Russia Still Under Putin’ Cloak

By David A. Mittell Jr.

The Providence Journal

To a New Englander, living without the presence of the sea is like living in a house without windows. This is also true in the psychology of Americans when we sing ``from sea to shining sea," ``from California to the New York island" or ``to the oceans white with foam." Our poets (Bates, Guthrie, Berlin) express the feeling of the Kansan as well as the Downeaster.

Russia, having produced a vastly inferior civil society than the United States, has, most booklovers agree, produced the greater poets. But these have had to make do without the sea. The name of Tolstoy's dacha, ``Yasnaya Polyana" ― ``light in a dark forest" ― is a metaphor for hope and mystery for which seagirt nations such as ours use the ocean.

Robert Massie, biographer of Peter the Great, has written that ``long before communism, the Russian land was communal." What he means is that the vast Russian motherland belongs to the heart of every Russian, from an aristocrat like Tolstoy to those who have lived and died and been buried without hope of legally owning any of the dirt they ever stood on.

The coming of Christianity in about 988 brought with it a self-conscious national ``Rus." Since then, the land has brought Russians sustenance and safety, but also danger. Danger came from European invaders: Charles XII of Sweden, Napoleon, the Central Powers in World War I, Hitler. Danger came from waves of Asiatics: Mongols, Huns, Turks, Tatars and many others. Danger came from within: In Moscow in the late 17th century (Massie notes), there were several murders, mostly robbery victims, every night.

For a thousand years unto Vladimir Putin, Russia can be understood, on one hand as love of the motherland; and as a Texas-sized gregariousness, tending to imperiousness ― backed by 27.5 Texases underfoot. On the other hand is a mortal fear of danger in this vast land, along with a painful awareness of Russia's poverty and economic backwardness.

This has led to alternating periods of fascination with the West, followed by periods of renunciation. Peter the Great built St. Petersburg with French architects, Italian artists, Dutch craftsmen and Ukrainian war prisoners (i.e., slaves). The word ``czar" comes from the Roman "caesar," the ``Romanov" dynasty from Latin, the name ``Yevgeny" from Greek, the name ``Katerina" from Swedish. Unto their execution in Ekaterinburg under Lenin's orders, in 1918, the Romanovs seldom bent their tongues to speak the Russian language. They spoke French.

In times of danger Russians have always been willing to trade the ether of personal freedom ― so prized in the West ― for safety from the recurrent dangers of 27.5 Texases. Russians prize their freedom, too. But on the whole they would prefer to have laws to break than the utter rule of lawlessness.

That may oversimplify the rise of Putin, but it helps explain it. Russia's most recent equivalent of "French architects and Italian artists" was American free markets under nine years of Boris Yeltsin. The effect was the Soviet kleptocracy unbound. It seemed to many Russians to be in cahoots with Harvard professors. Every industry was for sale to the corrupt comrade/oligarch at a fraction of its value.

At the same time, the abrupt collapse of inefficient industries that had provided Soviet citizens with bread at a fixed price and an apartment with a stove, a toilet and a double steel door, left tens of thousands ― maybe hundreds of thousands ― scrounging for something to eat or sell for a pittance.

There has been testimony by former members of the Russian FSB (Federal Security Service) that the very event that made Putin president ― the 1999 bombing of Moscow apartments, ostensibly by Chechen terrorists ― was an FSB operation. (As prime minister at the time, Putin canceled Russia's truce with her breakaway republic and revived the Chechen War. He became acting president when Yeltsin resigned at the end of the year, and was elected to his first term in March 2000. By 2005, the Chechens, who are Muslims, had been routed ― at least for now.)

As president, Putin has effectively renationalized the oil industry; taken over the all-important television media; ended the election of the governors of Russia's 89 regions; seen at least 44 journalists critical of his government murdered on his watch; and refused to cooperate with British officials in the investigation of the execution of a former FSB agent on British soil.

In foreign affairs, he may have gone boating with President Bush at Kennebunkport, Maine, but he has not used Russia's good offices to help solve problems in the world's worst trouble spots ― Burma, Iran, North Korea, Zimbabwe, etc. Rather, he has pursued petty Machiavellian tactics designed mainly, it seems to me, to get Europe and the United States to acquiesce in Russia's effectively retaking most of the former Soviet Union.

To the Western mind, the ``ether" of freedom has vanished under Putin. Yet he has probably been more popular longer than any other Russian political leader in a thousand years. He has brought stability and safety, and, with the good luck of high oil prices, unprecedented prosperity. ``What's not to like?" ask a majority of his countrymen.

Putin's critics must admit that the social contract he has made with his people has made them a little better off, which is all most Russians ever asked for. They are also freer in their daily lives than they were as Soviet citizens ― so long as they stay under the government's political and economic radar. But under Putin the country has become a one-party petro-state, with a number of features in common with others of the genre. The main difference may be Putin himself, who by his own lights is a patriot acting in his country's interests.

But Russians, who are well-informed despite the pabulum they get on Putin TV, deserve, and will demand, a future better than that of a one-party petro-state in which the murder of dissenters seems ― by a preponderance of the evidence ― still to be normal for a Russian government.

David A. Mittell Jr. is a member of the Providence Journal's editorial board. The article is distributed by Scripps Howard News Service (www.shns.com).