Strongman, The

 
INTRODUCTION
    When you shake hands with Vladimir Putin you scarcely notice whether it is a firm or a weak handshake. It is his eyes that consume you. He lowers his head, tilting his eyes upwards towards you, and fixes you for several seconds, as though memorising every detail, or maybe matching your face to a picture he had memorised earlier ... It is a glowering, piercing, highly unsettling look.
    Russia’s ‘national leader’ is like no other country’s president or prime minister. The former KGB spy was rather reserved and gauche at first, when he was unexpectedly propelled into high office in 1999. But he has grown into a man with no inhibitions – a strongman and a narcissist, who flaunts his physical strength in ever more frequent photo-shoots. In the beginning we saw only a few selected images – Putin the judo champion, Putin at the controls of a fighter jet. Later – particularly after he moved from the president’s office to that of the prime minister in 2008 – he began to invite camera crews on expeditions designed solely to project a film-star image. They showed him putting satellite tracking devices on polar bears, tigers, white whales and snow leopards. He took the cameras along to see him swimming the butterfly stroke in an icy Siberian river, and riding a horse through mountains, with bare chest and dark shades. He personally put out wildfires, drove snowmobiles, motorbikes and Formula One cars, went skiing and scuba-diving, played ice hockey, and even crooned ‘Blueberry Hill’ in English and played the piano in public – unembarrassed by his inability to do either. In August 2011 he had a cameraman on hand when he stripped to the waist for a doctor’s examination.
    What other world leader acts like this? Having muscular policies is one thing; but no one matches Putin for sheer vanity.
    In conversation he is attentive, combative and sometimes explosive, when he touches upon sensitive matters. He is exceedingly well-informed, but also surprisingly ignorant about aspects of Western life. He is courteous, but can also be boorish. As president and then as prime minister he has run Russia with a strong, and tightening, grip. In recent years he has taken to dressing down his ministers in public, creating an atmosphere in which most of his subordinates are terrified of contradicting him, or even of voicing an opinion in case it might contradict him. He has created a top-down system – the ‘vertical of power’ – which instils fear and stifles initiative.
    Russia has become a state contemptuous of its people’s rights: a country in which the head of the electoral commission says his guiding principle is that whatever Putin says must be correct, and the chairman of parliament describes it as ‘no place for discussions’. It is a country in which the most important decision about who will become president is effectively taken in private by two individuals, with no reference to the populace. This was what happened in September 2011, when Putin’s protégé and successor as president, Dmitry Medvedev, agreed to retire from the top job after one term to allow Putin to return as president in 2012 for, potentially, another 12 years. The two men cynically admitted what people had suspected but did not know for sure, that this had been the plan ever since Putin had stepped aside from the presidency in 2008: Medvedev’s stint in the Kremlin was a mere seat-warming exercise, designed to keep Putin in power for as long as he wished, while paying lip-service to (or, in fact, flouting) the constitutional ban on a president serving more than two consecutive terms.
    Putin did not start out like this. Back in 2000 many Western leaders at first welcomed his fresh, new approach, and his willingness to cooperate and seek consensus. It will be the task of this book to try to chronicle and explain how everything changed: why Putin became more and more authoritarian, how he challenged the West and how the West challenged him too; how each side failed to see the other’s concerns, causing a spiral of mutual mistrust and lost opportunities. On the one hand there is what the Americans and the West observed: Russia’s political crackdown, the brutal war in Chechnya and murders of journalists, the corrupt mafia state and growing bellicosity, culminating in the invasion of Georgia and the gas wars against Ukraine. On the other, there is Russia’s view: America’s domineering role in the world, its missile