The west has spent 20 years getting Putin wrong, and now it may be too late to get it right

I wonder if the Russian leader is edging past his peak; whether his sense of his country is now less sure

(AFP/Getty Images)

It is hard to imagine this today. But when Russia’s then president, Boris Yeltsin, named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin as his latest prime minister and successor, there were just two main responses, in Russia and abroad.

The first was: who is this non-entity, who looks so timid and inconsequential beside the bear-like Yeltsin. The second, not unreasonable given that Putin was Yeltsin’s fifth acting prime minister in a year, was: all right, so how long is this loser going to last?

The answer to the second question is now partly clear. Putin might have come seemingly out of nowhere, but he was no loser. He has now been at the top of Russian politics, as prime minister or president, for 20 years. His current presidential term takes him to 2024. He is a global figure. In his home country, he is often referred to just by his initials: there is only one VVP.

The first question, even after those two decades in power, is harder to answer, a lot harder indeed than most of the west’s Russia-watching fraternity maintain. All that can be argued – and I would do so with some passion – is that Putin has been grievously misread over the years, especially in the US and the UK, and that this has led to Russia being quite wrongly recast as the old Soviet adversary, with disastrous consequences for international relations generally.

February 2007 is commonly seen as the watershed. This is when Putin delivered his broadside against the west at Munich, singling out the expansion of Nato to Russia’s borders as a heinous breach of past undertakings (Nato vehemently contests this).

That the stand-off at Munich amazed so many, however, only showed the depth of misunderstanding. It also served to reinforce a negative image of Putin as unreasonable and belligerent that had been evolving ever since his 2000 election as Russia’s president in his own right. The – unproven – “collusion” claims in relation to the 2016 US presidential election can be seen as the culmination.

What can only be described as the West’s demonising of Putin has many elements, of which I will mention but a few. The first, and most obvious, is his KGB background. No matter that he took what was then the bold and unusual decision to transfer to civilian life after returning from the collapsed East Germany. It was “once a KGB man, always a KGB man”, especially after Yeltsin made him – briefly – head of the KGB’s successor organisation, the FSB.

In then choosing Putin to succeed him, Yeltsin was said to be protecting himself and his family against corruption claims after he left office. Maybe, maybe not: but the idea that one man could protect the Yeltsin clan against vengeful mafiosi seems fanciful.

And yet the KGB charge is raised time and again: it has a particular following in the UK, where Putin’s (in fact, singularly undistinguished) security service career is cited to implicate him personally in the death of Alexander Litvinenko, the supposed attempt on Sergei Skripal’s life, and a list of other killings of Russian exiles.

(Statista) (Statista.com/chartoftheday)

A second element is what could be called the “tsar complex” – the notion that Putin belongs to a despotic Russian tradition where he is lord and master of all he surveys. He has only has to click his fingers, it is assumed, for an opposition leader or journalist to be assassinated or imprisoned, or a civilian plane (over Ukraine) to be shot down.

Every now and again – at his marathon TV question and answer sessions, for instance – another reality can be glimpsed in which wayward regional administrations cannot be brought to heel and where the Kremlin’s writ simply does not run. Far from being proof of strength, Putin’s calls for a so-called “pyramid of power” suggest the opposite.

The third major charge against Putin is that he is an expansionist, who aims to restore the Soviet Union. You have only to look at a map of all Europe as alliances have shifted over the past 20 years to see the absurdity of this. Russia has not absorbed any state that became independent after the collapse of the USSR.

The only territory it has captured – reincorporated, it would say – is Crimea in 2014 in a move more likely born of panic that Russia could lose the lease on Sevastopol following the ousting (with western encouragement?) of Ukraine’s elected president.

If the combined prism – of KGB, omnipotent tsar and would-be restorer of Soviet power – through which Putin is commonly demonised is so wrong, then how might Putin be viewed otherwise?

First, he must be seen as a child of his age. His early life was in Leningrad in the harsh post-war years. His early adulthood was marked by the uncertainty, instability and insecurity that preceded and followed the Soviet collapse.

Russia then saw itself as humiliated by the west, in its actions and its words. Elevated (reluctantly) to be leader, Putin’s priority was economic and political stability – which helps to explain what often seems the excessive response to street protests. His social mores, like those of many of his citizens, are conservative.

Second, obvious though it might be, Putin is Russian. He sees the world – geographically, historically and security-wise – from Moscow. He has a keen sense of Russia’s national dignity, and what is expected of him as national figurehead and leader. This is not rampant nationalism, but it has taken America-first Trump and, to an extent, neo-Gaullist Emmanuel Macron, for us to understand that the ruler of the Kremlin will put Russia first.

Third, Putin quite ruthlessly eliminated oligarchic power in Russia. Back in 2001 only Mikhail Khodorkovsky refused the order to choose between money and politics. He suffered the consequences – prison, dispossession and exile. But a glance over to Ukraine, where a few resource tycoons still command political, economic and even military clout, to the detriment of elected power, suggests Putin’s early ruthlessness – on this score at least – was not misplaced.

Fourth, he has some character traits that the demonising tends to miss. Putin is exceptionally quick on the uptake; he commands the broad picture and the small print. He learns: the debacle after the Kursk submarine disaster has not been repeated. Early on, he insisted he was a “technocrat”, not a politician. Over 20 years, though, he has become a politician. Whatever you think about the quality of Russian democracy, Putin is a master campaigner and communicator.

He is also a survivor. His instinct for survival is partly why he took up judo in his youth. As Russia’s president, though, he has survived largely because of an uncanny ability to sense where the fast-evolving mid-point of Russian popular sentiment is at any one time and stay one step ahead.

I wonder, though, whether – in this respect – Putin is edging past his peak; whether his sense of his country is now less sure. He is 66. A new generation is now eligible to vote, which has no memory not only of Soviet communism or the empire’s collapse, but of the chaos and humiliation of the 1990s. They are, as a St Petersburg history professor told me, “an entirely different species”.

And yet again, the west risks having to run to catch up. Now, with almost comic mis-timing, it seems the tide in Putin-ology may finally be turning. There has been a flurry of recent books seeking to demolish the hyped Putin of our nightmares and bring him down to size. It is too soon to judge whether this reflects a new generation coming to influence here, as there, or a recognition that the demonising was, in fact, misplaced.

Even so, it is hard not to feel that, if only the west had tried to understand Putin and his country better – not indulge, but understand – the international outlook could look more hopeful today. Instead, we created a Putin in a largely Soviet image, after our own arrogance and fears. What a tragic waste of opportunities and time.