Throughline - Russia's Vladimir Putin

Episode Date: December 26, 2019

Vladimir Putin has been running Russia since 2000 when he was first elected as President. How did a former KGB officer make his way up to the top seat — was it political prowess or was he just the recipient of a lot of good fortune? In this episode, we dive into the life of Vladimir Putin and try to understand how he became Russia's new "tsar."Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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Thank you. Okay, we're going to take you back to 2009 for a minute, to a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and a bunch of wealthy Russian factory owners. Now, just imagine the scene. Putin, whose voice we're hearing, is sitting at the head of a long rectangular conference table. He's got on jeans and a windbreaker, and guys in suits are sitting around that table, hanging on his every word. And the Russian press is there to capture it all.

Putin is asking the group, why haven't you fixed this labor dispute yet? You were running around, and I quote, like cockroaches before I came. And it's no accident that he's dragging them through the mud in front of the Russian press. This is a publicity stunt. So after scolding them like children, Putin makes them all sign a contract ordering them to reopen their factories.

And he picks out one particular factory owner who, again, no accident, is a prominent Russian billionaire, whose name, by the way, has come up several times in the Mueller investigation, Oleg Deripowska. Did everyone sign this? Putin, by the way, has come up several times in the Mueller investigation. Oleg Deripowska. Did everyone sign this? Deripowska, have you signed? Yes, I have signed. Still, Putin makes Deripowska get up out of his seat, walk all the way around the table, and sign the contract again. And as Deripowska walks away, Putin says,

Give me back my pen. And makes Deripowska walk all the way back over to hand it to him. Russia has taken on a larger role on the world stage. America is officially calling a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin is preparing to extend his powerful grip into a third decade. He is already Russia's longest serving leader since Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Where we go back in time. To understand the present.

Hey, I'm Randa Abidfattah. I'm Ramtin Arablui. And on this episode. Decoding the power of Vladimir Putin. So that video we opened with, it honestly felt like I was watching a scene from a mobster movie. Yeah, I mean, Putin pretty much cast himself as a mob boss in that meeting. Like, he's really trying hard to portray himself as a tough guy.

So that got us thinking. How did Russia come to be run by this guy, Vladimir Putin? Today, when you say Russia, you might as well be saying Putin because he's been running the country for nearly 20 years. And on the one hand, you have this over-the-top image of Putin, the mob boss, the guy who rides shirtless on horseback or scuba dives for ancient treasures. That, of course, he always finds. And all of this is designed to make him seem unstoppable.

Like some kind of James Bond, you know? Strong and suave and, dare I say it, even sexy. Okay. But this is Putin on display, right? It's him posing. But then there's this other side of Putin as the protector of Russia, the person who's restored Russia's standing in the world, the puppet master who invades countries and kills dissidents. So these images of Putin that we see, how do they come to be? And how do they help him maintain power? To answer those questions, we have to understand how he became the person we see today.

Kind of like a ghost of Christmas past for Vladimir Putin. Exactly. There's an international escape in St. Petersburg. A bombing conspiracy. And a reality TV makeover. Thank you. for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today, or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. In the Soviet Union's notorious intelligence service,

the KGB. Putin started off as a rather junior and probably not very successful KGB officer. This is Edward Lucas. He worked for The Economist and was their Moscow bureau chief from 1998 to 2002. So Putin, fresh out of law school, was recruited to join the KGB way back in 1975. Not a lot is known about that time in his life. But what we do know is that in 1985, he was assigned to a post in a city in East Germany called Dresden. Which was a bit of a backwater. And that meant he was too far from

the capital, Berlin, to experience all the exciting spy games that were playing out there during the height of the Cold War. And it's not clear that he ever ran any agents or conducted any real espionage operations. And there's some suggestion that his main job was to be in counterintelligence. His job was checking up on other people, which is a sort of necessary but often rather unpopular job in intelligence agencies. Putin spent five years in Dresden and a total of 16 years in the KGB, all the while slowly working his way up the ladder, doing the jobs necessary to get ahead. But then, in 1991,

The world came crashing down around him. Just months after an attempted coup, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned from his position as president of the Soviet Union, effectively bringing it to an end. It was a different tide that rushed down the beach, and you could then see the kind of stony outcrops of real power. Suddenly, the country went from having a centralized communist economy to something that was more privatized. It was a wildly unstable time for everyone in Russia. A free market emerged that was poorly managed and a breeding ground for corruption. Mobsters and other criminals took advantage of the instability, and Russia's massive wealth was picked off by a few at the top.

