Putin doesn’t care what we think

Vladimir Putin, who rose to power in late 1999 as acting president of the Russian Federation following the resignation of Boris Yeltsin, is three years from surpassing Josef Stalin as Russia’s longest-serving leader of the last two centuries.

On Oct. 7 — Putin’s 73rd birthday — the Gazette spoke with Susan Glasser ’90, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and her husband, Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, about the Russian leader and the five U.S. presidents he’s faced during his 25-plus years in office, a topic they’re exploring for a forthcoming book. Glasser and Baker, fall fellows at the Institute of Politics, reported from Moscow on Putin’s early years in office, work that shaped their 2005 book “Kremlin Rising.”

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

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When you were reporting from Moscow, did you ever envision Putin would still be in power 25 years later?

Glasser: No, and anyone who tells you that they did is not being honest (laughs). There were plenty of people who were very clear-eyed from the beginning about Putin’s origins in the KGB, his suspicions of the West, his lamentation about Russia’s lost empire. We knew plenty of people in Moscow and some people in the United States who saw that he was no democrat, that he was no long-term friend of the United States. That was not such an outlier belief. I can’t think of a single person, whatever their ideological views about Russia, who saw in Putin the possibility to break Stalin’s record.

Which U.S. president had the best read on Putin?

Baker: What we found striking is that all of them, Republican or Democrat, came into office thinking they could manage him. And to each of them, Putin has been a singular challenge who proves not to be manageable. They did not, in fact, get out of him what they thought they could get out of him or keep him where they thought they could keep him, all the way up to the present day.

Glasser: One of the things that is notable is that many of them started out the Putin era with the idea that Russia’s period of post-Soviet weakness was just going to continue. The big mistake, according to this argument, would be not that we misread Putin (although I think many did) but that we misread Russia, and we made the mistake of believing our own fairy tale about a world where geopolitical Great Power competition somehow had faded away. That, obviously, was a misreading of history. We certainly didn’t foresee a “no limits” alliance between Russia and China, and made the mistake of projecting forward the rift between Russia and China that had persisted from the late Soviet era.

American presidents, Democrats and Republicans, made the mistake of overvaluing a personal relationship with Putin, as if it would really matter in the end against these bigger geopolitical forces. It looked bad at the time, and it looks even worse now, when George W. Bush said that he “looked into his soul and saw Putin as a man he could do business with.” That overlooked Putin’s background in the KGB and his habit of saying what his interlocutors wanted to hear. It’s so important to underscore that multiple presidents, not just George W. Bush, made inaccurate judgments about who Putin was and what he was going to do.

Is there one U.S. president Putin preferred or particularly disliked over the others?

Baker: I think, at first, he thought he had a good relationship with George W. Bush; that they did see eye-to-eye. The two of them met more than any American and Russian leaders in history, and they were friendly. And yet, from Putin’s point of view, what he would say is, “I hear these things from presidents, they all say these things, but the policy stays the same.” And I think he has come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter who is president because America is still going to do what America does, and that the president can say whatever they want, but it doesn’t change that. Even with Trump, whatever Putin thought of Trump coming in — whether he was somebody who could be manipulated, somebody he could manage — I think he still came away from his experiences with Trump thinking, “I didn’t get what I want out of this.” It’s not about the individual president.

What’s a fundamental misunderstanding people have about Putin?

Glasser: For years, many of the Russia experts in and out of the government that we respected the most were of the view that Putin was an insecure leader, and that a lot of what he did was driven by the need to shore up a not very strong system or to stay in power or to make sure that unrest didn’t happen inside Russia.

When he came back to power after the Medvedev interregnum and there were huge protests in the streets of St. Petersburg and Moscow, it was the biggest challenge to Putin’s tenure in the entire quarter century. And so, I think a smart explanation has been that from then on forward, Putin was determined to have a much tighter control on Russia — that he pivoted right in terms of how he governed the country and in terms of his foreign policy, that he was not tolerant of any kind of dissent, and that that really set him on the path that we see today. That is a compelling explanation.

Baker: He doesn’t care about what we care about. He doesn’t care about what we think he should care about, and we should stop trying to see him through our own lens because that’s not the way he sees the world. We think he should want his country to be strong economically and part of a vibrant international economy and world order, that that would be better for his people. Certainly, when we were there, we saw even in four years how much life got better for a lot of Russians because they were more integrated with the West, because they were economically developing. And he didn’t care that he closed it off. He doesn’t care that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of Russians have been killed or wounded in Ukraine. He doesn’t care that more than a million Russians have left the country — the brain drain from Russia is staggering. He doesn’t care that he has squandered a lot of things that he could have claimed as his successes over the last 25 years with this invasion of Ukraine. We need to see him in a clear-eyed way, rather than trying to see him through our own Western lens.