How Russian President Vladimir Putin built his rogue state
The Russian regime’s descent into lawlessness and autocratic rule was years in the making, with results including the Ukraine invasion and a symbolic arrest of a US reporter.
Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, was detained on false charges of espionage on March 29, 2023, in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg. Vladimir Putin’s government has been harassing Russian journalists, through intimidation, arrest and murder, since he came to power in 2000.
But the fact that Gershkovich is the first accredited American journalist to be arrested in Russia since the end of the Cold War has brought an unusual degree of international attention to his arrest — as those who signed off on it must have wished.
Gershkovich’s arrest attests to two long-term trends in Russia. The first is Putin’s arrival at unmitigated dictatorship.
Today, the Putinist social contract is clear: People in Russia will be left alone by the state only if they do not meaningfully contest the government’s good reputation or decision-making, which is what bona fide journalism does almost by definition.
The second trend is the establishment of a lawless foreign policy, in which the autocrat can rewrite the rules of the international order with impunity. As a journalist and a foreigner in Russia, Gershkovich has the misfortune of standing at the very point where these two trends meet.
The Russian word for arbitrary rule, proizvol, has a long history. Its origins lie in czarist Russia, where autocratic rule was entrenched.
Proizvol could and did co-exist with bureaucracy and laws. It merely meant that the law was negotiable. Nikolai Gogol satirised this state of affairs in his classic 1836 play The Inspector General, a comedy about official corruption that is reputed to be Putin’s favourite work of literature.
The Soviet Union inherited these political traditions, combining arbitrary rule with a new degree of state violence and terror. Joseph Stalin used hunger to subdue populations that he suspected of disloyalty and deported vast numbers of people for political and economic reasons.
A conspicuous example of Stalinist lawlessness was the execution of approximately 20,000 captured Polish officers in 1940, with the aim of destroying elite resistance to Soviet domination. The Soviet Union blamed the crime on Nazi Germany, and the cover-up lasted for decades.
When Boris Yeltsin became the first post-Soviet leader of Russia in 1991, he was eager to shed the darker legacies of the Soviet and Russian past. He accepted the existence of political parties and a free press.
He did not relish violence, grumbling about NATO expansion without actively trying to reverse it. Yet in 1993, Yeltsin deployed the military against the Russian parliament, whose challenge to his authority had led to a constitutional crisis. And in 1996, he employed state resources to ensure his own re-election.
In a stupendous instance of proizvol, he arranged to have his hand-picked successor appointed as acting president just a few months before the 2000 presidential election. That successor was Vladimir Putin.
By contrast with the erratic Yeltsin, Putin promised to bring stability to Russia through personal discipline and a selective embrace of globalisation. Once Russia had a stable government, he argued, capital would flow into the country and a middle class would emerge.
During his first two terms in office, from 2000 to 2008, the Russian government engaged in sporadic state violence, including assassinations.
After writing critically about Putin and Russian abuses in Chechnya, the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot and killed outside her Moscow apartment in 2006. In the same year, Russian agents used the radioactive element polonium to poison and kill the former intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko, who had been granted asylum in the UK.
Russia’s gruelling war to subdue a rebellion in Chechnya coloured domestic politics for the first years that Putin was in power. Dramatic acts of terrorism carried out by Chechen rebels inside Russia — including the seizure of a Moscow theatre in 2002 and a school in Beslan in 2004, leading to hundreds of deaths — bolstered Putin’s authority as a strongman, although the state’s response to these hostage crises was less than competent.
The war in Chechnya, which lasted until 2009, also conditioned the Russian population to the brutal tactics currently being used in Ukraine, resulting in high casualties and the widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure.
Still, Putin’s early years as president were far from the Great Terror of the 1930s. Out of deference to the Russian constitution, he even stepped down as president in 2008, going on to serve as prime minister under his chosen successor, Dmitry Medvedev.
The details of their arrangement are murky. It is reasonable to assume that Putin held the reins for the entire time Medvedev was president, though he did not feel ready to undermine the pretence of a constitutional order.
During this period, the Russian media landscape was vastly freer than in Soviet times, in part because Russians had access to international news sources on the internet.
At the same time, the government built a well-funded media apparatus of its own, especially on television, which effectively manipulated what less educated Russians learned about politics and the outside world. This was a dangerous tool in the hands of what was effectively a one-party state.
When Putin was re-elected president in 2012, the outlines of today’s autocracy started to become visible. The Russian government repressed protests in Moscow in the winter of 2011-12, and no credible alternative candidate to Putin was allowed to participate in the election.