Amid all that, a new leader came to power in Russia. His name? Boris Yeltsin. He tried to stabilize the Russian economy, but his methods were pretty shady. Yeltsin's government more or less acted like the mafia. You do me a favor, I owe you. Return a favor later, etc. You know, good old-fashioned corruption. Increasingly in the 90s, there was a picture of Russian politics as a kind of Byzantine court with all of these people with their new fortunes trying to get favors and influence decision making by the immediate circle around Yeltsin. This is Steve Sestanovich. He's a professor at Columbia University and was a top official in the U.S. State Department during the Clinton administration.

Now, I'm sure you're wondering where Putin ended up in all this chaos. And the truth is, it left him sort of disoriented. He'd been forced to move back to Russia with his young family after the Berlin Wall fell. His job with the KGB no longer existed because the KGB no longer existed. It went down with the Soviet Union. So his career plans were completely derailed.

Eventually, though, Putin caught a break. He got a job in his hometown, St. Petersburg, as an advisor to one of his former law professors and mentors, Anatoly Sobchak. By that point, Sobchak had left the university to become mayor of St. Petersburg. And Sobchak, deciding to take a chance on Putin, appointed him deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. This was Putin's training ground. It's where he learned how to play the game of Russian politics.

And he made it very clear he had higher ambitions than just running things behind the scenes in St. Petersburg. This is a clip from the 1992 documentary that Putin commissioned about himself. It's called Power. And in this scene, Putin is driving, his eyes visible in the rearview mirror, snow-covered trees pass by outside of his window. And then he makes a bold admission that he was formerly a member of the KGB, which wasn't very popular for a lot of people at the time.

It was kind of a symbol of Russia's dark past. But for Sobchak, that was exactly why he wanted Putin on his team. There are photographs, there are reminiscences, recollections of people who say that Putin had the desk right in front of Sobchak. And so Sobchak, I think it's pretty clear, wanted him there in a position of kind of a minder, gatekeeper, monitoring, keeping an eye on who was coming in, who was going out. There were a lot of skills that Putin's particular resume offered to Subchak at the time.

Skills like being a stealthy observer, operating in the shadows. Andrew Meyer told us a story about Putin that he heard from an American diplomat back when Meyer was Moscow correspondent for Time magazine in the 1990s. He was always the guy at the reception, in the corner, often silent, not drinking. He's famous for not drinking. And taking note, observing. And he said we called him the ghost

because he was always present but never really visible. Now, to really understand Putin's rise to power, we have to understand the dynamics between his boss, Sobchak, and Yeltsin, who, remember, at this time is the president of Russia. It's a dramatic tale of two rivals who couldn't have been more different. Yeltsin was kind of the big, bearish,

often clownish buffoon who would love to obviously drink shots with you and was the king of bluster. Sobchak was everything the opposite. Very measured and someone really that the West and especially government officials, lawyers, business people could appreciate. Yeltsin began to feel threatened by Sobchak, who wasn't the yes man he wanted. Plus, Yeltsin worried that Sobchak was becoming a potential opposition candidate who might mess up his chances for re-election. And the Sobchak-Yeltsin relationship bloomed into an outright rivalry. To test Sobchak's loyalty, Yeltsin summoned him to his office to ask him about re-election.

And he very simply says, you know, what do you think? Do you think I should run? And Subchak, of course, gives the wrong answer. What does he say? That I'm not sure that this is time you should think about, you know, taking it easy. Maybe it's time to step down. Maybe it's time to think about your health. Maybe it's time to think about your family. And those were the last words that Yeltsin wanted to hear. Subchuk had failed the test. And at that point, Yeltsin basically declared war on him.

It began with legal cases. It began with a lot of yellow journalism. He became a victim of tabloid, highly sensationalist charges, almost daily. It was a drip, drip, drip torture on Subchak. Subchak's name was mired in months of scandal. His reputation was in tatters. And so when it came to his re-election bid for mayor of St. Petersburg, he lost. Humiliated and facing a bunch of criminal investigations that may or may not have been politically motivated

and could land him in prison, Sobchak was in serious trouble. But then, one day, in the middle of all this chaos, Sobchak, a man forbidden from leaving the country, shows up in Paris. In those days, this was not something easy to pull off. That a man who was officially wanted by Russian intelligence, Russian law enforcement, his own political rivals, that he could just end up in Paris.

