Since arriving at the presidency, more than two decades ago, Vladimir Putin has set himself up to be the commander of a mission of imperial dimensions: to regain power in the Kremlin, after years of unstoppable decline. And, with an eye on his biography, the Russian leader signals that it is unacceptable to go down in history as the person responsible for allowing Ukraine to escape Moscow’s orbit of influence.
Therefore, in the calculation that led him to launch the war, there is also a concern with the historical contours of his dominance in the Kremlin. Putin certainly views Ukraine’s geopolitical loss, with the country’s approach to US-modeled structures, as the main defeat of his nationalist project.
And, on his agenda, regaining influence over Kiev has been a cornerstone since 2014, when pro-Washington Ukrainian parties came to power.
“Russia has been a great power for centuries and remains as such. It always had and still has legitimate areas of interest,” Putin maintained in one of his first public speeches in the late 1990s. Muscovite the owner of trajectory in the security apparatus crowned with the command of the FSB, one of the successor agencies of the KGB and responsible for the domestic scene.
Referring to an external dimension of his roadmap for regaining Russian state power, Putin continued: “We must not let our guard down in this field, nor must we allow our opinion to be ignored.”
On August 16, 1999, the Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, met to hear the speech of a previously obscure figure on the political scene and to vote on his nomination for the post of prime minister. Russia was going through the turmoil of the Boris Yeltsin era.
The then president emerged as the person responsible for, eight years earlier, commanding the dissolution of the Soviet Union, shaking the Bolshevik structures and, in foreign policy, seeking rapprochement with the White House. He starred in historical scenes such as brazen laughter with the American Bill Clinton, at a press conference in New York, in 1995.
Yeltsin, if successful in the dismantling of the USSR and in the expansion of democratic freedoms in a country with dictatorial traditions from tsarist and bolshevik times, reaped overwhelming failures on the foreign and domestic planes. He ordered the bombing of an opposition-dominated parliament and failed to garner robust Western support for the recovery of Russia’s decrepit economy, epicenter of a crisis with global reverberations in 1998.
Yeltsinism had reigned six years earlier, with the collapse of the USSR and the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev, the architect of perestroika. The era of Soviet reforms, between 1985 and 1991, granted unprecedented freedoms to the population, in areas such as freedom of expression and religious practice, but also led the nuclear superpower to experience its most intense economic crisis since World War II, evidenced by the arrival of international humanitarian aid.
When articulating the first words of his speech at the Duma, in 1999, Vladimir Putin already sought to signal the project of rupture with the fading of state power and with the turmoil of the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras. The former spy spoke of recovering “law and order”.
The passage through the Duma corresponded to a political ritual. Putin arrived at the government from an articulation supported by a sector of Russian society called “siloviki” (sil, in Russian, means force), members of the state security apparatus, such as the former KGB and the Armed Forces. The offensive sought to staunch the Kremlin’s bleeding of power.
Putin, as rehearsed, won support from deputies and became prime minister, the fifth holder of the post in 17 months, amid the mercurial modus operandi of Eltsinism. The next step in the restoration project, Yeltsin resigned from the presidency on December 31, 1999 and paved the way for the Putinist era.
At first, the new occupant of the throne attacked two fundamental focuses of the erosion of state power, strengthened during the previous period. First, the so-called oligarchs, billionaire bigwigs of the post-Soviet economy, whose fortunes had been amassed, in large part, thanks to relevant and, at the time, indispensable political connections.
Oligarchs, in Yeltsin’s time, also began to influence the Kremlin’s direction. Putin stifled the billionaires’ political ambitions, and those responsible for daring challenges to the new guidelines, such as Mikhail Khodorkovski and Boris Berezovski, faced jail or exile.
The former director of the FSB attacked another alternative pole of power: regional leaderships. A more radical example of the trend was the separatism of Chechnya, a region inhabited by a Muslim minority.
Russian armed forces launched a bloody war against separatists, the second in less than five years. And in the first, Moscow suffered defeat, unable to bend the independence aspirations of an area with only about 1 million people.
Actions led in the Caucasus by a newly-empowered Putin resulted in victory for the Kremlin after a devastating conflict in Chechnya. The restoration project was accumulating the first triumphs.
Having overcome initial challenges, Putin focused on managing an economic recovery based on rising oil and natural gas prices and consolidating political power, injecting authoritarianism into fragile post-Soviet structures.
And, years later, challenges erupted in the so-called “near abroad”, as the Kremlin often refers to former Soviet republics, around its borders. Countries like Ukraine and Georgia have fueled demands for membership in NATO, the US-led military alliance.
And Putin, the czar of the restoration project, does not admit to seeing his biography sculpted by the loss of so-called areas of influence, in particular in a country with the political, strategic, economic and historical importance of Ukraine.
