Must reading: In Putin’s Syria Intervention, Fear of a Weak Government Hand

Steven Lee Myers writes this fascinating piece in The New York Times:

On the night of Dec. 5, 1989, Vladimir V. Putin, then a lieutenant colonel in the K.G.B., watched with alarm as thousands of East Germans in Dresden swarmed the riverside compound of the dreaded secret police, the Stasi.

 

The Berlin Wall had been breached the month before, and the Communist government that had ruled East Germany since the end of World War II gasped its last breaths as protesters took to the streets across the country. The young officer and future Russian president, just 37 at the time, could only stand by helplessly at the K.G.B.’s Dresden outpost a few hundred feet away.

 

The takeover of the Stasi headquarters was relatively peaceful, but in Mr. Putin’s mind the crowd was frenzied, deranged and dangerous, and the experience that night haunted him like nothing else in his mostly undistinguished career as an intelligence officer. “I felt it like a fault of my own,” he told one of his oldest friends, Sergei Roldugin.

 

East Germany soon ceased to exist, as did the Soviet Union following the abortive putsch in August 1991, suffering from an affliction that Mr. Putin described as “a paralysis of power.”

 

That diagnosis has been a driving force in his consolidation of political power, and it does much to explain Russia’s forceful intervention last week to bolster the besieged government of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.

 

The specter of mass protest — of mob rule — is one that has haunted Mr. Putin throughout his political life, and that fear lies at the heart of his belief in the primacy of state authority above all else, both at home and abroad.

 

The East Germans considered their protests an expression of popular will, just as many Syrians did when protests against Mr. Assad’s government began in 2011. But Mr. Putin viewed them as an unlawful usurpation of government authority. And that, in his mind, leads inexorably not to positive political change, but rather to chaos.

 

“Of course, political and social problems have been piling up for a long time in this region, and people there wanted change,” Mr. Putin said at the United Nations on Monday, where he spoke for the first time in a decade. “But what was the actual outcome?”

 

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The collapse of the Soviet Union and the chaos that followed darkened Mr. Putin’s opinion of freewheeling democracy — and of the character of his own constituents. He was deeply ambivalent about the protests that hastened the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and as an obscure mayoral aide in St. Petersburg, cheered Boris N. Yeltsin’s forceful response to the political uprising in the constitutional crisis of 1993, which culminated in the shelling of the Parliament.

 

In 1998, as the head of Mr. Yeltsin’s security council, Mr. Putin had to mediate an electoral dispute in the southern region of Karachayevo-Cherkessia to prevent violence erupting between rival ethnic groups.

 

The lesson he said he learned was that only the strong hand of the state could avoid the economic and political chaos that consumed Russia in the 1990s. That belief is widely shared in Russia, and is one reason for Mr. Putin’s genuine popularity at home.

 

“The Russian people are backward,” he told a group of foreign academics in 2005, according to Marie Mendras’s account in “Russian Politics: The Paradox of a Weak State.” “They cannot adapt to democracy as they have done in your countries. They need time.”

 

This distrust of popular will has been the justification for laws that have throttled dissent at home. With each election, the Kremlin has tightened the rules governing political parties and public gatherings. When tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets to protest fraud in the parliamentary election in 2011 and Mr. Putin’s own re-election in 2012, the Kremlin responded forcefully to stanch the contagion.

 

The police arrested and convicted dozens of protesters over the next two years, while the authorities harassed the most prominent leaders of the opposition, like the anti-corruption crusader Aleksei Navalny.

 

And in February, Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, was assassinated outside the Kremlin.

 

What is striking, though perhaps consistent, is how Mr. Putin’s view of public protest has become the basis for an increasingly assertive foreign policy, one aimed at countering what he views as efforts by the United States and others to violate the sovereignty of nations by encouraging political change.
 

Mr. Putin considered United States support for the “color revolutions” that swept former Soviet republics — Georgia in 2002, Ukraine in 2004 and Kyrgyzstan in 2005 — as evidence of an American policy to topple governments in what had historically been Russia’s sphere of influence.

 

And fear of the “color” contagion — color, as in the orange worn by supporters of Ukraine’s president, Viktor A. Yushchenko — contributed to the deterioration of political freedoms in Russia. Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington noted in a report released on Friday that these popular uprisings have been studied by Russia’s military commanders as “a new U.S. and European approach to warfare that focuses on creating destabilizing revolutions in other states as a means of serving their security interests at a low cost and with minimal casualties.”

 

The civil war in Syria, in that view, is merely the latest in a series of messy conflicts that arise from the toppling or weakening of central authority through American aggression. Previous instances include the American war in Iraq that overthrew Saddam Hussein, and NATO’s military intervention in Libya in 2011.

 

The events in Libya proved decisive in Mr. Putin’s return to the presidency after stepping aside, at least formally, in accordance with the constitutional limit of two consecutive terms. With his protégé, Dmitri Medvedev, in the Kremlin at the time, Russia acquiesced to a United Nations Security Council resolution that authorized the use of force against the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

 

Milder than his mentor, and less suspicious of hidden motives, Mr. Medvedev had been far more amenable to cooperation with the West. He even expressed sympathy for the democratic aspirations of those who had taken to the streets in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, saying governments would “lose their real foundation” if they did not address protesters’ grievances.

 

When the Qaddafi government violently repressed the protests in Libya, Mr. Medvedev was moved by the humanitarian appeals of his American and European counterparts. He instructed Russia’s representative at the United Nations to abstain from the resolution, allowing the American and NATO air campaign that ultimately toppled Mr. Qaddafi.

 

Mr. Putin was furious, and said so, prompting the most public breach in the “tandem” of power that governed the country from 2008 to 2012. “It reminds me of a medieval call to crusade,” he said of the resolution, denouncing the war as another manifestation of American hegemony that, left unchecked, would spread.

 

According to several officials close to the Kremlin, Mr. Medvedev’s dangerous irresolution was a decisive factor in Mr. Putin’s decision to return to the presidency, which he announced six months later. Since his return, Russia has blocked resolution after resolution against Syria’s government, prompting criticism that its intransigence has only worsened the conflict.

 

By the time protests erupted again in Ukraine in the winter of 2013 and 2014, Mr. Putin was firmly back in the presidency. The upheaval seemed to him the continuation of an aggressive foreign incursion that was marching inexorably to the Kremlin itself. (That argument ignored the indigenous grievances that drew Ukrainians to the streets.)

 

“Any citizen has a right to express their opinion about the decisions made, but this must be kept within the law,” he said when the protests began.

 

Last week at the United Nations, he said “the people’s widespread frustration with the government was used for instigating a coup d’état from abroad.”

 

Mr. Putin used the chaotic flight of Ukraine’s president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, in February 2014 to justify annexation of Crimea and support of the armed rebellion in eastern Ukraine that has splintered the country and led to more than 7,000 deaths.

 

Many have variously interpreted Mr. Putin’s intervention in Syria as a response to domestic pressures caused by an economy faltering with the drop in oil prices and sanctions imposed after Crimea; a desire to change the subject from Ukraine; or a reassertion of Russia’s position in the Middle East.

 

All are perhaps factors, but at the heart of the airstrikes is Mr. Putin’s defense of the principle that the state is all powerful and should be defended against the hordes, especially those encouraged from abroad. It is a warning about Russia, as much as Syria.

 

“Nations shouldn’t be forced to all conform to the same development model that somebody has declared the only appropriate one,” he declared at the United Nations. The Soviet Union, he said, had once sought to export “social experiments, pushing for changes in other countries for ideological reasons, and this often led to tragic consequences and caused degradation instead of progress.”