But Sobchak had someone with special skills on his side. Putin orchestrated this sort of fantastic escape. He hired or arranged to hire through an intermediary a private jet from Finland, brings it across into Russian airspace, gets Sobchak on the plane. Somehow they get across to Paris, and it's only then when Sobchak lands in Paris, that the world finds out. Putin had basically done the impossible, and in the process, proved just how clever and loyal he could be. And this event landed Putin on Yeltsin's radar. Eventually, Yeltsin became so impressed with Putin that he gave him a position in his government.

But wait, this is kind of strange, right? Like, why would Yeltsin choose to hire the guy who was his rival, Sobchak's protege? Well, there are a couple of things. I mean, one is it didn't matter that Yeltsin was behind the campaign to doom him. The fact that Putin came sort of riding in on the white horse to rescue him is what resonated loudest in Yeltsin's mind.

Did he think maybe he'll do this for me one day? Because, you know, Yeltsin's government was super corrupt and he was quickly making enemies, losing popularity. Yeah, there's no question that everyone at the time, remembering the subchalk rescue, and at the same time, Yeltsin not only physically infirm, but all kinds of legal questions surrounding his own regime. The threat, not just of kind of a legal nightmare haunting Yeltsin, but even maybe something worse, something like a coup against him.

Clearly, the premium was on loyalty. And Putin was the man who had that greatest experience showing loyalty. I want to stop here for a second, Ramtin. Yeah. Because this whole Sobchak episode and everything that happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it kind of feels like Putin was on the receiving end of all of it, like that he was riding the wave and happened to end up on top. Yeah. And in a way, he was just kind of and happened to end up on top. Yeah. And in a way, he was just kind of in the right place at the right time. I mean, it doesn't even feel like he's a main character in his own story at this point. Yeah.

It's like an accident of history or something. Like his former mentor happened to become the mayor of St. Petersburg. He happened to appoint him deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. And ironically, when Subchuk fled, Yeltsin took an interest in him. And he's lucky that Yeltsin even reacted that way. In fact, things keep getting better for Putin. Not long after Putin makes it to Moscow, he's appointed the head of the new intelligence service in Russia, the FSB. Also known as Federalnaya Sluzhba How do you do? Honestly, not that bad.

But I wouldn't say great either. You know what I mean? I would say maybe average. More than I'd like to admit. Anyway, the FSB's role, well, it's not all that different from the KGB, which, remember, Putin had been a part of for a long time. So he was returning to very familiar territory. Well, it's not all that different from the KGB, which, remember, Putin had been a part of for a long time. So he was returning to very familiar territory.

And as the head of the FSB, Putin began his stunning ascent to power. This message comes from NPR sponsor Doctors Without Borders. Doctors Without Borders teams confront hard facts in conflict and crisis zones. This year is 1999. Boris Yeltsin has been ruling over Russia for the last seven years or so. But his health is failing. He's just barely won re-election, recently faced impeachment, and he's alienated his parliament and government. He realizes he can't hold on to power for long.

But he also knows just how much his government has stolen from the Russian people. Russia's President Yeltsin has done it again, sacking his entire government and plunging his country into crisis. And he's worried that the next president again, sacking his entire government and plunging his country into crisis. And he's worried that the next president will try to hold him and his, quote-unquote, family accountable.

So he needs to find a successor who he can trust. And who better than a guy who just a few years earlier took extreme measures to cover up for his boss? And so Yeltsin picks Putin out of relative obscurity to be Russia's next prime minister, hoping that if all goes according to plan, he might become the next president. Putin was really, I think, the last desperate throw of the dice by the Yeltsin family because they were facing impeachment. The Duma, the Russian parliament, was really fed up with the way the country had been run and the corruption of the Yeltsin inner circle. Again, Edward Lucas. So they were really going after him and they tasted blood already. And so I think what happened was that the Yeltsin family turned to Putin as a former KGB guy

and said, can you fix this? But they still had a problem. Russia was a democracy. And so Putin had to be legitimately elected as president. And at that point, pretty much no one inside Russia or outside Russia saw him as a potential world leader. I mean, people in the U.S. State Department could barely believe he had even been chosen as prime minister in the first place.

I remember getting a call in the early morning from the State Department telling me that this had been President Yeltsin's choice. And, you know, I laughed out loud. The idea that this seeming nobody could be appointed prime minister of the Russian Federation was astonishing to me and my colleagues. But one thing we were pretty sure of was this guy wasn't going to last. At this point, that skepticism made sense. For outsiders, Putin's rise came out of nowhere, and it didn't seem like he'd last.