In the years that followed, political parties that were not stage-managed from the Kremlin were allowed less and less room to voice opposition.
Impunity and lawlessness also came to dominate Russia’s foreign policy. In March 2014, Russia annexed Crimea in defiance of international law. In July 2014, a Malaysia Airlines flight en route to Kuala Lumpur was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing almost 300 including 38 Australians. The plane was brought down by a Russian-made Buk missile, and last November a Dutch court convicted two former Russian intelligence agents and a Ukrainian separatist in absentia for the crime. (The airliner was apparently mistaken for a Ukrainian military transport plane.)
The governments of Australia and the Netherlands have publicly blamed Russia for the disaster. The Russian government’s response to this tragedy was to obfuscate and spread wild rumours, alleging that the plane had been shot down by Ukrainian jets or that the entire incident had never taken place at all.
In 2015, Russia intervened in Syria’s civil war to support Bashar al-Assad, a dictator who used chemical weapons against his own citizens. Russia lent its air power to the Syrian government, contributing to assaults on Syria’s civilian population that ultimately caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and sent millions of Syrians across the border as refugees to Jordan, Turkey and Europe.
In the same period, political violence came more openly to the fore at home. Boris Nemtsov, a pedigreed and self-confident politician who had once been considered a possible successor to Yeltsin, was murdered outside the Kremlin walls in February 2015, perhaps at Putin’s behest or as a “gift” to him by Ramzan Kadyrov, the flamboyant leader whom Putin had installed in Chechnya.
In 2020, Alexei Navalny, a charismatic opposition figure, was poisoned with the intent to kill him or drive him into exile. When Navalny returned to Russia in January 2022, he was placed under seemingly permanent arrest.
In today’s Russia, lawlessness in domestic politics and in foreign affairs are mutually reinforcing. Dictatorship legitimises war, and war legitimises dictatorship. Since invading Ukraine in February 2022, Putin has extended state control over speech. In proper Orwellian fashion, it is a criminal offence in Russia to refer to the war as a war. There is a partial exception for pro-Putin “military bloggers”, who are allowed to criticise the conduct of the war but not the war itself.
Even the pettiest statement of opposition to the war can be punished. In one striking case, a man named Alexei Moskalev was sentenced to two years in prison for defaming the Russian military after his 12-year-old daughter drew an anti-war picture in school. Moskalev’s daughter was taken from him and placed in a children’s home; he fled Russia but was captured last month in Belarus. Such arrests are intended to instil fear and discourage anti-war or anti-government protests, and in fact, protests have been exceedingly rare in recent months.
Had Putin’s invasion worked out as he hoped, Ukraine’s government would have evaporated within a few days, and Russian soldiers would have paraded down the streets of Kyiv in the dress uniforms they were told to pack for this purpose.
But Russia’s armies met stiff resistance as soon as their invasion began, leading them to adopt exceptionally brutal tactics. In Bucha and Irpin, there is extensive evidence of atrocities committed under Russian occupation, including torture, rape and mass executions. Back in Russia, the soldiers responsible for atrocities in Bucha were decorated for their military service.
By comparison with Putin’s war against Ukraine, the Cold War was often harrowing, but in some ways it was also more restrained. The Soviet Union depended on its nuclear weapons for deterrence rather than aggression, and it was amenable to arms control. Apart from trying to station nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962, leading to the Cuban missile crisis, Soviet leaders did not engage in reckless nuclear brinkmanship.
But Putin has brought arbitrary rule even to the nuclear domain, deliberately sending mixed messages about when he might employ nuclear weapons. The thrust of his foreign policy, as of his domestic rule, is that he accepts no limits on his scope of action. He must perceive some advantage in the anxiety that this provokes.
Evan Gershkovich’s arrest on transparently false charges of espionage exemplifies the deliberate unpredictability and lawlessness of Putin’s rule. Gershkovich was not the only American journalist at work in Russia. To some degree, he may have been randomly selected, sending a message to all journalists in Russia that none of them are safe, regardless of what passport they hold.
The message to the US is that its norms and ethical standards do not apply to Russia, because Putin has the power to do whatever he wants. The Russian government does not necessarily need to arrest a dozen Evan Gershkoviches or a dozen Alexei Moskalevs to get its way, but it needs to show itself to be morally and legally capable of anything.
This is the state Vladimir Putin and his government have reached 23 years after the diminutive bureaucrat from St Petersburg was summoned to the Kremlin and handed the keys to the kingdom.
Michael Kimmage is a professor of history at the Catholic University of America and a senior associate at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. His new book, Collision: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability, will be published by Oxford University Press next year.
The Wall Street Journal
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