby securing their position for years to come, while hoping that Ukraine will eventually collapse. under pressure. And Vladimir Putin, the war dictator, although beaten, will win.
Aleksandar Đokić is a Serbian political scientist and analyst who has published articles in “Novaya Gazeta”. He was previously a lecturer at RUDN University in Moscow.
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