A Teflon President

A new survey of Vladimir Putin's political career chronicles his rise to power and assesses the successes and failures of his first term in office.

The first six months of Vladimir Putin's second term have surely been some of the worst of his presidency. As Putin and other leaders of the G8 made an awkward little walk along a blustery beach on Sea Island, Georgia, this June, a banking crisis was brewing in Moscow, provoked by sloppy comments from officials.

On his return to the Kremlin, Putin had to call in the Central Bank chairman to try to calm the situation. Russians were not convinced and waves of creditors demanded their money from Alfa Bank, the country's biggest private bank, while the authorities tried to argue that it wasn't a crisis, and blamed the public for being hysterical and the media for provoking the whole thing.

Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, whom Putin appointed in March to replace Mikhail Kasyanov, has excelled at not making decisions, keeping most reforms on hold apart from the poorly presented and very unpopular -- though perhaps essential -- changes to the social benefits system. Key ministers have clashed with Fradkov at cabinet meetings while the much-trumpeted administrative reform brought confusion and left officials unpaid for months.


Putin's credibility has been placed on the line with the absurdly handled attack on the chief shareholders of Yukos, the country's biggest oil exporter. It is as if Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the main Yukos owner, is showing us the reflection of Medusa in his shield, using the crackdown to illustrate the real condition of the state and those who run it.

This month, Russians watched the chaotic and bloody end to the hostage crisis in North Ossetia, where hundreds of children died, making it the worst terrorist attack in the country's history.

All this at a time when Putin is supposed to be at the height of his power and the economy is booming for a sixth straight year. The grand opening of Putin's second term has surely been a flop, showing the ambiguities of the president's aims and the weakness of the system he has helped to shape.

Andrew Jack, Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times, provides skillful insight into Putin's first term and the seeds of his (so far unimpressive) second term. No cold warrior, Jack gives a balanced critique of Putin's Russia, both chilling and optimistic. He tries to place Putin in his context, to give a taste of the country's chaotic history and show us the complexity of the decisions facing the country and its president. In doing so, the author displays an understanding that is sadly lacking in much that is written about this fascinating country.

Jack is enthralled by the degree to which Russians have -- or haven't -- come to terms with their Soviet past. Like the pact of silence that followed Franco's demise in Spain, the horrors of the Soviet Union are off-limits to many Russians. Indeed, many believe the collapse of the Soviet Empire left them worse off, and look back with nostalgia to the real or imagined stability and power of the past. Jack deals compassionately with the ambiguity of these memories, and links them to Putin's astute use of hybrid Soviet paraphernalia during his first term.

Putin's attempt "to build a bridge to the Soviet past while nurturing a new Russian pride" is one of his greatest achievements, Jack says, since it helped to cement the transition from the Soviet Union to capitalism. It is, after all, easy to forget the chaos of the Yeltsin years, and Putin has supplied some desperately needed, if fragile, stability.

"Inside Putin's Russia" is a pleasure to read and the criticism, when it comes, can be cutting, with Kremlin policy sliced in a few careful phrases. Yet Jack doesn't hog the pages, preferring to leave the facts and inconsistencies -- such as conflicting accounts of Putin's KGB career -- to speak for themselves.

The professors of St. Petersburg University's law faculty, where Putin studied, give some devastating quotes in which they come across as supporters of laws that toady to the powers that be. They seem to be blinded by the status of their former students, who include Dmitry Medvedev, now Putin's chief of staff, and Dmitry Kozak, the Cabinet chief of staff.

Jack traces Putin's career and his move to Moscow, helped into the Kremlin by Pavel Borodin, then head of the presidential property department, but blocked by Anatoly Chubais, then Yeltsin's chief of staff and now the very silent head of Unified Energy Systems. As Putin's move hung in the balance, Alexei Kudrin, now finance minister, drove to the airport with Putin and made the telephone call that got the future president through the gates of the Kremlin.

Chechnya is given ample space, and rightly so, for it is surely one of Putin's weakest points, an embarrassing boil in a very delicate place. Putin's reaction to the 1999 invasion into Dagestan, and the strange apartment bombings in Moscow, helped him to the top. For Jack, though, the war remains one of Putin's biggest failures. Tens of thousands are dead, the republic is devastated and Chechen fighters are still able to inflict deadly assaults against Russian forces while bloody terrorist attacks continue.

Best on the high politics of Putin's presidency, Jack leads the reader around the events, calmly explaining what is really going on and providing the quotes to back it up.

This is the real strength of the book: Jack gives us the knowledge of a journalist on the beat, the perspective of a good historian and interviews with key players, including many of the oligarchs.

The attack on Vladimir Gusinsky's Media Most was skillfully presented by Gusinsky's defenders as a crackdown on media freedom, yet Jack shows the attacks were much more about Gusinsky's failure to understand Putin. Jack gives a fascinating account of how Gusinsky is said to have basically threatened Putin at meetings in the winter of 1999, demanding a $100 million state credit in return for support. Those were their last meetings.

The taming of NTV has also left the country's media less critical, typified by the fawning coverage of the state channels. "Putin's blackest mark appears to be democratic back-sliding," Jack writes. "With a more tightly gagged media, the president becomes the first victim of censorship."

Jack describes Putin well: a cautious president, who is neither drunk nor ill, but who is very hard to categorize, almost slippery. "A Teflon personality designed to draw out his interlocutors without revealing much about himself, saying what they wanted to hear and promising what they sought, while not necessarily believing or planning to implement it."

Putin has been fortunate, presiding over the strongest burst of economic growth in recent Russian history, helped by high prices for oil, gas and metals but also sensible economic policy. Jack shows a president in charge of a disparate country, attempting to bring the order that will make her strong again economically and thus strong abroad, fulfilling what many see as her true destiny.

Toward the end of the book, Jack becomes more concerned about Putin, describing the autumn of the oligarchs and Khodorkovsky giggling nervously in his study a few months ahead of his arrest. The battle with Khodorkovsky has illustrated Putin's contradictions and, ultimately, his weakness.

Putin wants the benefits of independent business but cannot suffer pushy businessmen; he wants the dictatorship of the law but the law is used selectively; he wants an efficient economy but boosts state control. Putin's conflicting views on state and private property -- those of a KGB colonel and a free-market lawyer -- threaten his greatest achievements: economic growth and the perception of stability. In doing so, VVP may be hurting GDP.

Jack has produced the best introduction to Putin's first term so far available in English. The next four years will show us what Putin can do and, crucially, whom he chooses for the succession. The first six months of his second term do not bode well.

HERE