Steve Sosanovich told us about the first time he met Putin when he was working in the State Department during the Clinton years. He was then very new on the job. He was very unsure of himself, hesitant but ingratiating. He obviously wanted to make a good impression on the president of the United States. He was clearly very conscious of being not only a newcomer to high politics, but much shorter than Bill Clinton. And you could tell just the physical presence of Clinton made him somewhat uncomfortable. And what did Clinton think of him? I mean, Clinton afterwards said he liked him. He said he's so Russian. And I remember being a

little surprised by this because I could tell what Putin was trying to do was not seem Russian. He was trying to seem German, competent, impressive professional in contrast to Yeltsin, whom Clinton was used to dealing with. I also told Madeleine Albright after the meeting that he seemed to me a little rodent-like, you know, a small animal with a big, nervous, beating heart. But, you know, the next time we saw him. The next time they saw him? Well, we'll get to that. Let's just say he doesn't seem rodent-like for long. See, the thing that most people didn't realize at the time was that Yeltsin and Putin were willing to do anything to get him elected. It's a devastating scene.

The whole midsection of the building is gone. All that's left of some apartments are decorative rugs on the wall. There has been much speculation that the explosion was not an accident, but was a deliberate one. The city is terrorized. Rushed security forces are searching for all the suspects. A series of bombs go off in apartment buildings across Moscow. And more than a people were killed. And more than a thousand were injured. Yes, hi, this is Yuri Felchtynsky.

I'm a historian. I was born in Russia, moved to the United States. And Yuri was immediately suspicious of the Russian government's explanation about who was behind the bombings. Now, the government claims that this was done by Chechen terrorists, what was very easy for people to believe because... Because it wouldn't have been the first time. Just a few years earlier, Chechens declared independence and Russia invaded Chechnya in response, in what became the First Chechen War. The result? Hundreds of thousands of Chechens were either killed or left displaced. But after the 1999 bombings take place, it wasn't as easy to blame the Chechens because something strange happens.

In a town not far from Moscow, terrorists were arrested when they were trying to put explosives into the basement of one of the apartment houses. And this was immediately broadcasted by all major news stations in Russia. And when militia tried to investigate who those people are, they found out that they are officers of the FSB. And at that moment, the central FSB office in Moscow made a statement that those people were not terrorists and indeed this was an exercise conducted by the government. It's the same day, 23rd of September, the Russian government started to bomb Grozny and actually started the second. Chechen war, the same day. And at that point, Yuri had seen enough.

So he hopped on a plane to Russia to start investigating in person. He started to suspect that something big was going on. met many different people. Some of them happened to be former KGB officers. He started to suspect that something big was going on, that maybe Yeltsin and Putin saw political opportunity in all this. His theory was that Yeltsin, Putin, and the FSB were all conspiring to get Putin elected by manufacturing a war. Because remember, it was going to be really difficult to get Putin elected, and so they needed a way to make him look heroic and presidential. So Yuri thought that it was the FSB who planted the bombs in those apartment buildings, and that Yeltsin and Putin used the fallout as an excuse to start a second war with the Chechens. And when I had a general picture of what's going on. I approached the only person from the FSB

whom I knew and whom I trusted. Alexander Litvinenko, who was a high-ranking FSB officer, a real insider. I asked him one question, whether this is possible, that in September of 99, a group of officers would receive this order to blow up buildings and whether they would do this.

And Litvinenko told me that, of course, that, I mean, I should not have any doubt that if this order would be given, then, of course, you know, they will do it. Because that's what they do. Quick side note, Livinyenko was already in trouble with the government. Because a year before he met Yuri, he and some other FSB officers went public with some damaging information about the FSB. Information that revealed deep corruption. As a result, he was arrested and later released.

And this was all when Putin was still the head of the FSB. See, the security services in Russia were a tight-knit group that did not tolerate dissent. And Litvinenko was clearly fed up, enough so that he was willing to put himself and his family in danger to help prove what Yuri suspected, that Putin and the FSB were behind the apartment bombings. So the stakes were high for Litvinenko, and Yuri knew it.

And at that point, I told him, well, would you consider escaping from Russia? Litvinenko agreed. So I picked him up when he crossed the border to Georgia. Litvinenko from Georgia to Turkey, and on 1st of November, one month later, he landed in London. And exactly six years later, on 1st of November 2006, he was poisoned. Radiation poisoning, to be exact. It wasn't the first time the FSB had poisoned dissidents, even if they were living abroad. Yuri eventually concluded that the FSB had perpetrated more than one terror attack in Russia under Vladimir Putin's direct orders.

