Why Russian President Vladimir Putin is a ‘shrewd’ tactician but ‘lousy’ strategist

ThePrint takes a look at how the implosion of the Soviet Union and the decade long chaos that ensued had a lasting effect on Putin.

Russian President Vladimir Putin | Photo: Andrey Rudakov | Bloomberg

Over the past few years, analysts across the board have come to hold a common perception about Russian President Vladimir Putin. The argument generally goes, Putin is a “shrewd short-term tactician and a lousy long-term strategist”.

The short-term tactics refer to the ‘anti-West’ Russian foreign policy. Whether it was propping up Syrian dictator Bashar Al Asad’s regime or destabilising Ukraine after its Russian-leaning President Victor Yanukovych was ousted in 2014, the aim has been to disallow US or its Western allies any easy victory.

However, a deteriorating economy and shrinking demographics in the last decade, and Putin’s inability to manage them, makes him seem like a lousy strategist.

How can one reconcile the two? One needs to go back to the implosion of the Soviet Union and the chaotic decades of 1990s and 2000s to make some sense.

Origins of Putin’s worldview

In 2005 Putin referred to the fall of the Soviet Union as “a major geopolitical disaster of the century”. Perhaps this was his single most telling public utterance.

Three decades ago, in 1989, on the eve of Berlin Wall being taken down, Vladimir Putin was a KGB agent in East Germany.

In his 2000 autobiography First Person, Putin writes that as protestors threatened to break into the KGB office in Dresden, he quickly burned important Soviet documents. When he asked for military backup, his superiors told him, “We cannot do anything without an order from Moscow. And Moscow is silent.”

The implosion of the Soviet Union and the decade long chaos that ensued had a lasting effect on Putin. This decade in Russia was marked by massive civil unrest, looting of the economy by oligarchs, hyperinflation and complete political disorder.

Putin wanted to end this kind of rampant chaos. His aim was simple — reinstate a strong Russian state and end all chaos. And the template he used was a familiar one.

From spy to president

Almost six years after he moved to Leningrad to pursue his political career, Putin joined the administration of then Russian president Boris Yeltsin in 1996.

Two years later, Yeltsin had named Putin as the head of FSB (a successor agency to KGB). During his time as the intelligence chief, a massive attack through apartment bombings killed over 300 in Moscow. Terrorists from Chechnya were believed to be behind these attacks.

As the FSB chief, Putin reacted by starting a military operation in Chechnya, “soothing a rattled nation”.

These kinds of acts — of reinstating normalcy and Russian pride — would go on to become the defining features of Putin.

In May 2000, Putin embarked on his first term as the new Russian president.

Old playbook

Over the next few years, he used his old KGB playbook to run Russia and consolidate power.

His rule was marked with deft use of propaganda tools or what Russians call “Kompromat”. The collapse of the Soviet Union had a profound effect on Putin. And he made sure all the state propaganda was targeted towards making him seem like a leader who was making the Russian state strong again.

Beyond propaganda, two things greatly enhanced Putin’s power.

First, beginning with the purging of billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Putin would go on to purge all Yeltsin-era oligarchs. Instead, in their place he handed over all state-run industries to his old associates from his native St. Petersburg. With this, Putin and his clique were comfortably in control of the state’s economy.

Second, the first decade of the new millennium saw a massive rise in oil prices. With this rise, the Russian living standards greatly improved. Russia’s per capita GDP grew from just over $5,000 in 1998 to almost $11,000 in 2008 — it peaked in 2013 but has struggled ever since.

Notwithstanding the fact that any kind of dissent against Putin’s rule was brutally squashed and his political opponents were often found dead, he helped bring back the lost Russian pride. This also explains Putin’s domestic popularity.

Understanding Putin’s Anti-Americanism

For the first few years of his tenure, Putin showed enthusiasm towards cooperating with the West. He was the first one to phone call President George Bush after the 9/11 attack, expressing solidarity with US’s war on terror.

But his hopes of finding a place for Russia in the Western-led liberal order ended when his warnings against starting the Iraq war were completely overlooked.

In what is considered the clearest articulation of Russia’s ideological intent, Putin said at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, “Only two decades ago, the world was ideologically and economically split, and its security was provided by the massive strategic potential of two superpowers.”

Registering his complains about the ills of a US-led world order, he said, “It is the world of one master, one sovereign.”

In the same speech, Putin went on to declare that time had come “to rethink the entire architecture of global security”.

About a year later in 2008, Russia went to war with Georgia.

Over the next few years Russia under Putin would go on to annex Crimea, unleash a proxy war in Ukraine, prop autocrats like Asad in Syria, and intervene in the US and European elections.

All these actions were directed towards undermining the West, but often come at the cost of his own citizens – some of his actions invited Western economic sanctions.