All of this is detailed in the book he co-authored with Litvinenko called Blowing Up Russia. And we should be clear, there are some experts who dispute some of the specifics of Putin's alleged role in the bombings. But what's also true is that Putin has never denied any of the claims in the book. And the fact remains that in the spring of 2000, Putin was elected to his first term as president of Russia. Support for NPR. So this is a real song by a rap duo called AMG. And they're not who you might think of when you hear the words Russian nationalist. Two expats from Zimbabwe and Kenya who moved to Moscow to study medicine in the early 2000s.

And the music video is the best part. It features a bunch of slow-mo videos with Putin coming out of SUVs. Walking down a hallway full of armed guards. Shaking hands with people. There are tanks rolling down the street, things on fire, soldiers in combat. It makes Putin look like a real tough guy. And that perception is everything to Putin. So it's no surprise that when he got real power, he set out to get rid of any doubts he was fit to rule.

No one would think of him as rodent-like anymore. The first thing that Vladimir Putin does when he sort of takes power in 1999-2000 is take control of TV. This is Peter Pomerantsev. He's a Russian-born British journalist who actually has a pretty unique perspective. He worked as a TV producer in Russia in the 2000s. And it was really by creating him into this sort of macho superhero on television and launching a small, very, very deadly war in

Chechnya. He went from being the Moth, which apparently was his nickname in the security services, to being kind of, you know, a mixture of Donald Trump and Sly Stallone and all of them rolled into one. And his assertions of power through stage TV scenes and those over-the-top pictures we mentioned earlier, well, they began at home. So there would be bizarre scenes once a week

where he would sort of confront his own government saying you're doing a really bad job. You know, he would kind of act the gangster boss in these scenes. You know, he would sit at the end of a long table like Lucy Liu in what's it called again?

Kill Bill. Don Corleone in Godfather. And he sits at the end, the person sits at the end of the long table saying, hey, you know, I see you've got a problem with your ambulances, you know. We can find another governor. Or I see you've got an unresolved labor dispute. Remember that story about the pen we opened with?

That's basically what Putin was doing there, flexing his muscles. And a lot of people say Putin is a mafia don. I mean, sort of. He knows how to work with the mafia. But it's much more a case of him imitating that behavior. Because Russians respect gangsters, because gangsters have been the heroes of the 1990s. They're the ones with the money and the women. It's pretty extraordinary. I mean, to me, just as with my reporter's eye and ear, how he's grown over these years. Again, Andrew Meyer. From, you know, a middling former lieutenant colonel in the KGB to the man on top of the Kremlin for all these years. It's an extraordinary evolution.

And that's exactly the point. Putin's rise was epic. He went from a nobody in the early 1990s to the country's president by the end of the decade. And he has a story that may be embellished in the media. I mean, he controls it. But still, it's astonishing. And it's a story that resonates with a lot of Russians.

I have a phone that's right here, which I use whenever I have to discuss something that is needed, what is called a secure line. This is Margarita Simonian. She's the editor-in-chief at RT, which is an English-language news channel that's funded by the Russian government. And it's seen by many as just a propaganda machine

for the Kremlin. She was interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition a couple years ago. In that clip you just heard, she was talking about a special phone line in her office that connects her directly to the Kremlin. And then she went on to describe why so many Russians revere Putin. To understand Russia's fascination about Putin, and I think this is something that is completely not being understood in the West and in the mainstream media. And the reason why it's not being understood

is because people didn't live here through the 90s. All of the people I knew wanted to leave because we saw our country as something horrible, falling apart that will only continue to fall apart. And then came Putin, and he stopped all that. And we saw it in our lives. People around started, first of all, they stopped being hungry. Then they stopped having one pair of shoes for both my sister and me, you know, and my mom. So for three

of us, one pair of normal shoes. It all seemed magic. And when I'm saying, I want to underline this, it would be an extremely difficult task to find a single person who lived worse before Putin than now. Very difficult. This is the end of this week's show. I'm Ramteen Arablui. I'm Randa Abdelfattah. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. The show was produced by Randa and I. Our team includes...

And a special thanks to... And a special thanks to Allison McAdam, Jeff Rogers, and Jane Gilvin. Original music was produced by the fine folks at Drop Electric. If you like something you heard or you have an idea, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. Or hit us up on Twitter at NPR ThruLine. Hope you enjoyed the show. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.

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